You are conflating cause and effect here. The hardware manufacturers are focusing on energy efficiency and forsaking performance improvments *because* sales are down. They're trying to close the gap between traditional PCs and tablets, which people are buying in record numbers for their size and battery life. The way you close that gap is by improving energy efficiency.

By money, of course. Same way everything gets approved.

Private organizations don't have Amazon money.

Then compile up bash and add it to your rootfs. That's what we do, for exactly the reasons you mentioned; I wanted to run more modern shell scripts andd busybox didn't support them. But that's ok, just because you start with busybox doesn't mean you have to stop there.

Don't you mean Diverse-Internet-Experience-Fox?

Clearly, not taking his own advice here...

Perhaps a distant cousin of Microsoft Bob?

And who would tell the distro creators this? Linus? I don't think so. If he did that, it would cease to be linux. Linux is, by definition of it's creator, open. You are free to do with it what you please. If that means fragmenting the community, so be it. Let them follow you, or not, as they see fit. Does it cause problems? Sure. But the alternative is telling people what they can or cannot do with the source code. And that would not be Linux.

Linux may or may not converge into less distributions. You are free to argue that it should, and others are free to follow as they see fit. But somehow restricting people from creating forks of the code would be going against everything that Linux was created for. There are plenty of walled garden OS's that can offer you a consistent experience. If you want that, choose one of those. Linux will continue to be relevant and useful to many long after you're gone, regardless of whether you find it's particular use model suitable to your tastes.

1) Learn C/C++
2) Learn the relevant Linux APIs (File I/O, threading, etc)
3) Develop something useful using steps 1 + 2

Congratulations, you are now a Linux Professional. Enjoy your new and glamorous lifestyle among the programming elite.

Indeed. We need to spend our last seconds figuring out ways to make the ocean rise to meet the cliff.

Doesn't have to be that old. I wrote, and am still maintaining a program written for an MSP430 that fits into 13k (ok, 12.8k) of code, as it was a 16k part and 3k was used for the bootloader + vector table. It's running right now, controlling power supplies and running PID loops. Actually, it's running about 750,000 copies right now, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Which is why it had to fit into 16k. Every penny counts when you multiply times 3/4 million. And yes, of course it's in C. No worries about memory leaks though, there's no heap. I do worry about the 80 byte stack though, maybe it's time to bump it up to an even 128.

Mac users know better than to open their computers. You might untangle the interwebs in there.

This is one of those rare events when you are actually rooting for the lawyers.

Hard drive manufacturing started in Singapore due to an availability of high tech and has been migrating steadily north ever since to capture cheaper labor rates as hard drive margins shrank and technical competence in other countries increased. Singapore -> Malasyia -> Thailand -> China.

It's a dessert topping!

How much thermodynamics do you need to know that things that draw less power run less hot?