The state where it's illegal to have sex in any position other than missionary, with the lights off? Don't get me wrong, I love VA. I'm proud of its heritage as one of the leading states in the early union. But these days, outside of northern virginia, it's just another farmer-conservative* southern state.
* No offense to conservatives (for once:) Merely to distinguish it from more intellectual forms of conservatism.
The public seems to have something of a love-hate relationship with child porn. On one hand, child porn in the classical sense is bad. On the other hand, child porn in the form of Britney and Christina is just fine? I remember reading an article on Britney before the music industry pimped her out. Cute kid. I just say LeAnn Rimes the other day on a Blender cover, topless. Even country music has gotten into it. Sigh... Maybe just another reason to hate the RIAA?
Like those crazy-ass commie Founding Fathers. There is a place for censorship. That's just common sense. The government is not that place. That's senseless.
Ha ha ha. This post is a laugh riot. Contratulations on completely missing the point of my post. I never said that the US was imperialist. In fact, I said that I largely disagreed with the idea that the US is imperialist in the classical sense. I merely mentioned that many people do in fact believe that, and there is no point in being tactless and giving them cannon-fodder.
Now, let's see if I can clarify for you. We lucked out with Japan because we went into their country and imposed our system of government upon them. It's a miracle that they don't resent us for it. History shows actions like these usually end up in disaster.
even for poor peasants and backwards countries like Japan once was? >>>>>>>> Japan was a great nation with thousands of years of it's own history. It's this precise ignorance of cultural tradition that makes the US the butt of a world-wide joke when it comes to matters like these.
Two points --- 1) Nationalism matters. Like it or not, people would rather be ruled by a malevolent native, than a benevolent foreigner. Don't ask me why this is so. But if you look at all the nationalistic movements the world over, you cannot argue that this is indeed the case. I would love it if everyone in the world could embrace democracy, and see the same sucesss as Japan has. But human culture isn't on our side in this matter. 2) Culture matters. With Japan, we were in a rather unique position. Japan, culturally, was prepared for the modern democratic/industrial paradigm to take root. Most countries aren't. Countries like Iraq have 2000 years of history pushing them in a different direction. Pushing democracy where it won't fit is just asking for trouble. You can try to influence a culture until it gets to a position where it's amenable to adopting democracy, but you can't force it. Take a look at China. The western world has been working on China for more than a century. It's culture is slowly becoming more open and progressive. Maybe 100 years from now, China will have moved towards a real democratic system. But it's not ready for it now. That's OK. It took western countries centuries to get ready for democracy, so why should we expect it to take any less time for other countries?
I'm not going to argue with you. We have a fundemental disagreement in our world outlook that exceeds the ability of debate to bridge. You have a romanticized view of the military and of our actions. I've come to the conclusion that there are no heros, and that the only thing that differentiates our leaders is the varying degrees of moral bankruptcy they exhibit.
However, I contest your point that Bush is good because he refuses to bend his ideals. History has shown that an inflexible man is the worst kind. In a world where much is complex and nebulous, where even fundemental things like mathematics are incomplete and often contradictory, no one can afford to be rigid. An unwavering rightousness is the biggest trap of a weak mind.
He was pretty much responsible for creating the current Japanese system of government. >>>>>>>>> Careful. A lot of people just see that situation as an example of American imperialism streching out through history. I don't completely agree with that idea (America was hardly imperialistic, in the traditional sense, compared to countries like Great Britain or France) but tact is somewhat important here. That said, we lucked out with Japan. The Japanese were the kind of pragmatic (think Romans) people that could stand to be force-fed someone else's culture, if they saw some benefit from it in the end. Acting, in the future, based on that model would be unwise to say the least.
most compassionate and ethical. >>>>>>>> I doubt anyone is questioning the soldiers here. But the reality of the situation is that a soldier does what he is told, and the people giving the orders aren't necessarily as ethical as those carrying them out.
Heh. The BSD subsystem in OS X is actually still largely based on 4.4 BSD (yes the old one). Modern BSDs (Free and Net) are used mainly in userspace, and in the filesystem and networking subsystems.
While that's true, and it just highlights my point that the media has given everyone a serious lack of perspective, I'd also point out that the government isn't making fundemental, way-of-life altering policy choices over AIDs research.
Americans shouldn't be worried that they or someone they care about could be killed by terrorists? >>>>>>>>> No, they should realize that this worry ranks right up there getting hit by lightning as a major cause of death. The government doesn't go into contortions to prevent lightning-related deaths, and if it had any perspective, it wouldn't be fueling billions of dollars into protecting us against terrorism, money that could be put to far better use elsewhere.
Also, this "us" vs "them" idea is antiquated. Like it or not, we live in one big global economy. The US is constantly expanding it's markets outside it's own borders. What's good for "them" is often good for "us" because it means that they can by our products. In the long run, spending some money to end world hunger is going to be a hell of a lot more profitable than bombing the hell out of Iraq. Of course, we live in a system where the "long run" is measured in units of 4 years, and what happens decades from now is a non-issue.
It's not an underestimation here, but a bow to reality. A 3D driver is something difficult to write (hell, it took ATI's own engineers years to get a decent set!), but rather hard to get community enthusiasm for. Most people (even on Slashdot) don't even think it's all that complex. They think it's something of the same magnitude of complexity as a network driver. The free OpenGL drivers that exist (especially for complex hardware like ATI's) just aren't comparable to the vendor ones. There are many things working against free 3D drivers: 1) Technical knowledge -- 3D is a rather specialized field, and knowledge about the design of the hardware itself is pretty much localized to the company that designed it. While a team of coders for an open project can easily have the technical knowledge (equal to that of a team at a commercial company) to write something like a kernel, it's pretty much guarenteed that only the team at the hardware company is going to be the best qualified to write drivers for their own hardware. 2) Community support. It's rather easier to get a whole lot of dedicated people working on something like a kernel or a high profile application. But a single driver? I just don't see a whole lot of people clammoring to work on a project like that. 3) Time. Hardware changes quickly and drivers have to quickly respond to those changes. OSS projects aren't exactly known for their lightning quick reflexes.
I'm not generalizing. In my sig, the context of the second sentence is derived from the first. We're not talking about serial killers here. We're talking about people dying in a war. The vast majority of people that die in a war do not deserve it. An American soldier, who is killing because his government told him to is no different from an Iraqi soldier, who is killing because his government told him to. They majority of both are not evil, they are simply pawns in a game run by people so much larger than themselves. And the thousands of Iraqi civilians that will die in the war (and that's by the conservative estimates of the DOD) are no less important than the thousands of American civilians that died during 9/11.
You know what people have none of these days? Perspective. TV, the mass media, and the public's sheer laziness has made perspective a thing of the past. It is in this world without perspective that stupid ideas like "just bend over, you're government is only doing it because it loves you" can spread and flourish. Let's address one point right off the bat:
9/11, in the grand scale of things, should have already been forgotten. More than a year ago, 3005 people died as a direct result of 9/11. Today, 40,000 children the world over died as a direct result of starvation. Tomorrow, another 40,000 children will die of hunger. Another 40,000 the next day, and another 40,000 the day after that. Now, I understand the cultural and emotional significance of the event outweighs the mere logical aspect of it. But mobilizing a nation of 300 million people on a course of action based solely on an emotional reaction is just foolish. Destructive and foolish.
Now, I understand that past events can drive people to fear. This is why I have a hard time understanding why people trust the US government. The US government is not nice. No governments are. We live in a world where the President's duty to serve and protect his constituents and their interests often means that he has to screw over a whole lot of people. Just look up the history of US foreign policy. You don't have to make a judgement call here about whether these actions are justifiable. You just have to accept the idea that the US often does what it thinks it has to do to protect it's own interests.
Now here is the kicker. If the US government is going to act to protect it's own intersts, than individuals must act to protect their own. Far from being "luddites" (dictionary.com -- those resistant to technological change) pro-privacy people are simply doing what they must: look out for themselves.
Dude. This isn't mathematics. You know perfectly well that I mean "An Iraqi has inherently as much worth as an American, and one dying isn't any better than the other." But the latter doesn't fit in 120 chars, so I tried to shorten it, and assumed that people would have enough of a grasp of the language to figure it out...
In fact, there is a very legitimate reason to emulate playstation games. Games that have significant amounts of 3D can look very good, because current emulators can run them at very high resolutions with full texture filtering and everything. For me, epsxe has given my PSX gaming library a whole new life, on my (Linux!) laptop:)
The benifets of releasing hardware documentation really aren't that great. Writing a network card driver is one thing. An OpenGL driver is a different can of worms entirely. I do agree with you to some extent that NVIDIA should provide at least register specs for its hardware, but I don't believe any drivers of the quality that NVIDIA puts out could be written from them. As a result, I don't really see much of a benefit, and I can see how it might harm them.
C++ has garbage collection, but that's not the "C++" way of doing things. Reference counted smart pointers, on the other hand, are the officially blessed method. Delegation can quite easily be implemented at the library level. Properties are a significant missing feature, though. As for reflection -- it's questionable whether this is actually a language-level feature. Given appropriate compiler support, reflection can be supported in C++ with no changes to the language itself. Even in Java, reflection is more a library-level feature that uses information that the JVM happens to keep around.
Re:Independent and Unsanctioned?
on
Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1
If you look at the bottom, they have a line saying that they are in no way affiliated with Xiph.org
All I can say is, huh? You do realize that NVIDIA's Linux drivers reached performance-parity with NVIDIA's Windows drivers several generations ago? The latest Linux driver was release less than a week after the latest Windows driver. Their Linux drivers (with appropriate patches) work flawlessly on even bleeding edge development kernels. OpenGL on Linux is mature enough that SGI sells a bunch of x86 Linux machines with rebranded NVIDIA hardware, and ILM has switched to XSI (Softimage) on Linux for their next-generation rendering pipeline.
Sigh... We've been through this before. An OpenGL driver is a huge amount of code. We're not talking about a network card driver, that just bangs some registers, and can depend on the support of the kernel networking subsystem. An OpenGL driver is all of OpenGL. The NVIDIA driver encompasses everything from the header files, to the GLX module, to the kernel driver, to the X 2D driver, to the OpenGL library. This adds up to several megabytes of code. An OpenGL application interacts with the NVIDIA driver the second it makes *any* OpenGL call. Further, drivers are a critical part of their core business. Again, this is different from networking, where lots of manufacturers have excellent drivers. In the Linux market, NVIDIA is the only one with top-quality OpenGL drivers. In the Windows market, ATI hobbled for a long time with superior hardware but crappy drivers. So asking NVIDIA to OSS it's drivers would allow competitors to use large amounts of hardware-independent code in the OpenGL library. Asking NVIDIA to OSS it's drivers would be like asking Oracle to OSS Oracle DB. Most moderate Open Source advocates would not go so far as to ask Oracle to do something like that, but these same people seem to have no problem asking NVIDIA to do it.
Make most interface implementation compile-time checked, and ensure that the programmer has thought things through in a way which discourages ambigious inheritance chains. >>>>>>>> I don't follow. MI in C++ is completely type checked.
I could use assembler, too, but I want the language to work for me as much as possible. >>>>>>>> Using assempler is a huge step away from implementing a certain feature in a library instead of the language proper. libsigc++ (and Boost.Signal) are already written for you, all you have to do is use it. Once using it, it's as easy to use as a built-in mechanism would be. This is different from trying to do object oriented programming in C, which doesn't natively support it, because the end result is clean and easy to use, unlike something like GObject.
not figuring out how to implement X or Y with only basic building blocks. >>>>>>>>>> You're point makes no sense. You're not limited to the basic building blocks. You've got very powerful standard (STL) and semi-standard (Boost) libraries to work with. Complaining about events being implemented on as a user library in C++ is like complaining that the collection classes in Java aren't implemented at the language level.
A language is sufficiently complete if you can do most useful abstractions easily within the constraints of the language. C++ isn't sufficiently complete -- thanks to the algorithms portion of the standard library, lambda's and higher-order functions seem like they should be there, but aren't. Java is even less sufficiently complete -- You can't (yet) cleanly make homogenous containers like in the STL, you can't do contracts, etc.
Hinting and anti-aliasing have little to do with each other.
Anti-aliasing means to render parts of an outline with grey pixels to smooth the edges of a glyph. Hinting means to tweek the resolution-independent glyph outline before rendering it at a given resolution.
Of course, they interact with each other. Anti-aliasing without proper hinting (OS X) can leady to messy, blurry fonts. Hinting without anti-aliasing (WinXP) is legible, but leads to very distorted glyph shapes. Hinting with anti-aliasing sometimes looks weird since most hinting systems don't take the increased perceived resolution provided by antialiasing int account, which is why the TT hinter in WinXP has some hacks in it when using Cleartype.
Hm, garbage collection is a non-feature. You can do it in C++ (and it works just fine as long as you avoid C-style code), but it doesn't fit with the "C++ way of doing things." The preferred way of doing things in C++ is to use smart pointers that do reference counting. It's not any better or worse, just different.
Java and C# interfaces are basically just restricted multiple-inheritence implementations. You can argue all you want about whether MI is good, but can you do something with interfaces that you can't with abstract base classes?
Events can be implemented very cleanly without language support, as in libsigc++. The recent comparison of libsigc++ to C# delegates (search OSNews) showed that even though libsigc++ is an out-of-language feature, it is comparable in power and ease of use to delegates.
The only real thing C++ is missing is introspection and reflection. Not important for most code, but for some stuff (transparent serialization) it's crucial. Hopefully, this will be one of the things addressed in the C++ 0x standard.
Eh. Microsoft's new language is about as "standard" as C++ without the Standard Library. It's a castrated version of a real language. Further, C# _as_a_language_ isn't anything special. It's a cut-down version of C++ with native support for properties and delegation. The whole point of Java and.NET aren't the C# and Java languages, but the huge class libraries. Until those are standardized, ISO C# doesn't mean much.
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The state where it's illegal to have sex in any position other than missionary, with the lights off? Don't get me wrong, I love VA. I'm proud of its heritage as one of the leading states in the early union. But these days, outside of northern virginia, it's just another farmer-conservative* southern state.
:) Merely to distinguish it from more intellectual forms of conservatism.
* No offense to conservatives (for once
The public seems to have something of a love-hate relationship with child porn. On one hand, child porn in the classical sense is bad. On the other hand, child porn in the form of Britney and Christina is just fine? I remember reading an article on Britney before the music industry pimped her out. Cute kid. I just say LeAnn Rimes the other day on a Blender cover, topless. Even country music has gotten into it. Sigh... Maybe just another reason to hate the RIAA?
Like those crazy-ass commie Founding Fathers. There is a place for censorship. That's just common sense. The government is not that place. That's senseless.
Ha ha ha. This post is a laugh riot. Contratulations on completely missing the point of my post. I never said that the US was imperialist. In fact, I said that I largely disagreed with the idea that the US is imperialist in the classical sense. I merely mentioned that many people do in fact believe that, and there is no point in being tactless and giving them cannon-fodder.
Now, let's see if I can clarify for you. We lucked out with Japan because we went into their country and imposed our system of government upon them. It's a miracle that they don't resent us for it. History shows actions like these usually end up in disaster.
even for poor peasants and backwards countries like Japan once was?
>>>>>>>>
Japan was a great nation with thousands of years of it's own history. It's this precise ignorance of cultural tradition that makes the US the butt of a world-wide joke when it comes to matters like these.
Two points ---
1) Nationalism matters. Like it or not, people would rather be ruled by a malevolent native, than a benevolent foreigner. Don't ask me why this is so. But if you look at all the nationalistic movements the world over, you cannot argue that this is indeed the case. I would love it if everyone in the world could embrace democracy, and see the same sucesss as Japan has. But human culture isn't on our side in this matter.
2) Culture matters. With Japan, we were in a rather unique position. Japan, culturally, was prepared for the modern democratic/industrial paradigm to take root. Most countries aren't. Countries like Iraq have 2000 years of history pushing them in a different direction. Pushing democracy where it won't fit is just asking for trouble. You can try to influence a culture until it gets to a position where it's amenable to adopting democracy, but you can't force it. Take a look at China. The western world has been working on China for more than a century. It's culture is slowly becoming more open and progressive. Maybe 100 years from now, China will have moved towards a real democratic system. But it's not ready for it now. That's OK. It took western countries centuries to get ready for democracy, so why should we expect it to take any less time for other countries?
I'm not going to argue with you. We have a fundemental disagreement in our world outlook that exceeds the ability of debate to bridge. You have a romanticized view of the military and of our actions. I've come to the conclusion that there are no heros, and that the only thing that differentiates our leaders is the varying degrees of moral bankruptcy they exhibit.
However, I contest your point that Bush is good because he refuses to bend his ideals. History has shown that an inflexible man is the worst kind. In a world where much is complex and nebulous, where even fundemental things like mathematics are incomplete and often contradictory, no one can afford to be rigid. An unwavering rightousness is the biggest trap of a weak mind.
He was pretty much responsible for creating the current Japanese system of government.
>>>>>>>>>
Careful. A lot of people just see that situation as an example of American imperialism streching out through history. I don't completely agree with that idea (America was hardly imperialistic, in the traditional sense, compared to countries like Great Britain or France) but tact is somewhat important here. That said, we lucked out with Japan. The Japanese were the kind of pragmatic (think Romans) people that could stand to be force-fed someone else's culture, if they saw some benefit from it in the end. Acting, in the future, based on that model would be unwise to say the least.
most compassionate and ethical.
>>>>>>>>
I doubt anyone is questioning the soldiers here. But the reality of the situation is that a soldier does what he is told, and the people giving the orders aren't necessarily as ethical as those carrying them out.
Heh. The BSD subsystem in OS X is actually still largely based on 4.4 BSD (yes the old one). Modern BSDs (Free and Net) are used mainly in userspace, and in the filesystem and networking subsystems.
While that's true, and it just highlights my point that the media has given everyone a serious lack of perspective, I'd also point out that the government isn't making fundemental, way-of-life altering policy choices over AIDs research.
Americans shouldn't be worried that they or someone they care about could be killed by terrorists?
>>>>>>>>>
No, they should realize that this worry ranks right up there getting hit by lightning as a major cause of death. The government doesn't go into contortions to prevent lightning-related deaths, and if it had any perspective, it wouldn't be fueling billions of dollars into protecting us against terrorism, money that could be put to far better use elsewhere.
Also, this "us" vs "them" idea is antiquated. Like it or not, we live in one big global economy. The US is constantly expanding it's markets outside it's own borders. What's good for "them" is often good for "us" because it means that they can by our products. In the long run, spending some money to end world hunger is going to be a hell of a lot more profitable than bombing the hell out of Iraq. Of course, we live in a system where the "long run" is measured in units of 4 years, and what happens decades from now is a non-issue.
It's not an underestimation here, but a bow to reality. A 3D driver is something difficult to write (hell, it took ATI's own engineers years to get a decent set!), but rather hard to get community enthusiasm for. Most people (even on Slashdot) don't even think it's all that complex. They think it's something of the same magnitude of complexity as a network driver. The free OpenGL drivers that exist (especially for complex hardware like ATI's) just aren't comparable to the vendor ones. There are many things working against free 3D drivers:
1) Technical knowledge -- 3D is a rather specialized field, and knowledge about the design of the hardware itself is pretty much localized to the company that designed it. While a team of coders for an open project can easily have the technical knowledge (equal to that of a team at a commercial company) to write something like a kernel, it's pretty much guarenteed that only the team at the hardware company is going to be the best qualified to write drivers for their own hardware.
2) Community support. It's rather easier to get a whole lot of dedicated people working on something like a kernel or a high profile application. But a single driver? I just don't see a whole lot of people clammoring to work on a project like that.
3) Time. Hardware changes quickly and drivers have to quickly respond to those changes. OSS projects aren't exactly known for their lightning quick reflexes.
I'm not generalizing. In my sig, the context of the second sentence is derived from the first. We're not talking about serial killers here. We're talking about people dying in a war. The vast majority of people that die in a war do not deserve it. An American soldier, who is killing because his government told him to is no different from an Iraqi soldier, who is killing because his government told him to. They majority of both are not evil, they are simply pawns in a game run by people so much larger than themselves. And the thousands of Iraqi civilians that will die in the war (and that's by the conservative estimates of the DOD) are no less important than the thousands of American civilians that died during 9/11.
You know what people have none of these days? Perspective. TV, the mass media, and the public's sheer laziness has made perspective a thing of the past. It is in this world without perspective that stupid ideas like "just bend over, you're government is only doing it because it loves you" can spread and flourish. Let's address one point right off the bat:
9/11, in the grand scale of things, should have already been forgotten. More than a year ago, 3005 people died as a direct result of 9/11. Today, 40,000 children the world over died as a direct result of starvation. Tomorrow, another 40,000 children will die of hunger. Another 40,000 the next day, and another 40,000 the day after that. Now, I understand the cultural and emotional significance of the event outweighs the mere logical aspect of it. But mobilizing a nation of 300 million people on a course of action based solely on an emotional reaction is just foolish. Destructive and foolish.
Now, I understand that past events can drive people to fear. This is why I have a hard time understanding why people trust the US government. The US government is not nice. No governments are. We live in a world where the President's duty to serve and protect his constituents and their interests often means that he has to screw over a whole lot of people. Just look up the history of US foreign policy. You don't have to make a judgement call here about whether these actions are justifiable. You just have to accept the idea that the US often does what it thinks it has to do to protect it's own interests.
Now here is the kicker. If the US government is going to act to protect it's own intersts, than individuals must act to protect their own. Far from being "luddites" (dictionary.com -- those resistant to technological change) pro-privacy people are simply doing what they must: look out for themselves.
Dude. This isn't mathematics. You know perfectly well that I mean "An Iraqi has inherently as much worth as an American, and one dying isn't any better than the other." But the latter doesn't fit in 120 chars, so I tried to shorten it, and assumed that people would have enough of a grasp of the language to figure it out...
In fact, there is a very legitimate reason to emulate playstation games. Games that have significant amounts of 3D can look very good, because current emulators can run them at very high resolutions with full texture filtering and everything. For me, epsxe has given my PSX gaming library a whole new life, on my (Linux!) laptop :)
The benifets of releasing hardware documentation really aren't that great. Writing a network card driver is one thing. An OpenGL driver is a different can of worms entirely. I do agree with you to some extent that NVIDIA should provide at least register specs for its hardware, but I don't believe any drivers of the quality that NVIDIA puts out could be written from them. As a result, I don't really see much of a benefit, and I can see how it might harm them.
C++ has garbage collection, but that's not the "C++" way of doing things. Reference counted smart pointers, on the other hand, are the officially blessed method. Delegation can quite easily be implemented at the library level. Properties are a significant missing feature, though. As for reflection -- it's questionable whether this is actually a language-level feature. Given appropriate compiler support, reflection can be supported in C++ with no changes to the language itself. Even in Java, reflection is more a library-level feature that uses information that the JVM happens to keep around.
If you look at the bottom, they have a line saying that they are in no way affiliated with Xiph.org
All I can say is, huh? You do realize that NVIDIA's Linux drivers reached performance-parity with NVIDIA's Windows drivers several generations ago? The latest Linux driver was release less than a week after the latest Windows driver. Their Linux drivers (with appropriate patches) work flawlessly on even bleeding edge development kernels. OpenGL on Linux is mature enough that SGI sells a bunch of x86 Linux machines with rebranded NVIDIA hardware, and ILM has switched to XSI (Softimage) on Linux for their next-generation rendering pipeline.
NWN!
Sigh... We've been through this before.
An OpenGL driver is a huge amount of code. We're not talking about a network card driver, that just bangs some registers, and can depend on the support of the kernel networking subsystem. An OpenGL driver is all of OpenGL. The NVIDIA driver encompasses everything from the header files, to the GLX module, to the kernel driver, to the X 2D driver, to the OpenGL library. This adds up to several megabytes of code. An OpenGL application interacts with the NVIDIA driver the second it makes *any* OpenGL call. Further, drivers are a critical part of their core business. Again, this is different from networking, where lots of manufacturers have excellent drivers. In the Linux market, NVIDIA is the only one with top-quality OpenGL drivers. In the Windows market, ATI hobbled for a long time with superior hardware but crappy drivers. So asking NVIDIA to OSS it's drivers would allow competitors to use large amounts of hardware-independent code in the OpenGL library. Asking NVIDIA to OSS it's drivers would be like asking Oracle to OSS Oracle DB. Most moderate Open Source advocates would not go so far as to ask Oracle to do something like that, but these same people seem to have no problem asking NVIDIA to do it.
Make most interface implementation compile-time checked, and ensure that the programmer has thought things through in a way which discourages ambigious inheritance chains.
>>>>>>>>
I don't follow. MI in C++ is completely type checked.
I could use assembler, too, but I want the language to work for me as much as possible.
>>>>>>>>
Using assempler is a huge step away from implementing a certain feature in a library instead of the language proper. libsigc++ (and Boost.Signal) are already written for you, all you have to do is use it. Once using it, it's as easy to use as a built-in mechanism would be. This is different from trying to do object oriented programming in C, which doesn't natively support it, because the end result is clean and easy to use, unlike something like GObject.
not figuring out how to implement X or Y with only basic building blocks.
>>>>>>>>>>
You're point makes no sense. You're not limited to the basic building blocks. You've got very powerful standard (STL) and semi-standard (Boost) libraries to work with. Complaining about events being implemented on as a user library in C++ is like complaining that the collection classes in Java aren't implemented at the language level.
A language is sufficiently complete if you can do most useful abstractions easily within the constraints of the language. C++ isn't sufficiently complete -- thanks to the algorithms portion of the standard library, lambda's and higher-order functions seem like they should be there, but aren't. Java is even less sufficiently complete -- You can't (yet) cleanly make homogenous containers like in the STL, you can't do contracts, etc.
Hinting and anti-aliasing have little to do with each other.
Anti-aliasing means to render parts of an outline with grey pixels to smooth the edges of a glyph.
Hinting means to tweek the resolution-independent glyph outline before rendering it at a given resolution.
Of course, they interact with each other. Anti-aliasing without proper hinting (OS X) can leady to messy, blurry fonts. Hinting without anti-aliasing (WinXP) is legible, but leads to very distorted glyph shapes. Hinting with anti-aliasing sometimes looks weird since most hinting systems don't take the increased perceived resolution provided by antialiasing int account, which is why the TT hinter in WinXP has some hacks in it when using Cleartype.
Hm, garbage collection is a non-feature. You can do it in C++ (and it works just fine as long as you avoid C-style code), but it doesn't fit with the "C++ way of doing things." The preferred way of doing things in C++ is to use smart pointers that do reference counting. It's not any better or worse, just different.
Java and C# interfaces are basically just restricted multiple-inheritence implementations. You can argue all you want about whether MI is good, but can you do something with interfaces that you can't with abstract base classes?
Events can be implemented very cleanly without language support, as in libsigc++. The recent comparison of libsigc++ to C# delegates (search OSNews) showed that even though libsigc++ is an out-of-language feature, it is comparable in power and ease of use to delegates.
The only real thing C++ is missing is introspection and reflection. Not important for most code, but for some stuff (transparent serialization) it's crucial. Hopefully, this will be one of the things addressed in the C++ 0x standard.
Eh. Microsoft's new language is about as "standard" as C++ without the Standard Library. It's a castrated version of a real language. Further, C# _as_a_language_ isn't anything special. It's a cut-down version of C++ with native support for properties and delegation. The whole point of Java and .NET aren't the C# and Java languages, but the huge class libraries. Until those are standardized, ISO C# doesn't mean much.