You are so right about intent. Ignoring the kid's intent is part of what makes this repugnant.
In my workplace, I get technical people to work for me by honouring their expertise and sometimes cracking just a bit dumb. IT managers especially do not respond well to any hint that you know they are doing a second rate job. But academics and students should thrive on give-and-take. This kid acted in an academic sort of way at a university, and that should be fine. University is not the place where you should have to learn how to deal nicely with incompetent people. So I find it quite awful that this university is discouraging take free learning process.
Sucks to be the IT guy, but the best IT managers I ever saw at UNO were bored academics. Not always entirely technically competent, but they understood where we were coming from and knew how to keep us in line. And quite happy for us to point out security holes.
Thanks. The thing that surprises me is how far the MS shills get around here. They are great at pointing out that windows is technically as good as or better than the alternatives (which it is), and yet omit that it remains stunningly annoying.
And that was the problem with Vista. I'm fine with using it in some contexts, but not with pretending that it's all rosy.
You know, there is really no reason whatsoever that you can't use an open source driver with windows. The driver API is well published, and there is nothing stopping the community from stepping up and writing its own drivers.
There is one reason only: Microsoft does not encourage it. If Microsoft provided open & free source drivers as part of vanilla Windows, on their installation disks, and a proper installation disk (vanilla Windows) with each new machine, then Windows would be a whole lot better.
I could write some REALLY shitty software for linux that eats up all your resources unnecessarily and bogs down the system. How is that Canonical's or Redhat's fault?
Nothing personal, but this thread has gotten ridiculous, based on the premise that Microsoft has no power over third party drivers or applications. The simple fact is that the competition (Redhat, Apple, Canonical, take your pick) does have control, and Microsoft should have it, they suffer rightly for not having it, and they don't suffer enough!
If Redhat allowed their brand to be associated with your software, then they would deserve what they get. Instead, Redhat tightly controls what can be associated with "Redhat Linux" and they benefit from it.
The problem is not a technical one. Windows is largely technically excellent software, and it's correct that bad applications will always be able to stuff up good systems. MS exploits user ignorance, confusing the line between "Windows" "MS application" "other application" and "computer." Redhat on the other hand, is very clearly clear about what is and is not their responsibility. Also, I assume Microsoft could exert tighter control over what gets bundled with Windows if they were not a monopoly. Whether the reasons are legal or practical, it just so happens that Windows sucks partly because it is a monopoly---those reasons just don't apply to the competition.
Another aspect of the problem is partly technical, partly greed: Microsoft cannot and will not proper basic installation disc with each machine. As a result, customers cannot easily bypass the OEM applications. Again, the competition manages to work through the problem.
Now for the real rant. Slashbots are too focused on technical problems. The problem with Windows is mostly not technical but social. Microsoft is ultimately responsible for the quality of the apps installed by OEMs, and excusing them on technical grounds clarifies nothing. Learn from RMS! He was a technical kind of guy who identified that the technical problems had underlying social causes, and required a social (legal) fix. And it worked.
Whether your mission in life is to tear down Microsoft, to be a good programmer or helpdesk operator, to cure cancer, or to write insightful comments, you will not get far if you focus on technical fixes to social problems.
If you require a PI license in order to simply view logs of connections to your machine and to contact the people referenced in those logs then the law would be extended to a lot of other things.
Not so fast. Under certain circumstances you already need a PI license to act on the photons that hit your retina. Specifically, you need the license in order to collect and/or interpret those photons as part of a professional investigation.
Any professional activity can be reduced to a civil liberties question. Every person should have the right to move their hands as they wish? Even if they're sitting in the cockpit of an aeroplane? In some cases it is important to consider the civil liberties question, and at other times it is plainly absurd.
In this case, the thing being regulated is not the viewing of the logs but the professional investigation. It seems to me that professional investigation should obviously be regulated, because (1) it is not clearly a civil liberty and (2) because it has a very high potential for abuse. SafeNet clearly illustrates the consequences of abusive investigation and why it should be regulated.
The Sony employee reaches into the anus and pulls out the battery figures.
Be that as it may, the old battery figures at least told you one thing: how the manufacturer was trying to market machine and its battery life, especially relative to other machines from the same manufacturer. If they said "it has a three hour life" you knew it was a bit crap. If they said "it has a 10 hour life" you knew it was probably about as good as you were going to get from that company.
Those sorts of marketing signals are somewhat useful, because a company usually cannot market products to the wrong niche for very long.
PS. the thing that really drives me nuts is saying how many "cells" the battery has. Since when have "cells" been a useful measure of electrical energy? Will consumers revolt if Sony doesn't specify how many "cells" worth are in a battery? And as for milli-amp hours... Ugh.
Smallpox had been around for thousands of years, but it was only in the last few centuries that people identified it as being distinct from chickenpox, measles and other poxes. It doesn't prove that there's been a proliferation of poxes, just a lot more classifying going on.
That said, our changing living patterns do expose us to new diseases (see sibling post) like BSE, SARS and HIV---all depending on who you mean by "us". There's truth in what you observe, but it's not a huge deal because that same change in living patterns means that we know what caused it and what to do about it. Life expectancy has gone up dramatically despite the introduction of new diseases.
Don't. Blame the government for allowing the fine print.
The real problem is that Telcos are allowed to charge a per user access fee, PLUS data charges. But most people cannot reasonably be expected to estimate their data useage.
Instead of ocassionally hitting the jackpot, the companies should be required to offer you a retroactive upgrade to a plan that would have reflected your needs.
It did another interesting thing: gave me a lot of respect for Bill Gates as an actor. Maybe it wasn't the hardest part of all time, but he did it really well. It might give Microsoft a human face.
Even so. It will be a really easy target for Apple's "I'm a Mac" campaign. And it won't make me want to buy a PC.
this still doesn't automatically mean he was "eliminated" for his views on the Russian government.
Until the Russian government can demonstrate rather a lot more trustworthiness, there is no reason to assume that they have departed from their former ways. (Though it's more likely he was eliminated for his website than his views.)
So all you're saying is that if Microsoft wants to sue you then you're in a mess of trouble and frankly, that's not very insightful.
That conclusion is important to keep in mind, even if it's not a new discovery. It shows that the patent system is only part of the problem, the legal system is another half. The political system is another half of the problem. If your legal and political systems were less biased towards wealthy clients, then it would be less of a problem that the USPTO is broken-people could get justice despite it. The fact that the courts are broken means that the all patents are potentially problematic.
In complex societal discussions like this it's easy to focus on one particular group as responsible for all of the problems (here the USPTO). It's important here to identify problems that the USPTO is partlyresponsible for. Both the USPTO and the US courts need to be fixed, but not both at once.
I have a popular website which I pay $175 a month to host. A mate of mine has a niche site which he gets free with his ADSL. Should we both be paying the same?
I don't have a solution, I've only identified a problem. But if I have to answer, I'd say that if you want to pay more for reliability or for server space, go for it.
There's a little thing called 'living within your means' which used to be considered a virtue. That's why we laugh at people who have ten times as much stuff as us and yet feel more hard done by. Grow some restraint. It'll be good for you.
You are wrong. "The internet" is not an optional luxury. For me, living within my means meant that I ditched my wired internet connection because it was too expensive. (I am neither poor nor rich, I earn somewhat more than the median income in this country.) So I have a 3G connection that is good for email and web browsing.
And that means that I cannot telecommute as I would like to, nor can I download movies of any sort. You might regard those as luxuries, but I believe they are the foundation of the future economy.
And it's not crap, it's metered. You don't get free all-you-can-eat electricity or petrol or food each month - why should Internet capacity be different?
Bandwidth is unlike electricity and petrol because you don't use up gigabytes like you use up joules. It's more like the road: the costs are in the capacity building and maintenance. Internet usage it should be like road user registration: a flat rate per household.
Governments don't charge a per-kilometre road user's tax even though that would reflect costs better than a per-gigabyte bandwidth charge. The reason is that a tax on mobility would decrease people's participation in the wider economy. A tax on internet usage similarly makes me unable to buy many kinds of products, and unavailable for various kinds of work.
If you really want absolutely unlimited Internet with a charging regime completely uncoupled from usage, that means you want to socialise the cost of communications infrastructure.
Ooohhh... socialism! Shocking. I don't care what the solution is or what labels it gets. I also don't care that for historical reasons, the roads are publicly owned and the internets are privately owned. We have a problem and somebody needs to fix it or the economy will suffer.
You don't have to pay that in Australia: you can opt not to have a serious internet connection at all. I just did-I had a crappy ADSL connection ($60/month + connection costs) and decided to either upgrade, or go with a puny 3G modem. I'm not prepared to pay (near the centre of a major city) the sorts of prices you list. The singular of anecdote is "uninteresting" so you may ask, so what?
If geeky types like me consider quality internet access to be so expensive that it is not worthwhile, then our economy has a serious problem. For example, I have never once tried downloading any sort of movie, HD, DVD, or otherwise, or using any sort of remote access to work beyond basic SSH. Those decisions limit my participation in and value to the economy.
I don't care why there is a problem or how expensive the solution may be. I even suspect that if I got over being a cheap bastard, I might find that the benefits of having a fancy connection would be worthwhile. But I can't justify spending 2% of my income on something without a clear benefit. I am sure that I am not the only person in this situation: we have a major economic problem until Australian internet access improves.
You are right. A reasonable and informed person (the privacy commissioner) has raised some important issues. She should have the respect she deserves and don't assume that she is a danger, menace or clueless. The summary is way too inflammatory and emotive. The OP wrongly and somewhat offensively implies that this is something to do with freedom of speech or suppression of information. The OP should learn to assume that people in her position are as smart and as altruistic as him or herself.
In fact, she clearly understands and values free speech and open justice or she would have proposed a major barrier that can't easily be worked around. The idea behind the solution she has proposed (make stuff hard to find unless people go looking) is not dangerous, not menacing, and certainly not clueless.
It probably isn't the best solution, because she is not a technical person, and maybe she has a professional bias towards information containment. So if people feel strongly about it, they should demonstrate respect for her and her principles, even if they don't agree that there's a problem, or like the solution.
Despite my UID and this post, I am not new here! (Because of my UID I am not New Here.)
I suspect that the same downloaders also download movies. I really would like to see somebody make the leap and extend that argument to defend downloading movies. Only pay for live performances?...
Pretty much. It is not worth buggering up society so that people can make and enjoy $100m 'blockbuster' movies.
Here's what I envisage for movies:
Simultaneous global releases in cinemas. People will pay to see movies in cinemas if it is a pleasant social experience.
Radio-head style releases shortly afterwards. People will prefer to pay the original performers.
Trademark-protected trinkets and boxed sets. Prohibit the sale of unlicensed physical media for a certain amount of time.
Some styles of movies would become unprofitable because their business model is unsustainable. I really don't see how society could be poorer for returning the balance towards good acting, good cinematography and live theatre rather than special effects and actors with perfect smiles.
I mostly agree with you (well, entirely agree except for what I define as qualifying as a "better" language; I believe English is "better" than Esperanto just like I believe C++ is "better" in the general case than most other options).
My point was that we don't argue about superiority of natural languages, even though we understand that they are very different and useful for expressing different things. You can't directly translate "manyana" into English, or "were to have been" into Hebrew.
Awareness of what makes a language useful for a purpose is useful, and it is why C#, Mathematica and Esperanto great languages. The same awareness can be applied retrospectively to a language, and maybe you could say that Boost is to C++ as Dr Johnson was to English.
My complaints about documentation come because I'm a newbie of sorts, but not an idiot. I had the same experience as you, but with ublas... I could not figure out when to use which kind of sparse matrix. I have never used sparse matrices before, and didn't know what kind of matrix is appropriate, when. (Trial and error worked.) I could take a course on numerics, but an equally attractive alternative is to buy the Intel Math libraries and use their online documentation.
The tutorials don't give a good lead into where to get started, they show what is possible but don't give introductions to the relevant concepts. The reference manuals usually have good coverage. Unfortunately they include only trivial examples, meaning that they are generally too simple to be instructive. (Maybe they are good for experts?) Boost.MPL and Boost.Python both are guilty of this.
The boost build documentation is really lame. The source code is fortunately clear...
My feeling is that the Boost developers have written the better documentation into books, rather than putting it on the web for free. I really support that, and I hope it works for them. I have ordered one of their books, and if it's good will buy more. That said, quality online documentation is a good reason to select a tool, and boost hasn't got it.
I use C++ and Boost and like them. But it's a love-hate relationship. I mostly found the trolls to be insightful because they reflected that love-hate.
C++ is a great programming language in the sense that English is a great natural language. Undesigned, piecemeal, weird idioms, and a pig to learn. But expressive, powerful, portable. Boost plays the role of "the King's English" -- it's a style guide. Sometimes arguable, sometimes wrong, but mostly very good at pointing out how to avoid deficiencies in the language. C, C#, Delphi, Objective C, OCaml, Mathematica and Python are unquestionably better languages than C++. And Esperanto is better than English. But I speak English and use C++ because it does what I need it to do better than any of the alternatives.
Dealing with geeks is a problem for management to deal with. C++ is probably rightly the domain of ubergeeks. If you choose to use C++ because it suits your needs and your geeks like a bit of mental masturbation, good for you. No matter what language you use, your local geeks will push the boundaries. With C++, Boost mitigates the damage your geeks might cause when pushing boundaries (e.g. template metaprogramming). Boost is therefore a tool for managing geeks.
The biggest problem with C++ and Boost is also their biggest asset. The language is too plastic. Every new library, object or template comes with a domain-specific-language that you just have to learn. For example, using functors to create threads. That is counter-intuitive and hard. But with Boost, each domain-specific-language tends to be well designed, so that if you understand C++, then Boost will push you into using the features in a way that is portable and safe.
But an overwhelming gripe is that the online documentation is atrocious. In the sense of incomplete, unclear, impenetrable, useless examples, broken links, broken HTML, outdated. To the point where it becomes a good reason not to use Boost.
Slashdot Mirror
You are so right about intent. Ignoring the kid's intent is part of what makes this repugnant.
In my workplace, I get technical people to work for me by honouring their expertise and sometimes cracking just a bit dumb. IT managers especially do not respond well to any hint that you know they are doing a second rate job. But academics and students should thrive on give-and-take. This kid acted in an academic sort of way at a university, and that should be fine. University is not the place where you should have to learn how to deal nicely with incompetent people. So I find it quite awful that this university is discouraging take free learning process.
Sucks to be the IT guy, but the best IT managers I ever saw at UNO were bored academics. Not always entirely technically competent, but they understood where we were coming from and knew how to keep us in line. And quite happy for us to point out security holes.
Thanks. The thing that surprises me is how far the MS shills get around here. They are great at pointing out that windows is technically as good as or better than the alternatives (which it is), and yet omit that it remains stunningly annoying.
And that was the problem with Vista. I'm fine with using it in some contexts, but not with pretending that it's all rosy.
You know, there is really no reason whatsoever that you can't use an open source driver with windows. The driver API is well published, and there is nothing stopping the community from stepping up and writing its own drivers.
There is one reason only: Microsoft does not encourage it. If Microsoft provided open & free source drivers as part of vanilla Windows, on their installation disks, and a proper installation disk (vanilla Windows) with each new machine, then Windows would be a whole lot better.
I could write some REALLY shitty software for linux that eats up all your resources unnecessarily and bogs down the system. How is that Canonical's or Redhat's fault?
Nothing personal, but this thread has gotten ridiculous, based on the premise that Microsoft has no power over third party drivers or applications. The simple fact is that the competition (Redhat, Apple, Canonical, take your pick) does have control, and Microsoft should have it, they suffer rightly for not having it, and they don't suffer enough!
If Redhat allowed their brand to be associated with your software, then they would deserve what they get. Instead, Redhat tightly controls what can be associated with "Redhat Linux" and they benefit from it.
The problem is not a technical one. Windows is largely technically excellent software, and it's correct that bad applications will always be able to stuff up good systems. MS exploits user ignorance, confusing the line between "Windows" "MS application" "other application" and "computer." Redhat on the other hand, is very clearly clear about what is and is not their responsibility. Also, I assume Microsoft could exert tighter control over what gets bundled with Windows if they were not a monopoly. Whether the reasons are legal or practical, it just so happens that Windows sucks partly because it is a monopoly---those reasons just don't apply to the competition.
Another aspect of the problem is partly technical, partly greed: Microsoft cannot and will not proper basic installation disc with each machine. As a result, customers cannot easily bypass the OEM applications. Again, the competition manages to work through the problem.
Now for the real rant. Slashbots are too focused on technical problems. The problem with Windows is mostly not technical but social. Microsoft is ultimately responsible for the quality of the apps installed by OEMs, and excusing them on technical grounds clarifies nothing. Learn from RMS! He was a technical kind of guy who identified that the technical problems had underlying social causes, and required a social (legal) fix. And it worked.
Whether your mission in life is to tear down Microsoft, to be a good programmer or helpdesk operator, to cure cancer, or to write insightful comments, you will not get far if you focus on technical fixes to social problems.
If you require a PI license in order to simply view logs of connections to your machine and to contact the people referenced in those logs then the law would be extended to a lot of other things.
Not so fast. Under certain circumstances you already need a PI license to act on the photons that hit your retina. Specifically, you need the license in order to collect and/or interpret those photons as part of a professional investigation.
Any professional activity can be reduced to a civil liberties question. Every person should have the right to move their hands as they wish? Even if they're sitting in the cockpit of an aeroplane? In some cases it is important to consider the civil liberties question, and at other times it is plainly absurd.
In this case, the thing being regulated is not the viewing of the logs but the professional investigation. It seems to me that professional investigation should obviously be regulated, because (1) it is not clearly a civil liberty and (2) because it has a very high potential for abuse. SafeNet clearly illustrates the consequences of abusive investigation and why it should be regulated.
Average time before battery goes flat watching DVD: length of film - 10 minutes
DVD film? Over there beside the CD tape and the stone-tablet books I suppose.
The Sony employee reaches into the anus and pulls out the battery figures.
Be that as it may, the old battery figures at least told you one thing: how the manufacturer was trying to market machine and its battery life, especially relative to other machines from the same manufacturer. If they said "it has a three hour life" you knew it was a bit crap. If they said "it has a 10 hour life" you knew it was probably about as good as you were going to get from that company.
Those sorts of marketing signals are somewhat useful, because a company usually cannot market products to the wrong niche for very long.
PS. the thing that really drives me nuts is saying how many "cells" the battery has. Since when have "cells" been a useful measure of electrical energy? Will consumers revolt if Sony doesn't specify how many "cells" worth are in a battery? And as for milli-amp hours... Ugh.
Smallpox had been around for thousands of years, but it was only in the last few centuries that people identified it as being distinct from chickenpox, measles and other poxes. It doesn't prove that there's been a proliferation of poxes, just a lot more classifying going on.
That said, our changing living patterns do expose us to new diseases (see sibling post) like BSE, SARS and HIV---all depending on who you mean by "us". There's truth in what you observe, but it's not a huge deal because that same change in living patterns means that we know what caused it and what to do about it. Life expectancy has gone up dramatically despite the introduction of new diseases.
I blame the fine print...
Don't. Blame the government for allowing the fine print. The real problem is that Telcos are allowed to charge a per user access fee, PLUS data charges. But most people cannot reasonably be expected to estimate their data useage. Instead of ocassionally hitting the jackpot, the companies should be required to offer you a retroactive upgrade to a plan that would have reflected your needs.
I don't think there's any doubt that facebook is a malicious app. Maybe the world is too...
It did another interesting thing: gave me a lot of respect for Bill Gates as an actor. Maybe it wasn't the hardest part of all time, but he did it really well. It might give Microsoft a human face.
Even so. It will be a really easy target for Apple's "I'm a Mac" campaign. And it won't make me want to buy a PC.
this still doesn't automatically mean he was "eliminated" for his views on the Russian government.
Until the Russian government can demonstrate rather a lot more trustworthiness, there is no reason to assume that they have departed from their former ways. (Though it's more likely he was eliminated for his website than his views.)
So all you're saying is that if Microsoft wants to sue you then you're in a mess of trouble and frankly, that's not very insightful.
That conclusion is important to keep in mind, even if it's not a new discovery. It shows that the patent system is only part of the problem, the legal system is another half. The political system is another half of the problem. If your legal and political systems were less biased towards wealthy clients, then it would be less of a problem that the USPTO is broken-people could get justice despite it. The fact that the courts are broken means that the all patents are potentially problematic.
In complex societal discussions like this it's easy to focus on one particular group as responsible for all of the problems (here the USPTO). It's important here to identify problems that the USPTO is partlyresponsible for. Both the USPTO and the US courts need to be fixed, but not both at once.
I have a popular website which I pay $175 a month to host. A mate of mine has a niche site which he gets free with his ADSL. Should we both be paying the same?
I don't have a solution, I've only identified a problem. But if I have to answer, I'd say that if you want to pay more for reliability or for server space, go for it.
There's a little thing called 'living within your means' which used to be considered a virtue. That's why we laugh at people who have ten times as much stuff as us and yet feel more hard done by. Grow some restraint. It'll be good for you.
You are wrong. "The internet" is not an optional luxury. For me, living within my means meant that I ditched my wired internet connection because it was too expensive. (I am neither poor nor rich, I earn somewhat more than the median income in this country.) So I have a 3G connection that is good for email and web browsing.
And that means that I cannot telecommute as I would like to, nor can I download movies of any sort. You might regard those as luxuries, but I believe they are the foundation of the future economy.
And it's not crap, it's metered. You don't get free all-you-can-eat electricity or petrol or food each month - why should Internet capacity be different?
Bandwidth is unlike electricity and petrol because you don't use up gigabytes like you use up joules. It's more like the road: the costs are in the capacity building and maintenance. Internet usage it should be like road user registration: a flat rate per household.
Governments don't charge a per-kilometre road user's tax even though that would reflect costs better than a per-gigabyte bandwidth charge. The reason is that a tax on mobility would decrease people's participation in the wider economy. A tax on internet usage similarly makes me unable to buy many kinds of products, and unavailable for various kinds of work.
If you really want absolutely unlimited Internet with a charging regime completely uncoupled from usage, that means you want to socialise the cost of communications infrastructure.
Ooohhh... socialism! Shocking. I don't care what the solution is or what labels it gets. I also don't care that for historical reasons, the roads are publicly owned and the internets are privately owned. We have a problem and somebody needs to fix it or the economy will suffer.
You don't have to pay that in Australia: you can opt not to have a serious internet connection at all. I just did-I had a crappy ADSL connection ($60/month + connection costs) and decided to either upgrade, or go with a puny 3G modem. I'm not prepared to pay (near the centre of a major city) the sorts of prices you list. The singular of anecdote is "uninteresting" so you may ask, so what?
If geeky types like me consider quality internet access to be so expensive that it is not worthwhile, then our economy has a serious problem. For example, I have never once tried downloading any sort of movie, HD, DVD, or otherwise, or using any sort of remote access to work beyond basic SSH. Those decisions limit my participation in and value to the economy.
I don't care why there is a problem or how expensive the solution may be. I even suspect that if I got over being a cheap bastard, I might find that the benefits of having a fancy connection would be worthwhile. But I can't justify spending 2% of my income on something without a clear benefit. I am sure that I am not the only person in this situation: we have a major economic problem until Australian internet access improves.
I fart in your general direction.
You are right. A reasonable and informed person (the privacy commissioner) has raised some important issues. She should have the respect she deserves and don't assume that she is a danger, menace or clueless. The summary is way too inflammatory and emotive. The OP wrongly and somewhat offensively implies that this is something to do with freedom of speech or suppression of information. The OP should learn to assume that people in her position are as smart and as altruistic as him or herself.
In fact, she clearly understands and values free speech and open justice or she would have proposed a major barrier that can't easily be worked around. The idea behind the solution she has proposed (make stuff hard to find unless people go looking) is not dangerous, not menacing, and certainly not clueless.
It probably isn't the best solution, because she is not a technical person, and maybe she has a professional bias towards information containment. So if people feel strongly about it, they should demonstrate respect for her and her principles, even if they don't agree that there's a problem, or like the solution.
Despite my UID and this post, I am not new here! (Because of my UID I am not New Here.)
I suspect that the same downloaders also download movies. I really would like to see somebody make the leap and extend that argument to defend downloading movies. Only pay for live performances?...
Pretty much. It is not worth buggering up society so that people can make and enjoy $100m 'blockbuster' movies.
Here's what I envisage for movies:
Some styles of movies would become unprofitable because their business model is unsustainable. I really don't see how society could be poorer for returning the balance towards good acting, good cinematography and live theatre rather than special effects and actors with perfect smiles.
Excuse the second reply...
I mostly agree with you (well, entirely agree except for what I define as qualifying as a "better" language; I believe English is "better" than Esperanto just like I believe C++ is "better" in the general case than most other options).
My point was that we don't argue about superiority of natural languages, even though we understand that they are very different and useful for expressing different things. You can't directly translate "manyana" into English, or "were to have been" into Hebrew.
Awareness of what makes a language useful for a purpose is useful, and it is why C#, Mathematica and Esperanto great languages. The same awareness can be applied retrospectively to a language, and maybe you could say that Boost is to C++ as Dr Johnson was to English.
My complaints about documentation come because I'm a newbie of sorts, but not an idiot. I had the same experience as you, but with ublas... I could not figure out when to use which kind of sparse matrix. I have never used sparse matrices before, and didn't know what kind of matrix is appropriate, when. (Trial and error worked.) I could take a course on numerics, but an equally attractive alternative is to buy the Intel Math libraries and use their online documentation.
The tutorials don't give a good lead into where to get started, they show what is possible but don't give introductions to the relevant concepts. The reference manuals usually have good coverage. Unfortunately they include only trivial examples, meaning that they are generally too simple to be instructive. (Maybe they are good for experts?) Boost.MPL and Boost.Python both are guilty of this.
The boost build documentation is really lame. The source code is fortunately clear...
My feeling is that the Boost developers have written the better documentation into books, rather than putting it on the web for free. I really support that, and I hope it works for them. I have ordered one of their books, and if it's good will buy more. That said, quality online documentation is a good reason to select a tool, and boost hasn't got it.
I can't believe. I mentioned The King's English. In a post so embarrassingly badly written.
I use C++ and Boost and like them. But it's a love-hate relationship. I mostly found the trolls to be insightful because they reflected that love-hate.
C++ is a great programming language in the sense that English is a great natural language. Undesigned, piecemeal, weird idioms, and a pig to learn. But expressive, powerful, portable. Boost plays the role of "the King's English" -- it's a style guide. Sometimes arguable, sometimes wrong, but mostly very good at pointing out how to avoid deficiencies in the language. C, C#, Delphi, Objective C, OCaml, Mathematica and Python are unquestionably better languages than C++. And Esperanto is better than English. But I speak English and use C++ because it does what I need it to do better than any of the alternatives.
Dealing with geeks is a problem for management to deal with. C++ is probably rightly the domain of ubergeeks. If you choose to use C++ because it suits your needs and your geeks like a bit of mental masturbation, good for you. No matter what language you use, your local geeks will push the boundaries. With C++, Boost mitigates the damage your geeks might cause when pushing boundaries (e.g. template metaprogramming). Boost is therefore a tool for managing geeks.
The biggest problem with C++ and Boost is also their biggest asset. The language is too plastic. Every new library, object or template comes with a domain-specific-language that you just have to learn. For example, using functors to create threads. That is counter-intuitive and hard. But with Boost, each domain-specific-language tends to be well designed, so that if you understand C++, then Boost will push you into using the features in a way that is portable and safe.
But an overwhelming gripe is that the online documentation is atrocious. In the sense of incomplete, unclear, impenetrable, useless examples, broken links, broken HTML, outdated. To the point where it becomes a good reason not to use Boost.
I wouldn't call it a downgrade.
Perhaps a "retrograde to XP"? Sounds kinda hip.
... less willing to maintain an internet presence...
Yeah, and you're going to stop breathing because I farted? For CNN, the internet is about as dispensible as air.