Of spending money by governments in a competition to see who can do something first, without going bankrupt in the process..
Sad too, because NASA has pretty much always been chump change compared to the rest of the federal budget, and of all the money we print and spend it actually had measurable benefits on the quality of life in the world.
FUND NASA! Give them a goal, any goal, but make it a hard one and push them to succeed.... But alas, not going to happen any time soon.
Observers of the current state of the space program like to maintain that a space race, such as occurred in the 1960s, will never happen again.
Emphasis mine. The little race between Musk and Boeing is nice to watch, however in the 1960s we were watching a race between two superpowers with basically no holds barred.
Nor was any expense too much... Where they did try to stay within budget and keep it on schedule, it quite literally was forget the cost, make it work NOW!
There was a lot of common good generated by the effort to put men on the moon. You may not realize it, but they made vast advances in electronics, communications technology, materials and system design practices that have overflowed into the private sector from the Apollo effort. We learned a lot of stuff and built a lot of stuff from the technology advancements from Apollo, it's predecessors and the concurrent military build up that would have taken a lot longer to become viable enough to make a difference in the world.
Really? A Tricorder "like" device? Isn't an MRI, a CT, Ultrasound and X-ray a Tricorder LIKE device? Heck, add to that EEG and EKG devices, as are metal detectors, video recorders and cell phones.
So why do we insist on coupling some new reordering of existing technology with the public persona of Star Trek? Easy, it's an attempt to garner PR brownie points by leveraging something that's already popular in some circles. Frankly I'm growing tired of this ploy... Can't we just call them what they are, portable sensing devices and leave the fictional Star Trek device out of this? It ruins the story of Star Trek a little, each time we do this.
In reality, we will never have a "real" tricorder because they are FICTIONAL to start with, devices used to advance the plot line of a story, much like transporters, warp drives and dilithium crystals.
You can stock pile all you want, but any flexible magnetic media is going to go bad over time so I'd suggest you plan to unload your stock before 5 years is up.
Where I applaud the Irish for their effort (and whiskey and red hair), I'm not sure how this is really going to work.
1. Having a registry available by December 21st seems very aggressive.
2. The privacy concerns of those registering seems to be an unaddressed concern with the whole process.
3. I'm not aware of any penalties for not registering, or violating any of the IAA rules.
4. Who knows how much this will cost? Are there registration fees? Is it per aircraft or per operator or what?
5. Who's got the responsibility for enforcement? Do they have the resources to actually do enforcement?
This whole idea seems to be just a voluntary "Please register with us!" idea which is pretty much pointless. It won't force anybody to register, it won't force anybody to actually know or follow the existing rules, especially the idiots who insist on doing stupid things. What you really need is ENFORCEMENT, quick and harsh, for folks who insist on being stupid. A couple of test cases and the PR they would bring will do more to help the problem than all the rules and laws you can pass.
How does it benefit you not to have regulations that prevent devices from buzzing about over your head? In my mind there should be no weight minimums. I simply do not want these things flying around without well enforced rules.
So.. You want to force the registration of paper airplanes in the office now? I understand your idea, but I'm a bit confused as to how you intend to write a law that's reasonable and meets your criteria.
If China/Russia are actively hacking the joint, I must be running something really interesting because I get about 2000/night from Russia and China on my web servers. This is just some scaremongering from a company that has no IT or an IT without a clue.
Or someone with a political ax to grind who's making it all up...
Yes, I'm aware of TiVo's but they are EXPENSIVE and require a monthly fee.
The cable company charges me $12/month for a basic set top box and $25/month for a DVR. If you use the "whole house DVR" option they hit you up for $50/month plus the standard $12/month set top box fees. So for whole house DVR on three sets it cost you nothing up front, but $75/month or $900/year.
The TiVo DVR is going to set you back $200 plus $15/month for 4 tuners or $600 and $15/month (after the first year) for 6 tuners. The Mini is gong to set you back $150 per set top. Which for me is two set tops and the main DVR (three sets) or $900 up front plus $180/year after the first year. So they are break even with the cable company the first year and $700 to the black after that.
My Windows Media Center solution cost me $100 for the tuner, $200 for the media server DVR hardware and it worked with my existing Xbox 360 so I only needed to buy another used one for $100. So for $400, I'm all in for three TV's and have zero monthly fees (for now). That puts me $500 in the black the first year over the cable company, and $900 in the black every year after that.
I'm willing to let the monthly TiVo fees slide, because it's unlikely Microsoft will continue to provide the programming guide data forever at no cost, but the up front costs pretty much took me out of the TiVo market. That may change should the programming guide become unavailable, but for now TiVo is the more expensive option for me.
Thus my statement "Yea I know you can go out and buy a TiVo but for the love of money that's expensive.." TiVo is a nice product, but it's a pricy one too and so far the only "roll your own" software that does all the DRM stuff comes from Microsoft..
How about we take this one step further than the Cable Card. Let's get the FCC to force cable operators to support FREE software that is certified. Make the Cable Companies provide free DVR solutions as closed source binary distributions (at a minimum) for a number of the popular media center replacements. OR they can turn off the "Copy Once" flag on all their channels...
No, Windows Media Center is the only one with the certifications necessary right now.
I hear that Silicon Dust is working on a solution that will have the full DRM certifications but so far I don't know how far away they are. I'm guessing they are trying pretty hard, because if they don't succeed with this, their main consumer business line will effectively be dead, so they are fighting for their lives.
I'm not so sure the DRM has to go, but I think there needs to be multiple solutions that satisfy the DRM requirements.
Wondering out loud.... Could we not require cable companies to either turn off the "copy once" flag or have a viable freely available DVR solution that is certified to do the necessary DRM... Like having a closed source addition to the commonly available media solutions?
Actually the problem with CableCard is that there is but ONE way to use one as a DVR and get past all the DRM rules and that's Windows Media Center, which was last supported on Windows 8 and will NOT be supported going forward. Yea, you can play stuff, but you cannot record it for later use (for those channels who have full protection turned on).
Yea I know you can go out and buy a TiVo but for the love of money that's expensive if you need enough of them for every set in the house. I also am looking forward to the Silicon Dust development effort, but that is so much vaporware right now.
Oh for Pete's sake... I can produce chemical weapons in my kitchen, and not because I'm a horrible cook... Mustard gas is *easy* to produce, and accidentally gets made quite often by people mixing the wrong cleaners in the bathroom, just read the labels on that cleaner stuff. It's not like all this is secret or hard to do, nor does it take much in the way of equipment.
So I don't know what you *expected* to see in Iraq based on Bush's statements.
And YES the Benghazi video thing WAS a lie, told by people who knew it to be a lie. Didn't you pay attention to Hillary's statements and E-mails in the last hearing where she testified? No? Oh that's right, the media really didn't care about the fact that she was telling the American people it was a video, but sent her daughter an E-mail clearly saying otherwise AT THE SAME TIME.
But what difference does it make now? None, really, except to contrast what Hillary said to what Bush said. You want to call Bush a liar, but you don't mind giving Hillary a pass? Bush was saying something it *thought* was true, that everybody thought was true at the time, Hillary was saying stuff she KNEW wasn't true. I think you have multiple standards here, and those standards are politically motivated, but I digress..
What you are talking about is that we have ABSTRACTED memory management tasks by going through libraries and templates. The "problem" hasn't been "fixed", all we've done is make it easy for programmers to not think about it if they wish.
Yeah, sure, that's all any programming language ever is: layers of abstraction over assembly. My point was, from a practical perspective, you don't worry about memory leaks in modern C++ code any more than you do in modern Java code. But of course Java only offers the "no leaks" way, which in C++ you must discover the "no leaks" way, giving Java the easier learning curve. (You can still get memory leaks with anything, of course, if you try hard enough, but I'm talking about the 99% case here).
Um, like it or not, memory leaks still exist in Java and it's not that hard to stumble into code that causes them. The problem is that most people don't understand the parts that are abstracted away, they don't think they need to, so it's easy to stumble over your shoelaces and not know why. Yea, Java makes it a bit harder to bleed memory, but it doesn't eliminate the problem.
But that doesn't mean C++ is old and arcane, nor is it bizarre
Placement new. Weak references. Static initialization quirks (so many lock management and reference counting bugs caused by that over the years!). A Turing-complete templating language, so that you can turn your compiler run into a game of Tetris. Heck, just the fundamental need to understand that vectors will copy their member as they grow, and so you need to use the appropriate kind of smart pointer for that (which has changed, what 3 times now over the life of the language).
Bizarre and arcane. All there for good reason, to solve problems that can't otherwise be solved, but bizarre and arcane.
One man's garbage is another's treasure. You need to understand what you pay for all this convenience. I'm not saying Java doesn't have it's good points. All I'm saying is that there are time when other tools are better choices. I use Java, I use C++, heck I use Perl and Python too, but part of my job is to know what tool works best for which problem and have the skills to effectively apply the tool necessary.
Java and C# are slower, MUCH slower, and they use a lot more resources when they run.
I used to work on code where that mattered, back in the day. Now everything is I/O bound and horizontally scalable, in my world, and CPU load is around 5% average in my service fleet.
OTOH, guys working in the IOT world with devices with 4K of memory still love C.
You work on large machines, great. Some of us work in constrained places, where size, weight, power consumption and heat dissipation are primary design constraints. I work in embedded systems where I don't have the luxury of just inserting more memory or a faster processor and where a Java interpreter would NEVER fit, much less run. No, I'm not writing device drivers, but I do have design constraints that make using Java a problem. So I say again, you pick the tool for the job at hand, so you want as many tools in the box as you can get.
Admit it. Java and C# are only tools, just like C and C++
Do you see anyone around here saying different?
Yes, I see you defending Java while talking down C++ and I'm not sure you know the details well enough to make the claims you have. Java DOES have memory leaks, they are just not common because the JVM takes care of most of that for you. Plus, all the convienince comes at a price, all the abstraction costs you. You may not care for your application, but it's still there. I've always been saying "Use the best tool."
There you go again... Inventing stuff and then arguing your moral position based on your invented things. The WND statements where not made up, they where bad intelligence. Actually Iraq DID have WMD's, and had used them in the past on Iran. We found them and evidence of them, just not in sufficient numbers to make this whole argument go away in made up minds like yours. We found a few largely junk and unserviceable chemical weapons. This whole idea wasn't made up out of whole cloth like the "It was the video that caused a riot in Benghazi" farce pulled by the current administration.
And your side wishes to claim the moral high ground here? Shesh.. What's worse, saying something you KNOW is untrue or saying something you believe to be true that later proves to be inaccurate?
Shall we just stop now and agree that we don't agree on this? I get the feeling we won't come to any agreements here...
Oh yes there are memory management issues in C++, you still have to take care of it unless you only use stack and static storage. There are memory management issues in Java too, but most don't understand why they exist or how to avoid them (thankfully most don't run into the issues, but they are there).
What you are talking about is that we have ABSTRACTED memory management tasks by going through libraries and templates. The "problem" hasn't been "fixed", all we've done is make it easy for programmers to not think about it if they wish. That doesn't mean the programmer shouldn't be aware of how C++ manages memory and how your libraries and templates deal with it. It's the same problem that C has, only it can be a lot worse in C++ because many programmers don't fully understand when the compiler is going to run your constructors and destructors.
Sure, Java (aka C#), seems easier to you. It's what they teach in school because you can ignore whole swaths of information about what the hardware is really doing because it's abstracted away. But that doesn't mean C++ is old and arcane, nor is it bizarre if you truly understand what is going on beneath your programs feet. Java and C# just isolate you from all this by abstraction, but you pay a price for the convenience. Java and C# are slower, MUCH slower, and they use a lot more resources when they run. You also don't have much control over memory management, in Java and C#, everything pretty much stops when the garbage collector is running and there is not much you can do about it. In C and C++ you can write code that you know won't be interrupted for garbage collection, which may not be important to you, but it is important to some of us who are writing time sensitive systems with strict time budgets.
Admit it. Java and C# are only tools, just like C and C++. Each is a the preferred solution for specific tasks and are not better or worse than the other. They are just tools that bring their unique features to the table. A wise programmer has as many tools in the tool box as possible. He keeps them sharp and hones his skills so he can skillfully apply the BEST tool for the job at hand.
Yea, so? But it hid the details of the processor programing model from the programmer. So C programs became CPU independent, all you needed to do is create a cross compiler for your new CPU. It's just abstracting away the hardware dependence of Macro assemblers...
Java is just a way to abstract away the memory management issues of C++ (well it's at least partly that..)
C++ is but a tool we use to get our jobs done. Every tool has it's limitations, provisos, flaws and a purpose. When a tool is placed in the hands of a skilled craftsman using it for it's intended purpose it produces excellent results, but if it's used by somebody without the necessary skills, or for a task it is not designed to do, the results can be horrid. C++ may be dated, but for some problem domains it remains the tool of choice. You don't write device drivers in Java for a reason.
The wise programmer keeps as many tools in his tool box as possible. He sharpens them and maintains them and keeps adding the new and useful tools he finds. He knows the intended purpose and best use of his tools and selects the appropriate tools for the job at hand. All to often, young bucks show up to work armed with only ONE tool shiny and new, thinking that it is the only tool they need for any job. They deride the old salts who use the "old" tools well and make fun of the well warn, old tools they use. "Use this new shiny tool," they say, "It's the only tool you need." While the old experienced guys chuckle and shake their heads, remembering when they too said similar things and try to teach the younger ones that there is value in putting tools in the box...
Slashdot Mirror
So I can only have 10 accounts per website? That's not nearly enough.
Take off your shoes and socks and double the count...
Using a fingerprint for authentication is like using one unchangable password for every system. Bad practice!
I have ten fingers, so it's not as bad as you think... Although, rotating though 10 passwords isn't all that secure either....
Of spending money by governments in a competition to see who can do something first, without going bankrupt in the process..
Sad too, because NASA has pretty much always been chump change compared to the rest of the federal budget, and of all the money we print and spend it actually had measurable benefits on the quality of life in the world.
FUND NASA! Give them a goal, any goal, but make it a hard one and push them to succeed.... But alas, not going to happen any time soon.
Quote:
Observers of the current state of the space program like to maintain that a space race, such as occurred in the 1960s, will never happen again.
Emphasis mine. The little race between Musk and Boeing is nice to watch, however in the 1960s we were watching a race between two superpowers with basically no holds barred.
Nor was any expense too much... Where they did try to stay within budget and keep it on schedule, it quite literally was forget the cost, make it work NOW!
Apollo wasn't that valuable? I beg to differ...
There was a lot of common good generated by the effort to put men on the moon. You may not realize it, but they made vast advances in electronics, communications technology, materials and system design practices that have overflowed into the private sector from the Apollo effort. We learned a lot of stuff and built a lot of stuff from the technology advancements from Apollo, it's predecessors and the concurrent military build up that would have taken a lot longer to become viable enough to make a difference in the world.
Really? A Tricorder "like" device? Isn't an MRI, a CT, Ultrasound and X-ray a Tricorder LIKE device? Heck, add to that EEG and EKG devices, as are metal detectors, video recorders and cell phones.
So why do we insist on coupling some new reordering of existing technology with the public persona of Star Trek? Easy, it's an attempt to garner PR brownie points by leveraging something that's already popular in some circles. Frankly I'm growing tired of this ploy... Can't we just call them what they are, portable sensing devices and leave the fictional Star Trek device out of this? It ruins the story of Star Trek a little, each time we do this.
In reality, we will never have a "real" tricorder because they are FICTIONAL to start with, devices used to advance the plot line of a story, much like transporters, warp drives and dilithium crystals.
Stage 4 high explosives.... Self solving problem... I'm sorry sir, you have milliseconds to live once this blows up..
I don't believe the Silicon Dust offering is yet able to fully do the DRM protected content in the DVR part. But I have my eye on it.
You can stock pile all you want, but any flexible magnetic media is going to go bad over time so I'd suggest you plan to unload your stock before 5 years is up.
Hundreds of thousands? Just a bit of hyperbolae on that number. Your partisan underwear is showing.
Where I applaud the Irish for their effort (and whiskey and red hair), I'm not sure how this is really going to work.
1. Having a registry available by December 21st seems very aggressive.
2. The privacy concerns of those registering seems to be an unaddressed concern with the whole process.
3. I'm not aware of any penalties for not registering, or violating any of the IAA rules.
4. Who knows how much this will cost? Are there registration fees? Is it per aircraft or per operator or what?
5. Who's got the responsibility for enforcement? Do they have the resources to actually do enforcement?
This whole idea seems to be just a voluntary "Please register with us!" idea which is pretty much pointless. It won't force anybody to register, it won't force anybody to actually know or follow the existing rules, especially the idiots who insist on doing stupid things. What you really need is ENFORCEMENT, quick and harsh, for folks who insist on being stupid. A couple of test cases and the PR they would bring will do more to help the problem than all the rules and laws you can pass.
How does it benefit you not to have regulations that prevent devices from buzzing about over your head? In my mind there should be no weight minimums. I simply do not want these things flying around without well enforced rules.
So.. You want to force the registration of paper airplanes in the office now? I understand your idea, but I'm a bit confused as to how you intend to write a law that's reasonable and meets your criteria.
If China/Russia are actively hacking the joint, I must be running something really interesting because I get about 2000/night from Russia and China on my web servers. This is just some scaremongering from a company that has no IT or an IT without a clue.
Or someone with a political ax to grind who's making it all up...
Yes, I'm aware of TiVo's but they are EXPENSIVE and require a monthly fee.
The cable company charges me $12/month for a basic set top box and $25/month for a DVR. If you use the "whole house DVR" option they hit you up for $50/month plus the standard $12/month set top box fees. So for whole house DVR on three sets it cost you nothing up front, but $75/month or $900/year.
The TiVo DVR is going to set you back $200 plus $15/month for 4 tuners or $600 and $15/month (after the first year) for 6 tuners. The Mini is gong to set you back $150 per set top. Which for me is two set tops and the main DVR (three sets) or $900 up front plus $180/year after the first year. So they are break even with the cable company the first year and $700 to the black after that.
My Windows Media Center solution cost me $100 for the tuner, $200 for the media server DVR hardware and it worked with my existing Xbox 360 so I only needed to buy another used one for $100. So for $400, I'm all in for three TV's and have zero monthly fees (for now). That puts me $500 in the black the first year over the cable company, and $900 in the black every year after that.
I'm willing to let the monthly TiVo fees slide, because it's unlikely Microsoft will continue to provide the programming guide data forever at no cost, but the up front costs pretty much took me out of the TiVo market. That may change should the programming guide become unavailable, but for now TiVo is the more expensive option for me.
Thus my statement "Yea I know you can go out and buy a TiVo but for the love of money that's expensive.." TiVo is a nice product, but it's a pricy one too and so far the only "roll your own" software that does all the DRM stuff comes from Microsoft..
And you side step the moral argument I made about known liars from your side and betray your true motives. How partisan of you...
How about we take this one step further than the Cable Card. Let's get the FCC to force cable operators to support FREE software that is certified. Make the Cable Companies provide free DVR solutions as closed source binary distributions (at a minimum) for a number of the popular media center replacements. OR they can turn off the "Copy Once" flag on all their channels...
No, Windows Media Center is the only one with the certifications necessary right now.
I hear that Silicon Dust is working on a solution that will have the full DRM certifications but so far I don't know how far away they are. I'm guessing they are trying pretty hard, because if they don't succeed with this, their main consumer business line will effectively be dead, so they are fighting for their lives.
I'm not so sure the DRM has to go, but I think there needs to be multiple solutions that satisfy the DRM requirements.
Wondering out loud.... Could we not require cable companies to either turn off the "copy once" flag or have a viable freely available DVR solution that is certified to do the necessary DRM... Like having a closed source addition to the commonly available media solutions?
Actually the problem with CableCard is that there is but ONE way to use one as a DVR and get past all the DRM rules and that's Windows Media Center, which was last supported on Windows 8 and will NOT be supported going forward. Yea, you can play stuff, but you cannot record it for later use (for those channels who have full protection turned on).
Yea I know you can go out and buy a TiVo but for the love of money that's expensive if you need enough of them for every set in the house. I also am looking forward to the Silicon Dust development effort, but that is so much vaporware right now.
Oh for Pete's sake... I can produce chemical weapons in my kitchen, and not because I'm a horrible cook... Mustard gas is *easy* to produce, and accidentally gets made quite often by people mixing the wrong cleaners in the bathroom, just read the labels on that cleaner stuff. It's not like all this is secret or hard to do, nor does it take much in the way of equipment.
So I don't know what you *expected* to see in Iraq based on Bush's statements.
And YES the Benghazi video thing WAS a lie, told by people who knew it to be a lie. Didn't you pay attention to Hillary's statements and E-mails in the last hearing where she testified? No? Oh that's right, the media really didn't care about the fact that she was telling the American people it was a video, but sent her daughter an E-mail clearly saying otherwise AT THE SAME TIME.
But what difference does it make now? None, really, except to contrast what Hillary said to what Bush said. You want to call Bush a liar, but you don't mind giving Hillary a pass? Bush was saying something it *thought* was true, that everybody thought was true at the time, Hillary was saying stuff she KNEW wasn't true. I think you have multiple standards here, and those standards are politically motivated, but I digress..
What you are talking about is that we have ABSTRACTED memory management tasks by going through libraries and templates. The "problem" hasn't been "fixed", all we've done is make it easy for programmers to not think about it if they wish.
Yeah, sure, that's all any programming language ever is: layers of abstraction over assembly. My point was, from a practical perspective, you don't worry about memory leaks in modern C++ code any more than you do in modern Java code. But of course Java only offers the "no leaks" way, which in C++ you must discover the "no leaks" way, giving Java the easier learning curve. (You can still get memory leaks with anything, of course, if you try hard enough, but I'm talking about the 99% case here).
Um, like it or not, memory leaks still exist in Java and it's not that hard to stumble into code that causes them. The problem is that most people don't understand the parts that are abstracted away, they don't think they need to, so it's easy to stumble over your shoelaces and not know why. Yea, Java makes it a bit harder to bleed memory, but it doesn't eliminate the problem.
But that doesn't mean C++ is old and arcane, nor is it bizarre
Placement new. Weak references. Static initialization quirks (so many lock management and reference counting bugs caused by that over the years!). A Turing-complete templating language, so that you can turn your compiler run into a game of Tetris. Heck, just the fundamental need to understand that vectors will copy their member as they grow, and so you need to use the appropriate kind of smart pointer for that (which has changed, what 3 times now over the life of the language).
Bizarre and arcane. All there for good reason, to solve problems that can't otherwise be solved, but bizarre and arcane.
One man's garbage is another's treasure. You need to understand what you pay for all this convenience. I'm not saying Java doesn't have it's good points. All I'm saying is that there are time when other tools are better choices. I use Java, I use C++, heck I use Perl and Python too, but part of my job is to know what tool works best for which problem and have the skills to effectively apply the tool necessary.
Java and C# are slower, MUCH slower, and they use a lot more resources when they run.
I used to work on code where that mattered, back in the day. Now everything is I/O bound and horizontally scalable, in my world, and CPU load is around 5% average in my service fleet.
OTOH, guys working in the IOT world with devices with 4K of memory still love C.
You work on large machines, great. Some of us work in constrained places, where size, weight, power consumption and heat dissipation are primary design constraints. I work in embedded systems where I don't have the luxury of just inserting more memory or a faster processor and where a Java interpreter would NEVER fit, much less run. No, I'm not writing device drivers, but I do have design constraints that make using Java a problem. So I say again, you pick the tool for the job at hand, so you want as many tools in the box as you can get.
Admit it. Java and C# are only tools, just like C and C++
Do you see anyone around here saying different?
Yes, I see you defending Java while talking down C++ and I'm not sure you know the details well enough to make the claims you have. Java DOES have memory leaks, they are just not common because the JVM takes care of most of that for you. Plus, all the convienince comes at a price, all the abstraction costs you. You may not care for your application, but it's still there. I've always been saying "Use the best tool."
So, shall we discuss Emacs verses VI next?
There you go again... Inventing stuff and then arguing your moral position based on your invented things. The WND statements where not made up, they where bad intelligence. Actually Iraq DID have WMD's, and had used them in the past on Iran. We found them and evidence of them, just not in sufficient numbers to make this whole argument go away in made up minds like yours. We found a few largely junk and unserviceable chemical weapons. This whole idea wasn't made up out of whole cloth like the "It was the video that caused a riot in Benghazi" farce pulled by the current administration.
And your side wishes to claim the moral high ground here? Shesh.. What's worse, saying something you KNOW is untrue or saying something you believe to be true that later proves to be inaccurate?
Shall we just stop now and agree that we don't agree on this? I get the feeling we won't come to any agreements here...
Oh yes there are memory management issues in C++, you still have to take care of it unless you only use stack and static storage. There are memory management issues in Java too, but most don't understand why they exist or how to avoid them (thankfully most don't run into the issues, but they are there).
What you are talking about is that we have ABSTRACTED memory management tasks by going through libraries and templates. The "problem" hasn't been "fixed", all we've done is make it easy for programmers to not think about it if they wish. That doesn't mean the programmer shouldn't be aware of how C++ manages memory and how your libraries and templates deal with it. It's the same problem that C has, only it can be a lot worse in C++ because many programmers don't fully understand when the compiler is going to run your constructors and destructors.
Sure, Java (aka C#), seems easier to you. It's what they teach in school because you can ignore whole swaths of information about what the hardware is really doing because it's abstracted away. But that doesn't mean C++ is old and arcane, nor is it bizarre if you truly understand what is going on beneath your programs feet. Java and C# just isolate you from all this by abstraction, but you pay a price for the convenience. Java and C# are slower, MUCH slower, and they use a lot more resources when they run. You also don't have much control over memory management, in Java and C#, everything pretty much stops when the garbage collector is running and there is not much you can do about it. In C and C++ you can write code that you know won't be interrupted for garbage collection, which may not be important to you, but it is important to some of us who are writing time sensitive systems with strict time budgets.
Admit it. Java and C# are only tools, just like C and C++. Each is a the preferred solution for specific tasks and are not better or worse than the other. They are just tools that bring their unique features to the table. A wise programmer has as many tools in the tool box as possible. He keeps them sharp and hones his skills so he can skillfully apply the BEST tool for the job at hand.
Yea, so? But it hid the details of the processor programing model from the programmer. So C programs became CPU independent, all you needed to do is create a cross compiler for your new CPU. It's just abstracting away the hardware dependence of Macro assemblers...
Java is just a way to abstract away the memory management issues of C++ (well it's at least partly that..)
But it's small and fast when you use it right..
C++ is but a tool we use to get our jobs done. Every tool has it's limitations, provisos, flaws and a purpose. When a tool is placed in the hands of a skilled craftsman using it for it's intended purpose it produces excellent results, but if it's used by somebody without the necessary skills, or for a task it is not designed to do, the results can be horrid. C++ may be dated, but for some problem domains it remains the tool of choice. You don't write device drivers in Java for a reason.
The wise programmer keeps as many tools in his tool box as possible. He sharpens them and maintains them and keeps adding the new and useful tools he finds. He knows the intended purpose and best use of his tools and selects the appropriate tools for the job at hand. All to often, young bucks show up to work armed with only ONE tool shiny and new, thinking that it is the only tool they need for any job. They deride the old salts who use the "old" tools well and make fun of the well warn, old tools they use. "Use this new shiny tool," they say, "It's the only tool you need." While the old experienced guys chuckle and shake their heads, remembering when they too said similar things and try to teach the younger ones that there is value in putting tools in the box...