I also see ads for the IQ quiz that say "X of your friends think you're an idiot", but that one seems pretty believable to me.
I think I took the IQ quiz once, worked all the way through and bailed when it wanted a phone number. Most of the quizzes, despite all hyperbole to the contrary, are IMO completely benign. I am willing to share my personal interests and beliefs... that's why I'm on FB: to communicate these kinds of things with people. I don't mind targeted ads because if any ads are targeted properly for me, then that means I won't see all those stupid ads with pictures of pretty girls saying "Who is searching for you?" or whatever the current incarnation of "Punch the monkey" is nowadays. I saw an ad on FB the other day for an architectural firm that specializes in remodeling houses. They had dozens of cool photos on their site showing off their work. I have no interest in remodeling my house, mostly because I'm broke, but I enjoyed looking at the photos and fantasizing for a moment about the cool things I could do. Other times I see ads for Star Trek T-shirts or some other nerdy thing that appeals to me. I'm perfectly happy seeing those. Of course, there are still the stupid annoying or clearly scammy ads, but at least they're not animated (or if there are any, my Firefox extensions hide those from me).
Of course, I might be singing a different tune when brownshirts start rounding me up because I'm a heterosexual, conservative Christian, who supports the military, and capitalism, or as Janet Napolitano would say, a "ticking time-bomb". But frankly, if some marketing company knows I like science fiction, progressive music and "The Simpsons", I just can't get all hot and lathered over that. Maybe somewhere a light will click on over someone's head and they'll start making "Vanilly Crunch" again.
I just picked up an 8GB SDHC micro, i.e., a chip the size of my pinky fingernail for $30, for my Sansa music player. I've been using computers for 30 years, and I'm still in a state of constant amazement. My first harddrive was around $700 for 100MB.
They not only seem unable to create a character to replace 007, they also need to spend sixteen times as much to create the same level of special effects.
Have you seen "Dr. No"? The fanciest gadget Bond uses in that movie is pasting a hair to a door to see if someone uses it while he's gone. The movie was extremely modest in terms of production compared to today's movies which often end up being little more than an actor running around inside a CGI video game.
The movie succeeded so well because it was a great movie. I haven't seen any recent Bond movies, but I bet they aren't even in the same time zone, relying instead on gadgets, effects (plenty of explosions) and sexy women... not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's a completely different kind of movie, essentially a comic book featuring an invincible, emotionless superhero, in stunning but ultimately drama-free action.
The problem is we're all spoiled by eye candy. I saw "Star Trek" and loved it, but there's this lingering doubt in my mind that the reason I loved it was because it looked really cool (best visual effects ever... I'm a total sucker for spaceships) and it featured actors repeating stereotyped lines and actions that most of us have been familiar with since childhood. I can accept that this movie was more of an introduction or prelude to a revitalized Star Trek, and think it did a good job at re-establishing the milieu, which frankly had become paint-by-numbers/phone-it-in stale. But despite all that, I thought "ST: TMP" was far more in the spirit of the concept, despite the pastel pajamas.
When the inevitable sequel (or dare I hope, a TV series?) happens, and it doesn't give me a big dose of wonder, philosophy and real human stories that made Star Trek what it is, then it will have, like so many franchises, been reduced to a mere 2D cartoon version of itself.
The real question to me is, could J. J. Abrams have made a compelling low-budget Star Trek movie? Maybe so... and if so, that's what the next one needs to be: a movie that would work if it were done on the cardboard sets and with the primitive effects available to the original series in 1965. I give him a pass this time around. Just seeing Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock and the rest all over again was well worth it, and the timeline twists are a refreshing change. Plus, the satisfaction of knowing that thousands of fanboys are so angry their latex pointy ears are melting off their heads is a nice piece of schadenfreude.
Now he's got all the toys out of the boxes and lined up... this is where the game gets really interesting and challenging, or it remains just toys.
The same is true with James Bond. It's not a question of whether "Dr. No" could be made today. Of course it could, and for a million dollars (inflation notwithstanding) it would look and sound better than original in pure technical terms. The real question is whether any studio would try to make it?
I seriously doubt it, and there's the whole problem with Hollywood today.
Right. My comment wasn't meant to be a criticism of MR. I think those guys are total boffins, and wish them all the luck in the world.
"May your code compile on the first try, your machine never crash, and all your pointers be valid!"
I also respect Microsoft for creating and supporting pure research. My criticism to them was that there is precious little innovation to be found in Microsoft products, not because they lack the brain-power (I worked with an ex-Microsoftie and he was a very sharp guy), but because well, their interests and their goals are really not aligned with the concept of innovation, or even giving customers a decent product. Not at the highest levels, despite all the hard-working thousands of engineers, testers and other folks in the trench who are trying to do the best work that they can. Microsoft isn't a software company, they're a monopoly company.
Software is, these days, almost an after-thought, a means to an end. Not the end of making money, which is the goal of all business, but the end of how they make money: Unfairly.
I'm with you. After several years of AdBlock/FlashBlock/NoScript, I find it very difficult to even read a page with an animated ad. The more animation involved the more I'm inclined to _not_ do business with the advertiser (and of course, the advertisers with the worst ads are usually scams and/or garbage anyway).
Static ads usually don't bug me, unless they are really gross or distasteful in some way.
So what? The reality is the most popular products for MS platforms were not MS inventions.
Is there any major product from Microsoft, except Windows itself that actually originated at Microsoft?
Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but 95% of their innovation was purchased, not made. Take a look at wild stuff MS Research is doing sometime. Does _anything_ they do ever end up in a product?
You're right, but I'll give him a pass _this_ time around. I am not without criticism, but the very act of resetting was well-served by this movie that focuses on action and adventure rather than something like "Solaris" which is actually much closer to Star Trek of old. It wasn't so much a movie, but a first chapter.
Kinda like the movie "Remo Williams" where the set up was actually the majority and most interesting part of the movie.
I hope (and expect) that a second movie (or dare I wish?) a TV show, would take the new setup and do, er, Star Trek, with it. But the franchise needed a real kick in the ass, and it got it. If the next movie is just another rehash with a generic villain and lots of narrow escapes and derring-do but none of the philosophy and wonder, _then_ and not until then, will I have a problem.
Well, I'm sorry you feel this way, but many of us loyal fans thought the movie was great, and who cares about canon anymore? They screwed up canon so much it _needed_ to be thrown out. How can anyone care about the canon since it's been butchered by every movie and TV show in the franchise in the past decade (sometimes to good effect, sometimes for no good reason).
I don't want a rehash of some show I've been watching reruns of for 30 years. I want something new in Star Trek, but something that maintains the elements that I loved about the original. Despite this movie's emphasis on action and effects, I feel like I got what I wanted.
As far as I'm concerned Star Trek died a long slow death over the past decade (ever since DS9 ended), becoming a huge bloated enterprise (no pun intended) that was more interested in regurgitating the same old formula over and over than in actually telling us new stories about interesting people in some way that does NOT firmly reestablish the precise status quo ante right after the last act break.
This movie, which I really enjoyed, sets the stage for just that, and manages to be really fun and exciting at the same time.
Well, "Abort" means you recognize that it's broken and are telling it to give up, this is what they did to DOS, which brought us Windows 95. In many ways, it was a lateral move.
"Retry" means, yes, we admit it's broken, but we can do better. This was Windows NT.
I would point out that Windows 2008 Small Business Edition doesn't install on less than 4GB RAM.
I know that's a server OS, but I find it a little weird to think that Windows 2000 would work just fine in 64MB, as long as you didn't open more than a couple of apps. I know, I used it that way for about 6 months on my first laptop.
Yes, it was a little slow, but for basic editing, Web browsing and stuff like that, it was perfectly fine.
Isn't it more likely that this hidden partition was the "restore" partition that most laptop manufacturers include because permanently (that's the effect for most users) stealing 5GB of your hard drive saves them 23 cents compared to giving you some $&@^$#^$ physical media?
So why are they just now making this suggestion?! Windows has turned off filename extensions by default for 14 years now... since Windows 95!
In my opinion it is possibly the single stupidest thing Microsoft has ever done, and is always the first thing I turn off when sitting down at a Windows machine. Well, after turning off those stupid sounds and setting the UI to the Windows 2000 theme instead of that butt-ugly default theme in XP (and Vista too, if I used it, which I don't).
President Obama has suggested additional reductions in nuclear arms held by the US and Russia
The President needs a big clue. Those nuclear arms are for deterrence against all the suicidal nutjobs out there trying to get their hands on their own bombs. I mean we need some way to convince them not to strap a nuke on and walk into a city and...
Reminds me of this weird guy in some of my CS classes back in the mid 80s who always used to brag about how long his programs were, as if more code was good. I remember him bragging about finishing some project with 5000 lines of code when I did the same thing in like 1500 line. I never took the time to figure out if he was bragging about writing thorough comments, which isn't _completely_ stupid, or if he was just a complete moron. He came across as the latter.
Well said, Anonymous. MFC really was just shoehorning Win32 into C++. One of the things I was able to do was take MFC, which wasn't a bad start and fleshed it out to make it actually easier to use than Win32, which by itself it most certainly was not. One instance I recall in particular was creating a base class called CActiveXControl that made including an ActiveX GUI object into your window as easy as including any standard Windows control. The biggest problem with MFC was that there was _so_ much low-hanging fruit that could have been plucked to make the thing much easier and efficient to use, I cannot reach any other conclusion than that Microsoft really didn't care much.
The best example is around 1998 when I wanted to write a little program to quickly rip web pages in sequential order (i.e. something0001.html, something0002.html). I took at a look at Microsoft's "tear" utility, which literally did nothing more than take a URL argument and download the page to a disk file. Fine and dandy. Except it was something like 200 lines of code. It was utterly insane how much cookbook crap you had to wade through to do what was essentially an atomic operation. Rather than slog through all that crap, I found a non-MFC solution for the problem. That's always been Microsoft's biggest problem... making tools that make no effort to hide the mindless initialization crap that any sane library wouldn't expose, meaning a large proportion of your code that uses that library is nothing more than rote repetition of the same chunks of code over and over.
As I developed my MFC extensions, I later wanted a simple command-line program to do an FTP download. It took me about 2 minutes to write the program because I could initialize an "FTP session", connect and request the file and write it to disk in a handful of lines. (This was before wget was readily available for Windows). With Microsoft tools, at that time, it would have taken hundreds of lines of code, mostly copy-and-paste cookbook code, to do the same thing.
And yet, whenever you ventured outside the narrow domain of what the MS libraries provided, you were immediately out in the weeds. In other words, despite the low level you had to work with to use the library, the level of flexibility was always very narrow. Maybe it's better now, but I've got better things to do.
I'm not sure which company surprised me more that it still existed! I was a MAJOR fan of Borland's products starting with Turbo Pascal 1... you have to remember that way back then compiling and linking even a 50-line Fortran program was a several minute operation, and suddenly it went down to several seconds.
I hung tough with Borland products for about 8 years, even buying Turbo Pascal 4 around 1988, just for the editor, even though I no longer used Pascal. I took advantage, along with several co-workers of a misprint in Egghead's flyer for the week to pick up Borland C++ 1.0, and later did some serious OWL program. To this day, I still think OWL was far better than MFC.
I even thought Object Pascal was a nice implementation, and would have enjoyed using it if the team had decided that way. They ended up going with Microsoft C++, which was good, even if MFC at the time was nothing better than a half-hearted first cut.
I spent many years using Visual C++ and generally loved it. To this day, VS6 is my favorite IDE. None of my clients and employers ever made the jump to.NET and by 2004 or so, I'd made the jump to working on Linux middleware... no so much because I didn't want to Windows any more, but because that's was the best job available.
As of today, I'm glad I'm not doing Windows C++ programming any more. The number of layers between the code and the metal has become so ridiculous you're hardly programming at all. It's all just cookbook code to use Microsoft's byzantine libraries, and then reverse-engineering them when they don't do what you expect or what the documentation says. Of course, one could argue it's always been like that, but 10 years ago, it was possible to rewrite and/or extend most of MFC into something really slick and way easier and faster to use. I know because I did it. Nowadays, I would dread having to wade into the enormous amount of stuff involved in Windows programming... whether it's good or bad, it's massive and complicated, and those are two things I can't abide.
It wasn't records. An adult acted in a manner designed to cause a minor real harm. In the commission of harming her, the girl died. There was malace aforethought. There was a plan. There was intended harm. And an actual death occured. That's manslaughter at the least. The fact that it happened over a computer confused everyone involved.
So why is a new law needed? Sounds like we've got a perfectly good case of manslaughter or aggravated manslaughter or something like that. There couldn't possibly be anything that this new law, which will undoubtedly be poorly or vaguely worded, and quite probably voted on without being read, that isn't adequately covered by existing law.
This is just another opportunity to harass the politically incorrect speech du jour... because we all know that "intended harm" can mean just about anything from "fired a weapon at the target point blank" to "made some vague implication in a negative tone of voice" once the PC Mafia gets fired up.
Free Speech. Who needs it?
This is coming from the same group of morons that recently voted to define pedophiles as a protected class against hate crimes but refused to do so for pregnant women and members of the military. These are people (and I use the term loosely), who have nothing but contempt for everyone and everything but their own wealth and power.
Let me be very clear about this. Congress does NOTHING right, and hasn't for many years. If it weren't for unintended consequences they would be of no consequence at all. There is no way this law will do anything but make things worse in a country where the Constitution is already all but irrelevant. I wouldn't trust that pack of bloodsuckers to take out my trash.
Tough cases make bad law. So do emotional cripples. A healthy person would not kill himself over something like this. It's a very unfortunate situation, but this law is just another step down the Orwellian slippery slope our government has been rushing down the last 20 years or so.
How can a country founded on free speech enact laws that attempt to control what you think? That's what this is all about.
You cannot control people's thoughts. That's the worst kind of police state imaginable. Murder is murder. The pre-hate crimes definitions are only reasonable ways we can distinguish among different levels of culpability.
When it comes to speech, we cannot turn the whole world into Romper Room because some little emo girl took her nihilistic rock and roll records a little too literally. It's an ugly world out there. That's a shame, but it's true and you can't stop it or legislate it away.
Slashdot Mirror
I also see ads for the IQ quiz that say "X of your friends think you're an idiot", but that one seems pretty believable to me.
I think I took the IQ quiz once, worked all the way through and bailed when it wanted a phone number. Most of the quizzes, despite all hyperbole to the contrary, are IMO completely benign. I am willing to share my personal interests and beliefs... that's why I'm on FB: to communicate these kinds of things with people. I don't mind targeted ads because if any ads are targeted properly for me, then that means I won't see all those stupid ads with pictures of pretty girls saying "Who is searching for you?" or whatever the current incarnation of "Punch the monkey" is nowadays. I saw an ad on FB the other day for an architectural firm that specializes in remodeling houses. They had dozens of cool photos on their site showing off their work. I have no interest in remodeling my house, mostly because I'm broke, but I enjoyed looking at the photos and fantasizing for a moment about the cool things I could do. Other times I see ads for Star Trek T-shirts or some other nerdy thing that appeals to me. I'm perfectly happy seeing those. Of course, there are still the stupid annoying or clearly scammy ads, but at least they're not animated (or if there are any, my Firefox extensions hide those from me).
Of course, I might be singing a different tune when brownshirts start rounding me up because I'm a heterosexual, conservative Christian, who supports the military, and capitalism, or as Janet Napolitano would say, a "ticking time-bomb". But frankly, if some marketing company knows I like science fiction, progressive music and "The Simpsons", I just can't get all hot and lathered over that. Maybe somewhere a light will click on over someone's head and they'll start making "Vanilly Crunch" again.
I just picked up an 8GB SDHC micro, i.e., a chip the size of my pinky fingernail for $30, for my Sansa music player. I've been using computers for 30 years, and I'm still in a state of constant amazement. My first harddrive was around $700 for 100MB.
They not only seem unable to create a character to replace 007, they also need to spend sixteen times as much to create the same level of special effects.
Have you seen "Dr. No"? The fanciest gadget Bond uses in that movie is pasting a hair to a door to see if someone uses it while he's gone. The movie was extremely modest in terms of production compared to today's movies which often end up being little more than an actor running around inside a CGI video game.
The movie succeeded so well because it was a great movie. I haven't seen any recent Bond movies, but I bet they aren't even in the same time zone, relying instead on gadgets, effects (plenty of explosions) and sexy women... not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's a completely different kind of movie, essentially a comic book featuring an invincible, emotionless superhero, in stunning but ultimately drama-free action.
The problem is we're all spoiled by eye candy. I saw "Star Trek" and loved it, but there's this lingering doubt in my mind that the reason I loved it was because it looked really cool (best visual effects ever... I'm a total sucker for spaceships) and it featured actors repeating stereotyped lines and actions that most of us have been familiar with since childhood. I can accept that this movie was more of an introduction or prelude to a revitalized Star Trek, and think it did a good job at re-establishing the milieu, which frankly had become paint-by-numbers/phone-it-in stale. But despite all that, I thought "ST: TMP" was far more in the spirit of the concept, despite the pastel pajamas.
When the inevitable sequel (or dare I hope, a TV series?) happens, and it doesn't give me a big dose of wonder, philosophy and real human stories that made Star Trek what it is, then it will have, like so many franchises, been reduced to a mere 2D cartoon version of itself.
The real question to me is, could J. J. Abrams have made a compelling low-budget Star Trek movie? Maybe so... and if so, that's what the next one needs to be: a movie that would work if it were done on the cardboard sets and with the primitive effects available to the original series in 1965. I give him a pass this time around. Just seeing Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock and the rest all over again was well worth it, and the timeline twists are a refreshing change. Plus, the satisfaction of knowing that thousands of fanboys are so angry their latex pointy ears are melting off their heads is a nice piece of schadenfreude.
Now he's got all the toys out of the boxes and lined up... this is where the game gets really interesting and challenging, or it remains just toys.
The same is true with James Bond. It's not a question of whether "Dr. No" could be made today. Of course it could, and for a million dollars (inflation notwithstanding) it would look and sound better than original in pure technical terms. The real question is whether any studio would try to make it?
I seriously doubt it, and there's the whole problem with Hollywood today.
Right. My comment wasn't meant to be a criticism of MR. I think those guys are total boffins, and wish them all the luck in the world.
"May your code compile on the first try, your machine never crash, and all your pointers be valid!"
I also respect Microsoft for creating and supporting pure research. My criticism to them was that there is precious little innovation to be found in Microsoft products, not because they lack the brain-power (I worked with an ex-Microsoftie and he was a very sharp guy), but because well, their interests and their goals are really not aligned with the concept of innovation, or even giving customers a decent product. Not at the highest levels, despite all the hard-working thousands of engineers, testers and other folks in the trench who are trying to do the best work that they can. Microsoft isn't a software company, they're a monopoly company.
Software is, these days, almost an after-thought, a means to an end. Not the end of making money, which is the goal of all business, but the end of how they make money: Unfairly.
I'm with you. After several years of AdBlock/FlashBlock/NoScript, I find it very difficult to even read a page with an animated ad. The more animation involved the more I'm inclined to _not_ do business with the advertiser (and of course, the advertisers with the worst ads are usually scams and/or garbage anyway).
Static ads usually don't bug me, unless they are really gross or distasteful in some way.
So what? The reality is the most popular products for MS platforms were not MS inventions.
Is there any major product from Microsoft, except Windows itself that actually originated at Microsoft?
Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but 95% of their innovation was purchased, not made. Take a look at wild stuff MS Research is doing sometime. Does _anything_ they do ever end up in a product?
Doesn't anyone at Microsoft have a triple digit IQ?
There are thousands, just none in management. Like most companies.
...and anyone with a brain realizes that. Don't let the pedants get you down.
"Wagon train to the stars" no longer.
You're right, but I'll give him a pass _this_ time around. I am not without criticism, but the very act of resetting was well-served by this movie that focuses on action and adventure rather than something like "Solaris" which is actually much closer to Star Trek of old. It wasn't so much a movie, but a first chapter.
Kinda like the movie "Remo Williams" where the set up was actually the majority and most interesting part of the movie.
I hope (and expect) that a second movie (or dare I wish?) a TV show, would take the new setup and do, er, Star Trek, with it. But the franchise needed a real kick in the ass, and it got it. If the next movie is just another rehash with a generic villain and lots of narrow escapes and derring-do but none of the philosophy and wonder, _then_ and not until then, will I have a problem.
Well, I'm sorry you feel this way, but many of us loyal fans thought the movie was great, and who cares about canon anymore? They screwed up canon so much it _needed_ to be thrown out. How can anyone care about the canon since it's been butchered by every movie and TV show in the franchise in the past decade (sometimes to good effect, sometimes for no good reason).
I don't want a rehash of some show I've been watching reruns of for 30 years. I want something new in Star Trek, but something that maintains the elements that I loved about the original. Despite this movie's emphasis on action and effects, I feel like I got what I wanted.
As far as I'm concerned Star Trek died a long slow death over the past decade (ever since DS9 ended), becoming a huge bloated enterprise (no pun intended) that was more interested in regurgitating the same old formula over and over than in actually telling us new stories about interesting people in some way that does NOT firmly reestablish the precise status quo ante right after the last act break.
This movie, which I really enjoyed, sets the stage for just that, and manages to be really fun and exciting at the same time.
Should I retire complaining about the "fixed that for you" meme already? To you, it smacks of whininess
There, fixed that for you.
Here's a big clue for you: think carefully about whether "suicidal nutjobs" care about deterrence.
And here's a big clue for you too: Whooooooooosh!
In my case back then it was Smart Programming. Pascal has little tolerance for Excessive Cleverness.
Well, "Abort" means you recognize that it's broken and are telling it to give up, this is what they did to DOS, which brought us Windows 95. In many ways, it was a lateral move.
"Retry" means, yes, we admit it's broken, but we can do better. This was Windows NT.
"Fail" == Vista
I would point out that Windows 2008 Small Business Edition doesn't install on less than 4GB RAM.
I know that's a server OS, but I find it a little weird to think that Windows 2000 would work just fine in 64MB, as long as you didn't open more than a couple of apps. I know, I used it that way for about 6 months on my first laptop.
Yes, it was a little slow, but for basic editing, Web browsing and stuff like that, it was perfectly fine.
Isn't it more likely that this hidden partition was the "restore" partition that most laptop manufacturers include because permanently (that's the effect for most users) stealing 5GB of your hard drive saves them 23 cents compared to giving you some $&@^$#^$ physical media?
So why are they just now making this suggestion?! Windows has turned off filename extensions by default for 14 years now... since Windows 95!
In my opinion it is possibly the single stupidest thing Microsoft has ever done, and is always the first thing I turn off when sitting down at a Windows machine. Well, after turning off those stupid sounds and setting the UI to the Windows 2000 theme instead of that butt-ugly default theme in XP (and Vista too, if I used it, which I don't).
President Obama has suggested additional reductions in nuclear arms held by the US and Russia
The President needs a big clue. Those nuclear arms are for deterrence against all the suicidal nutjobs out there trying to get their hands on their own bombs. I mean we need some way to convince them not to strap a nuke on and walk into a city and...
Wait. Let me get back to you.
Reminds me of this weird guy in some of my CS classes back in the mid 80s who always used to brag about how long his programs were, as if more code was good. I remember him bragging about finishing some project with 5000 lines of code when I did the same thing in like 1500 line. I never took the time to figure out if he was bragging about writing thorough comments, which isn't _completely_ stupid, or if he was just a complete moron. He came across as the latter.
I wonder whatever happened to him.
That sucks!
Well said, Anonymous. MFC really was just shoehorning Win32 into C++. One of the things I was able to do was take MFC, which wasn't a bad start and fleshed it out to make it actually easier to use than Win32, which by itself it most certainly was not. One instance I recall in particular was creating a base class called CActiveXControl that made including an ActiveX GUI object into your window as easy as including any standard Windows control. The biggest problem with MFC was that there was _so_ much low-hanging fruit that could have been plucked to make the thing much easier and efficient to use, I cannot reach any other conclusion than that Microsoft really didn't care much.
The best example is around 1998 when I wanted to write a little program to quickly rip web pages in sequential order (i.e. something0001.html, something0002.html). I took at a look at Microsoft's "tear" utility, which literally did nothing more than take a URL argument and download the page to a disk file. Fine and dandy. Except it was something like 200 lines of code. It was utterly insane how much cookbook crap you had to wade through to do what was essentially an atomic operation. Rather than slog through all that crap, I found a non-MFC solution for the problem. That's always been Microsoft's biggest problem... making tools that make no effort to hide the mindless initialization crap that any sane library wouldn't expose, meaning a large proportion of your code that uses that library is nothing more than rote repetition of the same chunks of code over and over.
As I developed my MFC extensions, I later wanted a simple command-line program to do an FTP download. It took me about 2 minutes to write the program because I could initialize an "FTP session", connect and request the file and write it to disk in a handful of lines. (This was before wget was readily available for Windows). With Microsoft tools, at that time, it would have taken hundreds of lines of code, mostly copy-and-paste cookbook code, to do the same thing.
And yet, whenever you ventured outside the narrow domain of what the MS libraries provided, you were immediately out in the weeds. In other words, despite the low level you had to work with to use the library, the level of flexibility was always very narrow. Maybe it's better now, but I've got better things to do.
I'm not sure which company surprised me more that it still existed! I was a MAJOR fan of Borland's products starting with Turbo Pascal 1... you have to remember that way back then compiling and linking even a 50-line Fortran program was a several minute operation, and suddenly it went down to several seconds.
I hung tough with Borland products for about 8 years, even buying Turbo Pascal 4 around 1988, just for the editor, even though I no longer used Pascal. I took advantage, along with several co-workers of a misprint in Egghead's flyer for the week to pick up Borland C++ 1.0, and later did some serious OWL program. To this day, I still think OWL was far better than MFC.
I even thought Object Pascal was a nice implementation, and would have enjoyed using it if the team had decided that way. They ended up going with Microsoft C++, which was good, even if MFC at the time was nothing better than a half-hearted first cut.
I spent many years using Visual C++ and generally loved it. To this day, VS6 is my favorite IDE. None of my clients and employers ever made the jump to .NET and by 2004 or so, I'd made the jump to working on Linux middleware... no so much because I didn't want to Windows any more, but because that's was the best job available.
As of today, I'm glad I'm not doing Windows C++ programming any more. The number of layers between the code and the metal has become so ridiculous you're hardly programming at all. It's all just cookbook code to use Microsoft's byzantine libraries, and then reverse-engineering them when they don't do what you expect or what the documentation says. Of course, one could argue it's always been like that, but 10 years ago, it was possible to rewrite and/or extend most of MFC into something really slick and way easier and faster to use. I know because I did it. Nowadays, I would dread having to wade into the enormous amount of stuff involved in Windows programming... whether it's good or bad, it's massive and complicated, and those are two things I can't abide.
It's a REALLY long slope.
It wasn't records. An adult acted in a manner designed to cause a minor real harm. In the commission of harming her, the girl died. There was malace aforethought. There was a plan. There was intended harm. And an actual death occured. That's manslaughter at the least. The fact that it happened over a computer confused everyone involved.
So why is a new law needed? Sounds like we've got a perfectly good case of manslaughter or aggravated manslaughter or something like that. There couldn't possibly be anything that this new law, which will undoubtedly be poorly or vaguely worded, and quite probably voted on without being read, that isn't adequately covered by existing law.
This is just another opportunity to harass the politically incorrect speech du jour... because we all know that "intended harm" can mean just about anything from "fired a weapon at the target point blank" to "made some vague implication in a negative tone of voice" once the PC Mafia gets fired up.
Free Speech. Who needs it?
This is coming from the same group of morons that recently voted to define pedophiles as a protected class against hate crimes but refused to do so for pregnant women and members of the military. These are people (and I use the term loosely), who have nothing but contempt for everyone and everything but their own wealth and power.
Let me be very clear about this. Congress does NOTHING right, and hasn't for many years. If it weren't for unintended consequences they would be of no consequence at all. There is no way this law will do anything but make things worse in a country where the Constitution is already all but irrelevant. I wouldn't trust that pack of bloodsuckers to take out my trash.
Tough cases make bad law. So do emotional cripples. A healthy person would not kill himself over something like this. It's a very unfortunate situation, but this law is just another step down the Orwellian slippery slope our government has been rushing down the last 20 years or so.
How can a country founded on free speech enact laws that attempt to control what you think? That's what this is all about.
You cannot control people's thoughts. That's the worst kind of police state imaginable. Murder is murder. The pre-hate crimes definitions are only reasonable ways we can distinguish among different levels of culpability.
When it comes to speech, we cannot turn the whole world into Romper Room because some little emo girl took her nihilistic rock and roll records a little too literally. It's an ugly world out there. That's a shame, but it's true and you can't stop it or legislate it away.