That was ridiculously hard to find on CRTCs website. Infact I never did find it on the CRTC site. But google quickly revealed "Telus". How is that surprising. Bell has been on a conquest of all CDMA carriers in Canada. The only ones left are Bell, Telus, Sasktel, MTS and Latitude. And there is enough provincial/territorial interest in Sasktel, MTS and Lattitude that Bell can't buy them without hell freezing over. Besides Bell buying Telus puts them in direct competition with Saskatel, MTS and Lattitude, why go through the pain of taking trying to buy one of the other three. It is stupid, I hope that the CRTC squashes this and forces there to be some competition with Bell. Sasktel, MTS and lattitude are too small to compete against Bell. In fact Sasktel (don't know about MTS and Lattitude, but I suspect they are the same) gets their phones through Bell, I wonder how that will work when Bell is in direct competition with Sasktel. Sasktel already has a hard enough time supplying all their dealers with phones, I used to work for a dealer and we always (the entire ~5 months I worked there) had phones on back order. And it wasn't like we weren't asking for them, they never sent full orders, all the dealers in the city would run out of the same models within a day of each other. But all that is really a side note to the main topic.

+1 Always insightful, Thanks for the info.

You are right to point out that the cache is a major problem.

BUT, you try writing a compiler for a multi core system withOUT all those huge caches. And then try to tune a random selection of non trivial programs to maximize their throughput to get 50GFLOPS. And if you manage that you are going to have some serious heat/density/power issues as your tiny little cores are placed side by side all using dynamic logic to maximize their throughput

If you think the answer is a larger core just ask Intel, IBM or AMD why they have moved to multi-core systems in such a strong way. The simple answer is performance to cost, in other words more complex cores are to difficult to design and per core performance diminishes with complexity (ie too much power/heat for not enough performance).

The goal set by DARPA is meant to be manageable but not easily. Certainly not as easy as "look at those tiny tiny little cores".

The use of "GNU/Linux" does get a bit annoying and he does come off as a purist. But the argument of:

"purity" vs "usefulness"

Is a straw-man version of what RMS said. He never said don't include anything C#. Just not to include it in the default installation. Not where people will be encouraged to use it and an ecosystem of apps grow around and become an integral part of the community. And I see his argument if Mono (or C# more generally) becomes a integral part of the community it becomes a target.

So, is encouraging the use of C# in Linux distros worth it? To answer that I guess we have to ask the following: How safe are the free implementations from patent threat? How much will the software ecosystem around Mono grow if it is installed by default vs if it is an additional package that needs to be installed post install? How many apps can safely rely on Mono without making the cost of loosing Mono x the probability of loosing Mono too much?

The real point is what could happen? What are the risks in a few years after the Debian community has more widely adopted Mono as a basis for many apps and then it comes under threat of patent suits. The point made by RMS is that including Mono in the default installation encourages it's use/dependence by an increasing portion of the community. This larger portion of the community could then come under threat from patents, possibly taking all the apps that rely on it with it.

1) I agree with 99Bottles... with the FAT analogy. Just look at what RMS said, it doesn't say don't include Mono or Tomboy, just says not to include them in the default distributions:

2) To those comments regarding the mention of GNU Projects implementation of C#. The comment by RMS about the GNU implementation of C# was in braces (like this). It was a side note. And no where does RMS say to use the GNU Project's Portable.NET over Mono. He was pointing out that even the GNU project is putting effort into supporting C#. And therefore he must not be totally against free implementations of C#.

"although definitive claims of causation are premature"

Perhaps reading the entire summary before replying would prevent the miss use of correlation as causality. I know the media is bad for doing this but I expect people on Slash Dot to be better than the average sensation seeking journalist.