Drawing a line using hardware acceleration ends up in a bunch of geometry generated and sent to DirectX or OpenGL. That's how it's currently done, and even Cairo has a glitz backend that does just that. Qt supports this model widely. Legacy QPainter API using the OpenGL backend is available for QWidget and QWindow-based apps, and for Qt Quick 1. Qt Quick 2 has a way better performing scene graph implementation that renders using OpenGL as well.
Nobody in their fucking sane mind uses an OS-provided library/API for antialiasing or for actually rasterizing anything! It hasn't been done for ages if you care about portability at all. Anything that is portable out there will positively not use any platform APIs since they are usually a hell to deal with and are quirky (read: bugs that became "features" by default, not by design). Both Cairo and Qt do basic rasterization using their own code. If you use a cross-platform web browser, it doesn't use any platform APIs for drawing other than for copying the final bitmap to the screen. We're talking anything webkit-based, anything gecko-based, etc. If you use any recent Qt-based application, it does the same.
That's just silly. All of what you mention is still system-independent. Whether you antialias or not is just a choice of algorithms you use to draw lines. It produces identical output no matter where you run it. If you use Cairo to generate a PDF file or a JPEG file, the only differences in output will be due to floating point implementation differences. The operating system has nothing to do with anything here.
Such high-level concepts wouldn't be high level concepts if they were system dependent. Cairo offers a device-agnostic interface, just as C++ iostreams does, or C's file I/O. Many of Cairo's devices are completely system independent - pretty much any device that is not tied to the API of an operating system. So, if you use Cairo to draw into platform-specific handle on Windows or OS X then yes, your application is system dependent. But those are the only examples I think. Everything else is agnostic. With Cairo, you write to raster or vector files the same no matter what OS you're on, and the output is supposed to be the same; unless floating point implementation details interfere with that. Even output via Xlib will work the same for a given X server - you could be accessing that server from OS X, Windows, Linux, BSD, or even an OS-less embedded device that uses xlib with a stand-alone TCP/IP stack.
Nope. Templates are just another bunch of metadata that the compiler needs to instantiate them. There's no reason to extract that data over and over from text files. Borland-Pascal-style binary unit files that encapsulate object code (P-code for today's LTCG) and compiler metadata are exactly what one needs to solve it cleanly. There's no reason to think that a script couldn't extract the documented, human-readable interface description from such a file. It has been done (sans documentation) for BP unit files (did it once for TP 6 myself), so I just don't see what's so special about C++. Well, nothing is.
Borland Pascal has had it solved long time ago. Unit files were binaries that had both object code and metadata for the compiler. The compiler would literally load the binary structures from the unit file as-is, do some light-weight merging of them into the global symbol table, and that was it. Fast and easy.
Agreed, especially that.net micro framework is open source - you can actually look at how mostly MS-folk implemented it for targeting systems that would have been considered desktop PCs in 1990 or so.
And damn I hate dealing with people whose measured IQ is less than the eyelet count in their shoes.
I think it takes some social skill to have such people do your bidding. It can be done, even if they are in positions of authority. Scorn is counterproductive for you at that point.
On-line help. Learn it, use it. The best part: this approach hasn't changed much since the time of Windows 3.1. Well, the help's UI has morphed somewhat, but the overall approach of using MS-provided help to discover what's new on a particular version of Windows has remained the same for two decades now. If that's news to you, then well, what can I say?
Since when is a DVD player the part of the OS? I mean, come in, of the web browser isn't supposed to be a part of the OS, then why would a DVD player be? Besides, the issue is not about the codecs, but about decryption of the content. It's all about the steps the player has to take to authenticate itself to the drive if the official way of decrypting the content is to be followed.
The manufacturer of the machine is, again, normally providing a preinstalled DVD player software. When you pop in a DVD, it should just play. If it doesn't, it means that someone has wiped the original OS install - in such case, the DVD player software is on a recovery image bundled with the machine, it's easy enough to reinstall it. I really don't see where the problem is. If the drive is a stand-alone drive, then the manufacturer is providing the player on a medium bundled with the drive. Is that really so hard?
Besides, who the fuck cares about manufacturer-provided PowerDVD? Everyone should just use VLC and get over it.
I don't know how you manage it, but I have really not seen any place yet where a user machine would be open to the internet, not even in a whole bunch of internet cafe's, airports and hotels. Everyone and their dog has a NAS box between them and the wide world.
Security problems aside, NT 4 was quite refreshing back in the day. You could actually use the floppy drive without blocking the entire system, just as you could on Linux at the same time. Yet people commonly used Win9x and it just sucked in comparison. NT4 was pretty much the platform to develop software on. It was much easier to run the remote debugger on a Win9x machine and have Visual Studio running on an NT workstation.
There are both old applications and old machines where Windows 7 is simply a no-no. I have a perfectly nice old Thinkpad A31 that is used for debugging realtime machine control. There's simply no graphics driver support for Windows 7 on that machine. You're stuck with the slow legacy VGA driver - yes, it manages to set the resolution right, but it's visibly slow. Windows XP on that machine is very zippy, and with things set up just so it's a pleasure to use.
Frankly said, if I get Dell anything (and our office is full of Dells!), I simply reinstall the OS from MS media. I don't think there's any piece of Dell-branded software other than OMSA running on the servers that anyone has any use for.
Sometimes it's just easier to read the fine manual than to play around with discoverability. Once you read about it, and you use it, you won't forget. I'd say sometimes the discoverability is just not worth the effort, especially for something that you are supposed to just memorize and get over with. It's like Alt-F4 - you'll "discover" it only if you right click at just the right place (or hit whatever key combo is there for the "close" context menu that I never had any use for).
Nobody is supposed to do that on a device without touch input! You're supposed to use keyboard shortcuts for that! Why is that so hard to understand? I'm no MS apologist, as OS X is my daily driver, but man, I do get tired of Win 8 bashing.
Nobody fucking is born knowing that Alt-F4 is a way to close applications either. Windows 8 introduces a couple of its own keyboard shortcuts, so just google for them or read about them in their help (yes, it's there!) and you're done. What's the big problem? Win-C for charms, big deal.
I think it's all a waste of resources. They should have done an airdrop of food/supplies and had them weather it out. IIRC it was shortage of food that was the issue, they have fuel needed to duke it out.
Just because supporter of an idea "X" is saying stupid shit doesn't necessarily make idea "X" wrong. Gore is frankly doing the climate science a disservice.
I think you missed IICV's point. He clearly agrees with you. Capital is a diagnostic work. The Manifesto, on the other hand, is the "how to fix it" work, and the three of us agree that it belongs in the "terrible doctoring" category.
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Drawing a line using hardware acceleration ends up in a bunch of geometry generated and sent to DirectX or OpenGL. That's how it's currently done, and even Cairo has a glitz backend that does just that. Qt supports this model widely. Legacy QPainter API using the OpenGL backend is available for QWidget and QWindow-based apps, and for Qt Quick 1. Qt Quick 2 has a way better performing scene graph implementation that renders using OpenGL as well.
Cairo works better at rendering stuff on Windows than winapi-style libraries are. Seriously.
Nobody in their fucking sane mind uses an OS-provided library/API for antialiasing or for actually rasterizing anything! It hasn't been done for ages if you care about portability at all. Anything that is portable out there will positively not use any platform APIs since they are usually a hell to deal with and are quirky (read: bugs that became "features" by default, not by design). Both Cairo and Qt do basic rasterization using their own code. If you use a cross-platform web browser, it doesn't use any platform APIs for drawing other than for copying the final bitmap to the screen. We're talking anything webkit-based, anything gecko-based, etc. If you use any recent Qt-based application, it does the same.
That's just silly. All of what you mention is still system-independent. Whether you antialias or not is just a choice of algorithms you use to draw lines. It produces identical output no matter where you run it. If you use Cairo to generate a PDF file or a JPEG file, the only differences in output will be due to floating point implementation differences. The operating system has nothing to do with anything here.
Such high-level concepts wouldn't be high level concepts if they were system dependent. Cairo offers a device-agnostic interface, just as C++ iostreams does, or C's file I/O. Many of Cairo's devices are completely system independent - pretty much any device that is not tied to the API of an operating system. So, if you use Cairo to draw into platform-specific handle on Windows or OS X then yes, your application is system dependent. But those are the only examples I think. Everything else is agnostic. With Cairo, you write to raster or vector files the same no matter what OS you're on, and the output is supposed to be the same; unless floating point implementation details interfere with that. Even output via Xlib will work the same for a given X server - you could be accessing that server from OS X, Windows, Linux, BSD, or even an OS-less embedded device that uses xlib with a stand-alone TCP/IP stack.
Because templates.
Nope. Templates are just another bunch of metadata that the compiler needs to instantiate them. There's no reason to extract that data over and over from text files. Borland-Pascal-style binary unit files that encapsulate object code (P-code for today's LTCG) and compiler metadata are exactly what one needs to solve it cleanly. There's no reason to think that a script couldn't extract the documented, human-readable interface description from such a file. It has been done (sans documentation) for BP unit files (did it once for TP 6 myself), so I just don't see what's so special about C++. Well, nothing is.
Borland Pascal has had it solved long time ago. Unit files were binaries that had both object code and metadata for the compiler. The compiler would literally load the binary structures from the unit file as-is, do some light-weight merging of them into the global symbol table, and that was it. Fast and easy.
Agreed, especially that .net micro framework is open source - you can actually look at how mostly MS-folk implemented it for targeting systems that would have been considered desktop PCs in 1990 or so.
And damn I hate dealing with people whose measured IQ is less than the eyelet count in their shoes.
I think it takes some social skill to have such people do your bidding. It can be done, even if they are in positions of authority. Scorn is counterproductive for you at that point.
I had no way to discover anything
On-line help. Learn it, use it. The best part: this approach hasn't changed much since the time of Windows 3.1. Well, the help's UI has morphed somewhat, but the overall approach of using MS-provided help to discover what's new on a particular version of Windows has remained the same for two decades now. If that's news to you, then well, what can I say?
Since when is a DVD player the part of the OS? I mean, come in, of the web browser isn't supposed to be a part of the OS, then why would a DVD player be? Besides, the issue is not about the codecs, but about decryption of the content. It's all about the steps the player has to take to authenticate itself to the drive if the official way of decrypting the content is to be followed.
The manufacturer of the machine is, again, normally providing a preinstalled DVD player software. When you pop in a DVD, it should just play. If it doesn't, it means that someone has wiped the original OS install - in such case, the DVD player software is on a recovery image bundled with the machine, it's easy enough to reinstall it. I really don't see where the problem is. If the drive is a stand-alone drive, then the manufacturer is providing the player on a medium bundled with the drive. Is that really so hard?
Besides, who the fuck cares about manufacturer-provided PowerDVD? Everyone should just use VLC and get over it.
I can't agree more. Well said.
I don't know how you manage it, but I have really not seen any place yet where a user machine would be open to the internet, not even in a whole bunch of internet cafe's, airports and hotels. Everyone and their dog has a NAS box between them and the wide world.
Security problems aside, NT 4 was quite refreshing back in the day. You could actually use the floppy drive without blocking the entire system, just as you could on Linux at the same time. Yet people commonly used Win9x and it just sucked in comparison. NT4 was pretty much the platform to develop software on. It was much easier to run the remote debugger on a Win9x machine and have Visual Studio running on an NT workstation.
There are both old applications and old machines where Windows 7 is simply a no-no. I have a perfectly nice old Thinkpad A31 that is used for debugging realtime machine control. There's simply no graphics driver support for Windows 7 on that machine. You're stuck with the slow legacy VGA driver - yes, it manages to set the resolution right, but it's visibly slow. Windows XP on that machine is very zippy, and with things set up just so it's a pleasure to use.
Frankly said, if I get Dell anything (and our office is full of Dells!), I simply reinstall the OS from MS media. I don't think there's any piece of Dell-branded software other than OMSA running on the servers that anyone has any use for.
The manufacturer is supposed to bundle a DVD player with the machine. Look for it. There should be one.
Sometimes it's just easier to read the fine manual than to play around with discoverability. Once you read about it, and you use it, you won't forget. I'd say sometimes the discoverability is just not worth the effort, especially for something that you are supposed to just memorize and get over with. It's like Alt-F4 - you'll "discover" it only if you right click at just the right place (or hit whatever key combo is there for the "close" context menu that I never had any use for).
Nobody is supposed to do that on a device without touch input! You're supposed to use keyboard shortcuts for that! Why is that so hard to understand? I'm no MS apologist, as OS X is my daily driver, but man, I do get tired of Win 8 bashing.
Nobody fucking is born knowing that Alt-F4 is a way to close applications either. Windows 8 introduces a couple of its own keyboard shortcuts, so just google for them or read about them in their help (yes, it's there!) and you're done. What's the big problem? Win-C for charms, big deal.
I think it's all a waste of resources. They should have done an airdrop of food/supplies and had them weather it out. IIRC it was shortage of food that was the issue, they have fuel needed to duke it out.
Yeah, Antarctica had subtropical climate IIRC.
Just because supporter of an idea "X" is saying stupid shit doesn't necessarily make idea "X" wrong. Gore is frankly doing the climate science a disservice.
I'd say that a few classics by Dr. Seuss are a must, no matter what your age is. They are mostly just unabated fun and irreverence of the good sort.
I think you missed IICV's point. He clearly agrees with you. Capital is a diagnostic work. The Manifesto, on the other hand, is the "how to fix it" work, and the three of us agree that it belongs in the "terrible doctoring" category.