For your amusement: the author posted to defend his predictions on the Talkback links [LWN.net]

For your amusement: the author posted to defend his predictions on the Talkback links

Posted Jan 2, 2008 21:03 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (guest, #421)
Parent article: Trying to predict 2008 (ZDNet)

Not that he makes any more sense, but for entertainment here is what he posted (as user "murph_z"):

On IBM and SCO: Actually, they [IBM] appear to have wrestled defeat from victory. The problem is that if they succeed with the Novell ploy, they won't have addressed the issue - the breach of contract.
Ever watch a TV crime program in which the putative villain escapes on a technicality? That's great if you're rooting for the bad guy, but leaves the majority of the audience wanting a replay - and, in most cases, it's the replay that drives the program's emotional content.
[...]
As i've said before, the basis for settlement depend on one's perception of the original fault. If, as i think, the problems mostly originated with the mainframe linux project (with people from Dallas explicitly warning IBM management that AIX expertise was being applied to the Linux kernel port there) and then got into the GPL tree initially through SuSe then..
1 - IBM should kill that code base
2 - IBM should compensate SCO for losses arising from IBM's behavior
3 - all parties involved should release all remaining rights in AT&T and derived code under some open source license like the CDDL or GPL2.
In practice none of this would be easy, but the result could be to end this nonsense of Linux not being Unix and, therefore, the increasing bitterness with which people like Torvalds attack both Solaris and the BSDs. That conflict didn't exist prior to the lawsuit and is fundamentally wrong: we're all Unix supporters and the enemy is ignorance (often proxied by MS!), not the other guy's Unix.

Apparently, he seems to think that because IBM won with "the Novell ploy" (i.e. SCO not owning the copyrights?) it is somehow conceding on the breach of contract. And, obviously, that IBM is somehow in the wrong (thanks to that convincing evidence of "people from Dallas," which somehow doesn't seem to have swayed anyone in the courtroom). And there were no personality conflicts in the free-software world between the GNU/Linux and BSD camps, or with Sun (which has actually become a much bigger FLOSS player as far as I can tell), before the SCO lawsuit??

On PPC: yes the Mac now uses x86 and a 2007 dual Intel 2.7Ghz runs faster than a 2002 G4 single core at 1.2Ghz - but the mac now costs more than the PC (it didn't before because you got more for the buck) - and head to head PPC vs x86 comparisons using current chips from both groups show ppc significantly ahead. Remember: cell and Xenon are both PPC, and check out the embedded industry benchmark site.
[...]
I think MS will eventually be forced to switch to Linux or BSD for this.

Regarding the relative performance of PPC Macs and concurrent Intel PCs, he's obviously been drinking the kool-aid here (I use and like Macs, but any realistic benchmarks showed that they were neck-and-neck with Intel machines for years, sometimes faster, sometimes slower). And anyone who thinks that Cell benchmarks are at all relevant for the vast majority of software has never tried to program for it.

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