Some great points, however we don't even need greenhouses or irrigation to do this. Check out this story of the transformation of some of the most arid, salty and generally hard to farm land in Jordan that has been transformed into productive farmland that captures and stores its own water supply completely self sufficiently:
Greening the desert

Anyone have a 'Religiousness Cure' app handy that can help people become atheist? Would be fun to watch the reactions when Apple approve that one...

So how do you propose to make system calls directly in your user-land program without including Linux header files? Note that calls via libc are not system calls themselves.

Just realised that this is from 2009 and old news, sorry people! Original and non-social-bookmarked-to-oblivion article here

This pretty much explains the reasons behind Google's decision to go with Dalvik (well, except the specifics of the failed negotiations over J2ME licensing).

In short J2ME as licensed by Sun/Oracle under the GPL has deliberately had the 'classpath exception' removed. Developers targeting a GPL J2ME are forced to release their code as GPL due to the linking with all of the GPL'd libraries. According to their plan this would make paid J2ME licensing under non-GPL license a the only option for mobile vendors. Sun specifically did this for J2ME and not J2EE or J2SE as this is where they saw the most licensing money.

All this talk of complete implementation getting a patent license is moot it seems. Google decided that the paid licensing from Sun was prohibitive for one reason or another and that forcing the GPL on Android app developers was unacceptable. So when they took the decision to clean-room a VM from scratch any efforts to make the implementation complete would not have been rewarded with a patent grant.

My 'works for me' attitude is only the equivalent of your 'they suck as it won't work for me' attitude. I was just making a counter example where the results from the open source radeon driver have been excellent.

I can't stand fanboism either, my emphasis on the word *Ubuntu* was meant to mean : 'hey, its been stable for me *even* on Ubuntu' who don't have the best record on QA and have a reputation for putting features before stability.

Anyway its a shame you've had such a nightmare with the radeon driver but don't paint the efforts being made by AMD as worthless for everyone from your bad experience with one mobile GPU, there's a lot of happy users out there too.

Mobility X1400 (r500) in Thinkpad T60 user here. Radeon has been working great for well over a year now and KMS seems totally solid now, laptop goes for up to week or more at a time between reboots (suspend to RAM every night). 2D compiz is superbly smooth, even Flash plays smoothly full screened at 1650x1050. And thats on 64-bit *Ubuntu*.

You are missing the fact that when AMD introduced their open source strategy, they had a huge backlog of 'IP' to trawl through and review before releasing the documentation. Things started slowly and the wait for my R500 based laptop GPU to reach a decent level of support felt like a long time.

But from what we are seeing now AMD have made steady gains and have reached a point where they are releasing an OSS *driver* (albeit an immature one) for their latest GPU series less than a year after the hardware was released. Being able to 'drop' support for the proprietary drivers on legacy hardware earlier (in favour of the OSS driver option) will free up more developers within AMD to work on drivers for the latest GPUs. As the OSS driver team become and more more integrated within the workflow of the company we can expect to see OSS driver code and documentation get closer and closer to the hardware releases.

In short it looks like things are paying off for AMD and the OSS driver strategy. Keep up the good work AMD!

Its not that bad compared to most home other home NAS boxes though. Also if you put Debian on it the more recent kernels have had performance improvement work done by Marvell.

First UK software patent - March 2008.

after the UK IPO appealed against the EU patent office and lost in the high court. Slashdot missed this one (I submitted a story but it was ignored).