Decius wrote:
] Something that gets beaten into you in engineering is that
] there is no such thing as a situation that doesn't come down
] to price/performance. If you eliminate price from the picture,
] the conversation is silly. In the real world everything costs
] money. No square cows.

i had a feeling you'd be the first with that reply. i agree, of course. it's doubly hard in the world of engineering for normal people b/c there are so many hard to define parameters. so many preferences and habits and idiosyncracies, all of which make definition of the optimal specs even more impossible than on, say, a mechanical system that only 5 highly trained technicians will ever use.

and the points about linux as optimal for tasks with uncommon custom requirements is certainly true.

maybe too many software developers took their physics classes to heart instead of their engineering... "imagine a perfecly flat, frictionless surface, in a vaccuum, in a fixed reference frame..."

RE: ZDNet UK - News - Microsoft: 'We should learn from open source'