Yeah I think we both know that is not true. I love open source, but know that is not some magical force field against hardware-level bugs, so stop claiming there is. The most common examples of these exploits are done IN LINUX.

These are brilliantly done exploites, and the Linux-x64 house is made of just as much glass as Windows.

Difference being, Microsoft and Intel actually have to report to shareholders, so there is some accountability.

I'm a little off the reservation on what the proper path is since all is currently properly fucked.

Airports skam240, it is mainly the airports. SJC and SFO, not to mention Moffett Field pretty much limit the development height in the South Bay. Not to mention the whole seismic thing which makes it vastly more expensive with each story added.

Yeah, there are some local gov't regs that limit how tall buildings are in Mountain View as an example, but that is partially to preserve said mountain view and limitations on infrastructure that isn't easily fixed.

You can't transition from 10,000 single family homes built in the 1950's to even medium-density housing without basically ripping everything apart. Ask PG&E what they would like the local bus voltage to look like vs is what it currently is. I personally exploded one of their 7.5 kVA transformers from the 1920's while turning on some fairly normal equipment.

I honestly very much await you our someone else with clever and viable solutions to these problems. I don't see an easy or popular clear path.

So, like most others, I assume Firefly will finally be coming back???

Preface: I love me some Linux and hate replying to A/C's. However, this fanboi shit needs some reality . . . Unix / Linux has been pretty much "hacked" into existence. To claim that there was some sort of collective forethought from a collective herd of strangers is, well, a blog-worthy utopian sentiment. Furthermore, Linux does not have a "blue screen" mainly because there is no central authority to detect / report when something is truly wrong. Sure when the kernel is shitting the bed, you'll get a kernel panic, but that is a 1-second pre-reboot screen dump to the console that only luck would enable you to see. Logging may or may not happen. Uptime is really the only reliable diagnostic. That extends to all platforms. As for you comment on "mission critical" stuff - don't be so naive. In space stuff, mission critical things are done in orthogonal triplicate because you MUST assume that at some point, the hardware / software combination will screw up. With any luck, watchdog timers will reset stuff back to a responsible state before the next "event". No reasonable person would trust their $2 billion space widget / industrial plant to software that was pulled from a CVS repository 15 minutes before implementation. THAT is how you get disasters. Put some skin in the game next time you troll / post while high on ground-up Slackware install floppies.

Let's also not forget the upcoming Intel MIC. Sure it may be just a series of souped up vector processor, but it is "48+ cores" (whatever that even means in this context) worth of said processors. When Intel has a 4X advantage on density, it is hard to imagine how competitors will be able to effectively and responsibly scale until they catch up to that. From the looks of it, interconnect and lithographically, said competitors are several years back.

You know, I keep hearing this, but I do not understand how that is true. Were it true, you, being a slashdotter and thus years ahead would be composing this on a tablet. Apparently the soft-keyboard and such are no bother, nor is the lack of easy copy/paste functions. Personally, I'm typing this on my workstation which will never, ever, ever leave my office. Nor should it. I create content and solve problems on it. People may later consume said content but if you want to actually get anything more serious than email done, you need a real computer. Furthermore, could you imagine spending 8 hours a day on a tablet? That is a laughable suggestion. Given that unemployment is less than 50%, I suspect most people using computers for something other than leisure will still use a keyboard at some point during the day.

"Iâ(TM)m sure you could write at least 69 academic papers about sexual behavior based on sexts alone." 6am, and already that made my day.

Yes but how then do unjust laws change? (Insert civil disobedience here). Just because it is "illegal" doesn't necessarily mean it is correct. That is supposed to be the cool part of democracy - ideally then we could change the law to fit the moral majority.

This would be expensive, but it could work out. Figuring say at least $2500 for a decent node, like say maybe 128MB of RAM or more. Maybe like a PIII-600 or higher, although you could get off cheap by using Celeron's, but not a whole lot of L2 cache there. So if you want to have a huge cluster, lets say 300 nodes, thats $750,000. Now add in racks, and switches, etc, etc...we're talking over $1,000,000. Of course, if the programs are just running on the cluster, and don't have an interaction with the outside world, as little as a T1 could be sufficient. Also have to figure in monthly administration costs.

Okay, so you get funding, and let's say it goes over big and you have say 50 paying subscribers, we'll shoot small. Each paying $10/mo. That's $500/mo. total. That'll take a long time to pay off the investment. I do think though, that it could work with investment, and then have some paying subscribers, maybe they get priority over non-paying subscribers.