i guess microsoft has enough money to buy the best designers around. maybe they have an idea or two about perspective and also a couple of ideas about when to break those rules in exchange to something that simply looks better, and this is the case.
i got a kindle for xmas. it is amazing. however i've grown up in a house where every wall is covered by a bookshelf full of books. i love owning them, i love the fact that my father and me exchange books and than when i was a kid i could read the very same book that my father read as a child because he saved all of them.
i don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own.
i am against most of the forms of piracy, but frankly i don't like the idea of having to pay for the paper version AND the electronic version of a book. i don't feel it like it's buying two copies of the same book, but more like having to pay for the same book twice because one time you read it on the bus and the other time you read it on the couch. it's the same book whose rights i've already payed once, i think i buy the right of reading like i prefer.
i am generally regarded as an intelligent person, but i personally believe that intelligence is a highly overrated quality. speaking generally, being surrounded by intelligent people is "better", but if i ask myself, i'd rather have my girlfriend faithful, sweet and caring, my friends funny and reliable and my co-workers expert and easy-going because being stuck in an office with an intelligent moron 8 hours a day is not something i wish for myself.
so, while it is obviously better to have a friend fun AND intelligent or a girlfriend sweet AND intelligent, in the end pure smartness is never the first quality i look for in people.
hmmm... python had taught me that "battery included" means that out of the package i find a web server, drivers for at least one database server, graphics libraries... a compiler and a lexer aren't what i call "batteries".
the fact that rails is not for beginners is true (and main developers say so), but suggesting for beginners a smaller framework that gives you less and hence requires you to do more, know more and make choices that rails has done for you is simply nonsense.
i can summarize this pretty easily. competitors that see the argument like "apple is giving 1GB RAM for 500$, i'll give 2GB RAM for 500$!" are really missing the whole point. when you buy an apple phone / mp3 player / tablet / computer you're probably well aware that with the same price you can get a more powerful/feature rich device elsewhere, but you decide, instead, to invest in a brand you trust because has given you other reliable, innovative products that you already own and you know the new device will integrate seamlessly with whatever you already have, or you're buying "the iPhone", not a generic smartphone, the iPad, not a table, an iPod, not a mp3 player, so there's really no choice because apple is the only one doing it.
no, the biggest problem is that i never got the extra keys (eject, volume mute...) of my dell to work under linux, nor the second earplug output, and it pissed me off because i actually paid for them. also, the day i was like "you know what? i want to compose some music again, maybe i'll regain the interest" i was not able to find a semi-decent audio program for linux. this stands true for the day i was like "the new wacom bamboo tablet is so cool! i want it, who knows what i can do with that and photoshop".
i installed windows back and in a day i had all my extra keys, the second plug, photoshop, cubase and my wacom working.
i'm on a mac now, and they make the software for the hardware and the hardware for the software and i'm on the rich side of the market so adobe and wacom make software for my os of choice.
i don't think silverlight is going away in the nearest future, but if you're really "infuriating", the only reason i can assume is that you based your whole business in a proprietary technology owen by a company known for promoting something new, and making it obsolete after two years. you jumped with both feet in a technology that won't be an official standard and multiplatform like one of the competitors (html5 + js) nor as widespread like the other most direct competitor (flash).
my joy of using linux gone away long ago when i realized that i was spending more time searching forums, hacking drivers, trying solutions, paying more for compatible hardware, not having my laptop extra buttons work or trying to speed up a virtual machine just to have a usable photoshop than actually _using_ it.
i'm a happy mac user now (user, not fanboy) that enjoys having a posix compliant terminal in a window and photoshop in another, all working out-of-the-box.
while i like project euler, i find rosettacode to be more down-to-earth. in everyday life you're much more likely to have to solve rosettacode's tasks (eg download a page from the web, parse something, generate a bitmap, send a mail) than project euler's math-based tasks.
what are fun are the reactions of those "wtf, what now?!" microsoft fanboys.
how can you get on without wcf? change your webservices with 10 liner restful json-based services.
i'm reading the manual right now (http://opalang.org/public/book_opa.pdf), it is a lengthy pdf that also features a wiki, advanced chat, web service client and server and a reference of the language.
Gimp is one of the main reasons why I left Linux. After years of Windows I finally gave Linux a chance and immediately fell in love with it. Being a programmer it gave an incredible boost to my productivity and creativity. Having a proper shell, for example, or a real ssh client (not some half baked solution like putty).
As I also work with media (graphics and music), I find the lack of any semi-professional software for producing music (nothing to be compared with Cubase, Ableton Live or even Fruity loops) nor programs to make graphics (Inkscape is not close to Illustrator and then Gimp...).
So I had to constantly keep a virtual machine for those (read: running in a virtual machine the most resource expensive programs) or another partition for dual boot and I ended up having two PCs.
I sold them both and bought a Mac where I can have Photoshop in a window and a terminal with a proper unix machine on the other.