Don't answer calls from unknown numbers. Problem solved.
Impractical for those who are job hunting, or those who are a major contact in some community organization (such as for a church, community group, etc.)
First, you need an long-term goal for programming. The current job market appears to demand hyper-specialized individuals, and if you don't have a few years of something major under your belt, you won't be able to get a job. (Of course, you can disregard this if you're programming as a hobby rather than intending for a career.)
For getting started - practically anything that contains examples and also explains how things work. If one doesn't seem to be working out, you can easily switch to a different one.
The actual gap seems to be resource for Intermediate programmers - those who are skilled, but "not skilled enough". I haven't really seen any suitable resource for that group.
While targeting inept users can always work, this system makes it better for regular users, so that they don't have something forced installed because an ad-network redirected them to a malware page, and better for developers since they can still have the protection of regular users for anything untrusted while still being able to do their own thing.
And even if you manage to prevent inept users from activating developer mode without hindering developers, it still doesn't protect them against other social engineering attacks where they enter their own bank account information onto a phishing website. If anything, it's best to not worry too much about inept users, and simply let regular users be safe from whatever drive-by attack is happening today.
Problem with whitelisting is that it destroys your computer.
It's not a computer any more. It's an appliance.
Which is fine for people you can only trust to run an appliance, but it prevents anyone from programming aka becoming more productive.
With modern computers, I see no reason why this is an issue.
It is trivial to have a whitelist system that can be disabled for developers that want to program. Google Android does this, and I see no reason why future computers can't be setup this way either.
Too much white space, huge margins, too little information
At least there's some attempt to combat this. For example, if you screenshot something and paste it into LibreOffice, the image is autosized from margin-to-margin. For bonus points, if it's in "web view", the autosizing is to window width.
Of course, this is a slightly old version of Libre Office, and I'm having trouble updating it on that computer. Then again, I should update that computer entirely, it's a several years old.
But still, it's universal. Being more modern won't fix that, even if the modern paradigm is to have whitespace to make touch screens more usable.
Text is indistinguishable from controls
That's more of a UI bug.
Text in full-CAPS
Too true. Especially when viewing some apps, such as those that show reddit comments.
Certain controls cannot be easily understood (like on/off states for check boxes or elements like tabs)
Seen this quite common. Especially ones which toggle between Red and Green. Fun for those who are red-green colourblind.
Everything presented in shades of gray or using a severely and artificially limited palette
I recall DOS being like that... 16 font colors, 8 background colors for the font and option to blink well before the HTML tag.
Often awful fonts suitable only for HiDPI devices (Windows 10 modern apps are a prime example)
Out of the list, I think that's the only one that a problem specifically with modern user interfaces.
Especially when manufacturers dump their old low-resolution systems.
Cannot be controlled by keyboard
and the ones that do require memorizing various hotkeys that really shouldn't be necessary.
Very little customizability if any
Really love to disable that backspace hotkey in Firefox (cause it conflicts with backspacing over content in a web form), cause that browser is taking its sweet time.
Still, there's plenty of UIs that aren't customizable. Only the major applications had the effort invested to make themselves customizable, and even then, there's still static patterns that can't really be customized.
They see a rival on the other side of the window, and take the aggressive approach to remove them. Naturally, the rival male likewise takes an equally aggressive response, thus the bird either has to abort (and thus has to "compete" for food later) or use full force to drive out the rival.
Popups cause unnecessary extra fuss in the event that you don't want to use autofill, no different than Clippy saying "It looks like you are writing a letter", and no different than popups from ad networks asking you to try out the poop-providing-penis-pills.
Each time I restart Firefox, I get a popup asking me to enter the master password for saved logins. Since this popup is window modal, it slows down the process by claiming that logging into a site that I've already logged into is more important than actually doing what I want.
These popups would provide exactly zero benefit for any user, since it's a tacked-on patch for something that shouldn't be an issue in the first place. If these popups start appearing for autofill, I'd find a way to disable autofill entirely because that will fix two problems at once.
If autofill absolutely must be used, the correct way to do this would be to warn the user with a popup that the website is requesting information XYZ
Why must everything be a popup warning? You can instead have this in a right-click menu, or simply have the content available if the user presses a down-arrow in the relevant field.
Also, I'm astonished this attack hasn't popped up before now.
It first happened on MySpace, because that site allowed creating custom forms that tricked certain browsers into providing username/password information.
In any case where a website does silly stuff with entry fields, it's trivial to allow filling specific fields through a right-click menu, or through an easy method. Firefox already does this.
why a login page needs separate steps for the username and the password.
The theory behind this was to make it harder to sniff usernames and passwords, ignoring the fact that any sniffing utility already had a workaround.
4th-bit is brightness - as you can discover by playing around with the Dos color palette in Qbasic. In that pattern, three bits determine which colors are present, and the fourth bit makes them brighter.
Unless you're talking about the background text color, in which case the fourth bit instead causes the same effect as the HTML blink tag.
"Freeloading off a public good"? You need to decide if your imaginary strawman
Certain states, such as Colorado, have handed out fines in the past to those who have a water barrel to collect rain water. Such laws were under the belief of water theft, where the rain that lands wherever would always reach a river or natural water basin, and that diverting it for personal use is theft of the resource that was provided by God(tm) and the State(tm).
So before you fling around words such as "imaginary", at least check to make sure that it isn't an issue. You'll note that this is a daunting task, because there are at least 50 states in the US, all of which have different laws concerning water harvesting.
Oh, and those issues shouldn't exist in the first place, rather than having a fix being demanded.
is a conservative or Leftist here.
False dichotomy.
Once you break out of binary thinking, you can find a group that is in the middle of the horseshoe. Namely, the group that dislikes premitting large scale collection while prohibiting individuals collecting rainwater on a small scale.
Illegal, because that's freeloading off a public good. This includes rainwater, which the state declares should only be used once and is not meant to be recycled over and over again like the liberal environmentalists want to do.
there is no income tax deduction, so she receives all the value of her work.
Solomon Northop also didn't have income tax deduction.
she is the youngest employee to move up in to management
That's highly optimistic. It also makes two assumptions, where a line-assembly worker becomes more skilled at managing people by putting a fastener on a widget, and where said worker doesn't have competition to become the manager (including nepotistic promotions.)
Now, you may be correct in that breakout scenario, but it won't happen that easily since the bourgeois know how to keep the pauper class in their place.
Where do banks get their money from to sustain ~1% interest rates over a long period of time?
If banks are able to produce money from thin air, then I'm sure rich people can manage to do the same. Maybe the government could do so as well, nothing says free market by allowing the government to participate.
people and companies don't get rich by giving money away
Of course not. They become rich by having income. Some may get rich by doing the work themselves, and others get rich by acting as a middle-man, keeping the workers poor, and prices high. A few become rich by setting up a monopoly or oligopoly of a critical resource.
Of these rich folks, the latter two should be the focus of taxes.
"Unknown Person Attempts to Shame the internet for Not Implementing Pointless Shortcut"
Back in ~1995, any major application that failed to provide a PgDn mechanism would be the laughing stock everywhere.
It's technically optional to have the Spacebar do this, but the feature itself is never optional.
Needless to say there's no fucking space bar on mobile hardware
Something which isn't required for mobile devices because the user can trivially finger scroll that works as page down: Put the finger at the bottom of the screen, then move the finger to the top.
The elevator scene was written in a way that it didn't "require" an elevator operator. After the Epsilon asked "roof?", a voice instructed him to go down to floor 19, which the Epsilon did so manually. This is clearly a means to show Epsilons being given menial work rather than actually being necessary elevator operators (not that it was meant to insult actual elevator operators, as they needed to be trained in safety and proper alignment.)
The first chapter also demonstrated factory-like automation, including a special mechanism that reduces circulation to a generation of workers when they're right-side up, as a means to condition topsy-turvy with good feelings. With that, it would be trivial to make an automatic elevator without epsilons.
Also, even if elevator operators were present during the writing of Brave New World, an electronic signal control system was already developed, plus the author could easily save a few pages and simply make the elevator automatic.
You just need to watch the old black and white movies;
You can even go further back, and note that even animals had a job.
Horses used to have a rather common job of pulling carriages, until the internal combustion engine allowed horseless carriages.
Mules and/or oxes used to provide assistance plowing farmland. Now handled by machines
Sometimes, the job performed by the animal isn't obsolete, but simply ran out of fashion. Regardless, technology still had an impact on more than just humans.
elevator operators in high rise office blocks
There's a potential for them to return. Just check out the speculative documentary "Brave New World", where that task is given to an Epsilon, despite the trivial ability to automate it.
"Two kids in their dorm room cannot do anything interesting in space."
Obviously.
The Wright brothers didn't create the aircraft in their dorm room - they needed a garage and wide areas in order to do their stuff. Plus they needed wealth, which two kids in their dorm room are much less likely to have nowadays. They need space to construct that sort of stuff, much more than what's needed to build a hot-rod or small aircraft.
As for something interesting in space, the only things left is to colonize another planet (or moon), extract resources from the other planet, FTL jump to another system, etc. Two kids in the dorm room can't build the Lunar Cheese Extraction Facility, nor can they do hyperspace stuff.
The two kids in the dorm room that are capable of designing improved rockets or space vehicles wouldn't be in the dorm room because they would have been hired by any company wanting to do the same type of work.
If I "give" everyone $1k/month, then quickly a lunch at McDs approaches $75.
McDs is already approaching that amount without help from giving everyone $1k/month - it's price doubled since 12 years ago, and at that rate will hit that mark in 48 years (sooner if you include more than just the Big Mac.)
Also, if McDs does charge $75 per whatever, then that's a good enough reason for reclaim said money by McDonald's suppliers (i.e. those who provide McDs with beef, vegetables, transportation fuel, and other expenses), McDonald's shareholders (who own parts of the company), McDonald's workers (who actually make the profit), or governments (who are upset that McDs are trying to grab everyone's basic income).
Or even better, undercut McDs. Practically anyone can make a small garden even if inside their own house, and introduce free food into the market even if it isn't sold.
Two destructors is slow compared to zero constructors.
If you don't have destructors to call, you can erase an entire array of elements in one fast function call. If your data structure needs a destructor, then it is called for each individual element.
Also related are constructors - if you can get by with zero constructors as opposed to one, you don't have to worry about time spent initializing the entire set of elements (as long as you remember not to use uninitialized variables.)
With shared_ptr, the performance hit is with the reference count updating, so you should still pass a shared_ptr as a reference when possible.
In my case, it had a significant cost beyond the reference count, because it got included in a data structure. shared_ptr has a destructor, which forces any struct or class containing it to likewise have a destructor. What would originally be a simple bulk deallocation now requires calling ~2 destructors per entry (one from the main object, one from shared_ptr).
shared_ptr also requires a thread-safe reference count, which is a slowdown in itself.
I'm certain you can avoid most of the slowdown with shared_ptr if you already know what can happen, but there's still a developer who uses it without knowing what will happen ahead of time.
There really should be some form of universal interface that everyone agrees on, rather than trying to create an interface for each individual language. Maybe it could be called an API, and it could accept parameters in an agreed-upon fashion. Perhaps that would solve the interface problem once and for all.
An improved edition of C/C++ that provides safe pointer features
I tried using some of the "safe pointer" stuff - depending on which one is chosen, there is a performance hit depending on which safety mechanism you choose. For example, the auto-deallocate safety net slows things down a lot, while bounds checking tends to be less of a problem.
Still a good feature (where some compilers already have a limited implementation), although it could use a bit of work since you somehow need a custom library.
2. DEPRECATES pointer arithmetic and other language malfeatures with obtrusive compile warnings and such.
In some cases, the programmer requires speed. If said programmer knows what they're doing, there's no reason they should be separated from optimal flow.
Pretty sure MS-DOS 5.0 was rock-solid enough. It only faltered because things running under it had bugs that overwrote random bits - the kernel itself would be stable.
games
A non-rock solid game would practically crash frequently. Especially in the early era where patches are unheard-of - if the game is faulty, it's dead.
Most Apogee platformers seemed rather stable. It only took them until RotT before they had a major crash that would lock up a computer.
If you give everyone $600 extra I would bet that things like rental costs, utilities, etc. would just expand to take the extra money.
The extra money would then be collected into the company providing those services. If it just sits there, then it can get taxed at a higher rate (cause the government can play that game too.) If it is instead paid out to workers, that increases the worker's wages perhaps even more than normally obtained through UBI. If it is instead used to hire new workers, then that fixes unemployment. Stockholders of some companies may also demand dividends from the company's surplus funds that just sit there.
Also, in a free market, there's some companies that might not increase prices, and instead get additional profit from volume rather than scalping.
Speaking of price inflation, why doesn't Alaska suffer from massive price increases due to the Alaska Permanent Fund? Also, why don't prices likewise increase because of existing welfare programs?
monopolies
Governments already have systems in place to handle monopolies by now, especially if it's on an important resource. If not, then maybe the government should take control of said monopoly just to reap the benefits.
do you not remember the scrolling ticker tape status bars on the pages of the late 90s and early 00s?
That's dwarfed by other nasty Javascript effects, such as inhibiting right-clicks, move/shake the browser window, make popups, modal alert() loops that require restarting the browser, etc.
In any case, Firefox finally added a checkbox somewhere in 1.x to prevent Javascript from doing the most common annoyances. A little on the late side, but at least it can get stopped.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty sure it shouldn't be too hard to automatically determine which notes are playing at a given time.
You can put that in subtitles, or just show which notes are being hit, allowing deaf people to see what's going on.
Impractical for those who are job hunting, or those who are a major contact in some community organization (such as for a church, community group, etc.)
First, you need an long-term goal for programming. The current job market appears to demand hyper-specialized individuals, and if you don't have a few years of something major under your belt, you won't be able to get a job. (Of course, you can disregard this if you're programming as a hobby rather than intending for a career.)
For getting started - practically anything that contains examples and also explains how things work. If one doesn't seem to be working out, you can easily switch to a different one.
The actual gap seems to be resource for Intermediate programmers - those who are skilled, but "not skilled enough". I haven't really seen any suitable resource for that group.
While targeting inept users can always work, this system makes it better for regular users, so that they don't have something forced installed because an ad-network redirected them to a malware page, and better for developers since they can still have the protection of regular users for anything untrusted while still being able to do their own thing.
And even if you manage to prevent inept users from activating developer mode without hindering developers, it still doesn't protect them against other social engineering attacks where they enter their own bank account information onto a phishing website. If anything, it's best to not worry too much about inept users, and simply let regular users be safe from whatever drive-by attack is happening today.
With modern computers, I see no reason why this is an issue.
It is trivial to have a whitelist system that can be disabled for developers that want to program. Google Android does this, and I see no reason why future computers can't be setup this way either.
At least there's some attempt to combat this. For example, if you screenshot something and paste it into LibreOffice, the image is autosized from margin-to-margin. For bonus points, if it's in "web view", the autosizing is to window width.
Of course, this is a slightly old version of Libre Office, and I'm having trouble updating it on that computer. Then again, I should update that computer entirely, it's a several years old.
But still, it's universal. Being more modern won't fix that, even if the modern paradigm is to have whitespace to make touch screens more usable.
That's more of a UI bug.
Too true. Especially when viewing some apps, such as those that show reddit comments.
Seen this quite common. Especially ones which toggle between Red and Green. Fun for those who are red-green colourblind.
I recall DOS being like that... 16 font colors, 8 background colors for the font and option to blink well before the HTML tag.
Out of the list, I think that's the only one that a problem specifically with modern user interfaces.
Especially when manufacturers dump their old low-resolution systems.
and the ones that do require memorizing various hotkeys that really shouldn't be necessary.
Really love to disable that backspace hotkey in Firefox (cause it conflicts with backspacing over content in a web form), cause that browser is taking its sweet time.
Still, there's plenty of UIs that aren't customizable. Only the major applications had the effort invested to make themselves customizable, and even then, there's still static patterns that can't really be customized.
They see a rival on the other side of the window, and take the aggressive approach to remove them. Naturally, the rival male likewise takes an equally aggressive response, thus the bird either has to abort (and thus has to "compete" for food later) or use full force to drive out the rival.
They especially do this during mating season.
Popups cause unnecessary extra fuss in the event that you don't want to use autofill, no different than Clippy saying "It looks like you are writing a letter", and no different than popups from ad networks asking you to try out the poop-providing-penis-pills.
Each time I restart Firefox, I get a popup asking me to enter the master password for saved logins. Since this popup is window modal, it slows down the process by claiming that logging into a site that I've already logged into is more important than actually doing what I want.
These popups would provide exactly zero benefit for any user, since it's a tacked-on patch for something that shouldn't be an issue in the first place. If these popups start appearing for autofill, I'd find a way to disable autofill entirely because that will fix two problems at once.
Why must everything be a popup warning? You can instead have this in a right-click menu, or simply have the content available if the user presses a down-arrow in the relevant field.
It first happened on MySpace, because that site allowed creating custom forms that tricked certain browsers into providing username/password information.
In any case where a website does silly stuff with entry fields, it's trivial to allow filling specific fields through a right-click menu, or through an easy method. Firefox already does this.
The theory behind this was to make it harder to sniff usernames and passwords, ignoring the fact that any sniffing utility already had a workaround.
4th-bit is brightness - as you can discover by playing around with the Dos color palette in Qbasic. In that pattern, three bits determine which colors are present, and the fourth bit makes them brighter.
Unless you're talking about the background text color, in which case the fourth bit instead causes the same effect as the HTML blink tag.
Certain states, such as Colorado, have handed out fines in the past to those who have a water barrel to collect rain water. Such laws were under the belief of water theft, where the rain that lands wherever would always reach a river or natural water basin, and that diverting it for personal use is theft of the resource that was provided by God(tm) and the State(tm).
So before you fling around words such as "imaginary", at least check to make sure that it isn't an issue. You'll note that this is a daunting task, because there are at least 50 states in the US, all of which have different laws concerning water harvesting.
Oh, and those issues shouldn't exist in the first place, rather than having a fix being demanded.
False dichotomy.
Once you break out of binary thinking, you can find a group that is in the middle of the horseshoe. Namely, the group that dislikes premitting large scale collection while prohibiting individuals collecting rainwater on a small scale.
Illegal, because that's freeloading off a public good. This includes rainwater, which the state declares should only be used once and is not meant to be recycled over and over again like the liberal environmentalists want to do.
Solomon Northop also didn't have income tax deduction.
That's highly optimistic. It also makes two assumptions, where a line-assembly worker becomes more skilled at managing people by putting a fastener on a widget, and where said worker doesn't have competition to become the manager (including nepotistic promotions.)
Now, you may be correct in that breakout scenario, but it won't happen that easily since the bourgeois know how to keep the pauper class in their place.
Where do banks get their money from to sustain ~1% interest rates over a long period of time?
If banks are able to produce money from thin air, then I'm sure rich people can manage to do the same. Maybe the government could do so as well, nothing says free market by allowing the government to participate.
Of course not. They become rich by having income. Some may get rich by doing the work themselves, and others get rich by acting as a middle-man, keeping the workers poor, and prices high. A few become rich by setting up a monopoly or oligopoly of a critical resource.
Of these rich folks, the latter two should be the focus of taxes.
Back in ~1995, any major application that failed to provide a PgDn mechanism would be the laughing stock everywhere.
It's technically optional to have the Spacebar do this, but the feature itself is never optional.
Something which isn't required for mobile devices because the user can trivially finger scroll that works as page down: Put the finger at the bottom of the screen, then move the finger to the top.
The elevator scene was written in a way that it didn't "require" an elevator operator. After the Epsilon asked "roof?", a voice instructed him to go down to floor 19, which the Epsilon did so manually. This is clearly a means to show Epsilons being given menial work rather than actually being necessary elevator operators (not that it was meant to insult actual elevator operators, as they needed to be trained in safety and proper alignment.)
The first chapter also demonstrated factory-like automation, including a special mechanism that reduces circulation to a generation of workers when they're right-side up, as a means to condition topsy-turvy with good feelings. With that, it would be trivial to make an automatic elevator without epsilons.
Also, even if elevator operators were present during the writing of Brave New World, an electronic signal control system was already developed, plus the author could easily save a few pages and simply make the elevator automatic.
You can even go further back, and note that even animals had a job.
Horses used to have a rather common job of pulling carriages, until the internal combustion engine allowed horseless carriages.
Mules and/or oxes used to provide assistance plowing farmland. Now handled by machines
Sometimes, the job performed by the animal isn't obsolete, but simply ran out of fashion. Regardless, technology still had an impact on more than just humans.
There's a potential for them to return. Just check out the speculative documentary "Brave New World", where that task is given to an Epsilon, despite the trivial ability to automate it.
Obviously.
The Wright brothers didn't create the aircraft in their dorm room - they needed a garage and wide areas in order to do their stuff. Plus they needed wealth, which two kids in their dorm room are much less likely to have nowadays. They need space to construct that sort of stuff, much more than what's needed to build a hot-rod or small aircraft.
As for something interesting in space, the only things left is to colonize another planet (or moon), extract resources from the other planet, FTL jump to another system, etc. Two kids in the dorm room can't build the Lunar Cheese Extraction Facility, nor can they do hyperspace stuff.
The two kids in the dorm room that are capable of designing improved rockets or space vehicles wouldn't be in the dorm room because they would have been hired by any company wanting to do the same type of work.
McDs is already approaching that amount without help from giving everyone $1k/month - it's price doubled since 12 years ago, and at that rate will hit that mark in 48 years (sooner if you include more than just the Big Mac.)
Also, if McDs does charge $75 per whatever, then that's a good enough reason for reclaim said money by McDonald's suppliers (i.e. those who provide McDs with beef, vegetables, transportation fuel, and other expenses), McDonald's shareholders (who own parts of the company), McDonald's workers (who actually make the profit), or governments (who are upset that McDs are trying to grab everyone's basic income).
Or even better, undercut McDs. Practically anyone can make a small garden even if inside their own house, and introduce free food into the market even if it isn't sold.
Two destructors is slow compared to zero constructors.
If you don't have destructors to call, you can erase an entire array of elements in one fast function call. If your data structure needs a destructor, then it is called for each individual element.
Also related are constructors - if you can get by with zero constructors as opposed to one, you don't have to worry about time spent initializing the entire set of elements (as long as you remember not to use uninitialized variables.)
In my case, it had a significant cost beyond the reference count, because it got included in a data structure. shared_ptr has a destructor, which forces any struct or class containing it to likewise have a destructor. What would originally be a simple bulk deallocation now requires calling ~2 destructors per entry (one from the main object, one from shared_ptr).
shared_ptr also requires a thread-safe reference count, which is a slowdown in itself.
I'm certain you can avoid most of the slowdown with shared_ptr if you already know what can happen, but there's still a developer who uses it without knowing what will happen ahead of time.
There really should be some form of universal interface that everyone agrees on, rather than trying to create an interface for each individual language. Maybe it could be called an API, and it could accept parameters in an agreed-upon fashion. Perhaps that would solve the interface problem once and for all.
I tried using some of the "safe pointer" stuff - depending on which one is chosen, there is a performance hit depending on which safety mechanism you choose. For example, the auto-deallocate safety net slows things down a lot, while bounds checking tends to be less of a problem.
Still a good feature (where some compilers already have a limited implementation), although it could use a bit of work since you somehow need a custom library.
In some cases, the programmer requires speed. If said programmer knows what they're doing, there's no reason they should be separated from optimal flow.
Pretty sure MS-DOS 5.0 was rock-solid enough. It only faltered because things running under it had bugs that overwrote random bits - the kernel itself would be stable.
A non-rock solid game would practically crash frequently. Especially in the early era where patches are unheard-of - if the game is faulty, it's dead.
Most Apogee platformers seemed rather stable. It only took them until RotT before they had a major crash that would lock up a computer.
The extra money would then be collected into the company providing those services. If it just sits there, then it can get taxed at a higher rate (cause the government can play that game too.) If it is instead paid out to workers, that increases the worker's wages perhaps even more than normally obtained through UBI. If it is instead used to hire new workers, then that fixes unemployment. Stockholders of some companies may also demand dividends from the company's surplus funds that just sit there.
Also, in a free market, there's some companies that might not increase prices, and instead get additional profit from volume rather than scalping.
Speaking of price inflation, why doesn't Alaska suffer from massive price increases due to the Alaska Permanent Fund? Also, why don't prices likewise increase because of existing welfare programs?
Governments already have systems in place to handle monopolies by now, especially if it's on an important resource. If not, then maybe the government should take control of said monopoly just to reap the benefits.
That's dwarfed by other nasty Javascript effects, such as inhibiting right-clicks, move/shake the browser window, make popups, modal alert() loops that require restarting the browser, etc.
In any case, Firefox finally added a checkbox somewhere in 1.x to prevent Javascript from doing the most common annoyances. A little on the late side, but at least it can get stopped.