Don't knock something just 'cos you don't use it -I think exceptions are an abomination and an easy excuse for every weak programmer around, but I wouldn't deny their use to other projects.
Funnily enough, I was about to reply to the GP with exactly that example when I read to the end of your post. Exceptions are frequently used very poorly from a design perspective, and in C++ from an exception-safety perspective as well. That just means that most programmers suck, which we already knew. Nevertheless, exceptions used well by good designers and programmers can keep code much cleaner and more maintainable than it otherwise would be, and the safety comes almost without a second thought. Like any craftsman, a programmer has to know how to use his tools, or he's just another muppet with a bit of machinery in his hand.
So I've been told, for much of the last decade in fact. And yet Java hasn't somehow wiped out C++. Nor did VB, and nor will C#. As I've noted before, there are many ways you could make a language very much better than C++ if you're starting from a clean slate with 20 extra years of experience from C++ and other languages to build on. I'm really quite surprised that no-one has yet developed a killer application development language taking the stronger aspects of C++ and other languages, and reduced all of the above to nothing more than legacy support jobs.
But so far, they haven't. In fact, depending on who you talk to, Java is now on a serious downhill slide; even universities are starting to see that it's not all it's cracked up to be and switching back to teaching C or C++ as their primary example language for CS courses. C++ has stood up to the marketing machines of Sun and Microsoft, and competed on merit, and it's still around. I'd say that's a pretty good indicator about its future.
Congratulations, you've taken another step in the journey of learning to program. However, your conclusion is a little premature.
Some of us took that step a long time ago, lured in by the power and flexibility of functional programming languages, and the elegant simplicity of LISP in particular. And many of us came back, giving a polite nod to those languages, understanding some programming concepts a little more deeply than we used to, even wishing we could bring some of the neater stuff with us, and yet still returning to tools like C++ or Perl or Java for our serious work.
Why did we do this? The theoretical power of functional languages is undeniable, and for sure many of the current mainstream languages could learn more than a trick or two from them, but they tend to sacrifice practicality for purity. Lazy evaluation and side effects make ill bed-fellows, for example. In my universe, we frequently use side effects for I/O, and we do not consider monad-based techniques, however clever and theoretically pure, to be an adequate substitute when we're writing more than toy examples. Similarly, while LISP macros are awesomely powerful, for most jobs some well-thought-out and standardised syntactic sugar will offer more benefit.
It's perfectly possible to gain many of the advantages of functional languages in more mainstream alternatives, simply by adapting your programming practices: write in a more declarative style with liberal use of const, for example. However, at least in C++, you have a choice. In a strict functional language, you don't, and that's a deal-breaker for most programming jobs.
If you end up having problems figuring out where to use malloc and free, you have major architectural problems that will cause other errors to spring up.
Amen. And the memory management argument is even less relevant in C++, where resource management should generally be using at least simple RAII, and far more powerful schemes can be designed that still take advantage of deterministic destruction to ensure they're pretty much user-proof. Unlike certain other languages(TM) where memory is garbage collected -- sometimes -- and other resources are generally leaked like a sieve by programmers who haven't learned to do this stuff properly and think reading Learn A Language In 5 Seconds makes them good...
You could make an argument that the standard library should be designed that way, maybe with a root List interface and then a MutableList subinterface, but you could also make the argument that going that way doubles the number of classes in your collections API. Matter of taste, perhaps.
Or you could just use a language that supports the concepts of mutable and immutable data natively, like C++...
Slashdot requires you to wait at least 2 minutes between posting, so you can't flood the system with loads of messages before others have a chance to post.
A few days ago, someone broke the logic that checks this, and now you often get a message saying you have to wait 2 minutes between posts, and it's been [something more than 2] minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
The only way to fix this appears to be to shut down your browser and come back later. It's really, really annoying if you're trying to participate in ongoing discussions.
To an extent, I agree with your position: I don't favour all-encompassing libraries a la Java, and I do prefer somewhat centralised but community-driven framework's like Perl's CPAN or TeX's CTAN.
However, I think a certain amount of pragmatism is useful. To pick on the GUI library as an example, it's certainly true that many C++ programmers write GUI code, though many more do not. If you do, then whether you're using MFC or wxWidgets or Qt or Yet Another Clone Windowing Library, the basic concepts are very much the same.
In light of this, I believe that a standard library should provide a simplified framework of basic functionality in this sort of case, upon which more powerful non-standard extensions can build if they wish. There will always be platform-specific libraries, not least because not all platforms have the same capabilities, but the needless duplication of effort between all of the libraries I mentioned just above is an impediment to portability without benefit. Why not commoditise the common ground, and leave the specialist library guys to focus on the more powerful stuff in their respective fields, without that unnecessary duplication of effort, and without creating artificial barriers to portability?
For bonus points, this also provides useful basic features for the many applications that only use a simple GUI anyway. In addition, you reduce the learning curve for both the langauge and any libraries building on the standard framework, and make it easier to teach the language to beginners.
You can make much the same argument for many other fields, where a very large number of programmers do essentially the same basic thing, with different bells and whistles on top. C++ excels in providing tools for flexible, extensible, customisable code in libraries: classes, templates, overloading, RTTI, exceptions, and more. Of all the mainstream programming languages in use today, I think C++ is perhaps the most suitable to this framework-based approach. Over a million programmers are going to wind up using MFC or Qt or wxWidgets or whatever anyway, so it seems overly pedantic to restrict the scope of a standard library because a GUI component couldn't be used everywhere. After all, taken to the logical conclusion on that basis, you're not allowed any sort of file access, either, but I can't imagine any language hitting 3 million users if you had to download additional libraries just to open a file!
It seems quite clear that the rest of the world wants alternatives to US technologies, even if they work, they're efficient and/or well managed. That should tell you something of the level of trust other countries have in future US foreign policies.
s/future/current/
Speaking as an outsider, George W Bush is the worst PR guy you guys have had for a very long time. The collective ego represented by Bush and the current Republican government is staggering: obviously there was the whole Iraq thing; we've got legislation and trade agreements driven by major US interests coming out of everywhere even where they're clearly not in the interests of the local little guys; and just last week Bush himself went home from the G8 summit after telling the rest of the world to get stuffed on the environment. You have a government that, by its own admission and demonstration, is prepared to wage war, force its will on foreign legal systems, and wreck the planet, all in the interest of its economic drivers. Is it really any wonder that the rest of the world is no longer willing to leave such important facilities at the Internet and the GPS network under so much US-centric control?
In case anyone's wondering, this isn't meant as a troll, BTW. That really is the way the US is currently perceived over here, according to just about every conversation I've had on the subject for a long time now.
It's only centralised if you think the US is the centre of the world.
And you should find out the real answer to your own question about who has put in most of the money to fund the Internet as it's developed today. When you've worked that out, you'll start to understand why so many people think the US government and its ICANN subsidiary don't deserve their de facto overlord status.
So the U.S. didn't invent the web, but the U.S. did polish it up and turn it into something that was more generally useful.
So if the web was invented by a Brit, but it was obscure until the US polished it up, it's a US thing. However, if the Internet started out as a small network linking a few US military and academic sites together, and was obscure until the rest of the worldwide academic community picked up on it too, that's a US thing as well?
I tried messing with an SWT-based hello-world in eclipse and was frustrated that nowhere is there a simple how-to on how to do it. I couldn't get the SWT libraries correctly linked in.
This is the problem with languages that come with monolithic standard libraries. As long as what you want is in the library, and in the form you want it, you're fine. If it's not, or what's there isn't in a convenient or suitably adaptable form, you're in for a long day.
Compare and contrast with C++, where you bring in everything via separate libraries but pretty much everyone is familiar with how to do it, or Perl, where everyone knows you grab new packages off CPAN and usually has a one-liner tool available to do so.
Stuff that went into Boost should be in the standard library from now on...
Oh God, please, no!
C++ desperately needs some basic functionality in its standard library: concurrency, GUI, maybe things like sockets. (Alas, by the standards committee's own admission, some of these -- particularly the GUI one -- are unlikely to happen.)
What C++ doesn't need is for its relatively simple but useful standard library to be overwhelmed by every template freak and his brother's pet ideas, which is very much the direction a lot of the "in crowd" and a lot of Boost contributors are tending towards at present.
By all means, let library designers use whatever language features are useful in whatever ingenious ways they can, but please let the interface for anything that actually gets into the standard library be simple and effective, not infinitely customisable but massively over-complex. That means some parts of Boost would be excellent additions, but others certainly would not.
What will end up in my Start Menu? We all know the answer: a "Bar Corp." folder with a "Foo" sub-folder which will contain "Foo," "Uninstall Foo" (in spite of the uninstaller being in the Control Panel!!!!!!), and "Foo ReadMe" (in spite of the existence of a Help file). Ugh!
I've always thought this was counter-productive.
On my system, all the apps I like and have installed long-term are filed into a small number of folders: one for "office tools"; one for games, one for programming tools; one for Internet utilities; and a couple more. Anything useful that lives on my PC for more than a day or two gets filed appropriately, with extraneous menu items dumped in the process.
A corollary to that is that anything that doesn't get filed within a day or two doesn't tend to live on my system for any longer than that. If I install a trial version of some package, play with it for half an hour, decide it's got potential and leave it installed, but never get around to playing with it again before it expires because it's hidden four levels deep in my Start menu and I forget about it then it doesn't encourage me to buy the product, now does it? All that happens is that at some point a few days later, I get annoyed that my Start menu is cluttered, and I delete the clutter without a second thought.
If, OTOH, I'd simply been given a link to "Whizzy Graphics Pro Trial Edition" on the Start menu, I'd have been reminded that I'd installed the trial version every time I opened the menu, and might well have gone back for a second look some time later. It's a simple thing, but it probably makes a huge difference to whether/how the software I install is used.
That would be a great feature, except for two rather fundamental things:
The switch to turn it on is in a daft place.
It doesn't seem to do anything.
The first matters if you weren't the person who configured your machine. It might not have been on by the time you got the box, even if it's on by default.
I can confirm the second one, because I'm typing this on a Windows XP box, have just verified that the switch is on, and yet minimising and maximising windows (for several different apps, just to be sure) exhibits no perceptible difference to when the setting is off.
I thought this might be because, slightly unusually, I have the taskbar to the left of my screen, but I've just checked with it at the bottom as well, and it still doesn't do anything visually funky. The only blip during maximising is that you can just about see the redraw of the web page in Firefox.
I used to have this activated on my old PC, so I know the effect I'm looking for, and what I'm seeing definitely isn't it. That's a shame, because it is indeed a nice touch; I hadn't even realised WinXP was supposed to do it.
I jumped ship about three years ago and transitioned to Apple products. Since then I've been through several OS releases and lived through innovation and an excellent user experiance.
I appreciate your point about not sticking with Windows just because, and I also have a soft spot for Apple kit, but I have to ask: how many times did you have to give Apple money to get all those upgrades, and how much did it all add up to?
It would do, if what you wrote had been been equivalent to what I wrote, but I'm afraid I don't see how it was. The point I was making had far more to do with the scale of projects than their prominence; there just happens to be some correlation between the two in the most well-known cases.
Didn't we have this discussion 10 years ago? I think time has shown this idea to be false.
Has it, really? How many non-trivial, successful open source software projects aren't written mostly by staff paid to do the job? Pretty much all of the biggest names have some sort of commercial entity behind them, and those commercial entities expect to make money from the OSS-based work they do, by some means or other. The specific economic model may be non-traditional, but the underling economic principles certainly aren't!
"After today, I expect the travelling public will be more prepared to put up with a greater level of surveillance." Mr Stringer said.
I'm not sure that's true. Londoners and others have been remarkably resilient in the face of last week's attacks, with many transport staff and regular travellers being interviewed and saying that while they were shaken by the attacks, they absolutely wouldn't let it change their day-to-day lives, and they'd be back on the Underground the next day.
The greater level of surveillance implied by these machines may or may not make a difference to security, but will certainly cost a lot and upset a lot of people who don't like the idea of several random LU staff seeing them naked every day. They caused a stir with this when they started talking about using it at airports, and AFAIK the only plans currently in place at airports make it an optional alternative to a traditional "patting down". TFA does mention some methods QinetiQ have considered to address this issue, and I think the public would want to know that one of them was in place before they accepted this particular system.
I'm kind of in two minds about this whole thing. On the one hand, I'm about to go and send a message to two friends who were in one of the carriages that exploded, and were hospitalised as a result. Of course I wish they hadn't been there and no-one had been hurt last week. On the other hand, I know some other friends who seem to get stopped and anything up to strip searched almost every time they go to an airport, obviously causing them significant inconvenience and distress. Being checked out, either closely and physically or by a machine that essentially strips you, is not a pleasant experience. I find the fact that this happens to a couple of very attractive female friends far, far more often than any of the guys, even where they're travelling to or from the same home country, pretty telling.
If this actually helps security, maybe it's a price that most people would be willing to pay, though I'm not sure I entirely believe that. OTOH, this sounds like something expensive and good-looking that actually does jack to make anyone safer, and these systems do get abused, as those friends of mine can testify first-hand.
At the end of the day, you can never directly protect every key government installation, transport link, utility supplier, military base, and 101 other potential terrorist targets. It's just not possible, no matter how much technology and how many people you have. You can make it a bit more difficult for the bad guys, but the best ways to counter terrorism are based on intelligence/awareness (including the general public, not just some secret-agent-type mole), not creating unnecessary motivations for terrorist reprisals in the first place, and simply refusing to be intimidated by it so the tactic is shown not to be effective (as Londoners are doing so well today).
No, no, you're confusing Clippy with something that knows what's going on. It's more like:
Clippy: "This e-mail looks like it's from your bank and asking you to confirm your name and password for security reasons. Would you like help with that?"
The trick is, you don't actually have to memorize your passwords; after you type each one about 20 times, your fingers retain it in muscle memory.
If you want to rely on that, be my guest, but please be aware that there is no such thing as "muscle memory". Your muscles don't remember anything; you're just talking about transferring the information to a different part of your brain.
The problem with this approach, of course, is that the information you remember will shift slightly with time, and when you start mistyping a password slightly without "knowing" what it really is, you're screwed.
Absolutely. Hearing that companies ask this sort of interview question usually counts as a negative against them if I'm ever considering working for them. I rather suspect that I've spent far more time in my career clearing up someone's "clever" ideas than they saved by using them.
FWIW, I'd mod you (+1, Insightful) if I weren't posting.
Unfortunately, you can absolutely bet 100% that if a system such as this is proposed or comes anywhere near to implementation, the biggest and most affluent copyright holders will use it as an excuse to grab new and undue powers for themselves-- powers which they will then never, ever let go of, and be defending in a hundred year's time as "the way things have always worked".
Too true. Remember, this is the same EU that brought us the EU Copyright Directive, which is pretty much Europe's DMCA. It'll take a lot to convince me that they're doing this for the benefit of consumers.
Here's a great scenario for you, based on some investigation for an amateur dance club in the UK about the possibility of burning a selection of the best tracks used at club activities onto a small number of compilation CDs, so the club DJs don't have to carry several large boxes of CDs everywhere. For reference, the club already pays a fee to PPL for the right to play the copyrighted music in public at its classes and events. It also buys the original CDs just like anyone else.
It seems the club can also pay another fee to a different organisation, which gives it the legal right to make the compilations (and even to make multiple copies and sell the spares, with a few restrictions). However, while this would be more than enough, under UK law, to make the compilations normally, thanks to the EUCD those people making the compilations could be criminally liable for doing so if they take material from any "copy-protected" CDs. After all, circumventing copy protection now seems to be a criminal act in its own right here, even if you had every legal right to copy the protected material. <sigh>
Now, if the EU were to introduce some common sense to copyright -- the equivalent of fair use rights so everyone knows they're safe making a back-up or format-shifting material they've legally purchased, for example -- that would be great. If the EU want to introduce mandatory escrow for DRM-based material to guarantee that fair use, and prohibit the sale of music in any DRM'd form that doesn't submit a copy for escrow first, that would be in the interests of consumers and yet still consistent with protecting the legitimate rights of copyright holders.
I'm guessing this is neither of those things, but then this is also the EU that just threw out software patents, so there is some hope and perhaps I should keep the faith. Time will tell...
Slashdot Mirror
Funnily enough, I was about to reply to the GP with exactly that example when I read to the end of your post. Exceptions are frequently used very poorly from a design perspective, and in C++ from an exception-safety perspective as well. That just means that most programmers suck, which we already knew. Nevertheless, exceptions used well by good designers and programmers can keep code much cleaner and more maintainable than it otherwise would be, and the safety comes almost without a second thought. Like any craftsman, a programmer has to know how to use his tools, or he's just another muppet with a bit of machinery in his hand.
So I've been told, for much of the last decade in fact. And yet Java hasn't somehow wiped out C++. Nor did VB, and nor will C#. As I've noted before, there are many ways you could make a language very much better than C++ if you're starting from a clean slate with 20 extra years of experience from C++ and other languages to build on. I'm really quite surprised that no-one has yet developed a killer application development language taking the stronger aspects of C++ and other languages, and reduced all of the above to nothing more than legacy support jobs.
But so far, they haven't. In fact, depending on who you talk to, Java is now on a serious downhill slide; even universities are starting to see that it's not all it's cracked up to be and switching back to teaching C or C++ as their primary example language for CS courses. C++ has stood up to the marketing machines of Sun and Microsoft, and competed on merit, and it's still around. I'd say that's a pretty good indicator about its future.
Congratulations, you've taken another step in the journey of learning to program. However, your conclusion is a little premature.
Some of us took that step a long time ago, lured in by the power and flexibility of functional programming languages, and the elegant simplicity of LISP in particular. And many of us came back, giving a polite nod to those languages, understanding some programming concepts a little more deeply than we used to, even wishing we could bring some of the neater stuff with us, and yet still returning to tools like C++ or Perl or Java for our serious work.
Why did we do this? The theoretical power of functional languages is undeniable, and for sure many of the current mainstream languages could learn more than a trick or two from them, but they tend to sacrifice practicality for purity. Lazy evaluation and side effects make ill bed-fellows, for example. In my universe, we frequently use side effects for I/O, and we do not consider monad-based techniques, however clever and theoretically pure, to be an adequate substitute when we're writing more than toy examples. Similarly, while LISP macros are awesomely powerful, for most jobs some well-thought-out and standardised syntactic sugar will offer more benefit.
It's perfectly possible to gain many of the advantages of functional languages in more mainstream alternatives, simply by adapting your programming practices: write in a more declarative style with liberal use of const, for example. However, at least in C++, you have a choice. In a strict functional language, you don't, and that's a deal-breaker for most programming jobs.
Amen. And the memory management argument is even less relevant in C++, where resource management should generally be using at least simple RAII, and far more powerful schemes can be designed that still take advantage of deterministic destruction to ensure they're pretty much user-proof. Unlike certain other languages(TM) where memory is garbage collected -- sometimes -- and other resources are generally leaked like a sieve by programmers who haven't learned to do this stuff properly and think reading Learn A Language In 5 Seconds makes them good...
Or you could just use a language that supports the concepts of mutable and immutable data natively, like C++...
<ducks>
Slashdot requires you to wait at least 2 minutes between posting, so you can't flood the system with loads of messages before others have a chance to post.
A few days ago, someone broke the logic that checks this, and now you often get a message saying you have to wait 2 minutes between posts, and it's been [something more than 2] minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
The only way to fix this appears to be to shut down your browser and come back later. It's really, really annoying if you're trying to participate in ongoing discussions.
Thank you for a thoughtful reply.
To an extent, I agree with your position: I don't favour all-encompassing libraries a la Java, and I do prefer somewhat centralised but community-driven framework's like Perl's CPAN or TeX's CTAN.
However, I think a certain amount of pragmatism is useful. To pick on the GUI library as an example, it's certainly true that many C++ programmers write GUI code, though many more do not. If you do, then whether you're using MFC or wxWidgets or Qt or Yet Another Clone Windowing Library, the basic concepts are very much the same.
In light of this, I believe that a standard library should provide a simplified framework of basic functionality in this sort of case, upon which more powerful non-standard extensions can build if they wish. There will always be platform-specific libraries, not least because not all platforms have the same capabilities, but the needless duplication of effort between all of the libraries I mentioned just above is an impediment to portability without benefit. Why not commoditise the common ground, and leave the specialist library guys to focus on the more powerful stuff in their respective fields, without that unnecessary duplication of effort, and without creating artificial barriers to portability?
For bonus points, this also provides useful basic features for the many applications that only use a simple GUI anyway. In addition, you reduce the learning curve for both the langauge and any libraries building on the standard framework, and make it easier to teach the language to beginners.
You can make much the same argument for many other fields, where a very large number of programmers do essentially the same basic thing, with different bells and whistles on top. C++ excels in providing tools for flexible, extensible, customisable code in libraries: classes, templates, overloading, RTTI, exceptions, and more. Of all the mainstream programming languages in use today, I think C++ is perhaps the most suitable to this framework-based approach. Over a million programmers are going to wind up using MFC or Qt or wxWidgets or whatever anyway, so it seems overly pedantic to restrict the scope of a standard library because a GUI component couldn't be used everywhere. After all, taken to the logical conclusion on that basis, you're not allowed any sort of file access, either, but I can't imagine any language hitting 3 million users if you had to download additional libraries just to open a file!
s/future/current/
Speaking as an outsider, George W Bush is the worst PR guy you guys have had for a very long time. The collective ego represented by Bush and the current Republican government is staggering: obviously there was the whole Iraq thing; we've got legislation and trade agreements driven by major US interests coming out of everywhere even where they're clearly not in the interests of the local little guys; and just last week Bush himself went home from the G8 summit after telling the rest of the world to get stuffed on the environment. You have a government that, by its own admission and demonstration, is prepared to wage war, force its will on foreign legal systems, and wreck the planet, all in the interest of its economic drivers. Is it really any wonder that the rest of the world is no longer willing to leave such important facilities at the Internet and the GPS network under so much US-centric control?
In case anyone's wondering, this isn't meant as a troll, BTW. That really is the way the US is currently perceived over here, according to just about every conversation I've had on the subject for a long time now.
It's only centralised if you think the US is the centre of the world.
And you should find out the real answer to your own question about who has put in most of the money to fund the Internet as it's developed today. When you've worked that out, you'll start to understand why so many people think the US government and its ICANN subsidiary don't deserve their de facto overlord status.
So if the web was invented by a Brit, but it was obscure until the US polished it up, it's a US thing. However, if the Internet started out as a small network linking a few US military and academic sites together, and was obscure until the rest of the worldwide academic community picked up on it too, that's a US thing as well?
This is the problem with languages that come with monolithic standard libraries. As long as what you want is in the library, and in the form you want it, you're fine. If it's not, or what's there isn't in a convenient or suitably adaptable form, you're in for a long day.
Compare and contrast with C++, where you bring in everything via separate libraries but pretty much everyone is familiar with how to do it, or Perl, where everyone knows you grab new packages off CPAN and usually has a one-liner tool available to do so.
I stand corrected. It would appear that TweakUI messes with that setting.
Oh God, please, no!
C++ desperately needs some basic functionality in its standard library: concurrency, GUI, maybe things like sockets. (Alas, by the standards committee's own admission, some of these -- particularly the GUI one -- are unlikely to happen.)
What C++ doesn't need is for its relatively simple but useful standard library to be overwhelmed by every template freak and his brother's pet ideas, which is very much the direction a lot of the "in crowd" and a lot of Boost contributors are tending towards at present.
By all means, let library designers use whatever language features are useful in whatever ingenious ways they can, but please let the interface for anything that actually gets into the standard library be simple and effective, not infinitely customisable but massively over-complex. That means some parts of Boost would be excellent additions, but others certainly would not.
I've always thought this was counter-productive.
On my system, all the apps I like and have installed long-term are filed into a small number of folders: one for "office tools"; one for games, one for programming tools; one for Internet utilities; and a couple more. Anything useful that lives on my PC for more than a day or two gets filed appropriately, with extraneous menu items dumped in the process.
A corollary to that is that anything that doesn't get filed within a day or two doesn't tend to live on my system for any longer than that. If I install a trial version of some package, play with it for half an hour, decide it's got potential and leave it installed, but never get around to playing with it again before it expires because it's hidden four levels deep in my Start menu and I forget about it then it doesn't encourage me to buy the product, now does it? All that happens is that at some point a few days later, I get annoyed that my Start menu is cluttered, and I delete the clutter without a second thought.
If, OTOH, I'd simply been given a link to "Whizzy Graphics Pro Trial Edition" on the Start menu, I'd have been reminded that I'd installed the trial version every time I opened the menu, and might well have gone back for a second look some time later. It's a simple thing, but it probably makes a huge difference to whether/how the software I install is used.
Not if your taskbar is more than one line high. :-(
That would be a great feature, except for two rather fundamental things:
The first matters if you weren't the person who configured your machine. It might not have been on by the time you got the box, even if it's on by default.
I can confirm the second one, because I'm typing this on a Windows XP box, have just verified that the switch is on, and yet minimising and maximising windows (for several different apps, just to be sure) exhibits no perceptible difference to when the setting is off.
I thought this might be because, slightly unusually, I have the taskbar to the left of my screen, but I've just checked with it at the bottom as well, and it still doesn't do anything visually funky. The only blip during maximising is that you can just about see the redraw of the web page in Firefox.
I used to have this activated on my old PC, so I know the effect I'm looking for, and what I'm seeing definitely isn't it. That's a shame, because it is indeed a nice touch; I hadn't even realised WinXP was supposed to do it.
I appreciate your point about not sticking with Windows just because, and I also have a soft spot for Apple kit, but I have to ask: how many times did you have to give Apple money to get all those upgrades, and how much did it all add up to?
It would do, if what you wrote had been been equivalent to what I wrote, but I'm afraid I don't see how it was. The point I was making had far more to do with the scale of projects than their prominence; there just happens to be some correlation between the two in the most well-known cases.
Has it, really? How many non-trivial, successful open source software projects aren't written mostly by staff paid to do the job? Pretty much all of the biggest names have some sort of commercial entity behind them, and those commercial entities expect to make money from the OSS-based work they do, by some means or other. The specific economic model may be non-traditional, but the underling economic principles certainly aren't!
The mistake in the article is right here, IMHO:
I'm not sure that's true. Londoners and others have been remarkably resilient in the face of last week's attacks, with many transport staff and regular travellers being interviewed and saying that while they were shaken by the attacks, they absolutely wouldn't let it change their day-to-day lives, and they'd be back on the Underground the next day.
The greater level of surveillance implied by these machines may or may not make a difference to security, but will certainly cost a lot and upset a lot of people who don't like the idea of several random LU staff seeing them naked every day. They caused a stir with this when they started talking about using it at airports, and AFAIK the only plans currently in place at airports make it an optional alternative to a traditional "patting down". TFA does mention some methods QinetiQ have considered to address this issue, and I think the public would want to know that one of them was in place before they accepted this particular system.
I'm kind of in two minds about this whole thing. On the one hand, I'm about to go and send a message to two friends who were in one of the carriages that exploded, and were hospitalised as a result. Of course I wish they hadn't been there and no-one had been hurt last week. On the other hand, I know some other friends who seem to get stopped and anything up to strip searched almost every time they go to an airport, obviously causing them significant inconvenience and distress. Being checked out, either closely and physically or by a machine that essentially strips you, is not a pleasant experience. I find the fact that this happens to a couple of very attractive female friends far, far more often than any of the guys, even where they're travelling to or from the same home country, pretty telling.
If this actually helps security, maybe it's a price that most people would be willing to pay, though I'm not sure I entirely believe that. OTOH, this sounds like something expensive and good-looking that actually does jack to make anyone safer, and these systems do get abused, as those friends of mine can testify first-hand.
At the end of the day, you can never directly protect every key government installation, transport link, utility supplier, military base, and 101 other potential terrorist targets. It's just not possible, no matter how much technology and how many people you have. You can make it a bit more difficult for the bad guys, but the best ways to counter terrorism are based on intelligence/awareness (including the general public, not just some secret-agent-type mole), not creating unnecessary motivations for terrorist reprisals in the first place, and simply refusing to be intimidated by it so the tactic is shown not to be effective (as Londoners are doing so well today).
Cue profound wisdom from Franklin etc...
No, no, you're confusing Clippy with something that knows what's going on. It's more like:
If you want to rely on that, be my guest, but please be aware that there is no such thing as "muscle memory". Your muscles don't remember anything; you're just talking about transferring the information to a different part of your brain.
The problem with this approach, of course, is that the information you remember will shift slightly with time, and when you start mistyping a password slightly without "knowing" what it really is, you're screwed.
std::swap(a, b);
Did I pass? :-)
Absolutely. Hearing that companies ask this sort of interview question usually counts as a negative against them if I'm ever considering working for them. I rather suspect that I've spent far more time in my career clearing up someone's "clever" ideas than they saved by using them.
FWIW, I'd mod you (+1, Insightful) if I weren't posting.
Too true. Remember, this is the same EU that brought us the EU Copyright Directive, which is pretty much Europe's DMCA. It'll take a lot to convince me that they're doing this for the benefit of consumers.
Here's a great scenario for you, based on some investigation for an amateur dance club in the UK about the possibility of burning a selection of the best tracks used at club activities onto a small number of compilation CDs, so the club DJs don't have to carry several large boxes of CDs everywhere. For reference, the club already pays a fee to PPL for the right to play the copyrighted music in public at its classes and events. It also buys the original CDs just like anyone else.
It seems the club can also pay another fee to a different organisation, which gives it the legal right to make the compilations (and even to make multiple copies and sell the spares, with a few restrictions). However, while this would be more than enough, under UK law, to make the compilations normally, thanks to the EUCD those people making the compilations could be criminally liable for doing so if they take material from any "copy-protected" CDs. After all, circumventing copy protection now seems to be a criminal act in its own right here, even if you had every legal right to copy the protected material. <sigh>
Now, if the EU were to introduce some common sense to copyright -- the equivalent of fair use rights so everyone knows they're safe making a back-up or format-shifting material they've legally purchased, for example -- that would be great. If the EU want to introduce mandatory escrow for DRM-based material to guarantee that fair use, and prohibit the sale of music in any DRM'd form that doesn't submit a copy for escrow first, that would be in the interests of consumers and yet still consistent with protecting the legitimate rights of copyright holders.
I'm guessing this is neither of those things, but then this is also the EU that just threw out software patents, so there is some hope and perhaps I should keep the faith. Time will tell...