Trolls and cheaters in online games are kinda what made me quit. And yes, from people threatening to find and kill me FOR NO REASON, flying immortal enemies with all the best weapons...
Since I stopped, I've made something out of my life - finished college, got a decent job, great girlfriend, and lost those extra ponds. I thank those jerks every day!
But then, what works for me, might not work for you. You might not NEED a life!

This is great for business mail too... small company where I work was literally BURIED with spam until we moved to gmail. Since their mail addresses were "in the open" on our website for years, some of them get 200+ spams a day. Now, if 1 in 1000 passes, it's a bad day. Also, in my private inbox, I had an VERY old mail address still redirected to gmail address... turned out that was the source of 1/2 spams (100+ / day). But those were filtered too without problem. So far so good... not a single false detection for ham. Nothing but praise so far. Disclaimer: I do not work for gmail. I am the genuine satisfied customer with smile on my face, from "after" picture, as seen on TV!

Nothing like good ol' time vendor lock-in! Now let me just replace my dying generic proprietary hardware stuff by paying my vendor outrageous sums of money! Whoops. Seems like company moved to a place called Narnia and accepts only calls made though their proprietary DRM enabled inter dimensional subconscious interface.

I work at a small company ( 200 workers) and there is always a box with bunch of working mobile phones with dead chargers. Or working chargers from long dead mobile phones - all being kept for "pairing" - so until a match pops up, it's a box full of junk. If this was mandatory 10 years ago, we would have definitely saved some money. And have -1 box of junk. Oh and standard batteries would also rock. Of course, at least 3-4 standard types would be necessary due to different phone forms, but still much better than this proprietary mess. And that's just the financial/practical side. Don't get me started on the ecological side :)

No one is arguing that OTHER operating systems also don't have the same level of compatibility... Just that by the volume of software that gets abandoned on a platform, breakage in MS operating systems backward compatibility is by far the worst. So yes, professionals that use Mac for 10-15 years have experienced similar problems, but by comparison are a drop in the ocean compared to people who had to move from DOS. And its not just "It's not working" but "It's unmaintainable" - such as Visual Basic apps.

Exactly. "Some". And yes, better than none, but in the world of business keeping that last working 386 so the application can keep running is mostly not an option. In my case, DOS emulators saved the day for some, but proper printing was usually hard to achieve unless printers were specifically crafted for dos compatibility. My point being, not the design flaw of NEW version, but of OLD version - which they abandoned in haste so they could cut costs.

Hey, that's great - ( http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject ) But probably, some non-Gnome specific document should be used, as "common denominator" document for Gnome, KDE and all.

By volume of software, it is. And in real world, that's probably what matters.

Yes they did. Explain existence of "Compatibility modes" and DOS smulatgors such as DOSbox otherwise.

Ever since moving away from MS DOS (and gui they called windows 95/98/me) compatibility with legacy software has been dreadful - Microsoft practically forced the whole world into rewriting most of their applications for several times now! Since this is (kinda) happening again, they should start FreeWindows7 emulator now, so that it's ready in cca 2018 when Microsoft decides that its way too old and it needs to be replaced with whatever brand spanking new OS they are forcing on the world by then.

It is the basic philosophical dilemma - freedom with or without the control? Imho, both have valid arguments, but Linux ecosystem is modular enough to allow both. But standards and common sense above all! For the specific topic of UI design, things got MUCH better over the last couple of years in OSS world ("Why Free Software usability tends to suck" document was published in 2002!). That being said, open source community should probably publish a document / wiki with reference basic, simple guidelines for designing user interface for OSS programs. And improve document gradually over time, so that it becomes bible / manifesto of making a consistent user interface. Also, make simple tests for programs - if program conforms to it, it can get certificate such as "This program has a sane user interface as determined by OSF".