I've actually been thinking about this every now and then the last few years. That in a not-too-distant future someone will be able to whip up a virus that can kill only those its creators want to kill.
Like you what I thought wasn't targeting individuals so much as ethnic groups, some white supremacist in the US targeting genetic traits mostly found in black Africans (and their recent descendants), European right-wing extremists going after Arabs, certain groups in the Arab world going after ethnic groups which are predominately non-Muslim and so on.
If I was one of these crazies I'd also take other factors into account, for example, certain cultures are predominately patriarchal so you could perhaps limit your weapon to men, thus not completely depopulating a region. Or how about some crazy cultists targeting women in general?
Meh, pulling DIMMs at least implies a little knowledge, when I did tech support there were people who called in to complain about how they had to cut parts of the connector on their network cable off to make it fit the RJ-11 connection on their DSL modem and what a bunch of idiots we were because it still wouldn't work even though they had "fixed" our "defective" hardware...
I definitely agree on the iMac. The new one is something I would tolerate in an office setting if my employer was footing the bill (and dealing with upgrade cycles and repairs/replacements), at home I'd rather want something like the previous generation of iMac but with a replaceable hard drive, no optical unit and a relatively easy way to clean the fans.
And of course, bigger screen with higher (or the same) pixel density would also be nice but for now 27" 2560x1440 is good enough.
This discussion and your post make me think back to my teen years in the mid-90's. More specifically my memories of talking to sysadmins and developers who were working back then and the levels of stress and pressure they had compared to what these jobs are like today.
Now, I don't doubt there were plenty of stressful sysadmin jobs back in 1996 or that there weren't a lot of employers keeping track of when their sysadmins arrived for work in the morning back then but it definitely seems to me that back then there was a lot more leeway for sysadmins, developers and others in IT-related jobs. I knew a guy who was just another IT consultant back then, he worked for a company in the same town as the one I lived in and while their office hours were officially 09:00 to 17:00 in practice it wasn't unusual for most of the lights in their offices to still be out by 09:30 simply because people hadn't shown up yet. Missing your regular bus and showing up for work 15 minutes late didn't even seem to register for a lot of these people I knew back then.
By comparison, my first job after college was one where if you knew you'd be ten minutes late to work you were expected to phone ahead to let your boss know or you'd be in for a reprimand (you might still get a reprimand if this happened twice in a week or three or four times over the course of a month). Leaving early wasn't just frowned upon, it was completely out of the question, it was the sort of thing that was considered completely unacceptable.
And looking around at people I know in the industry today it seems this wasn't isolated, these days adherence to schedule and being just another cog in the machine is more important than it used to be.
Did I mention I'd love to have one of those mid-90's jobs where you could show up 20 minutes late and no one would really care because they would just assume you'd make up for it (or that it didn't matter since after all, how important could those 20 minutes in the morning possibly be and we all oversleep from time to time)? Those jobs didn't seem particularly relaxing but at least they were a little less stressful than what we've got now. Oh well, time for some more caffeine and work...
Every time I've installed WoW with Wine it has worked flawlessly, just download the installer, run it, install patches, play. It's probably the only game I've never had issues with running with Wine.
Makes me think the issue may be with something in your setup (hardware or wine install).
My experience when interviewing with startups is that they tend to offer a lot less (unless they just managed to get a bundle of investor money but I haven't interviewed with any of those).
That is, I may not care much about money but I prefer getting paid enough that I can afford rent, a bus pass, some new computer hardware every now and then, a couple of books every month and still have enough money left over every month that I can decide to order pizza even three days before I get paid without having to stop to consider whether pizza today means I'll be eating ramen for the next two days.
Of course, things may be different in Silicon Valley than they are in Sweden.
At least here in Sweden there's first and foremost a difference between being fired and being laid off. You can't just fire someone without just cause, if you do you are likely to have whatever union that employee belongs to breathing down your neck.
As for laying people off, even that isn't quite so simple. In theory it's "first in, last out" but in practice this is often negotiated away during layoffs (one way or another, sometimes the employees who are laid off despite not being "next in line" get a pretty good deal (severance et cetera) other times the union involved in the negotiations are a particularly useful one and just agree to just about everything the employer demands).
All in all it's not very easy for a boss to just up and fire you for no particular reason (unless we're counting 19 year-old fast food employees with no union membership and no knowledge of labor laws but that's like saying it's OK to rob someone who's somehow managed to not learn that robbery is a crime and that they can call the cops).
And I've seen guys with Master's degrees in CS and systems science using floats for currency calculations. I've even been the one to clean up after them, despite the fact that I dropped out of college and by the standards of some people should be the one using hash tables where I should be using lists, floats where I should be using decimals, shouldn't know what a modulo operator is, shouldn't have a clue when it comes to how the quicksort algorithm works, should never even have heard of big O notation...
Just as you shouldn't assume that everyone without a degree is completely lacking in skills you also shouldn't assume that a degree somehow makes someone competent, there are hordes of developers out there who took CS in college in the late 90's because they thought "computers = big money" and somehow managed to graduate. Hell, looking at a lot of the guys I went to HS with who went on to major in CS in college I suspect most of those just thought "I like computer games so why not study something with computer in its name?", I even had a few people like that as classmates in college (gotta love being the only one in a four man team actually writing code, the others all volunteered to write the documentation)...
And no, I don't think I'm a "rock star coder", I'd consider my skills as a developer to be pretty average. A decent enough CRUD and business coder who writes some slightly more interesting code in his free time.
I realized somewhere along the line that there were a lot of little everyday decisions that really didn't matter to me. Choosing what to have for lunch every day is a great example of one of these things. Lunch on a weekday is still "just lunch" to me, I have no wish to go out and eat some extravagant delicious meal, I just want to eat something relatively tasty and get back to work so over time I've resorted to having a fairly small number of "standard" lunches that I prepare for myself. This way I know I'm getting something I like and I don't have to put time and effort into picking what I'm going to eat every day.
Of course, you can take this too far and I always make sure to get a little more inventive with food, clothes and other routine things on weekends to make sure I don't get stuck in a rut.
But overall I think it's a good approach to those little boring and inefficient things in life. I used to never understand how some people could spend 20-30 minutes in the morning just picking out what to wear, then it dawned on me that they actually had no idea at all what to wear until they got out of the shower and it was time to get dressed, so at this point they'd actually start out trying to pick the "right" underwear, and socks, and pants, and shirt. Finally when they were done they'd take a few minutes to try to figure out what they should have for breakfast...
Iron Sky had potential. I would have loved to have seen the actual "nazis on the moon" idea taken seriously with a decent budget. Instead what they put together was a crummy near-slapstick comedy with crappy writing, ham-fisted acting and overall poor production values.
Lots of my friends went on about how amazing it was so I made the mistake of seeing it, turns out my friends just have hard-ons for space nazis...
I believe the problem with sci-fi fans is that they've become quite jaded at this point.
The vast majority of "sci-fi" movies that get released these days could better be described as "Action/horror, IN SPACE/IN THE FUTURE! (With extra romantic segments to attract the "girlfriend demographic" and comic relief characters to draw in the kids and maximize the merchandising potential of the franchise)".
Hell, lately I've taken to going through fantasy movies from the last ten years or so, amazingly enough a lot of them feel closer to actual sci-fi than most of the movies the studios try to market at sci-fi...
(Yes, I know there are exceptions, like Moon and a few others, but just go look at what the major players consider "sci-fi" right now, how much of that is actually sci-fi? Most of it is on a Star Wars/Space opera level, it's not even soft sci-fi)
That may be but I'm pretty sure a lot of people know about mind maps. Hell, here in Sweden I was "taught" how to use mind maps in school sometime around grade 5, then again for grade 8 and finally a couple of years later in high school. And so were all my classmates.
Well, as others have pointed out elsewhere, the risk of injury appears to actually go up when wearing a helmet (for several reasons including the attitudes of the cyclists themselves as well as others in traffic).
And I suspect that your view of riding a bicycle is one of "Have plan to go somewhere specific, gear up, get on bike, ride bike to destination, "un-gear", done". Sure, this may be the case for some people but most people who regularly get around on a bicycle treat it more like a hybrid between walking and proper vehicle. If I'm heading down to the corner store that is literally 2-3 minutes on my bike with no effort whatsoever on my part, just roll over there. Ok, well I was only stopping by at the corner store, next stop is the library to return a book, then I'm meeting a friend downtown and we'll probably head over to another friend's place after which we'll probably be going to... Are you starting to see my point? Throughout all of this I am most likely not lugging around a 90L backpack suitable for hiding away a helmet (and forget about leaving it on the bike, it'll be ruined or stolen when you get back) so I'm forced to carry the helmet around in my hands all day long.
Unfortunately that argument doesn't hold water. You could argue the same for seat belts in cars. If things go wrong on a bicycle then it is usually someone else responsibility to deal with your actions. The child like response of the government can't tell me what to do is rather irresponsible.
I'm not sure what you mean by "it is usually someone else responsibility to deal with your actions". I'm assuming your implied meaning is that either people who ride bicycles demand society cover their medical costs and that this was some variation of "Taxes are stealing! Everyone should be required to follow insane safety precautions just to get out of bed in the morning or I won't have any of it" or you were implying that when people on bicycles generally only cause accidents in a way that harms others (thought this seems unlikely).
The difference in countries that don't have mandatory helmet laws is that there is already a culture of people sharing the footpath/sidewalk with bicycles. So it is alright for people to ride around at medium speed. If you live in a country that doesn't have this sort of culture then you are screwed! You have to share the road with cars. This makes wearing a helmet mandatory.
Except in most countries bicycles don't belong on sidewalks and foot paths to begin with so this makes the rest of this paragraph wrong as well.
Definitely. Back in the late 90's it didn't really seem odd to hear influential people in IT say things like "UNIX is dead", "In ten years every server will be running Windows NT or Netware" or "Linux is just a toy, Windows is the future".
The only upside to those dark days was that a lot of companies who got suckered into the lovely all-Windows future dumped near-new workstations and servers because they were standardizing on NT on workstations and servers (and surprisingly often win9x on regular desktops, in networked environments).
Red Hat's packages have always been a pain in the ass, not sure how good/bad it is these days but back in the 5.x days it often felt like they were just messing with people.
Still have horrible memories of trying to install software packages compiled by Red Hat themselves only to realize that there weren't any packages for the right version of some required libs.
The "solution" to these problems was to either build your own packages for the libs in question or use rpmfind.net to find a compatible package, in either case you were sure to get bitten by this "meddling" on your part down the road when some other package refused to install because of the "rogue" packages you'd installed...
I think a lot of us who started using Linux in the 90's wound up trying Slackware fairly early because it was a bit of the enthusiast distro back then.
Personally I started with Red Hat (not RHEL, just plain Red Hat Linux), next up was Slackware and then a whole slew of other distros (Debian, Mandrake, a bunch of lightweight distros, SUSE and others) before settling on FreeBSD for several years. In 2006 I wound up buying an iMac for my main desktop and I'm still using OS X for my main desktop OS, all the good *nix bits under the hood but with a better selection of commercial/proprietary software and a polished UI (not to mention I've never had OS X uninstall core parts of the system when updating it, something which Ubuntu pulled on me not too long ago, more specifically it happily uninstalled the X server while telling me it wouldn't update the X server since it was already up-to-date).
I don't know the current state of Slackware but I know that in the past Slackware had various sets of floppies that could be downloaded. I mainly remember because I once downloaded and installed the base system plus networking bits over modem. This was for Slackware 3.x (don't remember the minor version but they all came out around 1996 - 1998.
It's amazing how much easier it is to install your average Linux distro these days, a few seconds to download a 100+ MB install ISO, throw it on a single USB stick (or make it available for PXE booting) and install. Back in those days formatting your disks tended to take less time than the actual install (a lot less if you installed from floppies)...
I think you're confusing the designers and developers with the dilbert-esque bosses.
It's amazing how little some PHB who wants to leave his mark on something has to do in order to completely destroy it, at least when it comes to anything design-related (for some reason a lot of people who would never dream of poking at a machine design and saying "I think we need a slightly larger cog here because I like large cogs" think that when it comes to design you can change the individual components without the whole thing falling apart).
Throw a few marketing guys into the mix and suddenly the easy-to-follow and user friendly design has been butchered completely (admittedly marketing guys tend to be a bit more understanding of design-related matters but they tend to fail miserably when it comes to more general UX issues.
Clearly I had more willpower than you did. And yes, I too was mighty annoyed at every other site wanting me to give them my full name, home address and my mother's first cat's favorite color just to access anything.
Have you never experienced Windows' "helpful" swapping out of applications?
Active application: App1.
Now you alt-tab to App2 which could fit in RAM with App1 easily but which Windows has "helpfully" swapped out...
Wait 15 seconds for App2 to load from disk again.
Open a menu
Wait another three seconds for Windows to load that part of the program from disk as well...
Click somewhere, copy a single value.
alt-tab to App1 again.
Oh look, you've been gone from App1 for several seconds so it has been swapped out. You get to wait another 20 seconds as App1 loads back from disk and temporarily freezes.
Paste value
I've experienced that. I've had long periods where every workday was like that. Sure, each instance of waiting is short but when copying a single line or value between two already open applications ends up taking 30+ seconds and 20+ seconds is just waiting and "everything" has similar delays it's no longer "a few extra seconds here or there", it's a major issue.
My experience is that most developers tend to stick with higher-level languages these days, regardless of whether or not they have a degree.
Personally I started coding when I was eight years old. Started with SV-BASIC on an old Spectravideo computer, briefly touched on Z-80 asm before moving on to the x86 world where I dabbled with C/C++, x86 asm and created my own simple cracks for a few shareware programs just because I could. A few years later I discovered Linux. At that point I found out there were competent scripting languages (*nix shell scripts alone were a godsend compared to DOS batch scripts, Perl was absolutely amazing to my teenage self). As time has gone by I've used a lot of higher-level languages and I can't say I've ever felt the need to go back to asm and C/C++ (except for a handful of things like fixing a bug in a third party webcam driver, fixing a broken ncurses UI and a few little things like that).
The truth is that these days there simply isn't much need for most developers to get that close to the hardware. If I was hiring a web developer I'd rather pick the guy who has basic knowledge of things like when it's better to use a list and when a hash table would be better and who is capable of writing code that outputs sane HTML than the guy who has memorized his data structure and algorithms textbooks from college but seems to think HTML 3 and table-based layout are the state of the art of web development. So yeah, some basic understanding of concepts like recursion and being able to understand that iterating through a list to find a single value might not be the most efficient way to find that value is needed but assuming everyone needs to have a Master's in CS is just silly.
I remember people complaining loudly about Windows 95 not being called Windows 4.0.
And then when they switched to "Millennium Edition" which became simply "ME" people complained about that. At about the same time people also complained about the renaming of NT 5 to 2000.
So no, a lot of people weren't fine with names like that, it's just that it was a relatively minor issue that only caused people to voice their opinion and then move on.
Slashdot Mirror
But for what one might call the current generation it was popularized by the show.
I've actually been thinking about this every now and then the last few years. That in a not-too-distant future someone will be able to whip up a virus that can kill only those its creators want to kill.
Like you what I thought wasn't targeting individuals so much as ethnic groups, some white supremacist in the US targeting genetic traits mostly found in black Africans (and their recent descendants), European right-wing extremists going after Arabs, certain groups in the Arab world going after ethnic groups which are predominately non-Muslim and so on.
If I was one of these crazies I'd also take other factors into account, for example, certain cultures are predominately patriarchal so you could perhaps limit your weapon to men, thus not completely depopulating a region. Or how about some crazy cultists targeting women in general?
It's really quite scary to think of.
Meh, pulling DIMMs at least implies a little knowledge, when I did tech support there were people who called in to complain about how they had to cut parts of the connector on their network cable off to make it fit the RJ-11 connection on their DSL modem and what a bunch of idiots we were because it still wouldn't work even though they had "fixed" our "defective" hardware...
I definitely agree on the iMac. The new one is something I would tolerate in an office setting if my employer was footing the bill (and dealing with upgrade cycles and repairs/replacements), at home I'd rather want something like the previous generation of iMac but with a replaceable hard drive, no optical unit and a relatively easy way to clean the fans.
And of course, bigger screen with higher (or the same) pixel density would also be nice but for now 27" 2560x1440 is good enough.
This discussion and your post make me think back to my teen years in the mid-90's. More specifically my memories of talking to sysadmins and developers who were working back then and the levels of stress and pressure they had compared to what these jobs are like today.
Now, I don't doubt there were plenty of stressful sysadmin jobs back in 1996 or that there weren't a lot of employers keeping track of when their sysadmins arrived for work in the morning back then but it definitely seems to me that back then there was a lot more leeway for sysadmins, developers and others in IT-related jobs. I knew a guy who was just another IT consultant back then, he worked for a company in the same town as the one I lived in and while their office hours were officially 09:00 to 17:00 in practice it wasn't unusual for most of the lights in their offices to still be out by 09:30 simply because people hadn't shown up yet. Missing your regular bus and showing up for work 15 minutes late didn't even seem to register for a lot of these people I knew back then.
By comparison, my first job after college was one where if you knew you'd be ten minutes late to work you were expected to phone ahead to let your boss know or you'd be in for a reprimand (you might still get a reprimand if this happened twice in a week or three or four times over the course of a month). Leaving early wasn't just frowned upon, it was completely out of the question, it was the sort of thing that was considered completely unacceptable.
And looking around at people I know in the industry today it seems this wasn't isolated, these days adherence to schedule and being just another cog in the machine is more important than it used to be.
Did I mention I'd love to have one of those mid-90's jobs where you could show up 20 minutes late and no one would really care because they would just assume you'd make up for it (or that it didn't matter since after all, how important could those 20 minutes in the morning possibly be and we all oversleep from time to time)? Those jobs didn't seem particularly relaxing but at least they were a little less stressful than what we've got now. Oh well, time for some more caffeine and work...
Every time I've installed WoW with Wine it has worked flawlessly, just download the installer, run it, install patches, play. It's probably the only game I've never had issues with running with Wine.
Makes me think the issue may be with something in your setup (hardware or wine install).
My experience when interviewing with startups is that they tend to offer a lot less (unless they just managed to get a bundle of investor money but I haven't interviewed with any of those).
That is, I may not care much about money but I prefer getting paid enough that I can afford rent, a bus pass, some new computer hardware every now and then, a couple of books every month and still have enough money left over every month that I can decide to order pizza even three days before I get paid without having to stop to consider whether pizza today means I'll be eating ramen for the next two days.
Of course, things may be different in Silicon Valley than they are in Sweden.
You're oversimplifying it.
At least here in Sweden there's first and foremost a difference between being fired and being laid off. You can't just fire someone without just cause, if you do you are likely to have whatever union that employee belongs to breathing down your neck.
As for laying people off, even that isn't quite so simple. In theory it's "first in, last out" but in practice this is often negotiated away during layoffs (one way or another, sometimes the employees who are laid off despite not being "next in line" get a pretty good deal (severance et cetera) other times the union involved in the negotiations are a particularly useful one and just agree to just about everything the employer demands).
All in all it's not very easy for a boss to just up and fire you for no particular reason (unless we're counting 19 year-old fast food employees with no union membership and no knowledge of labor laws but that's like saying it's OK to rob someone who's somehow managed to not learn that robbery is a crime and that they can call the cops).
And I've seen guys with Master's degrees in CS and systems science using floats for currency calculations. I've even been the one to clean up after them, despite the fact that I dropped out of college and by the standards of some people should be the one using hash tables where I should be using lists, floats where I should be using decimals, shouldn't know what a modulo operator is, shouldn't have a clue when it comes to how the quicksort algorithm works, should never even have heard of big O notation...
Just as you shouldn't assume that everyone without a degree is completely lacking in skills you also shouldn't assume that a degree somehow makes someone competent, there are hordes of developers out there who took CS in college in the late 90's because they thought "computers = big money" and somehow managed to graduate. Hell, looking at a lot of the guys I went to HS with who went on to major in CS in college I suspect most of those just thought "I like computer games so why not study something with computer in its name?", I even had a few people like that as classmates in college (gotta love being the only one in a four man team actually writing code, the others all volunteered to write the documentation)...
And no, I don't think I'm a "rock star coder", I'd consider my skills as a developer to be pretty average. A decent enough CRUD and business coder who writes some slightly more interesting code in his free time.
I realized somewhere along the line that there were a lot of little everyday decisions that really didn't matter to me. Choosing what to have for lunch every day is a great example of one of these things. Lunch on a weekday is still "just lunch" to me, I have no wish to go out and eat some extravagant delicious meal, I just want to eat something relatively tasty and get back to work so over time I've resorted to having a fairly small number of "standard" lunches that I prepare for myself. This way I know I'm getting something I like and I don't have to put time and effort into picking what I'm going to eat every day.
Of course, you can take this too far and I always make sure to get a little more inventive with food, clothes and other routine things on weekends to make sure I don't get stuck in a rut.
But overall I think it's a good approach to those little boring and inefficient things in life. I used to never understand how some people could spend 20-30 minutes in the morning just picking out what to wear, then it dawned on me that they actually had no idea at all what to wear until they got out of the shower and it was time to get dressed, so at this point they'd actually start out trying to pick the "right" underwear, and socks, and pants, and shirt. Finally when they were done they'd take a few minutes to try to figure out what they should have for breakfast...
Iron Sky had potential. I would have loved to have seen the actual "nazis on the moon" idea taken seriously with a decent budget. Instead what they put together was a crummy near-slapstick comedy with crappy writing, ham-fisted acting and overall poor production values.
Lots of my friends went on about how amazing it was so I made the mistake of seeing it, turns out my friends just have hard-ons for space nazis...
I believe the problem with sci-fi fans is that they've become quite jaded at this point.
The vast majority of "sci-fi" movies that get released these days could better be described as "Action/horror, IN SPACE/IN THE FUTURE! (With extra romantic segments to attract the "girlfriend demographic" and comic relief characters to draw in the kids and maximize the merchandising potential of the franchise)".
Hell, lately I've taken to going through fantasy movies from the last ten years or so, amazingly enough a lot of them feel closer to actual sci-fi than most of the movies the studios try to market at sci-fi...
(Yes, I know there are exceptions, like Moon and a few others, but just go look at what the major players consider "sci-fi" right now, how much of that is actually sci-fi? Most of it is on a Star Wars/Space opera level, it's not even soft sci-fi)
That may be but I'm pretty sure a lot of people know about mind maps. Hell, here in Sweden I was "taught" how to use mind maps in school sometime around grade 5, then again for grade 8 and finally a couple of years later in high school. And so were all my classmates.
Well, as others have pointed out elsewhere, the risk of injury appears to actually go up when wearing a helmet (for several reasons including the attitudes of the cyclists themselves as well as others in traffic).
And I suspect that your view of riding a bicycle is one of "Have plan to go somewhere specific, gear up, get on bike, ride bike to destination, "un-gear", done". Sure, this may be the case for some people but most people who regularly get around on a bicycle treat it more like a hybrid between walking and proper vehicle. If I'm heading down to the corner store that is literally 2-3 minutes on my bike with no effort whatsoever on my part, just roll over there. Ok, well I was only stopping by at the corner store, next stop is the library to return a book, then I'm meeting a friend downtown and we'll probably head over to another friend's place after which we'll probably be going to... Are you starting to see my point? Throughout all of this I am most likely not lugging around a 90L backpack suitable for hiding away a helmet (and forget about leaving it on the bike, it'll be ruined or stolen when you get back) so I'm forced to carry the helmet around in my hands all day long.
Unfortunately that argument doesn't hold water. You could argue the same for seat belts in cars. If things go wrong on a bicycle then it is usually someone else responsibility to deal with your actions. The child like response of the government can't tell me what to do is rather irresponsible.
I'm not sure what you mean by "it is usually someone else responsibility to deal with your actions". I'm assuming your implied meaning is that either people who ride bicycles demand society cover their medical costs and that this was some variation of "Taxes are stealing! Everyone should be required to follow insane safety precautions just to get out of bed in the morning or I won't have any of it" or you were implying that when people on bicycles generally only cause accidents in a way that harms others (thought this seems unlikely).
The difference in countries that don't have mandatory helmet laws is that there is already a culture of people sharing the footpath/sidewalk with bicycles. So it is alright for people to ride around at medium speed. If you live in a country that doesn't have this sort of culture then you are screwed! You have to share the road with cars. This makes wearing a helmet mandatory.
Except in most countries bicycles don't belong on sidewalks and foot paths to begin with so this makes the rest of this paragraph wrong as well.
Definitely. Back in the late 90's it didn't really seem odd to hear influential people in IT say things like "UNIX is dead", "In ten years every server will be running Windows NT or Netware" or "Linux is just a toy, Windows is the future".
The only upside to those dark days was that a lot of companies who got suckered into the lovely all-Windows future dumped near-new workstations and servers because they were standardizing on NT on workstations and servers (and surprisingly often win9x on regular desktops, in networked environments).
Red Hat's packages have always been a pain in the ass, not sure how good/bad it is these days but back in the 5.x days it often felt like they were just messing with people.
Still have horrible memories of trying to install software packages compiled by Red Hat themselves only to realize that there weren't any packages for the right version of some required libs.
The "solution" to these problems was to either build your own packages for the libs in question or use rpmfind.net to find a compatible package, in either case you were sure to get bitten by this "meddling" on your part down the road when some other package refused to install because of the "rogue" packages you'd installed...
I think a lot of us who started using Linux in the 90's wound up trying Slackware fairly early because it was a bit of the enthusiast distro back then.
Personally I started with Red Hat (not RHEL, just plain Red Hat Linux), next up was Slackware and then a whole slew of other distros (Debian, Mandrake, a bunch of lightweight distros, SUSE and others) before settling on FreeBSD for several years. In 2006 I wound up buying an iMac for my main desktop and I'm still using OS X for my main desktop OS, all the good *nix bits under the hood but with a better selection of commercial/proprietary software and a polished UI (not to mention I've never had OS X uninstall core parts of the system when updating it, something which Ubuntu pulled on me not too long ago, more specifically it happily uninstalled the X server while telling me it wouldn't update the X server since it was already up-to-date).
I don't know the current state of Slackware but I know that in the past Slackware had various sets of floppies that could be downloaded. I mainly remember because I once downloaded and installed the base system plus networking bits over modem. This was for Slackware 3.x (don't remember the minor version but they all came out around 1996 - 1998.
It's amazing how much easier it is to install your average Linux distro these days, a few seconds to download a 100+ MB install ISO, throw it on a single USB stick (or make it available for PXE booting) and install. Back in those days formatting your disks tended to take less time than the actual install (a lot less if you installed from floppies)...
I think you're confusing the designers and developers with the dilbert-esque bosses.
It's amazing how little some PHB who wants to leave his mark on something has to do in order to completely destroy it, at least when it comes to anything design-related (for some reason a lot of people who would never dream of poking at a machine design and saying "I think we need a slightly larger cog here because I like large cogs" think that when it comes to design you can change the individual components without the whole thing falling apart).
Throw a few marketing guys into the mix and suddenly the easy-to-follow and user friendly design has been butchered completely (admittedly marketing guys tend to be a bit more understanding of design-related matters but they tend to fail miserably when it comes to more general UX issues.
Clearly I had more willpower than you did. And yes, I too was mighty annoyed at every other site wanting me to give them my full name, home address and my mother's first cat's favorite color just to access anything.
"A few extra seconds"?
Have you never experienced Windows' "helpful" swapping out of applications?
I've experienced that. I've had long periods where every workday was like that. Sure, each instance of waiting is short but when copying a single line or value between two already open applications ends up taking 30+ seconds and 20+ seconds is just waiting and "everything" has similar delays it's no longer "a few extra seconds here or there", it's a major issue.
My experience is that most developers tend to stick with higher-level languages these days, regardless of whether or not they have a degree.
Personally I started coding when I was eight years old. Started with SV-BASIC on an old Spectravideo computer, briefly touched on Z-80 asm before moving on to the x86 world where I dabbled with C/C++, x86 asm and created my own simple cracks for a few shareware programs just because I could. A few years later I discovered Linux. At that point I found out there were competent scripting languages (*nix shell scripts alone were a godsend compared to DOS batch scripts, Perl was absolutely amazing to my teenage self). As time has gone by I've used a lot of higher-level languages and I can't say I've ever felt the need to go back to asm and C/C++ (except for a handful of things like fixing a bug in a third party webcam driver, fixing a broken ncurses UI and a few little things like that).
The truth is that these days there simply isn't much need for most developers to get that close to the hardware. If I was hiring a web developer I'd rather pick the guy who has basic knowledge of things like when it's better to use a list and when a hash table would be better and who is capable of writing code that outputs sane HTML than the guy who has memorized his data structure and algorithms textbooks from college but seems to think HTML 3 and table-based layout are the state of the art of web development. So yeah, some basic understanding of concepts like recursion and being able to understand that iterating through a list to find a single value might not be the most efficient way to find that value is needed but assuming everyone needs to have a Master's in CS is just silly.
I remember people complaining loudly about Windows 95 not being called Windows 4.0.
And then when they switched to "Millennium Edition" which became simply "ME" people complained about that. At about the same time people also complained about the renaming of NT 5 to 2000.
So no, a lot of people weren't fine with names like that, it's just that it was a relatively minor issue that only caused people to voice their opinion and then move on.
I'm pretty sure that was the case with earlier versions of Windows NT, before they started calling it 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 2003 and so on...
Windows NT Releases