The phone performs poorly, and the excuse is to blame the "impatience" of Americans?
This comment reads like a sarcastic "It's not a bug, it's a feature." If the phone is terrible compared to the competition, people aren't going to be patient and adaptable--they're going to buy the competition.
If you're doing any work at all with .NET, Visual Studio is the greatest IDE in the world. Believe it or not, people can be productive without a command line--especially if you can use VS to automatically generate thousands of lines of code.
If you don't mind me asking, where are you located? I get good T-Mobile reception inside all types of buildings in and around the Kansas City metro. The only place I've ever lost coverage is in the basement floors of my doctor's office away from windows.
I don't know the details about which parts of the simulation are run locally and server-side, but the fact that your cities are "always on" (i.e. other players' cities can trade and visit your city even if you're not playing) tells me that a good portion of the resources/traffic simulation is run on Maxis servers.
It may be not be a valid reason for you, but Sim City ran significantly faster than Civilization V on my machine. To me, they both perform a massive number of simultaneous simulations, and Sim City's performance is near instantaneous.
That said, there's one huge factor none of the beta players can take into account when judging Sim City's performance: no one has been able to build massive, multiple-city metropolises, as play time was limited to hour-long sessions.
I agree, its simulation has depth that rivals Civilization V. And even better, the game's simulation is run on the Maxis servers so it doesn't lose speed with larger cities. Sim City 4 and Civ 5 both have problems with processing large maps. Totally worth the DRM for me.
I definitely agree about VS. Microsoft got a bunch of heat for VS2012, but it's been their best release yet. Their IntelliSense support for C# is unmatched by any other language-IDE pairing I've used.
That said, I've used MonoDevelop in Windows and OS X and it works pretty damn well. The Mono project has done a great job mirroring the .NET API and runtime.
My girlfriend has the exact same shoe size (5 in the US). She buys all of her shoes from Chinese companies on Ebay, as they always seem to have her size in stock. I have no idea if there are regional foot size differences, but shopping online may be a solution.
I'm not entirely sure what you meant to say in that last sentence, but I know you didn't mean to say "uncanny valley". Stuck in limbo, perhaps? (whatever that would mean)
Thanks for the livecoding link. I assume there's some overhead in constantly checking for and applying code changes - that's probably the reason for the lower frame rate.
I enjoy the aesthetic of Windows 8 and was really excited to start messing around with app development as a new hobby project. The WinRT API, though... it's very bare.
Perhaps I was naive thinking the WinRT API would be similar to .NET, but Microsoft could have made it much, much simpler for current .NET developers to start working with WinRT.
My biggest gripe is that WinRT seems to be 100% focused on mobile/tablet platforms. My laptop has Windows 8 and I spend all of my time in the desktop, away from apps. Why? Because there's a lack of "real" applications in the Windows 8 Store. Writing system utilities for a more technical audience is almost impossible. They replaced the excellent System.IO namespace with the Windows.Storage namespace, which doesn't give you access to much of the computer's actual storage [1].
Hopefully I'm wrong and someone posts a reply with an easy way to search through the computer's files and folders, but I'm not getting my hopes up.