I learned to type before I could handwrite, and to this day doing anything more than writing a few notes on a whiteboard or filling out a 1-page form is difficult and my hand cramps up, and my writing is almost always horrid.

I am 26. My father got a C64 right before I turned two. I wanted to start playing with it immediately, but of course to do so often required some very basic typing (LOAD * 8,1). My father also worked at a company that was fairly early in having everyone with a terminal on their desk with an AS/400 style mainframe system. I remember when I was 4 having him show me how to send network messages to his terminal (yes, I was basically IM'ing my dad from another room in 1986 when I was 4). I clearly remember running to another room asking him how to spell eat, because I wanted to type "Go Eat Worms" but at first typed "Go Ate Worms" and it didn't look quite right to me. We got our first x86 system when I was 6, and by this time I was already very proficient typing and could probably get 30-45wpm depending on if I knew how to spell the words or not (hey, I was 6!).

Consequently, I barely ever learned to write. Yea, I forced myself to do some of it in grade-school because I had to, but it was never neat and I always much preferred to type things when I could. Learning cursive seemed backwards. Why weren't the other students being taught how to type at the time instead? It didn't make sense to me. In high school I started carrying a laptop frequently to class- running Zipslack.

To this day I hate writing by hand. The only real downside is that I'm starting to feel the pain from typing for ~24 years and my wrists and thumbs and hurting.

I suppose 15 years ago version/source control wasn't 'quite' as popular for all projects. Today with Git, it would be hard to lose all of the code as every checkout has the complete codebase.

Umm, I'm wondering if Apple is going to just mega-halfass what's needed to Jailbreak the firmware over there. I mean SOMEONE is going to figure out how to enable it. "opps" Apple can just blame it on "hackers"
It's not like we haven't jailbroken every version of the OS over here within days of its release. Just disable the wifi in firmware. Someone will hack it.

SOME of the bugs were fixed, but unfortunately it will still a super buggy and sometimes unstable game. I'm glad to see them releasing it, but of course source would have been nice (so we could fix the bugs on it!) I loved this game at the same time. It was a little more hardcore than Oblivion in many ways. Big stuff would just kill you (no equal leveling) and if you were vampire you lasted pretty much NO time during the day. Climbing everything, as buggy as it was- was pretty awesome too. Some stuff however was just outright glitched. It was the type of thing that drove me initially CRAZY when I was 11 playing it, because I'd spend hours just walking sometimes to 'see what was out there' on some islands or whatever. This game proved that bigger isnt' always better, because its impossible to populate everything with interesting stuff.

Sorry, had to ask. The Linux world always bitches when something ignores them. Just seemed right.

I hope that's not the case. I'm living in the house (soon) with one of the guys running the Boston group :) But the workshop in the basement is mainly just for woodworking and electronics- at least so far.

The concept isn't to doing ground-breaking research per-se, but to bring everyday biology to the masses. Rarely are people doing research in universities or with biotech firms interested in teaching and making available techniques cheaply to the masses and making it something that everyone can access. Also a severe leaning toward open source isn't common with 'big bio' research either.

We must ban anti-cancer drugs. The terrorists might use them. Terrorists could hurt children. Think of the children!

Why have there been so few mechanical turk jokes?

I saw a HARO request on this 11 days ago asking for, "Query:I'm looking for programmers who are willing to share any rituals or habits they have that help them code better -- whether by improving concentration or warding off buggy code or what have you. Email responses please."

That being said, not to dismiss the article, they were intentionally looking online for people that fit this category. Of course anything can be found online, and this leads toward a self-selecting population.

Just saying..

The first class addon system is what seems to make Firefox slow most of the time! I only have minimal Firefox Add-Ons installed, and yet it gets crashy even with those few. (Firebug, CoolIris, Alexa Sparky, Delicious) Yea, its a fun idea to have all these extensions, but I'll tell you that the debug window in Safari is a LOT more stable than Firebug (although not quite as full featured)

That doesn't explain why Firefox is so slow compared to Camino, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc. If you were Microsoft and had a browser, you'd try to ship it with your OS too. Last I checked all popular linux distros ship with a browser (generally Firefox being the default) and OS X ships with Safari.

The problem historically hasn't been that Microsoft ships IE, but that its very difficult, if not nearly impossible to separate it from the OS completely.

Additionally, this isn't the 'problem' that the article talks about, its talking about it being slow. Tighter integration with the OS should make it faster, not slower. You're mixing up the real problems at hand here.

Features create popularity, and popularity pushes for more features as users cry that the next browser over has something it doesn't. This create bloat.
Then again, over time, isn't this what happens with almost all software? They get more and more features as time goes by, and get bigger and consume more resources. Look at the size/requirements of any linux distro with a graphical system over the past 10 years.
No one wants to lose features, and users complain too much, so the only way to get a faster thing with less features is to fork it, or start anew (which is what the lesser popular browsers have often done).

By the time most of these games hit Public Beta it's really just stress testing the servers a bit (but never enough) and working on some tuning stuff. Mainly I've seen this by this stage it's really just about getting a solid buzz going around the game. Most users will have broken their NDAs by this point (as we saw happen recently in WotLK), but the entire point is just to get hype going for the game.

Until recently I was working for a game-industry related company, and we had a lot of close interaction with gamers and the game companies. I'm reading the article fully right now for some more of the developer/publisher-perspective details however.

Half the problem is that most of these gamers suck at betatesting. They don't want to file bug reports, they want to play the game free/early so that their guild can get a head start on others. the number of users that I've seen rant about a game having downtime turning beta, doing server wipes, etc... They weren't complaining because they couldn't get enough bug reports in, but because they couldn't get into their Raid.

Because of pressure on various fronts, most of these games are released with insufficient server architecture, horrid bugs, and critical balance issues. This is the stuff that should be stomped out during beta, but it isn't. Beta isn't about testing, its about PR and hype. Wish it was some other way. If i was developing an MMO I'd want to disable users accounts that didn't file bug reports properly, but I know that doesn't do well for the PR side.

People feel entitled to their games, and even more entitled to a chance to play for free. As expected, its not uncommon for some big players in the game industry to give beta accounts to people who run big guilds, but don't necessarily put in bug reports.