I can't understand how Wizardry didn't even make it anywhere on the page. It was the progenitor of all such games that followed.

Maximize and minimize functions are available still, in a non-intuitive way. This is one of the most irksome changes which has rubbed many people the wrong way.

Seriously, when I read this in the heading:

'With any luck you will feel more focused, aware, effective, capable, respected, delighted, and at ease.'

I almost laughed. I don't think I've ever used a massively changed GUI and ever felt "delighted, and at ease". I expect if I tried using GNOME 3 I would be frustrated, irritated, and cursing out loud. Just looking at the screenshots on the GNOME site gets me irritated, much less actually using the thing. And I like at the bottom of the page they include this:

Our system settings have been completely redesigned for GNOME 3.

Oh fun, the hide-the-system-settings-game, everyone enjoys playing that. I still haven't found the setting that controls the right-click menu in GNOME 2...

Why exactly wouldn't it be a good idea to remove it? It was an almost-always-nearly-blank toolbar that mostly just took up space

Said the person who uses no addons. My status bar has Noscript, Auto-pager, proxy settings, a Dilbert button, and of course conveniently displays load progress and most importantly link locations (this is not including the whole set of addons disabled by FF4). I don't know why FF devs think they need to copy Chrome, there are reasons some of us don't use Chrome and lack of things like status bar is one of them. And as of this moment, about 97k other people agree with me.

I used to use Ubuntu, and I loved it at first because it was my first Linux distro, but it kept breaking when I did auto-upgrades to new versions and some of the decisions they made really make little sense. ...
I switched over to Arch Linux, which, while not being nearly as simple to set up if you're a "n00b", only patches applications when absolutely necessary and lets you build your desktop how you want it from near-scratch. ...
Ubuntu, however, is an absolutely bloated mess with stupid design decisions that I wouldn't recommend to anybody any longer.

I second all these points. Same exact experience, been through all the "main" distros and they all have the same breakage problems. With RH, Fedora, or Ubuntu it seemed the system took forever to get tweaked, and by the time it got settled it was outdated and EOL'd. Rebuild and repeat. On the other hand there is Centos or RHEL which are such long releases that it feels you are forever anchored in time (we have work machines stuck on RHEL4, which was released what 6-7 years ago - long enough that when the time comes those machines don't get updated they get replaced).

For the last couple years I've been using Arch, and the rolling release model is much nicer experience than the others. The only rebuild I've done is to move a physical machine into a virtual machine. Updating a machine a year out of date isn't any more difficult than one that is a week out of date.

More bonuses for Arch is that it is not Gnome-centric (Metacity should be shot multiple times and buried somewhere), doesn't pre-install a crapload of unneeded services (sendmail running by default?!? only on every RH version ever), and by the time install is done you know exactly what is running (/etc/rc.conf FTW, not a bunch of config hidden in a directory somewhere and buried under a GUI).

No they are talking about distance to the terrestrial 4G transmit tower. As a vehicle (car or plane) approaches the tower the GPS device loses signal. This effect is real - essentially a powerful enough off-channel signal can saturate the front-end LNA in the GPS receiver and block the on-channel signal. I've had to deal with this before on GSM front-end designs (it's been a while but IIRC blocker specs may be in the GSM spec, I forget). Essentially the front-end SAW filters only provide so much off-channel attenuation, and the LNA is always more wideband than the narrow desired receive channel, so if you have a strong enough signal (say a giant tower transmitting a high level signal) on a close off-channel band you can easily saturate the LNA and kill the on-channel signal.

I have an encrypted drive on my laptop which has the same basic problem you describe. For this situation there is an easy workaround, just pop a live CD (I use a Puppy Linux live CD) into the drive and set the bios to boot from CD. It boots a little slower, but there is no login issue.

Another option is to put a live CD image on a USB stick and bury the stick somewhere in the laptop innards, then have it boot from that (essentially a small second HD hack, since most laptops don't have extra HD bays).

Mercurial's SVN re-education page does a good job of describing the advantages.

This is the same problem I've had with Linux also. For some reason the devs find it impossible to create a standard subsystem and then stick with it. There is this incessant drive to refactor the APIs, thereby breaking large numbers of what would otherwise be working apps. Ubuntu is notorious for shoehorning in some half-baked bleeding-edge code as part of their standard release (PulseAudio being a recent example).

Personally I got tired of "upgrading" an Ubuntu release only to have it left in a half-broken state. A couple years ago I switched to Arch linux using their rolling-release model, and that seems to have helped quite a bit. Another possible workaround I've used in the past is to build up a set of apps I need by static compiling them and dumping them in a /usr/local tree (that prevents a certain degree of "upgrade" breakage), but it's a hassle to maintain.

I do agree with other commenters that games represent a large part of the justification of keeping a Windows box, and I can't wait for the day Steam finally makes it to Linux.

Embedded systems places mainly.

This is good advice. Demonstrating competence in embedded designs is an easy way for an EE to get into CS. Microcontroller kits are abundant and cheap and can be made into demo projects for interviews. All kinds of areas too - RTOS, robotics, web-connected stand alone devices (can do things like connecting it to a cellphone app to make things even more impressive).

People get passed over for jobs they are qualified for just because hr departments throw out all the applicants who don't have a degree, even in an unrelated field. It makes it so that these people do essentially 'have to' go to college to get jobs, even though they'll get all the training they need on the job.

Aside from a manufacturing or manual labor type of job I don't know what job you are thinking of that you would get "all the training they need on the job". I can think of a lot of fields that I wouldn't want a DIY or on-the-job trained person to be working in - structural engineer, dentist, surgeon, even lawyer.

In our field (EE chip design) we don't hire people that need on-the-job training - the people we hire will eventually end up as our coworkers, not our trainees. When we interview people we always look for degrees (generally MS or better, but occasionally BS). If someone doesn't know the field (coming from an unrelated background), and can't even show a BS degree, then they aren't going to cut it as a coworker because they won't know what the hell they are doing.

A degree is more than a rubber stamped piece of paper, it shows an ability to apply yourself to a given task for a length of time and actually accomplish that task. It's a pretty low bar really, especially for a BS degree, since the whole education is guided and taught to you by someone else (advanced degrees generally involve a thesis, which shows some ability to guide oneself and accomplish a project).

Personally (as a person working on a PhD in science) I don't think a lot of people need to be going to college. I grew up in a car town, and a lot of my friends knew they were going to be doing manufacturing, but they went to college anyway.

This I don't get, unless they got useless degrees, or are simply incapable of moving to a place with better job opportunities. The town I grew up in didn't even have a college, and I was always dismayed at the absolute apathy and disinterest in the people there to improve their lives. Finally getting to a university I found to be a refreshing experience, as most people there are motivated to do something better with their lives (as contrasted with say the aforementioned town's high school where most people couldn't wait to leave and get back to their minimum wage jobs, apparently oblivious to the fact that their career path would go absolutely nowhere).

It also occurs to me the people who wrote TFA need to hook up with business leaders who claim that they need more H1Bs because there are not enough qualified applicants from here in the US.