Two things I use the most on Windows and which are missing on Linux:

A media player similar to MPC-HC. (VLC's UI is kind of crap. Nowadays - animated crap. Always was and it seems that they are not going to ever fix it. Still no click to play/pause. And some keyboard shortcuts are missing too. And the video tearing is also much worse on Linux than on Windows.)

A tool similar to AutoHotKey. There are efforts to replicate the tool on the Linux, but they are all castrated because of security and missing features and whatnot.

But in reality, though the state of the video players on Linux is as frustrating as it ever was, there is really nothing I'm missing too much.

Rrrrright.

A pile of generic performance optimization tricks definitely solves real world problems in real world applications. Or probably it does for you, the whole world is reduced to games and Android.

Try to write some business logic which crunches 100 millions entities, and then come back. Or networking application which serves 10K+/s requests in real-time. But why go so far - an Eclipse-like text editor without C, in pure Java. All that is routinely done in C/C++ - and still generally fails in Java. I know it, because I have tried.

That's like saying "do not use classes or templates in the C++".

If you have a library or an interface, you inevitably end-up with temp objects to accommodate the other interface. (Heck, even the Java standard library on its own creates piles of temps.)

Literally everything these days is in libraries and wrapped in the interfaces, there is no way in hell a sane Java programmer can reduce drastically the number of temp objects.

Practical example. In one project, few devels spent several weeks optimizing the main loop, and it has gone from 12 temps to 7 temps per iteration, on average. The performance boost was noticeable. But the application was still more than 2 times slower than the C++ counterpart.

This is just ridiculous.

"It works fine, up to the moment it doesn't." IOW it doesn't work fine. And "split second freeze" is a way too polite definition for the jitter and stutter of Java's interactive applications.

People keep telling that for as long as I have dealt with the software development (~25 years now, counting from the first programming courses I took).

The dreamers keep telling us that the compilers, which would be able to magically optimize the code, are just around the corner. So that even an idiot can write a program - and let the smart compiler to reduce it to the substance of what the user wanted. There would no need for the highly educated specialists to write software anymore and software development is a dead end for professional workers.

25 years on - and that shit still hasn't materialized. As much as Java has improved over the years, it is still miles behind the C/C++ when performance matters.

Nah. It's faster to simply :%s!^!wusa /uninstall /kb:!

Put money into funds/trusts.

And then get a job.

Wealth in itself is not the problem. It is the overreaction to the "success" which is the problem. Most "rich" folks are douchbags not because wealth makes them that, but because they believe that they are better than the rest.

Distance yourself from the money. Give yourself few years to get back on then feet. And only then (very) slowly start thinking what to do with the money.

Money is ultimately the choice. It is only social perception - the status - that if you rich, you have to have an expensive car and huge house. In reality, you can still drive a cheap replaceable car and live in a small comfy house.

P.S. It is easier when you have family and tight friends. It is changes nothing when you burn money on them. Do not lend/give away money to the close people: giving money would only distances you. Instead, for example, go to together to the expensive vacations destination, renovate house, etc.

Oh, you probably haven't had the problem. But for some the problem is relatively commonplace: NTPd after some time starts refusing to sync time. And no matter what you do (restart HW, restart NTPd, sync manually, and restart again everything) that POS would still within hours again start refusing to sync the time.

And when the NTPd refuses to sync time, the skew easily rises into the minutes. On some buggy virtualizations - even more. (I have said hours - because some VMware versions/configurations I have seen seem to have a bug in time implementation, where guest runs faster(?) by about 1 minute per hour. 2 days uptime == 20-30 minutes of time skew.)

In the same configuration under the same conditions, the OpenNTPd runs just fine.

The f***ed up configuration and documentation of the official NTPd was the main reason why people have actually developed the OpenNTPd. If NTPd was perfect, nobody would have even bothered.

Depends on your perspective.

To me it is: 10ms with the OpenNTPd vs seconds if not minutes with the official NTPd, which occasionally blankly starts logging some errors or warnings like "oops shit, not syncing anymore".

Official NTPd is capricious as hell. And the documentation is just horrible.

I generally replace it with OpenNTPd which "just works". Because, at the end of the day, I can live probably even with 25ms skew, but the seconds/minutes of official NTPd is just unacceptable.

Sleep and suspend, outside the white-box laptops, pretty much never worked for me on Windows (2000, XP, 7). That's at least 4 home-built PCs. First one I thought I have messed up with the parts. But for the later ones I have specifically looked for the the parts officially supported by Windows. And still no dice.

On Linux, it is historically hit and miss. On earliest systems, the sleep and suspend were not supported at all. Later, when Linux started warming up to the laptop support, it still generally didn't worked for me (but I also haven't specifically tried the distros which officially claimed to support the suspend). These days, Linux' sleep/suspend support (on Xubuntu) generally works for me without problems.

The last PC I have built, Windows fails to come out of the sleep/suspend. With hybrid suspend it takes ~5 minutes before Windows reverts to resume from hibernate and finally starts. The (X)Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 have no problem with the PC whatsoever: both sleep and suspend worked out-of-box without a hitch.

P.S. To the problem with the controllers SteamOS had, I can probably relate. In office I have several custom USB devices and corresponding applications which misbehave after suspend. The applications open the devices and keep them open. After suspend, it seems that Linux tries to "replug" the devices, but the device nodes are locked by the applications. Consequently, the kernel (or udev?) assigns to them new device nodes. Applications do not work, because devices have "disappeared". Restart of application doesn't help because the device nodes are not there. One has to stop the application, unplug the devices, replug the device and start application again. From perspective of the software developer, it is a rather underdeveloped area in Linux: detection and handling in application of coming out of the suspend. On Linux there is precisely zero ways to reliably detect that the system just came out out of the suspend. One has to resort to stupid unreliable hacks like the polling of CLOCK_BOOTTIME.

Hoped for a decent fast Git client, but what I got is a pile of stinking hipster UI: flat, non-discoverable and very very rudimentary. Worst part: it is white, not dark. The lack of basic features, combined with the fugly UI, made me in the end uninstall it.

On Windows I'm using mostly the command line client (the git-bash msys based thing).

N.B. Tellingly, after the GitHub client, I started loving the official "git gui".

Advices about a better Git UI for Windows (corporate friendly, aka portable or doesn't require installation) are welcome.

They are not retarded.

They simply have no f***ing idea what UI and UX are.

But that shit isn't new. The GUI design of the past always veered in the direction: design is just a beautiful static picture. The difference is that back then computers had no power or resources to make the UIs to look like that. But today they do.

Finally, the typical IQ of the marketing department and the responsible for the buying decisions seals the deal: choosing between quirky UI which customer needs and beautiful design which looks great on the front page of the product brochure has never being a dilemma.

Somebody should explain the idiot that the advanced tools for the code analysis are capable of checking (and instrumenting) the binary compiled code already for at least a decade.

When in the past I used the Rational Purify on the applications linked against the Oracle client, there were more that 200 Purify warnings coming from the Oracle libraries, and that before the main() was even reached. Draw conclusions yourself.

P.S. A global public variable - by all indications `int count;` - in the Oracle client libraries for Linux was just topping on the cake.

It rarely if ever has anything to do with the extensions or plug-ins. (From my perspective anyway.)

On one side, they rewrite more of the browser functionality in the JavaScript.

On the other side, they throw more and more memory to speed up the JavaScript executions, since it has become the bottleneck, since they decided to write more stuff in the JavaScript.

As for the plug-ins and extensions, the whole concept of Fx (compared to the original Mozilla) was "let's outsource as much as possible functionality to extensions" with the effect that some functionality - with the issues it brings - were simply removed from browser into the extensions. Had they kept the functionality in the browser, they could have integrated it deeper and better. Today, blaming the extensions writers is simply unfair and short-sighted: they fill the functional gaps which Fx intentionally choose to introduce by removing the functionality from the browser. (E.g. Mozilla had a built-in AdBlock - Fx doesn't. And one of the reasons I stayed with the Mozilla for the whole time was the ad blocking.)

I for once welcome the end of the Google's rolling releases stupidity.

Finally, Android is getting the security updates, as any other mature OS did for literally decades now.

Oracle is being Oracle, claim people who can't do anything without Oracle.