To be honest, I've kind of "grown away" from video games (and before anyone gets resentful, no, I don't mean I'm "too grownup for video games", I just have other hobbies that eat all my time these days), but even if I were gaming more often, I have more than enough from TuxGames (especially ones I never finished or are endlessly fascinating to me). I tend to "suck the marrow from games" and get a lot of worth from them.

I am not really your target market. But I'll say this: maintaining Windows (or OSX) for games just isn't worth the hassle, and keeping the hardware up to spec eats too much into my budget. If I were still gaming, I would not buy a game that didn't run under Linux. Full stop.

That would be Romney... good luck there.

At least luck is a factor.

Not really; since the platform that Romney stands for wants to deny control of their body to 50% of the population, what makes you think he'd be any more concerned about servers? Unless you were a big corporation, of course.

This dominant vendor was nearly able to kill off Apple with an OS that has no GUI and required MANUAL MEMORY MANAGEMENT.

Well, to be fair, let's not forget that Apple was pretty much the last org out there to offer protected memory and true multitasking; MacOS before X was a joke, something that looked like a student project, and a poor student at that. These days, even OSX is crippled by stupid policy.

I can second this, but I have to say that if I had to dump the current "winners" (KDE and GNOME), I'd push full-tilt for EFL. It's just incredible how fast and lightweight it is, plus it has teh shinee going for it.

There are two (well, 2.5) things that really need to get done for this to happen:

• Bindings to something more portable than C. Sure, it will lose you some speed, but in this day and age, you really need to allow programmers to program in something like Java (or Python, Scala, Vala, Clojure, etc). Python bindings are already there, but the more (portable) languages, the better.
• Stabilize things. EFL has been stable for a while, but I always have the fear that it will be re-written from scratch, yet again.
• And someone big needs to push it, and push it openly. The problem with Tizen is that it isn't very open (invite only). I was excited to hear about a new open tablet, but slightly disappointed to find that it was KDE based. All due respect to the KDE and Qt camp, but you just can't beat EFL/Enlightenment for speed, small footprint or shininess.

Sure, I know these comments are aimed more towards tablets and phones, but for low end desktop, resources also matter, and the beauty of EFL and Enlightenment is that they encourage experimentation. Wanna build something radically different? Go ahead and try it out with EFL! Wanna build a run of the mill, just get it done but eat resources desktop app? Go with Qt and KDE.

After a few more iterations, it'll look just like OS X.

That's okay; maybe in ten years OS X will have finished copying all the eye candy from Enlightenment. I doubt it will ever be as fast, though.

about pair programming was how it was described that "one would be thinking while the other one typed". Huh?! Shouldn't both programmers be thinking? Maybe their editor wasn't designed very well and the one typing had to concentrate on typing too much. Probably wouldn't happen with a better editor

Didn't read even the summary, but here goes: started out as a used computer salesman in high school, built my own 486 to run OS/2, got to college and found out I needed to know Linux to do help desk, learned Linux for that and classes, became help desk monkey, applied for systems programmer job, mentored under UNIX/Mac guru, took his job over when he graduated, then I graduated, then I worked for a startup working on RTLinux (http://fsmlabs.com), then the crash happened, then I tried (and failed) to freelance (including a stint with some accounting programming under AIX), then I got hired by the DoD, and that's where I am today. Unfortunately, I don't always get to work with Linux anymore (I still miss my job at FSM, but that's also because we didn't have an office, so we worked from home; even working to midnight is fun, if the code is fun and you can do it on your couch). I've never really gotten the hang of contributing to open source projects, something I *really* need to do, because if there is anything that being involved in this industry has taught me, it's that you get paid for what you are good at, and you get good at something by doing it. Unfortunately, I get distracted easily (probably why I never went on to get my grad degree or start my own company), and I hate working with Microsoft or Apple products (besides the fact that they are crap technically, there's the principle of the thing too), but you do what you need to get the bills paid.

Another thing I can recommend is going to conferences; I'm headed to Linux Plumbers Conference again because I found it so . . . invigorating? Inspirational? Heartening? In any case, it was nice to see that the Linux community is alive and kicking, and meet so many interesting people. It gives me hope that one day I may again get to hack on open source for a living. Preferably from my couch ;)

I see two major issues here; first and foremost is denial. Yes, there is a problem, and if you can't see it, it's probably because you are part of it (and almost certainly a male). It's like how whites in the South think that racism isn't a problem anymore. This *needs* to be addressed, and the first step is admitting there is a problem. As for dealing with the problem itself, I can say that part of it is the whole "brogrammer" phenomenon which has cropped up in recent years. I can say unreservedly, brogrammers need to fuck off; they are not welcome, and if they won't police themselves, we will. Hacker culture is one that should, above all else, respect intellect and creativity; gender, oneupmanship and "frat" antics don't come into it at any point.

The second issue I see is that the answer to the article question is no, sexual harassment is not a part of hacker culture. If sexual harassment is happening, it needs to have a bright light shone upon it, like a software bug, so that it can be fixed. We need to not allow these broken windows to exist in our house. The perpetrators should be shamed and banned from conferences, at a minimum. Some of the anecdotes I've heard would warrant criminal charges being pressed. The New Atheist movement is having similar issues, and they are starting to respond by banning people. If you think this is "censorship", fuck off; you can get your own fucking website and post all the misogyny you want, but you can't force others to host it for you.

I went to university with Valerie, and she's very smart, probably smarter than a lot of people here (definitely smarter than the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, misogynistic brogrammers who have infested the computer industry). She's been writing and talking about this problem for long time; it would be wise to listen to her.

One last point: I'm not "disgusted" or "offended" by these acts; I consider them the vulgar acts of those not fully human (for they lack empathy) and therefore beneath my contempt. These people should be treated like the animals they act like, and kept out of hacker culture so that we can get on with real work.

I keep hoping people here would be a little more informed than average

Ah, see there's your mistake: not in assuming that the general crowd at slashdot is smarter than average (they are); you are overestimating the average level of intelligence.

One big reason why things are the way they are, is that corporate types want somebody to blame when things go pear-shaped. There's not many linux companies of enough size to handle that. Just RedHat and SuSe.

Hmm, well then they better not have too close a look at any of MS or Apple's EULAs. They're all "no indemnification" and all that. Good luck suing MS or Apple, or even getting a response unless you already paid out the ass for a support contract.

The simple fact of the matter is that when it comes to big companies and technology, the ones making the "corporate" decisions are blithering idiots. Think about it: where are the smartest people you know working? Either they are actually getting (fun) shit done (eg, engineers solving problems), or they are in charge of their own startups (and how many startups go with MS?). Also, as someone else mentioned, there are some other large factors known as "mindshare" (why do you think MS gives deep discounts to college students) and bribes. If there were any justice in this world, MS would have gone out of business ten years ago due to everyone seeing through their BS. The depressing reality is that PT Barnum was right (and even that is a good example of mass ignorance: Barnum didn't say that, his opponent Hull did).

I'd like to say, congratulations! Android has very nearly caught up with where Maemo was when it was released in 2009. Also, suck it Wayland!

Or as they are commonly known in the post-industrial world: meetings.

True story: years ago, before I had a seploplasty and dropped about 30lbs, I was fighting sleep in a meeting. Fortunately, it was one of those huge, 100+ people "let's all gather to waste everyone's time with slides we should have emailed" type of meetings. Unfortunately, a guy right next to me raised his hand to ask a question just as I was doing one of those head-slumping-attempt-to-jerk-myself-awake maneuvers. I was trying to stay awake in the useless meeting, but the boss took this as me insubordinately sleeping in a meeting and called me into her office aftwerword. She said "if you can't stay awake in meetings, don't bother showing up." I said, "Okay" taking it as a free pass to never show up to meetings again, as I had a habit of falling asleep in them. That apparently wasn't the correct interpretation (NB: she and I didn't have the best employee/manager relationship before this incident).

I usually can stay awake in meetings these days, even if they are useless, although I try to make sure that meetings I attend stick to three simple rules: 1) no longer than an hour 2) must have an agenda or schedule (at a minimum, a topic to be discussed or question to be answered) 3) attendees should want to be there (ie, no "mandatory" meetings; everyone present should have a stake in the agenda items).