If you've never used a language with good support for OO (sorry, prototypes are a shitty hack, which is why more recent versions of JavaScript have actually started hacking in the idea of
classes), you wouldn't know how awful JavaScript's is.
Skype was cool 8-10 years back. It was solid, it was fast and it was the best option out there. People loved it.
The Skype you have today is an entirely different beast from what you used to use 8 years back. Back then it was written using Qt, and in C++. Small wonder then that it was fast, had a low footprint, and was reliable.
Once Microsoft took over, and probably ported it to.NET or whatever other shitty infrastructure they dreamed up, and it started to suck. As a general point, I seem to feel that anything written in.NET seems to run like its a slow lumbering beast.
Even if I do sign an EULA saying that I allow [Microsoft/Yahoo/Apple/Google] to provide my correspondence to the FBI, what prevents the bad guy from encrypting his message using a 4096 bit PGP encrypted string and THEN using steganography to hide it in image data and sending that image out to his compatriots?
Are you also going to make it illegal for the user to just use a complicated math calculation? Even if you do, how are you going to detect a violation of that?
This entire witch hunt on encryption by the enforcement agencies boggles my mind.
You'll never have to wait 15 minutes for a large code base to compile because you touched a header file.
Then that large code base was written by incompetent people. Using forward declarations wherever possible greatly cuts down compilation time due to touching a header. Or using good design practices such as programming to an interface (where the implementation header won't be included directly in client code and the implementation header is where most of the changes will be happening most of the time).
If India can afford a space program and nuclear weapons, they can afford to provide clean water and shelter for their population.
If only that were true...
It would cost much more to provide food, clothing and shelter to 600 million people than it would take to send a rocket to the moon.
Either way, the American aid package India can definitely do without.
Actually, I wonder if it would make an impact to the Indian economy if the U.S aid money stops. U.S aid to India totals to 91 million dollars a year. This token amount is primarily for the strategic benefits of the US maintaining a relationship with India (vis-a-vis China and the anti-terror assistance w.r.t Pakistan).
Compare that with aid to Isreal, a nation of 8 million people that receives a funding of 30 billion dollars in annual funding. Or the 1.5 billion dollars U.S gives to Pakistan, a state where most people want to burn the U.S to the ground. The aid to India is a drop in the bucket really.
The way I look at it is like this:
Let's say there is this fat guy. So you tell him he needs to lose weight. He agrees that he needs to do weight. But like most fat people he finds it difficult to stick to a diet/exercise regimen.
A couple of months later, you hear that this guy has picked up a guitar and is trying to learn to play it. Sure, he is still fat, but from the looks of it, he seems to be a quick learn when it comes to playing the guitar.
Do you now appreciate how well he is playing, or would you rather chastise him for not having done enough to lose weight first?
...before someone mentioned toilets or the lack of them, but nooooo. Think of India and the first thing that Slashdotters think of is toilets and then cows.
Or is it cows and then toilets?
Absolutely true. If you see how clunky Visual Studio and the new versions of XCode are (Xcode = 2.x was such an awesome IDE), and then use QtCreator, you are never going to go back to anything else. I find it surprising how hard it is for me to convince any of my colleagues to give it a try.
In addition to the shame that people associate it to be something used only for Qt, is the shame that Qt itself is thought of as only a GUI. QtCore and QtNetwork make non-Qt applications a breeze to code in C++.
Only, worse. Since telemarketers probably don't bother creating a FB page. So FB won't notify you of that.
TrueCaller gathers information by uploading your contacts list to their servers. And doing the same from millions of people who use. Is this a crazy breach of privacy - sure, it is - but so is everything about Facebook. Telemarketers hate it since once a few of report it as a spam call, it shows up with a warning saying as much when the same person calls someone else. Oh, and you can block that number too.
I am sure you are going to get a series of comments denouncing Qt, most of them ignorant of the current state of things, most of them coming from script kiddies who find anything to do with C++ frightening.
Whether Qt would be ideal for what you call a native app depends on what you are emphasizing with the word 'native'. If the emphasis is on 'native'-look and feel, then it might or might not suit your needs. QtGui module sure lets you create GUIs with native controls, however the QtQuick module is where all the awesomeness is at.
Using QtQuick, one can write an entire application with a beautiful declarative UI mark up language, that brought everything that the ReactJS people did, only 5 years ago, but then the GUI does not 'look' native, even though it will be a 'native' application.
However, when the emphasis is on native application like performance, Qt is THE tool for the job. Add to that the fact that QtCore gives you really useful tools (signals and slots), and OS agnostic threading, QtNetwork gives you OS agnostic sockets and all of the above work identically (on Linux/Mac/Windows/iOS/Android - seriously), Qt is the choicest tool for 'native' cross platform development.
So let the script kiddies whine, while I just push a commit and watch an automated build run for 5 platforms all at once without paying a cent for any API licensing.
Everyday I see the following scenario: researchers conduct an experiment that might show possible correlation between A and B, but like good scientists, provide adequate riders and caveats. Some eager reporter from a leading daily reads the synopsis and puts out a story screaming "People! You have GOT to try taking copious amounts of A! I will do a whole lot of B for you!!"
Here's a form the Delhi police accept with employee fingerprints, in order to track them if things go wrong.
http://www.delhipolice.nic.in/...
Yeah, I am sure the police light a few of those to keep warm during the Delhi cold waves when they are dutifully out on their patrols at night. That is why Delhi is such a safe and welcoming city for women. Right?
There are ways to confirm police clearance certificates - its just those ways aren't readily available on the internet. You gotta beat leather on the streets.
to save costs of actually hiring someone to take driver fingerprints and gumshoe the form over to a local police station?
Oh believe me when I say that the real costs accumalate AFTER getting to the police station. Try getting these guys to do ANYTHING without... um... "encouragement".
Yes, the fact that my country's law enforcement and judiciary are so weak is deplorable indeed. I will probably take another 20 years or so before he is finally convicted (post all the appeals he is eligible for).
There is no such number they can call. The Police does not provide any such facilities or have an operator ready to answer your queries as to whether a certificate they have issued is genuine. Finally, if you are of the opinion that they ought to send a guy over to the village Police station where the certificate was issued, for every driver who signs up, then you are either not an Indian and have no idea of how things look like here or you are utterly deluded and probably DO need some ganj to soothe your nerves.
The facts have been misrepresented in this case both in the Indian media and now in the U.S press. UBER did indeed ask for a police certified character certificate from the driver and the driver in turn handed them one, albeit a forged certificate. Any Indian who has worked with security agencies will tell you that Indian police character verification certificate is simply expensive paper to wipe your ass with. They have no standard format, are easily faked and are expensive to obtain no matter whom you pay - the crooks in uniform who give you one for a bribe or the crooks not in uniform who make forged copies for a fee. There is no central verification database which companies can use to authenticate one of these certificates. How then was UBER supposed to figure out that the certificate he handed them was a forged one? UBER is a boon for middle class Indians who are otherwise at the mercy of corrupt autorickshaw drivers who have no fixed metering and fleece customers based on the hour. Also, there is atleast some sort of traceability in a cab. Had the victim been raped by an autorickshaw driver, the case would still be unsolved: just another file in a mountain of open rape cases that the Indian police is too incompetent to deal with. What happened to her was terrible, but she is being an opportunist here. This is less about ushering in accountability from UBER than it is about squeezing UBER for every penny she can. It saddens me that a fellow Indian would resort to this.
Slashdot Mirror
The scenario that TBL is talking about here was preempted by Charles Stross in his 2006 novel: Accelerando.
Hear hear! (I am a millennial but I agree with this 100%).
I know what you're saying too, but most often, when people say OO, they mean "inheritance", and primarily just that. That is all I am railing against.
If you've never used a language with good support for OO (sorry, prototypes are a shitty hack, which is why more recent versions of JavaScript have actually started hacking in the idea of classes), you wouldn't know how awful JavaScript's is.
All of OO is a shitty hack.
We've cross-flashed the memory of the robot with serial number IR77 twice, yet it continues to persistently move towards the exit
They either have incompetent engineers.
Or a very effective PR team.
Skype was cool 8-10 years back. It was solid, it was fast and it was the best option out there. People loved it. The Skype you have today is an entirely different beast from what you used to use 8 years back. Back then it was written using Qt, and in C++. Small wonder then that it was fast, had a low footprint, and was reliable. Once Microsoft took over, and probably ported it to .NET or whatever other shitty infrastructure they dreamed up, and it started to suck. As a general point, I seem to feel that anything written in .NET seems to run like its a slow lumbering beast.
Even if I do sign an EULA saying that I allow [Microsoft/Yahoo/Apple/Google] to provide my correspondence to the FBI, what prevents the bad guy from encrypting his message using a 4096 bit PGP encrypted string and THEN using steganography to hide it in image data and sending that image out to his compatriots? Are you also going to make it illegal for the user to just use a complicated math calculation? Even if you do, how are you going to detect a violation of that? This entire witch hunt on encryption by the enforcement agencies boggles my mind.
You'll never have to wait 15 minutes for a large code base to compile because you touched a header file.
Then that large code base was written by incompetent people. Using forward declarations wherever possible greatly cuts down compilation time due to touching a header. Or using good design practices such as programming to an interface (where the implementation header won't be included directly in client code and the implementation header is where most of the changes will be happening most of the time).
Not true much longer. Ever used QString?
If India can afford a space program and nuclear weapons, they can afford to provide clean water and shelter for their population.
If only that were true... It would cost much more to provide food, clothing and shelter to 600 million people than it would take to send a rocket to the moon. Either way, the American aid package India can definitely do without.
Actually, I wonder if it would make an impact to the Indian economy if the U.S aid money stops. U.S aid to India totals to 91 million dollars a year. This token amount is primarily for the strategic benefits of the US maintaining a relationship with India (vis-a-vis China and the anti-terror assistance w.r.t Pakistan). Compare that with aid to Isreal, a nation of 8 million people that receives a funding of 30 billion dollars in annual funding. Or the 1.5 billion dollars U.S gives to Pakistan, a state where most people want to burn the U.S to the ground. The aid to India is a drop in the bucket really.
The way I look at it is like this: Let's say there is this fat guy. So you tell him he needs to lose weight. He agrees that he needs to do weight. But like most fat people he finds it difficult to stick to a diet/exercise regimen. A couple of months later, you hear that this guy has picked up a guitar and is trying to learn to play it. Sure, he is still fat, but from the looks of it, he seems to be a quick learn when it comes to playing the guitar. Do you now appreciate how well he is playing, or would you rather chastise him for not having done enough to lose weight first?
Surely, you do agree that (having all those problems + free wifi) > (having all those problems)? Even if the difference be only marginal?
...before someone mentioned toilets or the lack of them, but nooooo. Think of India and the first thing that Slashdotters think of is toilets and then cows. Or is it cows and then toilets?
Absolutely true. If you see how clunky Visual Studio and the new versions of XCode are (Xcode = 2.x was such an awesome IDE), and then use QtCreator, you are never going to go back to anything else. I find it surprising how hard it is for me to convince any of my colleagues to give it a try. In addition to the shame that people associate it to be something used only for Qt, is the shame that Qt itself is thought of as only a GUI. QtCore and QtNetwork make non-Qt applications a breeze to code in C++.
I don't know if you meant to troll, but an answer is Yes!
Only, worse. Since telemarketers probably don't bother creating a FB page. So FB won't notify you of that. TrueCaller gathers information by uploading your contacts list to their servers. And doing the same from millions of people who use. Is this a crazy breach of privacy - sure, it is - but so is everything about Facebook. Telemarketers hate it since once a few of report it as a spam call, it shows up with a warning saying as much when the same person calls someone else. Oh, and you can block that number too.
I am sure you are going to get a series of comments denouncing Qt, most of them ignorant of the current state of things, most of them coming from script kiddies who find anything to do with C++ frightening. Whether Qt would be ideal for what you call a native app depends on what you are emphasizing with the word 'native'. If the emphasis is on 'native'-look and feel, then it might or might not suit your needs. QtGui module sure lets you create GUIs with native controls, however the QtQuick module is where all the awesomeness is at. Using QtQuick, one can write an entire application with a beautiful declarative UI mark up language, that brought everything that the ReactJS people did, only 5 years ago, but then the GUI does not 'look' native, even though it will be a 'native' application. However, when the emphasis is on native application like performance, Qt is THE tool for the job. Add to that the fact that QtCore gives you really useful tools (signals and slots), and OS agnostic threading, QtNetwork gives you OS agnostic sockets and all of the above work identically (on Linux/Mac/Windows/iOS/Android - seriously), Qt is the choicest tool for 'native' cross platform development. So let the script kiddies whine, while I just push a commit and watch an automated build run for 5 platforms all at once without paying a cent for any API licensing.
...welcome our new female overlords
Everyday I see the following scenario: researchers conduct an experiment that might show possible correlation between A and B, but like good scientists, provide adequate riders and caveats. Some eager reporter from a leading daily reads the synopsis and puts out a story screaming "People! You have GOT to try taking copious amounts of A! I will do a whole lot of B for you!!"
Here's a form the Delhi police accept with employee fingerprints, in order to track them if things go wrong. http://www.delhipolice.nic.in/...
Yeah, I am sure the police light a few of those to keep warm during the Delhi cold waves when they are dutifully out on their patrols at night. That is why Delhi is such a safe and welcoming city for women. Right?
There are ways to confirm police clearance certificates - its just those ways aren't readily available on the internet. You gotta beat leather on the streets.
And UBER is expected to do this for all the drivers that register with them? Do you understand their business model at all? Anyone who actually lives in India, will have far less faith in the efficacy of getting the police here to do anything. Consider that this guy is a serial offender and they weren't able to get a proper conviction for over a decade!
to save costs of actually hiring someone to take driver fingerprints and gumshoe the form over to a local police station?
Oh believe me when I say that the real costs accumalate AFTER getting to the police station. Try getting these guys to do ANYTHING without... um... "encouragement".
Yes, the fact that my country's law enforcement and judiciary are so weak is deplorable indeed. I will probably take another 20 years or so before he is finally convicted (post all the appeals he is eligible for).
There is no such number they can call. The Police does not provide any such facilities or have an operator ready to answer your queries as to whether a certificate they have issued is genuine. Finally, if you are of the opinion that they ought to send a guy over to the village Police station where the certificate was issued, for every driver who signs up, then you are either not an Indian and have no idea of how things look like here or you are utterly deluded and probably DO need some ganj to soothe your nerves.
The facts have been misrepresented in this case both in the Indian media and now in the U.S press. UBER did indeed ask for a police certified character certificate from the driver and the driver in turn handed them one, albeit a forged certificate. Any Indian who has worked with security agencies will tell you that Indian police character verification certificate is simply expensive paper to wipe your ass with. They have no standard format, are easily faked and are expensive to obtain no matter whom you pay - the crooks in uniform who give you one for a bribe or the crooks not in uniform who make forged copies for a fee. There is no central verification database which companies can use to authenticate one of these certificates. How then was UBER supposed to figure out that the certificate he handed them was a forged one? UBER is a boon for middle class Indians who are otherwise at the mercy of corrupt autorickshaw drivers who have no fixed metering and fleece customers based on the hour. Also, there is atleast some sort of traceability in a cab. Had the victim been raped by an autorickshaw driver, the case would still be unsolved: just another file in a mountain of open rape cases that the Indian police is too incompetent to deal with. What happened to her was terrible, but she is being an opportunist here. This is less about ushering in accountability from UBER than it is about squeezing UBER for every penny she can. It saddens me that a fellow Indian would resort to this.