I work for a IT government contractor right now. We don't do work even close to the size of these exchanges, but even in our work the amount of bureaucracy and overhead involved is mind-numbing. To put a simple form on our web page requires an FRS, SDS, binder of validation documents, review and approval from several managers. It could take months just to make a simple change. Lots and lots of wasted time and grant money.
I spent nearly an entire summer doing this, back after I graduated from High School in 2003. If you just follow the manual and enter the commands blindly, you can do it a lot faster. Instead, I took the time to look up each package I was installing, figure out what it did, why I was installing it, and so forth. Chipped away at it a few hours a week, then went through the process of install X windows, _which was the worst experience of my life_.
Debian testing as been a good mix of "stable" and "new" for me. I was using Squeeze for awhile and it seems like "stable" in the Debian sense can also mean buggy and feature-less. There was a battery eating, CPU melting bug in the Squeeze kernel, and the fix wasn't actually brought over from testing. I'm thinking to myself "how stable is this really if I'm not getting an important fix like that?"
I really want a distro that is minimal but also "just works." I like tweaking things as much as the next guy, but when I'm heading off to work and want to print a shipping label from my laptop quick, I really don't want to have to sit and read a manual to figure out why my printer isn't working. On the other hand, 90% of the time I'm at my computer, I'm just using Vim or a web browser, so running a full desktop stack seems like a waste.
The closest thing I've found to what I want is Debian Testing. I've heard good things about Gentoo, and while I think I'm more than capable of RTFM and doing it myself, and sometimes I enjoy doing it myself--other time, I really do want it to just work so I can get work done too.
I've run into many problems and conflicts doing this. Upgrading becomes a mess and I'm often forgetting why I needed a PPA in the first place. I don't think this is a very good long term solution for people that don't want to re-install their OS every 6 months.
I never heard of Tesla growing up, which is either a sign that my school gave a poor education or a sign that we've recently gone back and looked at this part of our history again. (Or a sign that I was a lazy kid who slept in science class.)
I agree. For reading, high contrast is exactly what I want. Despite all these trends in UX design, the best user interface is still a white piece of paper with blank ink.
I used GNOME 3 for awhile. Of all the heavy, DE-style desktops, I like GNOME 3. I use Awesome WM more often because it's lighter and saves precious battery on my laptop, but GNOME 3 is zippy and mostly stays out of my way.
As long as you can access a terminal quickly, everything else is really window dressing.
The console doesn't exist yet and SquareEnix already is already making FF-remakes for it! I'm happy to see a big name in the gaming business offering some support, but I'm more excited to see some original, thinking-out-of-the-box homebrew games. I want to play the next Cave Story; I've already played FF3 like a bazillion times.
Squaresoft already has it running on Android (and Tegra 3, like in the Ouya), so I doubt it requires much effort on their part. Having Sq's name on board will definitely help PR on both sides though, making homebrew titles more likely.
FFIII was an NES game. One presumes the "remake" is just running the original ROM in an emulator. So the "development work" involved is essentially just getting a license written up and signed. Maybe they'll update some copyrights and artwork, too.
Nope. It was done as a pretty thorough remake for the DS a few years ago - added 3D, changes to core gameplay (that were not very well implemented as someone else pointed out), etc. These DS versions are what have been ported to iOS and Android.
