| > the corpses are kept upright as open source projects I think you are looking at this not merely wrongly, but in reverse. Gradually the PC compatible has paved over the entirety of desktop/laptop computing. It's like a farm: ripping out hedgerows, blasting with fertiliser and weedkillers and pesticides, trying to kill those pesky things stealing the land. Those chemicals have turned the innocent IBM PC, a half-8-bit half-16-bit low-end box, into this vasty computing colossus, a mile across, chewing through kilotons of work and emitting heat and work. And yet, all over that farm, in the wheel-ruts and in the cracks beside the farm buildings, a few of the weeds just keep on growing. The men in suits have tried SO very hard to exterminate them and they just will not die. And yet, if you raise your head and look outside the mega-farm, they are everywhere. Outside the farmland, where it's too steep to farm: vast forests of weird twisty weeds turned into trees. In people's pockets (phones). By the sofa (tablets). In their cars and cookers and hearing aids and pacemakers. Tiny Archimedes, everywhere: Arm chips, outselling all x86 by hundreds to one. Weird little CPU architectures, weird RTOSes and router OSes. They cannot kill those weeds, however hard they try, and despite all their efforts, there will always be more weeds than crops. |