Mod parent up! I can't, without modpoints for months after ticking that checkbox.

The same Blizzard that forbids LAN play in Starcraft 2, and the same EA that distributed Spore with DRM trough the roof, right? Maybe in the 90s it wasn't like that, but we ain't there anymore and there is no DeLorean in sight.

In short, I'm waiting for Core i7 prices to drop. The reason is, I always like to have my computer extensible in the future, and that's hard when the socket is at the end of the line. Core 2 is probably one of those, and of i5 and i7 socket confusion, my potential money is on i7's LGA 1366. But the current models are far too expensive here (central Europe).

To answer the main question, my computer-buying habits haven't changed, I usually run a DFS from Wikipedia to find information on hardware I'd like to purchase and to compare prices I use my local meta-stores (which are of no use to you, as we live in a different country, most likely).

MOD PARENT 2 (works in Haskell)

Chris DiBona and other people have stated that it's a fork. So it is a fork. Much like Chromium isn't called Chrome because the brand stands for a "different" product, this kernel shouldn't really be called Linux because it's a fork and there's no intention to make it the official Linux again. Sure, it contains a large part of the Linux kernel and it's free, I didn't say a word about that. But much like Chromium is not Chrome, Iceweasel is not Firefox, this is not Linux (the kernel).

Well, it's not technically Linux these phones use, as it's now an incompatible Linux fork. So, I guess like the authors of this article, the company told Linus to go fork himself.

Yeah, "free software from Google" indeed - too bad us Joe Sixpacks can't distribute it, only companies with the proper patent license portfolio can. If this debate tells us (free software fans) something, it's that it's time to move to GPL 3 before things get way worse.

And to all you people who don't care about this and just want their videos to work:

This video^H^H^H^H^H opinion is no longer available in your country.

[citation wanted, but not needed]

Well, not exactly. I'd like to find a font where the ASCII characters are *so* different that it's easy to distinguish between them even in really tiny sizes. That even at the price of branching off from the "standard" letters (I don't mind triangles instead of 'o's etc.).

Thanks!

You can always boycott their policies by *not* playing their games and doing something productive instead ... or, if you want to consume free art, read a Project Gutenberg book. There's plenty of great ones there.

And no, I'm not new to Slashdot, just a bit different.

I wouldn't label them as "disabled" myself, but if they were labeled as such, why is it such a problem? On a personal level, people usually do handle contacts with disabled people quite well; the only entities (except little kids maybe) that blatantly discriminate them are called "companies" and that problem will persist no matter which group of people we call "disabled".

After all, God wanted us to discover DNA manipulation... so let's fix the prejudices of greedy companies and be merry!

PS: I always wanted a ginger-haired daughter.

I agree with the above sentence (and I completely agree with the GP, he nailed it on the head). The problem I see with modern distros (modern GNU/Linux) is that many of those features that somebody "needs" are being hacked into the system without really thinking about the big picture. Basically, we're just hacking extra stuff into GNU/Linux that somebody wants to have now, because she saw it in a different OS and it seemed nice.

Do you know which OS tried to please everyone with extra featurettes that were copied from other systems, and layer upon layer of abstraction and backwards compatibility? It ended with a particular version of that OS which everyone hated, and I don't want Linux of 2012 to be the equivalent of that version.

The hard part would be designing the software correctly, choosing the appropriate data structures and algorithms, calculating the estimated algorithm complexity, planning all the features and making sure the code is extensible in the future (if there are plans for that).

For me, it's always paid out to spend as much time as possible thinking about the theoretical side. After that, you have a really good idea on what you want to do, and you don't have to stop and think about that code too much. But I admit, debugging and testing are the bothersome parts of software development - you can never eliminate them completely. Kudos to C# for trying to minimize time spent on those. It's a sad fact that a lot of coders think the design part can be skipped as well. (I'm not above those people, I used to code like that, too.)

What design feature stops that?

Code size: Well, C# is a pretty verbose language, much like Java. Usually you need to write a lot of "wrapping-paper" code to do what you need the program to do. That helps when you prefer a lot of subprojects that should behave alike, but that's not what we like to do in UNIX (We like to stitch our system together with small applications that do their tasks and only their tasks well.).

Application speed: Well, as far as I had the privilege of testing Mono/C#, it may perform as well as C in number-crunching, but its garbage collector slows things down sometimes (which is a design decision, and you can write code faster, I know, I know) and the I/O is also pretty slow compared to C/C++ (this I measured myself). By the way, parsing files (UNIX always was a text-processing OS) is a PITA to write in C# (unless you're using XML, but that's not how we roll in UNIX-land, most of the time).

Indeed, you need readable, maintainable, performant code. Which is why I use C#. You were expecting perl maybe?

I prefer readable, well-thought-out code. You get performance for free if you thought about it at the drawing board. Maintainability is hardly measurable. (I don't consider code bad if you need a "suffix tree monkey" to maintain it, cause the "code monkeys" are unable to.)

PS: I'm sorry I haven't brought any verifiable data to the table, but I'm currently far too into theory to care about any of those :o) Everything above is my experience, YMMV.

Indeed, that is my problem with Mono (or C#, for that matter) as well. We can't expect small, lean applications written in C# because of the language's design. C# is only good for writing code blazingly fast. Which is kind of silly to me, because as a semi-experienced programmer, I know that writing code is the easier part of software development.

So yeah, the more Mono/C# apps we get into Debian, the slower and memory-hungry (and disk-hungry, but I find that a non-issue in general) it gets. However, most people with enough RAM just 'meh' it out, after all, there is no such thing as Page's Law, right?

But it's not just Microsoft's products that bloat Debian. My personal windmills are applications like HAL, D-BUS, any gnome-*-daemon, any {Policy,Device,Console}Kit and so on. By the way, a useful hint - when a developer can't think of an original name and prefers to rip-off a name trendy at that time, expect the code to be as well thought-out as Nuka Cola Cherry.

(I get agitated when software bloat is discussed, I know.)