actually there is a kind of interesting trend I'm noticing in the open source world. Not a good one.
The OLPC has managed the accomplishment of booting 2-3x slower on linux than xp, and the environment is slow as snails. open office is bigger, slower, and buggier in my experience than MS office. I keep reviewing papers that want to simplify things by ... adding another layer of software! I just reviewed another paper that was more or less changing something about a process. In Plan 9, you add a new ctl command. In linux, you, what else? add a new system call. The OSS world has built such a complex house of cards that the only thing people know to do is add more stuff to make it simpler. And we can see how well that's working. It's quite a comment on the state of play that the OLPC guys, to improve the system overall, had to dump Linux for Windows. On the other hand, if you've used an OLPC, it makes some sense -- great machine, dog slow. For no reason: inferno runs on it like a bat. ron
