My guess is that you weren't using Windows. On most *NIX platforms, installing either was pretty trivial. On Windows, however, MySQL had a point-and-click installer years before PostgreSQL worked reliably on the platform. For web developers working on Windows, this meant that if they wanted to install the same DB on their dev machine as on their deployment system, MySQL was a clear winner.

When I was a student, you could get a student license to Windows 2000 and Visual Studio for under £100. You can now get both the latest OS and dev tools for free under the academic licensing. You don't need to have lots of disposable income to afford free...

Your metric will end up with no computer books being available. It took about 2 days between my last book being published and it being possible to find pirate copies online, and yet people are still buying it so obviously some people would rather have the dead-tree edition, and I suspect that most of those would happily buy it at a fraction of the price in a charity shop...

Here the seasons go autumn, winter, spring, tourist.

Superstition is the nonsense other people believe, faith is the nonsense I believe.

SHA256 is not an error correcting code. It can not correct even single-bit flips. If it could, it would be useless as a cryptographic hash. If you could take a hash and some data that was close to the data for which the hash was computed, and find the single-bit flip that would allow the data to match the hash, then you'd have a very easy way of creating SHA256 collisions. And if you had such an algorithm, you wouldn't use it in a filesystem, you'd use it to break all of the systems that rely on SHA256 collisions being difficult to create. If you want error correcting codes in a filesystem, then you'd use an error correcting code, not a cryptographic hash.

MSR has a budget of close to $6bn annually. This is just for blue-skies research and does not include the development budget for things that MS actually turns into products. IBM's total R&D budget is also $6bn annually. So, I'd say they're pretty close...

I'm sure that venture capitalists would love to fund someone with a new idea and a business model, knowing that they have no recourse when one of the existing players in the market sitting on a large war chest decides to throw ten times the engineering resources at the same problem. First mover advantage only goes so far...

Who do you think is going to be amending the patents when they're going through the cycle of submit, have prior art reported, amend, resubmit. Hint: It's not engineers...

None of the listed companies come close to IBM for patents filed per year.

My memory is slightly fuzzy, since it's over ten years since I studied this, but here goes:

Single-bit errors in DRAM are caused by the capacitor that stores the data being discharged. This means that the transitions happen in one direction: from charged to discharged. With parity RAM, you can tell that an error has occurred, but you can't tell what the error is. The parity and ECC checks happen in the the digital circuitry and so have no knowledge of the analogue state. Since ECC uses Hamming codes, it can detect more than single-bit errors, but it can only fix one bit flip (the bias isn't actually required, but it does make the code shorter).

No it isn't. Read the post I replied to:

If you bring your phone to another company, you are not going to get a contract with a phone, you're going to get a SIM-only plan.

If I have two files, with block IDs ABCDE and EFCGH, how would I place them on disk in such a way that a single sequential read would allow me to read either file? Without dedup, it's easy: ABCDEEFCGH, for example. With partial dedup, you could write them as ABCDEFCGH, eliminating the duplication of the E, but you've still got two copies of C. With full deduplication, if you write the first file contiguously, then you are going to need at least two seeks while reading the second - EF{seek}C{seek}GH.

The obvious distinction is whether they invest a engineering effort in developing things. Most patent trolls just buy up patents and then try to turn them into money. Companies like ARM also don't make things, but the stuff that they license has obvious value: creating it independently from scratch would require a lot of time and money. Typically, these companies don't just license patents, they also provide detailed designs, engineering support, and so on.

It's much easier to sell an unlocked phone than a locked one, so that's still valuable.