You wanna confine it to a handy though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumclaw_horse_sex_case

If you're talking about stackexchange, you are getting into a sysadmin/developer/knowledgeable user community. It's not really a representative sample.

AFAIK, no one has really got a reliable measure. It's pretty much impossible when you are talking about most FOSS. It is pretty clear that Ubuntu is by far and away the most popular for desktop usage.

I have a hard time believing that accounts for a significant percentage of Ubuntu's search volume. If both had the same popularity, for example, and even one third of people wanting info about Mint searched for "Linux Mint," if Ubuntu had a search volume of 166, then Mint would have a search volume of 33. This is a much smaller relative disparity than actually seen. And the likely case is that while some people searching for Mint information query for Ubuntu, most are still going to search for Mint.

Are you fucking kidding me? I have no idea why people ever think of Distrowatch as mattering. All that it measures is page hits to Distrowatch's info page about that distro. It only measures what people who go to Distrowatch click on at Distrowatch. Notice that the numbers are in the low thousands per month at best. Their audience is longer-time Linux users who remember it from like fifteen years ago.

Google search volumes are by far a more accurate gauge of interest, as it is both a much larger sample, and a more uniform sample, as a broader range of people use Google than visit some fucking site that was cool during Slashdot's heyday. Sampling 101.

The vast majority of linux users use Ubuntu, with Unity (they don't know what XFCE is). They just don't post on Slashdot. Take a look at this Google Trends frequency of search terms here.

Mint barely registers compared to Ubuntu. (Also, distrowatch really is useless).

The only people I know (aside from a few sysadmins with RHEL) that run another distro are my parents, because I put Mint on their computer. I just use FreeBSD now.

So you're telling me that things in other star systems are far away?

Except that it takes ages. The new pkgng on FreeBSD awesome though. Just as good as apt and not a pile of shit like pkg_tools.

n/t

Well, you will pay more (through incarceration and costs of the crime to society) if you don't prevent it in the first place.

It doesn't matter if you don't think you should pay for it. That's not how the world works.

Just having that much money means that the organization becomes bloated, and then produces worse and worse software due to design-by-committee and such.

Can Slashdot at least try to tone down the retardation?

I bet that's because there are few new perl devs, so on average they are far more experienced.

Got to be something like that. Perl is worse than C for the ability to have subtle errors, and it doesn't have C's excuse of manual memory management.

Which industry are you talking about? Because almost all your points are true for all industries to some extent. If that's your explanation why women are reluctant to study CS, you haven't proved your case.

Systemd does not need to die. All the more power to those who wish to use it.

However, it is undesired by a significantly large portion of users and sysadmins, and it is unsuitable for those who still actually want to run Linux as a Unix-like OS.

For these reasons, in my opinion, it is not (yet) ready to become the init for a number of general-purpose distributions out there. Moreover, it is unacceptable for the udev subsystem to reside in the same source tree as systemd, and it is unacceptable for udev to integrate, except through the use of a stable and init-independent interface, into any particular init implementation or design.

Clean room reimplementation is legal as long as the specification used by the implementors is free of copyright (and other I.P.) issues.

I definitely agree that some of the prior cases of clean-room implementation is at odds with the notion that APIs are copyrightable. To be honest, copyright law has never been logically consistent to me -- which is why I don't even pretend to have knowledge of it unless I'm arguing about legal topics on slashdot ...