* Posts by Mikel

2643 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008

Oracle murders free OpenSolaris CD shipping

Mikel
Megaphone

It's row or swim in Larry Land

Giving stuff away does not add immediately to the bottom line. It's not how Oracle operates. Larry Ellison is not in the "giving stuff away" business and he doesn't intend to be.

So get over it. It's time to get forking all the Sun things that can be forked, and replacing all the things that can't.

Leaked details on HP iPad challenger reveal tight fight

Mikel
Pint

This would be cool

If it had a Tegra 2 processor and twice as much RAM. And Android. And 16:9 display. And didn't weigh over 2 pounds. And was a little cheaper. And had the iPad's battery life. And didn't need antivirus.

Wait... how is this like an iPad challenger again? Just the tablet form factor, with Windows? That's been done before to death.

Cybercrime's bulletproof hosting exposed

Mikel

Author understands a lot

These researchers too.

But there are a lot more layers to this onion than you think.

Ballmer in the clouds: 'Microsoft redefines, Amazon repackages'

Mikel
Troll

It's full of magic glue

And it won't in any way tie you to everything else that Microsoft does. Because that's just not how they operate. It will seamlessly integrate with everybody else's cloud, cloud tools, and client software using completely transparent and reasonable interfaces. It will differentiate itself not by tying itself to everything that Microsoft touches and stifling all opposition, but by being an outstanding package in the field that draws an eager developer base by its excellence!

It's completely lead-free, the ultimate in green and made of 70% recycled products.

Even in the first version the code is robust, resilient and secure - these are things Microsoft is famous for. The best is yet to come though: Every iterative version will be completely compatible with the last, though offerring greater power, flexibility and usibility with an ever-improving user experience. And of course each revision will be more secure than the previous.

Now if only it came with free candy.

Cisco ejects HP from privileged partner camp

Mikel

This will be interesting

And we have yet to hear from Oracle/Sun.

Windows Phone 7 will not translate to Win Mobile after all

Mikel
Gates Halo

A clean slate

In IT the field is so dynamic that there are few things you can really count on. Over the decades though, one thing has remained reliable: the consistent performance, stability and security of a new Microsoft operating system. Without a doubt the experience of one of their total rewrites is almost a committed guarantee. Excitement throughout the blogosphere is building to a fevered pitch over the utterly amazing things they're sure to have done with it this time, and how much fun we'll have experiencing and reporting the result ourselves.

It's a fresh new OS with a full suite of Microsoft appliations without the clutter of an app store with thousands of Apps. Fortunately it will be locked to Bing and Silvelight, the zune marketplace, etc. so I won't be troubled with choosing my search engine and browser plugins and all that other stuff. I hate having to choose - it makes me responsible when things turn out wrong. So nifty Microsoft is keyed into this common demand for less choice, less confusion.

I, for one, can't wait to see it in action.

PHPers prefer Windows desktop to Linux

Mikel
Thumb Up

Personal Home Page

It's rare to see an interpreted language evolve from a personal project for web page management into a modern language that's ready to challenge the giants in the field.

I would say gracefully evolve, but I was there and some of it was not pretty.

And yet here it is, held up above Perl and Python, Lisp and others one would have thought more worthy - not because of its semantic rigor, but because it's easy to learn.

Maybe it's true: the language matters little. The libraries are where the functionality is at and the language just applies the syntactic sugar.

Nonetheless, when programming in PHP I prefer a Linux platform, if for no other reason than that the Windows environment snags up my text file LFs into CR/LFs, which hoses up my bytewise binary accesses of text-based databases.

Microsoft re-tiles mobile platform for Windows 7 era

Mikel
Thumb Up

Microsoft needed a product launch today

By summer at the latest. By year end at the current trend Windows Mobile will be well under 5% of sales. That niche market won't draw developers. Even if they ship on time, have an oustanding UI and reliability is flawless - three things they've had trouble with in the past - it's too little too late.

It's fabulous news for Apple and Google.

Microsoft erases Windows 8 optimism

Mikel
Gates Halo

Windows.not

Development of Windows.next started in 1991, and has taken lessons learned from NT, XP, Vista and Windows 7 as well as Solaris, Linux, BSD and Mac OS-X.

W.next will embrace a robust and diverse marketplace by providing and connecting to open interfaces in a well documented and robust manner. The visual interface will be stunning. It will run on architectures from routers to cell phones, thin clients, ATMs, fighter jet consoles, automobile dashboards, embedded television processors, media centers, desktops, servers, blade servers, cloud clusters and HPC superclusters and more. It will do all of these things well. It will be robust, with no launch day exploits, bugs or crashes thanks to its commitment to ownership of the driver stack. Its network stack will be impeccable - they've run it against every known exploit and bug, every fuzzing algorithm, the NSA, CIA, several other TLAs and over 200 AI enhanced positive feedback self-educating attack bots. It will support every common filesystem including NTFS, HPFS, ZFS, EXT3, EXT4, and many more. It will even boot from the network.

W.Next will include a full suite of office applications that use open file formats, intuitive interface design, connectivity with all open applications. It will come with a vendor-neutral installation client with its own search engine which will tap vendor certified and third-party repositories and leverage apt-url for painless installation of any application. Of course it will include installers for all your favorite development environments including gcc, perl, Python, Ruby, Sun Java, MySQL, Postgres and more! A full application development environment will be an easy install, for dozens of programming languages. Users will be able to create their own spins on W.Next and share them with all their friends.

You will be able to choose your install image from a 50MB business-card CD .ISO to a completely full BDROM, HD-DVD or 7-DVD set, all of which will be seeded on bittorrent on launch day, legally because W.next is free.

All this and more! It will be completely fabulous. Oh, wait. It already is.

Google's Android code deleted from Linux kernel

Mikel

solution

Hand out a few hundred Android slates and phones to kernel geeks. They'll fall in love with it and maintain the Android code because it serves them. It's all about motivation.

Google moves to extend DNS protocol

Mikel
Happy

The evil Google

They want to mine my preferences to better tailor the advertiising I've blocked. More power to 'em. Along the way they deliver open stuff I like. It's a win/win for me.

Google mystery server runs 13% of active websites

Mikel
Linux

More interesting

Apparently IIS has lost half its market share of active websites in the last 24 months. That's not market migration - it's a stampede.

Obama to scrap Moon, Mars expeditions - report

Mikel
FAIL

And so it goes

The grand adventurer shakes his gaze from far horizons and settles into a rocking chair. We won't go because it's far. We won't go to the moon and Mars and do the other things in this decade or any other because it's hard and we're scared. Let others set sail for the great unknown to learn the wonderous lessons along the way and claim the rest of the universe for their own. We're tired. Tired and old and spent. It's cold out there. You go. We'll wait here and tend to our knitting and when you get back you can spin us a tale of wonders beyond imagining, wealth beyond the dreams of Midas - of petroleum waterfalls and diamond seas. Write if you find life.

MS to release WinMo 7 to phone makers in September

Mikel
Welcome

Too late

Even if they get it off by September, it's still too late for mobile phone developers to put their own spin on it and get it under the tree for Christmas. If the rumours of a second reboot of the team in a year are true, does anybody believe they can launch a good product in time?

Shoot, does anybody think that they can deliver a decent phone OS even if everything goes perfectly? That would fly in the face of tradition. If they pull it off, will anybody care?

I guess it's a Android tablet or iSlate under my tree.

Microsoft re-org hints at Windows and Mobile merge

Mikel
Black Helicopters

Anonymous post on a blog...

That's not a strong reference to hang your hopes on.

And what of Roz Ho? Has she led the Premium Mobile eXperience into Danger long enough?

IE zero-day used in Chinese cyber assault on 34 firms

Mikel
Happy

IE on the client side, not at google

An unpublished exploit in IE? Say it ain't so, Steve.

Maybe Google should just deprecate IE support - or gradually make it slower. Nah, Google wouldn't pull a low down dirty trick like that.

Microsoft predicts Linux will fail mobile 'quality' test

Mikel

Running scared and the should be

When everybody has a copy of OS-X on their iPhone, and a linux kernel in their Android phone, and not Windows, something odd is going to happen: they're not going to afraid of Linux and OS-X. When their computer doesn't work - when it's so bogged down with the Microsoft Crud it takes 10 minutes to boot they'll start each day browsing the 'Net on an OS that's secure, stable and reliable enough to use on a phone. The kind of OS you want in your pocket when your car breaks down and you need to navigate your way discreetly out of Compton or Detroit without walking door to door in the middle of the night begging for help. The kind of OS you want in your hand when you're reaching out to your kid.... "and if you need me, call."

And when their Windows PC crashes, or fails or won't connect, what are they going to use to access customer service and call for help? Their good OS. That's going to get some people thinking about their desktop OS priorities.

Android and WinMo updates going head-to-head

Mikel

Watch the video

This is how you make a Snapdragon sad. Plant it with Windows Mobile. I am amazed by the nearly complete lack of progress. Is this really the best Microsoft can do?

Microsoft sees its chance in Googlephone

Mikel
Jobs Horns

Sendo. Sendo. Sendo. Sendo!

How soon we forget...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/06/microsofts_masterplan_to_screw_phone/

Yeah, rush right into Microsoft's embrace they will - like cats to the bath. Directly into this:

http://gizmodo.com/5253646/windows-mobile-team-admits-explains-65s-half+assed-ui

They'll run to Microsoft because the CEOs and board chairmen of the world's largest phone corporations - previously pragmatic old men - have secretly been replaced by highly emotional fifteen year old girls who are "particularly miffed".

@frymaster: Yes, contrary to Google's expectations, phone partners are opting to pay rather than go the free route. They get some nice integration services and as you note, some apps and in return give some money and some access to the experience. They seem to be liking the deal so far, but if they change their minds they can always build their own platform because Android is free also. Google doesn't care - they just want people to have a phone with a decent browser so they can sell ads on their services - which are 12 of the world's top 40 websites right now, and a good share of the top 200.

http://www.alexa.com/topsites

WinMo 6.5 is, as some here have noted, pants. They're going to rush the production of 7 as well because of that - and they just rebooted the team last February so expect exciting new crashy bugs and security vulnerabilities as the new team gets up to speed:

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/02/Microsoft_moves_key_execs_to_Windows_Mobile_for_new_strategy39101162.html

Meanwhile Roz Ho is still VP of Premium Mobile Experiences (PMX) even after the Danger disaster, which may define the word inexplicable:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/rozho/

And even Microsoft's affectionate friend Gartner is predicting the rise of the open phone OS:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139301/Symbian_Android_will_be_top_smartphone_OSes_in_12_Gartner_reiterates

Yeah, WinMo is going to sweep up these disgruntled phone partners and deliver them from the evil Google, when Google hasn't actually done any dirty cheating underhanded tricks yet, nor demonstrated active gross incompetence. I can see that happening - not.

The Googlephone - there's more where that came from

Mikel
Pint

@TitaniumConsulting

Flop? Not likely unless it does something dastardly like lose everyone's data like Micrososft's Danger did. I can't fault them for the pricing. The conversation with their phone partners probably went something like: "OK, guys, you don't want to sell this phone so we'll sell it. Where can we price it so you don't throw a fit?" The phones are up for sale on ebay and amazon priced at $700-$1000 and selling briskly to international customers who can't buy it at the Google phone store.

Google will sell an Android slate device too, priced the same way and for the same reasons. The top 5 OEMs have had them designed for a year and won't ship because of their existing partner relationships - it won't run Windows and it doesn't have an Intel processor. They'll hold up prototypes, and then come back later and say aw, shucks, we couldn't get it to work.

I think it's deliciously ironic that the efforts to prevent adoption of this technology are going to push Google unwillingly into being a consumer electronics giant they had no intention of being and make them untold billions in profits.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/170726/

http://www.androidacademy.com/3-forums/9-handsets-a-devices/247-dells-streak-mid-video

Google to mobile industry: ‘F*ck you very much!’

Mikel
Grenade

Progress ain't easy

The wireless situation was hopelessly blocked up by companies preventing progress to maximize their profits. Along comes Google and says "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" I care less about the business models of companies that won't give me progress than I do about the ones that do. So forgive me for not shedding a tear for the poor defenseless wireless cabal with their deliberately incompatible networks, vendor lock-in, locked-down phones. I will not lament the end of their stately motion toward newer and better technologies - we've paid them well and they let us down. Now it's time for a bumpy breakneck scramble into the future, complete with bruises and pain - but it will be an exciting ride.

/grenade because there was no plunger.

TomTom iPhone Car Kit

Mikel
FAIL

He's just resting

The fact that Droid does turn-by-turn directions for free was just a scratch. He's not even hurt. He doesn't want to go on the cart.

HPcom spells 'IT disaster,' says UK firm

Mikel

@AC 11:02 GMT

Perhaps you hadn't noticed, but Oracle has their own hardware platform now. Oracle is not being shy about their intent to build optimization in both code and hardware to tailor their products to work better together. If HP wants to compete, they need to play hardball.

Mikel
Thumb Up

Virtually complete

@AC "Strange Combination": HP has some good stuff in ProCurve. Adding 3COM adds customers and high speed core switching, and some valuable IP.

HP has an interesting "whole stack" solution from the netbook to the server to storage to the core of the network, integrated with a unified management architecture solution called "Insight Control" They need a compelling software virtuallization story and a database to complete the set. They don't have the cheapest solutions, but what they do have is some solid stuff. They sell more computers than anybody. Some think that Citrix, with its XenServer environment is the last piece, but the price of Citrix is high and it's a delicate dance to provide complete solutions for every customer and yet provide a fair platform for every external partner. Maybe HP would acquire Citrix to get XenServer and spin off the rest. If Sun should have to spin off MySQL in order to merge with Oracle and HP took it up, that would complete their quest. HP would still need to spin up some systems analysts to fit it all together but they would have a complete offer from your pocket to the top500. They would be in the position Steve Jobs would kill for.

In my mind Oracle is taking entirely the wrong tack here. They're ticking off every partner they have to acquire and offer a complete product line. EMC and Cisco are doing it better by accentuating their "best together but first-in-class alone" message. I don't know what IBM is doing here -- probably watching the whole thing play out from their Olympian view.

HP might buy Citrix and spin off the other products to get XenServer. Alternatively Mark Hurd just might call up Tom Bogan and Mark Templeton and explain to them how they don't need the virtualiztion piece that they're not using to its full effectiveness, and how powerful a full partnership with HP can be in the current environment. HP might get the virtualization piece of the puzzle for a song and a dance if they take care and sell it.

Regardless of how these giants dance to own their whole set each will do some things better than others. The best answer for each customer will be different.

/I don't work for any of these people, nor own stock in any of them.

Apple under Jobs: from muck to mountaintop

Mikel
Thumb Up

Doing it right

Apple hasn't been without missteps this last decade, but it's been so right so much more often than it's been wrong - and more importantly done more right than its peers - that it's doing very well.

Now it's not just a PC company and a software company - it's a music and video and application vendor, a phone vendor, a home video appliance vendor, a personal pocket media vendor too. In all these fields it has room to grow. If they continue to execute as well and grow their base there's a long bright future ahead.

Bit-patterned disk media moving closer

Mikel

Give up already

Mechano-magnetic media is dead. Long live Solid State!

Microsoft munches super startup carcass

Mikel

Kiss of death

So ISC was going like gangbusters on Linux clusters and then they partnered with Microsoft and coincidentally got a new CEO. They went under and Microsoft winds up with their key personnel including the new CEO and the company's intellectual property - to make the product Microsoft HPC only of course. Other investors get nothing. That sum it up?

Another successful Microsoft joint venture!

White hats release exploit for critical Windows vuln

Mikel

Conficker

6,443,852 unique IP's generated 435,608,525 hits to the Conficker Work Group servers yesterday. Both of those numbers are new records.

http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/wiki/pmwiki.php/ANY/InfectionTracking

That's just one botnet of many. Mean time to clean is what, 2 years? Wouldn't it be nice to opt out of this game?

IT shops rank servers on downtime

Mikel
WTF?

Didiot

El Reg should know better than to feed this troll. She exists to get her quotes in print, and then sell her advocacy. She's in the same class of pundit as Rob Enderle.

Here's a reference to an article where she said the exact opposite thing: http://www.osnews.com/thread?131171

Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo! to join anti-Googlebook war

Mikel
Thumb Up

Making out of print books available

Not all of the good books stay in print. But good old books have to go away if publishers want to sell us cheesy new or trivially modified full price books. By making books permanently available Google is performing a service at great cost and with uncertain profit. The risk is huge, and these sorts of suits just add to the costs and the risk. If someone else wants to perform that service too, that would be great. But preventing the service is not in the consumer's best interest.

I say good on Google for saving the dusty books of yesteryear, that my children might read Farenheit 451 long after publishers abandon it. For noone to preserve these works and make them available would be to ignore the message in that very important book.

Up for Google.

Microsoft banks on Windows 7 double holiday hit

Mikel
Pirate

Already licensed 100m seats of Software Assurance

And the product isn't even shipped yet.

Ballmer gets tough with girly Microsoft partners

Mikel
Gates Horns

Microsoft will compete agressively

Microsoft wants to provide web services and virtual machine hosting. They're willing to be as aggressive with that competition as they've always been. They're a $200Bn corporation who doesn't have to pay for the software.

If I was an online web services or cloud services provider, I think I would rethink my business plan a little so that it didn't depend on software from a competitor for success. And if I was invested in one, I think I'd have some questions about long term investments in a company that's competing against Microsoft in this field using Microsoft's own software.

Microsoft's Azure cloud price pipped by Amazon's Linux

Mikel
FAIL

Never undercut your distributor

This should teach Amazon not to run Windows Server on their cloud. There's no way they can compete with Microsoft on pricing if they have to pay for the server software licensing.

NHS hospitals struggle to hold back the malware tide

Mikel
Stop

Windows malware

If only there were a way we could avoid Windows Malware, we could prevent it from causing these failures of these system critical to the protection of life and health.

>Also, please quit using every single virus outbreak as justification to use linux.

Why? Does that not neatly solve the problem of avoiding Windows Malware? The Windows environment does not provide some magical health industry benefit to be found nowhere else. It's a window into data and nothing more. There is nothing special about Windows that makes it better for this task. In fact, the existence of a thriving Windows Malware ecosystem as illustrated by the fine article prove it is unsuitable for the task. For all of that, a web front end is all you need for this class of applications. There's no excuse for making it more complicated than that. Outlook integration and Photoshop are NOT required to provide patient care.

Intel cozying up to Google Chrome OS

Mikel
Thumb Up

It's about Innovation

I think Intel has completed its re-visioning from a widget maker to a fount of progress. Good on them.

IBM not worried about Cisco blades

Mikel
Stop

HP is not worried

Not about this and not about IBM's 8Gb/s SAN connection.

HP shrunk the SAN and put it _inside_ the server blade. 8Gb/s and 100k IOPS in 320GB as a blade internal mezzanine module. Use up to three per blade. Up to 256 per 42U rack, for an aggregate bandwidth of You've Got to be Kidding Me. Oh - and the thing draws five watts.

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/io_accelerator/index.html

Oops. The game changed again.

Microsoft smooths Windows 7 snafu

Mikel
Go

Downloaded with FF3

When you get to the page with the download button, view source. You'll see the URI down near the bottom. Paste that into a new tab address bar, and you're off to the races.

Have seen comments that we're all sharing from a pool of five keys for 7/32 and five for 7/64 to the 2.5 million users limit may be a red herring.

SanDisk flash holds secret flash sauce till after Christmas

Mikel
Thumb Up

IOPS

SLC flash has upside potential for databases and transaction based operations. At over 80 times the I/O transactions per second related to the fastest spinning drives, the price increment is not a consideration if you need the I/Os. Flash has the potential to meet the I/Os of RAM in a technology that retains its data under a loss of power. For some applications this is crucial. For the same amount of storage it also costs less. It should help drive down the cost of larger sticks of RAM as well.

For laptops, not so much. MLCs will find common use here. Even now the storage capacity is not as much an issue as the cost of the chips. A standard 2.5" drive form factor can easily hold far more Flash chips than is marketable right now. Current offerings contains a good deal of wasted space. Flash drives will always have a power consumption advantage over dynamic RAM, and as the data size grows this difference becomes ever more material. As we seek the maximum number of bits that can be stored in a cell, we'll fight to find the balance between density and reliability.

For the real high end we're getting away from drive emulation as an interface now. PCIe direct interface is here, and for the extreme high end Infiniband. An IO chip that simulates cylinders, heads and sectors is redundant once you realize that the essential part of that abstraction is that when you put a block and then request it back, you get the data that you put. Where exactly in the device the data is actually stored for access speed and wear levelling is not relevant - only that the block put is the same block retrieved. Now that the engineers building these devices grasp the essence of the abstraction, the interface itself is irrelevant. Sometime soon we may begin to see Flash units that support variable block size.

The new products are interesting in that they promise much more potential than is yet exploited.

RISC daddy conjures Moore's Lawless parallel universe

Mikel

The laptop performance mountain is climbed

Laptops can now do what laptops need to do. It's time now to focus on making them do it all day on a reasonable battery, and the battery should lose weight every year.

Microsoft slings Windows Home Server in OEM bargain bin

Mikel
Linux

@Works for me

Try Clonezilla. It makes Operating system backups to a Windows share, ftp server, portable hard drive or a bunch of other ways. It's cheap, fast and free.

BitTorrent Inc. amputates half of self

Mikel
Flame

Bring back FC

Apparently Pud is working on something, but it's not FC. 30 days to launch.

http://ask.pud.com/2008/11/06/working-on-something-new/

Yeah, it's time to start up the corporate dead pool again. I've got GM, Chrysler and Ford, in that order for December, January and February.

Linux at 17 - What Windows promised to be

Mikel
Thumb Up

Happy Birthday Tux

Linux was at first very poor. That's to be expected. In 17 years it has improved some.

Although we call it Linux in most uses the GNU software does play more of a part and should be recognized, as well as the contributions of UCSD and contributors under their BSD license. The terms Operating System and Operating Environment are fairly nebulous even to this day. Still, we need an easy handle to hold it by, and "Linux" will do.

In the beginning it ran on one system with one processor (Linus's). Now it runs on 85% of the top 500 supercomputers, my wireless router and phones and many platforms in between (and beyond!). Hardware support used to be poor. Now Linux supports more hardware than any other system ever offered, period. This has been true for a long time.

Linux conquered the server room first, as is natural. The server room is a hot environment where professionals are classically educated and use real metrics to determine what works and what does not. Technologies are born and live or die in the server room before most of us ever see them. As the World Wide Web grew the power of Linux became obvious to the denizens of server rooms and it matured just in time to be adopted by many of them. In many cases the tech boom of the late '90s was a Linux boom.

Once upon a time it wasn't useful on laptops, but now it's on half of the top selling laptops on a major vendor, Amazon.com. Major vendors used to shun it, in deference to their major partner Microsoft. Now all major vendors offer it preinstalled, some in varying flavors. For a long time Linux was not pretty. Now it's not hard to convince people that a two year old installation of Linux is actually the "next" version of the dominant desktop OS. Linux is now the Belle of the Ball.

Software installation on Linux could still use some work. It's not as bad as Windows. The add/remove programs feature in Windows doesn't actually Add programs, except in certain rare circumstances. The add programs utilities in most Linux distributions links to repositories of software so deep they had to include an internal search engine. Still, the installers in most Linux distributions should also reference a "local" and "Local Area Network" repositories by default, so that applications could add themselves to these repositories as part of their standard installation process. They'll figure this out soon.

The Linux of today embraces the classical scientific rigor of a bygone era, the splashy interfaces marketing thrives on, and the brutal Darwinian winnowing of our current IT environment. It survives and it looks good doing it by doing what it does well.

Most importantly, the direction of the knife has shifted. The cutting edge isn't on optimum performance processing any more. We've seen the trap that that is finally - "Intel giveth, and Microsoft taketh away." Now the huge growth is thin-is-in low wattage desktops and laptops that somehow have gained 20% of the market share in just a year. Here the low overhead requirements of Linux are well positioned to exploit the growth of emerging markets abroad (the third world) and emerging markets at home (nettops, netbooks and thin clients). I believe this is by design -- many of the new generation of developers live in growth markets where building apps that require the juice sucking high wattage platforms of yesteryear is not targeting their optimum market because they just don't have the watts and building out the watts is just not going to happen. I also believe the major vendor is suffering from inertia and failed to make the turn here. In the challenging economic environment before us the power of "free" will gain considerable leverage for the next decade even at home.

There are major applications still which are preventing people from adopting Linux. Photoshop is a major example. As soon as Adobe realizes that their platform partner will not stop trying to kill them with their Adobe Flash replacement Silverlight, they may begin to see the wisdom in diversifying their platforms. Even if they don't, they're a weak anchor. Game vendors follow other platforms too, but their loyalty is transient anyway. The brutal evolution of games is such that the ones that choose the wrong platform die and the life cycle of a game company is about five years.

Linux is only a tiny fraction of the free software revolution, but it can bear the standard for the millions of developers and thousands of projects that march us toward the future. The use, reuse, and improvement of open projects increases the utility for all. For each little bit you put in, you get a million back. This is progress.

Thanks Tux!