It's a time honored tradition in 'murica. The Glazers are gleefully practicing it.

I think the combination of a lot of those numbers comes from several servers that has basically died, and people simply giving up instead of transferring. Fix your broken servers Blizzard, you have too many.

Apples Global Service Exchange is quite accurate with regards to country of origin for their products with serial numbers.

CentOS tracks RHEL, that's about 10 years of guaranteed stability for free. Getting someone to do ./configure && make && make install is probably cheaper than $10k anyway. CentOS/RHEL will also happily keep chugging along even after EOL, and will probably be more stable/secure than XP.

Just because there's no stable internal ABI doesn't mean userspace gets broken, and if the driver of some sort of hardware is present upstream, great pains are taken to ensure it still works when there's some change in the kernel.

As said earlier, a stable internal ABI inside the kernel is not needed for backwards compatibility, there's nothing that stops you from shipping all your libraries and binaries in /opt and leave it there, I'm guessing it would survive all kinds of kernel craziness. Linus has a rule to not break userspace, it seems you've not paid that much attention. But I guess since you characterize people as 'zealots' you're not the most open minded person, and I doubt you even properly know Linux/Unix. You just learned to parrot some incorrect "fact".

If only The Big Bang Theory writers would get this.

Ah, incompetent, I see.

They have a netinstall, but sadly you can't decide which DE you want to install. There's only the standard or nothing. There is however, a few iso images with KDE, XFCE and LXDE you can download if you don't want GNOME3 to ever touch your workstation.

They do? Because when I walk over to http://debian.org/ and then click on either "Getting Debian" or "CD ISO Images" it says absolutely fuck all about "Wheezy", "Squeeze", "Etch", "Sarge" or anything. And when you download it, the iso is labeled with the version number 6.0.7.

Likewise, when I head over to Ubuntu.com, click "Download" in the upper right corner, and then Ubuntu Desktop, it says 12.10, no code name here either. Now, there are few places where the codename will appear, but it's not in extensive use. And it's not any worse than OS X recycled names(Mountain Lion is the same as Puma, which is the same as Cougar. Puma has already been used on 10.1).

I think you might mean formally...

They will not support 3 displays on the newer nvidia-cards, that's a windows-only feature, unless you buy the quattro cards. Never buying nvidia-again.

Why aren't Canonical helping to fix Wayland then, instead of causing more fragmentation at the backend level?

I know you guys would gladly gobble down Marks cock if you could, so there's probably no reason to answer this, but what the heck. Red Hat, Intel aren't just backing them with money, but also experienced X.org developers. These things take time, and Wayland is way further ahead than Mir is. If Canonical wanted something working in a timely fashion(Hahahaha, Canonical and timely), what's the use of throwing lots of devs who haven't done any serious X/graphical development behind a project with basically no code? The point isn't that commercial interests, or backed projects are bad, it's that Canonical has this absurd need to do this alone. They're a really lousy contributor when it comes to community. When you make Red Hat look like saints, you're doing a shitty job. Also, Canonical started by basically copying Waylands design, and then making a lot of wrong claims about Wayland. So if Canonical thinks that their clueless developers are going to make this work faster than all the other distributions together, then sure. Let them have a go. I just think duplicating efforts at the plumbing level is fucking stupid.

It's not about difficult vs easy when it comes to distributions. Both Fedora and OpenSUSE installs with relative ease these days. But Canonicals insistance of doing everything alone, fragmenting with new upstream projects. There's no rhyme nor reason for Mir, and all it does is cause headaches everywhere. And that's what they've gotten most shit for these past days. Not their ease of use.

Linux has never been hacked in pwn2own.

Oracle can't retroactively take away the source code, so no. The parts that are free software will forever be so, and the other distributions can pick up development. Red Hat would probably love to spit in Oracles soup if possible.