Sorry, I'm having a hard time working out whether you're being sarcastic there or not. I'll assume you'd have used tags if you were, and answer based on the assumption that your post was serious.
It really isn't crazy when you can think of architects as artists.
Why does that change anything? A photograph of a building isn't a building. I can see the point of copyright on the design of a building - that stops me copying the plans and building a great building, based on someone else's work that I haven't paid for. That seems fair and reasonable. But I cannot for the life of me work out why an architect should have any rights that could possibly make me need special permission to take a photograph of their work. How on earth does that affect their need to make a living designing buildings?
There is absolutely nothing they do but make a building look pretty.
Uh... that, and handle little details like making sure you have a safe route to get out by if there's a fire, or ensuring that there's sufficient ventilation so you don't suffocate when you close the window. I understand that a few people even value these attributes more highly than prettiness.
There is also someting 'overflowing', it's called a 'stack' , hmmmm?
Ooh, I've heard of that! It was a problem with recursive function calls in certain neanderthal programming languages, way back before the invention of tail call optimisation in the early Middle Ages, wasn't it?
Surely nobody is still using such primitive tools today.
"Viruses" as Windows users know them are only possible in the Windows world.
That depends how pedantic you're going to be about definitions. Most computer users think of trojans and worms as special types of virus, rather than as distinct types of malware.
And a trojan, for example, would be trivial to write for Linux, in theory: you just need a local root exploit and a malicious script. The only difficulty (once you'd found an exploit) would be in getting malicious code into a script people will just download and run. I'd think the configure script of a sufficiently popular bit of software would do the trick. Maybe you could release a cool new plugin for a popular desktop environment, in an attack along the lines of those trojan screensavers you used to see for Windows...
Incidentally, I just scanned through the other legislation he mentions (the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988), and what it says is this:
(1) The author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it, subject to the following provisions.
(2) Where a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, or a film, is made by an employee in the course of his employment, his employer is the first owner of any copyright in the work subject to any agreement to the contrary.
This is the only mention in the entire act of any concept of works belonging to an employer, except for a couple of references to this section. I am having serious difficulties figuring out how "in the course of his employment" is supposed to imply "irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours".
As for the Patents Act 1977, what it says is this:
(1) Notwithstanding anything in any rule of law, an invention made by an employee shall, as between him and his employer, be taken to belong to his employer for the purposes of this Act and all other purposes if - (a) it was made in the course of the normal duties of the employee or in the course of duties falling outside his normal duties, but specifically assigned to him, and the circumstances in either case were such that an invention might reasonably be expected to result from the carrying out of his duties; or (b) the invention was made in the course of the duties of the employee and, at the time of making the invention, because of the nature of his duties and the particular responsibilities arising from the nature of his duties he had a special obligation to further the interests of the employer's undertaking.
(2) Any other invention made by an employee shall, as between him and his employer, be taken for those purposes to belong to the employee.
Now, if anything you invent belongs to your employer, what exactly is the point of (2) there?
Disclaimer: IANAL. It's quite possible that these laws are written in an evil dialect of English in which "belongs to the employee" means "belongs to the employer". Consult a real lawyer if you care.
Its lack of 3D hardware is another nail in its coffin. Can it compare with PSP in gaming? No at all.
Bear in mind what a lot of people are saying about the PSP: "Okay, there's no games on it apart from half a dozen identical racers, but it's really cool for running homebrew software! I hope I don't have to upgrade to firmware 1.50 and break all my emulators!"
This GP2X? It's half the price of a PSP, and while it doesn't have the racing games, it does have the cast-iron guarantee that the company that makes it is not doing everything it can to destroy your homebrew experience and prevent you using your hardware to do whatever you like - unlike Sony, who tighten their grip on their platform with every revision.
Can it compare with PSP in eye-candy? Not at all, not even close. Can it compare with PSP in emulation and homebrews? Well, let's see - it's half the price, it runs Linux, and it's explicitly marketed at the homebrew scene. Hmm, I wonder.
So maybe it's not your thing. That doesn't mean it's crap, you know?
Er, Delphi never supported type inference, closures, or metaprogramming of the sort that Microsoft are introducing to.NET in C# 3 and VB 9. These features are coming from the functional programming world, from languages like Lisp and ML.
For existing languages that offer similar features in a braces syntax, see Nemerle or Scala.
(Languages like Ruby offer related features, but their lack of static typing means they're more distant cousins.)
these types of "OMFG LOOK AT WTF MICROSOFT IS DOING!!!" comments have no credibility anymore if the Mozilla foundation is doing essentially the same thing.
Don't be ridiculous. It's nothing to do with whether they're hiding the details of the bug or not. It's all about whether they claim that's enough to make you safe.
Who at Mozilla is saying "you are completely safe because we are hiding details until the bug is fixed"? I'll tell you: nobody connected with Mozilla is saying that! Nobody at all. If they are saying anything, they are saying that it makes you safer, which it does. Whereas here we have a Microsoft spokesman who genuinely is claiming that it means there is no risk.
What's the difference? Simple: the Mozilla people aren't lying, and the Microsoft people are.
Say what? Was there a revolt or wasn't there? The other side's story isn't self-contradictory.
Nor is this. It's not very well written, I'll grant you, but I think it's clear enough that what it's saying is basically "some of them left and then revolted against the rest of us. You have probably heard that I revolted against everyone else, and I deny that."
However, if that person doesn't mind it, no one, whether it be a fellow no-one like me, or someone like the Pope or the Dalai Lama, has any right to stop me from doing it , or to stop the person who is enjoying having the crap beaten out of them from enjoying it.
That's a fine sentiment. But how do you determine whether that person doesn't mind it? You can't necessarily believe them if they say so. They might be afraid that you'll do something worse to them if they say they don't like it.
This is not a hypothetical question. It's an issue that comes up a lot in rape cases, for example. So what's your solution? How would you solve this problem in your mature and permissive utopia?
I'm tempted to get the first Bone episode, but twenty bucks for 4-6 hours of gameplay?
I've spent more than twenty bucks on a night out at the theater before now, and that sure didn't come anywhere near 6 hours of entertainment - more like 40 minutes driving, 10 minutes looking for somewhere to park, 1 hour queuing, 1 hour of advertisements, 90 minutes of disappointing movie, and another hour listening to the people I was with complaining about what a crap evening it had been all the way home.
Looked at that way, it suddenly doesn't sound quite such a bad deal, does it?
Based on that evidence alone, I feel that Apple had a right to sue.
Oh, so you accept that look-and-feel should be considered "property"? What a strange idea.
I suppose in your ideal world, you would be able to tell who published a book by looking at the direction the text ran on a page, and you would be able to tell where somebody bought their cutlery by whether they were eating with forks or spoons, and you would be able to tell what brand of car someone drove by whether the wheels were square or triangular. I'm glad I don't live in a world like that. I actually appreciate living in a world where most things are standard and predictable.
Note that Xerox, who invented the GUI that Apple fanboys like to pretend sprang fully formed from Steve Jobs' backside, believed that everyone should be given the right to develop something that looked just like the Xerox GUI, in order that it might become a standard and the world might benefit as a result. And that's just what's happened, as it turns out: windowed user interfaces have become a standard that everyone implements, and the world has benefited as a result.
there are some things a grammar checker could readily do . . . see if a sentence ends in a preposition, etc.
Wait, why should a grammar checker be used to enforce pointless and arbitrary style guidelines which have never had any foundation in the usage even of the best writers, let alone served any purpose other than to require hideous contortions from anyone daring to employ phrasal verbs - like "to put up with", in that famous example which I'm sure I don't have to quote?
Bonus points for anyone spotting the other stupid and arbitrary "rule" which I've flouted several times in this post. One which Word's detestable "grammar checker" does attempt to pick up on. (Ooh, I just ended a sentence with a preposition!)
Agreed! We already have the problem of people not knowing how to spell (reliance on spellchecking) and people not being able to do basic math (reliance on calculators) - this would just dumb people down even more.
And don't forget the problem of people not knowing how to shoe a horse (reliance on motor vehicles), or light a fire (reliance on electricity), or plough a field (reliance on supermarkets).
Wait, those aren't problems, they're examples of how the advance of technology has completely obsoleted things that used to be vital life skills. Whereas clearly spelling, grammar, and basic maths are completely different, and we should not be making any effort to help people take their mind away from niggling details and let them concentrate on the content of their writing or the implications of their calculations.
No, wait, I'm still not quite following the logic here...
Final Fantasy IV (II) a pioneer in featuring moral dilemmas and character development? Don't make me laugh. Try Ultima IV, perhaps, which did it all half a decade earlier in 1985.
Puh-lease. Maybe Final Fantasy IV was something new and special in console terms, but computer-based RPGs were already way ahead, and providing little things like mature themes and non-linear gameplay that the Final Fantasy series still hasn't got the hang of, for all its flashy graphics.
Don't get me wrong - the FF series is on my "great games" list too, particularly nos. 5-7. Just don't go kidding yourself it ever broke any ground -- because it didn't, whatever its fanboys want to think. Truly Final Fantasy is the Halo of the RPG world.
I worked for a firm earlier where we had to change our passwords every week where the password had to 1) be exactly 14 characters and 2) be ~60% different to the previous four passwords.
Man, you had it easy. My current place uses iris scans for authentication. We have to swap out our eyeballs every 30 days, and our new eyes can't be the same colour as the last pair.
the ipod + itunes combo is an outstanding example of how simplicity, reliability, and having a complete system can win over consumers even if the device is overpriced at times, and if other MP3 players have more features.
It's also a perfect example of how having a complete range, covering a wide variety of price points and feature sets, is not actually a bad thing.
"I'd like an iPod, please." "Certainly, sir, would that be a 20 GB iPod, a 60 GB iPod, a 2 GB iPod Nano, a 4 GB iPod Nano, a 512 MB iPod Shuffle, a 1 GB iPod Shuffle, or we have some special editions over there and some old stock including various iPod Minis over there..."
In fact, all in all there are probably several times as many different variations on the iPod as there will be on Windows Vista. So, uh, what was your point again?
Microsoft didn't want to release Windows XP Starter edition, or Windows XP N. GOVERNMENT made them release those.
Windows XP N, yes. Any chance you would be so kind as to identify which government forced Microsoft to release XP Starter Edition?
Of course you can't, because it didn't happen. Microsoft came up with the Starter Edition idea themselves, so as to be able to compete with Linux on ultra-cheap PCs. The Brazilian government was involved in specifying the price of said PCs, but they never "made" Microsoft release anything. It was entirely Microsoft's choice whether they participated in the initiative or not; they could quite well have sat out and let Linux take over the market, or offered special pricing on XP Home.
Actual violence not needed very often. The last king to be killed was over 300 years ago (Charles I). He was hung from a tree - no guns needed.
Actually he was beheaded. Still no guns needed, but last time I checked the government wasn't too keen on people walking around with big sharp axes either...
I remember how in the early 90s cartoons were actually GOOD. Disney Afternoon was top-notch animated entertainment.
Have you considered that in the early 90s you were 10-15 years younger than you are now?
It's possible that the quality of cartoons has plummeted. But it's just as likely that all that's happened is that your tastes have matured, so you no longer like new kids' shows, but the old stuff still looks golden because nostalgia has kicked in.
What if there were more guns in half-life2 or special playmodes online for quake. Or a special class in WoW. People will flock to the limited edition then. Wouldn't even think twice.
Would WoW really be more fun if the first thousand people to preorder the game got a special class to use? Nope, it would just mean that anyone using the special class got special attention from griefers.
Adding fundamental gameplay advantages to a limited edition will only alienate customers who missed out on it.
Besides, I wasn't aware that Blizzard were left with warehouses full of the limited edition as it was. Seems to me they judged it about right.
WARNING: Clicking the above link will crash firefox.
Only for some people. It needs to specify a character set, too; the "exploit" appears only to crash Firefox when the character set is ISO-8859-1, so if your browser is set to use anything else by default, the link will not do anything at all.
Typically, GC prevents exactly one category of programmer error for exactly one type of resource: forgetting to release memory before your program ends. That category of error is one of the least dangerous anyway, since pretty much any modern OS will do it for you as a last resort.
Wrong. Many (most?) GC implementations don't bother to run a collection cycle at shutdown - precisely because the OS will clean up anyway, so there's no point.
GC provides no guarantees against a poor design hogging memory while the program is still running, and often doesn't work well with resources other than memory.
Oh dear, the old "it's not absolutely perfect so I will reject it out of hand" line. Yes, of course GC isn't a silver bullet. It's just another useful tool that makes it easier to write programs with fewer bugs in them. Yes, of course it doesn't magically remove every single possible cause of memory leaks. It just removes one large class of potential problems from the things the programmer has to worry about.
And yes, GC doesn't solve the problem of handling resources other than memory. RAII cleans up file handles and stuff for you too. That's nice, I admit it. But there are other strategies that can handle this in a GC language. C#'s "using" statement, for example. And I don't know about the code you write, but in the code I write, the vast majority of objects do not represent any resource other than memory - so GC handles them just fine, thank you.
If doctors were C++ programmers, we'd still have kids dying of easily treated diseases daily - after all, antibiotics don't cure viruses, so there's no point using them, is there?
Correction: Read "nowhere near the performance of ATI/NVidia's top-end models".
Why do NVidia bother selling the GeForce FX 5200 any more? It's crap compared to a 7800 GTX!
Oh, wait, it's because they can make a lot of money by capturing the low end of the market as well as the handful of geeks who are anal enough about frame rates to spend more on a single graphics card than the average person spends on a complete computer. Hey, you reckon S3 might just be planning to make their money by selling into the huge mainstream market, rather than wasting vast sums of money trying to compete at the top?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I'm having a hard time working out whether you're being sarcastic there or not. I'll assume you'd have used tags if you were, and answer based on the assumption that your post was serious.
It really isn't crazy when you can think of architects as artists.
Why does that change anything? A photograph of a building isn't a building. I can see the point of copyright on the design of a building - that stops me copying the plans and building a great building, based on someone else's work that I haven't paid for. That seems fair and reasonable. But I cannot for the life of me work out why an architect should have any rights that could possibly make me need special permission to take a photograph of their work. How on earth does that affect their need to make a living designing buildings?
There is absolutely nothing they do but make a building look pretty.
Uh... that, and handle little details like making sure you have a safe route to get out by if there's a fire, or ensuring that there's sufficient ventilation so you don't suffocate when you close the window. I understand that a few people even value these attributes more highly than prettiness.
There is also someting 'overflowing', it's called a 'stack' , hmmmm?
Ooh, I've heard of that! It was a problem with recursive function calls in certain neanderthal programming languages, way back before the invention of tail call optimisation in the early Middle Ages, wasn't it?
Surely nobody is still using such primitive tools today.
"Viruses" as Windows users know them are only possible in the Windows world.
That depends how pedantic you're going to be about definitions. Most computer users think of trojans and worms as special types of virus, rather than as distinct types of malware.
And a trojan, for example, would be trivial to write for Linux, in theory: you just need a local root exploit and a malicious script. The only difficulty (once you'd found an exploit) would be in getting malicious code into a script people will just download and run. I'd think the configure script of a sufficiently popular bit of software would do the trick. Maybe you could release a cool new plugin for a popular desktop environment, in an attack along the lines of those trojan screensavers you used to see for Windows...
Incidentally, I just scanned through the other legislation he mentions (the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988), and what it says is this:
This is the only mention in the entire act of any concept of works belonging to an employer, except for a couple of references to this section. I am having serious difficulties figuring out how "in the course of his employment" is supposed to imply "irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours".
As for the Patents Act 1977, what it says is this:Now, if anything you invent belongs to your employer, what exactly is the point of (2) there?
Disclaimer: IANAL. It's quite possible that these laws are written in an evil dialect of English in which "belongs to the employee" means "belongs to the employer". Consult a real lawyer if you care.
Its lack of 3D hardware is another nail in its coffin. Can it compare with PSP in gaming? No at all.
Bear in mind what a lot of people are saying about the PSP: "Okay, there's no games on it apart from half a dozen identical racers, but it's really cool for running homebrew software! I hope I don't have to upgrade to firmware 1.50 and break all my emulators!"
This GP2X? It's half the price of a PSP, and while it doesn't have the racing games, it does have the cast-iron guarantee that the company that makes it is not doing everything it can to destroy your homebrew experience and prevent you using your hardware to do whatever you like - unlike Sony, who tighten their grip on their platform with every revision.
Can it compare with PSP in eye-candy? Not at all, not even close. Can it compare with PSP in emulation and homebrews? Well, let's see - it's half the price, it runs Linux, and it's explicitly marketed at the homebrew scene. Hmm, I wonder.
So maybe it's not your thing. That doesn't mean it's crap, you know?
Er, Delphi never supported type inference, closures, or metaprogramming of the sort that Microsoft are introducing to .NET in C# 3 and VB 9. These features are coming from the functional programming world, from languages like Lisp and ML.
For existing languages that offer similar features in a braces syntax, see Nemerle or Scala.
(Languages like Ruby offer related features, but their lack of static typing means they're more distant cousins.)
these types of "OMFG LOOK AT WTF MICROSOFT IS DOING!!!" comments have no credibility anymore if the Mozilla foundation is doing essentially the same thing.
Don't be ridiculous. It's nothing to do with whether they're hiding the details of the bug or not. It's all about whether they claim that's enough to make you safe.
Who at Mozilla is saying "you are completely safe because we are hiding details until the bug is fixed"? I'll tell you: nobody connected with Mozilla is saying that! Nobody at all. If they are saying anything, they are saying that it makes you safer, which it does. Whereas here we have a Microsoft spokesman who genuinely is claiming that it means there is no risk.
What's the difference? Simple: the Mozilla people aren't lying, and the Microsoft people are.
Say what? Was there a revolt or wasn't there? The other side's story isn't self-contradictory.
Nor is this. It's not very well written, I'll grant you, but I think it's clear enough that what it's saying is basically "some of them left and then revolted against the rest of us. You have probably heard that I revolted against everyone else, and I deny that."
However, if that person doesn't mind it, no one, whether it be a fellow no-one like me, or someone like the Pope or the Dalai Lama, has any right to stop me from doing it , or to stop the person who is enjoying having the crap beaten out of them from enjoying it.
That's a fine sentiment. But how do you determine whether that person doesn't mind it? You can't necessarily believe them if they say so. They might be afraid that you'll do something worse to them if they say they don't like it.
This is not a hypothetical question. It's an issue that comes up a lot in rape cases, for example. So what's your solution? How would you solve this problem in your mature and permissive utopia?
I'm tempted to get the first Bone episode, but twenty bucks for 4-6 hours of gameplay?
I've spent more than twenty bucks on a night out at the theater before now, and that sure didn't come anywhere near 6 hours of entertainment - more like 40 minutes driving, 10 minutes looking for somewhere to park, 1 hour queuing, 1 hour of advertisements, 90 minutes of disappointing movie, and another hour listening to the people I was with complaining about what a crap evening it had been all the way home.
Looked at that way, it suddenly doesn't sound quite such a bad deal, does it?
Maybe they could put the fabled "Aeris resurrection quest" back in...
...and then have her die again ten minutes later. I'd pay good money to hear the fanboys scream!
Based on that evidence alone, I feel that Apple had a right to sue.
Oh, so you accept that look-and-feel should be considered "property"? What a strange idea.
I suppose in your ideal world, you would be able to tell who published a book by looking at the direction the text ran on a page, and you would be able to tell where somebody bought their cutlery by whether they were eating with forks or spoons, and you would be able to tell what brand of car someone drove by whether the wheels were square or triangular. I'm glad I don't live in a world like that. I actually appreciate living in a world where most things are standard and predictable.
Note that Xerox, who invented the GUI that Apple fanboys like to pretend sprang fully formed from Steve Jobs' backside, believed that everyone should be given the right to develop something that looked just like the Xerox GUI, in order that it might become a standard and the world might benefit as a result. And that's just what's happened, as it turns out: windowed user interfaces have become a standard that everyone implements, and the world has benefited as a result.
No thanks to Apple and their many lawsuits.
there are some things a grammar checker could readily do . . . see if a sentence ends in a preposition, etc.
Wait, why should a grammar checker be used to enforce pointless and arbitrary style guidelines which have never had any foundation in the usage even of the best writers, let alone served any purpose other than to require hideous contortions from anyone daring to employ phrasal verbs - like "to put up with", in that famous example which I'm sure I don't have to quote?
Bonus points for anyone spotting the other stupid and arbitrary "rule" which I've flouted several times in this post. One which Word's detestable "grammar checker" does attempt to pick up on. (Ooh, I just ended a sentence with a preposition!)
Agreed! We already have the problem of people not knowing how to spell (reliance on spellchecking) and people not being able to do basic math (reliance on calculators) - this would just dumb people down even more.
And don't forget the problem of people not knowing how to shoe a horse (reliance on motor vehicles), or light a fire (reliance on electricity), or plough a field (reliance on supermarkets).
Wait, those aren't problems, they're examples of how the advance of technology has completely obsoleted things that used to be vital life skills. Whereas clearly spelling, grammar, and basic maths are completely different, and we should not be making any effort to help people take their mind away from niggling details and let them concentrate on the content of their writing or the implications of their calculations.
No, wait, I'm still not quite following the logic here...
Final Fantasy IV (II) a pioneer in featuring moral dilemmas and character development? Don't make me laugh. Try Ultima IV, perhaps, which did it all half a decade earlier in 1985.
Puh-lease. Maybe Final Fantasy IV was something new and special in console terms, but computer-based RPGs were already way ahead, and providing little things like mature themes and non-linear gameplay that the Final Fantasy series still hasn't got the hang of, for all its flashy graphics.
Don't get me wrong - the FF series is on my "great games" list too, particularly nos. 5-7. Just don't go kidding yourself it ever broke any ground -- because it didn't, whatever its fanboys want to think. Truly Final Fantasy is the Halo of the RPG world.
I worked for a firm earlier where we had to change our passwords every week where the password had to 1) be exactly 14 characters and 2) be ~60% different to the previous four passwords.
Man, you had it easy. My current place uses iris scans for authentication. We have to swap out our eyeballs every 30 days, and our new eyes can't be the same colour as the last pair.
does ANYONE think this is a good idea?
Yes, since you ask. Microsoft, for example.
the ipod + itunes combo is an outstanding example of how simplicity, reliability, and having a complete system can win over consumers even if the device is overpriced at times, and if other MP3 players have more features.
It's also a perfect example of how having a complete range, covering a wide variety of price points and feature sets, is not actually a bad thing.
"I'd like an iPod, please."
"Certainly, sir, would that be a 20 GB iPod, a 60 GB iPod, a 2 GB iPod Nano, a 4 GB iPod Nano, a 512 MB iPod Shuffle, a 1 GB iPod Shuffle, or we have some special editions over there and some old stock including various iPod Minis over there..."
In fact, all in all there are probably several times as many different variations on the iPod as there will be on Windows Vista. So, uh, what was your point again?
Microsoft didn't want to release Windows XP Starter edition, or Windows XP N. GOVERNMENT made them release those.
Windows XP N, yes. Any chance you would be so kind as to identify which government forced Microsoft to release XP Starter Edition?
Of course you can't, because it didn't happen. Microsoft came up with the Starter Edition idea themselves, so as to be able to compete with Linux on ultra-cheap PCs. The Brazilian government was involved in specifying the price of said PCs, but they never "made" Microsoft release anything. It was entirely Microsoft's choice whether they participated in the initiative or not; they could quite well have sat out and let Linux take over the market, or offered special pricing on XP Home.
Actual violence not needed very often. The last king to be killed was over 300 years ago (Charles I). He was hung from a tree - no guns needed.
Actually he was beheaded. Still no guns needed, but last time I checked the government wasn't too keen on people walking around with big sharp axes either...
I remember how in the early 90s cartoons were actually GOOD. Disney Afternoon was top-notch animated entertainment.
Have you considered that in the early 90s you were 10-15 years younger than you are now?
It's possible that the quality of cartoons has plummeted. But it's just as likely that all that's happened is that your tastes have matured, so you no longer like new kids' shows, but the old stuff still looks golden because nostalgia has kicked in.
What if there were more guns in half-life2 or special playmodes online for quake. Or a special class in WoW. People will flock to the limited edition then. Wouldn't even think twice.
Would WoW really be more fun if the first thousand people to preorder the game got a special class to use? Nope, it would just mean that anyone using the special class got special attention from griefers.
Adding fundamental gameplay advantages to a limited edition will only alienate customers who missed out on it.
Besides, I wasn't aware that Blizzard were left with warehouses full of the limited edition as it was. Seems to me they judged it about right.
WARNING: Clicking the above link will crash firefox.
Only for some people. It needs to specify a character set, too; the "exploit" appears only to crash Firefox when the character set is ISO-8859-1, so if your browser is set to use anything else by default, the link will not do anything at all.
Typically, GC prevents exactly one category of programmer error for exactly one type of resource: forgetting to release memory before your program ends. That category of error is one of the least dangerous anyway, since pretty much any modern OS will do it for you as a last resort.
Wrong. Many (most?) GC implementations don't bother to run a collection cycle at shutdown - precisely because the OS will clean up anyway, so there's no point.
GC provides no guarantees against a poor design hogging memory while the program is still running, and often doesn't work well with resources other than memory.
Oh dear, the old "it's not absolutely perfect so I will reject it out of hand" line. Yes, of course GC isn't a silver bullet. It's just another useful tool that makes it easier to write programs with fewer bugs in them. Yes, of course it doesn't magically remove every single possible cause of memory leaks. It just removes one large class of potential problems from the things the programmer has to worry about.
And yes, GC doesn't solve the problem of handling resources other than memory. RAII cleans up file handles and stuff for you too. That's nice, I admit it. But there are other strategies that can handle this in a GC language. C#'s "using" statement, for example. And I don't know about the code you write, but in the code I write, the vast majority of objects do not represent any resource other than memory - so GC handles them just fine, thank you.
If doctors were C++ programmers, we'd still have kids dying of easily treated diseases daily - after all, antibiotics don't cure viruses, so there's no point using them, is there?
Read: Nowhere near the performance of ATI/NVIDIA.
Correction: Read "nowhere near the performance of ATI/NVidia's top-end models".
Why do NVidia bother selling the GeForce FX 5200 any more? It's crap compared to a 7800 GTX!
Oh, wait, it's because they can make a lot of money by capturing the low end of the market as well as the handful of geeks who are anal enough about frame rates to spend more on a single graphics card than the average person spends on a complete computer. Hey, you reckon S3 might just be planning to make their money by selling into the huge mainstream market, rather than wasting vast sums of money trying to compete at the top?
Say Tip a quarter to the right,
And your computer promptly donates 25 cents to the Republican party.
All together now: natural language is NOT a good interface.