...you don't really understand how credit cards work, do you?
What AmEx did was exactly what happens when people dispute a charge and the CC company sides with the merchant. The charge is dropped during the investigation, and if the investigation convinces the company that the charge was legit then it is reinstated.
Minor nitpicking here, but this is the internet... An EMT is not the same as a Paramedic
If you hadn't, I'd have.:-)
I would describe it a bit differently though. Essentially, there are four levels of EMT: EMT Basic, EMT Intermediate, EMT Advanced, and Paramedic. That is, all paramedics are EMTs but not vice versa.
A couple times I've considered geting EMT-basic certification and volunteering. I never have, but I did look into the training requirements. An EMT Basic course will usually be one semester; I think the one around here is twice a week for around 3 hours each meeting. That comes out to around 80 hours. I could be wrong, but I think the Intermediate course was another semester. The paramedic curriculum though is a couple years of more classes. The basic and intermediate courses struck me as something that it'd be reasonable for a lot of people to do while still having a day job, but the paramedic curriculum definitely seemed like a much more full-time commitment.
If you get it and it has value, then it's income and you should pay taxes on it.
I look forward to keeping a tally of the number of pens I take from the stock room over the course of the year and figuring out the monetary value is of the air conditioning and heating that this building has so I can claim them on my 1040.
1. I'd be tempted to attach an accelerometer to the conductor's baton or hand. This could probably be made small and unobtrusive enough to not be a bother. I'm not sure how to present the information. Detecting the beats may not be so tough, but I suspect you could do better. If you look at even electronic metronomes or metronome software for instance, some will still have a display that mimics the old mechanical arm. This provides useful information, as it shows the progress to the next beat, which allows you to anticipate (based on more than the time of the previous beat) rather than just react. If you convert either the acceleration or a derived speed or derived location to a tone in an earpiece, you may be able to learn to use it.
2. Have either the conductor or an assistant murmur the beat into a microphone which you pick up.
Oh, I just re-read my post.:-) I see what prompted your question, because I wasn't very clear.
What I meant wasn't so much that you'd have to spend a lot of time in an absolute sense on it, but that if you're doing a long trip you have to do an hour-long charge every three hours or so. (At least that's my memory from what people were talking about during the NYTimes review flap.) That's a lot more time stopped than I spend when on a long drive, and that's the frequency I was talking about when I said you have to do it often.
How often do you have to use them? I'm guessing not very often, unless you have a ridiculously long daily commute (in which case a gasoline car will be faster, but then you end up paying a huge monthly gas bill instead; either way it sucks).
Not very often, but when it is necessary, it can be a big deal. For instance, there are a couple drives I occasionally make which are just on the edge of what I can do in one day. One of them in particular; I've sometimes done it in one, and sometimes done it in two. If I had to do the Tesla charge along the way, there'd probably be no hope.
I've thought a bit about how I would like to grade a typical upper-division project-based CS course, like your typical OS class, where there are assignments of the form "okay, now go program such-and-such". (As opposed to theory courses, or more open-ended project classes where the students can pick what they want to do or different people do different projects.)
What I'd kind of like to do is have a submission server which would do three things that each contribute to the final grade. First: before the submission deadline, people could submit at any point. It would build the project and run a set of tests which was released to the students, reporting full results and that portion of the grade. (Students could submit multiple times without penalty, and it would use either the final or highest submission. Not sure which.) Second: before the submission deadline, it would do the same thing with a set of hidden tests, except not report information about what the tests were, just giving a number or letter grade. If students can't figure out what they're doing wrong, they could come talk to me. Third: after the submission deadline closes, it would run another set of secret tests to get the third component of the grade, and report it to the students at that time. In addition, there would be a fourth portion of the grade which was not automated. I'm not totally sure what the mix would be between them.
(I've also thought about making students submit enough test cases to get good coverage on either their or my solution or both, which would be a fifth category.)
I graphed the number of networks visible in the morning and evening commutes. The first ~5 min of the morning commute is sitting stationary. The vertical lines are caused by the obnoxious-as-hell network manager that comes with Ubuntu accessing the interface and causing a "device or resource busy" error with my thing, which causes a report of 0 networks in range. Remember the drag I mentioned before: the three big peaks little after 10AM correspond to the three most popular stops along the street with bigger apartment buildings, but the decline from the peaks occurred even as the bus was sitting before.
There were >1600 unique SSIDs seen in the morning commute, >1200 in the evening one, and >1800 total.
The way I collected this data was to:
collect it with for num in $(seq 1 3600); do iw dev wlan0 scan > $num.txt; sleep 2; done
convert it to CSV with for file in *.txt; do echo "$file, $(stat --printf="%y" $file | cut -f2 -d" "), $(wc -l net.csv
I'd actually be interested in this as well. Hopefully there's a tool that doesn't require a "Smartphone forensics" degree. I only see a few networks whenever I look... but that doesn't mean I'm not passing through the range of many more.
So what I wound up doing was using the iw dev wlan0 scan command in Linux to list information, from which I grep'd out the SSID: blah lines. I then ran this with a 2 or 3 second pause inside of a shell for loop as I rode in. I'll post results this evening, but with a caveat, there were a couple points where iw dev wlan0 scan | grep SSID returned over 100 networks. I don't even live in a metropolitan area; most of my ride in is quite suburban.
There were 1,644 unique network SSIDs reported during my 30-minute ride in.
(The caveat is I think there is some "drag" of what networks it reports. For instance, if it sees network Foo at one moment, I think that will be reported for a bit longer even after it's no longer in range. Because of this drag, I'm not sure that there were actually ever more than 100 networks in range.)
Going down a street where there are a lot of apartments, I wouldn't be surprised if I see 40.
By the way, that's 40 at once, along most of the street. I'd be surprised if I don't see 100 different networks at one point or another from one end of the street to another.
Either you work in a very very crowded area, or San Diego is seriously slacking in the Wireless department. There are exactly zero visible wireless signal available from my office. My company's SSID is not broadcast, and it's a fairly large campus, so no others can make the trip in. From my home, I can see a few, maybe 3 or 4 on a good day (including my own.) Perhaps people in my neighborhood just keep their SSIDs hidden.
Depending on where exactly I am in my apartment (I can move a few feet and the number changes), from three sample points I see between 20 and 28 different networks at home. There were 15 or 20 visible from my office earlier today. Going down a street where there are a lot of apartments, I wouldn't be surprised if I see 40.
Things like your 2D assumption really get destroyed by apartment buildings, not to mention your statement that "if you think that you need a separate access point from someone less than 30m away, I think that you need to work on your interpersonal skills":-).
If anyone knows a way -- either on Linux or Windows 7 -- to record a list of SSIDs which are visible over time, I'll run it on my bus ride and see how many unique networks are visible during the entire route.
Very much no. I don't remember the last time I came across non-kernel software that required a reboot immediately to work. Obviously, new drivers and whatnot will not work until you reboot, but the old versions will remain in memory and in-use until you do if they can't be used immediately.
I'm not really worried about whether I'll get the new version; that's fine. What I'm worried about is that some file Foo which is not being used at the time of the update will be changed, and then after the update the old version of the program which is still running will go and open Foo, and because of a version mismatch, bad things will happen.
Is it likely to happen? No. Is it theoretically possible it could? Absolutely.
(And for the record, I've also run Windows for some time after completing an update without restarting, and haven't really hit any problems because of it as far as I know. So Windows and Linux in that scenario are really not all that different.)
I'm not sure of this but the last time I remember using Ubuntu, I believe it did tell you on the update list prior to installation. I could be wrong.
Well, I could be wrong too.:-) I did try it before posting, but the current batch of things I needed didn't require an update so it wasn't a good test. I'll keep an eye out.
Even with the assumption that these are not unique access points... that's still an insane number. If we change the time-frame to 2 years, roughly the average lifespan between upgrades, he's up to 95 WiFi points per day.
If the wifi points are non-unique, 100 wifi points per day would be downright easy to achieve. I probably pass far more than that on the way to and from work each day on the bus.
Remember, it's not "how many networks have you connected to" but "how many have come in range of your antenna."
Unique points would be a lot harder to hit, but as someone else points out, you could probably rack up access points very quickly in a metropolitan area.
However, I don't know this for sure... for instance, I can imagine that they'd take a conservative approach and update if there was some X or Unity update as well
That should have said "and reboot if there was some X or unity update".
It was, and that's my guess as well. However, I don't know this for sure... for instance, I can imagine that they'd take a conservative approach and update if there was some X or Unity update as well, and there's not an indication in the update list as to which particular updates require a reboot. Heck, I think it doesn't even tell you in aggregate ("installing the selected updates will require a reboot") until after it's done. (In 12.10 it doesn't even show you the list of updates by default!) So I'm basically in the same situation as in Windows: do the update, then if it says "reboot", try to do it ASAP in case not doing so could cause something to go haywire.
(Is it likely to go haywire? No. Could it? Yes, theoretically. Not having audited the code for everything being updated, I can't say for certain.)
(Yes, I know this can be configured away with registry editing and whatnot, but it's not the default or even easy.)
If you just want to do it on a per-update basis, there's no registry editing necessary; you just have to stop the Windows Update service. Heck, you can probably do it with a net stop command from the command line.
But yes, even though I would characterize it as "small", it's a benefit nonetheless.
There are some good games. But where's Mass Effect? Xcom? Hell, where's Portal?
There problem is almost all good games are not available. At this point you're still very limited in the selection. If you're happy with what's there, or are satisfied enough that it makes up for not having to deal with Windows, that's great. (I'd recommend Frozen Synapse, which IIRC is there.) But at the same time, a lot of people won't agree.
...and as an additional nice point, don't require a reboot (usually only kernel updates need a reboot in Linux)
Eh, my informal impression from being a partially-Ubuntu user for a bit now is that, at least with Ubuntu, reboot-requiring updates actually come about as often (maybe even a little more often) than they do on Windows. I tried tracking this for a little bit of time but for a couple reasons I wasn't diligent enough about checking for updates, and reboot-required updates come by infrequently enough that it'd take a few months of observation to get a decent answer.
Other distros of course don't require updates nearly as often, but (1) as Ubuntu is probably the most popular distro especially for non-technical and first-time users, that's what most of them are going to see, and (2) it would make me wonder, if I was using another distro, whether I should be updating anyway even though the distro wasn't pushing it.
The worst part for me is that most people complain about Metro without realizing it works exactly like the Windows 7 start menu - shortcuts are identical.
Not quite identical.
It's funny, because I mostly agree with you; Metro actually affects my day-to-day use of Windows almost not at all. Under Win7, when I wanted to start a program, I pressed the Win key, typed part of the name, and hit enter. In Win8, when I want to start a program, I press the Win key, type part of the name, and hit enter. I do occasionally notice differences (e.g. when I want to click something, in which case I'd say it changes a lot), but honestly even Chrome's UI has more of a negative effect on my day-to-day use.
However, I do have one tiny complaint about it where it differs from Win7, which is that the search scope is different. There are three scopes: start menu entries, settings, and files. In Win7, it would search all three; in Win8, it only shows you results from one at a time. So if I want to bring up environment variable settings, in Win7 I would also just press the windows key, type "environment variables", and hit enter -- but in Win8, you have to either press Win-W or switch the active scope after the search has been started (I only know how to do this by clicking).
So I don't really like the changes -- though I can definitely buy that it's better for touch-first devices -- but I also almost don't notice them from some point of view.
Yes, you can make a RTS playable by controller by some definition. But to do so you either have to make it much harder to play by controller, make it much easier to play by keyboard/mouse, or offer two modes. My suspicion is that the two modes thing would have to be sufficiently different as to require quite a bit of "duplicate" engineering.
My worry would be that the keyboard/mouse input would suffer as a result; as a PC gamer (more than "casual", less than "hardcore") it already seems like making games multiplatform are causing the PC versions to be "dumbed down" a bit.
"3rd-party GPU drivers that don't work in *every* distribution." - says who? The Linux kernel is just that - the Linux kernel. A distribution is a collection of user-space software packages, software repositories, and a file system structure - nothing else.
Um, not really. Often distros include their own patches to both the kernel and user-level software. It's certainly conceivable -- though unlikely/rare -- that a distro's patches could break drivers.
Games are an interesting problem but that's being addressed by Valve.
Valve's working on it, but there's on so much they can do. They only have indirect say over what platforms other publishers wirte for (unless they overextend their hand even for them, I suspect), and even if they can convince publishers to start writing Linux versions, there's still an enormous backlog of Windows- or Windows/Mac-only games that probably won't even be ported.
I am quite happy for what Valve is doing, but I am also quite skeptical about "the year of Linux on the desktop" for a while longer. At least unless they've got something else up their sleeve like a much better Wine layer. At least for me, even if all future games were cross platform I have quite a lot of backlog to play through before I drop Windows.
That's why you can't name drop any of them, in stark contrast to perhaps to a single video,audio, or CAD tool that costs more than you are willing to spend.
I've bought two versions of Lightroom and will probably buy more. Most entries on the Wine Application Compatibility DB for it are "garbage". Even the couple entries that are higher certainly don't sound it to me; the ratings on the appdb have always seemed very soft. (e.g. a bronze rating where "Viewing pictures in Library/Develop (invisible)" does not work... that's primary functionality! How does something where the program basically doesn't work get a bronze rating?)
Ha, "ripoff of bash". As if sh, csh, or ksh never existed...
Plus the fact that anyone who says that PowerShell is a ripoff of the traditional Unix shell either (1) doesn't know anything about PS, (2) doesn't know anything about sh, or (3) is smoking something pretty darn strong.
Slashdot Mirror
...you don't really understand how credit cards work, do you?
What AmEx did was exactly what happens when people dispute a charge and the CC company sides with the merchant. The charge is dropped during the investigation, and if the investigation convinces the company that the charge was legit then it is reinstated.
This link someone else posted has a video and a much more comprehensible account of what transpired: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/jean-segura-steals-second-then-steals-first-bizarre-103642855--mlb.html
Minor nitpicking here, but this is the internet... An EMT is not the same as a Paramedic
If you hadn't, I'd have. :-)
I would describe it a bit differently though. Essentially, there are four levels of EMT: EMT Basic, EMT Intermediate, EMT Advanced, and Paramedic. That is, all paramedics are EMTs but not vice versa.
A couple times I've considered geting EMT-basic certification and volunteering. I never have, but I did look into the training requirements. An EMT Basic course will usually be one semester; I think the one around here is twice a week for around 3 hours each meeting. That comes out to around 80 hours. I could be wrong, but I think the Intermediate course was another semester. The paramedic curriculum though is a couple years of more classes. The basic and intermediate courses struck me as something that it'd be reasonable for a lot of people to do while still having a day job, but the paramedic curriculum definitely seemed like a much more full-time commitment.
Privacy shouldn't be an opt-in situation
This is the quote of the story.
If you get it and it has value, then it's income and you should pay taxes on it.
I look forward to keeping a tally of the number of pens I take from the stock room over the course of the year and figuring out the monetary value is of the air conditioning and heating that this building has so I can claim them on my 1040.
1. I'd be tempted to attach an accelerometer to the conductor's baton or hand. This could probably be made small and unobtrusive enough to not be a bother. I'm not sure how to present the information. Detecting the beats may not be so tough, but I suspect you could do better. If you look at even electronic metronomes or metronome software for instance, some will still have a display that mimics the old mechanical arm. This provides useful information, as it shows the progress to the next beat, which allows you to anticipate (based on more than the time of the previous beat) rather than just react. If you convert either the acceleration or a derived speed or derived location to a tone in an earpiece, you may be able to learn to use it.
2. Have either the conductor or an assistant murmur the beat into a microphone which you pick up.
Oh, I just re-read my post. :-) I see what prompted your question, because I wasn't very clear.
What I meant wasn't so much that you'd have to spend a lot of time in an absolute sense on it, but that if you're doing a long trip you have to do an hour-long charge every three hours or so. (At least that's my memory from what people were talking about during the NYTimes review flap.) That's a lot more time stopped than I spend when on a long drive, and that's the frequency I was talking about when I said you have to do it often.
How often do you have to use them? I'm guessing not very often, unless you have a ridiculously long daily commute (in which case a gasoline car will be faster, but then you end up paying a huge monthly gas bill instead; either way it sucks).
Not very often, but when it is necessary, it can be a big deal. For instance, there are a couple drives I occasionally make which are just on the edge of what I can do in one day. One of them in particular; I've sometimes done it in one, and sometimes done it in two. If I had to do the Tesla charge along the way, there'd probably be no hope.
However if you travel and you go beyond the storage limit even, and it will take you 6 hours to recharge...
Hell, even the 45-60 minutes of the Tesla's superchargers are, IMO, way too long for how often you have to do it.
When I want to talk to machines, I write code.
I've thought a bit about how I would like to grade a typical upper-division project-based CS course, like your typical OS class, where there are assignments of the form "okay, now go program such-and-such". (As opposed to theory courses, or more open-ended project classes where the students can pick what they want to do or different people do different projects.)
What I'd kind of like to do is have a submission server which would do three things that each contribute to the final grade. First: before the submission deadline, people could submit at any point. It would build the project and run a set of tests which was released to the students, reporting full results and that portion of the grade. (Students could submit multiple times without penalty, and it would use either the final or highest submission. Not sure which.) Second: before the submission deadline, it would do the same thing with a set of hidden tests, except not report information about what the tests were, just giving a number or letter grade. If students can't figure out what they're doing wrong, they could come talk to me. Third: after the submission deadline closes, it would run another set of secret tests to get the third component of the grade, and report it to the students at that time. In addition, there would be a fourth portion of the grade which was not automated. I'm not totally sure what the mix would be between them.
(I've also thought about making students submit enough test cases to get good coverage on either their or my solution or both, which would be a fifth category.)
Any thoughts?
I graphed the number of networks visible in the morning and evening commutes. The first ~5 min of the morning commute is sitting stationary. The vertical lines are caused by the obnoxious-as-hell network manager that comes with Ubuntu accessing the interface and causing a "device or resource busy" error with my thing, which causes a report of 0 networks in range. Remember the drag I mentioned before: the three big peaks little after 10AM correspond to the three most popular stops along the street with bigger apartment buildings, but the decline from the peaks occurred even as the bus was sitting before.
There were >1600 unique SSIDs seen in the morning commute, >1200 in the evening one, and >1800 total.
The way I collected this data was to:
collect it with for num in $(seq 1 3600); do iw dev wlan0 scan > $num.txt; sleep 2; done
convert it to CSV with for file in *.txt; do echo "$file, $(stat --printf="%y" $file | cut -f2 -d" "), $(wc -l net.csv
and then graph it in LO Calc.
I'd actually be interested in this as well. Hopefully there's a tool that doesn't require a "Smartphone forensics" degree. I only see a few networks whenever I look ... but that doesn't mean I'm not passing through the range of many more.
So what I wound up doing was using the iw dev wlan0 scan command in Linux to list information, from which I grep'd out the SSID: blah lines. I then ran this with a 2 or 3 second pause inside of a shell for loop as I rode in. I'll post results this evening, but with a caveat, there were a couple points where iw dev wlan0 scan | grep SSID returned over 100 networks. I don't even live in a metropolitan area; most of my ride in is quite suburban.
There were 1,644 unique network SSIDs reported during my 30-minute ride in.
(The caveat is I think there is some "drag" of what networks it reports. For instance, if it sees network Foo at one moment, I think that will be reported for a bit longer even after it's no longer in range. Because of this drag, I'm not sure that there were actually ever more than 100 networks in range.)
Going down a street where there are a lot of apartments, I wouldn't be surprised if I see 40.
By the way, that's 40 at once, along most of the street. I'd be surprised if I don't see 100 different networks at one point or another from one end of the street to another.
Either you work in a very very crowded area, or San Diego is seriously slacking in the Wireless department. There are exactly zero visible wireless signal available from my office. My company's SSID is not broadcast, and it's a fairly large campus, so no others can make the trip in. From my home, I can see a few, maybe 3 or 4 on a good day (including my own.) Perhaps people in my neighborhood just keep their SSIDs hidden.
Depending on where exactly I am in my apartment (I can move a few feet and the number changes), from three sample points I see between 20 and 28 different networks at home. There were 15 or 20 visible from my office earlier today. Going down a street where there are a lot of apartments, I wouldn't be surprised if I see 40.
Things like your 2D assumption really get destroyed by apartment buildings, not to mention your statement that "if you think that you need a separate access point from someone less than 30m away, I think that you need to work on your interpersonal skills" :-).
If anyone knows a way -- either on Linux or Windows 7 -- to record a list of SSIDs which are visible over time, I'll run it on my bus ride and see how many unique networks are visible during the entire route.
Very much no. I don't remember the last time I came across non-kernel software that required a reboot immediately to work. Obviously, new drivers and whatnot will not work until you reboot, but the old versions will remain in memory and in-use until you do if they can't be used immediately.
I'm not really worried about whether I'll get the new version; that's fine. What I'm worried about is that some file Foo which is not being used at the time of the update will be changed, and then after the update the old version of the program which is still running will go and open Foo, and because of a version mismatch, bad things will happen.
Is it likely to happen? No. Is it theoretically possible it could? Absolutely.
(And for the record, I've also run Windows for some time after completing an update without restarting, and haven't really hit any problems because of it as far as I know. So Windows and Linux in that scenario are really not all that different.)
I'm not sure of this but the last time I remember using Ubuntu, I believe it did tell you on the update list prior to installation. I could be wrong.
Well, I could be wrong too. :-) I did try it before posting, but the current batch of things I needed didn't require an update so it wasn't a good test. I'll keep an eye out.
Even with the assumption that these are not unique access points ... that's still an insane number. If we change the time-frame to 2 years, roughly the average lifespan between upgrades, he's up to 95 WiFi points per day.
If the wifi points are non-unique, 100 wifi points per day would be downright easy to achieve. I probably pass far more than that on the way to and from work each day on the bus.
Remember, it's not "how many networks have you connected to" but "how many have come in range of your antenna."
Unique points would be a lot harder to hit, but as someone else points out, you could probably rack up access points very quickly in a metropolitan area.
However, I don't know this for sure... for instance, I can imagine that they'd take a conservative approach and update if there was some X or Unity update as well
That should have said "and reboot if there was some X or unity update".
Ubuntu was probably downloading new kernels.
It was, and that's my guess as well. However, I don't know this for sure... for instance, I can imagine that they'd take a conservative approach and update if there was some X or Unity update as well, and there's not an indication in the update list as to which particular updates require a reboot. Heck, I think it doesn't even tell you in aggregate ("installing the selected updates will require a reboot") until after it's done. (In 12.10 it doesn't even show you the list of updates by default!) So I'm basically in the same situation as in Windows: do the update, then if it says "reboot", try to do it ASAP in case not doing so could cause something to go haywire.
(Is it likely to go haywire? No. Could it? Yes, theoretically. Not having audited the code for everything being updated, I can't say for certain.)
(Yes, I know this can be configured away with registry editing and whatnot, but it's not the default or even easy.)
If you just want to do it on a per-update basis, there's no registry editing necessary; you just have to stop the Windows Update service. Heck, you can probably do it with a net stop command from the command line.
But yes, even though I would characterize it as "small", it's a benefit nonetheless.
There are some good games. But where's Mass Effect? Xcom? Hell, where's Portal?
There problem is almost all good games are not available. At this point you're still very limited in the selection. If you're happy with what's there, or are satisfied enough that it makes up for not having to deal with Windows, that's great. (I'd recommend Frozen Synapse, which IIRC is there.) But at the same time, a lot of people won't agree.
...and as an additional nice point, don't require a reboot (usually only kernel updates need a reboot in Linux)
Eh, my informal impression from being a partially-Ubuntu user for a bit now is that, at least with Ubuntu, reboot-requiring updates actually come about as often (maybe even a little more often) than they do on Windows. I tried tracking this for a little bit of time but for a couple reasons I wasn't diligent enough about checking for updates, and reboot-required updates come by infrequently enough that it'd take a few months of observation to get a decent answer.
Other distros of course don't require updates nearly as often, but (1) as Ubuntu is probably the most popular distro especially for non-technical and first-time users, that's what most of them are going to see, and (2) it would make me wonder, if I was using another distro, whether I should be updating anyway even though the distro wasn't pushing it.
The worst part for me is that most people complain about Metro without realizing it works exactly like the Windows 7 start menu - shortcuts are identical.
Not quite identical.
It's funny, because I mostly agree with you; Metro actually affects my day-to-day use of Windows almost not at all. Under Win7, when I wanted to start a program, I pressed the Win key, typed part of the name, and hit enter. In Win8, when I want to start a program, I press the Win key, type part of the name, and hit enter. I do occasionally notice differences (e.g. when I want to click something, in which case I'd say it changes a lot), but honestly even Chrome's UI has more of a negative effect on my day-to-day use.
However, I do have one tiny complaint about it where it differs from Win7, which is that the search scope is different. There are three scopes: start menu entries, settings, and files. In Win7, it would search all three; in Win8, it only shows you results from one at a time. So if I want to bring up environment variable settings, in Win7 I would also just press the windows key, type "environment variables", and hit enter -- but in Win8, you have to either press Win-W or switch the active scope after the search has been started (I only know how to do this by clicking).
So I don't really like the changes -- though I can definitely buy that it's better for touch-first devices -- but I also almost don't notice them from some point of view.
Yes, you can make a RTS playable by controller by some definition. But to do so you either have to make it much harder to play by controller, make it much easier to play by keyboard/mouse, or offer two modes. My suspicion is that the two modes thing would have to be sufficiently different as to require quite a bit of "duplicate" engineering.
My worry would be that the keyboard/mouse input would suffer as a result; as a PC gamer (more than "casual", less than "hardcore") it already seems like making games multiplatform are causing the PC versions to be "dumbed down" a bit.
"3rd-party GPU drivers that don't work in *every* distribution." - says who? The Linux kernel is just that - the Linux kernel. A distribution is a collection of user-space software packages, software repositories, and a file system structure - nothing else.
Um, not really. Often distros include their own patches to both the kernel and user-level software. It's certainly conceivable -- though unlikely/rare -- that a distro's patches could break drivers.
Games are an interesting problem but that's being addressed by Valve.
Valve's working on it, but there's on so much they can do. They only have indirect say over what platforms other publishers wirte for (unless they overextend their hand even for them, I suspect), and even if they can convince publishers to start writing Linux versions, there's still an enormous backlog of Windows- or Windows/Mac-only games that probably won't even be ported.
I am quite happy for what Valve is doing, but I am also quite skeptical about "the year of Linux on the desktop" for a while longer. At least unless they've got something else up their sleeve like a much better Wine layer. At least for me, even if all future games were cross platform I have quite a lot of backlog to play through before I drop Windows.
That's why you can't name drop any of them, in stark contrast to perhaps to a single video,audio, or CAD tool that costs more than you are willing to spend.
I've bought two versions of Lightroom and will probably buy more. Most entries on the Wine Application Compatibility DB for it are "garbage". Even the couple entries that are higher certainly don't sound it to me; the ratings on the appdb have always seemed very soft. (e.g. a bronze rating where "Viewing pictures in Library/Develop (invisible)" does not work... that's primary functionality! How does something where the program basically doesn't work get a bronze rating?)
Ha, "ripoff of bash". As if sh, csh, or ksh never existed...
Plus the fact that anyone who says that PowerShell is a ripoff of the traditional Unix shell either (1) doesn't know anything about PS, (2) doesn't know anything about sh, or (3) is smoking something pretty darn strong.