https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Supposedly leaked from inside Microsoft, a spoof of MS pointing fun at themselves and as a reminder of how not to do things

Aye, I understand that. Eventually a fiscal decision was made, rationally, by a company teetering on the edge. And that's OK.

But speaking as a developer, I keep going back to my earlier statement; each moment when you're working on code and you have to make a decision, you weigh up the pros and cons of each option and pick the one that you want. The decisions they were making back then were, each time, to choose a windows-specific choice.

Somewhere along the way, the small marginal improvement in development time outweighed the benefits of keeping the code portable. I'd understand if it was a pathologically windows-only tool to begin with, but it wasn't; it was a fantastically portable codebase that they chose to decimate!

I would wager that when they eventually developed mac support, the time and developer resources that it took was way more than the time saved by choosing Windows-only options in the past. As someone who works on portable codebases a lot, the ability to run Valgrind on Linux, and Shark on OSX, is alone worth the extra time it took, because it so significantly offsets debugging time on windows. Difficult-to-debug bugs that manifest only in rare cases on one platform oftentimes manifest far more easily on other platforms, somehow that's the nature of the beast.

Huh, I posted as AC by accident. Well, to make up for it, here's the post where they officially gave Linux the finger: http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/9244 . The post was titled "Linux Expectation Management"

Borderlands did that, with drop-in multiplayer co-op.

In one fell swoop, that game was killed for me; I was really enjoying playing, I ended up in a maximum-size group with all decent people, completely by accident. We played the last half of the game in one loooong sitting.

Just as we were getting to the last boss, some exploiting douchebag came in and killed the end boss via some exploit.

Thus I don't play multiplayer games. As if I didn't hate them before, I sure as hell hate them now. The sad thing is that I *really* enjoyed Borderlands, but that put me off even buying the expansions.

Gary (-;

"the current regulatory framework would lead to constant legal challenges to the FCC's authority every time it attempted to pursue a broadband policy."

And... so?

"Something's good for consumers but unpopular with service providers; because the service providers might be bitchy let's not do it."

What? The *point* of the FCC is *exactly* to suffer being that middle man.

Gary (-;

Oh, and I should add that a relatively piddling amount of money in the face of "no, seriously, this *will* kill your customers" is hardly making me think more highly of them.

Gary (-;

First... It seems obvious at this point that volcanic ash does, in fact, destroy engines. The fact that "how much ash for how much destruction" is unknown, well, I can almost sympathise with the airlines, and perhaps the governments really were erring a bit vigorously on the side of caution.

Then I think... Man, there was a time when airlines garnered occasional goodwill. I'd feel I'd been treated well by them, where there wasn't nickel-and-diming at every turn, where flying didn't make me feel like a criminal [sure, not entirely the airlines fault, but I don't remember any of them ever stepping up on behalf of their customers].

That time has passed. Nowadays it brings nothing but joy to me to see their airlines suffering. In some parts of the world stuff like this is known as karma. Treat your customers like shit, eventually mother nature dumps thousands of tons of rock on your ass.

Gary (-;

When you're shopping for a new thing, what you do is: You weigh up the pros and cons of each thing available, compare those against the list of your needs, then pick the most appropriate one.

If affordable early termination is one of your specific needs, then don't buy the phone you're looking at from the provider you're looking at where early termination is a big scam. You have to weigh up the pros and cons and pick what's best for you. There are lots of phone providers, and sure - they all suck. But you pick what best meets your needs.

- And this is why I still don't have a smartphone. Because the cons [such as monthly cost c.f. my current plan] don't add up to be sufficient to meet my needs [such as affordable]. The cons of Apple's iPhone douchebaggery far outweigh the pros of having a phone I could kinda-sorta develop for.

Another simple way to avoid the problem of accidentally hitting the web browser is to remap the web browser button to something else. Even my cheap phone can do that.

Gary (-;

Sure, and some people like their web browser to have a built in mail client.

The original purpose of phoenix was to stop putting in exactly this kind of cruft.

Perhaps if the "awesome bar" was so awesome, then someone could implement it as a plugin. That way, everyone's happy. You get a browser *with* that feature, and I get a browser *without* that feature.

The [not] "awesome bar".

Somehow it always makes it harder to find what I want, not easier [eg, for some reason, it appears to have decided that penny-arcade.com is the correct url when I type in "facebook"]

And no; "just turn it off" studiously avoids the OP's complaint - which was that things like this shouldn't have needed to be added in the first place. How soon we forget - the name "phoenix" didn't even appeared in the news post [although it is in TFA].

Indeed. Quantity isn't the issue, especially when data available shows that the US school kids has up to, or more than, twice the number of hours spent in school. I know my kids in third grade here have longer days than I did in Sweden in the third grade by a rather significant margin. What is also rather apparent is that US school kids tend to spend less weeks in school, but with longer days. It's pretty obvious for anyone that works that mornings usually are more productive, by far, than evenings. The same is true for schooling. Adding a few hours to the day will result in even less efficient learning and bad bang for the buck. Add days but lower the number of hours per day, and quality will go up even if the hours spent at work goes down.

Heck, it's not uncommon in the nordic countries at least go have 7x5 work weeks (yes 35 hours) and as a result gain overall productivity and quality of work performed. More doesn't even equal better. In fact, most of the time it equals worse.

When I last went shopping for a phone, I didn't get Verizon because of exactly this. I bought a motorola razr cheap from t-mobile.

Let me sync with my mac out of the box. Phone cost: 20 dollars. Service cost: don't remember exactly but it's something like thirty bucks a month.

You make it sound like AT&T-iPhone vs Verizon are the only two games in town. In fact, they're just two of the worst. Perhaps you're into self-hate - is that why the only two options you describe both proscribe crippled hardware?

Gary (-;