Yeah but besides that, why did this piece of thread (didn't mean it, honestly) get to be about Apple anyway? Does this world have only three tech giants? And why do we perpetuate that illusion? Shouldn't it derail to something a little more interesting such as impact on small players on the market? Innovators? Anyone?

And besides the point: let's say you specify in your will that you want daisies on your grave and you leave a sum of money in order to do that, then afterwards your relatives get the money and use part of it to buy a marker to draw a daisy on your gravestone. Breaking a agreement, a license or a contract like that doesn't translate to revenue loss in most cases ("he doesn't mind, he's dead and the goose is in the bag now"), but it still feels like a d**k move.

Actually the answer is merit. In order to have profit with an open source project it needs to be reasonably good and damn useful. Also always expect poor donations until enough people get to know your product.

My projects (and I believe most open source projects) started by scratching an itch. In each case developer's itch... Commercial products usually start by attempting to scratch a known itch for the intended audience. The transition to open source from closed source is successful when the project in question successfully scratches an itch, by the aforementioned 'damn' amount, and it draws (and allows, by design) people with the itch scratched to contribute.

... but why don't they replace the keyboard+mouse with a touch-enabled device? It's like they never considered that possibility. You get to keep the entire screen estate but you add complex input to it.

...OS releases to existing application then none of them should really do.

Joke aside, if we are completely pragmatic then a team of any sorts could do better with more Software Engineers than with a majority of Computer Science graduates. But in any team I would work with, there must be at least one Comp Sci graduate, as we Engineers may lose focus of best practices in our field.... Some advisory about when to not bend the rules is welcome, but most of the time the need is for more practical people.

$0.021

But many lost the need to taste it. This is not a virtual loss, it's actually a lost potential probable income. Think of the taxes that would have gone to the Government from that income. So many statistical orphans skipping lunches, being denied the dream of making hard-earned money from music. It's murder, i tell you!

google virtual appliances... both VirtualBox and VMware have awesome examples of VMs for specific software environments pre-packaged

And I disagree with you. I've been using VirtualBox a lot in the last 3 years and it's come a long way but it has a lot of rough edges. I agree it's really useful for a beginner, especially when you're unsure about an investment, and a good path to specialized solutions, but you can't ignore the fact that it crashes more than VMware. Take my word for it.

I got really pissed when I found flash working better in a windows virtual machine than on a native Linux setup. I know the downsides of Windows so I use it only when I need it, as opposed to enjoying the bittersweet experience of my Linux machine. I didn't question your point, thank you for your concern, I just added to my arguments to get back to the initial point.

An how is this acceptable in comparison to the Windows experience? TBH the (heavy) stuff I run on my Linux are my personal reason to prefer it as a platform. It isn't seamless, it isn't consistent, far from easy, but it lets me do my things better. I dislike having flash influenced by resource-hogging processes or even by ads, given that in similar circumstances the Windows version works better. It's not the same thing having a Linux version of a product as enjoying it's features in Linux terms and that is bugging people. And I'm hopeful that standards will occur in a seemingly natural form for Linux to replace the Flash experience. Until then I can ignore the issues.

You could understand the usefulness of CCleaner when it cleans. A gaming rig means installing games, playing them, then uninstalling them to free space. Usually installs and uninstalls leave dangling classes in registry that point to nothing, file associations, temporary files and stuff.. After two or three of these cycles you may notice slowdown. This is why CCleaner is useful, it was created for that. Also, browser cache usually stores files for sites you aren't planning to visit anymore whis is sometimes the bigger part of the cache, or files for older version of a page. Periocicly cleaning that up saves space and allows the browser to restart caching instead of comparing file versions. This also reduces chances of resident malware in cache.

While I can say the same, flash on linux is not as good s some people want it... For example it bugs me that sometimes it gets stuck for half a second or so. It's no wonder that some people labels it as unaccceptable.