Do you (or anyone else) have suggestions on how to get started on this? I'm still pretty early in my career and have taken some of the easy obvious steps to saving, but feel like finance planning is full of dark and twisty passageways (likely filled with grue).

Is it worth trying to find a local personal finance adviser you can sit down with face-to-face? Where would you look for someone like this? Suggestions for types of investment and retirement accounts, and how much you should put away?

I realize it's a deep subject but appreciate any comments. Thanks.

Ha ha, loved that.

Yes and no, I think. I don't think icons generally get classified as skeuomorphic since they just represent targets or classes of entities. Another poster mentioned the Android clock icon -- I don't think the Windows 7 date/time icon was made to resemble another material or object -- it's just a pictogram that clearly presents the idea of a calendar or clock. Compare that to the Android clock icon. I suppose that sort of looks like a clock if you already knew what it was, but it's certainly not clear. In my view that icon has failed at expressing any clear idea and is therefor a failure. Which one do you think a new user would more quickly identify as the way to bring up a date/time widget?

Compare this to one of Apple's absurd interfaces. This day calendar program is clearly trying to emulate a physical day calendar, complete with leather stitching and yellow lined legal paper. This is what the current trend has pushed back against, and that's probably not entirely a bad thing. You can take emulation like this too far, and Apple almost certainly did with their suite of apps.

But I don't think the current "UX" trend has as much to do with a severe over-correction to skeuomorphs as it has to do with flat, near monochromatic designs being a lot simpler to scale and make look uniform on a wide variety of screen sizes and pixel densities (as others said). It might be easy but it looks like shit and is about as usable.

I hadn't seen them laid out so clearly before, but now that I have, all I can say about the original Windows 10 icons (middle row) is oh my god.

Seriously, what happened here? When did we go completely off the rails and let pea-brained designers start throwing this kind of bullshit around, calling it "modern" and "clean". No shit it's clean -- that recycle bin probably took all of 30 seconds to draw with the Line tool. No, faster probably, since they were just pulled out of the Windows 1.0 archives.

I look at those three rows of icons and truly cannot fathom why someone would ever choose (especially) the second or third rows. They're low contrast, simpleton drivel that doesn't even do a good job of representing the objects they're trying to depict. Whoever created them should be fired, along with the manager that approved them.

In fact, Microsoft would be well-served by firing the whole damned "UX" group and replacing this new-age cargo-cult mentality of user interface design with a scientific approach of usability studies and research. You know, that thing they used to do. Let Google and Apple waste their time with that hipster crap if they want to -- normal people and business just want to get shit done and you don't get off on the right foot to do that by making all your icons indistinguishable pale pastel blobs.

I disagree strongly that "culture" (a word that's constantly misconstrued by executive trying to justify a horrible workplace) has any bearing on whether an open plan is successful. It much more strongly depends on the type of work being done.

A police bullpen or typing pool may be fine in a big open area. The same goes for sales and marketing types. However, if you're talking about any work which requires stretches of concentrated effort then it's just a Bad Idea. Engineers? No. Programmers? No. Accountants? No. Any kind of researcher? No.

This is the only real reason they're pushing this model. It's a clear terminus of the erosion that's led us from offices, to cubicles, to the little half walls, to just acres of desks. Well, that, and wanting to look hip by copying other companies who are doing it.

He's the guy that makes sure Natalie Portman (naked and petrified) remains covered in grits and that they're always piping hot.

That's going a bit far. Javascript definitely has some kludge in the corners and along the basebords. The wallpaper also needs to go.

Not many lanaguage need a book called "the good parts" (great book, by the way). Or, a little more tongue-in-cheek....

That's funny, because it's the opposite for me. Chrome starts slow, and feels so clunky. Every now and then it pauses for several seconds, and if I minimize the window it takes 5-10 seconds before it's responsive again (I assume the 20-processes of memory are paged out or something).

Firefox does too, by default now, but I don't see why everyone fawns over HTML5 video. It's just a damned webm/H.264 video stream, and we had <embed>'d videos way back when.

Hanlon's razor says

Of course that doesn't mean malice and stupidity can't walk hand-in-hand, and I'm pretty sure that's what's happening at Mozilla. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were a few bad actors, but there are dozens more that simply suffer from stupidity and lack of foresight. Every "ux expert" and "architect" seems to think they're god's own gift to mankind, and Mozilla is packed to the brim with those. Combine them with some ivory towers and you can pretty easily explain the current sad state of affairs.

I've loved Firefox since it was Firebird and it kills me to see it painfully dying from this cancer. My only hope is that we'll be left with a fork of some kind that continues from somewhere before it went completely off the rails. All such a fork needs is a little momentum behind it and some pragmatic people at the reins and it could be great.

It's true that Blizzard doesn't want you selling your characters, but it happens nonetheless. This was especially true around the time he's talking about, before Battle.net accounts were a thing and it was fairly simple to merge WoW accounts, but it's still possible today. I have a friend who started playing in 2004 and he sold his account for about $4,000 right before starting college in mid-2006.

Well, there are two points to consider about this:

1) The ban was not permanent, but was only six months. This is a departure from their previous botting bans and will put expiration near the end of the year, which lines up with a potential patch / expansion release.

2) As others have mentioned, getting banned does not prevent you from creating a new account and buying the game again. That's an instant ~$70 for Blizzard, equivalent to a player subscribing for about 4.5 months.

3) Botting had gotten very bad in some places. A lot of customers were complaining about them turning a blind eye to it and they really needed to do something.

Finally, the primary botting software that was targeted was HonorBuddy which is mostly used for player-vs-player activities. Given how much people have complained about the current state of PvP it's not surprising they went after it in an attempt to improve things. As a bonus, the developer of HonorBuddy has said he will be discontinuing development of the software due to the ban wave.