No. Spending all your time posting to message boards and chatting online contributes to social ineptness. The consequences of behavior are totally different in real life versus message boards, and regardless of how much time you spend hunched over a keyboard, you have to go outside and interact with people in person sometime.
People generally need social interaction as a part of good mental health, and online communities are one way that people who are weak at social interaction can avoid direct personal contact. It also allows the crazies to go without detection much longer.
Most sensible people use internet chat and message boards to enhance their daily lives, not replace huge chunks of them.
Doesn't matter. US citizens are not allowed to travel to Cuba under any circumstances other than what is allowed by the State Dept.
Sure, you can travel to Mexico or Canada and then get on another plane to Cuba, but it is still technically illegal, and you will be fined or jailed if you come back with a Cuban stamp without proper authorization. Most Americans get around this by asking the Cuban authorities not to stamp their passports, and they almost always oblige.
Just like it's technically illegal to import Cuban cigars into the country (and the vast majority are poorly constructed fakes from the DOminican Republic), but they're easy to get if you know who to do business with in Europe, Australia, Hong Kong, or the UAE. If you're particularly worried about getting caught, they'll even unband the cigars and ship the boxes and bands separately so that Customs has no reason or right to seize them.
No you won't. You'll be compensated very handsomely and offered raises from competing hospitals like it's going out of style. Most nurses alternate 3-12s and 4-12s every other week. They might not get a standard weekend (unless they ask for it), but they get shift differential for working at night and because they are valued so highly because of the nursing shortage, they can tell their bosses to go screw when called in to work for someone else and they'll still have their job when they get back. Both my sisters are nurses. They have a sweet job and they know it.
Microsoft didn't make all that money by innovating or being better than their competitors. They made that money by doing a better job of selling their products to their customers.
I can tell you with all honesty that in the ERP market, IT business consultants made about 60% more on average than the developers they work with. The ability to map out business processes in a way that makes interfacing with software possible is a much more sought after ability than developing software from those plans. There are business students who got their feet in the door who have 5 years of experience and are pulling down over 200K a year.
There are many, many jobs out there that specifically ask for MSc or PhD level candidates, most of which dealing with exactly the type of research you've done. I think you need to rethink the whole avoiding a US job issue. Regardless of the politics in the country, it's not going to affect you that much if at all on a day-to-day basis. You'll also have considerably more job opportunities and be able to build the kind of experience where eventually companies in Europe will salivate at the chance of having you on their team.
Or, if you don't mind banging out mundane code for a while before starting your own consultancy, you could probably do well at any of the chemical or petroleum refineries in northern Mexico. Get your foot in the door doing ERP development, and you'll be able to name your price to clients down the road because (I assume) you're multilingual. You'll make enough that you'll be able to start your own company creating your own software in the long run.
People generally make their own matches in GoW, and it works just fine. Every once in a while you'll run across some people whose skills don't quite match up, but once you've played the game for an appreciable amount of time, you can get a very nice game going with 8 highly skilled players in very short order.
Besides, there's no amount of automated matchmaking that will help you automatically filter out insufferable asses or hyperactive children. You're better off just playing enough until you know enough good players.
More likely that any business that gives a damn about its own bottom line will toss the GPL 3 toolchain out the window like a hot grenade and continue to collaborate along with the rest of the community on a fork of the software licensed under GPL 2, which will continue to be the standard.
Novell is by no means alone here. If the FSF "attacks" them with unreasonable terms, they won't be the only company to pull the rug out from under the FSF and its relevance in terms of the marketplace.
Now enterprise software developers too can take a hodgepodge of technologies and combine them into a poorly designed application of Frankensteinian proportions.
What the world really REALLY needs are more programming books that reinforce software engineering concepts and best practices as they teach you the language. Almost every programming language has its own unique set of rules that makes code easier to develop and manage.
Most programming language books I've seen will give you just enough rope to hang yourself... you'll be able to write a sweet multithreaded Hello World program with a nice GUI and a database connection, but without understanding how and why to develop and use objects properly, you might as well be coding in PHP 4.
Depends on the type of agreement. The agreement is usually either a percentage of first year's salary, a flat fee, or if it's a contractor, whatever the markup is. Before getting my first development job, I was a recruiter because it was all I could find at the time.
In the first case, percentage of first year's salary, you'd think that a recruiter would want to get as much as possible for the employee. That ain't necessarily the case. The first and foremost responsibility of that recruiter is to foster a long-term relationship with the client. They likely won't make anymore dough off of you after they're done with you, but they CAN go to the client again and again. If they bring a candidate in front of the client who then wants a high level of pay, the client manager may have to go to his boss to justify the candidate, and then if the candidate doesn't work out, the client manager is going to be the one with egg on his face... get my point?
In the flat fee case, the recruiter wants to squeeze you because he gets dough based on volume, and he can probably squeeze more people onto a dev team with lower salaries... and he'll probably be the first to be called if another spot opens up.
In the markup scenario, they want to bring your hourly wage down simply because the client usually quotes an hourly limit for which they can spend on the position, and any decrease in your salary means more money for them. I once placed a guy for well more than double what his hourly rate was simply because he didn't know his own worth on the market. Even working for a contracting firm, I made about 17 bucks an hour off of him for a year.
That's only because you were goofy enough to quote what you previously made to a recruiter. You NEVER EVER quote what you last made, because it gives the recruiter the ability to know how much he can squeeze you and increase the margin against what he charges the client. Instead, tell the recruiter only what you wish to make.
You are always #3 on the recruiter's list of priorities. #1 is his own wallet, #2 is the whim of the client who has opened a request for candidates.
I'm not laughing at the eventuality that there will be a day that Microsoft will be no more (though that length of time is undetermined and is likely to be longer than any of our lifetimes).
But the prevalent idea amongst fanatics that Linux will be the successor to the throne is absolutely hilarious. Innovation is a concept. Software patents are a legal construct. You don't beat well tested legal constructs with concepts, and you can't win the argument by telling the judge that you didn't patent something because you're just against the idea of patents.
Linux itself is both trademarked and copyrighted. Why is is ok for the creator to say that nobody else can use the term without his permission, or use the code without obeying the license, but horrible for someone else who has created something to take the third step and protect his work with a patent? It isn't about innovation at all. It's about wanting to take something for nothing because it suits your purpose, because without circumventing the law, you CAN'T compete against those who are willing to pay for it.
Besides, the sheer difficulty that the average user faces in simply getting a Linux distribution to work correctly with their hardware proves that the community isn't really about innovation at all, because IF IT WERE, it'd be looking into making their tools as easy to use as the competition, which still wouldn't level the playing field, but would at least show that they're interested in trying. Their actions and attitudes betray them every single time.
Huh? O'Reilly isn't a conservative. He's a media savvy tabloid host and always has been. He just happens to pander to the crowd who watches the channel his show is on the most with topics that will get the most attention. If he thought he'd make more dough and get more reaction by pulling an Arianna Huffington tomorrow, he'd do it in a heartbeat.
Perhaps if you'd put down the controller and pick up a book or two, you'd rely less on sweeping generalizations and actually learn to think critically.
And yes, I was kidding, but seriously, put the controller down before you hurt yourself.
Hmmm... on the flip side, if you teach your students nothing but theory along with languages that are neat for learning but aren't widely used in production, you run the risk of giving them nice slips of paper and a head full of algorithms but nothing that they can use practically because no employer will even talk to them.
I developed a few emulators, compilers, and interpreters. I simulated a computer system that never existed along with a machine language and compiler for that system. I developed a rudimentary database system. I developed a 3 dimensional planetary system using a gravity based models to keep all the planets and their moons from flinging wildly outward. I wrote an MVC based drag and drop queueing simulator complete with all sorts of neat statistical views. I wrote my own web browser.
Didn't matter when it came time to get a job, because my resume had words like Ada and Pascal instead of Java and C++. Not that I never programmed in those languages, mind you, but I never did it in school and didn't live in an area with a whole lot of IT internships. It took me YEARS before I could even get so much as an interview, and then it was for a very small company with a very small salary.
There needs to be a balance. Professors need to be aware of the market, because the fact of the matter is that most of their students AREN'T interested in holding down jobs in academia.
Gears of War... the co-op mode on that game is great and it forces you to watch each other's back. Besides, it helps if you get stuck playing the single player campaign when, after an intense battle and before you reach the next checkpoint, your computer controlled teammate invariably wanders into the darkness to get eaten by little black flying things... forcing you to start all over.
Perhaps you don't deserve the big bucks from patents because you're working for a huge employer, and very few employees who work for huge employers ever get rich off of the product they've spent years of their lives working on.
We paid you, we supported your research, we should own the result. If you want to own the result, then feel free to go start up your own lab and look for the venture capital to fund your research just like every other person who wants to strike out into business for themselves. You knew when you entered academia that it was a cushy job with a nice pension (wouldn't want to forget that since they're virtually non-existent in the private sector). You're getting a better deal than virtually every private sector peon gets, so quit your whining.
I'd be the first to claim that a CS program is there to teach a scientific discipline instead of a vocational skill. However, the reality of the situation is that kids ARE in school to become sufficiently knowledgeable in a field of expertise to eventually become employed in some capacity in that field. There's absolutely nothing wrong about requiring a student to turn in a properly commented and well documented programming assignment. And yes, I still maintain that it SHOULD be a part of the curriculum and count towards the grade. I don't care how talented you are, if you can't express your thoughts and actions clearly to an expert in the subject, then you probably don't deserve to pass the class.
A good CS program should incorporate many of the concepts of software design into their program WITHOUT having to focus specifically on professional design in any one class. CS isn't about becoming a pro software developer, that just happens to be a possible result of graduating with the degree.
IMO you'll learn more about the software lifecycle by actively and progressively participating in it as a requirement of each course than by taking a single course where that's all they harp on, especially because each professor, like each employer, will have different specific requirements. Learning to be comfortable with the discipline will ultimately serve you better than memorizing a bunch of facts and figures.
The shows are for use on the console only. Also, depending on what you get, some have 14 day expiration times. Given that a single episode of Robot Chicken cost 240 points for 480p ($3) and 320 points for 720p ($4).
They might as well be asking for bars of solid gold if they don't allow me to take the video wherever I want to go. Movie tickets around here are still less than 10 bucks and for that I get 2-3 hours of the whole experience. Pausing ain't worth THAT much to me.
Because you "plebians" have no standard for which to set yourselves against.
In my current position I'm maintaining and upgrading code that the "genius, 5 years ahead of his time" previous lead developer left for my employer after Katrina. It's pure 100% unadulterated crap, complete with no documentation, no comments, no obvious planning, a broken templating system, classes that aren't objects in the vaguest sense complete with configuration data in the class file, no exception handling, and error messages that have no obvious meaning. Everything is either over-engineered or isn't at all. The entirety of his work here has been nothing more than a giant WTF, which has been the case with virtually every "home taught" programmer I've ever worked with. When I brought the obvious problems to the CTO, he was shocked because he had just assumed that it was the way it was supposed to be. When you've never had a standard that you HAD to code against, which is the case of most non-degreed programmers, it's easier for you to trick yourself into believing that you're designing and developing your software correctly.
I'm sure there are exceptions, and some of the all time greats come to mind. But while a degree doesn't mean that someone can code worth a damn, it sure weeds out some of the weekend hobbyists who couldn't cut it in the curriculum. When hiring someone without a degree, I require code and documentation samples in addition to the technical questions, just to weed out those who have memorized all the usual questions.
As for the "genius, 5 years before his time" guy, well, apparently he's run into a problem with employment and is now trying to sell himself in a consulting role. He petitioned the CTO with a pitch to revamp parts of our system using the MVC pattern... apparently he's picked up Design Patterns for Dummies, because MVC is totally inappropriate for the application.
They said exactly that 10 years ago about Linux and the desktop, and the Linux desktop user space is still incredibly fragmented and nearly unusable by the average joe. Fix and standardize the desktop FIRST, along with tools and guidelines and standards, and THEN when it's usable, worry about the games. THAT way, when I load Kubuntu and actually put enough software on it so that it's actually usable, I don't waste time watching a goddamned bouncing cursor sit on my screen for 10 seconds simply because I've decided to use Kate or Kedit or deal with the glitches that come with trying to run GTK enabled software in KDE.
Some have decided that open source must carry with it the penalty of indecisiveness. Most people just want something that is easily configurable and works. Give it to them, and then the games will start to come as people find a reason or twenty to switch.
When most people won't use what you freely give away, there's a real freaking problem there, especially when it's something as potentially feature rich as Linux could be.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Spending all your time posting to message boards and chatting online contributes to social ineptness. The consequences of behavior are totally different in real life versus message boards, and regardless of how much time you spend hunched over a keyboard, you have to go outside and interact with people in person sometime.
People generally need social interaction as a part of good mental health, and online communities are one way that people who are weak at social interaction can avoid direct personal contact. It also allows the crazies to go without detection much longer.
Most sensible people use internet chat and message boards to enhance their daily lives, not replace huge chunks of them.
Doesn't matter. US citizens are not allowed to travel to Cuba under any circumstances other than what is allowed by the State Dept.
Sure, you can travel to Mexico or Canada and then get on another plane to Cuba, but it is still technically illegal, and you will be fined or jailed if you come back with a Cuban stamp without proper authorization. Most Americans get around this by asking the Cuban authorities not to stamp their passports, and they almost always oblige.
Just like it's technically illegal to import Cuban cigars into the country (and the vast majority are poorly constructed fakes from the DOminican Republic), but they're easy to get if you know who to do business with in Europe, Australia, Hong Kong, or the UAE. If you're particularly worried about getting caught, they'll even unband the cigars and ship the boxes and bands separately so that Customs has no reason or right to seize them.
No you won't. You'll be compensated very handsomely and offered raises from competing hospitals like it's going out of style. Most nurses alternate 3-12s and 4-12s every other week. They might not get a standard weekend (unless they ask for it), but they get shift differential for working at night and because they are valued so highly because of the nursing shortage, they can tell their bosses to go screw when called in to work for someone else and they'll still have their job when they get back. Both my sisters are nurses. They have a sweet job and they know it.
Imperialism....
Who exactly is depicted on your $20 bill and was on most of your currency for decades? A foreign monarch perhaps?
Hmmmmm.....
Microsoft didn't make all that money by innovating or being better than their competitors. They made that money by doing a better job of selling their products to their customers.
They still do.
I can tell you with all honesty that in the ERP market, IT business consultants made about 60% more on average than the developers they work with. The ability to map out business processes in a way that makes interfacing with software possible is a much more sought after ability than developing software from those plans. There are business students who got their feet in the door who have 5 years of experience and are pulling down over 200K a year.
There are many, many jobs out there that specifically ask for MSc or PhD level candidates, most of which dealing with exactly the type of research you've done. I think you need to rethink the whole avoiding a US job issue. Regardless of the politics in the country, it's not going to affect you that much if at all on a day-to-day basis. You'll also have considerably more job opportunities and be able to build the kind of experience where eventually companies in Europe will salivate at the chance of having you on their team.
Or, if you don't mind banging out mundane code for a while before starting your own consultancy, you could probably do well at any of the chemical or petroleum refineries in northern Mexico. Get your foot in the door doing ERP development, and you'll be able to name your price to clients down the road because (I assume) you're multilingual. You'll make enough that you'll be able to start your own company creating your own software in the long run.
People generally make their own matches in GoW, and it works just fine. Every once in a while you'll run across some people whose skills don't quite match up, but once you've played the game for an appreciable amount of time, you can get a very nice game going with 8 highly skilled players in very short order.
Besides, there's no amount of automated matchmaking that will help you automatically filter out insufferable asses or hyperactive children. You're better off just playing enough until you know enough good players.
More likely that any business that gives a damn about its own bottom line will toss the GPL 3 toolchain out the window like a hot grenade and continue to collaborate along with the rest of the community on a fork of the software licensed under GPL 2, which will continue to be the standard.
Novell is by no means alone here. If the FSF "attacks" them with unreasonable terms, they won't be the only company to pull the rug out from under the FSF and its relevance in terms of the marketplace.
Now enterprise software developers too can take a hodgepodge of technologies and combine them into a poorly designed application of Frankensteinian proportions.
Wait, how is this different than before?
Recruiters don't have the technical competence to give valuable feedback, and learning from your failures is CERTAINLY valuable.
What the world really REALLY needs are more programming books that reinforce software engineering concepts and best practices as they teach you the language. Almost every programming language has its own unique set of rules that makes code easier to develop and manage.
Most programming language books I've seen will give you just enough rope to hang yourself... you'll be able to write a sweet multithreaded Hello World program with a nice GUI and a database connection, but without understanding how and why to develop and use objects properly, you might as well be coding in PHP 4.
Depends on the type of agreement. The agreement is usually either a percentage of first year's salary, a flat fee, or if it's a contractor, whatever the markup is. Before getting my first development job, I was a recruiter because it was all I could find at the time.
In the first case, percentage of first year's salary, you'd think that a recruiter would want to get as much as possible for the employee. That ain't necessarily the case. The first and foremost responsibility of that recruiter is to foster a long-term relationship with the client. They likely won't make anymore dough off of you after they're done with you, but they CAN go to the client again and again. If they bring a candidate in front of the client who then wants a high level of pay, the client manager may have to go to his boss to justify the candidate, and then if the candidate doesn't work out, the client manager is going to be the one with egg on his face... get my point?
In the flat fee case, the recruiter wants to squeeze you because he gets dough based on volume, and he can probably squeeze more people onto a dev team with lower salaries... and he'll probably be the first to be called if another spot opens up.
In the markup scenario, they want to bring your hourly wage down simply because the client usually quotes an hourly limit for which they can spend on the position, and any decrease in your salary means more money for them. I once placed a guy for well more than double what his hourly rate was simply because he didn't know his own worth on the market. Even working for a contracting firm, I made about 17 bucks an hour off of him for a year.
That's only because you were goofy enough to quote what you previously made to a recruiter. You NEVER EVER quote what you last made, because it gives the recruiter the ability to know how much he can squeeze you and increase the margin against what he charges the client. Instead, tell the recruiter only what you wish to make.
You are always #3 on the recruiter's list of priorities. #1 is his own wallet, #2 is the whim of the client who has opened a request for candidates.
I'm not laughing at the eventuality that there will be a day that Microsoft will be no more (though that length of time is undetermined and is likely to be longer than any of our lifetimes).
But the prevalent idea amongst fanatics that Linux will be the successor to the throne is absolutely hilarious. Innovation is a concept. Software patents are a legal construct. You don't beat well tested legal constructs with concepts, and you can't win the argument by telling the judge that you didn't patent something because you're just against the idea of patents.
Linux itself is both trademarked and copyrighted. Why is is ok for the creator to say that nobody else can use the term without his permission, or use the code without obeying the license, but horrible for someone else who has created something to take the third step and protect his work with a patent? It isn't about innovation at all. It's about wanting to take something for nothing because it suits your purpose, because without circumventing the law, you CAN'T compete against those who are willing to pay for it.
Besides, the sheer difficulty that the average user faces in simply getting a Linux distribution to work correctly with their hardware proves that the community isn't really about innovation at all, because IF IT WERE, it'd be looking into making their tools as easy to use as the competition, which still wouldn't level the playing field, but would at least show that they're interested in trying. Their actions and attitudes betray them every single time.
Huh? O'Reilly isn't a conservative. He's a media savvy tabloid host and always has been. He just happens to pander to the crowd who watches the channel his show is on the most with topics that will get the most attention. If he thought he'd make more dough and get more reaction by pulling an Arianna Huffington tomorrow, he'd do it in a heartbeat.
Perhaps if you'd put down the controller and pick up a book or two, you'd rely less on sweeping generalizations and actually learn to think critically.
And yes, I was kidding, but seriously, put the controller down before you hurt yourself.
Hmmm... on the flip side, if you teach your students nothing but theory along with languages that are neat for learning but aren't widely used in production, you run the risk of giving them nice slips of paper and a head full of algorithms but nothing that they can use practically because no employer will even talk to them.
I developed a few emulators, compilers, and interpreters. I simulated a computer system that never existed along with a machine language and compiler for that system. I developed a rudimentary database system. I developed a 3 dimensional planetary system using a gravity based models to keep all the planets and their moons from flinging wildly outward. I wrote an MVC based drag and drop queueing simulator complete with all sorts of neat statistical views. I wrote my own web browser.
Didn't matter when it came time to get a job, because my resume had words like Ada and Pascal instead of Java and C++. Not that I never programmed in those languages, mind you, but I never did it in school and didn't live in an area with a whole lot of IT internships. It took me YEARS before I could even get so much as an interview, and then it was for a very small company with a very small salary.
There needs to be a balance. Professors need to be aware of the market, because the fact of the matter is that most of their students AREN'T interested in holding down jobs in academia.
Gears of War... the co-op mode on that game is great and it forces you to watch each other's back. Besides, it helps if you get stuck playing the single player campaign when, after an intense battle and before you reach the next checkpoint, your computer controlled teammate invariably wanders into the darkness to get eaten by little black flying things... forcing you to start all over.
Perhaps you don't deserve the big bucks from patents because you're working for a huge employer, and very few employees who work for huge employers ever get rich off of the product they've spent years of their lives working on.
We paid you, we supported your research, we should own the result. If you want to own the result, then feel free to go start up your own lab and look for the venture capital to fund your research just like every other person who wants to strike out into business for themselves. You knew when you entered academia that it was a cushy job with a nice pension (wouldn't want to forget that since they're virtually non-existent in the private sector). You're getting a better deal than virtually every private sector peon gets, so quit your whining.
Dunno if you were replying to me or not, but...
I'd be the first to claim that a CS program is there to teach a scientific discipline instead of a vocational skill. However, the reality of the situation is that kids ARE in school to become sufficiently knowledgeable in a field of expertise to eventually become employed in some capacity in that field. There's absolutely nothing wrong about requiring a student to turn in a properly commented and well documented programming assignment. And yes, I still maintain that it SHOULD be a part of the curriculum and count towards the grade. I don't care how talented you are, if you can't express your thoughts and actions clearly to an expert in the subject, then you probably don't deserve to pass the class.
A good CS program should incorporate many of the concepts of software design into their program WITHOUT having to focus specifically on professional design in any one class. CS isn't about becoming a pro software developer, that just happens to be a possible result of graduating with the degree.
IMO you'll learn more about the software lifecycle by actively and progressively participating in it as a requirement of each course than by taking a single course where that's all they harp on, especially because each professor, like each employer, will have different specific requirements. Learning to be comfortable with the discipline will ultimately serve you better than memorizing a bunch of facts and figures.
The shows are for use on the console only. Also, depending on what you get, some have 14 day expiration times. Given that a single episode of Robot Chicken cost 240 points for 480p ($3) and 320 points for 720p ($4).
They might as well be asking for bars of solid gold if they don't allow me to take the video wherever I want to go. Movie tickets around here are still less than 10 bucks and for that I get 2-3 hours of the whole experience. Pausing ain't worth THAT much to me.
Because you "plebians" have no standard for which to set yourselves against.
In my current position I'm maintaining and upgrading code that the "genius, 5 years ahead of his time" previous lead developer left for my employer after Katrina. It's pure 100% unadulterated crap, complete with no documentation, no comments, no obvious planning, a broken templating system, classes that aren't objects in the vaguest sense complete with configuration data in the class file, no exception handling, and error messages that have no obvious meaning. Everything is either over-engineered or isn't at all. The entirety of his work here has been nothing more than a giant WTF, which has been the case with virtually every "home taught" programmer I've ever worked with. When I brought the obvious problems to the CTO, he was shocked because he had just assumed that it was the way it was supposed to be. When you've never had a standard that you HAD to code against, which is the case of most non-degreed programmers, it's easier for you to trick yourself into believing that you're designing and developing your software correctly.
I'm sure there are exceptions, and some of the all time greats come to mind. But while a degree doesn't mean that someone can code worth a damn, it sure weeds out some of the weekend hobbyists who couldn't cut it in the curriculum. When hiring someone without a degree, I require code and documentation samples in addition to the technical questions, just to weed out those who have memorized all the usual questions.
As for the "genius, 5 years before his time" guy, well, apparently he's run into a problem with employment and is now trying to sell himself in a consulting role. He petitioned the CTO with a pitch to revamp parts of our system using the MVC pattern... apparently he's picked up Design Patterns for Dummies, because MVC is totally inappropriate for the application.
They said exactly that 10 years ago about Linux and the desktop, and the Linux desktop user space is still incredibly fragmented and nearly unusable by the average joe. Fix and standardize the desktop FIRST, along with tools and guidelines and standards, and THEN when it's usable, worry about the games. THAT way, when I load Kubuntu and actually put enough software on it so that it's actually usable, I don't waste time watching a goddamned bouncing cursor sit on my screen for 10 seconds simply because I've decided to use Kate or Kedit or deal with the glitches that come with trying to run GTK enabled software in KDE.
Some have decided that open source must carry with it the penalty of indecisiveness. Most people just want something that is easily configurable and works. Give it to them, and then the games will start to come as people find a reason or twenty to switch.
When most people won't use what you freely give away, there's a real freaking problem there, especially when it's something as potentially feature rich as Linux could be.
1. Tetris Attack - best puzzle game ever
2. Guitar Hero - Pick it up, play a few, put it back down again
3. Battlefield 2 - Takes a bit of an effort to get an online game that rotates maps, but it's worth it.
4. Astropop - It's like Magical Drop but not. Well worth the 10 bucks.
5. Geometry Wars - old school action with modern AI = fun