I sure as fuck chose my lifestyle, thanks. Three bad engagements to women, and I made up my mind to date men after that.

Sounds like you're a bisexual person who made a choice to date only men. Ok, fine. Congratulations, even. But most of us could no more choose which gender to date, and to be sexually attracted to, than we could choose which sort of music we like.

If you're looking for a more traditional desktop combined with the Ubuntu ecosystem, Linux Mint might be worth checking out.

Hell, Windows is significantly different than Windows from one version to another. That's not why Linux fails on the desktop.

Linux for servers has a significant advantage when serving up internet-related traffic. The job it needs to do is largely platform-agnostic, because it's working with open standards. Given that it can do the exact same job that MS servers can for zero cost, suddenly it has a real advantage and no real downsides.

However, the desktop is a different story. It's not about the OS so much as the software. Linux has a lot of free software that's pretty good. Some of it is as good as their counterparts on Windows. In my experience, though, most are a far cry from what you can find on Windows. And worse, there are a lot of programs for which there are simply no comparable Linux products at all. The desktop is still about what sort of programs you can run locally, and Windows still completely dominates here.

Of course, like you mentioned, Microsoft did it's absolute damnedest to throw that away by inventing a brand new ecosystem incompatible with their old "legacy" desktop platform. They seem to be backpedaling enough that Windows 9 will probably be a decent OS, but we'll see. I'm just waiting for them to lose their square-blocked, flat shaded, primary colored, butt-fugly UI fetish.

Ummm, no. The skills required to be a good engineer are not the skills required to be a good manager of engineers. There's some overlap, sure, but you can be an outstanding engineer but have poor leadership skills, or be an amazing and revered leader but terrible at actually designing the stuff your people are working on.

You should be in charge of exactly as many people as you are good at being in charge of. That's unrelated to how good you are at being one of the workers.

I believe those articles demonstrate several things, but it's impossible to tell in what proportions:

* Educational indoctrination from birth, censorship, and propaganda seem to be effective
* Some are afraid to say what they really think, especially when being quoted on the record
* Some don't mind authoritarian regimes or censorship

It's important not to draw conclusions solely from what people say when there are obvious external factors which may be influencing the truthfulness of their statements. The poll data linked in the second article indicated the information was gathered from phone calls and in-person interviews, which means the people responding could not be certain their opinions weren't being tracked or monitored in some way. If you can get in trouble for criticizing the government, and then poll people to see if they have any criticisms of the government, are you surprised when they tell you they have no real complaints?

That makes a lot more sense. I couldn't even imagine how load times could be 45 minutes. Those are build times, not load times.

Still, that wasn't their only complaint. Whatever their technical merits, the team ended up unhappy with Unity, and seemed much more happy with Unreal, apparently. In the end, we'll probably find out if the real problem was the tools or the developers who couldn't use them properly when we see the final game - the proof of the pudding, if you will.

I would go nuts if a "buy it now" button popped up while reading fiction, but this is a newspaper article.

When newspaper articles are written so as to be conducive to advertizing, they are fiction of the worst sort.

But not WW2. People do learn. Only took a few million deaths of their youngsters to do it.

If you read the article, the $500 fee isn't really the primary issue. It's only particularly galling because it appears that the fee is used to license a product that's more or less a workaround for an abysmally poor-performing editor. That fee is in *addition* to everything else, if I understand correctly. I mean, 45-minutes to load a project? Are you kidding me? How do you even manage that on modern hardware? There's nothing more frustrating than a clunky workflow or limited tools that you have no way of fixing yourself. That really seemed to be the driving factor in the switch.

I've worked on large games before (200+ developers). We used our own custom engine and tools, and our designers could start up the game editor and be working in about half a minute or so. It's not impossible to keep things nice and snappy for the end users, even with *massive* amounts of content. You just have to be a bit clever about things.

I think that's a potential problem with a company that does nothing but write engines for others to use. They don't have to actually talk to the people that are suffering because of poor decisions they made, or crappy limitations that they never bothered to address. It makes a big difference when you can walk down the hall and watch people at work using the tools you made. There's a pretty big difference between a fully featured game and little tech demos or samples.

Damn, I still can't get over that 45-minute+ load time. There would be blood flowing in the isles if we made our designers go through that, and rightly so.

Someone who buys a product with others' tax money is still a drain on the economy, because not only was there a loss of revenue from an actual worker / producer used to buy that product, there was also overhead in the transfer of that revenue. It can no more be a net benefit back to the economy than a perpetual motion machine can sustain its own energy.

Whether or not you feel someone is "working" or not, if their capital is invested, that money is then being used to move the economy forward. Business borrow money in order to expand product lines or upgrade equipment. Individuals borrow money to purchase a car or a home. However, it's dependent on people having capital to invest. In other words, even if someone isn't working, their money probably is. And make no mistake, there's not enough wealth at the top to pay for the government's current spending levels. We could tax the top 10% at 100% rates and it wouldn't even fix our current deficit.

It's unwise to base fiscal policy on emotions such as jealousy towards wealthy people or a desire for social justice. Blaming the rich for not paying their fair share make for great politics but poor fiscal policy.

The scientists and engineers that design the US nuclear weapons have computational problems that are measured in CPU months. A senior scientist was talking to a consultant, and explained the importance of these simulations.

"Just think about it.", he said. "If we get those computations wrong, millions of people could accidentally live."

-credit to the unknown US nuclear scientist who told this joke to Scott Meyers, who in turn relayed it at a conference.

What if I don't want to slice my cabbage thin? What are you, some sort of cabbage Nazi? Hitler probably liked thin sliced cabbage too!

Godwin's Law

I think it's fair to say that we've reached a point where we're flying "fast enough" for most practical purposes. Flying to the other side of the world only takes about 18 hours or so, which is pretty amazing, and the fast majority of flights are much shorter hops. Once cost, safety, reliability, and noise all reach a point where they can't be easily improved, aerospace engineers will probably start pushing harder against the speed barrier again. It's not that there's no impetus, it's just that there are currently higher priorities.

I think there are some interesting parallels to the improvements of tech components. We may be approaching a stabilizing trend because our computers are becoming "fast enough" for darn near whatever most people need to do with them, and because the physics for making components smaller and faster are really starting to get in the way. At some point, computers will be fast enough that they'll do whatever people want them to do, and there will be very little impetus to make them significantly faster. Besides gaming or other high-end jobs, personal computers are already ridiculously overpowered for what the user actually demands of them. And a lot of performance issues can simply be blamed on poor software design or overly deep and inefficient software abstractions. Note how the last two Windows OSes have actually *improved* CPU and memory performance since Vista, which was a pretty notorious hog.

I suppose this explains why most people are probably better off with a smartphone or a tablet, and why PC sales are dropping. I think the PC isn't dying so much as finding a more appropriate niche within the computational power spectrum.

Or Go, which looks a lot like C Done Right, was designed for systems programming, and has a positively minimal learning curve compared to C++. I get why C++ exists and what problems it aims to solve, but I don't think I'd want to have to use it to solve those problems when there are more programmer-friendly alternatives.