Man, the one time I actually have a real use for mod points and I don't have any. You've hit the button on the head there. I've had Foobar2k pushed at me for years and in all that time, it still sucks royally. It's a UX nightmare. Winamp is small, fast, just works. Audacious does a good job on Linux, but needs some work on win32 -- and I'm really hoping to get the motiviation & time to do it. Because balls man. Winamp. WTF.
If I had mod points, you'd have them. I'd like a FLOSS world, but I'll take a working closed world over a broken open one. As much as I'd like to, I simply can't fix everything I come across that's broken, no matter how open it is.
All that proves, really, is that people are able to regurgitate information more accurately, probably, in part, driven by econimically-guided procreation: people who have been able to do this better are getting better jobs, have better prospects, etc, etc, etc.
Common sense, on the other hand, remains rare -- and I would argue it's rarer than it's been in the past. You'd think that the average populace would be more difficult to dupe -- but they're not. You'd think that the number of people who can see through an obvious farce would rise -- but I'm sure most would agree that this isn't the case.
Of course, sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between actual stupidity and self-centered ignorance. When another person impacts your life negatively through some act which just seems blatantly stupid, is it actually just because they are too selfish to take anyone else into consideration? Quite likely.
Don't confuse UI with task accomplishment. I totally hear you about a hanging background thread (which sucks for the user), but, let's imagine that background threads are properly handled (and perhaps even timed-out, as would be for network traffic). So a good example is this: imagine an application which presents you with a list of tasks to accomplish for the day. It starts up blank and asynchronously fetches your tasks for the day from a remote source. Now, the reason you want an indeterminate progress feedback mechanism (eg daisy loader) is because, on the day when you have no tasks, you need to know the difference between the app being busy and actually having completed its work, presenting your empty task list. This kind of thing is easy to accomplish, say, with jQuery where you have an asynchronous call which has two functions given to it: one when the call completes properly, and one which is called when the asynchronous call fails. BOTH should implement some kind of feedback that the operation has "completed" (ie, hide the daisy loader), and, of course, the failure path should inform the user that the operation failed -- and perhaps offer a mechanism for retry. But, for this discussion, the only interesting parts are: 1) show the daisy loader 2) perform asynchronous call 3) when the asynchronous call completes or fails, hide the loader.
I can tell you that it's not always easy to give back a progress indicator which is meaningful to the user. The user wants to know (generally), how *long* is left, time-wise, where most progress-bars indicate how much of the overall activity is left to complete. The OP actually makes this point quite clear.
And therin lies the proverbial rub: if you're, for example, unpacking a small app, but you send some kind of statistic or registration information over a network at the end, even though that last sub-action is small (in comparison to the overall process), you're at the mercy of network latency, so that could be anything from 5 seconds to whatever network timeout has been set.
Trying to give a useful ETA on a progress bar / percentage feedback: now that's a challenge. Just for chuckles, check out http://code.google.com/p/fappy -- it's a playlist generator written in python. I wanted some kind of ETA on there, but I'll be the first to admit that it takes a while to settle and the ETA may rise -- because you can only make future predictions based on past experiences so, whilst you may have zipped through the first 1000 of 20000 files really quickly, you could hit a bunch of super-fragmented files, wait longer on disk IO, and have your ETA rise.
So the short answer is that it's quite easy to provide a progress bar displaying, essentially, a percentage of completed tasks within a procedure. But tying a progress indicator to an ETA or making sure that all percentage points come at the same time cost -- less than trivial.
Actually, they (and daisy loaders) do have a point, when used correctly: they're an indicator to the user that the process hasn't STALLED, even though the time to completion is unknown. I'd rather have one of these than an app that looks like it's hung. So, apparently, would most users: even an indeterminate progress "meter" makes users happier to wait for a process to complete -- even to wait longer!
I've been trying to pick up some ad-hoc / freelance work, much like the OP. Freelancer.com has been a complete waste of time. It's obvious from the bids on projects that a lot of the bidders don't have a clue and are just trying to get in the cheapest bid -- but even when I have been the cheapest bid, I have yet to actually be contacted or acknowledged. The sad thing is that I'm happy to do the work at a cheaper rate just for some extra $$ and I'm pretty good at what I do: I have 12 years software dev experience in a range of languages and tech. My current job is good and I have recruiters scrabbling to get me on to the next thing -- but none of that appears to matter on these sites. I've actually given up with trying to find work there -- it's a complete waste of time for me as a dev. It appears to be a complete waste of time for the people looking for devs too:/
The problem becomes that of the OP the moment this rock star is no longer available (hit by a proverbial -- or literal -- bus, for example). Then it becomes everyone's problem -- except his.
Ok, so now I've spent the time reading all of the posts (thanks, I have nothing better to do with a toddler in the house:/) and I still have to stand by the statement that Linus, whilst often blunt to the point of traumatic, is no liar. He's quite honest.
The apology only comes AFTER being chewed out -- the initial stand from Mauro is erring on the side of stating that PA is broken (which it may be, but that's not the point here; the point is that Linus has made it very clear in the past that kernel changes cannot break userspace because when they do, users (desktop and server) as well as userland developers lose confidence in the base system. It's bad for everyone.
I don't think you fully understand the terms "cowboy" and "rock star" and just how detrimental these people are. Sure, I only described "cowboy" for you, but since you're so intent on full completion, let me remind you that rock stars don't work well in teams because they believe their stuff is simply better than everyone else's. Often, they may even be right -- which causes a feedback loop that just makes the situation worse. I've had to maintain a rock star's code before -- sure, it was good, functional, fast. It was also incredibly difficult to read and when I fixed a flaw which became quite obvious, the tantrum that ensued made sure that I would never helpfully commit to that code base again. I had to interface with that code so when I found routines that were of interest to me, I would often rip them out, make them readable, fix any edge cases and keep them in my repo -- instead of just committing the (imo) higher quality code back to the original author.
Regarding your last comment: I still think that the linked mail from Linus (whilst quite blunt) is not completely off-kilter. A project of any reasonable size requires a technical lead who understands the project and its requirements and the unbreakable rules that come with those requirements. Linus is that guy and I think he does a reasonable job of it considering the size and requirements of the project. It's his leadership which gives me confidence in the kernel -- because it's no longer a hackthing: it's actually a solid work now (and has been for quite a few years; bear in mind where Linux came from) and Linus is putting that ahead of the feelings of the contributors -- which, at the end of the day, is good for the user and, eventually the contributors.
Mauro is properly apologetic *after* being chewed out. And I believe that (a) he won't make a mistake like that again and (b) he will be a useful member of the contributing team, having learned that the rules that have been established for the project are, in fact, immutable. He's no arch-villain, in the same way that Linus is no hero: Mauro made a mistake, got flamed and learned. Linus is just doing his job.
I think you misunderstand the terms "rock star" and "cowboy". These terms are not reserved for people who are merely proud of what they do - they are labels for people who code without thought of consequence, e.g. considering who has to clean up when the next gem they excrete breaks everyone else's work.
As for the second part, I have to admit that I only bothered to read Linus' response. Whilst I think many people know of Linus' volatile nature, I don't think he's a liar or apt to fabricate a fanciful scenario. Just reading his post paints the picture that this dev was not apologetic for breaking user-space, but instead tried to blame PulseAudio (ok, everyone likes to blame PA). Also his comments on code quality and clarity WRT the submitted patch were on target (again, assuming he's not lying about the patch contents).
So either you're saying Linus fabricated the whole thing or perhaps you read something out of order?
Contributors who want to be rock stars and cowboys shouldn't be welcome in a project worth any salt. So if this chap doesn't learn that the user is the most important part of the system and he's scared off, then good. If he learns his lesson, then he's all the more valuable.
No, instead, it actually reminds the world that Linux is not a hodge-podge of arbitrary decisions and that there is a strong leader who is determined to make sure that the desktop doesn't suffer because of kernel development. If Steve Ballmer crapped out his staff for making a service pack that broke existing application functionality, it would actually raise him a notch in my book.
I say good on Linus. He's stressed before that the userland is not a place to break stuff because it negatively affects the entire world's perception of the kernel and the OS distributions built around it. This chap made a mistake and didn't have the guts to admit it and back off. So perhaps he (and other cowboy programmers) will learn that actually the USER is the MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE SYSTEM.
you should have checked out CyanogenMod long ago. I just updated to an S3, so sticking with stock for now, but loved CM10 on my old S1. Installation is really simple, very safe (I found the S1 to be un-brickable because no matter what state I got it into, I could always push a ROM with Odin), and you can get Jelly Bean today. Better functionality, reliable alarms (2.1 on my S1 wouldn't bring the phone out of sleep for alarms), and better battery. Go get it.
Big Picture is pretty, controller-friendly and, imo, a great user experience... or, it would be if: a) it didn't flatline one of my cores whilst it's active b) every single trailer on it didn't crash within a few seconds of starting. I'm not alone on this -- there's a (small) thread on the steam forums.
These problems have been here during the beta and persist now that it's live.
I'll actually answer the question instead of shooting off on a tangent about how pulseaudio sucks...
* Borderlands (1 & 2) * Crysis * Deus Ex * Valve titles (Portal, HL, etc -- but those are coming) * Serious Sam (well, 1.1 and 1.2; the rest were a bit of a waste; haven't played 3 yet -- when my harsh mistress Borderlands2 gives me time...) * Painkiller (series) * Torchlight 2 (apparently it wines, but I'm quite sick of wine and its artifacts, no reflection on the wine devs -- I think their efforts rock, just that many games take a serious penalty in the arena of performance and quirkiness)
There are plenty of games that I can play across both though, like Trine (1&2) and Torchlight and, of course, the great stuff from the Humble Bundles (of which I have them all!).
The sad truth though is that win8 actually runs smoother on the same hardware for regular use than my Linux Mint (KDE). Please don't suggest a different DE -- I've tried basically everything and they're either strange to use (though I should try Unity again -- I gave up on it because of the introduction of other artifacts which broke other GTK apps) or just plain fugly. I've even recently considered moving my daily operations to win8... It's a huge step up from the 2 decades of crap to fall out of the ass of Redmond in the past.
Sad and disgraceful for the human race though this may be, it's not news. Talented and bright kids have been disguising their talents to fly under bully radar since time immemorial.
The linked benchmark puts the iPhone 5 at a score of 1601. According to the original poster, this is " faster than the S3", yet searching for S3 results yields numbers around 1800 (some lower, a lot higher). So please could someone explain how the iPhone 5 is supposedly faster?
The patent file date is 11 March 2011. I've been silencing my AlarmDroid (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.splunchy.android.alarmclock&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5zcGx1bmNoeS5hbmRyb2lkLmFsYXJtY2xvY2siXQ..) alarm with an acceleration of configurable intensity (and yes, that means sometimes I whack it, sometimes I shake it) since well before then.
... with the immediate parent. It's been a long time since I haven't have a "everything just works" experience from a modern Linux distro on any hardware I've bothered to install on. And the install process takes about 50%-80% less time. And I'm using the same apps, so i don't really see the point of windows, *except* that I'm a gaming ho' so I kinda need my steam fix and I have a dual-boot Windows install for that. Oh and I make my living off of programming on and against Windows -- but that's more of an indication of the lack of Linux-based companies in my country than anything else (I did work for one -- work was awesome, boss was less so -- but the options for such opportunities are slimmer and I valued personal sanity over personal preference). So windows gets me bread and play time, but it's still more of a mission to install. And I still don't get why changing the USB port of a USB device requires a device driver install... And why that action is a working resolution for issues with a USB device...
Sorry, but your "not true" is, I'm afraid, really not true. I was lucky enough to be picked for the closed beta recently so I can say so from actual experience.
The "online all the time" aspect of the game sucks, granted, but it's not for DRM. It's because Blizzard wanted to allow people to play with their characters that they built up "at home" on the Battle.Net servers -- and you couldn't in Diablo 2 for the obvious reason that hacking a local character was ridiculously easy.
Now, is it a good idea to go this route? I don't think so -- personally, I'm more likely to play single player than online, mainly because the game starts to feel like it's lagging when everything has to go through a central server. The game itself, even in single player, is essentially played at the server and it becomes obvious if you disable your network connection (or saturate your line) during play: the player's character animates attacks which do nothing and monsters seem oblivious to your existence.
I have a 1mbps line and with nothing else on it I still sometimes feel lag:/
Personally, I would rather have the split home/battle.net characters of Diablo 2. That being said, Diablo 3 is very pretty (most especially the environments): dark, grisly, befitting a Diablo title. The music could be more horrifying (I miss the original Diablo 1 music!). The character development in the beta is incredibly limited and linear, so I'm really hoping that changes (though I don't know how much it can). You no longer get to assign your attribute points on level up. I have yet to (in one play-through with a Barbarian and an hour as a Monk) have to make a tough decision between two skills at level up as I've basically been forced to take one by virtue of it being the only option opened to me.
I've pre-ordered and I'm hoping I won't be (too) disappointed. Blizzard has some real talent -- perhaps they can work something out (like batched information transfer for single player with a kind of disconnected mechanism). I really, really hope so.
Let's face it: 90% of all captchas are a COMPLETE waste of time imposed on the reasonable interwebs users by the effects of spambots. So I'm wasting my time, I'm frustrated that I have to try to read some garbled POS to prove that I'm human.
If an ad can run to the point I have to see to defeat the captcha in around 5 seconds and then leave that content visible, what do I care if I have to type in "finding nemo" instead of "deafloo marblegreep"?
I have an ad-blocker because the blinking animated images and obnoxious flash ads destroy page flow and make actually consuming article data quite difficult -- perhaps I'm too easily distracted. I don't generally use ad-aware Android apps because the screen real estate is too small to waste 1/10 of it on an advert. I don't really have a problem with creative advertising -- even if it's not for a product that I want because, as an earlier slashdotter pointed out, if the ads were targeted, that would require the ad companies to know stuff about me.
So I say, bring it on. It can't be more annoying than current captchas and perhaps it will reduce the number of other annoying ads.
Try holding down another mouse button (eg, the third), and then, with that button still down, click as you would normally on the control you want to click.
I've had this in the past. It's not uncommon. I remember setting an environment variable pertaining to GTK to fix this -- though I can't find it and I can't remember it now. Hopefully, google will be as kind to you as it was to me when I looked.
I think there are a gaggle of devs on the Mono project who would have to disagree with your sweeping statements about the non-portability of C#.
Good on ya, Monodevs (:
I know *exactly* where you are coming from, having finished a programming course about 8 years ago, and having to deliver pizza (hey, a job is a job!) whilst waiting on the people who ran my course to find me a job (as they had promised). Of course, they started demanding the money for their course (which they were supposed to extract from the people they got me a job with... catch-22 deluxe).
Long story short: you should first see if there is some way you can relocate within your current company -- if they are forward-thinking, they will try to help you "be all you can be"; if they aren't, you're better off somewhere else anyway. Which brings me to the other point: you will have to accept the first programming job that you can find, irrespective of pay, or even environment. If you can prove flexibility, it doesn't matter where your programming roots are: a good company will realise programming talent irrespective of development environment. Take this from someone who initially had a side-course of C on a Chemical Engineering degree, which lead to taking a focussed programming course in COBOL (yes, I know, horrid stuff!), which landed my first job doing VB, which got me my second job doing ASP (and then PHP), which prepared me to work for myself for a while in TCL/TK, PHP, ASP; on to a job in primarily Delphi, and then on to a C++ position, now a C++ / "whatever I want to use" position. Of course, there were helpings of SQL, shell scripts, Python (yum!) and Perl (scary!) along the way. I'm quite sure I've forgotten at least one...
I know there will be people who object to such diversity. But hey, it's worked well for me. I have a good idea of programming principles and which tools will deliver what benefits to my current project.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, the one time I actually have a real use for mod points and I don't have any. You've hit the button on the head there. I've had Foobar2k pushed at me for years and in all that time, it still sucks royally. It's a UX nightmare. Winamp is small, fast, just works. Audacious does a good job on Linux, but needs some work on win32 -- and I'm really hoping to get the motiviation & time to do it. Because balls man. Winamp. WTF.
Not sure what os you're interested in doing this on, but llama for Android can do exactly this (and a lot more). And it's free.
If I had mod points, you'd have them. I'd like a FLOSS world, but I'll take a working closed world over a broken open one. As much as I'd like to, I simply can't fix everything I come across that's broken, no matter how open it is.
All that proves, really, is that people are able to regurgitate information more accurately, probably, in part, driven by econimically-guided procreation: people who have been able to do this better are getting better jobs, have better prospects, etc, etc, etc.
Common sense, on the other hand, remains rare -- and I would argue it's rarer than it's been in the past. You'd think that the average populace would be more difficult to dupe -- but they're not. You'd think that the number of people who can see through an obvious farce would rise -- but I'm sure most would agree that this isn't the case.
Of course, sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between actual stupidity and self-centered ignorance. When another person impacts your life negatively through some act which just seems blatantly stupid, is it actually just because they are too selfish to take anyone else into consideration? Quite likely.
Don't confuse UI with task accomplishment.
I totally hear you about a hanging background thread (which sucks for the user), but, let's imagine that background threads are properly handled (and perhaps even timed-out, as would be for network traffic). So a good example is this: imagine an application which presents you with a list of tasks to accomplish for the day. It starts up blank and asynchronously fetches your tasks for the day from a remote source. Now, the reason you want an indeterminate progress feedback mechanism (eg daisy loader) is because, on the day when you have no tasks, you need to know the difference between the app being busy and actually having completed its work, presenting your empty task list. This kind of thing is easy to accomplish, say, with jQuery where you have an asynchronous call which has two functions given to it: one when the call completes properly, and one which is called when the asynchronous call fails. BOTH should implement some kind of feedback that the operation has "completed" (ie, hide the daisy loader), and, of course, the failure path should inform the user that the operation failed -- and perhaps offer a mechanism for retry.
But, for this discussion, the only interesting parts are:
1) show the daisy loader
2) perform asynchronous call
3) when the asynchronous call completes or fails, hide the loader.
I can tell you that it's not always easy to give back a progress indicator which is meaningful to the user. The user wants to know (generally), how *long* is left, time-wise, where most progress-bars indicate how much of the overall activity is left to complete. The OP actually makes this point quite clear.
And therin lies the proverbial rub: if you're, for example, unpacking a small app, but you send some kind of statistic or registration information over a network at the end, even though that last sub-action is small (in comparison to the overall process), you're at the mercy of network latency, so that could be anything from 5 seconds to whatever network timeout has been set.
Trying to give a useful ETA on a progress bar / percentage feedback: now that's a challenge. Just for chuckles, check out http://code.google.com/p/fappy -- it's a playlist generator written in python. I wanted some kind of ETA on there, but I'll be the first to admit that it takes a while to settle and the ETA may rise -- because you can only make future predictions based on past experiences so, whilst you may have zipped through the first 1000 of 20000 files really quickly, you could hit a bunch of super-fragmented files, wait longer on disk IO, and have your ETA rise.
So the short answer is that it's quite easy to provide a progress bar displaying, essentially, a percentage of completed tasks within a procedure. But tying a progress indicator to an ETA or making sure that all percentage points come at the same time cost -- less than trivial.
Actually, they (and daisy loaders) do have a point, when used correctly: they're an indicator to the user that the process hasn't STALLED, even though the time to completion is unknown.
I'd rather have one of these than an app that looks like it's hung. So, apparently, would most users: even an indeterminate progress "meter" makes users happier to wait for a process to complete -- even to wait longer!
I've been trying to pick up some ad-hoc / freelance work, much like the OP. Freelancer.com has been a complete waste of time. It's obvious from the bids on projects that a lot of the bidders don't have a clue and are just trying to get in the cheapest bid -- but even when I have been the cheapest bid, I have yet to actually be contacted or acknowledged. The sad thing is that I'm happy to do the work at a cheaper rate just for some extra $$ and I'm pretty good at what I do: I have 12 years software dev experience in a range of languages and tech. My current job is good and I have recruiters scrabbling to get me on to the next thing -- but none of that appears to matter on these sites. :/
I've actually given up with trying to find work there -- it's a complete waste of time for me as a dev. It appears to be a complete waste of time for the people looking for devs too
The problem becomes that of the OP the moment this rock star is no longer available (hit by a proverbial -- or literal -- bus, for example). Then it becomes everyone's problem -- except his.
Ok, so now I've spent the time reading all of the posts (thanks, I have nothing better to do with a toddler in the house :/) and I still have to stand by the statement that Linus, whilst often blunt to the point of traumatic, is no liar. He's quite honest.
The apology only comes AFTER being chewed out -- the initial stand from Mauro is erring on the side of stating that PA is broken (which it may be, but that's not the point here; the point is that Linus has made it very clear in the past that kernel changes cannot break userspace because when they do, users (desktop and server) as well as userland developers lose confidence in the base system. It's bad for everyone.
I don't think you fully understand the terms "cowboy" and "rock star" and just how detrimental these people are. Sure, I only described "cowboy" for you, but since you're so intent on full completion, let me remind you that rock stars don't work well in teams because they believe their stuff is simply better than everyone else's. Often, they may even be right -- which causes a feedback loop that just makes the situation worse. I've had to maintain a rock star's code before -- sure, it was good, functional, fast. It was also incredibly difficult to read and when I fixed a flaw which became quite obvious, the tantrum that ensued made sure that I would never helpfully commit to that code base again. I had to interface with that code so when I found routines that were of interest to me, I would often rip them out, make them readable, fix any edge cases and keep them in my repo -- instead of just committing the (imo) higher quality code back to the original author.
Regarding your last comment: I still think that the linked mail from Linus (whilst quite blunt) is not completely off-kilter. A project of any reasonable size requires a technical lead who understands the project and its requirements and the unbreakable rules that come with those requirements. Linus is that guy and I think he does a reasonable job of it considering the size and requirements of the project. It's his leadership which gives me confidence in the kernel -- because it's no longer a hackthing: it's actually a solid work now (and has been for quite a few years; bear in mind where Linux came from) and Linus is putting that ahead of the feelings of the contributors -- which, at the end of the day, is good for the user and, eventually the contributors.
Mauro is properly apologetic *after* being chewed out. And I believe that (a) he won't make a mistake like that again and (b) he will be a useful member of the contributing team, having learned that the rules that have been established for the project are, in fact, immutable. He's no arch-villain, in the same way that Linus is no hero: Mauro made a mistake, got flamed and learned. Linus is just doing his job.
I think you misunderstand the terms "rock star" and "cowboy". These terms are not reserved for people who are merely proud of what they do - they are labels for people who code without thought of consequence, e.g. considering who has to clean up when the next gem they excrete breaks everyone else's work.
As for the second part, I have to admit that I only bothered to read Linus' response. Whilst I think many people know of Linus' volatile nature, I don't think he's a liar or apt to fabricate a fanciful scenario. Just reading his post paints the picture that this dev was not apologetic for breaking user-space, but instead tried to blame PulseAudio (ok, everyone likes to blame PA). Also his comments on code quality and clarity WRT the submitted patch were on target (again, assuming he's not lying about the patch contents).
So either you're saying Linus fabricated the whole thing or perhaps you read something out of order?
Contributors who want to be rock stars and cowboys shouldn't be welcome in a project worth any salt. So if this chap doesn't learn that the user is the most important part of the system and he's scared off, then good. If he learns his lesson, then he's all the more valuable.
No, instead, it actually reminds the world that Linux is not a hodge-podge of arbitrary decisions and that there is a strong leader who is determined to make sure that the desktop doesn't suffer because of kernel development. If Steve Ballmer crapped out his staff for making a service pack that broke existing application functionality, it would actually raise him a notch in my book.
I say good on Linus. He's stressed before that the userland is not a place to break stuff because it negatively affects the entire world's perception of the kernel and the OS distributions built around it. This chap made a mistake and didn't have the guts to admit it and back off. So perhaps he (and other cowboy programmers) will learn that actually the USER is the MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE SYSTEM.
you should have checked out CyanogenMod long ago. I just updated to an S3, so sticking with stock for now, but loved CM10 on my old S1. Installation is really simple, very safe (I found the S1 to be un-brickable because no matter what state I got it into, I could always push a ROM with Odin), and you can get Jelly Bean today. Better functionality, reliable alarms (2.1 on my S1 wouldn't bring the phone out of sleep for alarms), and better battery. Go get it.
Big Picture is pretty, controller-friendly and, imo, a great user experience... or, it would be if:
a) it didn't flatline one of my cores whilst it's active
b) every single trailer on it didn't crash within a few seconds of starting. I'm not alone on this -- there's a (small) thread on the steam forums.
These problems have been here during the beta and persist now that it's live.
I'll actually answer the question instead of shooting off on a tangent about how pulseaudio sucks...
* Borderlands (1 & 2)
* Crysis
* Deus Ex
* Valve titles (Portal, HL, etc -- but those are coming)
* Serious Sam (well, 1.1 and 1.2; the rest were a bit of a waste; haven't played 3 yet -- when my harsh mistress Borderlands2 gives me time...)
* Painkiller (series)
* Torchlight 2 (apparently it wines, but I'm quite sick of wine and its artifacts, no reflection on the wine devs -- I think their efforts rock, just that many games take a serious penalty in the arena of performance and quirkiness)
There are plenty of games that I can play across both though, like Trine (1&2) and Torchlight and, of course, the great stuff from the Humble Bundles (of which I have them all!).
The sad truth though is that win8 actually runs smoother on the same hardware for regular use than my Linux Mint (KDE). Please don't suggest a different DE -- I've tried basically everything and they're either strange to use (though I should try Unity again -- I gave up on it because of the introduction of other artifacts which broke other GTK apps) or just plain fugly. I've even recently considered moving my daily operations to win8... It's a huge step up from the 2 decades of crap to fall out of the ass of Redmond in the past.
Sad and disgraceful for the human race though this may be, it's not news. Talented and bright kids have been disguising their talents to fly under bully radar since time immemorial.
The linked benchmark puts the iPhone 5 at a score of 1601. According to the original poster, this is " faster than the S3", yet searching for S3 results yields numbers around 1800 (some lower, a lot higher). So please could someone explain how the iPhone 5 is supposedly faster?
The patent file date is 11 March 2011. I've been silencing my AlarmDroid (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.splunchy.android.alarmclock&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5zcGx1bmNoeS5hbmRyb2lkLmFsYXJtY2xvY2siXQ..) alarm with an acceleration of configurable intensity (and yes, that means sometimes I whack it, sometimes I shake it) since well before then.
... with the immediate parent. It's been a long time since I haven't have a "everything just works" experience from a modern Linux distro on any hardware I've bothered to install on. And the install process takes about 50%-80% less time. And I'm using the same apps, so i don't really see the point of windows, *except* that I'm a gaming ho' so I kinda need my steam fix and I have a dual-boot Windows install for that. Oh and I make my living off of programming on and against Windows -- but that's more of an indication of the lack of Linux-based companies in my country than anything else (I did work for one -- work was awesome, boss was less so -- but the options for such opportunities are slimmer and I valued personal sanity over personal preference).
So windows gets me bread and play time, but it's still more of a mission to install. And I still don't get why changing the USB port of a USB device requires a device driver install... And why that action is a working resolution for issues with a USB device...
Sorry, but your "not true" is, I'm afraid, really not true. I was lucky enough to be picked for the closed beta recently so I can say so from actual experience.
The "online all the time" aspect of the game sucks, granted, but it's not for DRM. It's because Blizzard wanted to allow people to play with their characters that they built up "at home" on the Battle.Net servers -- and you couldn't in Diablo 2 for the obvious reason that hacking a local character was ridiculously easy.
Now, is it a good idea to go this route? I don't think so -- personally, I'm more likely to play single player than online, mainly because the game starts to feel like it's lagging when everything has to go through a central server. The game itself, even in single player, is essentially played at the server and it becomes obvious if you disable your network connection (or saturate your line) during play: the player's character animates attacks which do nothing and monsters seem oblivious to your existence.
I have a 1mbps line and with nothing else on it I still sometimes feel lag :/
Personally, I would rather have the split home/battle.net characters of Diablo 2. That being said, Diablo 3 is very pretty (most especially the environments): dark, grisly, befitting a Diablo title. The music could be more horrifying (I miss the original Diablo 1 music!). The character development in the beta is incredibly limited and linear, so I'm really hoping that changes (though I don't know how much it can). You no longer get to assign your attribute points on level up. I have yet to (in one play-through with a Barbarian and an hour as a Monk) have to make a tough decision between two skills at level up as I've basically been forced to take one by virtue of it being the only option opened to me.
I've pre-ordered and I'm hoping I won't be (too) disappointed. Blizzard has some real talent -- perhaps they can work something out (like batched information transfer for single player with a kind of disconnected mechanism). I really, really hope so.
Let's face it: 90% of all captchas are a COMPLETE waste of time imposed on the reasonable interwebs users by the effects of spambots. So I'm wasting my time, I'm frustrated that I have to try to read some garbled POS to prove that I'm human. If an ad can run to the point I have to see to defeat the captcha in around 5 seconds and then leave that content visible, what do I care if I have to type in "finding nemo" instead of "deafloo marblegreep"? I have an ad-blocker because the blinking animated images and obnoxious flash ads destroy page flow and make actually consuming article data quite difficult -- perhaps I'm too easily distracted. I don't generally use ad-aware Android apps because the screen real estate is too small to waste 1/10 of it on an advert. I don't really have a problem with creative advertising -- even if it's not for a product that I want because, as an earlier slashdotter pointed out, if the ads were targeted, that would require the ad companies to know stuff about me. So I say, bring it on. It can't be more annoying than current captchas and perhaps it will reduce the number of other annoying ads.
Try holding down another mouse button (eg, the third), and then, with that button still down, click as you would normally on the control you want to click. I've had this in the past. It's not uncommon. I remember setting an environment variable pertaining to GTK to fix this -- though I can't find it and I can't remember it now. Hopefully, google will be as kind to you as it was to me when I looked.
I think there are a gaggle of devs on the Mono project who would have to disagree with your sweeping statements about the non-portability of C#. Good on ya, Monodevs (:
I know *exactly* where you are coming from, having finished a programming course about 8 years ago, and having to deliver pizza (hey, a job is a job!) whilst waiting on the people who ran my course to find me a job (as they had promised). Of course, they started demanding the money for their course (which they were supposed to extract from the people they got me a job with... catch-22 deluxe).
Long story short: you should first see if there is some way you can relocate within your current company -- if they are forward-thinking, they will try to help you "be all you can be"; if they aren't, you're better off somewhere else anyway. Which brings me to the other point: you will have to accept the first programming job that you can find, irrespective of pay, or even environment. If you can prove flexibility, it doesn't matter where your programming roots are: a good company will realise programming talent irrespective of development environment. Take this from someone who initially had a side-course of C on a Chemical Engineering degree, which lead to taking a focussed programming course in COBOL (yes, I know, horrid stuff!), which landed my first job doing VB, which got me my second job doing ASP (and then PHP), which prepared me to work for myself for a while in TCL/TK, PHP, ASP; on to a job in primarily Delphi, and then on to a C++ position, now a C++ / "whatever I want to use" position. Of course, there were helpings of SQL, shell scripts, Python (yum!) and Perl (scary!) along the way. I'm quite sure I've forgotten at least one...
I know there will be people who object to such diversity. But hey, it's worked well for me. I have a good idea of programming principles and which tools will deliver what benefits to my current project.