...or GNU.

Last time I checked, there were a number of BSD-derived files in the glibc source. Not that many, but still. Which were then made public, to use your wording, under license terms of GNU's choosing.

Which is fine of course.

A good question which I've asked myself a number of times. As for Android, its libc is BSD based, but the kernel isn't.

I don't know whether the decision to use a Linux kernel for Android was made at Android, Inc or later at Google, but it's pretty clear that Google wanted Linux.

I suppose at the time, the whole Linux mobile thing had already generated a sufficient amount of traction so that a lot of the necessary infrastructure was already there.

I was working for a mobile phone manufacturer at the time (that was later acquired and shut down by BenQ) and for us, the successor to Symbian would have been Linux, too, built along the Opie and Qtopia userlands on Texas Instruments OMAP hardware. Both Google and Trolltech had offices in the city (Munich). At that time, Google was still developing its products as J2ME software though.

I recall frequent kernel panics while booting that were related to the Intel Ethernet chipset on a SuperMicro H8SGL-F board (not exactly the least common hardware) in a released version (I think it was 8.2 or 8.3), which was probably this. Rather annoying.

There have been other problems, too (off the top of my head), like

• the mediocre PAE support,
• and the in my eyes rather ungracefully handled transition to Xorg 7.2 in the 6.x releases, which for me didn't work at all like the documentation said, although this was not a problem of the base system, but the ports collection.
• Then there's stuff like some guys arbitrarily deciding to reimplement the system installer and on top of that, to remove the old one in the time window between 9.0 RC 3 and 9.0-RELEASE, see (along with some elitist Linux bashing going on:) here and here
• or the transition to Clang at a time when it wasn't even ready for the non-x86 architectures!

So sometimes I ask myself whether this OS is really ready for prime time

But enough of the rant. I've been sticking to it since 2000 and for most of the time it just runs and does its job. It's got some nice coherent documentation too.

Well I mean Minix was already microkernel at the point of the Tanenbaum/Torvalds discussion. (Kind of funny actually how the later replies to that thread talk about how legendary that same thread is.) Don't know what version it was though.

Actually NT4 was already the first version to move GDI into the kernel, because of (as you and others have already mentioned) the high cost of context switches and marshalling/unmarshalling in NT 3.5's microkernel-style display server architecture. See this TechNet article.

I'm being a bit pedantic here, but Minix was Tanenbaum's microkernel system, so kernel-mode drivers are more like Linus' legacy...

Second that. Larger cities generally have ones that open till midnight. Hostels are not ideal, the ones I've been to (Germany, UK) aren't quiet at all. If you already know what you'll be working on, that's good, I think finding projects locally could be a real challenge.

this happens in Summer too, like 2010/2011, when hm, surprisingly high temperatures knocked out a number of trains' AC systems ('Schienensauna'). Bottom line is it shouldn't be too hot nor too cold, nor too wet/windy, then the system works well enough. Except sleeper trains, that often accumulate 30+ min delays regardless of environmental conditions. I still use them often enough though because short-distance flights can suck, too (like sitting on the runway for one hour until you get the slot from the destination airport...)

Ha, that's pretty much what I thought when I read this poll. Like straight from a market research phone interview.

In the future, will we see /. polls like:

"On a scale between 1 and 5, where 1 means 'do not agree at all', and 5 means 'agree completely', to what extent do you agree with the following statement:

<some statement>

[ ] 1
[ ] 2
[ ] 3
[ ] 4
[ ] 5"

If you're referring to Cyprus, you got your logic wrong. The alternative that wouldn't feed any bankers (and have all customers lose their savings) would be letting the banks crash.

I don't think there are many applications that refuse to work if the MIT-SHM, SMT, or DRI extensions are not present. They've never been guarantees, after all. The apps will just run slower, but still work over the net. Apart from that, client-side text through Xft/XRENDER, or videos using XV or GLX are unaffected and in my experience work very well over a 100 MBit/s LAN, in this case RDP and VNC don't really work better.

That's true, there is even an example that moves windows between displays in the gtk-demo program that comes with GTK. GNU Emacs supports it as well I think.

That's what made me switch as well two years ago, an NNTP server, static IPv4, and a native IPv6 /48 block :-) Costs 50% more than the previous ISP but I don't regret it.

That's exactly what I thought. At my university we were equipped with a bunch of Ultra60s that were upgraded from Solaris 7 to 8, from 8 to 9, and finally from 9 to 10. None of these upgrades slowed them down in any way, at least not that I noticed (they did get memory upgrades however). Now I could understand if Oracle dropped support for the Ultra60 with Solaris 11, but for a Blade2000 or Ultra45, which may be just a couple of years old? That's a surprise. I have an Ultra45 myself and I'm not at all happy with this, especially since Solaris 11 Express looked quite promising on the machine.