As the former manager for a team of 75 consultants, I saw the exact opposite. The companies my staff were placed at were so hell-bent on improving their stats that every woman they employed was promoted to project manager, team leader, or management within 2-3 years of starting with the company, far faster than any males were.

A minority woman? Shit, she was a director in five years.

Let anyone with the aptitude and the desire to code do so. Enough of this forced "equality" for something that will never appeal to everybody.

What's next? Forcing equality on nursing? Medicine? Firefighters? Garbage collectors?

Face it: "equality" is a mealy-mouthed politically correct term. The term people should be using is equivalency -- as in people with different skills are getting paid equivalent salaries in different professions.

That's the beauty of FOSS. If you're in a pissy, childish mood, you can take a copy of someone else's ball and go home to pout. :P

I have to agree. I had a tough time sitting through the last season, and this season I finally gave up after two episodes. It just seems so forced and stilted now that the "freshness" has gone off the show.

"Familiarity breeds contempt"
-- Author unknown

There have been "abuse" problems on the internet since before it existed, when bulletin board servers were common. There is just something about being on a remote keyboard or microphone that brings out the absolute worst in a lot of people. Trash talking gamers, bigots, racists, stark raving lunatics -- they're all "wired".

You can complain about it all you like, but unless you're going to censor the shit out of every forum, website, and mailing list in existence, you are going to be faced with it. The same way you're going to be faced with such people in real life.

Sadly, a lot of people would rather whinge and whine about their "rights" and their "feelings" rather than face up to reality. They live in a dream world of kittens, unicorns, and rainbows that exhibits a completely and totally unrealistic expectation of what society is or should be.

Can't handle the pressure? Leave -- which she is doing. But posting a long-winded rant about why you're leaving is just childish, selfish, "pity poor me" bullshit. Everyone already knows it's going on; they don't give a flying fuck about your hurt feelings over anyone else's (often including their own.)

This article isn't about Firefox, you single minded oaf!

Now you've got me wondering if I'm actually thinking of twm. It all started so long ago... over half a lifetime ago... *LOL*

No, I mean trying to figure out how Motif/CDE did menus so I could customize them. Frustrating as hell before I got that working... no Googling for answers back then -- you had to actually RTFM, and the manuals sucked most horridly.

^^^ This.

Many FOSS projects are all about the fun of programming them, not about having a user base. Such projects get put "out there" in the hopes that someone might someday find them useful, but it doesn't really matter to the people working on them whether they ever have a substantial user base, as long as it continues to be fun to program and work on the project.

If user base was what counted to me, I'd have abandoned MSS Code Factory years ago. To this day I've never had more than 100 or so downloads in a week, and usually more like 10-20. But it's fun. It keeps me entertained. And that is what really "matters" to me; not it's popularity.

"Popularity breeds contempt."

You call it "Stockholm Syndrome"; I call it being "willing to learn".

Fully half of the things I see people complaining about over Gnome 3 have been fixed over the years. But they keep on bringing up bugs and issues that were with the .1 release.

Being ignorant of something is forgiveable; it can be corrected through education. Remaining willfully ignorant about something by refusing to educate yourself is stupidity.

A "serious try" meant spending more than five minutes playing with it. It only took a day or two to get used to.

Many desktops, like Motif, took weeks to learn in comparison.

*shrug* Gnome 3 is different, but it isn't that bad if you take the time to learn how to work with it. I was frustrated with KDE 5 after many years of being a KDE advocate, so I gave Gnome 3 a serious try a few months ago and am now quite comfortable with it on my desktop. Contrary to the bleating of people who whine about it being "touch-oriented", I don't find it to be so at all.

But I'm not a "normal" desktop user. I've used so many desktop environments since the '80s, starting with the Amiga and Atari, that I really don't have much for specific expectations of "how a desktop should work." OS/2 Warp, Windows, Mac Classic, Motif, Sun's desktop, the environments provided by HP and IBM workstations, KDE, XFce, Gnome 2, Gnome 3... there really isn't much in common amongst them other than that they all had windows of some sort. :)

How do you "kill off" an open source project if the public is willing to take over the development and maintenance? Sure you may be continuing with a non-open-source branch of the code for your own products, but that doesn't stop anyone from working with the last released code base.

"Evil" is just a lot less subjective than "the right thing." The "right thing" for what reasons? What motives? Whose benefit?

Evil, on the other hand, is a much clearer term in most people's minds.

I want an update for my old SNES. Just because.

Remember when things were sold "as is" and there was no such thing as an "update"?