This would be nothing more than syntactic sugar. Why is using a struct such a big deal?
Because, when a function is not inlined, the ABIs for passing structures around are broken and usually force you to put the structure in memory, and only pass a pointer around. I mean, come on, on a 64 bit architecture you can pass a 64 bit structure right in a register. Most of those architectures have so many registers that passing 128 bits of a struct in two registers isn't out of question either. Yet, instead, all that you pass is a 32 or 64 bit pointer. Many compilers do not ever promote elements of a structure to registers, so even using a struct for automatic variables to make code more readable is a performance no-no. That's why making such performance-changing choices implementation defined and not standardized is a big back-assward stupid move. Yeah, it's "portable C" or "portable C++" but you can get wild performance regressions just because you use innocuous-looking abstractions.
Good luck, since you will have to fight to get your drivers signed
Lolwut? Your "fight", then, is as follows: Forking over around $250 for a certificate, downloading a cross certificate and running signtool on the driver files.
Wakeup call: you sign the drivers yourself. Having the drivers pass WHQL testing is another matter and fairly optional.
All it'd take to get rid of this problem in the civilized world would be to make the PCI and USB VID/PID combination subject to trademark law. A knockoff product couldn't use the same PID/VID as the brand name, and brand name drivers would ignore it. You could of course tweak it in the driver's.inf file, but that breaks the signature and Windows rightfully bitches about it. A blurb of code in the driver can check if the signature verification for the driver as a whole had passed, as well as checking the VID/PID and "disabling" itself if things are broken. Sure people can hack around it, but it requires extra effort. A proper way of "disabling" is to make things crash often, not an outright failure to initialize the driver, of course:)
For enforcement, it would not be hard at all to have a small handheld "scanner" that can read the VID/PID from any relevant device you throw at it (PCI, PCIe, USB) and looks up the VID/PID on a database on an SD card, giving you the legitimate manufacturer that is entitled to use that VID/PID. It'd make it easy for the customs enforcement and incoming inspections at the entry into the distribution chain.
I can only guess, but perhaps the coating on the terminals has to maintain certain mechanical properties over time. A wrongly formulated alloy, or a wrong thickness of plating will give you a connector that, perhaps, degrades in presence of heat and vibration. Or perhaps it plastically deforms on the contact area, thus lowering the contact pressure and eventually leading to loss of reliable connection. When you have small contact area, the contact pressure is sufficient to provide essentially a gas-tight connection. As the contact area grows, the pressure drops and eventually you expose your contact area to the atmosphere. At that point things usually go wrong.
Pure gold is soft and by itself it has about the worst properties imaginable for any sort of a connector surface. It literally rubs off, it's so soft. Its low resistance is irrelevant, since the gold layer is very thin. Gold's bulk conductance plays little role in overall resistance of a mated contact pair. You could replace gold with a metal that has 10x lower conductance, usually with little or no measurable change in contact resistance -- that is, if you can find something that can match gold in other properties (wetting of underlying surfaces, resistance to oxygen, etc.).
Gold is also useless as plating for high current terminals. I have designed plenty of connectors where some pins were for small signals and were gold plated, and others were for power and were silver plated. Gold plated power contacts simply lose the gold and then you have all the problems of an unplated contact pair that's exposed to the atmosphere since the gold erodes away leaving craters. It's no fun.
When you get relays with gold-plated contacts, there are often two sets of ratings. One is for low-current use, where the gold is guaranteed to stay on the contacts. Another rating is for sufficiently high current use where the gold is vaporized away and you're left with some other coating material that works well in this application. You can't swap such relays around without realizing what's going on, since contact pairs that were exposed to high currents will perform horribly in small signal, small current applications.
I also can't quite understand why people still buy gold jewelry -- all it took for me was a gold wedding band. I switched to tungsten carbide after a decade and I'm not looking back. The standard 18K alloy is a joke.
Just what you need in a game: building permits. I feel ambivalent about that, having to fork out ~$500 (US) for city permits to renovate a room... Otherwise, Civitas seems promising. Alas, the real building permits ate my gaming budget this year.
I don't know about Ubisoft, but EA is now not even a dozen quarters removed from being bankrupt, IMHO. Their games are not selling fine - they don't support their company's continued existence, and haven't for a while now. Myself, I say good riddance.
Like viewing the actual filesystem hierarchy as a tree of folders?
Short of the old-style Windows File Explorer view, modern Windows doesn't really offer anything like that either.
Like being able to orient yourself quickly and easily within said hierarchy when an Open... dialog plops you into some seemingly arbitrary location that is not the last place you were at when opening or saving files?
It's the application that chooses where the Open dialog plops you into, it's not hard coded into the OS. Go complain to the app developer, I guess. Alas, no matter where you are plopped into, there's nothing preventing you from knowing where you are. The path bar is your friend. Your "not well publicized" hack adds a button. Who the heck needs that button I wouldn't know. Maybe it was needed pre-Leopard? I was an early Leopard adopter, and it had the path bar. You can turn the path bar on and off, of course, but it's your choice. Get educated about it, or something...
I think the only saving grace for those machines would be some sort of a low-level just-in-time-recompiling emulator/vm like rosetta, but working in the opposite direction. I don't think there's any demand for such a product.
There hasn't been a decent version of Flash for those machines for a long while now. I've brought my friend's Powerbook up to Leopard ~4 years ago and it was already a pain back then. It mostly had to do with third party application support, nothing to do with Apple!
In my evaluation, I personally found the disappearing scrollbars to be unnerving for all of two workdays worth of use, or thereabouts. It's not an important feature when you have a high resolution screen with few windows, but once things become cluttered I like it. I don't get what progress feedback was taken out of Mail, the Mail I used to use in Snow Leopard had no feedback I noticed.
I have never understood why people think Finder is awful. It provides all the features you get in Windows, most of the features you got in KDE 3, and I really see no issue with it. Works just fine, I have no complaints.
I think the biggest boo-boo on Windows 8 is that the new WinRT APIs are not available for Desktop applications. It's retarded, IMHO. I'd like to use RT but to write a Desktop application. Per Microsoft, if I want to write unmanaged desktop code, I need to stick to winapi or MFC. With managed code, I have whatever.net provides, but still no RT. It sucks, IMHO.
Agreed. I have kept my win7 VM up for the last month, just logging in and out occasionally to backup my roving profile. I'm quite happy, finally having moved from an XP-running VM.
It's not like you can run newest and greatest Windows on old hardware either, it just doesn't work all that great. Of course Windows versions get a bit longer support than OS X releases, but still, I wouldn't claim that they "rip support away from you". The have to end it eventually, just as Microsoft does with Windows versions. I'm getting an SSD and upgrading my 2008 macbook pro to 10.8, I don't really see a need to buy a new computer. 6GB is enough to run a VM or two and still be productive. Probably in a year or two I'll switch, moving the ssd to a new machine. The only real issue I have is sluggishness of the browser with a rust platter drive -- with 2/3 of the memory taken by the VMs, the remainder is not large enough to keep the working set of a browser with lots of tabs open. That's where the SSD comes in to the rescue.
I used to do my taxes myself, but turbotax online is not cheaper than my time, so I go that route. For someone with a simpler tax situation of course it may be different. There are benefits to online filing, though -- the refund can be much quicker, if you are getting one, that is.
That's exactly how it works. An alternative may be a chapter 13 bankruptcy, where you're forced into a 3-5 year payment plan. Your creditors are paid first, and you get paid what's left.
That's somewhat bigoted. If you have an excessive amount of bounced payments or overdraft fees, a bank may decide to close your account and not let you reopen it. Apparently banks share this information with other banks, so that once you're blacklisted, you can't have a checking account for a few years.
In some places they do, in some they don't:) There's no single public decency standard. The prude U.S. has gone quite far downhill as far as western cultures go.
Sorry, in most places in the civilized world it's perfectly legal to do so. Heck, there are places where people don't mind that all that much. I remember that there was quite a lot of nice flesh to be seen through windows in Copenhagen.
What Google did is different simply because there are laws specifically prohibiting unauthorized access to computer systems, the networks being an extension and integral part of the same -- otherwise those laws would be largely moot, as you could claim that, say, injecting some broadcast DDOS traffic is "just" messing with the network and not the end nodes. Google did collect data that was meant for the end nodes, effectively gaining unauthorized access not only to people's private systems, but also those of the various service providers. Now you may argue whether those laws make sense or not, but that's a separate issue.
If you sniff packets, you are getting unauthorized access to a computer system. Heck, two computer systems - the endpoints of the conversation. Remember that the network is an essential part of the system.
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It doesn't matter if all CPUs have it or not. Lightweight syntax hardly ever results in lightweight machine code, so it's a moot point IMHO.
m) Add proper multiple return types
This would be nothing more than syntactic sugar. Why is using a struct such a big deal?
Because, when a function is not inlined, the ABIs for passing structures around are broken and usually force you to put the structure in memory, and only pass a pointer around. I mean, come on, on a 64 bit architecture you can pass a 64 bit structure right in a register. Most of those architectures have so many registers that passing 128 bits of a struct in two registers isn't out of question either. Yet, instead, all that you pass is a 32 or 64 bit pointer. Many compilers do not ever promote elements of a structure to registers, so even using a struct for automatic variables to make code more readable is a performance no-no. That's why making such performance-changing choices implementation defined and not standardized is a big back-assward stupid move. Yeah, it's "portable C" or "portable C++" but you can get wild performance regressions just because you use innocuous-looking abstractions.
Good luck, since you will have to fight to get your drivers signed
Lolwut? Your "fight", then, is as follows: Forking over around $250 for a certificate, downloading a cross certificate and running signtool on the driver files.
Wakeup call: you sign the drivers yourself. Having the drivers pass WHQL testing is another matter and fairly optional.
All it'd take to get rid of this problem in the civilized world would be to make the PCI and USB VID/PID combination subject to trademark law. A knockoff product couldn't use the same PID/VID as the brand name, and brand name drivers would ignore it. You could of course tweak it in the driver's .inf file, but that breaks the signature and Windows rightfully bitches about it. A blurb of code in the driver can check if the signature verification for the driver as a whole had passed, as well as checking the VID/PID and "disabling" itself if things are broken. Sure people can hack around it, but it requires extra effort. A proper way of "disabling" is to make things crash often, not an outright failure to initialize the driver, of course :)
For enforcement, it would not be hard at all to have a small handheld "scanner" that can read the VID/PID from any relevant device you throw at it (PCI, PCIe, USB) and looks up the VID/PID on a database on an SD card, giving you the legitimate manufacturer that is entitled to use that VID/PID. It'd make it easy for the customs enforcement and incoming inspections at the entry into the distribution chain.
I can only guess, but perhaps the coating on the terminals has to maintain certain mechanical properties over time. A wrongly formulated alloy, or a wrong thickness of plating will give you a connector that, perhaps, degrades in presence of heat and vibration. Or perhaps it plastically deforms on the contact area, thus lowering the contact pressure and eventually leading to loss of reliable connection. When you have small contact area, the contact pressure is sufficient to provide essentially a gas-tight connection. As the contact area grows, the pressure drops and eventually you expose your contact area to the atmosphere. At that point things usually go wrong.
Pure gold is soft and by itself it has about the worst properties imaginable for any sort of a connector surface. It literally rubs off, it's so soft. Its low resistance is irrelevant, since the gold layer is very thin. Gold's bulk conductance plays little role in overall resistance of a mated contact pair. You could replace gold with a metal that has 10x lower conductance, usually with little or no measurable change in contact resistance -- that is, if you can find something that can match gold in other properties (wetting of underlying surfaces, resistance to oxygen, etc.).
Gold is also useless as plating for high current terminals. I have designed plenty of connectors where some pins were for small signals and were gold plated, and others were for power and were silver plated. Gold plated power contacts simply lose the gold and then you have all the problems of an unplated contact pair that's exposed to the atmosphere since the gold erodes away leaving craters. It's no fun.
When you get relays with gold-plated contacts, there are often two sets of ratings. One is for low-current use, where the gold is guaranteed to stay on the contacts. Another rating is for sufficiently high current use where the gold is vaporized away and you're left with some other coating material that works well in this application. You can't swap such relays around without realizing what's going on, since contact pairs that were exposed to high currents will perform horribly in small signal, small current applications.
I also can't quite understand why people still buy gold jewelry -- all it took for me was a gold wedding band. I switched to tungsten carbide after a decade and I'm not looking back. The standard 18K alloy is a joke.
Just what you need in a game: building permits. I feel ambivalent about that, having to fork out ~$500 (US) for city permits to renovate a room...
Otherwise, Civitas seems promising. Alas, the real building permits ate my gaming budget this year.
You mean, like some LISP systems were doing for decades? Why, what a great idea :)
I don't know about Ubisoft, but EA is now not even a dozen quarters removed from being bankrupt, IMHO. Their games are not selling fine - they don't support their company's continued existence, and haven't for a while now. Myself, I say good riddance.
Like viewing the actual filesystem hierarchy as a tree of folders?
Short of the old-style Windows File Explorer view, modern Windows doesn't really offer anything like that either.
Like being able to orient yourself quickly and easily within said hierarchy when an Open... dialog plops you into some seemingly arbitrary location that is not the last place you were at when opening or saving files?
It's the application that chooses where the Open dialog plops you into, it's not hard coded into the OS. Go complain to the app developer, I guess. Alas, no matter where you are plopped into, there's nothing preventing you from knowing where you are. The path bar is your friend. Your "not well publicized" hack adds a button. Who the heck needs that button I wouldn't know. Maybe it was needed pre-Leopard? I was an early Leopard adopter, and it had the path bar. You can turn the path bar on and off, of course, but it's your choice. Get educated about it, or something...
Ahh, yes, for those who have negative federal tax you'd be right of course.
I think the only saving grace for those machines would be some sort of a low-level just-in-time-recompiling emulator/vm like rosetta, but working in the opposite direction. I don't think there's any demand for such a product.
There hasn't been a decent version of Flash for those machines for a long while now. I've brought my friend's Powerbook up to Leopard ~4 years ago and it was already a pain back then. It mostly had to do with third party application support, nothing to do with Apple!
In my evaluation, I personally found the disappearing scrollbars to be unnerving for all of two workdays worth of use, or thereabouts. It's not an important feature when you have a high resolution screen with few windows, but once things become cluttered I like it. I don't get what progress feedback was taken out of Mail, the Mail I used to use in Snow Leopard had no feedback I noticed.
I have never understood why people think Finder is awful. It provides all the features you get in Windows, most of the features you got in KDE 3, and I really see no issue with it. Works just fine, I have no complaints.
I think the biggest boo-boo on Windows 8 is that the new WinRT APIs are not available for Desktop applications. It's retarded, IMHO. I'd like to use RT but to write a Desktop application. Per Microsoft, if I want to write unmanaged desktop code, I need to stick to winapi or MFC. With managed code, I have whatever .net provides, but still no RT. It sucks, IMHO.
Agreed. I have kept my win7 VM up for the last month, just logging in and out occasionally to backup my roving profile. I'm quite happy, finally having moved from an XP-running VM.
I guess it tells you something when even ninite comes with a start menu replacement. Those things must be installed on assloads of machines.
It's not like you can run newest and greatest Windows on old hardware either, it just doesn't work all that great. Of course Windows versions get a bit longer support than OS X releases, but still, I wouldn't claim that they "rip support away from you". The have to end it eventually, just as Microsoft does with Windows versions. I'm getting an SSD and upgrading my 2008 macbook pro to 10.8, I don't really see a need to buy a new computer. 6GB is enough to run a VM or two and still be productive. Probably in a year or two I'll switch, moving the ssd to a new machine. The only real issue I have is sluggishness of the browser with a rust platter drive -- with 2/3 of the memory taken by the VMs, the remainder is not large enough to keep the working set of a browser with lots of tabs open. That's where the SSD comes in to the rescue.
I used to do my taxes myself, but turbotax online is not cheaper than my time, so I go that route. For someone with a simpler tax situation of course it may be different. There are benefits to online filing, though -- the refund can be much quicker, if you are getting one, that is.
But you can adjust your withholdings by setting an artificially high number of dependents so that you get those credits back throughout the year!
That's exactly how it works. An alternative may be a chapter 13 bankruptcy, where you're forced into a 3-5 year payment plan. Your creditors are paid first, and you get paid what's left.
That's somewhat bigoted. If you have an excessive amount of bounced payments or overdraft fees, a bank may decide to close your account and not let you reopen it. Apparently banks share this information with other banks, so that once you're blacklisted, you can't have a checking account for a few years.
+1 informative. You're spot on.
Doesn't sound very civilized to me :)
In some places they do, in some they don't :) There's no single public decency standard. The prude U.S. has gone quite far downhill as far as western cultures go.
Sorry, in most places in the civilized world it's perfectly legal to do so. Heck, there are places where people don't mind that all that much. I remember that there was quite a lot of nice flesh to be seen through windows in Copenhagen.
What Google did is different simply because there are laws specifically prohibiting unauthorized access to computer systems, the networks being an extension and integral part of the same -- otherwise those laws would be largely moot, as you could claim that, say, injecting some broadcast DDOS traffic is "just" messing with the network and not the end nodes. Google did collect data that was meant for the end nodes, effectively gaining unauthorized access not only to people's private systems, but also those of the various service providers. Now you may argue whether those laws make sense or not, but that's a separate issue.
If you sniff packets, you are getting unauthorized access to a computer system. Heck, two computer systems - the endpoints of the conversation. Remember that the network is an essential part of the system.