You can always boycott their policies by *not* playing their games and doing something productive instead
And no, I'm not new to Slashdot, just a bit different.
So people who don't meet that could be considered disabled, or worse.
I wouldn't label them as "disabled" myself, but if they were labeled as such, why is it such a problem? On a personal level, people usually do handle contacts with disabled people quite well; the only entities (except little kids maybe) that blatantly discriminate them are called "companies" and that problem will persist no matter which group of people we call "disabled".
After all, God wanted us to discover DNA manipulation... so let's fix the prejudices of greedy companies and be merry!
PS: I always wanted a ginger-haired daughter.
Or what's the "old and understood" method for an application to receive notification when the disk is full? Or when a USB device is inserted?
I agree with the above sentence (and I completely agree with the GP, he nailed it on the head). The problem I see with modern distros (modern GNU/Linux) is that many of those features that somebody "needs" are being hacked into the system without really thinking about the big picture. Basically, we're just hacking extra stuff into GNU/Linux that somebody wants to have now, because she saw it in a different OS and it seemed nice.
Do you know which OS tried to please everyone with extra featurettes that were copied from other systems, and layer upon layer of abstraction and backwards compatibility? It ended with a particular version of that OS which everyone hated, and I don't want Linux of 2012 to be the equivalent of that version.
Just for curiosity's sake, what exactly do you consider to be the hard part of software development? Testing? Debugging? Because writing in C# tends to make the debugging easier as well......
The hard part would be designing the software correctly, choosing the appropriate data structures and algorithms, calculating the estimated algorithm complexity, planning all the features and making sure the code is extensible in the future (if there are plans for that).
For me, it's always paid out to spend as much time as possible thinking about the theoretical side. After that, you have a really good idea on what you want to do, and you don't have to stop and think about that code too much. But I admit, debugging and testing are the bothersome parts of software development - you can never eliminate them completely. Kudos to C# for trying to minimize time spent on those. It's a sad fact that a lot of coders think the design part can be skipped as well. (I'm not above those people, I used to code like that, too.)
What design feature stops that?
Code size: Well, C# is a pretty verbose language, much like Java. Usually you need to write a lot of "wrapping-paper" code to do what you need the program to do. That helps when you prefer a lot of subprojects that should behave alike, but that's not what we like to do in UNIX (We like to stitch our system together with small applications that do their tasks and only their tasks well.).
Application speed: Well, as far as I had the privilege of testing Mono/C#, it may perform as well as C in number-crunching, but its garbage collector slows things down sometimes (which is a design decision, and you can write code faster, I know, I know) and the I/O is also pretty slow compared to C/C++ (this I measured myself). By the way, parsing files (UNIX always was a text-processing OS) is a PITA to write in C# (unless you're using XML, but that's not how we roll in UNIX-land, most of the time).
Indeed, you need readable, maintainable, performant code. Which is why I use C#. You were expecting perl maybe?
I prefer readable, well-thought-out code. You get performance for free if you thought about it at the drawing board. Maintainability is hardly measurable. (I don't consider code bad if you need a "suffix tree monkey" to maintain it, cause the "code monkeys" are unable to.)
PS: I'm sorry I haven't brought any verifiable data to the table, but I'm currently far too into theory to care about any of those
Indeed, that is my problem with Mono (or C#, for that matter) as well. We can't expect small, lean applications written in C# because of the language's design. C# is only good for writing code blazingly fast. Which is kind of silly to me, because as a semi-experienced programmer, I know that writing code is the easier part of software development.
So yeah, the more Mono/C# apps we get into Debian, the slower and memory-hungry (and disk-hungry, but I find that a non-issue in general) it gets. However, most people with enough RAM just 'meh' it out, after all, there is no such thing as Page's Law, right?
But it's not just Microsoft's products that bloat Debian. My personal windmills are applications like HAL, D-BUS, any gnome-*-daemon, any {Policy,Device,Console}Kit and so on. By the way, a useful hint - when a developer can't think of an original name and prefers to rip-off a name trendy at that time, expect the code to be as well thought-out as Nuka Cola Cherry.
(I get agitated when software bloat is discussed, I know.)
Jocks think that, but luckily they know very little about the absence of correlation between genetic material and nerdery.
I, for one, welcome our new German teen-aged overlord - Der Unwahrscheinlichmann!
I understand that piracy can make someone think they lost money (it is disputable, but there's at least a bit of truth to that claim). However, I have yet to meet a person that was fired (or a company that went down) because the company's product was pirated too much. Naturally I'm not counting cases where the person in question leaked the product herself.
Make the client Windows-only again and you'll feel my wrath!
(Reply by Google: What are you going to do, quit gmail? Ouch! )
...it would definitely make some games more fun. Imagine that at the end of the game, you meet the big boss - but instead of his usual self (object 13023), he looks like the one at 13024, a steel door.
Full House, eh? Three Democrats and two Republicans?
To be honest, I don't think it's just that. In the country where I'm from (Czech Republic), pirating is the prevailing method of game distribution among teenagers and young adults (everyone does it, and it's "free", so why not me?). DRM, serial numbers, CD checks, none of that was ever a problem for us. Even young kids always check for a Crack/ folder on the game CD.
What really seems to be working (note that all of this is personal observations) is adding some functionality for players registered online. Good examples are Spore (except the DRM part) and Half-Life 2 - both of those had pirated versions circulating, but you wouldn't get access to updates or multiplayer (HL2) or new content (Spore, at least I think so) when you play the pirated version.
Of course, what works every time (for myself) is to have a really new, innovative game. Prince of Persia is not exactly hot new stuff, and even though its visual style is interesting, I'm not convinced there's anything new in the gameplay.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.