Since I can't afford Skyrim right now, I went back and started replaying Morrowind with the graphics overhaul called Morrowind 2011. Reminded me how detached attacks feel, and how ridiculously slow you walk and run at the start of the game. And then I started walking all over the place, going in caves, killing crazy monsters. And times were good. Hoping Skyrim goes on a steam sale around xmas so I can get it >.>

When coding gets routine for me I like to throw myself across the proverbial board. Doing web development? Go write a coreboot driver for your motherboard, or do some wine API hacks. Likewise, if you spend all your time on the linux kernel mailing list, maybe making a website for someone wouldn't hurt to mix things up. If you are tired of the whole english bit, maybe go design your dream house or something. If there is anything I have learned about myself and my passion for programming is that it comes from a more fundamental desire to build and create. I like making things. I loved lego throughout my childhood and made entire cities with the things while messing around in msdos and inside the computer case. So look for some other creative outlet. And quit your job. Its a workers market, and you sound like you have plenty of experience to go enter a start up or something.

Some of the recent advances in GUI have been good. The OSX inspired pinning of applications to a unified taskbar where mouseovers show active instances is something I like, and it is now present in gnome3, unity, windows 7 / 8, and osx. I think you can get it in XFCE through some addons. Another thing I like is the menu global search they are all implementing. In the same way that google is the front page to going places on the internet through search, I feel in the long run it may not be a good idea to indoctrinate people into the idea of search being how you find everything rather than by the file system, but for the average joe it is a great abstraction of the system. Makes finding stuff a breeze if you know the name. Some other stuff, like making the GUIs take up large fractions of the screen (cough, unity) or have flashy FX (windows, osx) is all gloss with no purpose, and doesnt really belong in the GUI. I think the problem is that GUIs need to be designed by what is natural to the user, instead they are all just trying to copy the current most popular OS even if its GUI isnt remarkable.

At some fundamental level, I like C# more than Java, because it has some Lambda functionality which can lead to less boilerplate. mono isn't copying .net, because C# is a programming language outside .net - it is just that Microsoft for a long time was the only company making a compiler for it, since they made the language in the first place. In terms of Banshee, I have likes and dislikes about it. It was a pain to get my media keys on my keyboard to reference banshee, and Banshee segfaults if it detects my iPhone, so I can't have it plugged it when starting Banshee. I feel that something like a basic music player can easily be written in C without needing all the huge project overhead of a C# / Java platform. Just have GTK+ as the GUI and some folder in the installation called codecs that you can throw some .so files of codecs not already in the system codecs for portability.

I'd call 5.0 a pretty big deal, since that was when they got the browser CSS 3 / HTML 5 compliant in full. I'd also consider 9.0 to be a big deal, since its a pretty big speedup to jagermonkey. But yeah, 6 and 7 haven't been much of anything but a few tweaks like greying the non-domain address and such. I have no idea why Mozilla thought doing the Chrome name scheme was a good idea. I have no idea why Chrome thinks it is a good idea. All it does is make every release irrelevant and makes it so you can't hype new tech in the browser because to every user it is just "oh, another version".

Why don't they just fork the GNOME project into small and large form factors? That might be a misnomer - its more like close and far displays, because you would probably like a Gnome 3 style interface when you are 10 - 15' away from the screen. Hopefully the devs working on Unity and Gnome realize that end users just want customization. Nothing wrong with introducing start menu search and OSX style docks but let the user decide how they want their desktop configured, because you never know what they want. I use XFCE right now, but the lack of a built in global application search drives me insane, and the inability to get a Windows 7 / Unity esque task bar where I can pin applications rather than have duplicate quick launch / active windows buttons is a feature I miss. The inability to drag / drop apps to a panel is also extremely cumbersome. Then again, you can't really complain about all of the X desktop environments because you could just go fork the project and fix them yourselves if you didn't like something.

I'm pretty sure 99% of developers visiting Slashdot know the patent system is broken. You should not be able to patent mathematics. We know this. The problem is, to fix it, we have to not only teach people who have no clue what computer science even is how code works and how it is all mathematical formulas at the end of the day, but the people that need to know that patenting software is akin to patenting a paragraph of a book have been listening to lawyers and patent trolls for years, and those are the ones profiting from the broken system.

AMD's weakness is not in getting brand recognition, every major PC carrier knows who they are. They need a competitive product. That requires engineering investments and hard work to catch up to soon to be Ivy Bridge. Servers don't want a power inefficient processor, and power users want top class for the price, and AMD is delivering neither right now on the CPU front. They also shouldn't try entering any other markets, I imagine that is what they are thinking though, try to get out of the x86 business since they are falling behind. Hopefully the Radeon 7000 series does really well, this next GPU generation is shaping up to be a huge force in the massively parallel server market, and AMD better realize the opportunity they have right now to earn back some cred with a rock solid GPU lineup. It doesn't help that Nvidia, AMD, and every ARM manufacturer are all basically waiting on TSMC for bulk 28nm transistors. They are all starting to feel the heat for depending on one company for all their silicon for this next gen of graphics hardware.

If Bing ever actually provided better results, I'd start using it. It is still pretty laughably bad, Microsoft is just playing off the naivety of every average joe consumer on a windows 7 pc that doesn't know what IE even is, let alone that they use it. I also wonder if google intentionally turns off search mechanics to lessen server burden from queries, and now they have to turn some of them back on to keep people from experimenting with Bing. But again, experimentation isn't really the problem - its the extreme ignorance of the average PC user (and it isn't their fault really) as to what search engines are, what browsers are, etc. They have limited scopes of understanding that are being exploited with IE, and theres nothing wrong with Microsoft having IE use bing - or to have it the default browser on Windows. If people buy the product, they get what they buy. Microsoft just gives them all their services as the defaults. Its the users responsibility to change them if they don't like them, and apparently people are "fine enough" with Bing not to switch back.

I agree with this, nothing stops us from writing html 5 / css / javascript apps that people download and execute as an html script and call that an app. You just have the website locally and render it in your browser. Same principle, and it works everywhere.