For complex uses... it depends on the niche. Certainly for software development, Linux wins for basically everything except native and .NET Windows apps. For other uses, I will grant you, the professional-grade applications are not available (even if they run in Wine). But I'm not an artist. I'm a developer.

I agree that you should use whatever OS runs the apps you need. Here's some anecdotal evidence to throw into the discussion:

I work in a software shop with probably 100-200 developers. Our software runs on Linux, but on specialized hardware so far removed from the desktop that you might as well consider it an embedded system. Compilation and debugging is all done on the target machines. Some people do their edits on the target machine, others prefer to edit locally and copy to the target to compile. We have no IDE and no particular reliance on office suites or anything like that. As long as you have an ssh client you're golden.

So, the choice of desktop OS has absolutely no bearing on development here. Everyone gets a laptop. You have your choice of Apple or Dell hardware (both with pretty similar specs) and any OS you want. Of the entire population of developers, roughly 75% use Macs with OSX; 20% use Dell hardware with Linux or (Open|Free|Net)BSD; and 5% use Dell hardware with Windows.

There you have it. For one small sampling of developers where the desktop machine is purely personal preference, the desktop environment of choice is OSX.

If you approve of something, then you cannot tolerate it because tolerance implies disapproval. It's part of the definition.

tolerate: allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of something that one does not necessarily like or agree with without interference

It's not our fault that you can't read a dictionary, or refuse to accept the meanings of words. Look inward.

Look inward yourself. You missed a very important word in that definition: "necessarily". The definition says that it's not necessary to like or agree with something in order to tolerate it. Your approval is not needed to tolerate something, but it's not prohibited either.

After all, it's not our fault that you can't read a dictionary, or refuse to accept the meanings of words.

When you ask for meaningful evidence of misogyny on slashdot (or wider society) you only underscore your blindness to the problem. You shouldn't need anyone to point out examples, because an intelligent person would be able to find a discussion and skim it.

Wow, did you really just say that? Because that sounds exactly like the stereotypical line used by a woman when she is mad at her boyfriend/husband: "I shouldn't have to tell you why I'm mad! You should know why I'm mad!"

The response, "I shouldn't have to tell you the problem, you should already recognize the problem." never helps advance the discussion. If you don't tell someone what's wrong and why it's a problem how can you ever expect them to change their behavior?

Well of course they sound the same. That just proves that your speakers are crappy. You need audiophile speakers, a tube amp, monster cable, and a wooden volume knob to really appreciate the difference. Go buy all that, then come back and tell me you can't hear the difference. And if that doesn't work, burn the clips to a CD and color the edge with a green marker. That'll do it for sure.

It's not different. I find the ticker thing mighty annoying, too.

You really have to admire the cojones on the cell providers. They take the part of the service that costs them the absolute least to provide and charge a premium for it. They somehow managed to convince the public that a 140-byte, non-realtime, unidirectional text message is as valuable as a minute of 8000 bps bi-directional realtime voice data. Brilliant, gentlemen, brilliant. *slow clap*

I don't mind shooting up some virtual people, I want to be as far away from real war as I possibly can be.

Yes, as an adult, you realize that. But would you have realized it as a child? Probably not, if the only experience you had with guns and death was video-game based.

I was a child in the 70s. We didn't have video games then, but we did have nasty brutish violent cartoons. We had concerned citizen groups whining "Think of the children!" right and left, but I don't remember anybody getting an anvil dropped on them because they saw it in a cartoon.

Games are just the modern replacement for cartoons in the same tired argument. Give kids some credit. They really can tell fantasy apart from reality.

Sure as hell doesn't serve the end-users.

"We find the defendant not guilty, your honor, on the grounds that the prosecutor is a dipshit."

Or, it's a test. My wife sometimes needs to hire clerical workers. The help-wanted ad she posts end with "Fax a resume to...". I looked at the ad and said, "Fax? Who has a fax machine any more? You should give them an email address!" She says no, the instruction to fax is intentional. She wants someone who can A) follow directions; and B) is resourceful enough to find a fax machine. This is not a high barrier to entry; think of it as the FizzBuzz of office help. In fact, that's exactly what it is, a way to weed out the absolute dregs before you start.

I'm not saying that filling out an awkward online form is necessarily a test for a tech job, but it may be... Can you follow directions? Can you restate your prior job responsibilities in a format other than your prepared resume? And, let's face it, they're asking you to do the data entry of basic information such as name, address, phone, etc. Key-punch operators are a thing of the past. Nobody's paying people to copy hand-written information off of paper and into the database anymore. If you're such a prima donna that you won't fill out the form, why should I even consider hiring you? Asking for a mailed application simply on the grounds that "your web site sucks" (even if it's true) only makes you look conceited and arrogant.

(Full disclaimer: My company's online job application sucks. It's not a test, it's just a poor purchasing decision that was made by a different department. I've argued to make it better. Still, it's not impossible to get through as evidenced by the fact that we have people successfully applying every day. If you can't or won't make the effort you're probably not someone I'm going to want to work with anyway.)

The story has a good premise: Can we measure the programmer's emotional and cognitive states to predict when they're more likely to produce buggy code? That's a fair question. Where it loses it is when it jumps from that to the assumption that difficulty (and thus concentration) is the mental state in which bugs are produced. Hopefully that was just a case of the reporter missing the point.

Never say "the risks seem obvious." They're not, obviously -- demonstrated by the fact that at least one company thinks it's a good idea. So why don't you state what you think is obvious and we'll have something discuss?

RTFA:

The digital system for the exam works on usersâ(TM) personal laptop, which they bring to the testing facility, where they download the company's application to the computers they use to take the tests. At the end of the exam, the file closes and locks. When the user is able to connect to the Internet, the file uploads. Users cannot make changes to the file after the conclusion of the test.

You have to drive to the exam site but you're expected to bring your own equipment? Who thought that up? Rather than trying to intrusively lock down everyone's machine it would be far better to simply issue everyone a cheap tablet or netbook on which to take the exam. Controlled hardware, no need to try to "lock down" innumerable variations of BYOD. The ExamSoft web site says the software runs on "any modern machine", defined as Windows, Mac, or iPad purchased in the past 3-4 years. But disable any anti-virus, and no VMs. They're basically trying to secure any random machine off the street to prevent cheating. That's a very fine example of "doing it wrong".

Requiring a human to be ready and able to take control in an emergency is just plain dumb. The human in question will be distracted. They'll be texting or playing Flappy Birds or doing any number of things that a passenger might do during a commute. Even if you require that their hands be on the wheel at all times they'll get bored and daydream and be absolutely useless in an emergency situation.

The only reason you'd want to require human controls would be in case the vehicle gets into a (non-emergency) situation that it can't deal with. Think about a situation that would normally be wrong, like parking on a lawn or driving on the wrong side of the road due to a blockage or something like that. Something that requires a judgement weighing the letter of the law against the practical realities of the situation.

Anyone actually used them? Is it as good as their demos?

I haven't done any admin or dev work with it, but as far as just logging in to the VPN at work Duo works very well. I initiate the VPN connection on my computer and get a pop-up on my phone almost instantly. Hit approve, and the VPN login on the computer completes. In my pre-smartphone days I used their SMS service. They'd send me 10 codes via SMS and the VPN login would say "enter code A", "enter code B", etc. Each code was used once, and a new batch sent whenever you'd used them up. (This is probably quite insecure if you use Google Voice or some similar service that redirects your texts so you can read them online.)

Plus, I used to work with Dug Song, one of the founders of Duo. Smart guy. I trust him to have done his homework.