There's a difference between using a EULA or the DMCA to prevent you from repairing your stuff, and just not supplying spare parts or repair manuals. There's stuff Apple won't repair (when my son's iPad's screen broke, they charged $300 to swap out to another iPad); should Apple provide spare parts or repair manuals for them? There's stuff that's difficult or impossible to repair because of basic design considerations; should Apple be forced to make something that is repairable? Apple considers the fingerprint recognizer to be a vital security feature, and replacing that and bringing it back to original functionality would require special facilities; should Apple be required to provide that? What of the prices of spare parts? The cost of rewriting the repair manuals so they're generally useful? Such a law has a lot of potential to cause problems.
Planned obsolescence? My sister-in-law uses my wife's old iPhone 4, which is over six years old now. The battery has never been replaced. What's the point in a user-replaceable battery when the phone will be obsolete before the battery dies?
Typical/. lack of empathy. Apple makes stuff lots of people like, but which doesn't always appeal to the typical geek. The typical geek doesn't understand the attraction, and rather than try assumes that people with different opinions are either members of a cult or brainwashed by marketing.
FACT: Most people don't give a shit if their phone is 1mm thicker or thinner, and many would happily trade a millimeter or two of thickness for a larger battery. But somehow the Powers That Be have decided that what people want isn't as important as saving a dollar in production costs.
Says you. I suspect that Apple does a lot of research on what will sell best, and I trust their research over your or my intuition. I doubt it's production cost either, since a thinner lighter phone needs more precision in building.
In fact, for decades the default design was a battery compartment with removable batteries- it's only recently that manufacturers have started fucking shit up by sealing batteries in the device and making it non-replaceable.
Because rechargeable batteries were a lot worse than what we have today. We can do things today we couldn't in the 1950s, and that changes the optimum design.
Because for 50+ years I've used thousands of devices that had battery compartments (including mobile devices) and 99.9% of them consisted of a simple plastic enclosure that worked fine and didn't require a Masters degree to design.
Because we couldn't do any better than that. The simple plastic enclosure adds at least one fairly thick layer to the device, and putting in discrete batteries cuts down on the battery volume considerably. Now that we can make thin battery-powered devices, we find that they sell better.
Seriously, please don't give me this stuff about "battery compartments are really difficult". They're not.
If you don't care about the size of the device, and are willing to use batteries that make inefficient use of volume, they're easy.
The question, DickBreath*, is whether you're representative of people who might buy iPhones. I suspect Apple does a lot of research to figure what will sell best, and apparently it isn't what I really want either, which is why I didn't upgrade my iPhone after the usual three years. If fashion sells, Apple will sell fashion. If it's a matter of what's most comfortable in people's hands in general, they'll take that into account also, and that is being user-friendly.
Imagine an integrated kitchen, that keeps track of what you've got in the refrigerator and the pantry (perhaps through RFID chips in the packaging). You could have it generate grocery lists, make meal recommendations, all sorts of things. Lights that can turn themselves on and off to simulate someone doing things in the house to make it look occupied. Drawing a bath of desired temperature and depth without watching it. Having the dishwasher, shower, bathtub, and washing machine coordinate the need for hot water. I can think of lots of things I'd like the house to do, and which are technically feasible.
The C++ runtime doesn't have to be bigger than the C runtime, if you don't want to use the features that add to it.
Most programmers do not in fact work on operating systems, device drivers, or embedded programming, and have no real need to know C. Knowing how things work near the metal is useful but not essential for an applications programmer.
C++ and C are two different languages. Good C++ style includes never using some basic C constructs (such as arrays and strings) except for APIs, so it's quite possible to be a good C++ programmer and flounder with C.
There's other reasons to keep inheritance trees short. Inheritance produces very close coupling between the classes involved, and if you're not actively taking advantage of inheritance (typically using polymorphism), don't use it.
If the compiler inlines the same function in two different compilation units, you'll have two copies of the function. That's what inlining means. There's nothing special about a template function in this regard.
At one job interview, I was asked to write a simple SQL query, so I turned to the whiteboard and wrote it down. It had a SELECT clause, a FROM clause, and a WHERE clause. I was standing there waiting to be asked to do something not immediately obvious to the SQL novice, and was slightly startled when they didn't.
If the latest Watcom C++ was 10.something, the year was 1994-1997. In those years, C++ was developing, there was no standard, and so compatibility could be a bitch. I don't know what sort of magic you had to do, because in that period my only C++ was on the Metrowerks compiler for the Mac, and that had its own idiosyncrasies. (I worked on a project in 2002 to convert my employer's code to standard C++, rather than keeping the differences with pre-standard Sun, HP, and one other compiler and adding an AIX one. It had complications.)
Also, C++ has no more overhead than C. There are a lot of ways you can create overhead, but those are optional, if you're willing to sacrifice the functionality (and if you're considering C instead you're willing to sacrifice it).
Read and write barriers? In C++, anyway, the program is required to do all volatile memory accesses in the order specified by the program, I may be suffering a post-lunch loss of imagination, but I'm not seeing why that would be inadequate.
There's a very useful subset of modern C++ that can be used without years of knowledge and whose discipline can be enforced by code reviews. You're going to want people around who know C++ better than that, but for most purposes there's no need to use a lot of C constructs.
I would guess that the people who think it humorous have fewer dollars to extract than people who think the offensiveness outweighs any humor involved.
Do you want people and institutions to be free to refuse service to blacks or Jews or women for arbitrary reasons? (It's a defensible position, if not one I agree with.) If you can see he reasons behind anti-discrimination policies, then it's a matter of where to draw the line.
From another point of view, we as a society provide a business environment for people to operate in, running their businesses. With the laws and infrastructure already set up, there come some restrictions.
I believe in free speech, so I suppose to some extent that makes me a hypocrite
Freedom of speech doesn't mean you get to use my resources to say whatever you want. It means you can say what you want and try to get it disseminated, with or without my help. If you post something I think inappropriate to my blog (which isn't currently functioning), I'll delete it. Get your own blog if you want to disseminate pro-COBOL propaganda.
It's too big to be a fringe, true. However, his support is almost certainly likely to dwindle. Lacking honesty, he promised working folks he'd fix things, but he can't. The coal miners? Coal power is going away and it isn't coming back any time soon, since natural gas and wind are more economical and cleaner. (Removing the EPA for now will encourage some operators to keep coal plants operating longer, but nobody's going to build one on the assumption that environmental legislation isn't coming back.)
Manufacturing jobs did go overseas, but they aren't going to come back. Trump's not going to give up cheap overseas labor to make his stuff, after all, and US factories will become increasingly automated. Back when America was "great" according to Trump, it was relatively easy to get a job paying a wage sufficient to support a family if you had no real skill but were willing to work hard. That's not happening again.
Therefore, Trump supporters will see nothing they really want happening despite Trump's actions. Lots of them are going to stop supporting him. The evangelicals who supported a walking list of deadly sins are presumably already disappointed that he backed off his promise to attack LGBTQ government employees. I don't know what these supporters are actually going to do, but their support for Trump will erode a lot over the years.
No, racism doesn't need institutional support. There used to be institutional support for racism against blacks, but that went away over a few decades when I was younger, and racism hasn't gone away. Many people are racist without the need of government encouragement.
There are people who simply disagree with me. They're wrong, of course, but that's no big deal. Some hold irrational beliefs (I never would, of course). Some sure seem to act like shills. When Slashdot ran articles on Russian armed aggression, there were several new accounts popping up that pushed bad pro-Russian propaganda, and they looked like shills to me. (You know, I never knew Putin cared about Slashdot.)
When Gates started, well before the Mac and Amiga and when Unix and VMS were not available for reasonably priced desktop use, Microsoft was best known for their BASIC interpreters, which were good for the time on the available computers. The PCs of the time had 8-bit CPUs without hardware multiply and could address 64K of memory, except that 64K was pretty expensive at the time (I was happy to be able to pay only about $100 for 16K) and not all computers supported it. Most of the big commercial brands had their own proprietary OS, and CP/M was the dominant OS for the other computers. This went on, and Microsoft was a quite successful software company, but not a real standout.
Then IBM decided to bring out a PC, and didn't want to do any more work than they had to, so they looked for an OS. Gates knew this from his mother's contacts in IBM, and bought exclusive rights to QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from the Seattle Computer Club. He repackaged it, sold a non-exclusive license to IBM, and it became known as PC-DOS once the PC came out. I read at the time that you could also get your PC with CP/M-86 or the UCSD p-system, but I never saw a PC with either.
At this point, we can start saying Microsoft was succeeding because it was the only provider. With the exception of some computers that quickly became niches in the market, everybody ran PC-DOS. IBM was selling computers to businesses, because they were IBM. A computer from some place called Apple or Radio Shack was obviously not suited for real business work, but IBM! If you wanted a computer for serious use, and you didn't have a reason to get something else, you got an IBM PC (which was a pretty good computer at the time), and Microsoft got some of your money.
Remember when I said IBM didn't want to do any more work than they had to? This means that the PC was made as much as possible out of off-the-shelf components, with a 16K BIOS that was nothing really special. Somebody produced a clean-room BIOS that was functionally equivalent, and from there it was easy to use off-the-shelf components to make a PC clone. These needed operating software to run, of course, and Microsoft was happy to supply a renamed version of PC-DOS. The clones would run all IBM PC software, no problem, and they were a lot cheaper (at one time I estimated that getting the IBM on the side of your computer cost about $500 a letter). More manufacturers sold more computers, each of which had to have PC/MS-DOS on it.
The Hague convention says that civilians get the same protections, provided they carry arms openly and fight more or less according to the laws of war, before their enemy has intervened. If the perfidious Canadians were to cross the border and attack the Twin Cities, I'd have the legal right to pick up a rifle and start shooting as a lawful combatant. That right ends the moment the US Armed Forces show up, which in this particular case would be before I could get a rifle.
For a little context, the Hague conventions of the early Twentieth Century are, as far as I can tell, the first codification of the laws of modern war in treaties. I believe they're still the basis for much of it, although those conventions were found a trifle lacking in WWII. The Geneva Conventions, as far as they relate to war, are extensions of the Hague.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between using a EULA or the DMCA to prevent you from repairing your stuff, and just not supplying spare parts or repair manuals. There's stuff Apple won't repair (when my son's iPad's screen broke, they charged $300 to swap out to another iPad); should Apple provide spare parts or repair manuals for them? There's stuff that's difficult or impossible to repair because of basic design considerations; should Apple be forced to make something that is repairable? Apple considers the fingerprint recognizer to be a vital security feature, and replacing that and bringing it back to original functionality would require special facilities; should Apple be required to provide that? What of the prices of spare parts? The cost of rewriting the repair manuals so they're generally useful? Such a law has a lot of potential to cause problems.
Planned obsolescence? My sister-in-law uses my wife's old iPhone 4, which is over six years old now. The battery has never been replaced. What's the point in a user-replaceable battery when the phone will be obsolete before the battery dies?
Typical /. lack of empathy. Apple makes stuff lots of people like, but which doesn't always appeal to the typical geek. The typical geek doesn't understand the attraction, and rather than try assumes that people with different opinions are either members of a cult or brainwashed by marketing.
Says you. I suspect that Apple does a lot of research on what will sell best, and I trust their research over your or my intuition. I doubt it's production cost either, since a thinner lighter phone needs more precision in building.
Because rechargeable batteries were a lot worse than what we have today. We can do things today we couldn't in the 1950s, and that changes the optimum design.
Because we couldn't do any better than that. The simple plastic enclosure adds at least one fairly thick layer to the device, and putting in discrete batteries cuts down on the battery volume considerably. Now that we can make thin battery-powered devices, we find that they sell better.
If you don't care about the size of the device, and are willing to use batteries that make inefficient use of volume, they're easy.
The question, DickBreath*, is whether you're representative of people who might buy iPhones. I suspect Apple does a lot of research to figure what will sell best, and apparently it isn't what I really want either, which is why I didn't upgrade my iPhone after the usual three years. If fashion sells, Apple will sell fashion. If it's a matter of what's most comfortable in people's hands in general, they'll take that into account also, and that is being user-friendly.
Imagine an integrated kitchen, that keeps track of what you've got in the refrigerator and the pantry (perhaps through RFID chips in the packaging). You could have it generate grocery lists, make meal recommendations, all sorts of things. Lights that can turn themselves on and off to simulate someone doing things in the house to make it look occupied. Drawing a bath of desired temperature and depth without watching it. Having the dishwasher, shower, bathtub, and washing machine coordinate the need for hot water. I can think of lots of things I'd like the house to do, and which are technically feasible.
The C++ runtime doesn't have to be bigger than the C runtime, if you don't want to use the features that add to it.
Most programmers do not in fact work on operating systems, device drivers, or embedded programming, and have no real need to know C. Knowing how things work near the metal is useful but not essential for an applications programmer.
Ah, the old language wars. $MYLANGUAGE has $FEATURE, and I don't know that $YOURLANGUAGE has $FEATURE, so $MYLANGUAGE is better.
C++ and C are two different languages. Good C++ style includes never using some basic C constructs (such as arrays and strings) except for APIs, so it's quite possible to be a good C++ programmer and flounder with C.
There's other reasons to keep inheritance trees short. Inheritance produces very close coupling between the classes involved, and if you're not actively taking advantage of inheritance (typically using polymorphism), don't use it.
If the compiler inlines the same function in two different compilation units, you'll have two copies of the function. That's what inlining means. There's nothing special about a template function in this regard.
At one job interview, I was asked to write a simple SQL query, so I turned to the whiteboard and wrote it down. It had a SELECT clause, a FROM clause, and a WHERE clause. I was standing there waiting to be asked to do something not immediately obvious to the SQL novice, and was slightly startled when they didn't.
If the latest Watcom C++ was 10.something, the year was 1994-1997. In those years, C++ was developing, there was no standard, and so compatibility could be a bitch. I don't know what sort of magic you had to do, because in that period my only C++ was on the Metrowerks compiler for the Mac, and that had its own idiosyncrasies. (I worked on a project in 2002 to convert my employer's code to standard C++, rather than keeping the differences with pre-standard Sun, HP, and one other compiler and adding an AIX one. It had complications.)
Also, C++ has no more overhead than C. There are a lot of ways you can create overhead, but those are optional, if you're willing to sacrifice the functionality (and if you're considering C instead you're willing to sacrifice it).
Read and write barriers? In C++, anyway, the program is required to do all volatile memory accesses in the order specified by the program, I may be suffering a post-lunch loss of imagination, but I'm not seeing why that would be inadequate.
There's a very useful subset of modern C++ that can be used without years of knowledge and whose discipline can be enforced by code reviews. You're going to want people around who know C++ better than that, but for most purposes there's no need to use a lot of C constructs.
I would guess that the people who think it humorous have fewer dollars to extract than people who think the offensiveness outweighs any humor involved.
Do you want people and institutions to be free to refuse service to blacks or Jews or women for arbitrary reasons? (It's a defensible position, if not one I agree with.) If you can see he reasons behind anti-discrimination policies, then it's a matter of where to draw the line.
From another point of view, we as a society provide a business environment for people to operate in, running their businesses. With the laws and infrastructure already set up, there come some restrictions.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean you get to use my resources to say whatever you want. It means you can say what you want and try to get it disseminated, with or without my help. If you post something I think inappropriate to my blog (which isn't currently functioning), I'll delete it. Get your own blog if you want to disseminate pro-COBOL propaganda.
It's too big to be a fringe, true. However, his support is almost certainly likely to dwindle. Lacking honesty, he promised working folks he'd fix things, but he can't. The coal miners? Coal power is going away and it isn't coming back any time soon, since natural gas and wind are more economical and cleaner. (Removing the EPA for now will encourage some operators to keep coal plants operating longer, but nobody's going to build one on the assumption that environmental legislation isn't coming back.)
Manufacturing jobs did go overseas, but they aren't going to come back. Trump's not going to give up cheap overseas labor to make his stuff, after all, and US factories will become increasingly automated. Back when America was "great" according to Trump, it was relatively easy to get a job paying a wage sufficient to support a family if you had no real skill but were willing to work hard. That's not happening again.
Therefore, Trump supporters will see nothing they really want happening despite Trump's actions. Lots of them are going to stop supporting him. The evangelicals who supported a walking list of deadly sins are presumably already disappointed that he backed off his promise to attack LGBTQ government employees. I don't know what these supporters are actually going to do, but their support for Trump will erode a lot over the years.
No, racism doesn't need institutional support. There used to be institutional support for racism against blacks, but that went away over a few decades when I was younger, and racism hasn't gone away. Many people are racist without the need of government encouragement.
There are people who simply disagree with me. They're wrong, of course, but that's no big deal. Some hold irrational beliefs (I never would, of course). Some sure seem to act like shills. When Slashdot ran articles on Russian armed aggression, there were several new accounts popping up that pushed bad pro-Russian propaganda, and they looked like shills to me. (You know, I never knew Putin cared about Slashdot.)
When Gates started, well before the Mac and Amiga and when Unix and VMS were not available for reasonably priced desktop use, Microsoft was best known for their BASIC interpreters, which were good for the time on the available computers. The PCs of the time had 8-bit CPUs without hardware multiply and could address 64K of memory, except that 64K was pretty expensive at the time (I was happy to be able to pay only about $100 for 16K) and not all computers supported it. Most of the big commercial brands had their own proprietary OS, and CP/M was the dominant OS for the other computers. This went on, and Microsoft was a quite successful software company, but not a real standout.
Then IBM decided to bring out a PC, and didn't want to do any more work than they had to, so they looked for an OS. Gates knew this from his mother's contacts in IBM, and bought exclusive rights to QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from the Seattle Computer Club. He repackaged it, sold a non-exclusive license to IBM, and it became known as PC-DOS once the PC came out. I read at the time that you could also get your PC with CP/M-86 or the UCSD p-system, but I never saw a PC with either.
At this point, we can start saying Microsoft was succeeding because it was the only provider. With the exception of some computers that quickly became niches in the market, everybody ran PC-DOS. IBM was selling computers to businesses, because they were IBM. A computer from some place called Apple or Radio Shack was obviously not suited for real business work, but IBM! If you wanted a computer for serious use, and you didn't have a reason to get something else, you got an IBM PC (which was a pretty good computer at the time), and Microsoft got some of your money.
Remember when I said IBM didn't want to do any more work than they had to? This means that the PC was made as much as possible out of off-the-shelf components, with a 16K BIOS that was nothing really special. Somebody produced a clean-room BIOS that was functionally equivalent, and from there it was easy to use off-the-shelf components to make a PC clone. These needed operating software to run, of course, and Microsoft was happy to supply a renamed version of PC-DOS. The clones would run all IBM PC software, no problem, and they were a lot cheaper (at one time I estimated that getting the IBM on the side of your computer cost about $500 a letter). More manufacturers sold more computers, each of which had to have PC/MS-DOS on it.
It's been months since I could tell an Onion article from the headline.
Then someone will get the idea that they need work metrics. I was told at one performance review that I didn't have as many checkins as my colleagues.
The Hague convention says that civilians get the same protections, provided they carry arms openly and fight more or less according to the laws of war, before their enemy has intervened. If the perfidious Canadians were to cross the border and attack the Twin Cities, I'd have the legal right to pick up a rifle and start shooting as a lawful combatant. That right ends the moment the US Armed Forces show up, which in this particular case would be before I could get a rifle.
For a little context, the Hague conventions of the early Twentieth Century are, as far as I can tell, the first codification of the laws of modern war in treaties. I believe they're still the basis for much of it, although those conventions were found a trifle lacking in WWII. The Geneva Conventions, as far as they relate to war, are extensions of the Hague.