You can bet your ass at some stage this will lead to your wife asking: "Why are you jerking off to C-SPAN?"

FAIL: You didn't use a Raspberry Pi.

Oh my, South Africans _love_ to complain about how cars manufactured in SA (esp. Toyota) can possibly sell for less in Aus. than in SA. If you think you get a bad deal on cars, imagine how we feel. We have huge taxes on imported cars (a US$30k car gets ~70% import duty) to prevent outside competition with domestic manufacturers, so they charge what they want... because imported (by distributors) brands are even more expensive.

The companies lining their pockets are gonna keep it that way.

Stuff like this is especially maddening when they require you to ship digital products.

I had an experience recently where I got a gift voucher for Amazon. I went there knowing a game I wanted would be about the value of the voucher. To my delight I found a digital-only version for the right price.

"Sweet, I'll be playing this puppy in an hour or so!". No beans. Digital copy not available in my country.

WHAT?! Why?! I can go down the road and buy this title legitimately in my country for the same price!

Then I was going: OK, I'll buy the frikkin physical thing then. Only to find shipping the damn disc to my country was going to cost the entire price of the game. So to use my voucher I was going to have to pay the entire price of the voucher for shipping. Something I could, once again, just go do at my corner store.

Finally I contacted a US-based friend and just shipped the disc to him for no shipping charge, and had him email me the serial. Then I found a digital copy of the data myself.

Hint: Never give foreigners vouchers for online retailers. It's a burden to the recipient.

Well apparently your shower knows who you are, your clock radio knows if you're awake, a security gate knows what your neural pathways react like at a distance..... But your computer has no idea and needs a card. And worse, your house locks by RFID!

Can't I just have one authentication device?

No. Grandma's grave. Really happens.

Geek BMW driver here: I only go to work in T-shirts with game logo's on them and jeans. I can't tell you how priceless the looks are when I get out sometimes. This unruly looking nerd?

BUT, Pro tip: Since driving a 5 I've had multiple job approaches from strangers on the street. I'd go so far as to call it an investment in your career (even if you buy a cheaper 2nd hand one like I did).

That's not the way it's supposed to be, but my RL experience bears it out. Typical convo (I swear on my grandma's grave, this has really happened to me. Even at a funeral - no relation to grandma):
"Hey, that's a nice car you have there"
"Uhh, hi, yeah, thanks"
"What do you do?"
"I'm a software developer"
"Looking for a job? My name is X and I work for...."
I've verified that those I didn't immediately blow off were indeed mgmt at software companies.

So, ya'll have fun bashing bmers!

Nope, but I appreciate the compliment. Thanks :)

TFA's 2 points about over/under - interest in radio controlled aircraft, I can see it now: "Good morning sir, I'm somewhat interested in radio controlled aircraft and would like to purchase one. Now, don't get me wrong, I do have a interest that sits above just a casual interest, however I'm also not overly interested in them, in fact, I'd say I'm about just the right amount of interested in radio controlled aircraft to buy one, but not so interested that it'd be suspicious.... say, who are you calling?"

At our dev shop if we get stuck we'll sometimes report that the problem requires a "shower moment" to solve.

We literally mean that often times we dream up the best solutions in the shower.

(yes the plus is it makes a funny bit of on-the-side innuendo)

Yeah but you're always glad on that idle sunday afternoon when you suddenly realise having a character LCD would be "so cool" for the thing you happen to be hacking together, you walk to the cupboard to find there's one just sitting there... begging to be ripped out of that old equipment.

I often keep old/damaged stuff around just for assorted LED's, switches, connectors, etc. etc... The point is neither the cost nor the time. It's that I never anticipate that random moment I'm going to realise I need it. That's the worst moment to NOT have something.

a) My employer's hardware, and not old at all, but I don't get to pick it, and is supported under linux, because I could get it working. But I've played this game a number of times over the years, I can't say I've noticed much of an improvement, just a proliferation of more layers that make it ever more difficult to solve.

b) I've never met a 'novice' (as mentioned in gp's post) that had ever heard of a HCL.

*I* can get this to work (as I did), but I'm under no illusion that installing a driver on linux "after the fact" is nearly as easy as it is on windows.

I'm not saying Windows always works out the box (even though that's where I've had the most success "out the box"). I'm OK with that, especially if the hardware is a bit "out there". What I'm saying is: in that situation the fix for windows is vastly easier than it is for Linux.

Blame vendors, blame my hardware, call me a noob, blame closed hardware specs, whatever.... That is the reality.

Hey, if only it was so easy on linux, just download an installer, run it and viola! It works!

In my dreams. I'm a Linux fanboy but I do feel sad when my sound goes numb and I have to navigate a minefield of my-special-sound-daemon (un)interacting with other-guys-magical-sound-server using TLA ridden bits and bobs everywhere and my only help being totally incomprehensible forum posts here and there, all of which assume I have a Phd in sound server internals.

"Oh! Of course, what a noob I am! All I had to do was compile a custom kernel module, find the tla.conf file, enable undocumented feature Y, blacklist all the other drivers, and I'm good to go! What a noob, if _only_ windows was this easy!"

Hey, you wanna talk about inconsistency, go look at the plethora of different ways there are to get something as basic as SOUND working on linux. Funnily enough, on the same hardware, dual-boot a windows PC and stand in awe of how it just works. At worst, all I need do is download those evil drivers you speak of and run the installer.

This doesn't make me angry, or long for windows, but be realistic.

To my shame, I have actually grabbed the wrong end, it hurts.

Ease of use. I can't plug an Arduino into a monitor and program it on the metal in whatever language I like and run an interactive debugger on the hardware, or get even close to the processing power, or easily store a ton of data on it (or the network), install a firewall on it, make it a file server, the list is endless. I'm sure at this point you have about 5 arduino add-ons you want to mention to me. And that's the point, RPi has all that and more out the box.

Plus: I don't have to learn new instruction sets, or subsets/modified versions of certain programming languages, or completely new programming languages... just to get it to work. And I can use databases on it, web servers, unix tools, bash scripts..... I just can't stop thinking of things I can easily do on a RPi that I cannot do on an arduino.