Agree 100%, it has blown me away my whole life how engineers downplay marketing and [product|personal] presentation in spite of the reams of data suggesting it has some of the best ROI possible of anything you can spend your time improving.
Do you want to make more money, get more connections, have everyone like you more and treat you better? It's as simple as buying some nicer shirts, getting regular haircuts, and eating better (which has its own host of plusses).
Some programmers are 55 and really good. They also have stains on their t-shirts, are overweight, and act morose all the time. In a perfect world this wouldn't matter for a job interview, but you are not interviewing or operating for a job in a perfect world.
I was one of the inventors of RSS. I was on the RSS 1.0 RSS-DEV Working Group.
I'm also the creator of Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/) which you could think of as a massive petabyte-scale RSS aggregator.
Seeing that I helped invent RSS, and have probably parsed more RSS than anyone (hundreds of petabytes), I'm going to call it and say that RSS is dead.
Datastreamer used to index RSS and we've long since deprecated it as a secondary data source. It's really not our primary content source.
We prefer to index raw HTML.
HTML can do exactly what you want and you don't need RSS thanks to microformats and microdata.
Here's the main problem:
1. Publishers don't care about your use case. They WANT you go to back to the site and click their ads.
2. Publishers want to hoard their content and sell it if possible. This is the exact antithesis of RSS content distribution (that the Internet should be open).
What's the way forward?
1. HTML microdata parsing RSS but implemented in microdata.
Publishers actually WANT their data to be distributed this way as they're hoping their content is distributed over Twitter and Facebook.
The only downside here is that full content is often not used.
2. Metadata sharing.
SELF metadata sharing where communities of users markup and share their own content.
I'm going to be working on some ideas around this in Polar (my project around distributed content sharing).
Yeah, that's a problem/trap I fall into a lot with any sort of productivity aid. Omnifocus was a nightmare for me. I never did finish tweaking it to be just "right" because I really didn't know what "right" was.
Disclosure: I very briefly worked for a competitor.
A) Drivers reveal a surprising amount of "secret sauce" for a GPU. The "public-facing" interface to a GPU is something like HLSL or GLSL, but the real interface is some proprietary ISA. The manufacturers are slowly moving in this area, but the culture of the ISA being proprietary remains. That leads to things like implementation details getting inserted into ISA docs, or code comments, or driver architecture designs, because they're for internal use only anyway. This philosophy is slowly changing, but it's still the case quite a bit.
B) There's much less difference than you would expect between a $500 gaming GPU and a $2,000 workstation GPU. It's totally plausible that you are one FOSS driver away from a much more expensive GPU. That is a problem for everybody, including the gamers who want to keep buying $500 GPUs.
C) There is a VERY complicated balance of power between OEMs (who control the purse), Intel (who sometimes competes and sometimes complements the video card manufacturers) and Microsoft (for better or for worse, a de facto standards body) and increasingly, new kinds of competitors like PowerVR. So this is just a hypothetical, but one way it could go down is like this: NVidia decides to fully embrace FOSS. Microsoft gets pissy and tries to write them out of the standard. NVidia forced to lower prices to get PC makers to buy. Apple swoops in and places a huge order of the now-cheap parts. Intel gets pissy that Apple is shipping too many Nvidia GPUs per Intel GPU, raises Apple's CPU pricing to cover the loss. The price of Macs goes up driving some customers to iPads. PowerVR's royalty fees double, and since they don't have to manage any inventory, they are increasingly more attractive to investors than traditional manufacturers like NVidia. NVidia's stock price falls, and some C-level forgoes a vacation in Europe.
Pro tip: I was a neurosurgical anesthesiologist at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center for twelve years (1983-1995). Every now and then I'd get a call from our billing office that they'd received a letter from a patient I'd cared for who was too poor to pay what our department had billed (usually many thousands of dollars: I had NO IDEA what our charges were, BTW, nor did any of my colleagues in the department). Every time that happened, I'd go over to the billing office and — without bothering to read the letter — tell our billing chief to waive all anesthesia-related charges. In other words, by my initialing a form we had, their balance due us was 0. Try it, you never know, it might work for you.
Do you want to make more money, get more connections, have everyone like you more and treat you better? It's as simple as buying some nicer shirts, getting regular haircuts, and eating better (which has its own host of plusses).
Some programmers are 55 and really good. They also have stains on their t-shirts, are overweight, and act morose all the time. In a perfect world this wouldn't matter for a job interview, but you are not interviewing or operating for a job in a perfect world.