under a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
It's wonderful that the DOE pays for networking for needy companies. Is the DOE also going to fund my upgrade to 802.11a? I really need something faster than I have right now.
It stores and versions them--what more do you want?
renaming files, and the biggest of all, renaming directories.
Renaming files and directories is already pretty straightforward in CVS. But since there is no explicit command for it, many people seem to think it's hard. Adding a "cvs rename" would be easy--no reason to throw out the entire system and start from scratch.
Larry McVoy has an entirely reasonable business concern.
Yes, but it is just as reasonable for open source users to reject such software. Merely making software available for free under some license does not obligate anybody to use it or open source advocates to defend it.
CVS is quite powerful and fast. I think just about any project for which CVS is not powerful enough probably needs to be broken up into larger numbers of independent source trees and groups of developers. And, yes, I include the Linux kernel in that assessment.
The difference is more a question of tradeoffs: functional programming lets you write correct programs quickly and with much less testing. But it's harder to get control over resource usage and I/O in functional programming languages. Financial and accounting software would probably be one of the best applications of functional programming if the community wasn't so conservative. Parsers and compilers are also great for FP. Numerical programming in FPLs can be very efficient and convenient, but you need special compilers. User interfaces and real-time programming aren't quite there yet, although people have good ideas.
The danger with getting to know FP through multi-paradigm languages (Lisp, Oz, etc.) is that people may stick with their familiar paradigms. But if you want a good multi-paradigm FPL, OCaml seems like the best choice right now.
The proficiency in writing programs means more. Most languages are functionally equivalent,
Languages like C, C++, Java, C#, Ada, Eiffel, VisualBasic, etc., are indeed largely interchangeable, and you can all approach them with the same mainstream object-oriented design methodology.
But just because you are a proficient Java or Eiffel programmer and object-oriented designer doesn't mean that you have a clue about how to write effective code in a functional programming language. You can design functional programs like object-oriented programs, and the result will work, but it will be as tedious as if you had written the code in an object-oriented language to begin with.
To take advantage of functional languages (or, more generally, other non-object-oriented languages), you have to unlearn pretty much everything you learned about object-oriented design.
It's quite analogous to the procedural/object-oriented transition: lots of people believed that they could write object oriented code because their procedural coding styles kind of kept working, but they were missing the point. You are missing the point, too, if you think that functional programming is just a small variation of what you are already doing.
Furthermore, functional programming is very hard to simulate well in object-oriented languages--most attempts end up not being able to provide the invariants and encapsulation that functional programming guarantees automatically, and without the type systems of functional programming languages, many interesting usages are just too complex to type.
How do you know it was shoddy security? Maybe the hackers were really good.
If you watch a lot of movies, you do get the impression that some brilliant hacker can get into any computer system with enough effort. Reality is different. Computer systems can be made completely impervious to break-ins by outsiders, and unlike physical security, doing so is not costly.
I hope that you have your house very, very secure. If you don't have bars over the windows, I'm coming in and taking everything, and that's entirely your fault for not having bars over the windows.
If you think that the police is going to do anything more than spend 10 minutes on taking a report for a break-in at your house, you haven't been a victim of a crime. I have.
For practical purposes, people are responsible for protecting themselves from criminals: insurance, bars over their windows, etc. And the motivation for doing that is that if you lose it, it's your money that's at stake--in most cases, the police will not recover it for you.
But companies that are negligent with your and my information on-line don't lose much themselves--they just get out of it with a simple "oops". They should be responsible for their negligence--that's the only way they will take the steps necessary to safeguard your and my information.
So your saying that if someone gets robbed its thier fault becuase they didn't secure thier wallet well enough?
No, that's not what I'm saying. Physical security and computer security are very different. Security involving personal property and security involving businesses is very different.
Furthermore, if you put valuables into a bank's safe deposit box and the bank leaves their vault and the boxes unlocked, the bank is negligent.
And we shouldn't do anything to the guy that robbed him
I said no such thing. People who break into computer systems are clearly criminals. The question is who pays for catching them, and whether we let the businesses who behaved negligently go free.
Who said anything about monolithic software design?
You did: designing the UI and a class hierarchy almost always leads to that.
I'm suggesting he do the design up front. Whether he chooses to go with a monolith or a suite it entirely up to him.
If you do "the design" and "the user interface" "up front", that implies that there is a single design and user interface.
If you took the traditional UNIX approach, you would build a dozen separate command line tools. Each tool would have its own design and often not attempt to reuse a lot of code from the other tools; the class hierarchies and designs are independent from one another. You would build a user interface only pretty late in the game, and it would be a thin wrapper, almost completely independent from the command line tools.
No matter what the goal is, it is generally not a good idea for a new developer to start developing a large system with an up-front design: a developer new to some problem will simply not have the experience or knowledge of the patterns needed. Either the developer needs to throw away a couple of designs and implementation attempts, or he needs to design and implement multiple, small, loosely coupled programs.
accused of helping Alexey Ivanov steal credit card numbers from U.S. online banks, e-commerce companies and Internet service providers
It's the "on-line banks, e-commerce companies and Internet service providers" that are putting their customers at risk through shoddy security. We can spend billions on arresting "cyber criminal" and "hackers", if those companies don't get their systems to be secure, it just won't end.
There is no reason for any bank or company to leave their systems in a state that allows a "hacker" to break into them--making systems secure against break-ins from the outside is not costly. Failing to protect against outside break-ins is negligent and should subject the company to civil and possibly criminal liability. Companies should not be able to shrug off poor security with a simple "oops", and the tax payer should not have to foot the bill to have the police and legal system solve a problem that is much more easily and cheaply prevented before it ever occurs.
with a good design document, you could hire a semi-talented high school student to do the coding
Yes, and you will end up with software that looks like it was coded by a semi-talented high school student.
Design the user interface, and write that down, in detail. Do a high-level design of the whole system - what are the objects, what are their responsibilities, and how to they communicate? For each class, do a detailed design. How does it carry out its responsibilities?
And what you will get out of that process is a professional Windows-style application--a big, monolithic piece of software with lots of buttons. It's not very UNIX-like, and many UNIX programmers don't consider the product very high quality. But, I suppose, to each their own.
Well, the focal length and depth of focus are both properties of the camera lens, and have nothing to do with the detector being used (film or CCD/CMOS)
The fact that an 7.6mm lens on a digital camera is a moderate wide angle, while it would be an extreme wide angle on a 35mm camera, has to do with sensor size.
What it comes down to is that digital cameras, in practice, have larger DOF than 35mm cameras. That's not so good for some art or portraits, but it's great for snapshots and other, more utilitarian photography.
How does a professional programmer approach this design task? Ultimately I would like to be able to tie it into any number of different operating systems, graphics API's (OpenGL, DirectX, etc..), and so on. What are some good ways to do this?"
Professional programmers generally work as part of larger teams with lots of division of labor. Many such teams have dedicated designers. I seriously doubt that a professional programmer would attempt a project of this magnitude on his own. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but you are asking the wrong question.
Another question to ask is: who is this software for? Is it for your own edification? Do you want to write a book about it? Do you want it to become a larger project with more participants? Answers to those questions should determine how you structure the project, how you design it, etc.
My general advice would be: break the problem up into lots of smaller, independently useful programs. That way, you'll have something to motivate you and to show for your work. Don't create ambitious, general class hierarchies--that is the best way of killing even a large project, let alone a one person project.
Large DOF has nothing to do with digital vs. analog and everything to do with the fact that the focal length in most consumer digitals is so short that the hyperfocal distance becomes very short.
Come on, what kind of confused reasoning is that? Digital cameras have shorter focal lengths and larger DOF because digital sensors are smaller than 35mm film.
I found the excess DOF in my DC280 annoying enough that I sprung for a DSLR
I agree that excess DOF is not particularly nice for certain shooting situations. However, for most people, it's a good thing because it makes "getting the shot" much easier.
Actually, I find 35mm DOF to be neither here nor there: it doesn't give satisfactory separation of subject and background in many situations, yet it is small enough to punish inaccurate focussing ruthlessly. I think MF and digital each represent better tradeoffs: with MF, I get meaningful separation of subject and background, and with digital, I generally don't have to worry about it at all.
that film still, and will always have its advantages. For one, all charge coupled devices (CCD and CMOS) with the exception of one camera (The Sigma SD9) use a pattern of red, green, and blue sensors, tiled.
Film represents colors as blobs of dye. That leads to equivalent artifacts in color film.
A lot of digital cameras still suffer from rather severe Chromatic Aberrations, and ccd noise.
Both of those are wrong. Under very specific lighting conditions, many (but not all) consumer digital cameras show a very specific kind of "chromatic aberration"; in fact, calling it "chromatic aberration" is a misnomer because it has little to do with the color artifacts you get from cheap film cameras. This is not usually a problem in practice. Many digital cameras also have excellent noise characteristics, outperforming film in low-light conditions (the fact that they have faster lenses also help).
The Nikon D100, a "prosumer" digital SLR camera is over $2000, and that's just for a body, no lens. I can get a Nikon F100, the professional Nikon film camera, for half that.
Digital SLR cameras are largely overpriced kludges, toys for film photographers scared of making the jump and wanting to hold on to a familiar brick: they have lenses that aren't well-adapted to the CCD and perform poorly, and you pay a premium for that.
Something like the Sony F-717 costs under $1000, comes with a spectacular lens, and beats the closest available Nikon N90 setup handily in pretty much every category, including price. Of course, you can't even get a 35-200mm f2.0 zoom for the Nikon if you try, and if you could, its quality would be less good and it would be several times as heavy.
See why i'm not excited about digital yet?
Some people also still think that vinyl sounds better. Old technologies have a certain charm and there are good reasons to hang on to them for some people. But on pretty much every rational measure, digital is already better than film for most photographic applications.
The two media have completely different characteristics and applying 35mm performance characterizations to digital doesn't make much sense. For example, people love to point at the high resolution of 35mm film, but that's only for contrasty images. Digital cameras give you 12bpp or 14bpp even at the highest resolution. If you asked: what is the highest resolution at which 35mm film gives you the equivalent of 12bpp, film resolution would be very poor.
If you don't look at it in terms of numbers, for most practical purposes, in terms of image quality, digital has become comparable to 35mm with the advent of high quality 5 Mpixel cameras. There are still some areas where 35mm is better, but there are already many areas where even a 5 Mpixel camera exceeds a 35 mm film camera in terms of image quality.
Apart from issues of image quality, the immediate feedback of digital, the lighter and faster lenses, greater DOF, and better performance at low light levels mean that you can get many shots with digital that were very hard to get with film.
Others, such as the hatred of Microsoft and the loathing of Spam come from a quite reverse philosophy - a principled distain [sic] of the side-effects of capitalism, betraying socialist ancestry.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist; their actions are not a "side-effect of capitalism", their actions have been anti-competitive, anti-free market and, arguably, anti-democratic.
Spam, too, is theft of service--a crime--not a "side-effect of capitalism". I pay for my mail bandwidth, and most of it is taken up by stuff I didn't pay for. Big companies can have anybody prosecuted who as much as connects to their server in a way they don't like, why do I have to put up with megabytes of spam every day?
Geeks understand the machinations of power, influence and money a lot better than Steinberg gives them credit for, and apparently a lot better than Steinberg himself does. The difference between geeks and other participants in the political process is that geeks often won't shut up about it and they take a long-term perspective and won't accept expedient short-term compromises that only make the situation worse in the long term. The opposition of geeks to Microsoft, the RIAA, and spam doesn't derive from a hypothetical "socialist ancestry", it arises out of a concern that high technology can only prosper in a democratic society, in a free market, and in a country where people can discuss and exchange ideas free from private or public interference.
Maybe geeks won't be able to prevent the destruction of free speech, free markets, or democratic and constitutional principles in America, but we are certainly not going to shut up about it. If the rest of the country ignores us, that's their loss. We are doing all we can by speaking up.
Question is, what's to stop people going `just a bit faster' if the limit is higher?
That's a circular argument. People are saying that strict photo-enforcement of speed limits is unreasonable because the speed limits are unreasonably low. I'm saying: let's raise the speed limits until they are reasonable and then enforce them strictly and automatically.
This is a social education problem, not a technological one.
A $50 photo-ticket for gridlock or running a red light is a very good technological means of achieving social education.
Exceptions work on pretty much all compilers. And while template instantiation in general is tricky, it's easy to write template code that works reliably across all reasonable compilers.
wxWindows really needs this because resource management and error handling in wxWindows is error-prone, just like in many big C++ libraries.
If the posted speed limits are too low (and I think they are in many places), we should raise them. The current situation, where "everbody" goes a "little" faster just invites selective enforcement.
Given the amount of gridlock in many cities, I would very much welcome red light cameras. People driving into the intersection when they shouldn't are a major nuisance.
However, to prevent abuses, ownership and revenue from such systems has to be handled correctly. The systems should be owned and operated by non-police city employees, and any excess revenue should go to the state government, not the city.
Also, such automatic enforcement should never be used for significant fines and it should not lead to "points" on your license either--a mistake on a $50 or $100 ticket is something most people can live with--stuff happens. But losing your license or paying $1000s more in insurance is another matter and really should require more careful determination of guilt (like, who the driver really was).
TrollTech's support of KDE right from the start, and their willingness to turn their business model almost on its head for it, has been one of the most successful strategies I've seen in the software industry, securing them forever the number one spot in C++ toolkits for Linux, and assuring them of major profits to come as Linux gradually achieves world domination.
I don't see Troll Tech as doing so spectacularly well. Yes, they have managed to attract commercial developers through dual licensing. But many commercial developers are wary of the commercial tie-in and the high licensing fees compared to other commercial and free systems.
The commercial desktop UNIX world is pretty clearly moving towards Gnome and Gtk+--Sun, IBM, or HP have no interest in handing a market to a small company somewhere. And I think that pretty much decides the long-term fate of Qt--it will hang around, but it won't become the dominant toolkit on UNIX and Linux desktops.
wxWindows actually doesn't use templates or exceptions. This is rather unfortunate, since resource management could be greatly improved with automated reference counting and exception handling. Taking advantage of more standard C++ features I think is the biggest issue for the next major release.
As for "adult" language, I think C++ is "adult" in the same way that a Corvette is--it's fast and it's fun to drive, but it's mostly the choice of people who have only just become adults. Given the choice, most people would pick something more comfortable.
Still, if circumstances force you to program in C++ (and for some applications, it is a good language), wxWindows is probably the best toolkit you can get right now.
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Everything you describe works on Linux as well. And with Linux, you save a couple of hundred dollars in software licenses.
Look for "personal area networks" on Google. Zimmerman and Gershenfeld worked on this.
It's wonderful that the DOE pays for networking for needy companies. Is the DOE also going to fund my upgrade to 802.11a? I really need something faster than I have right now.
It stores and versions them--what more do you want?
renaming files, and the biggest of all, renaming directories.
Renaming files and directories is already pretty straightforward in CVS. But since there is no explicit command for it, many people seem to think it's hard. Adding a "cvs rename" would be easy--no reason to throw out the entire system and start from scratch.
Yes, but it is just as reasonable for open source users to reject such software. Merely making software available for free under some license does not obligate anybody to use it or open source advocates to defend it.
CVS is quite powerful and fast. I think just about any project for which CVS is not powerful enough probably needs to be broken up into larger numbers of independent source trees and groups of developers. And, yes, I include the Linux kernel in that assessment.
O'Reilly has a book available on-line, Developing Applications with O'Caml.
The danger with getting to know FP through multi-paradigm languages (Lisp, Oz, etc.) is that people may stick with their familiar paradigms. But if you want a good multi-paradigm FPL, OCaml seems like the best choice right now.
Languages like C, C++, Java, C#, Ada, Eiffel, VisualBasic, etc., are indeed largely interchangeable, and you can all approach them with the same mainstream object-oriented design methodology.
But just because you are a proficient Java or Eiffel programmer and object-oriented designer doesn't mean that you have a clue about how to write effective code in a functional programming language. You can design functional programs like object-oriented programs, and the result will work, but it will be as tedious as if you had written the code in an object-oriented language to begin with.
To take advantage of functional languages (or, more generally, other non-object-oriented languages), you have to unlearn pretty much everything you learned about object-oriented design.
It's quite analogous to the procedural/object-oriented transition: lots of people believed that they could write object oriented code because their procedural coding styles kind of kept working, but they were missing the point. You are missing the point, too, if you think that functional programming is just a small variation of what you are already doing.
Furthermore, functional programming is very hard to simulate well in object-oriented languages--most attempts end up not being able to provide the invariants and encapsulation that functional programming guarantees automatically, and without the type systems of functional programming languages, many interesting usages are just too complex to type.
If you watch a lot of movies, you do get the impression that some brilliant hacker can get into any computer system with enough effort. Reality is different. Computer systems can be made completely impervious to break-ins by outsiders, and unlike physical security, doing so is not costly.
I hope that you have your house very, very secure. If you don't have bars over the windows, I'm coming in and taking everything, and that's entirely your fault for not having bars over the windows.
If you think that the police is going to do anything more than spend 10 minutes on taking a report for a break-in at your house, you haven't been a victim of a crime. I have.
For practical purposes, people are responsible for protecting themselves from criminals: insurance, bars over their windows, etc. And the motivation for doing that is that if you lose it, it's your money that's at stake--in most cases, the police will not recover it for you.
But companies that are negligent with your and my information on-line don't lose much themselves--they just get out of it with a simple "oops". They should be responsible for their negligence--that's the only way they will take the steps necessary to safeguard your and my information.
No, that's not what I'm saying. Physical security and computer security are very different. Security involving personal property and security involving businesses is very different.
Furthermore, if you put valuables into a bank's safe deposit box and the bank leaves their vault and the boxes unlocked, the bank is negligent.
And we shouldn't do anything to the guy that robbed him
I said no such thing. People who break into computer systems are clearly criminals. The question is who pays for catching them, and whether we let the businesses who behaved negligently go free.
You did: designing the UI and a class hierarchy almost always leads to that.
I'm suggesting he do the design up front. Whether he chooses to go with a monolith or a suite it entirely up to him.
If you do "the design" and "the user interface" "up front", that implies that there is a single design and user interface.
If you took the traditional UNIX approach, you would build a dozen separate command line tools. Each tool would have its own design and often not attempt to reuse a lot of code from the other tools; the class hierarchies and designs are independent from one another. You would build a user interface only pretty late in the game, and it would be a thin wrapper, almost completely independent from the command line tools.
No matter what the goal is, it is generally not a good idea for a new developer to start developing a large system with an up-front design: a developer new to some problem will simply not have the experience or knowledge of the patterns needed. Either the developer needs to throw away a couple of designs and implementation attempts, or he needs to design and implement multiple, small, loosely coupled programs.
It's the "on-line banks, e-commerce companies and Internet service providers" that are putting their customers at risk through shoddy security. We can spend billions on arresting "cyber criminal" and "hackers", if those companies don't get their systems to be secure, it just won't end.
There is no reason for any bank or company to leave their systems in a state that allows a "hacker" to break into them--making systems secure against break-ins from the outside is not costly. Failing to protect against outside break-ins is negligent and should subject the company to civil and possibly criminal liability. Companies should not be able to shrug off poor security with a simple "oops", and the tax payer should not have to foot the bill to have the police and legal system solve a problem that is much more easily and cheaply prevented before it ever occurs.
Yes, and you will end up with software that looks like it was coded by a semi-talented high school student.
Design the user interface, and write that down, in detail. Do a high-level design of the whole system - what are the objects, what are their responsibilities, and how to they communicate? For each class, do a detailed design. How does it carry out its responsibilities?
And what you will get out of that process is a professional Windows-style application--a big, monolithic piece of software with lots of buttons. It's not very UNIX-like, and many UNIX programmers don't consider the product very high quality. But, I suppose, to each their own.
The fact that an 7.6mm lens on a digital camera is a moderate wide angle, while it would be an extreme wide angle on a 35mm camera, has to do with sensor size.
What it comes down to is that digital cameras, in practice, have larger DOF than 35mm cameras. That's not so good for some art or portraits, but it's great for snapshots and other, more utilitarian photography.
Professional programmers generally work as part of larger teams with lots of division of labor. Many such teams have dedicated designers. I seriously doubt that a professional programmer would attempt a project of this magnitude on his own. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but you are asking the wrong question.
Another question to ask is: who is this software for? Is it for your own edification? Do you want to write a book about it? Do you want it to become a larger project with more participants? Answers to those questions should determine how you structure the project, how you design it, etc.
My general advice would be: break the problem up into lots of smaller, independently useful programs. That way, you'll have something to motivate you and to show for your work. Don't create ambitious, general class hierarchies--that is the best way of killing even a large project, let alone a one person project.
Come on, what kind of confused reasoning is that? Digital cameras have shorter focal lengths and larger DOF because digital sensors are smaller than 35mm film.
I found the excess DOF in my DC280 annoying enough that I sprung for a DSLR
I agree that excess DOF is not particularly nice for certain shooting situations. However, for most people, it's a good thing because it makes "getting the shot" much easier.
Actually, I find 35mm DOF to be neither here nor there: it doesn't give satisfactory separation of subject and background in many situations, yet it is small enough to punish inaccurate focussing ruthlessly. I think MF and digital each represent better tradeoffs: with MF, I get meaningful separation of subject and background, and with digital, I generally don't have to worry about it at all.
Film represents colors as blobs of dye. That leads to equivalent artifacts in color film.
A lot of digital cameras still suffer from rather severe Chromatic Aberrations, and ccd noise.
Both of those are wrong. Under very specific lighting conditions, many (but not all) consumer digital cameras show a very specific kind of "chromatic aberration"; in fact, calling it "chromatic aberration" is a misnomer because it has little to do with the color artifacts you get from cheap film cameras. This is not usually a problem in practice. Many digital cameras also have excellent noise characteristics, outperforming film in low-light conditions (the fact that they have faster lenses also help).
The Nikon D100, a "prosumer" digital SLR camera is over $2000, and that's just for a body, no lens. I can get a Nikon F100, the professional Nikon film camera, for half that.
Digital SLR cameras are largely overpriced kludges, toys for film photographers scared of making the jump and wanting to hold on to a familiar brick: they have lenses that aren't well-adapted to the CCD and perform poorly, and you pay a premium for that.
Something like the Sony F-717 costs under $1000, comes with a spectacular lens, and beats the closest available Nikon N90 setup handily in pretty much every category, including price. Of course, you can't even get a 35-200mm f2.0 zoom for the Nikon if you try, and if you could, its quality would be less good and it would be several times as heavy.
See why i'm not excited about digital yet?
Some people also still think that vinyl sounds better. Old technologies have a certain charm and there are good reasons to hang on to them for some people. But on pretty much every rational measure, digital is already better than film for most photographic applications.
If you don't look at it in terms of numbers, for most practical purposes, in terms of image quality, digital has become comparable to 35mm with the advent of high quality 5 Mpixel cameras. There are still some areas where 35mm is better, but there are already many areas where even a 5 Mpixel camera exceeds a 35 mm film camera in terms of image quality.
Apart from issues of image quality, the immediate feedback of digital, the lighter and faster lenses, greater DOF, and better performance at low light levels mean that you can get many shots with digital that were very hard to get with film.
Others, such as the hatred of Microsoft and the loathing of Spam come from a quite reverse philosophy - a principled distain [sic] of the side-effects of capitalism, betraying socialist ancestry.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist; their actions are not a "side-effect of capitalism", their actions have been anti-competitive, anti-free market and, arguably, anti-democratic.
Spam, too, is theft of service--a crime--not a "side-effect of capitalism". I pay for my mail bandwidth, and most of it is taken up by stuff I didn't pay for. Big companies can have anybody prosecuted who as much as connects to their server in a way they don't like, why do I have to put up with megabytes of spam every day?
Geeks understand the machinations of power, influence and money a lot better than Steinberg gives them credit for, and apparently a lot better than Steinberg himself does. The difference between geeks and other participants in the political process is that geeks often won't shut up about it and they take a long-term perspective and won't accept expedient short-term compromises that only make the situation worse in the long term. The opposition of geeks to Microsoft, the RIAA, and spam doesn't derive from a hypothetical "socialist ancestry", it arises out of a concern that high technology can only prosper in a democratic society, in a free market, and in a country where people can discuss and exchange ideas free from private or public interference.
Maybe geeks won't be able to prevent the destruction of free speech, free markets, or democratic and constitutional principles in America, but we are certainly not going to shut up about it. If the rest of the country ignores us, that's their loss. We are doing all we can by speaking up.
That's a circular argument. People are saying that strict photo-enforcement of speed limits is unreasonable because the speed limits are unreasonably low. I'm saying: let's raise the speed limits until they are reasonable and then enforce them strictly and automatically.
This is a social education problem, not a technological one.
A $50 photo-ticket for gridlock or running a red light is a very good technological means of achieving social education.
wxWindows really needs this because resource management and error handling in wxWindows is error-prone, just like in many big C++ libraries.
Given the amount of gridlock in many cities, I would very much welcome red light cameras. People driving into the intersection when they shouldn't are a major nuisance.
However, to prevent abuses, ownership and revenue from such systems has to be handled correctly. The systems should be owned and operated by non-police city employees, and any excess revenue should go to the state government, not the city.
Also, such automatic enforcement should never be used for significant fines and it should not lead to "points" on your license either--a mistake on a $50 or $100 ticket is something most people can live with--stuff happens. But losing your license or paying $1000s more in insurance is another matter and really should require more careful determination of guilt (like, who the driver really was).
I don't see Troll Tech as doing so spectacularly well. Yes, they have managed to attract commercial developers through dual licensing. But many commercial developers are wary of the commercial tie-in and the high licensing fees compared to other commercial and free systems.
The commercial desktop UNIX world is pretty clearly moving towards Gnome and Gtk+--Sun, IBM, or HP have no interest in handing a market to a small company somewhere. And I think that pretty much decides the long-term fate of Qt--it will hang around, but it won't become the dominant toolkit on UNIX and Linux desktops.
As for "adult" language, I think C++ is "adult" in the same way that a Corvette is--it's fast and it's fun to drive, but it's mostly the choice of people who have only just become adults. Given the choice, most people would pick something more comfortable.
Still, if circumstances force you to program in C++ (and for some applications, it is a good language), wxWindows is probably the best toolkit you can get right now.