Fireplaces (burning wood) just make smoke. They don't make (AFAIK) nasty stuff like NOx emissions that you get from diesel engines, or all the nasty stuff you get from coal. Also importantly, wood doesn't create global-warming pollution, unless you were planning on sticking all that wood in a sealed-off coal mine or something. Burning the wood releases its carbon into the atmosphere, but leaving the wood to rot on the ground will do the same, just a little slower. Burning fossil fuels is bad because you're releasing carbon that's been locked up underground for eons, whereas with burning wood you're just releasing carbon that was only relatively recently captured from the air and turned into plant matter.
The problem with the smoke from fireplaces is if there's too many people in the area burning wood; obviously too much smoke is a respiratory hazard. So in cities, yeah, lots of fireplaces are a bad thing. But if you live out in the sticks, I fail to see how a wood-burning fireplace is really a problem.
Looks like MS is doing just great lately. So all this talk about MS circling the drain is completely denying basic reality. I personally don't like it one bit (reading through my comments for the last 15 years would show that), but I'm not going to deny reality like so many people these days do.
Basically, the Gnome developers want to chase the dominant players, and have, like Stockholm Syndrome, convinced themselves that the latest UI fads are correct.
Then, they're reinforced by people like you, who happily use Gnome3. Your complaining doesn't matter because you still use the product, instead of voting with your feet. There's no shortage of other desktop environments for Linux: KDE, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, Lxde, Unity, etc., but instead of trying them out and using one of those, you just surrender and use the one which "assumes its users are technophobes" and "hides too much information", so you're in fact admitting that you're a technophobe.
If most Linux users actually refused to use Gnome3 and switched to something else, and made sure the Gnome-pushing distros knew this, then we wouldn't see this kind of thinking infecting the Linux-verse.
Having said that, if it really annoyed me I could either switch to something else or get under the hood and modify it, and I don't.
Exactly. So why should the Gnome devs, or anyone else who designs UIs, give two shits about your opinion on "technophobe"-oriented UIs? They're just going to give you these stunted UIs and you're going to use them, because some people like them, and the people who don't will just bend over and use them anyway. So the people who do actively refuse end up being a tiny minority, not large enough to change the overall trend towards these UIs.
What kind of trouble do *you* think they're in? I sure don't see it. For sure, I don't see them growing much any time soon, because the PC market is so mature, but I sure don't see them as being in any kind of "trouble" either.
PCs aren't going anywhere. You need them to do real work, which can't be done on phones or with phone OSes which are horribly limited (by design). Obviously, you (and many others) believe that Apple seems to be dropping the ball here, and sales numbers do seem to support that currently. However, there's no evidence that people are flocking to anything else either, in sufficient numbers to matter. As much as I'd like everyone to switch to desktop Linux, and have been hoping for that for 15+ years now, I've given up on it because I just don't see it happening. Luckily, desktop Linux is IMO completely usable and in fact superior, but that doesn't equate to mass adoption. People (and companies) are just too married to the Windows platform and its "ecosystem".
So AFAICT, MS can just sit back and milk the Windows/Office cash cow indefinitely. Again, this is not a company you should invest in if you're looking for a "growth" stock, but it absolutely should have reliable revenues.
I'm (and I suspect many others) am no longer seeing any useful innovation which would support the traditional 2 year upgrade cycle
Exactly. I have a 2-3 year old Galaxy S5 now, and I really fail to see what newer phones offer that this one doesn't. The screen on this thing is already great (super AMOLED) and the resolution very good; any extra resolution really isn't going to make a noticeable difference. This phone is waterproof, unlike many others. It also has a removable battery, something that's mostly disappeared now. And it has an SDcard slot so I can expand the memory. The CPU seems pretty fast. It has a fingerprint sensor. What else would I want? (Besides a good de-bloating...)
A lot of these new "features" seem to have dubious usefulness, or actual negative usefulness. Almost no border around the screen? How the heck do you put it in a good Otterbox case to protect it from drops then? Or do they think I'm just going to forgo the case and replace it in a few months when the screen gets cracked or it gets too scratched up? Removing the headphone jack (on many models, not the S8 apparently)? That's not helpful, that's a big PITA for me because I use that a lot. Thinner? I don't give a shit; I keep my phone in an big Otterbox defender case already.
It seems that the main driver for phone upgrades now is the lack of software updates.
Exactly. The problem is that the right-wing stuff is a mix of 1, 2, and 4, while the "mainstream news" these days has a whole lot of 2 and 4. So when left-leaners talk about "fake news" on the right where they're really talking mostly about #1, the right-wingers respond but fail to recognize that the mainstream/left stuff is devoid of #1, but the 2 and 4 stuff still makes that side look bad.
I'm just pointing out that your logic is faulty, because you imply that the sheer size or valuation of the company should be sufficient to assume that the general public, or at least the audience, knows about it so that providing background information on it is unnecessary. We wouldn't do this with Cargill.
Now if you had said that, because of Slashdot's userbase and its technical/computing background, it's safe to assume that readers here are sufficiently familiar with Microsoft to make background information unnecessary, I would completely agree. But I would also say the same for Mozilla, which is a much, much smaller and less valuable company than MS. Same goes for Wikimedia Foundation, the FSF, Newegg.com, etc. Background info on those companies (or non-profit foundations) are not necessary here. Company size and valuation really isn't important, it's the audience of this site and the nature of the company in question.
I realize that, I was responding to the OP who claimed "it's fair to assume most people know of them" solely based on the valuation of the company. He said nothing about these "most people" being on Slashdot, so I assumed he meant the general population. I pointed out that this is fallacious logic based on other companies with similar valuations which many people have probably either never heard of, or really know nothing about.
MS has billions in the bank. They can afford the best lawyers. And their EULA explicitly absolves them of responsibility for any problems caused by their software, and EULAs have been successfully tested in court. Exactly how far do you think you're going to get with a lawsuit? Good luck with that.
AFAIC, if your company gets burned by MS like this, it's your own stupid fault. This stuff isn't a surprise.
For one, you can get a Mac with MacOS. Yes, it's a small share of the market, but it is somewhere close to 10% last I heard, which is nothing to sneeze at. They even sell these things at fancy mall stores, and have for over a decade.
Secondly, you can buy a computer with Linux (usually Ubuntu). I think there was an article here a few days ago about being able to buy a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu for less than the same machine with Windows, which is different than the past. Of course, the marketshare here is pretty tiny too, even smaller than Macs. And of course, you can always load Linux yourself, which is really easy to do these days.
The fact is, you DO have choices. The problem is, almost no one actually does. At least 85% of PC users continue to use Windows despite shenanigans like this, and there's no sign this number is going to decrease significantly any time soon. It really doesn't matter what MS does; no matter how poorly they treat users, almost none of them will abandon the platform, so MS might as well amp up the evil and screw these people as hard as it wants for more profit (from advertising, telemetry, spyware, etc.). Personally, I think it's funny when people whine about how much of a pain Windows 10 is being, and repeat my mantra: "if you don't like it, don't use it". That just seems to piss them off, which makes me laugh even more. They've dug themselves into a hole and now they refuse to climb out, so I have no sympathy.
Did you know that the two largest privately-held companies are Cargill and Koch Industries ($120B and $115B respectively)?
How many people on the street (or on Slashdot) have heard of these companies, even know the first thing about these companies, how large they are, or what they do? I barely know anything about either of these companies, except that Koch is associated with the infamous Koch brothers, and my quick Google search shows that Cargill is involved in agriculture.
If you don't like systemd, you're free to choose a Linux distro which doesn't have it. There are plenty of such distros around, including Slackware and Devuan. And if that's not good enough for you, you're free to roll your own distro. It isn't that hard to do, and all the components are freely available.
So, almost by definition, if IBM or any other company is making money they're also making the world a better place one computer or pot or pan or refrigerator or jet airplane at a time.
That's demonstrably untrue. There's entire industries that actually make the world a worse place, while making money doing so. Telemarketing is one good example here, payday loan stores are another (plus actual loan sharks), Nigerian scammers are another, and patent trolls are yet another. I'd also argue that there's many other industries that are really bad for the world too and only exist because of bad government regulation: tax preparers and car dealerships come to mind here. Both of these are just parasites, though the tax preparers are frequently necessary for many people because the US tax code is such a complicated mess. The real estate bubble in the previous decade is another great example of people and businesses making lots of money while making the world a worse place, driving up the cost of real estate while not providing any actual value.
Now back to IBM, because this is really tangential: my argument there was that IBM doesn't need to be changing the computing market. Just because they did that in the past in a big way doesn't mean that needs to remain their mission forevermore. After the whole PS/2 debacle, it should have been pretty obvious that IBM was a has-been, and was never going to be the pioneer and world-changer in personal computing that they once were (entirely by accident I might add; they thought their PC would be a small thing and just help sell more mainframes). So they've moved their business into other areas, which is fine. To my knowledge, they still do a lot of mainframe stuff, along with professional services, along with research and patents (for instance, I believe they invented the copper-on-silicon process back in the 90s which is now critical to chipmaking). The OP seems to think they're somehow "failing" because they aren't trying to be a big force in the computing market (outside of mainframes), and that's simply silly. Lots of very old businesses no longer do the same stuff they started out in, yet remain highly successful. Nokia, for a while, was the leading mobile phone maker, but they started out making tires IIRC. There's a bunch of Asian companies that do entirely different things now than what they started out doing.
No, because whenever you add new syntax, you have to avoid breaking compatibility with old syntax.
No, you don't. You just need to tell your compiler to use the older standard. GCC does this with the --std= flag. If your code won't work in C++17, just add "--std=c++0x" or something.
And just how successful python 3 is? In every shop I worked in, they insisted on using python 2.
The problem with Python is they didn't do it like C++. To run a Python2 program, you actually have to have a Python2 interpreter/runtime and libraries compatible with it. You can't just take the latest Python3 interpreter and pass it a "--std=python2" flag and make it work. So you end up having to have two entirely separate and parallel installations of Python. It's a big mess. C++ isn't like this; you can even compile your libraries with a different C++ standard than your application code or each other, because the linker will resolve the linkages.
The problem isn't backwards compatibility, the problem is that Python did a terrible job of making a new version of their language.
It doesn't need to be that backwards-compatible. When you compile C++, you can easily set the compiler to use a particular standard (c++0x, c++11, c++14, etc.).
So if you have old code, simply direct your new compiler to follow the older standard instead of the latest one. You don't need to drag everyone else down.
First, those 10 things aren't "organs", they're just features. Your fingers aren't organs either, even though you probably need them to function normally every day.
Secondly, the article is partly wrong. For #1, it even admits that the "third eyelid" is useful for ensuring tear drainage and sweeping debris away. #9 is flat-out wrong: the appendix, while not essential to life, is very useful when you have big problems with your GI system. It's basically like a first-stage bootloader for your gut bacteria. You may never even need it, but when you do, it's really useful. #10 isn't a misfeature, it's a by-product of the way we develop as embryos. Take away male nipples and you lose female ones too, which really do have an important function. Eliminating them without losing the female ones would probably require a significant re-engineering of the genetic code, which doesn't happen with an evolved system. #4 sounds like #9: calling something "useless" because we don't fully understand it yet. Maybe we really do make good use of the ability to detect pheromones (or then again, maybe it causes us to make terrible choices for dating/marriage partners). For #3, I've read some people claim that armpit and pubic hair does serve some important function WRT bacteria, I forget exactly what now. It may have some truth or may be bunk, I don't know, but as seen with #9 and our complete lack of understanding until very very recently the role of gut bacteria (such as with its effect on obesity), it does seem like our medical sciences have largely overlooked the roles of bacteria on human health over the years.
So back to C++, just because you don't see the need for a feature doesn't mean that it's actually useless. A good example here is the 'volatile' keyword. It's useless in most C++ programming, but absolutely essential if you're doing low-level hardware access on an embedded system.
No, but I do here [sic] people who go in to modify something say "Gosh, I wish there weren't so many different types of connectors, why does this screw have a starburst and this one a rhombus on it?"
Well if people had adopted a really good screw-head standard way back, we wouldn't have this mess. We have different types because better standards have been invented, and the old ones are utter crap (particularly slotted and Philips heads). Now we have Robinson (square) and Torx and e-Torx which are much better fastener heads than what came before. Strangely, Robinsons have been around for about a century now, but only started catching on in recent years for some reason (I believe patents had something to do with it).
BTW, do you really now know how to spell "hear"? I'm seeing so many mistakes like this lately, I'm starting to wonder if everyone is using voice-to-text to compose messages, and the result is a complete mess.
Remember that for every Clever Lad who writes this code, an army of dudes has to come through and read and modify it over time.
Try removing a Philips-head screw that's been over-torqued or just from age/corrosion has gotten stuck. Now try it with a Torx-head screw. On the former, you're going to be drilling it out after stripping out the head, whereas the Torx will come right out. There's a reason we invent new standards: because the old ones are frequently shit. Just look at the early versions of Java.
That's not to speak against it- merely that as the language gets broader, supporting it becomes slower and more expensive.
Yep, there's really no way around that. The alternative is stagnation (getting stuck with a shitty old language that has demonstrable deficiencies (again, see early Java)), or having people constantly jumping to new languages that aren't much different from the old ones (which we're seeing to an extent now: Rust, Go, D, etc.), and this incurs its own costs.
That's not the only reason you don't want exceptions. Exceptions are non-deterministic. Anything that's non-deterministic must be disabled on a mission-critical realtime system. This even includes processor caches.
Doing things statically at compile time rather than at runtime is how you get high performance. If you want lousy performance, then there's other languages that are easier to write in, such as Python or Java, that do tons of stuff at runtime.
Similar, but not exactly. The OP is pointing out why experts are frequently bad at imparting their knowledge to others, particularly laypeople. This is a valid hypothesis.
Trump supporters, OTOH, go much farther, and simply discount anything claimed by experts if it contradicts their "gut feeling" or what they "know" or what their preacher tells them.
Every time I read something like this, I'm so glad that I quickly dismissed the idea of buying an American car the last time I needed a new car, and stuck with Japanese. Japanese cars are so much easier to work on and so much better designed. (Don't get European though; if anything those cars are *even worse* than American cars for repairability.)
Slashdot Mirror
Fireplaces (burning wood) just make smoke. They don't make (AFAIK) nasty stuff like NOx emissions that you get from diesel engines, or all the nasty stuff you get from coal. Also importantly, wood doesn't create global-warming pollution, unless you were planning on sticking all that wood in a sealed-off coal mine or something. Burning the wood releases its carbon into the atmosphere, but leaving the wood to rot on the ground will do the same, just a little slower. Burning fossil fuels is bad because you're releasing carbon that's been locked up underground for eons, whereas with burning wood you're just releasing carbon that was only relatively recently captured from the air and turned into plant matter.
The problem with the smoke from fireplaces is if there's too many people in the area burning wood; obviously too much smoke is a respiratory hazard. So in cities, yeah, lots of fireplaces are a bad thing. But if you live out in the sticks, I fail to see how a wood-burning fireplace is really a problem.
I need to add here that there's zero evidence that Microsoft is in any trouble, in fact it's quite the opposite:
Microsoft earnings blow past estimates in every category, beats Street
Looks like MS is doing just great lately. So all this talk about MS circling the drain is completely denying basic reality. I personally don't like it one bit (reading through my comments for the last 15 years would show that), but I'm not going to deny reality like so many people these days do.
Basically, the Gnome developers want to chase the dominant players, and have, like Stockholm Syndrome, convinced themselves that the latest UI fads are correct.
Then, they're reinforced by people like you, who happily use Gnome3. Your complaining doesn't matter because you still use the product, instead of voting with your feet. There's no shortage of other desktop environments for Linux: KDE, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, Lxde, Unity, etc., but instead of trying them out and using one of those, you just surrender and use the one which "assumes its users are technophobes" and "hides too much information", so you're in fact admitting that you're a technophobe.
If most Linux users actually refused to use Gnome3 and switched to something else, and made sure the Gnome-pushing distros knew this, then we wouldn't see this kind of thinking infecting the Linux-verse.
Having said that, if it really annoyed me I could either switch to something else or get under the hood and modify it, and I don't.
Exactly. So why should the Gnome devs, or anyone else who designs UIs, give two shits about your opinion on "technophobe"-oriented UIs? They're just going to give you these stunted UIs and you're going to use them, because some people like them, and the people who don't will just bend over and use them anyway. So the people who do actively refuse end up being a tiny minority, not large enough to change the overall trend towards these UIs.
What kind of trouble do *you* think they're in? I sure don't see it. For sure, I don't see them growing much any time soon, because the PC market is so mature, but I sure don't see them as being in any kind of "trouble" either.
PCs aren't going anywhere. You need them to do real work, which can't be done on phones or with phone OSes which are horribly limited (by design). Obviously, you (and many others) believe that Apple seems to be dropping the ball here, and sales numbers do seem to support that currently. However, there's no evidence that people are flocking to anything else either, in sufficient numbers to matter. As much as I'd like everyone to switch to desktop Linux, and have been hoping for that for 15+ years now, I've given up on it because I just don't see it happening. Luckily, desktop Linux is IMO completely usable and in fact superior, but that doesn't equate to mass adoption. People (and companies) are just too married to the Windows platform and its "ecosystem".
So AFAICT, MS can just sit back and milk the Windows/Office cash cow indefinitely. Again, this is not a company you should invest in if you're looking for a "growth" stock, but it absolutely should have reliable revenues.
I'm (and I suspect many others) am no longer seeing any useful innovation which would support the traditional 2 year upgrade cycle
Exactly. I have a 2-3 year old Galaxy S5 now, and I really fail to see what newer phones offer that this one doesn't. The screen on this thing is already great (super AMOLED) and the resolution very good; any extra resolution really isn't going to make a noticeable difference. This phone is waterproof, unlike many others. It also has a removable battery, something that's mostly disappeared now. And it has an SDcard slot so I can expand the memory. The CPU seems pretty fast. It has a fingerprint sensor. What else would I want? (Besides a good de-bloating...)
A lot of these new "features" seem to have dubious usefulness, or actual negative usefulness. Almost no border around the screen? How the heck do you put it in a good Otterbox case to protect it from drops then? Or do they think I'm just going to forgo the case and replace it in a few months when the screen gets cracked or it gets too scratched up? Removing the headphone jack (on many models, not the S8 apparently)? That's not helpful, that's a big PITA for me because I use that a lot. Thinner? I don't give a shit; I keep my phone in an big Otterbox defender case already.
It seems that the main driver for phone upgrades now is the lack of software updates.
Exactly. The problem is that the right-wing stuff is a mix of 1, 2, and 4, while the "mainstream news" these days has a whole lot of 2 and 4. So when left-leaners talk about "fake news" on the right where they're really talking mostly about #1, the right-wingers respond but fail to recognize that the mainstream/left stuff is devoid of #1, but the 2 and 4 stuff still makes that side look bad.
I'm just pointing out that your logic is faulty, because you imply that the sheer size or valuation of the company should be sufficient to assume that the general public, or at least the audience, knows about it so that providing background information on it is unnecessary. We wouldn't do this with Cargill.
Now if you had said that, because of Slashdot's userbase and its technical/computing background, it's safe to assume that readers here are sufficiently familiar with Microsoft to make background information unnecessary, I would completely agree. But I would also say the same for Mozilla, which is a much, much smaller and less valuable company than MS. Same goes for Wikimedia Foundation, the FSF, Newegg.com, etc. Background info on those companies (or non-profit foundations) are not necessary here. Company size and valuation really isn't important, it's the audience of this site and the nature of the company in question.
Here's a discussion on StackOverflow about it.
I realize that, I was responding to the OP who claimed "it's fair to assume most people know of them" solely based on the valuation of the company. He said nothing about these "most people" being on Slashdot, so I assumed he meant the general population. I pointed out that this is fallacious logic based on other companies with similar valuations which many people have probably either never heard of, or really know nothing about.
MS has billions in the bank. They can afford the best lawyers. And their EULA explicitly absolves them of responsibility for any problems caused by their software, and EULAs have been successfully tested in court. Exactly how far do you think you're going to get with a lawsuit? Good luck with that.
AFAIC, if your company gets burned by MS like this, it's your own stupid fault. This stuff isn't a surprise.
That is simply not true.
For one, you can get a Mac with MacOS. Yes, it's a small share of the market, but it is somewhere close to 10% last I heard, which is nothing to sneeze at. They even sell these things at fancy mall stores, and have for over a decade.
Secondly, you can buy a computer with Linux (usually Ubuntu). I think there was an article here a few days ago about being able to buy a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu for less than the same machine with Windows, which is different than the past. Of course, the marketshare here is pretty tiny too, even smaller than Macs. And of course, you can always load Linux yourself, which is really easy to do these days.
The fact is, you DO have choices. The problem is, almost no one actually does. At least 85% of PC users continue to use Windows despite shenanigans like this, and there's no sign this number is going to decrease significantly any time soon. It really doesn't matter what MS does; no matter how poorly they treat users, almost none of them will abandon the platform, so MS might as well amp up the evil and screw these people as hard as it wants for more profit (from advertising, telemetry, spyware, etc.). Personally, I think it's funny when people whine about how much of a pain Windows 10 is being, and repeat my mantra: "if you don't like it, don't use it". That just seems to piss them off, which makes me laugh even more. They've dug themselves into a hole and now they refuse to climb out, so I have no sympathy.
Did you know that the two largest privately-held companies are Cargill and Koch Industries ($120B and $115B respectively)?
How many people on the street (or on Slashdot) have heard of these companies, even know the first thing about these companies, how large they are, or what they do? I barely know anything about either of these companies, except that Koch is associated with the infamous Koch brothers, and my quick Google search shows that Cargill is involved in agriculture.
Hahahaha!!! You really think Trump's DOJ is going to prosecute that case? Wake up.
If you don't like systemd, you're free to choose a Linux distro which doesn't have it. There are plenty of such distros around, including Slackware and Devuan. And if that's not good enough for you, you're free to roll your own distro. It isn't that hard to do, and all the components are freely available.
Try that with Windows.
So, almost by definition, if IBM or any other company is making money they're also making the world a better place one computer or pot or pan or refrigerator or jet airplane at a time.
That's demonstrably untrue. There's entire industries that actually make the world a worse place, while making money doing so. Telemarketing is one good example here, payday loan stores are another (plus actual loan sharks), Nigerian scammers are another, and patent trolls are yet another. I'd also argue that there's many other industries that are really bad for the world too and only exist because of bad government regulation: tax preparers and car dealerships come to mind here. Both of these are just parasites, though the tax preparers are frequently necessary for many people because the US tax code is such a complicated mess. The real estate bubble in the previous decade is another great example of people and businesses making lots of money while making the world a worse place, driving up the cost of real estate while not providing any actual value.
Now back to IBM, because this is really tangential: my argument there was that IBM doesn't need to be changing the computing market. Just because they did that in the past in a big way doesn't mean that needs to remain their mission forevermore. After the whole PS/2 debacle, it should have been pretty obvious that IBM was a has-been, and was never going to be the pioneer and world-changer in personal computing that they once were (entirely by accident I might add; they thought their PC would be a small thing and just help sell more mainframes). So they've moved their business into other areas, which is fine. To my knowledge, they still do a lot of mainframe stuff, along with professional services, along with research and patents (for instance, I believe they invented the copper-on-silicon process back in the 90s which is now critical to chipmaking). The OP seems to think they're somehow "failing" because they aren't trying to be a big force in the computing market (outside of mainframes), and that's simply silly. Lots of very old businesses no longer do the same stuff they started out in, yet remain highly successful. Nokia, for a while, was the leading mobile phone maker, but they started out making tires IIRC. There's a bunch of Asian companies that do entirely different things now than what they started out doing.
No, we're not. We're in an alternate universe, one where society collapses in a few years, leaving us living like we're in The Walking Dead.
No, because whenever you add new syntax, you have to avoid breaking compatibility with old syntax.
No, you don't. You just need to tell your compiler to use the older standard. GCC does this with the --std= flag. If your code won't work in C++17, just add "--std=c++0x" or something.
And just how successful python 3 is? In every shop I worked in, they insisted on using python 2.
The problem with Python is they didn't do it like C++. To run a Python2 program, you actually have to have a Python2 interpreter/runtime and libraries compatible with it. You can't just take the latest Python3 interpreter and pass it a "--std=python2" flag and make it work. So you end up having to have two entirely separate and parallel installations of Python. It's a big mess. C++ isn't like this; you can even compile your libraries with a different C++ standard than your application code or each other, because the linker will resolve the linkages.
The problem isn't backwards compatibility, the problem is that Python did a terrible job of making a new version of their language.
It doesn't need to be that backwards-compatible. When you compile C++, you can easily set the compiler to use a particular standard (c++0x, c++11, c++14, etc.).
So if you have old code, simply direct your new compiler to follow the older standard instead of the latest one. You don't need to drag everyone else down.
First, those 10 things aren't "organs", they're just features. Your fingers aren't organs either, even though you probably need them to function normally every day.
Secondly, the article is partly wrong. For #1, it even admits that the "third eyelid" is useful for ensuring tear drainage and sweeping debris away. #9 is flat-out wrong: the appendix, while not essential to life, is very useful when you have big problems with your GI system. It's basically like a first-stage bootloader for your gut bacteria. You may never even need it, but when you do, it's really useful. #10 isn't a misfeature, it's a by-product of the way we develop as embryos. Take away male nipples and you lose female ones too, which really do have an important function. Eliminating them without losing the female ones would probably require a significant re-engineering of the genetic code, which doesn't happen with an evolved system. #4 sounds like #9: calling something "useless" because we don't fully understand it yet. Maybe we really do make good use of the ability to detect pheromones (or then again, maybe it causes us to make terrible choices for dating/marriage partners). For #3, I've read some people claim that armpit and pubic hair does serve some important function WRT bacteria, I forget exactly what now. It may have some truth or may be bunk, I don't know, but as seen with #9 and our complete lack of understanding until very very recently the role of gut bacteria (such as with its effect on obesity), it does seem like our medical sciences have largely overlooked the roles of bacteria on human health over the years.
So back to C++, just because you don't see the need for a feature doesn't mean that it's actually useless. A good example here is the 'volatile' keyword. It's useless in most C++ programming, but absolutely essential if you're doing low-level hardware access on an embedded system.
No, but I do here [sic] people who go in to modify something say "Gosh, I wish there weren't so many different types of connectors, why does this screw have a starburst and this one a rhombus on it?"
Well if people had adopted a really good screw-head standard way back, we wouldn't have this mess. We have different types because better standards have been invented, and the old ones are utter crap (particularly slotted and Philips heads). Now we have Robinson (square) and Torx and e-Torx which are much better fastener heads than what came before. Strangely, Robinsons have been around for about a century now, but only started catching on in recent years for some reason (I believe patents had something to do with it).
BTW, do you really now know how to spell "hear"? I'm seeing so many mistakes like this lately, I'm starting to wonder if everyone is using voice-to-text to compose messages, and the result is a complete mess.
Remember that for every Clever Lad who writes this code, an army of dudes has to come through and read and modify it over time.
Try removing a Philips-head screw that's been over-torqued or just from age/corrosion has gotten stuck. Now try it with a Torx-head screw. On the former, you're going to be drilling it out after stripping out the head, whereas the Torx will come right out. There's a reason we invent new standards: because the old ones are frequently shit. Just look at the early versions of Java.
That's not to speak against it- merely that as the language gets broader, supporting it becomes slower and more expensive.
Yep, there's really no way around that. The alternative is stagnation (getting stuck with a shitty old language that has demonstrable deficiencies (again, see early Java)), or having people constantly jumping to new languages that aren't much different from the old ones (which we're seeing to an extent now: Rust, Go, D, etc.), and this incurs its own costs.
That's not the only reason you don't want exceptions. Exceptions are non-deterministic. Anything that's non-deterministic must be disabled on a mission-critical realtime system. This even includes processor caches.
Doing things statically at compile time rather than at runtime is how you get high performance. If you want lousy performance, then there's other languages that are easier to write in, such as Python or Java, that do tons of stuff at runtime.
Similar, but not exactly. The OP is pointing out why experts are frequently bad at imparting their knowledge to others, particularly laypeople. This is a valid hypothesis.
Trump supporters, OTOH, go much farther, and simply discount anything claimed by experts if it contradicts their "gut feeling" or what they "know" or what their preacher tells them.
"Divide and conquer" is one of the oldest strategies in warfare.
Every time I read something like this, I'm so glad that I quickly dismissed the idea of buying an American car the last time I needed a new car, and stuck with Japanese. Japanese cars are so much easier to work on and so much better designed. (Don't get European though; if anything those cars are *even worse* than American cars for repairability.)