The only problem with the CLI is the illiteracy fostered by Windows and the still prevailing inconvenience of the DOS like command prompt. Some people think that if there is no GUI for a problem, there is no solution at all. Most people do not even know that you can actually tell a computer what to do instead of clicking on abstract symbols. We humans tell other humans all the time what to do. We left runes and hieroglyphs and symbols millenia ego, but if you tell people you can actually tell a computer what to do they will not known what you mean.
This is a facile and flawed analogy. Humans (at least native speakers of the language in question) are very, very good at dealing with incomplete or corrupt language input. Most people will be able to understand what you are saying even if you pronounce/spell things wrong, or use incorrect syntax and/or grammar. There are multiple words for the same concept, and unless you're using a really esoteric synonym, the person to whom you're speaking or writing will understand it.
None of this is the case with PC command lines. The syntax, spelling, and formatting has to be exact or else it won't work. There is very little wiggle room. If the average person had to write a perfectly spelled, perfectly grammatical sentence using only specific hand-picked words in order to be understood, then mass literacy would be impossible.
As far as I know, no one is disputing that the command line is a useful interface for many administrative and scripting functions. But these are not things that most users are going to be doing.
The important part is this: "no piece of technology targeted at the consumer market should ever require that something be done via CLI". If you require a command line, then you must accept that a majority of regular users aren't going to put up with it. Fundamentally, this is aimed at Linux: as long as a substantial number of operations require dropping down to the command line (and Linux fans defend this state of affairs), then Linux on the desktop will never be a mainstream reality.
You can do important stuff from the command line on Windows - IIS log queries with LogParser and batch image editing with ImageMagick are some of the reasons I've used this in just the past couple of days. But the average Windows user never needs to see or touch it. This is why Windows is a mainstream desktop OS and Linux is not.
PHP is well beyond fixing - mysql_escape_string and mysql_real_escape_string prove it, otherwise the first method would have been fixed rather than "replaced".
They had to do it this way for backward compatibility. If they changed the way it works, then any program that relied on the existing (buggy) behavior would break as a result.
Re:Fix? I think you mean, "migrate"
on
The PHP Singularity
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It is not as though there is no other choice. The only two things that need to be done are (a) stop writing new PHP code and (b) start migrating old PHP code to better languages. We can do web development in Python, Haskell, various Lisps, Scala, and several others.
None of these languages use standard C-style syntax. That syntax is one of several reasons why PHP is so ubiquitous: any reasonably competent C/C++/Java programmer can adapt to it quickly.
This is for consumer grade Linksys junk, not enterprise. Cisco may be dumb, but hopefully not THAT dumb
Home users may not know that Cisco = Linksys, but network administrators do. And I don't think most people are going to be very confident that a company that already screwed over one large portion of its user base in this way wouldn't do the same to the other part if it thought it could get away with it.
So who just plugs in a firewall/router and starts using it out of the box without changing the password and checking over all the settings?
Average users.
Under the Administration / Management tab, you'll find a radio button clearly marked "Remote Management", and beneath that settings for Remote Upgrade. The day I installed it I discovered remote management was enabled by default, so I immediately set it to disabled. I remember thinking "My god, that's f*ing stupid! Who would ever want to expose router management to the wild side?" Apparently this answers my question.
This should never have been enabled by default. It's terrible security practice: the default settings should be as secure as is reasonably possible, and any loosening of those settings should have to be explicitly approved by the user/administrator. This is especially true on a consumer focused product that many users aren't going to be configuring at all.
This is typical of the short-term thinking that is all too common among corporations today. They're throwing away their credibility with professional users – you know, the ones who buy the expensive Cisco gear that generates most of their profits – so they can grab a few quick bucks by data-mining the consumer market. How many network administrators are going to hear about this and rule out Cisco for future consideration? Keep in mind that the silent and unprompted nature of the update implies that there already was a back door into the routers, even before this recent change. And I don't think that Cisco can cleanly separate its credibility in the home and enterprise markets, even if this is what they're planning to do.
1 have as little of the OS loaded as possible
2 the OS image should be on a readonly image (with the image FIXED no later than 14 days before an election)
3 the poll info should be on a separate image (also readonly)
For such a simple application, why use an OS at all? Wouldn't it make more sense to run on bare metal on a microcontroller?
If there were flat-panel touch screens, or even regular flat-panel color LCD monitors, then the units would probably have been worth more than 9 euros each. I did a search and found some photos of these machines (there's one at the top of this article) and they don't have any of this. There is only what appears to be a two-line, character-based, monochrome LCD display, with a big row of labeled pushbuttons and corresponding LEDs below it. Cheap, generic, largely worthless hardware.
on windows it's making them directly money on their report spreadsheets, due to flash development tools being on windows(and there's huge use and demand still there, from flash games to stupid adverts to streaming shit).
however, they have awful time metering the income that comes from supporting the mobile platforms, they always had. they never found anyone to pay them a bill specifically just for supporting the mobile platforms(manufacturers weren't going to go for paying for it without there already being something worthwhile on it).
But there's a problem with that argument. If Flash isn't supported on mobile devices (which are a large and increasing part of web traffic), then far fewer websites are going to use Flash. How many companies want their sites to not work on the iPad or iPhone? The only reason Flash was so widely used was that everyone had the plugin, so everyone could see the site. Now, a substantial portion of web surfers don't have it and can't get it on their devices, so even if they prefer to program in Flash, web developers will have little choice but to transition away from it. There goes Adobe's income stream on Flash development tools.
The proper response then to GO TO ANOTHER RESTAURANT. I've done similar things MANY times. If going through flash is the only option, I will not purchase from that site/supplier. In the old days I used to mail them a "FYI" so they could improve, but I don't do that any more. If they're still cluesless in 2012, nothing anyone can say will change them.
You really think the average independent restaurant owner sat down himself and wrote the website in Flash? Don't be ridiculous; this was all contract work. And before you say "they should have known better" - how much do you know about the restaurant business? If you don't know how to run a restaurant properly, why do you expect restaurant owners to know how to write a website properly (or even what buzzwords to ask the contractor about)?
Lots of restaurants still have their menus or even entire sites done in flash. I notice because I use Chrome on android which does not have flash and have to switch to firefox when I hit a site that depends on it.
Then complain to those restaurants. Tell the manager/owner: "Did you know that the menus on your website don't work on the iPad or iPhone?" (Don't bother mentioning Android; just stick to the iPad/iPhone since everyone knows what it is.) Most likely this crap was done by a cut-rate web development shop without their knowledge. I don't think most restaurants want to lose business from mobile users if they can help it.
So how were they spying on us to figure this out? [...] To say that most everyone isn't using a Start button would mean they were snooping on our activities.
No need to guess, it's the Customer Experience Improvement Program. This is turned off by most experienced users for the privacy reasons you mention, and blocked by group policy at most companies. So Microsoft is getting a sample that is heavily loaded with the most inexperienced Windows users.
The problem is that anyone with half a clue turns off the privacy-invading telemetry ("Customer Improvement Program") in Windows. So the metrics Microsoft collects come exclusively from the users without a clue.
Besides, how many people are still on XP? I'd bet start button usage is higher there. I don't care what Microsoft wants to make the default settings, but I don't understand why they feel they must not give us a choice. Heck, why not design the whole Explorer GUI with XML (sort of like Firefox does for its user interface) and let users customize it however we want? Also let us set a registry key to use unsigned themes instead of hacking a DLL.
To the extent that home power users still use x86 desktops, it's because they are an open, flexible, and customizable platform (as opposed to ultra-locked-down, consumption oriented ARM devices). Microsoft needs to recognize that fact and go with it. As for business users, who are even more important to MS's bottom line, most businesses do not want to have to re-train people for no good reason.
Every time manned space exploration is discussed on Slashdot, we usually see false analogies to the Age of Exploration on Earth. These analogies are false because they fail to account for the vast, vast difference between traveling to a foreign (but inhabitable and, in fact, already inhabited) continent on Earth, and traveling to a hostile desert in outer space.
Christopher Columbus made not one trip to the New World, but four. It wasn't a one-way journey and he didn't die there; he died back in Spain, a successful and wealthy man. People who went to the New World didn't do it for shits and giggles; they did it because they calculated they could be more successful there, because they thought they would be freer in America than in Europe, or in some cases because they were expelled there as convicted criminals (this latter instance was even more common with Australia). And for the most part these were rational beliefs; America had a lot of good land available, while in Europe it was mostly in the hands of a few wealthy aristocrats. (And in an agrarian society where most of the population consisted of farmers, this was a big deal.) There were plenty of natural resources in America, and once the first communities got settled, people could have a decent life there for themselves and their children. It was far enough from Europe that the European countries couldn't meddle too deeply into local affairs, but near enough that there could be an import/export trade, communication, and a return to the homeland if need be.
The same was true of America's Western frontier expansion - yes, there was an ideological element (Manifest Destiny) but the average pioneer did so because they thought they could better make their fortune out West, either by homesteading land or by prospecting for valuable minerals. And again, the land was livable and the native people had in fact been living there for thousands of years already.
None of this applies to a mission to Mars. There is literally nothing for us out there. It's a vast desert worse than any on Earth - at least in the Sahara you can breathe. How could anyone plausibly think that going to Mars would mean greater material prosperity, or more actual freedom? (Yes, there are no governments on Mars, but remember you'll be relying on supply ships from Earth, and if they don't like what you're doing up there, you can easily be cut off.)
This absurd proposal has more in common with Jonestown than with Jamestown.
At its core, C is designed to be a sort of portable assembly language. Most of its original features were intended to map directly to PDP-11 opcodes, and fortunately these proved to be generic enough that they could be implemented much the same way on other systems. (You'd be hard-pressed to find an architecture where the C construct ++var; didn't map to an increment opcode.) This is what makes C so great for when both portability and speed are necessary.
Unfortunately, it hasn't really kept up with the improvements in modern instruction sets. MMX dates back to 1996, and while many people first dismissed it as a gimmick, it proved to be the first of many such SIMD/vector instruction sets. Today, SSE/SSE2 and their successors are a mainstay, especially in applications like video and audio encoding/decoding. Other architectures like ARM also have their own SIMD instruction sets. But C does nothing to support this. There really ought to be SIMD data types and functions built in to the language, rather than having to rely upon compiler-specific extensions or inline assembly language.
That's easy to fix, just don't use Microsoft's crappy compiler. The days when it could compete effectively with GCC are long gone, and LLVM is coming up fast too.
What if you want to use Direct2D or DirectWrite in your software? The last time I checked, GCC for Windows (MinGW) didn't support these APIs. Has this been fixed? Until you can use the full set of Windows APIs on the open compilers, many Windows programmers will have no choice but to use VC++.
How does a dedicated scaler device offer much better results than what software can do? Does it use some magic process that isn't reproducible using a Turing machine?
I'm sure you could replicate it using shaders on a video card (or more slowly on the CPU) if you had access to the exact algorithms used. But the companies that produce dedicated scaler devices aren't going to make these algorithms publicly available, since keeping them a trade secret is in their financial best interest. And Intel, AMD, and nVidia don't place the same high priority on making the absolute best scaling and deinterlacing algorithms as do companies to whom this is their core business.
What interconnect do you use for this? What kind of display devices will accept it as input?
YCbCr 4:2:2 is part of the HDMI standard, so you would use a regular HDMI cable. Videophiles would run this through a stand-alone video scaler like the Lumagen or Crystalio, so that the scaler could see the exact decompressed data from the original video stream instead of having it already pre-processed into RGB (which is a lossy process on the 8-bit channel values used in digital video).
FWIW, my Sony TV takes YCbCr input just fine, and I think most other HDMI devices do as well.
We've come a long way since the 47 registers and paltry documentation of the Commodore 64's 6567 video chip
I wouldn't call the 6567 (VIC-II) documentation "paltry." Sure, it didn't cover every weird edge case, but the official C-64 Programmer's Reference Guide included full register details and everything you needed to get access to all the chip's features.
This is a good thing - it means that open-source drivers can now be written that will be adequate for most users. Unless you are doing heavy 3D gaming or HTPC, Intel's products are fine.
For HTPC, Intel would be a great choice if only they'd finally fix that lingering 23.976 FPS bug. They just don't seem to be taking it that seriously, though, since it's existed since the G45 days at least. Also, I don't know if this is supported through the registers (even the documents may not make it clear) but it would be great to have real YCbCr 4:2:2 output – AMD cards claim to do this, but they are actually converting the data from YCbCr (on DVD/Blu-Ray) to RGB and then back to YCbCr for output. Allowing source-direct YCbCr output (which currently only dedicated SoCs can do) and fixing the 23.976 FPS problems would make Intel-based HTPCs a viable option at the high end. (Advanced videophiles want to use a dedicated scaler device, which offers much better scaling and/or deinterlacing results than what software and average standalone players can do.)
It's unfortunate that Craigslist is the most popular wanted-ads site on the Internet, since they insist on remaining stuck in the past, and making it as hard as possible for people to access their content.
Their obsession with "localism" and consistent refusal to implement an all-aread search feature (and consistent breaking of third-party sites which do this) is especially problematic. I collect electric fans from the 1980s, which often don't show up on eBay because people don't think they are worth anything, but commonly appear on Craigslist. An all-areas search would be extremely helpful, but every time one appears, Craigslist either threatens them or does something on their site to break it. If someone doesn't want to ship (I usually offer them extra money in addition to the actual shipping costs if they are willing to do so), that's fine, but it should be their choice, not Craigslist's.
This seems like a good place to ask: What is the best firewall and antivirus software available for Windows?
For home users, there's little reason not to go with Microsoft Security Essentials as your antivirus: it does a good job of detecting most malware, it's free, and it's faster and less intrusive than most third-party solutions.
Regarding firewalls, I've heard good things about the Comodo firewall, but personally I've never had a problem just using the standard Windows firewall in conjunction with a NAT device.
Make sure to keep Windows Update set to automatic, and install the security updates when they become available. More importantly, be sure to update Flash and Adobe Reader, since these are actually a bigger vector for infection now than Windows and IE. Don't install Java unless you really need it, and even if you do need it for a desktop app, make sure the browser plugin is disabled, and that you keep the VM up to date at all times. It's a big attack surface.
Much source code exists within the structure because it is built on MS Access.
MS Access is an absolutely horrible choice for any kind of production software, much less something as important as voting. Even MS tries their best to steer people away from it and toward MS SQL Server instead. What on earth were these programmers thinking?
Not after the bank is done neglecting them.
Shameful waste of resources.
True enough. But many of the cheap houses in my area are Fannie Mae foreclosures, and they're usually pretty good about getting the property sold quickly before it's had a chance to fall apart too much. In some cases, prices are low enough that they sell almost immediately. Others are short sales, which means that there is no prolonged period of vacancy since the original owner makes an agreement to sell at a loss, rather than being simply kicked out.
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The only problem with the CLI is the illiteracy fostered by Windows and the still prevailing inconvenience of the DOS like command prompt. Some people think that if there is no GUI for a problem, there is no solution at all. Most people do not even know that you can actually tell a computer what to do instead of clicking on abstract symbols. We humans tell other humans all the time what to do. We left runes and hieroglyphs and symbols millenia ego, but if you tell people you can actually tell a computer what to do they will not known what you mean.
This is a facile and flawed analogy. Humans (at least native speakers of the language in question) are very, very good at dealing with incomplete or corrupt language input. Most people will be able to understand what you are saying even if you pronounce/spell things wrong, or use incorrect syntax and/or grammar. There are multiple words for the same concept, and unless you're using a really esoteric synonym, the person to whom you're speaking or writing will understand it.
None of this is the case with PC command lines. The syntax, spelling, and formatting has to be exact or else it won't work. There is very little wiggle room. If the average person had to write a perfectly spelled, perfectly grammatical sentence using only specific hand-picked words in order to be understood, then mass literacy would be impossible.
As far as I know, no one is disputing that the command line is a useful interface for many administrative and scripting functions. But these are not things that most users are going to be doing.
The important part is this: "no piece of technology targeted at the consumer market should ever require that something be done via CLI". If you require a command line, then you must accept that a majority of regular users aren't going to put up with it. Fundamentally, this is aimed at Linux: as long as a substantial number of operations require dropping down to the command line (and Linux fans defend this state of affairs), then Linux on the desktop will never be a mainstream reality.
You can do important stuff from the command line on Windows - IIS log queries with LogParser and batch image editing with ImageMagick are some of the reasons I've used this in just the past couple of days. But the average Windows user never needs to see or touch it. This is why Windows is a mainstream desktop OS and Linux is not.
PHP is well beyond fixing - mysql_escape_string and mysql_real_escape_string prove it, otherwise the first method would have been fixed rather than "replaced".
They had to do it this way for backward compatibility. If they changed the way it works, then any program that relied on the existing (buggy) behavior would break as a result.
It is not as though there is no other choice. The only two things that need to be done are (a) stop writing new PHP code and (b) start migrating old PHP code to better languages. We can do web development in Python, Haskell, various Lisps, Scala, and several others.
None of these languages use standard C-style syntax. That syntax is one of several reasons why PHP is so ubiquitous: any reasonably competent C/C++/Java programmer can adapt to it quickly.
This is for consumer grade Linksys junk, not enterprise. Cisco may be dumb, but hopefully not THAT dumb
Home users may not know that Cisco = Linksys, but network administrators do. And I don't think most people are going to be very confident that a company that already screwed over one large portion of its user base in this way wouldn't do the same to the other part if it thought it could get away with it.
So who just plugs in a firewall/router and starts using it out of the box without changing the password and checking over all the settings?
Average users.
Under the Administration / Management tab, you'll find a radio button clearly marked "Remote Management", and beneath that settings for Remote Upgrade. The day I installed it I discovered remote management was enabled by default, so I immediately set it to disabled. I remember thinking "My god, that's f*ing stupid! Who would ever want to expose router management to the wild side?" Apparently this answers my question.
This should never have been enabled by default. It's terrible security practice: the default settings should be as secure as is reasonably possible, and any loosening of those settings should have to be explicitly approved by the user/administrator. This is especially true on a consumer focused product that many users aren't going to be configuring at all.
This is typical of the short-term thinking that is all too common among corporations today. They're throwing away their credibility with professional users – you know, the ones who buy the expensive Cisco gear that generates most of their profits – so they can grab a few quick bucks by data-mining the consumer market. How many network administrators are going to hear about this and rule out Cisco for future consideration? Keep in mind that the silent and unprompted nature of the update implies that there already was a back door into the routers, even before this recent change. And I don't think that Cisco can cleanly separate its credibility in the home and enterprise markets, even if this is what they're planning to do.
1 have as little of the OS loaded as possible 2 the OS image should be on a readonly image (with the image FIXED no later than 14 days before an election) 3 the poll info should be on a separate image (also readonly)
For such a simple application, why use an OS at all? Wouldn't it make more sense to run on bare metal on a microcontroller?
Touch screen computers from Ireland?
If there were flat-panel touch screens, or even regular flat-panel color LCD monitors, then the units would probably have been worth more than 9 euros each. I did a search and found some photos of these machines (there's one at the top of this article) and they don't have any of this. There is only what appears to be a two-line, character-based, monochrome LCD display, with a big row of labeled pushbuttons and corresponding LEDs below it. Cheap, generic, largely worthless hardware.
on windows it's making them directly money on their report spreadsheets, due to flash development tools being on windows(and there's huge use and demand still there, from flash games to stupid adverts to streaming shit). however, they have awful time metering the income that comes from supporting the mobile platforms, they always had. they never found anyone to pay them a bill specifically just for supporting the mobile platforms(manufacturers weren't going to go for paying for it without there already being something worthwhile on it).
But there's a problem with that argument. If Flash isn't supported on mobile devices (which are a large and increasing part of web traffic), then far fewer websites are going to use Flash. How many companies want their sites to not work on the iPad or iPhone? The only reason Flash was so widely used was that everyone had the plugin, so everyone could see the site. Now, a substantial portion of web surfers don't have it and can't get it on their devices, so even if they prefer to program in Flash, web developers will have little choice but to transition away from it. There goes Adobe's income stream on Flash development tools.
The proper response then to GO TO ANOTHER RESTAURANT. I've done similar things MANY times. If going through flash is the only option, I will not purchase from that site/supplier. In the old days I used to mail them a "FYI" so they could improve, but I don't do that any more. If they're still cluesless in 2012, nothing anyone can say will change them.
You really think the average independent restaurant owner sat down himself and wrote the website in Flash? Don't be ridiculous; this was all contract work. And before you say "they should have known better" - how much do you know about the restaurant business? If you don't know how to run a restaurant properly, why do you expect restaurant owners to know how to write a website properly (or even what buzzwords to ask the contractor about)?
Lots of restaurants still have their menus or even entire sites done in flash. I notice because I use Chrome on android which does not have flash and have to switch to firefox when I hit a site that depends on it.
Then complain to those restaurants. Tell the manager/owner: "Did you know that the menus on your website don't work on the iPad or iPhone?" (Don't bother mentioning Android; just stick to the iPad/iPhone since everyone knows what it is.) Most likely this crap was done by a cut-rate web development shop without their knowledge. I don't think most restaurants want to lose business from mobile users if they can help it.
So how were they spying on us to figure this out? [...] To say that most everyone isn't using a Start button would mean they were snooping on our activities.
No need to guess, it's the Customer Experience Improvement Program. This is turned off by most experienced users for the privacy reasons you mention, and blocked by group policy at most companies. So Microsoft is getting a sample that is heavily loaded with the most inexperienced Windows users.
The problem is that anyone with half a clue turns off the privacy-invading telemetry ("Customer Improvement Program") in Windows. So the metrics Microsoft collects come exclusively from the users without a clue.
Besides, how many people are still on XP? I'd bet start button usage is higher there. I don't care what Microsoft wants to make the default settings, but I don't understand why they feel they must not give us a choice. Heck, why not design the whole Explorer GUI with XML (sort of like Firefox does for its user interface) and let users customize it however we want? Also let us set a registry key to use unsigned themes instead of hacking a DLL.
To the extent that home power users still use x86 desktops, it's because they are an open, flexible, and customizable platform (as opposed to ultra-locked-down, consumption oriented ARM devices). Microsoft needs to recognize that fact and go with it. As for business users, who are even more important to MS's bottom line, most businesses do not want to have to re-train people for no good reason.
Every time manned space exploration is discussed on Slashdot, we usually see false analogies to the Age of Exploration on Earth. These analogies are false because they fail to account for the vast, vast difference between traveling to a foreign (but inhabitable and, in fact, already inhabited) continent on Earth, and traveling to a hostile desert in outer space.
Christopher Columbus made not one trip to the New World, but four. It wasn't a one-way journey and he didn't die there; he died back in Spain, a successful and wealthy man. People who went to the New World didn't do it for shits and giggles; they did it because they calculated they could be more successful there, because they thought they would be freer in America than in Europe, or in some cases because they were expelled there as convicted criminals (this latter instance was even more common with Australia). And for the most part these were rational beliefs; America had a lot of good land available, while in Europe it was mostly in the hands of a few wealthy aristocrats. (And in an agrarian society where most of the population consisted of farmers, this was a big deal.) There were plenty of natural resources in America, and once the first communities got settled, people could have a decent life there for themselves and their children. It was far enough from Europe that the European countries couldn't meddle too deeply into local affairs, but near enough that there could be an import/export trade, communication, and a return to the homeland if need be.
The same was true of America's Western frontier expansion - yes, there was an ideological element (Manifest Destiny) but the average pioneer did so because they thought they could better make their fortune out West, either by homesteading land or by prospecting for valuable minerals. And again, the land was livable and the native people had in fact been living there for thousands of years already.
None of this applies to a mission to Mars. There is literally nothing for us out there. It's a vast desert worse than any on Earth - at least in the Sahara you can breathe. How could anyone plausibly think that going to Mars would mean greater material prosperity, or more actual freedom? (Yes, there are no governments on Mars, but remember you'll be relying on supply ships from Earth, and if they don't like what you're doing up there, you can easily be cut off.)
This absurd proposal has more in common with Jonestown than with Jamestown.
At its core, C is designed to be a sort of portable assembly language. Most of its original features were intended to map directly to PDP-11 opcodes, and fortunately these proved to be generic enough that they could be implemented much the same way on other systems. (You'd be hard-pressed to find an architecture where the C construct ++var; didn't map to an increment opcode.) This is what makes C so great for when both portability and speed are necessary.
Unfortunately, it hasn't really kept up with the improvements in modern instruction sets. MMX dates back to 1996, and while many people first dismissed it as a gimmick, it proved to be the first of many such SIMD/vector instruction sets. Today, SSE/SSE2 and their successors are a mainstay, especially in applications like video and audio encoding/decoding. Other architectures like ARM also have their own SIMD instruction sets. But C does nothing to support this. There really ought to be SIMD data types and functions built in to the language, rather than having to rely upon compiler-specific extensions or inline assembly language.
That's easy to fix, just don't use Microsoft's crappy compiler. The days when it could compete effectively with GCC are long gone, and LLVM is coming up fast too.
What if you want to use Direct2D or DirectWrite in your software? The last time I checked, GCC for Windows (MinGW) didn't support these APIs. Has this been fixed? Until you can use the full set of Windows APIs on the open compilers, many Windows programmers will have no choice but to use VC++.
How does a dedicated scaler device offer much better results than what software can do? Does it use some magic process that isn't reproducible using a Turing machine?
I'm sure you could replicate it using shaders on a video card (or more slowly on the CPU) if you had access to the exact algorithms used. But the companies that produce dedicated scaler devices aren't going to make these algorithms publicly available, since keeping them a trade secret is in their financial best interest. And Intel, AMD, and nVidia don't place the same high priority on making the absolute best scaling and deinterlacing algorithms as do companies to whom this is their core business.
What interconnect do you use for this? What kind of display devices will accept it as input?
YCbCr 4:2:2 is part of the HDMI standard, so you would use a regular HDMI cable. Videophiles would run this through a stand-alone video scaler like the Lumagen or Crystalio, so that the scaler could see the exact decompressed data from the original video stream instead of having it already pre-processed into RGB (which is a lossy process on the 8-bit channel values used in digital video).
FWIW, my Sony TV takes YCbCr input just fine, and I think most other HDMI devices do as well.
We've come a long way since the 47 registers and paltry documentation of the Commodore 64's 6567 video chip
I wouldn't call the 6567 (VIC-II) documentation "paltry." Sure, it didn't cover every weird edge case, but the official C-64 Programmer's Reference Guide included full register details and everything you needed to get access to all the chip's features.
This is a good thing - it means that open-source drivers can now be written that will be adequate for most users. Unless you are doing heavy 3D gaming or HTPC, Intel's products are fine.
For HTPC, Intel would be a great choice if only they'd finally fix that lingering 23.976 FPS bug. They just don't seem to be taking it that seriously, though, since it's existed since the G45 days at least. Also, I don't know if this is supported through the registers (even the documents may not make it clear) but it would be great to have real YCbCr 4:2:2 output – AMD cards claim to do this, but they are actually converting the data from YCbCr (on DVD/Blu-Ray) to RGB and then back to YCbCr for output. Allowing source-direct YCbCr output (which currently only dedicated SoCs can do) and fixing the 23.976 FPS problems would make Intel-based HTPCs a viable option at the high end. (Advanced videophiles want to use a dedicated scaler device, which offers much better scaling and/or deinterlacing results than what software and average standalone players can do.)
It's unfortunate that Craigslist is the most popular wanted-ads site on the Internet, since they insist on remaining stuck in the past, and making it as hard as possible for people to access their content.
Their obsession with "localism" and consistent refusal to implement an all-aread search feature (and consistent breaking of third-party sites which do this) is especially problematic. I collect electric fans from the 1980s, which often don't show up on eBay because people don't think they are worth anything, but commonly appear on Craigslist. An all-areas search would be extremely helpful, but every time one appears, Craigslist either threatens them or does something on their site to break it. If someone doesn't want to ship (I usually offer them extra money in addition to the actual shipping costs if they are willing to do so), that's fine, but it should be their choice, not Craigslist's.
This seems like a good place to ask: What is the best firewall and antivirus software available for Windows?
For home users, there's little reason not to go with Microsoft Security Essentials as your antivirus: it does a good job of detecting most malware, it's free, and it's faster and less intrusive than most third-party solutions.
Regarding firewalls, I've heard good things about the Comodo firewall, but personally I've never had a problem just using the standard Windows firewall in conjunction with a NAT device.
Make sure to keep Windows Update set to automatic, and install the security updates when they become available. More importantly, be sure to update Flash and Adobe Reader, since these are actually a bigger vector for infection now than Windows and IE. Don't install Java unless you really need it, and even if you do need it for a desktop app, make sure the browser plugin is disabled, and that you keep the VM up to date at all times. It's a big attack surface.
Much source code exists within the structure because it is built on MS Access.
MS Access is an absolutely horrible choice for any kind of production software, much less something as important as voting. Even MS tries their best to steer people away from it and toward MS SQL Server instead. What on earth were these programmers thinking?
Not after the bank is done neglecting them. Shameful waste of resources.
True enough. But many of the cheap houses in my area are Fannie Mae foreclosures, and they're usually pretty good about getting the property sold quickly before it's had a chance to fall apart too much. In some cases, prices are low enough that they sell almost immediately. Others are short sales, which means that there is no prolonged period of vacancy since the original owner makes an agreement to sell at a loss, rather than being simply kicked out.