Why don't you do it on a whiteboard then? My at-home space has a three-monitor sit-stand desk, with a whiteboard directly behind my chair. All I have to do is stand up, hit the button, and everyone on my video conference can see my whiteboard. Agreed they can't write on that board, because it is an actual white board, but it still gives you that free-form space to express your ideas just as you would in an in-person conference room. And based on experience, whiteboard sessions are typically not that collaborative. Most collaboration consists of another member of the group writing something on the side, or erasing what you wrote and writing their own interpretation. I'm not saying it does not happen; I'm saying that a remote experience does not have to be as negatively impactful as may be assumed.

I don't remember Stallman missing an opportunity to explain why he does something or what he believes to be important. Certainly not something on the scale of leaving FSF. He also gathered massive amounts of hatred and mockery from people much more influential than some shitty journalist, and probably someone somewhere still calls him an extremist at least few times a second. So this complete lack of comments is so far outside of his normal methods, I can only attribute it to some obligation. As opposed to Media Lab guys, he has no meaningful obligations toward MIT, and I doubt that he gives rat's ass about reputation of MIT or Media Lab management. Silence may be related to some lawsuit or investigation, and leaving MIT may be a way to avoid a conflict of interests, however that would not explain leaving FSF. Therefore either, there is some completely separate reason for leaving FSF, or he had encountered a form of media bullying that he never had to deal with. What sounds truly terrifying considering what he had to deal with in the past.

Sigh. One word. Cloud. Or, to tie it a little closer to Microsoft's home, Azure. This is a Big Data play people. Big Data requires Big Compute, and Big Storage. This is likely because Microsoft wants to make R work better on its cloud offering than any other vendors. We will have to see if that means locking other cloud vendors out or not, but I'm hoping that with the new direction (open sourcing .NET anyone?) they will not try that tactic again. Only time will tell. I'm not suggesting that we let our guard down, but at the same time let's not jump to conclusions.

Where is Perl in the relative rankings of programming language usage today? I'm not suggesting any correlation, let alone causation, but it is interesting to ponder the question.

Visual R is already a product called RStudio.

Oh but they tried that in the past -- those products had a consistent result of killing the whole market segment then themselves.

1. Windows CE PDAs -- almost completely replaced healthy PDA-oriented OS due to Windows name, then wiped out the first generation of non-phone PDAs due to being absolutely inadequate in all ways possible. Survivors were iPAQ (Windows CE/Mobile), Palm (PalmOS), Visor (PalmOS), Blackberry (Blackberry OS, a phone but from PDA generation).

2. Windows Mobile phones -- sold to carriers, disappointed users, lost all market to dumbphones and Symbian-based Nokia, then completely wiped out by iPhone.

3. Windows Phone phones -- Survive by being produced by zombified Nokia, can't get any presence on the market due to iPhone and Android competition.

4. Windows RT tablets -- No one bought them in the first place.

Please re-read what you are responding to.

No, it's not just "preference". There is usually a reason why nearly half of the whole population stays away from some completely normal activity, but not any of (supposedly similar) others.

That's a really pointless statement, considering that it's DoJ speculating about possible DoJ decisions.

You forgot at least two layers of virtualization you use to "run Linux" on those servers.

If anything, competition from Microsoft causes people to hastily add features and polished look while infesting their products with boatloads of bugs and painting themselves into a corner as far as technology development is concerned. The best projects are those that ignore Microsoft completely, Linux among them.

No, the fungus watches Fox News.

They can not be standardized because any "Computer Engineer" without sufficient Electrical Engineering background is actually a Shit Engineer.

And that would create a massive mess of dependencies in weirdest places, along with a burden of supporting software that can not even be built and tested while some other software is installed, thanks to name conflicts. No, after this kind of sabotage by the original developers, the code is for all practical purposes dead.

Gentoo actually supports old packages (or at least did for a long time), however dependencies and lack of active development make it at best suitable for transition. The problem is, there is nothing to move to in the first place, new versions of GNOME are not going to be usable for the foreseeable future.

Linux distributions had no choice -- GNOME 3 re-uses the names of components from GNOME 2, for its new, incompatible ones. Once GNOME 3 is installed, GNOME 2 can't run. MATE project basically renamed everything with randomly chosen names, just to make the thing run.