Try this mental experiment. What if the article described Microsoft using camels for Bing map service? Would it change your view?

The background of that app is a grey gradient with lots of uneven banding. Over that there is text drawn with white MS Sans Serif font. When you change Windows DPI setting, the text becomes larger, but also horribly aliased and can't fit the window anymore. There is a button to check for updates, but you have never seen it find one. "Check update ..." "No update found !" When you restore the app from system tray you can see how it slowly paints its GUI. Then when you exit the app, it pops up a message box with the text "Error: NULL".

Almost no one but the actual developers of the project read the source code. Software projects are so large these days that people seldom wade through the multiple thousands lines of code just for fun.

Here's an experiment people here can do: download the source code of some small project and read it thoroughly. Just try what it feels like. Understanding how the program actually works can take surprisingly big amount of time.

Do that experiment now.

This is also the reason why I cringe when the backend of Linux distros is often woven together with shell scripts. You have to be super careful to write code with proper input validation, and all the related tools must retain their interfaces or you get weird "Invalid argument" type of breakage. Then there are things like Shellshock which immediately made the dhclient script vulnerable. It's all just too dangerous. And I didn't even begin to talk about the slow parsing of scripts and the forking overhead of every little process the script calls.

That can be true if the hardware company is writing the Linux driver. I have seen it only happen with Intel though.

You mean The Pirate Bay? They have just outsourced the trackers, that's all. Or if you meant Magnet links, if you read through them, you can see that they contain a bunch of tracker addresses too.

Cloud distribution is probably also much more efficient.

Don't get me wrong, I think BitTorrent is very cool technological achievement. But transferring data between semi-random hosts around the globe and opening hundreds of TCP connections per computer while doing it, is like the ultimate way to clog the pipes.

Why would a higher resolution cause more traffic between CPU and GPU?

I don't see how lowering the resolution would free CPU time. Wouldn't the CPU still do the same object calculations at the same positions, and the rasterization be left completely to the GPU?

"UNIX" is a sexy word which is thrown around a lot, but does it matter that much? UNIX is an old crusty architecture just like Win32. It's not the end of the world if we disregard it and build things around something more modern. The traditional UNIX way of "one tool for every little job" can be challenged. Computers are much more complex beasts these days, so new approaches might actually provide more value.

All those things you listed had the same strong hate casted upon them, especially GNOME 2 and ALSA.

Because it is actually hard work.

I doubt that. A lot of programs these days are tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It takes months to go through that and familiarize oneself with the codebase. It's a feasible act only for the original developers.

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