The scorpion has good reasons for waiting until the river is crossed. But he still always stings the frog.

GNOME has 16 years of showing an inability to create and maintain a stable API. No matter how important it is, why in the world would you expect that to change now?

Once the api stablizes,

You really think the api is going to stabilize for any appreciable period of time before they throw out GNOME 3 entirely in favor of GNOME 4? What, in the history of the whole GNOME project since its foundation in 1997, makes you think that's even remotely likely?

Jesus fucking Christ, did you read the damn thread? Claiming you can't provide backwards compatibility without a VM because of the processor is provably bullshit, because, as was already pointed out, Wine on 64-bit Linux on an x86-64 cpu can run 16-bit Windows programs without a VM. Yes, 16-bit Windows binaries running on an x86-64 CPU in 64 bit mode, no VM layer.

It's not that Microsoft could not provide real backwards compatibility. Hell, the Wine code is all LGPL, so there's nothing stopping them from taking the Wine code as the core of their own effort to provide the backwards compatibility. It's that Microsoft, deliberately, by choice, did not provide real backwards compatibility.

Running an entire virtual machine running a full OS isn't "backwards compatibility", and XP mode is not available to all Windows 7 users.

Sorry, no, that's an old IBM patent from 1975. Of course, Microsoft was able to use it under the business relationship they had with IBM. It seems to have been the main reason for the IBM-Microsoft alliance, since Microsoft ended the relationship when the patent expired in 1992, allowing them to use it freely.

Note the upgrade methods means 32-bit Windows 7. 64-bit Windows 7 can't run 16-bit DOS and Windows apps (though it's obviously possible to engineer a way to execute them on a 64-bit OS, given Wine on 64-bit Linux can run 16-bit Windows apps).

I mean, NIH is one thing, but this kind of thing goes way past that. Ubuntu is in the full-throttle grip of CADT.

.. .you'd mod me down for my spelling, grammar, and character set errors?

(Apparently I become illiterate when incensed.)

The guy who launched GNOME as a counter to KDE is complaining about "the fragmentation of Linux as a platform"? Tthe guy who made the decision replace GNUstep (which was the GNU project's official toolkit/framework in 1996) in favor of GTK â" he's fled to the Mac? He's got the chutzpah to say, "Linux just never managed to cross the desktop chasm"â"without admitting that his decisions are a major cause of that failure?

Good damn riddance.

It's not that people reject change. It's that Windows 8 on phones/tablets/netbooks is the equivalent of cramming a lobotomized MVS onto the original 8088-based IBM PC, while Windows 8 on PCs is like making a port of COMMAND.COM the shell on MVS.

remember when /. was edited by people with a brain?

Let me guess, you've just temporarily misplaced the password for your three-digit UID?

Blatant collusion in price-fixing is illegal, and screaming "But Amazon!" doesn't change that.

And, oh, my, Senator Schumer of New York says things that support New York-based publishers in a dispute with Washington-based Amazon? Next up, we'll ask congressmen from West Virginia what they think about nuclear power as an alternative to coal; it'll be just as reliable.

Nope. A weakness is not the same thing as a vulnerability. Weaknesses are things that already have gone wrong and are already accounted for in market share; vulnerabilities are things that haven't gone wrong yet. Weaknesses don't kill market-dominating platforms; vulnerabilities do. Fragmentation and lack of updates are not new things that are going to suddenly appear and kill Android.

On the other hand, the next iPhone's hardware sucking hard, the next version of iOS sucking hard, carriers getting pissed at Apple and ending subsidies/ads/support, or Apple screwing up the App Store, those are all things that have not yet hurt Apple market share, but could. That doesn't mean they will; Apple doesn't have to screw up. But they can, and if they do, it's an opportunity for rivals (assuming Android's weaknesses keep it from just eating that share of the market anyway).

iOS is vulnerable, because Apple can screw up. Apple can screw up the hardware, the OS, the App Store, or carrier relations, and cripple it as a result. And somebody else can become #2.

Android, on the other hand, is set. If a handset manufacturer screws up, it'll just get eaten by one of the others. If Google screws up the OS, it'll get forked from the source to the previous version. Google Play turns bad, there's Amazon's Appstore, and plenty more less well-known alternatives. There isn't any one controlling entity to screw up carrier relations, either.

Why would he? Chromebooks exist, you can install Linux on them.