Gnome has always been on the wrong track from day 1. It was a political response to KDE's use of Qt (which was QPL back then) and always a mishmash of libraries and utility applications rather than a fundamentally solid desktop environment. That it might have been usable at some point is more luck than anything.

I don't use KDE (or GNOME, I prefer RiscOS On X because it's insanely fast and powerful), but at least KDE has had a solid vision from the get-go, if sometimes flawed.

I "joke" that github is my social network of choice .. but it's not really a joke. A lot of real actual stuff happens on github, and it's highly useful.

The distribution features you've mentioned have arguably been provided for awhile by SourceForge (which was great for its time), but nothing beats the sheer speed, simplicity, and focus on the code that github provides. And while git beats the pants off everything else, I dread having to deal with "other" sites (*cough*gitorious*cough*) because they're just not as fast and useful as github. That is, git alone doesn't make github what it is.

I just wish their private hosting was a little less pricey, but hey whatever the market will bear.

In a democracy *the people* are the arbiters of what is 'nonsense' and what is not.

Don't make me laugh. If popular news media, slashdot, and 4chan are any indication of anything, it's that "nonsense" appeals far more than "sense". A lot of people are going to vote for something because they think it's funny.

If the majority of people were reliable arbiters of sense, we'd have a lot fewer problems in the world.

The Galaxy Note series use Wacom technology which, according to Wikipedia, was patented and is now expired. This is separate from the touchscreen, and provides stuff like pressure, tilt, and multi-device support (though I'm not sure if the latter is supported on Samsung devices). In short, it works really well, it's well-proven, and it's not patentable.

Since you are now selling access to me, why am I not getting a fiscal benefit as a result?

When you pay the grocery store for a tin of nuts, the nuts do not get a cut.

How does Facebook deserve this money?

As much as I am not a fan of Facebook (or on it at all), they run the hardware and wrote the software. You were the one willing to sign up to be their product and agree to their contract. Any right you had to complain already got clicked away.

• Scripting in Houdini (python, etc)
• Nuke in python
• Maya scripting in python and MEL.
• Softimage scripting (python, etc)
• 3dsmax in python and MAXScript

I'm not sure this is the best argument (as I am sure there are others), since a multi-thousand-dollar seat cost is probably easily outweighed by investing in more render nodes, which you'd probably end up wanting anyway.

With as far as Blender has come from its early days, though, I'm guessing the day is coming when it will simply be the best. The Free(tm) nature and easy extensibility could make it the preferred target for academic and other research.

The only real threat they face are young individuals with novel ideas forming small/nimble businesses that totally upset the existing market landscape.

Yes but let's not pretend Apple is a "young upstart" just trying to live the American Dream. They're the problem, as much as any other large corp. And unfortunately this is a clear counterexample to your "the only real threat they face" assertion. Apple won't play nice with the other megacorps. This is really a bigger threat, because it means your cartel-esque arrangements can't be made.

I expect everyone else to band together and make an example out of Apple for any other megacorp who wants to try this in the future, which is what's essentially happening in this case.

I hope that Steve Jobs' thermonuclear approach to Android will backfire on an epic level: once the patent wars leave the shell of dead corporations strewn all over the landscape, people will huddle together and promise themselves "never again" And the only way to do that: no more patents.

That is not the only way. The more probable approach is that the next round of "standards" won't be, that corps involved (e.g., Motorola, Samsung, Sony, and others who are usually involved in actual R&D) will patent the hell out of everything, and this time no Mr. FRAND Nice Guy. Everyone will know Apple is the enemy unwilling to share its toys in the sandbox, and no one will let Apple play. Apple gets squashed out of the market, and it's a lesson to the next company who wants to try the same approach.

Got root?

It's an old boys' club, the yes man gets ahead, and messengers get shot when exposing contradictions.

I don't really think this is a contradiction. I think the reality of the party line is more "Corporations are people .. the only people." Less government, less taxes, less regulation, more rights. These apply to real people: corporations, not you or me.

The desire for fulfill the prophesies of Moore's law and to have ever faster and more powerful computing has already exhausted itself.

While software has been hampered by web "technology" over the last decade, we are hardly at the pinnacle of software and computing... it's more like the Dark Ages, actually. Some stuff is being done elsewhere (GPUs, mobile), but we're still mired in fundamentally stagnant and backwards principles on the desktop (and server, really).

Games are just about as good as they are going to get without new display technologies.

Laughable. Let's assume anything video-related is "new display technology," and that we certainly have a long way to go to realtime radiosity and raytracing at extremely high resolution in a mobile device, then toss it 3D for good measure, so that's a given. But in terms of gameplay, all the computing and RAM you can get can be eaten up for a very long while. Simulation in games, today, isn't anything like what it could be. If I can't build a city at the SimCity level, zoom in and rampage through it at the GTA level, and walk up to each and every person on the street and learn their personal history and daily routines at an RPG level, then go into every structure and demolish it bit-by-bit with full soft-body dynamics, you've got quite a long way to go.

The desktop PC has been maxed out and has been resorting to multi-processor and multi-core as the means to keep growing but meanwhile, the primary OS for most people running these systems is still not taking full advantage of even those advances.

This is true to some extent, but "resorting to multi-processor and multi-core" means the desktop isn't maxed out. The primary OS (and software) may not be taking advantage of these things, but they are there and we're far from done yet.

Microsoft shows no remorse over their architectural choices and show no signs of slimming down and getting lighter. So nothing points in Microsoft's direction... not even Microsoft. They are raising prices to make up for the lack of interest in what they are doing now.

Microsoft is irrelevant. They have been for a long time. They may not be going away anytime soon, but they've been irrelevant since Google used the web to effectively route technology around them (due to earlier attempted lock-in). Of course, this has resulted in aforementioned Dark Age of Software, but at least we're not stuck on one platform. We're at the point where Valve is looking to seriously move gaming away from Windows, and there are alternatives for everything else, so what happened before doesn't really apply to what can happen in the future.

Think about what we are seeing.

What we are seeing is ripe potential for a Computing Renaissance.

Just basing this on how many connections there are is pretty irrelevant. Are we really expecting there to be many unofficial major backbones crossing national borders? Could you really enumerate them if there were? Even assuming some random people have a line (wired or otherwise) across a border for network access, this is probably not going to route the majority of the country's traffic anyway, and is equally unlikely to be counted in this survey.

A real measure would be more like "how likely will an entity have to shut down their connection due to government pressure," but for that you need to analyze the legal system, political situation, history, etc. Of course, that's much more work than simple counting, but I suppose "simple counting" is the most we can expect from a pop media source.