"trying writing even a simple Brickout clone without knowing basic trigonometry and you'll run into problems."
Having written a simple Breakout clone back in 1990, I can assure you that you need to know little more than basic arithmetic. I wrote several remakes of old arcade games (Breakout, Asteroids, Missile Command, Space Invaders) before I could solve even basic equations.
3D programming, to be sure, is a whole different ball of wax. That absolutely requires excellent Algebra, Trig., and Calculus capabilities to do anything useful.
"School vouchers' intentions are to move kids with potential out of the "slum schools" and into private schools that put more an emphasis on education than on checking children for knives as they walk in through the door in the morning."
If only that were the case. The reality of school vouchers is to put public money into private Christian schools, where such blather as creationism, deities, demons, Heaven, Hell, etc. can be promulgated into the squishy matter of impressionable young minds with the full endorsement of the U.S. Government.
I would otherwise be in full agreement with taking studious young intellectual talent out of the craphole that is public education and funding their development, with public money, in private schools.
"I'm from the UK, and there is a stereotype of the American geek as small, weak, beaten up, no girlfriend etc, but I've wondered if this is accurate."
Like all stereotypes, this has an element of truth. In this case, it's a large element of truth. I'll answer each element in turn:
1) American geeks tend to be smaller and non-violent (I'm 5'8" and 170 pounds, somewhere around "average" to "small"), and tend towards software development because I'm not particularly drawn to physically demanding activities. This in itself is a relative distinction because an overwhelming number of American males in my age group are "large" due to all the huge amounts of extra fat they carry.
2) When I was growing up in the public school system, I was teased, taunted, picked on, and generally made to be a borderline social outcast because I didn't play sports (which is extremely boring stuff). I tended towards intellectual activities, something which was highly frowned upon by my peers in the U.S. I ended up learning Okinawan Kempo just for the psychological terror it inflicted upon the school bullies. A short demonstration as part of a required class presentation (subject matter was at the student's discretion) was the key to freeing me from the "targets" list.
3) Not having a girlfriend is hit and miss, as it is in most walks of life in America. Being the brunt of cruelty does a lot to damage one's self-respect, and therefore one's ability to interact with other people and with the opposite sex. Not being a part of the mainstream opens one up to this type of cruelty in America. There is also the matter of a small pool of desirable and available women, part of another very true American stereotype: more Americans than not, of both sexes, are grotesquely fat.
So yes, it's largely a cultural issue. America has turned into a cesspool of worker bees happy to pull in a small weekly paycheck in exchange for not having to stress their brains too hard.
I stopped reading when I got to the first "prolly". I hate to be a spelling/grammar nazi, since I make my own fair share of mistakes, but the overuse of certain non-words like "prolly" really, truly grates on my nervers.
"If you can sell it, you can get stung selling it."
Bingo, and the reason that this will be a problem, at most, for a [subjective term]short[/subjective term] period of time.
I haven't gotten a single spam message since the two recent spam ring busts. Now that law enforcement sees these things as problems, and has a little experience handling them, I don't think this "problem" is going to amount to anything significant.
"Please tell me where in the GPL does it state that you have to acknowledge its roots or pay its proper respects."
Section 2. Specifically section 2c, though the end user is only required to be explicitly informed of the GPL roots under certain circumstances.
I really can't fault Sun for not doing what is not required. Doing so would score brownie points with the community, and would therefore increase its goodwill asset, but Sun is not violating its obligations at this time regarding what PJ brought up.
It sound like Sun desperately wants to alienate the community in the future, though, when the exec talks about including closed Microsoft technology in Sun's distribution.
Re:Qt vs Java/Swing
on
A Taste of Qt 4
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· Score: 3, Informative
"Java is not perfect, but it's - yes we can say that in public - definitely more productive than c++"
I've been programming in Java and C++ for years, and in Java for years before learning C++. My productivity with Qt/C++ equals (and in most cases, exceeds) my productivity with Java.
While Swing on the Mac may have dramatically improved its performance (I'll have to take your word for it), Swing on Linux and Windows are still (as of JDK 1.4x) horrendously slow to start and horrendously slow to run.
Qt outperforms Java/Swing by a huge margin on those platforms.
Re:Qt is almost a like a language
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"I don't feel qualified to play judge between DDJ and Trolltech on wether that is good or bad C++ practice."
Like all language features, whether Qt's automatic object deletion is good or bad depends entirely on the programmer taking advantage of the feature (or failing to take advantage of it).
I think it's a great feature. It proves its usefulness each time I create a non-trivial user interface.
I use QPtrList (the class which does the behind-the-scenes auto-deletion) extensively in my non-GUI classes just so I can take advantage of auto-deletion. When the class goes out of scope, all its children objects are automatically destroyed.
It's the concept of a destructor extended to be even more useful.
Re:Yeah, BUT....
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"Somebody who uses Java is not going to switch to Qt as Java is still simpler."
I wrote Java GUI applications for a few years before having been exposed to C++ (much less Qt). I learned C++ solely so I could use GTK--.
A year later, I found Qt and found myself using it more than I used Java (I had since become disillusioned with GTK--).
Today, I only write Java code if I would otherwise be stuck writing VB. In all other cases, I write C++ with Qt.
"A port of the GPL'd Qt/X11 to Windows can be found here."
Thanks for the link. I had no idea such a port was so far along. As a former Qt licensee (my workplace bought the license, but can't justify the cost of continuing to do so) who writes only in-house software, this is incredibly good news.
"(Sure, bandwidth would be conserved. But doesn't Moore's Law render bandwidth an eventual non-issue?)"
Moore's Law deals with the processing power of personal computers, not the availability of bandwidth. Gates' Law (any increase in processing power will be immediately consumed and wasted), of course, counteracts Moore's Law.
"The reason they gave is that too many commercial companies used the GPL version of the library in their commercial software instead of using the pricy commercial version of the library, and they said it's impossible to go and sue all of them."
I could find no such reference in the section of the interview talking about a GPL'd version for Windows.
The actual reason given was incoherent and completely meaningless. If they had just come right out and said, "we make the vast majority of our money by requiring Windows developers for pay for licenses, and we don't want to lose that revenue," then they would have put the question to rest. Instead, they sidestepped the question entirely.
I work for county government, and I produce software for internal use only. Management was perfectly willing to license all internally developed software under the GPL. All our users are on Windows, so the Windows versions was the only Qt option that was viable.
Since I am so proficient with Qt, the county bought a Windows license for me last year. I do all my development on Linux, then recompile on Windows using the Borland free command line compiler.
I am the only developer in the county who is familiar with Qt, and the only developer who primarily uses Linux. I have been in love with the Qt API since day one. The others develop entirely on Windows.
Qt got the official boot at work for a couple reasons:
1) No Windows IDE. Having to pay for a full IDE (Visual Studio or C++ Builder), then having to pay for Qt licenses on top of that is a ridiculous proposition. And the poor integration with them both is a non-starter. This is by far the biggest reason Qt lost to C++ Builder.
2) We don't make any money off of software development. It is necessary for us to create software to support our internal processes, but that software is useless to anyone but us. Given Qt's lack of an IDE (which we could work around), the fact that it was going to cost us at least as much as C++ Builder (which has a full IDE), and twice as much under some circumstances, there was absolutely no way the boss was going to standardize on Qt.
Trolltech is badly fumbling the ball here. The only reason that Qt gained the following that it has on Linux is because it's Free/free for writing GPL'd applications. Being a great toolkit was not enough. Qt gained an Open Source following because of the license.
I can't believe that Trolltech people actually said that the main reason they don't GPL Qt for Windows is because there is no Open Source community under Windows. That's backward logic.
The real reason there is no Open Source Qt community under Windows is because there's no GPL'd Qt under Windows. Duh!
The Windows Open Source community would materialize the moment Qt were GPL'd under Windows. A large part of that would be a melding of the Linux community with the Windows community.
Yes, I know that Qt is pronounced as "Cute", but I refuse to pronounce it like that. It's hard enough to get Management to take it seriously as it is, since it lacks an IDE, but calling it "cute" would have gotten me 100% ignored.
Calling Qt "cute" also makes conversation about it with outsiders obnoxious, as people think I'm using an adjective instead of a noun. It's just easier in all respects to stress both letters (cue tee).
"I don't care that much whether some app is able to delete/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX - I mean, it'll be a pain if it happens, but that file is part of the operating system and therefore recoverable with nothing more than a re-install."
I'm of the opposite opinion (and experience). My personal files (years of source code development, my own ripped ogg files, and hundreds of megabytes of other misc. stuff which gets backed up regularly) can be fully restored in well under an hour. That's no big deal; I do it every time I upgrade my distribution.
It's the system-wide stuff that is the royal pain to restore. All my games are installed to restricted directories, so they would have to be reinstalled. All my patches are already in place, so they would have to be reapplied. All my upgraded RPMs have been installed, so they would have to be determined and reinstalled. All those programs I installed from source are in system directories, so they would have to be recompiled and reinstalled.
All my system-wide stuff takes ten times longer to get back into shape than a simple restoration of my home directory. I would be much more upset if I had to restore my system than if I had to merely restore my home directory because it's so much more work to restore the system than it is to restore my personal files.
"Don't most licenses read that the original contributor can't be sued?"
I'm sure some do, but that wasn't my point. This license doesn't say, "if you use my code, you can't sue me." This license says, "if you use my code, and I get sued for something I put in there, you have to foot my legal bills."
I wouldn't touch this code with a pole of any length. Section 4 is one extraordinarily draconian provision. It basically states that if you make a commercial application using this software, and then Microsoft gets sued because of its original contribution, you have to pay all of Microsoft's legal expenses.
And yes, I'm fully aware that this license was created by IBM.
Who in their right mind would ever base a derivitive work on anything covered by this license? It's completely insane. Treat this software as you would treat misappropriated Microsoft source code: don't even look at it.
"One of the primary reasons we don't do LINUX is because there's no profit in it for us. If we integrate a Sun, SGI, PC, etc., we get to tack on our 10% to the OS costs..."
You're joking, right? Do you realize that you can buy Redhat (among others) for thousands of dollars per installation? If you make money on per-unit commission, you have lots of money waiting to be made through suckers willing to pay it.
I bought WP8 when it as first released for Linux, and I had mixed opinions. On the one hand, all the WP features were there. On the other hand, the GUI was the bastard child from Hell; absolutely awful.
I very intentionally did not buy the version 9 suite since it was not Linux native. I would buy the Corel Office suite if three conditions were met:
1) All Corel Office applications were present and fully functional.
2) All the applications were Linux native.
3) The applications did not use that horrendous looking Motif toolkit. Qt would be the ideal framework to use for this.
My workplace uses Corel Office, so I would buy the Linux version just to be able to use it at work (I do all of my new work on Linux) instead of having to go into Winblows.
"Open source application server maker JBoss offers 24-hour support and is certifying its software for the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard, but the small company is going up against companies like BEA, IBM, Microsoft and Sun. Convincing a CIO that it can deliver better, , more cost effective support than its billion dollar competitors is a credibility and growth challenge for JBoss and its brethren."
Here is a model of hypocrisy. Roughly translated, it means: "we probably won't buy support from Open Source providers anyway, but we're not going to let that stop us from complaining if the support isn't there."
If I transmit pictures that violate someone's human rights, then I should be prosecuted for violating that person's human rights; not for the act of transmitting the picture. If I transmit the same picture, and no one is harmed, then I have done nothing wrong.
If I yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre and nobody gets hurt, then I have done nothing wrong.
It boils down to: "No harm, no foul." Governments have gone way overboard making potential problems illegal, even if most of the time no actual harm results.
"I have always thought that if you need Hungarian notation to tell if "userName" is an integer or a string, then your program is too messy."
I hated Hungarian notation when I was first exposed to it (expecially the horrendous form Microsoft uses). I have, however, found a very good use for a limited version of it. I had tried posting a code example, but that damn stupid Slashdot whitespace filter rejected the posting. It involved containers and counters sharing the same root name, but with datatype prefixes for easy organization.
I can use the same root name (Names) with the data type prefixing the root name. This works especially well when my method manipulates several container objects.
For those wondering, I get the size of the vector in its own counter variable before starting the loop mostly for efficiency. It's faster than calling vecNames.size() for each iteration within the loop. With hundreds of methods, those saved cycles can become noticable.
Basic prefixing is also quite handy when my methods grow beyond the height of my development window. For those readying the inevitable "your method is badly designed it it takes more than one screen": in most nontrivial software, well planned and implemented methods can easily grow beyond that size.
"I wanted to do things like burn DVDs, edit video, play Quicktime movies. Sure, you can do these things with Linux, but I've got other things to do than spend hours/days/months trying to get everything sort-of-kind-of-working."
I don't think any mainstream version of Linux comes with video editing tools out of the box, so I'll grant that point to you.
Burning DVDs with Mandrake 9.2 means right clicking on a file and selecting k3b. Playing Quicktime movies (and any other media file) on Mandrake 9.2 involves nothing more than clicking on the file. All the necessary software is preinstalled.
The Mac probably still has an advantage in some areas, but the gap has closed considerably in others.
Slashdot Mirror
"trying writing even a simple Brickout clone without knowing basic trigonometry and you'll run into problems."
Having written a simple Breakout clone back in 1990, I can assure you that you need to know little more than basic arithmetic. I wrote several remakes of old arcade games (Breakout, Asteroids, Missile Command, Space Invaders) before I could solve even basic equations.
3D programming, to be sure, is a whole different ball of wax. That absolutely requires excellent Algebra, Trig., and Calculus capabilities to do anything useful.
The only patent reform we need to to stop granting patents for the fucking obvious! That by itself would eliminate about 95%+ of all patents.
"School vouchers' intentions are to move kids with potential out of the "slum schools" and into private schools that put more an emphasis on education than on checking children for knives as they walk in through the door in the morning."
If only that were the case. The reality of school vouchers is to put public money into private Christian schools, where such blather as creationism, deities, demons, Heaven, Hell, etc. can be promulgated into the squishy matter of impressionable young minds with the full endorsement of the U.S. Government.
I would otherwise be in full agreement with taking studious young intellectual talent out of the craphole that is public education and funding their development, with public money, in private schools.
"I'm from the UK, and there is a stereotype of the American geek as small, weak, beaten up, no girlfriend etc, but I've wondered if this is accurate."
Like all stereotypes, this has an element of truth. In this case, it's a large element of truth. I'll answer each element in turn:
1) American geeks tend to be smaller and non-violent (I'm 5'8" and 170 pounds, somewhere around "average" to "small"), and tend towards software development because I'm not particularly drawn to physically demanding activities. This in itself is a relative distinction because an overwhelming number of American males in my age group are "large" due to all the huge amounts of extra fat they carry.
2) When I was growing up in the public school system, I was teased, taunted, picked on, and generally made to be a borderline social outcast because I didn't play sports (which is extremely boring stuff). I tended towards intellectual activities, something which was highly frowned upon by my peers in the U.S. I ended up learning Okinawan Kempo just for the psychological terror it inflicted upon the school bullies. A short demonstration as part of a required class presentation (subject matter was at the student's discretion) was the key to freeing me from the "targets" list.
3) Not having a girlfriend is hit and miss, as it is in most walks of life in America. Being the brunt of cruelty does a lot to damage one's self-respect, and therefore one's ability to interact with other people and with the opposite sex. Not being a part of the mainstream opens one up to this type of cruelty in America. There is also the matter of a small pool of desirable and available women, part of another very true American stereotype: more Americans than not, of both sexes, are grotesquely fat.
So yes, it's largely a cultural issue. America has turned into a cesspool of worker bees happy to pull in a small weekly paycheck in exchange for not having to stress their brains too hard.
I stopped reading when I got to the first "prolly". I hate to be a spelling/grammar nazi, since I make my own fair share of mistakes, but the overuse of certain non-words like "prolly" really, truly grates on my nervers.
"If you can sell it, you can get stung selling it."
Bingo, and the reason that this will be a problem, at most, for a [subjective term]short[/subjective term] period of time.
I haven't gotten a single spam message since the two recent spam ring busts. Now that law enforcement sees these things as problems, and has a little experience handling them, I don't think this "problem" is going to amount to anything significant.
"Please tell me where in the GPL does it state that you have to acknowledge its roots or pay its proper respects."
Section 2. Specifically section 2c, though the end user is only required to be explicitly informed of the GPL roots under certain circumstances.
I really can't fault Sun for not doing what is not required. Doing so would score brownie points with the community, and would therefore increase its goodwill asset, but Sun is not violating its obligations at this time regarding what PJ brought up.
It sound like Sun desperately wants to alienate the community in the future, though, when the exec talks about including closed Microsoft technology in Sun's distribution.
"Java is not perfect, but it's - yes we can say that in public - definitely more productive than c++"
I've been programming in Java and C++ for years, and in Java for years before learning C++. My productivity with Qt/C++ equals (and in most cases, exceeds) my productivity with Java.
While Swing on the Mac may have dramatically improved its performance (I'll have to take your word for it), Swing on Linux and Windows are still (as of JDK 1.4x) horrendously slow to start and horrendously slow to run.
Qt outperforms Java/Swing by a huge margin on those platforms.
"I don't feel qualified to play judge between DDJ and Trolltech on wether that is good or bad C++ practice."
Like all language features, whether Qt's automatic object deletion is good or bad depends entirely on the programmer taking advantage of the feature (or failing to take advantage of it).
I think it's a great feature. It proves its usefulness each time I create a non-trivial user interface.
I use QPtrList (the class which does the behind-the-scenes auto-deletion) extensively in my non-GUI classes just so I can take advantage of auto-deletion. When the class goes out of scope, all its children objects are automatically destroyed.
It's the concept of a destructor extended to be even more useful.
"Somebody who uses Java is not going to switch to Qt as Java is still simpler."
I wrote Java GUI applications for a few years before having been exposed to C++ (much less Qt). I learned C++ solely so I could use GTK--.
A year later, I found Qt and found myself using it more than I used Java (I had since become disillusioned with GTK--).
Today, I only write Java code if I would otherwise be stuck writing VB. In all other cases, I write C++ with Qt.
"A port of the GPL'd Qt/X11 to Windows can be found here."
Thanks for the link. I had no idea such a port was so far along. As a former Qt licensee (my workplace bought the license, but can't justify the cost of continuing to do so) who writes only in-house software, this is incredibly good news.
"(Sure, bandwidth would be conserved. But doesn't Moore's Law render bandwidth an eventual non-issue?)"
Moore's Law deals with the processing power of personal computers, not the availability of bandwidth. Gates' Law (any increase in processing power will be immediately consumed and wasted), of course, counteracts Moore's Law.
"The reason they gave is that too many commercial companies used the GPL version of the library in their commercial software instead of using the pricy commercial version of the library, and they said it's impossible to go and sue all of them."
I could find no such reference in the section of the interview talking about a GPL'd version for Windows.
The actual reason given was incoherent and completely meaningless. If they had just come right out and said, "we make the vast majority of our money by requiring Windows developers for pay for licenses, and we don't want to lose that revenue," then they would have put the question to rest. Instead, they sidestepped the question entirely.
I work for county government, and I produce software for internal use only. Management was perfectly willing to license all internally developed software under the GPL. All our users are on Windows, so the Windows versions was the only Qt option that was viable.
Since I am so proficient with Qt, the county bought a Windows license for me last year. I do all my development on Linux, then recompile on Windows using the Borland free command line compiler.
I am the only developer in the county who is familiar with Qt, and the only developer who primarily uses Linux. I have been in love with the Qt API since day one. The others develop entirely on Windows.
Qt got the official boot at work for a couple reasons:
1) No Windows IDE. Having to pay for a full IDE (Visual Studio or C++ Builder), then having to pay for Qt licenses on top of that is a ridiculous proposition. And the poor integration with them both is a non-starter. This is by far the biggest reason Qt lost to C++ Builder.
2) We don't make any money off of software development. It is necessary for us to create software to support our internal processes, but that software is useless to anyone but us. Given Qt's lack of an IDE (which we could work around), the fact that it was going to cost us at least as much as C++ Builder (which has a full IDE), and twice as much under some circumstances, there was absolutely no way the boss was going to standardize on Qt.
Trolltech is badly fumbling the ball here. The only reason that Qt gained the following that it has on Linux is because it's Free/free for writing GPL'd applications. Being a great toolkit was not enough. Qt gained an Open Source following because of the license.
I can't believe that Trolltech people actually said that the main reason they don't GPL Qt for Windows is because there is no Open Source community under Windows. That's backward logic.
The real reason there is no Open Source Qt community under Windows is because there's no GPL'd Qt under Windows. Duh!
The Windows Open Source community would materialize the moment Qt were GPL'd under Windows. A large part of that would be a melding of the Linux community with the Windows community.
Yes, I know that Qt is pronounced as "Cute", but I refuse to pronounce it like that. It's hard enough to get Management to take it seriously as it is, since it lacks an IDE, but calling it "cute" would have gotten me 100% ignored.
Calling Qt "cute" also makes conversation about it with outsiders obnoxious, as people think I'm using an adjective instead of a noun. It's just easier in all respects to stress both letters (cue tee).
"I don't care that much whether some app is able to delete /System/Library/CoreServices/BootX - I mean, it'll be a pain if it happens, but that file is part of the operating system and therefore recoverable with nothing more than a re-install."
I'm of the opposite opinion (and experience). My personal files (years of source code development, my own ripped ogg files, and hundreds of megabytes of other misc. stuff which gets backed up regularly) can be fully restored in well under an hour. That's no big deal; I do it every time I upgrade my distribution.
It's the system-wide stuff that is the royal pain to restore. All my games are installed to restricted directories, so they would have to be reinstalled. All my patches are already in place, so they would have to be reapplied. All my upgraded RPMs have been installed, so they would have to be determined and reinstalled. All those programs I installed from source are in system directories, so they would have to be recompiled and reinstalled.
All my system-wide stuff takes ten times longer to get back into shape than a simple restoration of my home directory. I would be much more upset if I had to restore my system than if I had to merely restore my home directory because it's so much more work to restore the system than it is to restore my personal files.
"Don't most licenses read that the original contributor can't be sued?"
I'm sure some do, but that wasn't my point. This license doesn't say, "if you use my code, you can't sue me." This license says, "if you use my code, and I get sued for something I put in there, you have to foot my legal bills."
This is an outrageous licensing requirement.
I wouldn't touch this code with a pole of any length. Section 4 is one extraordinarily draconian provision. It basically states that if you make a commercial application using this software, and then Microsoft gets sued because of its original contribution, you have to pay all of Microsoft's legal expenses.
And yes, I'm fully aware that this license was created by IBM.
Who in their right mind would ever base a derivitive work on anything covered by this license? It's completely insane. Treat this software as you would treat misappropriated Microsoft source code: don't even look at it.
"One of the primary reasons we don't do LINUX is because there's no profit in it for us. If we integrate a Sun, SGI, PC, etc., we get to tack on our 10% to the OS costs..."
You're joking, right? Do you realize that you can buy Redhat (among others) for thousands of dollars per installation? If you make money on per-unit commission, you have lots of money waiting to be made through suckers willing to pay it.
I bought WP8 when it as first released for Linux, and I had mixed opinions. On the one hand, all the WP features were there. On the other hand, the GUI was the bastard child from Hell; absolutely awful.
I very intentionally did not buy the version 9 suite since it was not Linux native. I would buy the Corel Office suite if three conditions were met:
1) All Corel Office applications were present and fully functional.
2) All the applications were Linux native.
3) The applications did not use that horrendous looking Motif toolkit. Qt would be the ideal framework to use for this.
My workplace uses Corel Office, so I would buy the Linux version just to be able to use it at work (I do all of my new work on Linux) instead of having to go into Winblows.
"Open source application server maker JBoss offers 24-hour support and is certifying its software for the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard, but the small company is going up against companies like BEA, IBM, Microsoft and Sun. Convincing a CIO that it can deliver better, , more cost effective support than its billion dollar competitors is a credibility and growth challenge for JBoss and its brethren."
Here is a model of hypocrisy. Roughly translated, it means: "we probably won't buy support from Open Source providers anyway, but we're not going to let that stop us from complaining if the support isn't there."
"At least it sucks! :D"
That's the man's version. The woman's version vibrates when it's turned on.
"..and argued he had committed no crime in Australia."
So breaking into someone else's computer and taking valuable data isn't a crime in Australia?
If I transmit pictures that violate someone's human rights, then I should be prosecuted for violating that person's human rights; not for the act of transmitting the picture. If I transmit the same picture, and no one is harmed, then I have done nothing wrong.
If I yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre and nobody gets hurt, then I have done nothing wrong.
It boils down to: "No harm, no foul." Governments have gone way overboard making potential problems illegal, even if most of the time no actual harm results.
"I have always thought that if you need Hungarian notation to tell if "userName" is an integer or a string, then your program is too messy."
I hated Hungarian notation when I was first exposed to it (expecially the horrendous form Microsoft uses). I have, however, found a very good use for a limited version of it. I had tried posting a code example, but that damn stupid Slashdot whitespace filter rejected the posting. It involved containers and counters sharing the same root name, but with datatype prefixes for easy organization.
I can use the same root name (Names) with the data type prefixing the root name. This works especially well when my method manipulates several container objects.
For those wondering, I get the size of the vector in its own counter variable before starting the loop mostly for efficiency. It's faster than calling vecNames.size() for each iteration within the loop. With hundreds of methods, those saved cycles can become noticable.
Basic prefixing is also quite handy when my methods grow beyond the height of my development window. For those readying the inevitable "your method is badly designed it it takes more than one screen": in most nontrivial software, well planned and implemented methods can easily grow beyond that size.
"I wanted to do things like burn DVDs, edit video, play Quicktime movies. Sure, you can do these things with Linux, but I've got other things to do than spend hours/days/months trying to get everything sort-of-kind-of-working."
I don't think any mainstream version of Linux comes with video editing tools out of the box, so I'll grant that point to you.
Burning DVDs with Mandrake 9.2 means right clicking on a file and selecting k3b. Playing Quicktime movies (and any other media file) on Mandrake 9.2 involves nothing more than clicking on the file. All the necessary software is preinstalled.
The Mac probably still has an advantage in some areas, but the gap has closed considerably in others.