That seems like typical geek thinking (no offense intended)... add more features, more buttons, more complexity, and more expense. And honestly, I think it's precisely the oppose of what most people would actually want. It's the reason many geeks didn't get (and still don't get) why Apple products like iPods and iPhones are so insanely popular. They'll look at the specs and see that they're really no different or even technically inferior to the product they purchased for half the price, without ever understanding that the critical factor is the streamlined user experience.
Want more laundry detergent? Press the detergent button. Done. No fumbling through a crappy menu and display that's overly complicated to program and use. For people who want maximum control, there's a website and mobile app you can use. This is entirely aimed at people who prefer simplicity and convenience.
There's "MS compromised", who will likely send you targeted advertisements. And there's "Chinese or Russian hacker compromised", who may steal your credentials and drain your bank account. Are you trying to tell me if you see no difference here? If not, I'm not sure what to tell you. Use the Russian or Chinese torrent version and go nuts.
Some other possibilities: * Continue using Windows 7 until 2020. * Install and use Windows 10 on a virtual machine. * Use Windows 10 but disable all the cloud-based features. Nearly everything can be turned off, and there are some apps to disable the rest. * Dual boot, only using Windows 10 when you must, otherwise using Linux, BSD, or whatever you feel is more secure. * See if the software you require can run using Wine under Linux, or if there are free alternatives.
Exactly this, thank you. I wasn't implying that iOS was perfect by any means, but considering what a rich target their users are, there are remarkably few incidents of malware that ultimately impact those users. Note: this is me as an Android user as well. I'm just calling it like I see it.
Oh, I'm sure that's part of it, but certainly not the entire story. You should skim over iOS's security whitepaper sometime if you don't believe there's a hell of a lot of security features built into the hardware and software at a *very* deep level. It's actually quite impressive. Keep in mind that the ability to root your phone doesn't necessarily invalidate all the other protections provided for the average user.
To start with, consider the notion of selective application permissions with user consent, compared to the "give this application all access to all resources" model with the PC. Applications are isolated from each other, which gives less flexibility, but also helps to prevent a rogue app from spreading itself everywhere on the system. The system is hardware-encrypted by default until you turn the device on (using a secure boot chain) and unlock it, meaning you can't simply pry the device apart and read the flash memory. And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head.
A significant problem is that computer-related security lessons seem to have to be learned from the ground up, industry by industry. Contrary to this, the smartphone industry (especially Apple) has relatively sophisticated security in both hardware and software, and I think it was because they could learn a lot of valuable lessons from their experience with the PC. As a result, iOS users enjoy a relatively malware-free system.
The automobile industry on the other hand, is probably somewhere in the early 2000's mindset, comparatively speaking. You see the same mistakes being made with many early Internet of Things manufacturers with brain-dead security mistakes, such as storing hard-coded encryption keys right on the devices themselves. Router manufacturers, just as little as a few years ago were still leaving shipping with services open to the internet by default. They're STILL shipping devices with known, default passwords, mysterious backdoors, and all sorts of other vulnerabilities. You can probably point to any other industry and see the same lack of basic security knowledge and practices. It's not going to change until these issues are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light of day... either by lawsuits, legislation, or simply too much bad press.
People are so used to Google providing free services which are monetized through advertising that they forget about the more traditional way to turn a profit: built a product people want, charge money for it, and sell lots of them. It works well enough for Apple, after all.
No, I think it's quite a bit more subtle than that. Trying to inject advertising into your internet stream would be a ham-handed approach the idiots at Lenovo would try. Google is more clever than to slit their own device's throat with something so stupid as that.
Google has a vested interest in improving people's online experience. That's why they invest in all sorts of network/internet technology, including a web browser they give out for free, fiber access to homes, and under-the-hood improvements to internet communication standards that make things more efficient and more secure. They want people to be safe, secure, and happy to be online. They want people connected to the internet all the time, with fast and stable connections, and they've seen that the current market of wifi routers is pretty much garbage, in terms of features, stability, and security.
ALL OF THIS relates to encouraging people to stay online, which in turn means relying on Google services, which they can then mine for data to sell to advertisers, which is how they earn their money. Yes, it's about advertising in the end, but not like you're thinking.
Hmm, I'll have to take your word for it, as I've only really used C++ and C# myself. For C support, is the complaint about the lack of standards compliance (which I heard improved in 2013) or the editor and tools support?
In one videogame studio I've worked at, the game designers used an internal Wiki to keep track of the both the game lore as well as planned game design elements. It's a great way to summarize people, places, things, and major events for quick reference, and of course, for cross-referencing related topics. I'm not sure what other studios use, but I'd presume an online bible like this is especially useful for RPGs, with their sprawling stories and large numbers of characters.
What's interesting is that post-release, you can actually rely more on the *public* wiki that the fans help to fill out to completely document the game, at least for the parts that are known to them. There are obviously a lot more fans than designers, so it's nearly always much more detailed and comprehensive. The internal wiki can then be trimmed back to future or as-yet-unknown-by-fans sort of knowledge.
That's the thing with Visual Studio: it's great for C#, not so great for some other languages.
I'm curious why you'd say that. Out of the box VS 2013 has support for at least seven or eight languages, I believe. And for any other language, all you need to do is write a plugin. For instance, I also use WIX (essentially an XML-based installer language) for writing Windows installers.
I've been using it for C++ programming before C# existed. Yes, there were a few sad years when C# was all the hotness and native languages were all but ignored, but C++ is once again a first-class citizen. I'm a videogame programmer, and we make our own interfaces (except for tools), so I never really partook of the "visual" aspect.
I haven't tried 2015 yet. Oddly enough, I kept trying to figure out how to buy a copy of Visual Studio 2015 Professional. As it turns out, as a solo developer, I'm apparently expected to use the "community" edition for free. I guess individual developers that pay for VS are a small enough data point that they don't mind me using it for free.
Good to know. I bet the Marines wish they could claim these guys. Reading more, they apparently spotted the guy acting suspiciously as he went to the bathroom, then heard the sounds of the clips being loaded. Amazingly heads-up. The perp apparently had 300 rounds in total. This could have been a major bloodbath.
I do agree with the general notion that an individual's liberties must be held sacrosanct, and not sacrificed at the alter of the common good, because all sorts of evils can be perpetrated with that logic.
I think you're wrong to dismiss the importance of society in general, though. I'd argue that individual liberties can best be protected within a well-functioning society. When you look at examples of highly dysfunctional societies, both past and present, you're likely to see a corresponding lack of respect for individual liberties.
It's awesome that these guys (the two marines and a civilian, from what I read) had the courage and presence of mind in a highly stressful and unexpected situation to charge in and ultimately save a lot of people's lives. Their actions do them a hell of a lot of credit.
I hope that in addition to whatever medals or awards they're presented with, they at least get something practical out of this, like some fine wine and/or champagne on the house.
I think my overall point is that I'd bet that cloud-object storage is designed around the premise of per-object atomic transactions at a very fundamental level. If you look at some of the most popular applications, like backup solutions, off-site storage, or data synchronization, this model makes a lot of sense. Essentially, the per-object model is prioritizing file transfer efficiency and design simplicity over flexibility. A POSIX interface would be making the opposite tradeoff. As such, I think it's no surprise that the current interfaces are what they are.
I suppose it may be possible to build a POSIX-like interface on top of this atomic per-object model. You'd essentially need to create a virtual filesystem that used individual objects similar to how a disk accesses physical sectors instead of one byte at a time. By locating these services in the same datacenters on virtual machines, you'd reduce a lot of the overhead of external communication with external applications. So, each transaction would have a minimum of overhead with the external internet, and each file would potentially require many individual objects to store it's data.
I think having an affair would be one of the most emotionally hurtful things one person can do to another. Many married couples make explicit vows of faithfulness at their weddings, along with witnesses. An affair is a complete betrayal of that trust. We override raw instincts with reason and intellect all the time. We defer immediate gratitude for long-term payoffs. That's part of becoming an adult and a functioning member of our society. It seems like a bad idea to make excuses based on what our natural instincts are, because that leaves the door open to all sorts of horrible tendencies that are "instinctual".
Also, I'd argue monogamous marriage is more a societal construct than a political one. There are roughly the same number of single men and women in society at large. Unless you plan to kill off large numbers of young men in pointless and frequent wars or turn them into eunuchs, they're probably going to want to get married. The math just doesn't let polygamy work all that well, so we've deemed it bad for society and outlawed it.
Mac... says he doesn’t regret the affair he had via AshleyMadison; his only regret is not finding a way to keep his home address out of his records on the site.
Apparently, no guilt at all. He's only worried that he might be caught.
Think for a moment about how much network overhead it would require to:
a) Open a specific file b) Seek to a specific location c) Read or write data down to the byte level an arbitrary number of times d) Close the file.
Each one of those operations needs back and forth communication across the internet, with error-checking and encryption overhead. Now, remember that these operations need to by synchronized across multiple machines, probably in multiple data centers across the world as well.
Compare that to atomic per-object operations, and how much more straightforward that is for network-intensive operations. In the end, it's probably much more efficient to simply send an entirely new file than trying to change a single byte inside a file.
Besides, if you really need byte-level access to remote storage... we have that already. It's called a database.
It's really, really hard to do that when you're a young person on your first job, and are just thankful that you're being given a shot to gain some valuable real-world experience. It's also very easy to say that when you've got fifteen or more years of experience, lots of high profile projects under your belt, and can get a job just about anywhere you like with relative ease.
So, when you talk about "equals", you have to consider that some "equals" have much more bargaining power than others. I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, but I'd suggest that it falls on senior developers to take on some leadership in these sorts of fights against bad managerial practices.
Personally, I still don't get the short-term thinking of forcing insane work hours on programmers or other skilled workers. For myself, I've noticed that my quality of work and productivity per hour drop dramatically when I've worked long hours. Even when I'm working on my own now as an independent developer, I try to limit my hours per day and per week for fear of making bad decisions or writing bad code. It comes back to bite you in the end.
Moreover, forcing long hours on people simply burns them out, meaning you're going to lose your best and hardest-working people in the end. Or at the very least, they'll need a long time to recover, negating any short-term gains. I've seen an entire game development team simply disintegrate at the end of a project after a long, extended death march. The company foolishly sacrificed an entire team for the sake of one project, and the end results weren't even that spectacular. People tend to slog it out to the end, because they want to see their own work through to the finished project, but afterwards, they realize that they never want to be subjected to that again, and find other jobs, many even leaving the industry.
Death marches are nearly always a result of management failure. Either management failed with initial estimates and unrealistic scope, or by failing to make necessary revisions or cuts earlier in the project, when things started falling behind (in other words, making hard decisions). Or worst, they're a callous way to try to squeeze more from less as a matter of economics - pretty much the most idiotic type of short-term thinking imaginable.
I've found my tastes have changed quite a bit as I get older. Obviously, when I started (in the heyday of arcades and the earliest consoles) my choices were limited. We grew up with an Odyssey 2 console, and most friends had an Atari. ALL games were pretty much arcade games, with a few rare exceptions. I bought a Nintendo, but skipped consoles until the Xbox came out, preferring PC gaming. I loved shooters, flight sims, adventure games (especially back in the Sierra/Lucasarts heyday), and I played competitive games like Team Fortress. I would have laughed at the notion of "preferred genre", playing anything that looked fun to me.
These days, I mostly buy console games, with only occasional Steam or GOG purchases. Why? I work on a PC all day, every day. I prefer to relax on the couch while playing, and consoles make that easy. Still enjoy an occasional shooter, but I really love RPGs, both western and eastern, for slightly different reasons. Will mix in an occasional adventure game. I eschew competitive gaming nowadays, and prefer a deep story and interesting setting to mindless arcade action. I got enough of that when I was younger. I can't figure out why MOBAs are so popular - they look incredibly dull to me.
Current favorite genres: RPGs of all types, occasional shooters and adventure games. That doesn't mean I won't pick up any other type of game if it looks interesting to me. Keep in mind that "genre" isn't a straitjacket... it's just shorthand for some common design decisions, and it's useful to week out types of games you aren't quite as interested in. There are a LOT more games available than there used to be, and I have less free time than I used to. As such, I'm much more discriminating than I used to be.
It depends on the environment. If it's a company that primarily has expert users by definition (for instance, a software development house), then users typically have admin rights. I'm in videogame development, and typically *every* user in the company has full admin rights - that means programmers, artists, game designers, sound designers, writers, QA, management, etc. A whitelist policy simply wouldn't be practical, because tools change all the time.
Yep, that was UX "experts" feeling their oats. It's a self-correcting problem when a company actually tries to *sell* that nonsense, fortunately enough. We're still in the correcting phase with Windows 10, and will only be purged once the last vestiges of flat, ugly styling gives way to a saner aesthetic. Maybe something with borders and gradients.
Pfft. I got that beat with my current gig. It's pretty amusing how many levels of indirection there are between me and the ones financing the project. Essentially, I'm a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a company that's being financed by a large conglomerate.
It's fine as long as you take it for what it is. It's also nice that the hours are flexible and capped at 40 hours a week. I don't begrudge the company I'm subcontracting with for taking a small cut, because I never would have gotten this job without their connections, and it's still good pay for my line of work.
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That seems like typical geek thinking (no offense intended)... add more features, more buttons, more complexity, and more expense. And honestly, I think it's precisely the oppose of what most people would actually want. It's the reason many geeks didn't get (and still don't get) why Apple products like iPods and iPhones are so insanely popular. They'll look at the specs and see that they're really no different or even technically inferior to the product they purchased for half the price, without ever understanding that the critical factor is the streamlined user experience.
Want more laundry detergent? Press the detergent button. Done. No fumbling through a crappy menu and display that's overly complicated to program and use. For people who want maximum control, there's a website and mobile app you can use. This is entirely aimed at people who prefer simplicity and convenience.
There's "MS compromised", who will likely send you targeted advertisements. And there's "Chinese or Russian hacker compromised", who may steal your credentials and drain your bank account. Are you trying to tell me if you see no difference here? If not, I'm not sure what to tell you. Use the Russian or Chinese torrent version and go nuts.
Some other possibilities:
* Continue using Windows 7 until 2020.
* Install and use Windows 10 on a virtual machine.
* Use Windows 10 but disable all the cloud-based features. Nearly everything can be turned off, and there are some apps to disable the rest.
* Dual boot, only using Windows 10 when you must, otherwise using Linux, BSD, or whatever you feel is more secure.
* See if the software you require can run using Wine under Linux, or if there are free alternatives.
Exactly this, thank you. I wasn't implying that iOS was perfect by any means, but considering what a rich target their users are, there are remarkably few incidents of malware that ultimately impact those users. Note: this is me as an Android user as well. I'm just calling it like I see it.
Oh, I'm sure that's part of it, but certainly not the entire story. You should skim over iOS's security whitepaper sometime if you don't believe there's a hell of a lot of security features built into the hardware and software at a *very* deep level. It's actually quite impressive. Keep in mind that the ability to root your phone doesn't necessarily invalidate all the other protections provided for the average user.
To start with, consider the notion of selective application permissions with user consent, compared to the "give this application all access to all resources" model with the PC. Applications are isolated from each other, which gives less flexibility, but also helps to prevent a rogue app from spreading itself everywhere on the system. The system is hardware-encrypted by default until you turn the device on (using a secure boot chain) and unlock it, meaning you can't simply pry the device apart and read the flash memory. And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head.
A significant problem is that computer-related security lessons seem to have to be learned from the ground up, industry by industry. Contrary to this, the smartphone industry (especially Apple) has relatively sophisticated security in both hardware and software, and I think it was because they could learn a lot of valuable lessons from their experience with the PC. As a result, iOS users enjoy a relatively malware-free system.
The automobile industry on the other hand, is probably somewhere in the early 2000's mindset, comparatively speaking. You see the same mistakes being made with many early Internet of Things manufacturers with brain-dead security mistakes, such as storing hard-coded encryption keys right on the devices themselves. Router manufacturers, just as little as a few years ago were still leaving shipping with services open to the internet by default. They're STILL shipping devices with known, default passwords, mysterious backdoors, and all sorts of other vulnerabilities. You can probably point to any other industry and see the same lack of basic security knowledge and practices. It's not going to change until these issues are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light of day... either by lawsuits, legislation, or simply too much bad press.
People are so used to Google providing free services which are monetized through advertising that they forget about the more traditional way to turn a profit: built a product people want, charge money for it, and sell lots of them. It works well enough for Apple, after all.
To be fair, Command & Conquer had a pretty awesome installer.
No, I think it's quite a bit more subtle than that. Trying to inject advertising into your internet stream would be a ham-handed approach the idiots at Lenovo would try. Google is more clever than to slit their own device's throat with something so stupid as that.
Google has a vested interest in improving people's online experience. That's why they invest in all sorts of network/internet technology, including a web browser they give out for free, fiber access to homes, and under-the-hood improvements to internet communication standards that make things more efficient and more secure. They want people to be safe, secure, and happy to be online. They want people connected to the internet all the time, with fast and stable connections, and they've seen that the current market of wifi routers is pretty much garbage, in terms of features, stability, and security.
ALL OF THIS relates to encouraging people to stay online, which in turn means relying on Google services, which they can then mine for data to sell to advertisers, which is how they earn their money. Yes, it's about advertising in the end, but not like you're thinking.
Hmm, I'll have to take your word for it, as I've only really used C++ and C# myself. For C support, is the complaint about the lack of standards compliance (which I heard improved in 2013) or the editor and tools support?
In one videogame studio I've worked at, the game designers used an internal Wiki to keep track of the both the game lore as well as planned game design elements. It's a great way to summarize people, places, things, and major events for quick reference, and of course, for cross-referencing related topics. I'm not sure what other studios use, but I'd presume an online bible like this is especially useful for RPGs, with their sprawling stories and large numbers of characters.
What's interesting is that post-release, you can actually rely more on the *public* wiki that the fans help to fill out to completely document the game, at least for the parts that are known to them. There are obviously a lot more fans than designers, so it's nearly always much more detailed and comprehensive. The internal wiki can then be trimmed back to future or as-yet-unknown-by-fans sort of knowledge.
That's the thing with Visual Studio: it's great for C#, not so great for some other languages.
I'm curious why you'd say that. Out of the box VS 2013 has support for at least seven or eight languages, I believe. And for any other language, all you need to do is write a plugin. For instance, I also use WIX (essentially an XML-based installer language) for writing Windows installers.
I've been using it for C++ programming before C# existed. Yes, there were a few sad years when C# was all the hotness and native languages were all but ignored, but C++ is once again a first-class citizen. I'm a videogame programmer, and we make our own interfaces (except for tools), so I never really partook of the "visual" aspect.
I haven't tried 2015 yet. Oddly enough, I kept trying to figure out how to buy a copy of Visual Studio 2015 Professional. As it turns out, as a solo developer, I'm apparently expected to use the "community" edition for free. I guess individual developers that pay for VS are a small enough data point that they don't mind me using it for free.
Good to know. I bet the Marines wish they could claim these guys. Reading more, they apparently spotted the guy acting suspiciously as he went to the bathroom, then heard the sounds of the clips being loaded. Amazingly heads-up. The perp apparently had 300 rounds in total. This could have been a major bloodbath.
I do agree with the general notion that an individual's liberties must be held sacrosanct, and not sacrificed at the alter of the common good, because all sorts of evils can be perpetrated with that logic.
I think you're wrong to dismiss the importance of society in general, though. I'd argue that individual liberties can best be protected within a well-functioning society. When you look at examples of highly dysfunctional societies, both past and present, you're likely to see a corresponding lack of respect for individual liberties.
It's awesome that these guys (the two marines and a civilian, from what I read) had the courage and presence of mind in a highly stressful and unexpected situation to charge in and ultimately save a lot of people's lives. Their actions do them a hell of a lot of credit.
I hope that in addition to whatever medals or awards they're presented with, they at least get something practical out of this, like some fine wine and/or champagne on the house.
I think my overall point is that I'd bet that cloud-object storage is designed around the premise of per-object atomic transactions at a very fundamental level. If you look at some of the most popular applications, like backup solutions, off-site storage, or data synchronization, this model makes a lot of sense. Essentially, the per-object model is prioritizing file transfer efficiency and design simplicity over flexibility. A POSIX interface would be making the opposite tradeoff. As such, I think it's no surprise that the current interfaces are what they are.
I suppose it may be possible to build a POSIX-like interface on top of this atomic per-object model. You'd essentially need to create a virtual filesystem that used individual objects similar to how a disk accesses physical sectors instead of one byte at a time. By locating these services in the same datacenters on virtual machines, you'd reduce a lot of the overhead of external communication with external applications. So, each transaction would have a minimum of overhead with the external internet, and each file would potentially require many individual objects to store it's data.
I think having an affair would be one of the most emotionally hurtful things one person can do to another. Many married couples make explicit vows of faithfulness at their weddings, along with witnesses. An affair is a complete betrayal of that trust. We override raw instincts with reason and intellect all the time. We defer immediate gratitude for long-term payoffs. That's part of becoming an adult and a functioning member of our society. It seems like a bad idea to make excuses based on what our natural instincts are, because that leaves the door open to all sorts of horrible tendencies that are "instinctual".
Also, I'd argue monogamous marriage is more a societal construct than a political one. There are roughly the same number of single men and women in society at large. Unless you plan to kill off large numbers of young men in pointless and frequent wars or turn them into eunuchs, they're probably going to want to get married. The math just doesn't let polygamy work all that well, so we've deemed it bad for society and outlawed it.
From the article:
Mac ... says he doesn’t regret the affair he had via AshleyMadison; his only regret is not finding a way to keep his home address out of his records on the site.
Apparently, no guilt at all. He's only worried that he might be caught.
Think for a moment about how much network overhead it would require to:
a) Open a specific file
b) Seek to a specific location
c) Read or write data down to the byte level an arbitrary number of times
d) Close the file.
Each one of those operations needs back and forth communication across the internet, with error-checking and encryption overhead. Now, remember that these operations need to by synchronized across multiple machines, probably in multiple data centers across the world as well.
Compare that to atomic per-object operations, and how much more straightforward that is for network-intensive operations. In the end, it's probably much more efficient to simply send an entirely new file than trying to change a single byte inside a file.
Besides, if you really need byte-level access to remote storage... we have that already. It's called a database.
It's really, really hard to do that when you're a young person on your first job, and are just thankful that you're being given a shot to gain some valuable real-world experience. It's also very easy to say that when you've got fifteen or more years of experience, lots of high profile projects under your belt, and can get a job just about anywhere you like with relative ease.
So, when you talk about "equals", you have to consider that some "equals" have much more bargaining power than others. I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, but I'd suggest that it falls on senior developers to take on some leadership in these sorts of fights against bad managerial practices.
Personally, I still don't get the short-term thinking of forcing insane work hours on programmers or other skilled workers. For myself, I've noticed that my quality of work and productivity per hour drop dramatically when I've worked long hours. Even when I'm working on my own now as an independent developer, I try to limit my hours per day and per week for fear of making bad decisions or writing bad code. It comes back to bite you in the end.
Moreover, forcing long hours on people simply burns them out, meaning you're going to lose your best and hardest-working people in the end. Or at the very least, they'll need a long time to recover, negating any short-term gains. I've seen an entire game development team simply disintegrate at the end of a project after a long, extended death march. The company foolishly sacrificed an entire team for the sake of one project, and the end results weren't even that spectacular. People tend to slog it out to the end, because they want to see their own work through to the finished project, but afterwards, they realize that they never want to be subjected to that again, and find other jobs, many even leaving the industry.
Death marches are nearly always a result of management failure. Either management failed with initial estimates and unrealistic scope, or by failing to make necessary revisions or cuts earlier in the project, when things started falling behind (in other words, making hard decisions). Or worst, they're a callous way to try to squeeze more from less as a matter of economics - pretty much the most idiotic type of short-term thinking imaginable.
I've found my tastes have changed quite a bit as I get older. Obviously, when I started (in the heyday of arcades and the earliest consoles) my choices were limited. We grew up with an Odyssey 2 console, and most friends had an Atari. ALL games were pretty much arcade games, with a few rare exceptions. I bought a Nintendo, but skipped consoles until the Xbox came out, preferring PC gaming. I loved shooters, flight sims, adventure games (especially back in the Sierra/Lucasarts heyday), and I played competitive games like Team Fortress. I would have laughed at the notion of "preferred genre", playing anything that looked fun to me.
These days, I mostly buy console games, with only occasional Steam or GOG purchases. Why? I work on a PC all day, every day. I prefer to relax on the couch while playing, and consoles make that easy. Still enjoy an occasional shooter, but I really love RPGs, both western and eastern, for slightly different reasons. Will mix in an occasional adventure game. I eschew competitive gaming nowadays, and prefer a deep story and interesting setting to mindless arcade action. I got enough of that when I was younger. I can't figure out why MOBAs are so popular - they look incredibly dull to me.
Current favorite genres: RPGs of all types, occasional shooters and adventure games. That doesn't mean I won't pick up any other type of game if it looks interesting to me. Keep in mind that "genre" isn't a straitjacket... it's just shorthand for some common design decisions, and it's useful to week out types of games you aren't quite as interested in. There are a LOT more games available than there used to be, and I have less free time than I used to. As such, I'm much more discriminating than I used to be.
It depends on the environment. If it's a company that primarily has expert users by definition (for instance, a software development house), then users typically have admin rights. I'm in videogame development, and typically *every* user in the company has full admin rights - that means programmers, artists, game designers, sound designers, writers, QA, management, etc. A whitelist policy simply wouldn't be practical, because tools change all the time.
Were you sent here by the devil?
Yep, that was UX "experts" feeling their oats. It's a self-correcting problem when a company actually tries to *sell* that nonsense, fortunately enough. We're still in the correcting phase with Windows 10, and will only be purged once the last vestiges of flat, ugly styling gives way to a saner aesthetic. Maybe something with borders and gradients.
Pfft. I got that beat with my current gig. It's pretty amusing how many levels of indirection there are between me and the ones financing the project. Essentially, I'm a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a company that's being financed by a large conglomerate.
It's fine as long as you take it for what it is. It's also nice that the hours are flexible and capped at 40 hours a week. I don't begrudge the company I'm subcontracting with for taking a small cut, because I never would have gotten this job without their connections, and it's still good pay for my line of work.
What about us brain-dead slobs?