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Let's see.

Having to use software that only exists on Windows

Tragic. Regrettable. I consider anyone in this situation to be literally a hostage to a corporation that is an illegal monopoly. Some hostages suck up to their kidnappers, others get hurt trying to escape. Guess which one the parent poster is...

Working at a place where Windows boxes are the norm.

Sad. Do you mean "norm", or "the only permissible OS" ?

Developing things for Windows

Pathetic. This is what you call an "accomplice", unless they're sensible enough to port it to other platforms too. Don't complain about what are ultimately windows problems, if you are doing your part to further entrench an illegal monopoly.

Enjoying playing modern games

Funny, trying to paint me as the childish and/or uneducated one, and you trot out games? Better yet, you call them modern. Instead of what you really mean, which is "commercialized".

Simply prefering Windows

Completely irrelevant. Either I'm wrong, or I'm right. If I am right, then preferring something that doesn't work is stupid. Period. Preferring your engineless Ford Pinto sitting up on blocks is something you're allowed to do I suppose, but if you complain about not being able to drive where you want, prepare to be bitchslapped.

And if I'm wrong, well, then it's just moot.

but since your academic career no doubt stopped at the time you dropped out of high school

I did flunk out of highschool. I also went to college anyway, decent SAT scores can do that. Read John Taylor Gatto's book "The Underground History of Education" sometime, its a free web ebook. You might stop tossing around lame insults that rely on an unfounded respect for education and/or academia.

But since you have never coded anything but a couple of lines of Basic in kindergarten

I didn't go to kindergarten. But at about that age, my uncle bought a TRS-80 Model I. He tried to teach me assembly, but was a little beyond me. Whatever flavor of basic it was that the thing had though, I did pick up on that. I wouldn't try assembly again until the TI994a that I got for christmas, several years later. And on a TMS9900 cpu, ugh. Scary. But I can do decent asm on both the z80 and the tms9900 now, so it's not all for naught. Do you even recognize "tms9900" ? I'm quite decent at asm on most 8bit cpus, and I still occassionaly mess with PICs, even work on my own little z80 machine I soldered together. Amazing that it runs at all, with the tangle of wire-wrap wire that it has... but, the tolerances on that old stuff were always pretty lenient.

I can do 68k asm, 68020 to an extent. I do decent 386ish x86 assembly. I tinker in it too. I occassionally write little C programs, but I'm just as likely to crank out a perl cgi. I've offered patches on a bunch of weird linux apps you've probably never heard of. None have been accepted as far as I know. I'm working on some code of my own to extend a game engine called "glest", which is like a generic brand warcraft3.

I'm writing a word processor in XUL. Learning what I can of XPCOM, so that a spreadsheet might be possible.

I'm working on a webapp for a database that no one thinks is possible. I've got a whole series of diaries over on K5 explaining it, and while there are a few critics that claim it isn't modelable, much less any decent way to get the data into it, I've got a webapp that will allow distributed data entry from thousands of contributors who have to substitute in until we get some kickass AI.

Please though, tell us what it is that you do, that makes you such a veritable expert on programming.

What, you must mean apps? Well, I doubt someone will bother redoing firefox in GORM, but even for those KDE and gnome apps that you just must use, get a gnustepish theme. Gtk2step (gnome) and newstep (kde) both come to mind. Much nicer than the fugly widgets they have by default. I've even been working on an opera skin, myself.

Future projects of mine: patches for gimp/inkscape (ala gimpshop) that will move vertical scrollbars to the left, and replace file dialogs with Next-styled ones.

And for those that want things just a bit more OSXish than NeXTish, try out skippy (exposé) and kxdocker (OSX dock). Both work well in windowmaker (kxdocker needs you to upgrade to the latest windowmaker and you have to edit the configuration manually). My desktop looks somewhat weird, what with the NeXT dock on the left side for dockapps, and kxdocker at the bottom to lauch apps (had 4 minidocks at one point). Heh, and the orange on black xterms so that they look like old monochrome amber terminals...

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

What does this have todo with the story?

Also check out skippy for your expose-like-feature.
http://thegraveyard.org/skippy.php

You might want to try http://thegraveyard.org/skippy.php/. I have heard of numerous success-story in the Gentoo forums - could eventually be exactly what you are missing.

psyeye

QTorrent is quite decent.

Qtorrent is a QT-based client. It is, though, not much more than a basic client. If you don't need much more than that, though, it's quite useful.

Link

I want to see GNOME and KDE using nifty hardware accelerated effects. Real transparency built into the terminal and an Expose clone. Then distros can start worrying about packaging X.org.

The Expose clone is skippy or expocity, and I presume, given time (and coders) X.org will have real transparencies, as a default (and stable) option.

Seeing as skippy is NETWM compliant, also it is fairly safe to presume it too will also get real transparencies at some point

Is there any plan to support fd.o composite extension for transparencies? I know the support in current xorg implementation is rather slow and not completely backward compatible, but up till now I've seen very little activity on this subject: metacity support is almost unexistant (in fact, if you want to use a composition manager, you'd better recompile metacity without composite support or switch to xfwm4). The two features I'm looking forward more shadows and transparencies and something like expose (currently there are only a couple of unmantained hacks.. see expocity and Skippy)

There is an mplayer backend for xmms, and can be found at TheGraveyard.org

Skippy, desktop-neutral
Expocity, for GNOME (more accurately, Metacity)
Komposé, for KDE

Don't forget Skippy - http://thegraveyard.org/skippy.php - works with any WM/DE. And it supports XDamage etc.

Using QTorrent here. No other reason than that it was QT based (running KDE here) and already in portage, but it seems to work really nicely in a no-nonsense kind of way. :)

I know the parent is supposed to be funny (actually, it kinda is), but since I found out SoulSeek (and specially Nicotine), I don't miss Kazaa at all.

As far as the Napster in it's glory days, I was stuck on dialup at home, and I didn't really have a convenient way of taking advantage of my high school's broadband, so obviously, I couldn't take advantage of those uncapped speeds.

On the other hand, Audiogalaxy had great community features. At the time, I had tons of time to scour for new music, so that was a terrific feature. And the web-based interface let me jump onto a computer at school and have the music finished (or at least on its way) when I got home in the afternoon.

For my downloading these days, I use Soulseek, or, rather, the Nicotine client for it. It's home to a lot of dedicated music fans, so you can easily find all kinds of obscure music.

nicotine, forked from pyslsk, is coming along nicely. the lead on it is much more liberal, at least when it comes to adding new features and other improvements than the original pyslsk author.

>>Anyway, as long it's not 12 guys AT THE SAME TIME with the chick....

>Yeah, geeks can already download plenty of that.

For example using nicotine.