Or maybe said "shitty" programmer:
- is writing a for-profit web app for his own company that consists of mostly programmers
- already knows in advance that the only queries he's ever going to make are those defined by the programmers, and that for his particular use case it's no disaster if newly introduced queries only work over new data
- already knows in advance that his data size will become several terabytes in several months and thus needs sharding
- does not want or have the resources to spend several million dollars on expensive Oracle licenses

Go ahead. Find me an auto-sharding solution for MySQL or PostgreSQL that doesn't involve tons of money. Then I'll change my mind.

Only CSS transitions with scale()/translate()/rotate()/etc, as well as scrolling, are GPU accelerated. Everything else is not only rendered in software, it's also literally 10 times slower than on a desktop computer. I presume that Firefox's GPU acceleration goes a bit further than that.

Where are these "most benchmarks"?

Firefox 3 is faster than Firefox 2. Firefox 4 is faster than Firefox 3. You do the math. If you don't believe, download Firefox 2 (don't forget to clear Firefox's caches and history) and compare it for yourself.

It has got nothing to do with how smart or dumb Apple thinks people are, and has got everything to do with the legal system. Most of the US and the UK fall under Common Law where judges interpret laws and contracts to the letter. If something isn't written in the contract then it isn't there. This in contrast to Civil Law countries where judges interpret laws and contracts according to their spirit. If something isn't written in the contract then the judge can still make a decision based on what is reasonable. This is the reason why US contracts are insanely long: every single stupid corner case, no matter how obvious, like chewing on iPods, have to be mentioned, otherwise you can be held liable.

Your cynical undertone that software only get slower and slower is not true. Firefox 4 *is* faster than Firefox 3. Haven't used Firefox 5 yet. Phusion Passenger 3 is 50% faster than Phusion Passenger 2.

These days there are GPGPUs with GP standing for "General Purpose". They're not only used for displaying graphics anymore but for general-purpose vector calculations. GPUs are faster *for vector calculations* because most of the chip consists of arithmetic units. In return, GPUs are much, much worse at pretty much everything else, such as branching. Don't try to run if-statements on GPUs.

And your hyperbole is based on what evidence? Linux 2.6 runs fine even in an x86 emulator written in Javascript.

Wait a minute, you call GNOME NIH but applaud Apple for inventing their own stuff?

Yeah but those differences are nowhere near as big as between OSes. All Linux distros use iptables. All Linux distros have /proc and /sys. Now compare with FreeBSD and Solaris.

The difference between distros is a lot smaller than the difference between any Linux distro and, say, FreeBSD and Solaris.

The days that desktop environments are only GUIs and only consisted of a bunch of windows that paint stuff on the screen are long over. These days desktop environment handle a lot more lower-level stuff, and users rightfully expect them to do so. Think for example user interfaces for managing hardware, system settings (user accounts, security, firewall, wired and wireless network), etc. GNOME depends on various background daemons that must be started at boot. All of these things have system-dependent mechanisms. Configuring the wireless network is completely different between FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux. All 3 of those OSes have a completely different init system, completely different firewall system, etc.

Except people think that it's not a "program that randomly popped up" (if they even know what a program is), they think it's their "computer" giving them a real warning.

Clearly you've never seen online bullies who go into extraordinary lengths to crack (maybe brute force) someone's passwords in order take over their accounts or to steal their identities to harm their reputations, or spam their web spaces with insults so that it scares away all of the victims' visitors and associates.

So that users don't have to install anything, making it easier to distribute software.