The network effect, the winner takes all effect, is becoming less pronounced as there are more ways to build cross platform software.
Well, grow enough to counter-balance the sudden loss of billions of Android devices? I don't think there's reason to believe that. It had stalled for ages on the desktop, and mostly got to devices outside the embedded space through Android.
(Of course Android-Linux devices will continue to exist -- but eventually those with the new Google kernel/OS underneath will overtake them, especially if Google insists on OEMs using it to get access to the various Google apps).
>The network effect, the winner takes all effect, is becoming less pronounced as there are more ways to build cross platform software.
It's not about having some cross platform software though, it's about the whole ecosystem. Which is e.g. one of the reasons why Firefox OS, et al never got anywhere.
Consider Unity, the game making tools. When shipping there is pretty much a series of checkboxes for what kinds of packages you want to make. Unless you went out of your way to use some OS specific stuff it will work everywhere. There are other tools like this for other non-gaming domains, do they contribute in your view of OS ecosystems?
I think the time is ripe for a new OS. Especially given that Google's OSes don't expose much of the OS to apps - it should make it quite easy to port their userspaces over.
For fundamental there have been several schedulers, the removal of the "Big Kernel Lock" and many other changes.
For monitoring hotplugging, yes it works. I did it several times today. I have 3 laptops with 3 different GPUs and it works on all of them.
The flipside is that "report" buttons can become surrogate downvote buttons, and the lopsided volume of reports leads to inconsistent enforcement of rules, so commenters unpopular with the crowd or mods are more and more likely to be banned, while discussion devolves to groupthink, cliquishness and sycophancy towards the locally-powerful. IME BBSes are the most prone to fall victim to this; the communities are small enough that you can't be "anonymous," and with threads that can continue and be bumped to the top indefinitely, there's no mechanism besides moderator intervention to stop a flame war. Blogs and HN/Reddit-style aggregators do better because old threads are quickly buried.