Did you see the restrictions on game content? It's broad enough to mean "anything we don't want to allow is banned."
* Gambling-related content or game features * Anything that violates China’s constitution * Anything that threatens China’s national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity. * Anything that harms the nation’s reputation, security, or interests. * Anything that instigates racial/ethnic hatred, or harms ethnic traditions and cultures. * Anything that violates China’s policy on religion by promoting cults or superstitions. * Anything that promotes or incites obscenity, drug use, violence, or gambling. * Anything that harms public ethics or China’s culture and traditions. * Anything that insults, slanders, or violates the rights of others. * Other content that violates the law
The old men that run the government still believe that console games are meant exclusively for children - or at least adults who need to be "protected from dangerous ideas" as though they were children. This is no different than what many of our own legislatures and citizen activists wished to impose on us... "for the children", of course, but fortunately, saner heads prevailed.
If you miss adventure games, there are still good ones out there, but most of them are being made by smaller studies or indie devs (check out Steam). Plus, there are a bunch of old classics in addition to new adventure titles available on GOG. Did you know King's Quest is being remade, and is coming out this fall? It's hard to say if it will be any good, but it look promising, and it does sound like they're trying to remain true to the spirit of the original. The adventure game isn't dead by any means. It's just found a smaller, comfortable niche.
and have work to solve puzzles and you celibate when you continue the story plot
Still, I'm not sure I'd care to give up sex for the sake of a videogame, no matter how engaging the plot.
What you're asking for is developers to volunteer their time to work on what is the most difficult and least-rewarding part of game development - bug-fixing, maintenance, and compatibility issues. As a contract programmer, I get paid a lot per hour for helping out projects up against a deadline. It's difficult, frustrating work, and it takes me several times longer to find and fix a bug than a regular dev who has been working on the project for the last few years. Even so, they pay me to do this, because any bug I do find frees their internal devs to fix other issues.
In short, it's *real work*. There's a reason you generally need to pay people to do this. The previous devs have already finished the fun part of the game - designing and building the game from the ground up. What's left is now is the hard, shitty work - trying to fix all the bugs, and work around an old, crusty engine that can't seem to keep from breaking scenarios from release to release - signs that there are serious under-the-hood problems (which they sort of admit themselves).
I wish you guys all the best, and hope you find some philanthropic devs to help you. Unfortunately, any free time I find myself with goes into my own personal project. There's simply no way I can spread myself even thinner.
if one could subscribe to a car service like one subscribes to cable television service?
You'd be better off not comparing car rentals to cable companies, which are known for bundling services and channels you don't want, charging exorbitant prices, blocking free market competition, and providing atrocious customer service.
Has anyone mentioned that these games were removed for compatibility reasons? Does that make a difference? I'd love to know how nvidia is supposed to fix 3rd party games if they simply don't work on the latest version of the OS? Do they not let people update? Or leave the games there, but just broken? I'm not sure there are any good answers here. Ideally, the developers would fix their own games, but there's probably very little financial incentive for them to do that at this point.
Why exactly is this a breaking update? That might be a good question to ask as well. This is sort of crappy for owners of those devices, but I'm not sure this is in quite the same league as what Sony did.
In a sports competition, the entertainment is devalued if the competition is rigged in any way. Competition-based entertainment is the idea that, with enough skill, any of the contenders can win the prize. Doping, cheating, or any other rigging of the competition destroys that sense of possibility, and thus, the core entertainment. It makes the win feel cheaper, and diminishes the audience experience, as there's an expectation of fair play.
For performers, their only job is to provide an entertaining show for the masses, whether by music or acting, but there's still an expectation of "fair play". If a singer was caught lip-syncing in all their performances and recordings (e.g. Milli Vanilli), then yes, their Grammy should be revoked.
If you had spent an intimate and passionate night with your significant other, but later learned he/she had taken a lover to bed just prior to your rendezvous, it would probably diminish your perspective on the night, even though it may have been fantastic at the time. Same principle, I think.
It's because... NUCLEAR (booga! booga! booga!) The radioactive waste will last 10,000 years! Just ignore all that talk about reprocessing, mind you. And make sure to oppose any plan to actually deal with the waste in a sane manner. NUCLEAR!!!
Seriously, don't ask for a logical reason. Environmentalists have spent the last thirty or forty years convincing themselves and anyone who listened to them that nuclear power is the devil. It's a little hard to turn those beliefs and feelings around on a dime, now that it turns out nuclear power may end up being the key to saving the planet because of environmental concerns. Irony.
No, I never asserted that. I simply stated that I prefer to do my own salary negotiations, that I'd prefer my salary not be made public, and that I'd not like to work within a fixed payscale system. Sorry, I don't care what supposed benefits come from everyone making their salaries public.
I work in the videogame industry, and if money was what primarily motivated me, I'd have found a far more lucrative job long ago. I also wouldn't have quit my job to start my own business, where I've been earning no regular salary at all (only occasional contract work) while I finish my first game.
Besides, if I want to see what industry salaries look like, I can just look at an annual salary survey for the videogame industry, which has the benefit of being far more scientific, is far broader in scope, and is anonymous in nature. This lets you effectively determine whether people are being underpaid in your company in general, rather than simply comparing your salary to your co-workers.
Back when I was in the Army, we all knew exactly how much everyone else made in base pay, from E1 to O9. That at least gave incentive to work up the chain from the bottom.
Well, that makes sense for the armed forces, as it would be sort of chaotic for everyone to negotiate their own pay. Union jobs are like that as well. I'm sure a fixed system is great if you hate the idea of negotiating for yourself, or don't have the self-confidence or negotiating skills to effectively ask for what you're worth. For instance, my understanding is that women (on average) tend to accept lower negotiated salaries than what they could probably get. To be honest, though, I'd prefer to negotiate my own salary with my employer, and not be tied to a system that dictates what I earn at each "tier".
I probably wouldn't care to share my income data, as I consider it a private matter. I'd tell a family member only if they asked, but anyone else? Only if it was anonymous, like a salary survey - which I think are important for people to get a general idea of what they should be worth. Maybe I'm old fashioned? Meh.
For a long time, it was simply assumed that ALL users had Flash installed, and it was more or less true (statistically speaking). So, why not show Flash ads as well, since you can animate them, make them interactive, have them spit out sound, and all sorts of other annoying things?
You're only now starting to see a minor trend of people (like me) uninstalling or others blocking Flash by default.
Ah, I missed it right in the first paragraph. Good work getting the initial funding and your company off the ground. Mine isn't nearly so ambitious, but I can sympathize with the headaches of getting a new business started.
I'm a software guy, and know only the theoretical basics about the hardware I program for, but the notion of putting more of the complexity into the compiler instead of the chip is interesting. I wonder if this technology requires new approaches to languages and compilers, or whether it can be adapted to existing infrastructure (existing compilers like GCC or LLVM). Hopefully the latter, as it would be a bigger barrier to adoption if a whole new toolchain needed to be adopted along with the chip.
In either case, it sounds like a hell of a challenge, as (if I understand correctly) you'd presumably need to pre-evaluate logic flow and track how resources are accessed in order to embed the proper data cache hints. However, those sort of access patterns can change depending on the state of program data, even within the same code. Or, I suppose you could "tune" the program for optimal execution through multiple pass evaluation runs, embedding data access hints in a second pass after seeing the results of a "profiling" run.
If you can't reveal that sort of secret sauce yet, don't worry about it, as it's fun to speculate as well. Thanks for checking in with us. Interesting stuff!
Keep in mind that aside from math or simple "fill in the blank" questions, grading free form answers involves quite a bit of subjectivity. The only fair thing to do in standardized testing is to remove ambiguity like that, but unfortunately, that eliminates a lot of opportunity to judge things like creativity. How do you ensure that two different graders wouldn't give two completely different grades for the same "creative" answer? Even the same grader might give a different grade depending on how tired they are of grading tests at the moment.
Both are pretty damn impressive, although for chip manufacturing, $100,000 isn't exactly a lot of money. Consider what a single engineer earns per year. Apparently, they have six people, and hiring a seventh. I guess that means they must have some other funding coming in from somewhere, as he talked about how "supercomputing" is a poisoned word among Silicon Valley VC firms.
I hope to hear interesting things about this young man and his company in the future.
You're thinking of Google like a smaller company, and it just doesn't work that way. I wouldn't be surprised if she was applying for different positions in completely different groups or sections of the company. I'd imagine each section manages their own hiring.
Applying multiple times at a giant corporation is not a "fuck up". You probably need to interview specifically with the group that's doing the hiring. I'm not 100% sure how it works at Google, but when I applied at Microsoft, I was applying specifically for a particular development group, for example. When I was applying as a contractor, it was even more specific, as I was interviewed by the lead developer on the project I would be working on.
This makes sense because while someone may be a lousy fit for one particular group, they may happen to have the skills, experience, and personality to fit in with a different group. There's little chance (with some rare exceptions) you could conduct a generic interview at Google or Microsoft to determine whether or not someone should be hired. Interviewing is also a highly subjective process, so you don't want to exclude someone based solely on another person's decision. You might lose out on otherwise great candidates who just didn't click in another interview.
I'm younger than her, but I'm certainly not young. I'm closing in on two decades of experience, so you can do the math. But you're right - I haven't experience discrimination like that as far as I know, and I'm acknowledging that I've been pretty lucky in my in-person interviews, with perhaps a success rate around 50% or so for the roughly dozen in-person interviews that I can recall.
That's why I was asking what people's experiences were, and what sort of feelings they had about those interviews. I wasn't trying to deny that this sort of thing happens, in case my post wasn't clear.
Interesting... when I haven't gotten a job, I've never gotten a clear reason why I wasn't offered the position. Most of the time, like I mentioned, I sort of had a feeling afterwards of what went wrong. For instance, in one case (it was a Microsoft interview), the interviewer asked me a bunch of math questions that I simply couldn't answer. In other cases, I simply never even made it past the initial screening, and again, there was no feedback there.
If I heard back that I "didn't have enough experience" (I've got a bit shy of two decades of experience), then yeah, I'd be suspicious as well.
No, they're that huge. I've worked at Microsoft as a contractor several times in the past, and the different groups might as well be completely different *normal sized* companies, each with their own hiring process, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if Google was the same way.
Too bad she didn't try for a job one last time in the past year. With all the noise Google has been making about wanting to hire more female programmers, she would have been able to put them to the test to see if they were interested in hiring "females" or "young, attractive females".
most students nowadays are expected never to be able to pay off their loans their entire working lives.
Good Lord! Either your education costs far too much, or you pay your graduates far too little.
Look at her work experience in-between her degree and now. It's not like learning to program a computer is some black art that can only be learned in school. It's perfectly reasonable (unlike a neurosurgeon) to learn the trade on the job.
We don't really know what the facts of the case are, but I wonder what it is about people that lead them to believe they're being discriminated against based on a particular factor, like age, race, etc? I've gone to plenty of in-person interviews where I didn't get the job. I could often tell when I didn't answer the questions as well as I'd have liked. For instance, I'm a pretty decent programmer, but my math skills are not outstanding. If the interviewer asks a bunch of math-intensive questions, it's nearly always game over for me. I've had other interviewers ask me really abstract problems, such as how to calculate the number and types of elevators a particular-sized building needed. Honestly, I had no fucking clue. I'm a videogame programmer, not an architect. I reasoned it out as best I could, and obviously I didn't guess well enough.
Has anyone ever had an experience where they were positive they had a good chance at the job, but nothing came of it? Honestly, I don't think I ever have. Rather, the ones I came away from feeling really good about were generally the ones in which I was offered a job. I'm also sort of curious why someone would interview at the same company four times. Good lord, after the second or third time being rejected, I would have told the next interviewer to piss off, and let them know exactly why.
Google used to be a knight in shining armor, not so much these days.
Google was NEVER a knight in shining armor. The only thing that changed was that they got caught pulling the same sort of shit just about every other corporation on the planet does, and now very few people believe that "don't be evil" nonsense. You got it almost correct - it was a "marketing strategy", not a "market strategy", and it was brilliantly done.
Giant corporations are like nuclear power plants. Their production capacity is pretty much unmatched, but you also have to take great care to ensure they don't run wild, and there's always some nasty by-products in exchange for that productivity.
Oh man, that Gedit screenshot. Damn... It's a very *lovely* looking interface, but I would have no idea what the hell to click on to get anything done. Yep, definitely a redesign by some "UX expert".
The save icon is another one said "experts" are always trying to get rid of (if I'm not mistaken, we can see an example here as well. It's hard to tell though). "But we don't use floppies anymore...", they whine. Yes, but by now, everyone that uses a computer knows what that symbol means, even if they've never seen a floppy in their life. It's a universally known symbol. Don't screw with it!
Now, granted, tradition can go too far in the other direction. I can't even count the number of applications that have a main "File" menu when they rarely deal with files at all, or are not at all document-based to begin with. Unfortunately, I'm not sure anyone's come up with a decent replacement convention. Application? Something else? However, a text editor certainly doesn't have this problem, as it's most assuredly a file / document based application.
Exactly. I was going to say the frequency of updates of your OS probably is inversely proportional depending on the seriousness of the work you're doing on it.
Updating from daily builds? Hobby OS.
Upgrading to new OS immediately after release? Thanks for finding all those zero-day exploits and rare bugs for the rest of us when we eventually upgrade.
Applying ONLY critical patches, and even then only when thoroughly vetted? You're using your computer to do actual work, and can't afford downtime.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you see the restrictions on game content? It's broad enough to mean "anything we don't want to allow is banned."
* Gambling-related content or game features
* Anything that violates China’s constitution
* Anything that threatens China’s national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity.
* Anything that harms the nation’s reputation, security, or interests.
* Anything that instigates racial/ethnic hatred, or harms ethnic traditions and cultures.
* Anything that violates China’s policy on religion by promoting cults or superstitions.
* Anything that promotes or incites obscenity, drug use, violence, or gambling.
* Anything that harms public ethics or China’s culture and traditions.
* Anything that insults, slanders, or violates the rights of others.
* Other content that violates the law
The old men that run the government still believe that console games are meant exclusively for children - or at least adults who need to be "protected from dangerous ideas" as though they were children. This is no different than what many of our own legislatures and citizen activists wished to impose on us... "for the children", of course, but fortunately, saner heads prevailed.
If you miss adventure games, there are still good ones out there, but most of them are being made by smaller studies or indie devs (check out Steam). Plus, there are a bunch of old classics in addition to new adventure titles available on GOG. Did you know King's Quest is being remade, and is coming out this fall? It's hard to say if it will be any good, but it look promising, and it does sound like they're trying to remain true to the spirit of the original. The adventure game isn't dead by any means. It's just found a smaller, comfortable niche.
and have work to solve puzzles and you celibate when you continue the story plot
Still, I'm not sure I'd care to give up sex for the sake of a videogame, no matter how engaging the plot.
What you're asking for is developers to volunteer their time to work on what is the most difficult and least-rewarding part of game development - bug-fixing, maintenance, and compatibility issues. As a contract programmer, I get paid a lot per hour for helping out projects up against a deadline. It's difficult, frustrating work, and it takes me several times longer to find and fix a bug than a regular dev who has been working on the project for the last few years. Even so, they pay me to do this, because any bug I do find frees their internal devs to fix other issues.
In short, it's *real work*. There's a reason you generally need to pay people to do this. The previous devs have already finished the fun part of the game - designing and building the game from the ground up. What's left is now is the hard, shitty work - trying to fix all the bugs, and work around an old, crusty engine that can't seem to keep from breaking scenarios from release to release - signs that there are serious under-the-hood problems (which they sort of admit themselves).
I wish you guys all the best, and hope you find some philanthropic devs to help you. Unfortunately, any free time I find myself with goes into my own personal project. There's simply no way I can spread myself even thinner.
if one could subscribe to a car service like one subscribes to cable television service?
You'd be better off not comparing car rentals to cable companies, which are known for bundling services and channels you don't want, charging exorbitant prices, blocking free market competition, and providing atrocious customer service.
Has anyone mentioned that these games were removed for compatibility reasons? Does that make a difference? I'd love to know how nvidia is supposed to fix 3rd party games if they simply don't work on the latest version of the OS? Do they not let people update? Or leave the games there, but just broken? I'm not sure there are any good answers here. Ideally, the developers would fix their own games, but there's probably very little financial incentive for them to do that at this point.
Why exactly is this a breaking update? That might be a good question to ask as well. This is sort of crappy for owners of those devices, but I'm not sure this is in quite the same league as what Sony did.
In a sports competition, the entertainment is devalued if the competition is rigged in any way. Competition-based entertainment is the idea that, with enough skill, any of the contenders can win the prize. Doping, cheating, or any other rigging of the competition destroys that sense of possibility, and thus, the core entertainment. It makes the win feel cheaper, and diminishes the audience experience, as there's an expectation of fair play.
For performers, their only job is to provide an entertaining show for the masses, whether by music or acting, but there's still an expectation of "fair play". If a singer was caught lip-syncing in all their performances and recordings (e.g. Milli Vanilli), then yes, their Grammy should be revoked.
If you had spent an intimate and passionate night with your significant other, but later learned he/she had taken a lover to bed just prior to your rendezvous, it would probably diminish your perspective on the night, even though it may have been fantastic at the time. Same principle, I think.
It's because... NUCLEAR (booga! booga! booga!) The radioactive waste will last 10,000 years! Just ignore all that talk about reprocessing, mind you. And make sure to oppose any plan to actually deal with the waste in a sane manner. NUCLEAR!!!
Seriously, don't ask for a logical reason. Environmentalists have spent the last thirty or forty years convincing themselves and anyone who listened to them that nuclear power is the devil. It's a little hard to turn those beliefs and feelings around on a dime, now that it turns out nuclear power may end up being the key to saving the planet because of environmental concerns. Irony.
Sigh... maybe we should just quit beating around the bush and just create a "-1 Disagree and Wish to Silence You" mod.
No, I never asserted that. I simply stated that I prefer to do my own salary negotiations, that I'd prefer my salary not be made public, and that I'd not like to work within a fixed payscale system. Sorry, I don't care what supposed benefits come from everyone making their salaries public.
I work in the videogame industry, and if money was what primarily motivated me, I'd have found a far more lucrative job long ago. I also wouldn't have quit my job to start my own business, where I've been earning no regular salary at all (only occasional contract work) while I finish my first game.
Besides, if I want to see what industry salaries look like, I can just look at an annual salary survey for the videogame industry, which has the benefit of being far more scientific, is far broader in scope, and is anonymous in nature. This lets you effectively determine whether people are being underpaid in your company in general, rather than simply comparing your salary to your co-workers.
Back when I was in the Army, we all knew exactly how much everyone else made in base pay, from E1 to O9. That at least gave incentive to work up the chain from the bottom.
Well, that makes sense for the armed forces, as it would be sort of chaotic for everyone to negotiate their own pay. Union jobs are like that as well. I'm sure a fixed system is great if you hate the idea of negotiating for yourself, or don't have the self-confidence or negotiating skills to effectively ask for what you're worth. For instance, my understanding is that women (on average) tend to accept lower negotiated salaries than what they could probably get. To be honest, though, I'd prefer to negotiate my own salary with my employer, and not be tied to a system that dictates what I earn at each "tier".
I probably wouldn't care to share my income data, as I consider it a private matter. I'd tell a family member only if they asked, but anyone else? Only if it was anonymous, like a salary survey - which I think are important for people to get a general idea of what they should be worth. Maybe I'm old fashioned? Meh.
For a long time, it was simply assumed that ALL users had Flash installed, and it was more or less true (statistically speaking). So, why not show Flash ads as well, since you can animate them, make them interactive, have them spit out sound, and all sorts of other annoying things?
You're only now starting to see a minor trend of people (like me) uninstalling or others blocking Flash by default.
It's not "more modern looking", it's simply a modern designer trend. There's a really big difference.
Ah, I missed it right in the first paragraph. Good work getting the initial funding and your company off the ground. Mine isn't nearly so ambitious, but I can sympathize with the headaches of getting a new business started.
I'm a software guy, and know only the theoretical basics about the hardware I program for, but the notion of putting more of the complexity into the compiler instead of the chip is interesting. I wonder if this technology requires new approaches to languages and compilers, or whether it can be adapted to existing infrastructure (existing compilers like GCC or LLVM). Hopefully the latter, as it would be a bigger barrier to adoption if a whole new toolchain needed to be adopted along with the chip.
In either case, it sounds like a hell of a challenge, as (if I understand correctly) you'd presumably need to pre-evaluate logic flow and track how resources are accessed in order to embed the proper data cache hints. However, those sort of access patterns can change depending on the state of program data, even within the same code. Or, I suppose you could "tune" the program for optimal execution through multiple pass evaluation runs, embedding data access hints in a second pass after seeing the results of a "profiling" run.
If you can't reveal that sort of secret sauce yet, don't worry about it, as it's fun to speculate as well. Thanks for checking in with us. Interesting stuff!
Keep in mind that aside from math or simple "fill in the blank" questions, grading free form answers involves quite a bit of subjectivity. The only fair thing to do in standardized testing is to remove ambiguity like that, but unfortunately, that eliminates a lot of opportunity to judge things like creativity. How do you ensure that two different graders wouldn't give two completely different grades for the same "creative" answer? Even the same grader might give a different grade depending on how tired they are of grading tests at the moment.
Both are pretty damn impressive, although for chip manufacturing, $100,000 isn't exactly a lot of money. Consider what a single engineer earns per year. Apparently, they have six people, and hiring a seventh. I guess that means they must have some other funding coming in from somewhere, as he talked about how "supercomputing" is a poisoned word among Silicon Valley VC firms.
I hope to hear interesting things about this young man and his company in the future.
You're thinking of Google like a smaller company, and it just doesn't work that way. I wouldn't be surprised if she was applying for different positions in completely different groups or sections of the company. I'd imagine each section manages their own hiring.
Applying multiple times at a giant corporation is not a "fuck up". You probably need to interview specifically with the group that's doing the hiring. I'm not 100% sure how it works at Google, but when I applied at Microsoft, I was applying specifically for a particular development group, for example. When I was applying as a contractor, it was even more specific, as I was interviewed by the lead developer on the project I would be working on.
This makes sense because while someone may be a lousy fit for one particular group, they may happen to have the skills, experience, and personality to fit in with a different group. There's little chance (with some rare exceptions) you could conduct a generic interview at Google or Microsoft to determine whether or not someone should be hired. Interviewing is also a highly subjective process, so you don't want to exclude someone based solely on another person's decision. You might lose out on otherwise great candidates who just didn't click in another interview.
I'm younger than her, but I'm certainly not young. I'm closing in on two decades of experience, so you can do the math. But you're right - I haven't experience discrimination like that as far as I know, and I'm acknowledging that I've been pretty lucky in my in-person interviews, with perhaps a success rate around 50% or so for the roughly dozen in-person interviews that I can recall.
That's why I was asking what people's experiences were, and what sort of feelings they had about those interviews. I wasn't trying to deny that this sort of thing happens, in case my post wasn't clear.
Interesting... when I haven't gotten a job, I've never gotten a clear reason why I wasn't offered the position. Most of the time, like I mentioned, I sort of had a feeling afterwards of what went wrong. For instance, in one case (it was a Microsoft interview), the interviewer asked me a bunch of math questions that I simply couldn't answer. In other cases, I simply never even made it past the initial screening, and again, there was no feedback there.
If I heard back that I "didn't have enough experience" (I've got a bit shy of two decades of experience), then yeah, I'd be suspicious as well.
No, they're that huge. I've worked at Microsoft as a contractor several times in the past, and the different groups might as well be completely different *normal sized* companies, each with their own hiring process, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if Google was the same way.
Too bad she didn't try for a job one last time in the past year. With all the noise Google has been making about wanting to hire more female programmers, she would have been able to put them to the test to see if they were interested in hiring "females" or "young, attractive females".
most students nowadays are expected never to be able to pay off their loans their entire working lives.
Good Lord! Either your education costs far too much, or you pay your graduates far too little.
Look at her work experience in-between her degree and now. It's not like learning to program a computer is some black art that can only be learned in school. It's perfectly reasonable (unlike a neurosurgeon) to learn the trade on the job.
We don't really know what the facts of the case are, but I wonder what it is about people that lead them to believe they're being discriminated against based on a particular factor, like age, race, etc? I've gone to plenty of in-person interviews where I didn't get the job. I could often tell when I didn't answer the questions as well as I'd have liked. For instance, I'm a pretty decent programmer, but my math skills are not outstanding. If the interviewer asks a bunch of math-intensive questions, it's nearly always game over for me. I've had other interviewers ask me really abstract problems, such as how to calculate the number and types of elevators a particular-sized building needed. Honestly, I had no fucking clue. I'm a videogame programmer, not an architect. I reasoned it out as best I could, and obviously I didn't guess well enough.
Has anyone ever had an experience where they were positive they had a good chance at the job, but nothing came of it? Honestly, I don't think I ever have. Rather, the ones I came away from feeling really good about were generally the ones in which I was offered a job. I'm also sort of curious why someone would interview at the same company four times. Good lord, after the second or third time being rejected, I would have told the next interviewer to piss off, and let them know exactly why.
Google used to be a knight in shining armor, not so much these days.
Google was NEVER a knight in shining armor. The only thing that changed was that they got caught pulling the same sort of shit just about every other corporation on the planet does, and now very few people believe that "don't be evil" nonsense. You got it almost correct - it was a "marketing strategy", not a "market strategy", and it was brilliantly done.
Giant corporations are like nuclear power plants. Their production capacity is pretty much unmatched, but you also have to take great care to ensure they don't run wild, and there's always some nasty by-products in exchange for that productivity.
Oh man, that Gedit screenshot. Damn... It's a very *lovely* looking interface, but I would have no idea what the hell to click on to get anything done. Yep, definitely a redesign by some "UX expert".
The save icon is another one said "experts" are always trying to get rid of (if I'm not mistaken, we can see an example here as well. It's hard to tell though). "But we don't use floppies anymore...", they whine. Yes, but by now, everyone that uses a computer knows what that symbol means, even if they've never seen a floppy in their life. It's a universally known symbol. Don't screw with it!
Now, granted, tradition can go too far in the other direction. I can't even count the number of applications that have a main "File" menu when they rarely deal with files at all, or are not at all document-based to begin with. Unfortunately, I'm not sure anyone's come up with a decent replacement convention. Application? Something else? However, a text editor certainly doesn't have this problem, as it's most assuredly a file / document based application.
Exactly. I was going to say the frequency of updates of your OS probably is inversely proportional depending on the seriousness of the work you're doing on it.
Updating from daily builds? Hobby OS.
Upgrading to new OS immediately after release? Thanks for finding all those zero-day exploits and rare bugs for the rest of us when we eventually upgrade.
Applying ONLY critical patches, and even then only when thoroughly vetted? You're using your computer to do actual work, and can't afford downtime.