So you'll only occasionally be accused of pedophilia. Good to know!

I would be quite embarrassed to have asked this on slashdot. Next up: why doesn't magic work?

This sounds very interesting me, because in the last few years I had some major life changes, and afterwards found that I really quite dislike going into this state that makes for really productive programming. I now try to tackle it much more piecemeal and process oriented, and while I might be more thorough and thoughtful, I'm pretty sure it's much slower.

So my conclusion is that this alpha state for programmers is something really unhealthy and maybe programming is quite damaging ...

You're right it's not black and white: but the problem is, even if you enjoy it, you probably don't enjoy doing it ALL THE TIME. At work, you have no choice; you've got to keep doing it, even if you don't currently feel like it or there's some aspect you don't enjoy.

Yes, there really can be too much of a good thing.

For years, Microsoft has been stuck on making everything "Windows". "Word for Windows". "Windows Live Messenger". "Windows Phone". Their marketing department seems convinced that it's their strongest brand and needs to be spread to absolutely everything, no matter how irrelevant.

They clearly now have committed the whole company to it, building the Windows logo into the company logo.

Personally, I think it's tedious and repititive and of little value. But they clearly aren't going to let go now...

I bought a cheap Kobo reader, and it's been a smooth transition from reading paperbacks - rarely - to reading ebooks regularly.
The availability of a store for instant gratification is nice, although it's still severely limited in range (maybe a Kobo thing).
The web browser is too crude to use daily, but I think shows that it would be quite nice to read web pages on an e-Ink device.

The Kobo has a nice looking UI, but everything else is a bit clumsy; PC software was clunky, store is clunky, performance is patchy. I just got it because I had some vouchers and it was cheap. And for plain reading, it's fine.

Does it really? Or is that just a hypothetical? I would imagine HFT is only worth doing in markets that are already liquid.

In other news, glaziers are experiencing a boom from the number of broken windows.

Shoot Em Up was kind of in this vein, and a lot of fun

My impression was there was huge progress from 1995 to (say) 2005ish. But after that things slowed. Essentially the Linux desktop was good enough, but Linux as a platform is now held back by other non-technical things: the kernel "no ABI" philosophy, the fragmented distributions, Windows is now also "good enough", specific applications that businesses rely on (Office, Photoshop, etc) even if there are equivalents.

Huh? Facebook has pretty stated that their strategy is to try major, risky changes at high speed and retract them if necessary. A careful, backwards-compatible, regression tested release process is the opposite of what they do.

So: I would say anyone trusting facebook with their critical data is a fool.

Yes, indeed that does answer the questions, but that's not really what Linux users probably have in mind :)

Then it's a matter of "launching a new console", which is an extremely difficult problem (mostly - getting big game houses on board and marketing $$$ to be visible to consumers).

Perhaps I'm being naive, but Steam only solves one part of the "problem" of games on Linux. Many other difficult technical problems remain, such as the fragmentation of distros, poor 3D video drivers/performance, fragmented APIs such as audio.
And then there all the "marketing" problems, such as that many Linux users are not interested in paying for games, or want open source, or also run Windows for games.

No thanks, that would suck. The success of iPhone followed by Android shows that people want new software (or at least software with a new UI) suited to the form factor. In any case, my favourite desktop apps now consist of a web browser, and ... um. An IDE? Good luck using that on a phone.

Well. I used to think the same too. But in reality I was just suppressing the pain, and it came bubbling back up eventually. Humans are biologically wired to be with a mate, just like most animals, and those instincts and desires don't really go away...

As a game artist myself, you can never have textures with too much resolution [...] or models with too much detail.

As a player, I stopped caring about improved resolution some time ago. Current PS3 games have enough. It would be a minor nicety to have more resolution, but only if it was free (ie. didn't hurt framerates, load times, effort put into gameplay, etc).