you're not going to find anything simple, unfortunately -- i wasn't. you have to put in the work to understand poorly written or documented code. i haven't looked at it myself but pokerstove is open source now, and you may have luck with that:

https://github.com/andrewprock/pokerstove

TYVM

I had heard vaguely that Poker Stove had somehow changed. I didn't realize it had gone open source.

Pretty much all my experience from destroying and recovering from destruction come from the days where I played with Gentoo a lot. I'd say I have decent experience in that regard in Linux land. Windows meh I've only used it on gaming/home desktops. The fact that you couldn't even change the language of the system and the old cmd was a major pain, DLLs were all over the place and the registry felt clumsy never had me dig really deep. It just feels like it's not really meant to be tinkered with.
I've dealt with multiple corrupted/infected/compromised windows installations. Maybe there's some other way to recover but I pretty much always reinstalled to be sure (those were mostly not my own systems)

I could not even say if there is a chroot for Windows tbh. Def. a very casual user (could also never afford/wanted to buy any of the server windows and for the most part picked my employers as ones that didn't use windows by default)

In order to try the 8.1 update again, windows store has to redownload the entire 3.6 gigs (and this is without moving anything around)

Companies are already using Windows 8? Seems like a giant disaster. I can't see upgrading from Windows 7 for a dev box for some (unless it's to Linux).

I thought the cool kids develop on MacOS.

It's safe to say that I don't work at a dev house; I'm surprised they have computers at all, tbh.

To be a little more serious, I guess they recently bought some new computers and didn't consider the issues that may arise if they bought 8 and not 7. Where I work at, we only need Excel, one silly program that supposedly makes our life easier, and apparently can make do with a 5mb internet connection. Windows 7 or 8 doesn't matter.

I can't find a real picture of this online, but someone at a meetup had a modded Apple with this logo on it, which I guess they got from Clojure/West:


(courtesy of MSPaint)

For 2 seconds, I was like "I want that Apple compu...!!!" oh, forget it.

well, seeing as the flamebait has already been tossed into the waters, i'll say i enjoyed this quote from jonathan franzen's recent essay http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...g-modern-world

pretty much every dev I've seen at jobs, conferences, hacknights etc uses macos now.

I've seen the inside of two start ups, one in Portland, and they all use macs.

Ubuntu is not a bad alternative these days.

I was at a marker conference last week and even a ****load of them had macs.

We wouldn't be able to use Ubuntu. We have to use Excel plug-ins.

And I'm afraid to ask, but what is a marker?

The books people mentioned are good. However, taking one of the algo classes on coursera will give you more structured learning imo.

Somewhat amusing story from the front lines.

Someone who used to work there, and is apparently decent friends with the company, decided he'd like to quit and do web building instead. Logically, the first project for him is to build a new website for the company.

When I first started there 4 or 5 months ago, he was studying a book on HTML5. Yesterday, we got an email from him saying the site was "pretty much ready" and we requested an IP address.

We look at the site, and from a distance, it looked really nice. I examined it closer and it became obvious that this was a template. This was obvious because said template featured a bunch of anchors to products that we don't sell. So, I click around and every link is broken, and of course, the site isn't ready for the images he requested.

We hit ctr-U and see that this is a CMS of some name I never heard of and Google doesn't seem to obey my "dot net cms" command. Yes, it is a .Net CMS. I take a look at the site and aside from 15 pages of marketing material, they offer about 5 tutorials in the documentation section, none of which seems complete and all beginning with "Getting started with [shopping cart | feature x | feature y]...".

I asked one of my coworkers if he thought the company (or the web builder) realized that MS isn't a fan of companies using their web-dev products for free.

Summary:
- Guy gets web-dev job thinking that the #1 step is reading HTML5 for Dummies (okay, maybe O'Rielly).
- Guy takes 5 months to install a front page template (probably hacked core as well)
- Guy builds site on poorly-documented CMS no one ever heard of.
- Said CMS is built on the beginner-friendly .Net Framework.

typo'd marketer

That's not surprising at all. Historically, Final Cut Pro was not available for Windows. Apple also led PC in image and audio software and drivers as well, and it wasn't until fairly recently the PC caught up in those technologies.

Its not the least surprising at all that marketers generally use Apple, and you would certainly have a difficult time seeing PC in use back in the early 2000s as well. Marketer's lifeblood revolved around musicians, film editors, and artists, who in some cases had no other choice but to use Apples and surely wasn't going to send over PC-friendly formats even if they were able to.

source: My friend's father owns an ad firm in Chicago and we used to question why he'd want to use an Apple at all (this is before the Intel days).

After a decade in the Windows world, I switched to a Mac 3 years ago, paying 3x as much as I would have otherwise, and I haven't regretted it for a second.

May I ask what the critical VAS of the 3x price tag is?

I'll be the first to admit that development on Windows sucks, but why Apple over *nix then?

I think we've had this argument before but a mac isn't 3x the price tag of an equivalent non-mac machine. Just sayin'.

Me too.

I've run mint natively on old macs and in Parallels on new macs and it just doesn't look as good as OSX, it barely looks better than windows. That's enough to keep me on Macs.

Love your beautiful retina displays all you want, just don't do #666 on #fff, please.

That is actually what I love about my install of Linux. All those silly unreadable fonts and bizarre color choices don't show up at all on websites. I just get good 'ol b&w and fast rendering and no flash of unstyled content.

Of course, this does take away the joy of auto-pushing backspace when I wait more than 3 seconds for a site to load.

I've got a hadoop cluster bitches!

Mmmmmm. Big data.

Oh, I don't have any data or know how to write a map reduce, but I've got a goddamned hadoop cluster!