Already wind and solar are cheaper per watt of installed power
Please define what exactly you mean by "installed power" and/or cite your sources. Assuming you mean per watt of maximum output power bear in mind that comparing cost per watt of maximum output power for two power sources with very different characteristics is misleading at best and outright deceptive at worst.
In particular a coal/gas/nuclear plant will be able to generate at near it's maximum capacity most of the time. Occasionally it will need to be shut down planned maintenance and very occasionally there might be an emergency shutdown but by and large it can provide it's maximum output when the grid needs it.
A solar panel or wind turbine generates when the weather is right. When the weather is wrong it generates only a small fraction of it's maximum output power if anything.
Dam based hydro can generate power on demand but afaict most of the good sites for it in the west are either already in use for hydro or have sufficiant other development that using them is politically impossible.
Solar thermal with heat storage looks interesting but afaict is still in it's infancy.
Symbian was a horrible platform to code for (they basterdised C++ by removing exceptions and replacing them with these things called "leaves" which didn't work correctly with RAII type structures, then they introduced another hack to try and deal with that) and while it had a web browser afaict wasn't much good. In the days before the iPhone sybian was tolerated because the alternatives weren't much better but with iOS and andriod (which is in some ways a clone of iOS) arround it rapidly started looking like crap. I don't recall their being an app store for symbian either and if there was it certainly wasn't promoted.
Even before the MS guy got involved nokia was looking at moving away from symbian, they just couldn't seem to decide where they were going. They did several linux based experiments but couldn't seem to stick with one for long enough to make it matter.
GPL - you can freely use my code as long as you pass that freedom on and don't mix it with code that while similarly or more free differs in certain technicalities
Not that i'm against the GPL per-se but I think that certifying as "free" licenses that are incompatible with their flagship "free" license and not making the "or later" thing a part of the license itself (leading to all the fun from GPLv3 being incompatible with GPLv2) really sends out strabge messages "you are free to use and modify program X" and "you are free to use and modify program Y" but "you aren't free to mix code from program X with code from program Y"..
It measures the time to send a packet to the target and get a reply back.
While I could see this technique working in some cases there are several factors that work against it.
One is jitter, afaict you can't directly measure the time from a router to the target. You can only measure the time from yourself to the router and from yourself to the target. A subtraction should yeild the difference BUT only if the time from you to the router is stable.
Things are further complicated by the fact that afaict you can only trace the outbound route of a packet and there is no gaurantee that the return path will match the outbound path and more importantly in particular there is no gaurantee that two users who share a router in the outbound path will take the same return path..
Finally I don't know what internet infrastructure is like in the US but there is no way they would achive that accuracy on average here in the UK. Too many people are on ADSL connections that are effectively tunneled to london.
In most langauges you can build a clunky equivilent to a feature the language doesn't have. That doesn't mean the language isn't missing a useful feature.
Or at least, something that is functionally identical, if requiring more complex code
What you really want in GUI work is a "method pointer" (method pointer is the delphi name for them, I dunno what other languages call them) which points to both an object and a method. There are a couple of ways of creating something like this in java.
One way is to use an interface and write an implementation (possiblly as an inner class or anonymous class) that calls the method. You have to write such an implementation for each method you want to be able to point your method pointer at. This is roughly the approach the java standard libraries take though they like to combine multiple functions onto one interface (meaning you need to write an implementation of that interface for each combination of targets, not just for each target).
The other way is to use reflection . Based on this you can very easilly build a class "MethodPointer" which has a constructor that takes an object reference, a method name and a set of argment types (to disambiguate overloaded methods). But there will be no compile time checking of parameter types and afaict reflection is a lot slower than features built into the langauge.
Either way what should be a simple process is made far more complex in terms of either programmer effort (for the first method) or run time overhead (for the second method).
hmm, the embedded devices I worked on the "debricking" procedure was to use JTAG to rewire the flash (AIUI the programmer software uses JTAG to take control of the CPUs address/data lines and uses those address/data lines to program the flash). It was a bit slow but it didn't rely on any functional code being on the device at all.
Indeed, while intel did introduce 8-core xeons the clock speeds sucked so much that really the only reason to use them was if you wanted a 4-socket system or had some other weird requirements (e.g. INSANE ammounts of ram). For two socket systems with up to 96GB of ram the 4/6-core 56xx series xeons were the best option, especially if the system is to be used as a workstation.
I suspect the next major revision on the mac pro will use some form of sandy bridge based LGA2011 xeon. Probablly with up to 8 cores per socket and two sockets (up to 16 cores total).
Some ships have onboard cranes that can lift containers onto smaller vessels, I saw them doing it on an episode of "salvage code red" (they were removing the containers to reduce weight and get the beached ship out)
Meh, phone cameras suck in general, high mega-pixels are mostly just for advertising (the optics are too poor to really take advantage of them). Apple has enough other good points to advertise on and enough fanboys that they really don't need to play the game of inflating a headline spec while actually reducing what that spec is thought the represent (put too many megapixels on for your optics and you just increase noise without increasing details).
What apple really got right was the interface and in particular the web browser. Mobile phones have had web browsers before but afaict they sucked and were little used. By combining a really good multi-touch screen with a good browser engine apple created a mobile browser that people actually wanted to use.
Similarly symbian could support user apps but it was horrible to code for (based on a basterdised version of C++) and there was no central place to distrubute apps. The iphone didn't initially support user apps at all but when they did add support they did it in a way that brought them a huge number of developers.
I don't like the way apple locks their phones down or the way they make the batteries difficult to replace but they got many things right with the iPhone. Things other smartphone vendors rushed to copy.
If a drug is freely and legally available the patent owner (though patent licensing fees) if there is one and/or the governement (through taxes or lack of taxes) will largely control the price and provided they aren't too greedy will get the lions share of the profit. Illegal sources that want to survive will have to undercut the legal source.
Patent holders will set the price at what the market will bear, clearly they have determined that the american market (where the buyers are largely private insurance companies) will bear a higher price than the canadian market (where afaict the main buyer is the government).
Most of the well known illegal drugs are too old to be under patent protection and/or where developed by entities with no interest in patenting so if legalised and not taxed (beyond normal taxes that apply to any goods) they would become much cheaper. If legalised and taxed (like tobacco and alcohol are) then their price would be largely under government control.
Afaict that is easy enough to do with "regular" users but much harder with sysdmins (and at a hosting provider a large proportion of the employees are probablly sysadmins of some sort). They tend to know passwords that are poorly documented and/or shared. A disgruntled admin may even go as far as creating extra accounts specifically for the purpose of maintaining access after they are fired.
True, even a huge chunk of the classic Doctor Who episodes would have been lost, had it not been for archives abroad.
Even with the foreign "archives" (which afaict were often just rolls of film forgotten somewhere) some are still missing and many were recovered in poor condition requiring heavy restoration.
And IIRC we only still have the famous silent film "metropolis" because people who were contractually obliged to destroy their copies didn't actually do so.
He banged out volumes 1, 2 and 3 over about 5 years. It's been nearly 40 years since then with relatively little progress. Something has slowed knuth down big time whether it is other commitments, reduction in mental capacity, inceasing complexity of the work or some combination thereof.
The whole CA system is fundamentally broken, your browser trusts a huge list of CAs and further those CAs have the power to delegate their authority (either through signing a cert that delegates authority or by allowing those people to request certificates with little to know further checking). The result is a huge number of people who have the power to sign certificates that your browser will treat as evidence that a web site is who they say they are. Further the CAs don't really have much interest in security beyond doing the minimum nessacery to keep themselves in the browsers root certificate lists.
When you have a large number of people and/or entities with such a power there is a significanct chance that some of them will be corrupt, open to coersion, lax about security or some combination of those attributes.
Commodo claimed that there were no further mis-issued certificates as a result of this but I'd be very wary of such a claim.
It might very well hose up your profile, but it isn't going to take over the entire machine unless you actually allow it to.
"Hosing up your profile" includes stuff like modifying your menus and modifying the executable path your shell windows use.
And with those powers it's pretty easy to set things up so that the next time you use su, sudo, the root terminal menu entry or whatever other means you have of launching root processes the malware gets root too.
Why doesn't the earth fall into the sun? because it's moving perpendicular to the sun and that movement is curved into an orbit by the suns gravity.
Decrease the speed of perpendicular movement and you will move towards the sun increase the speed of perpendicular movement and you will move away from the sun until you eventually reach a velocity where you escape into interstellar space.
In space there is nothing significant to push against. Therefore in space all changes in velocity cost energy and propellant. There is a trade-off between energy cost and propellant cost, a high exhaust velocity gives better propellant efficiency but worse energy efficiency.
This contrasts to our regular experiance on earth where we are constantly fighting forces trying to make us stationary relative to the earth. So deceleration relative to the earth can be achieved by simply turning off the power and waiting. It can also be sped-up in many cheap ways. This causes us to intuitively think of deceleration as cheap.
In five years when everybody is unrolling/unfolding an awesome, lightweight 30" display, are you still going to be happy with your 15" laptop?
Will that be a display that actually gives me the pixels to make full use of those 30 inches or will it be a mere 1920x1080 like the better 15 inch laptops?
If it's a mere 1920x1080 then the only use I see for it would be presentations and frankly a projector is probably just as convenient for that as long as you can find a reasonably flat and neutral peice of wall. If it's higher res then I could see it being useful in a mobile office scenario.
Either way for actual use on the go I tend to think even 15 inch is too big, for that use 10 inch seems to be the sweet spot though getting a 10 inch with an acceptable* screen resolution is a PITA.
*I do not consider anything lower than 1024x768 in either dimension to be acceptable.
Agreed rolling certainly has advantages for packing certain types of object. With clothes the advantage is it makes it much easier to pack them tightly because the clothes friction with themselves contains most of the compressive force you have applied whereas with a flat fold you have to apply the force to the package as a whole (which you can do but you risk damaging other more delicate items in the suitcase when you sit on it).
With a screen the poential advantage would be that by reducing the surface area you could reduce the amount of volume spent on protection for the screen and/or give the screen better protection. With a modern thin laptop even a fairly thin sleeve can end up with a volume that is a significant percentage of the laptops volume, more protective cases will have significantly greater volume.
Checking one of my favorite suppliers (there are probablly cheaper ones out there)
Ram is about £10 per gig and if you want to go beyond 16GB it's time to bend over and pay a lot more for your CPU/MB to get support for that extra ram. SSD is about £1.50 per gig HDD is about 10p per gig
Superfetch sounds great if you have a regular schedule every day switching between programs at known times, for those whose usage patterns aren't so consistent it doesn't seem so useful (still mostly on XP mysefl, wondering whether to try and get a copy of XP for my next computer somehow or bite the bullet and go win7).
The one thing I learned from the accident in Japan is that our storage pools require active cooling
The reason those pools have such a heat problem is because they are storing fuel rods that were only recently removed from the reactor and are still very "hot" (that is undergoing a LOT of decay events which translates to lots of radiation and lots of heat). In that state they are considered too dangerous to move very far so they are kept close to the reactor until they cool off a bit (that is the elements with short half lives decay).
I agree the pools should have a big buffer of water so they can go without active cooling for a while but it's a totally seperate problem to the long term waste problem that yucca mountain aims to solve.
I used an 8210 (slightly older than a 3310 but much higher end when it came out and IMO the nicest phone I have ever used) for years and when it finally died I bought more secondhand, the problem is I found they were becoming unreliable, the phones would sometimes cut out when trying to connect a call especially in low signal areas. I suspected a power problem but didn't have any way to track things down further. IIRC I tried a new battery and that didn't make any difference.
It got replaced with a modern low end nokia and yeah the games are a little better, it's a little lighter, it has some data functionality (though i've never used it) and it has a large color screen and a camera. However as a basic phone it sucks compared to the 8210, there is little to no gap between the front cover and the screen so it's much easier to smash the screen (mine is on it's third screen) and the color screens are vritually unreadable with the backlight off. With the black andwhite LCD of the old phones there was really no need for the backlight at all and I generally turned it off in the settings.
Do you really know what postfix_increment(C) does anymore than operator++?
Yes, unless the programmer was deliberately setting out to obfuscate things it is very unlikely they would call a function postfix_increment unless that is what it actually did and even then it would be a pretty strange way to name a function and an immediate red-flag.
In all the langauges I have experiance with there is a very limited set of operators. The result is where there is no operator that is a good fit the programmer must either give up on operator overloading entirely or (ab)use an existing operator which is a poor fit. This forced descision make operator overloading a dangerous tool. Used properly and sparingly it can make code clear and concise. Overused it will make code smaller but harder to follow.
Below are a couple of examples from the standard library of what I consider to be bad uses of operator overloading:
The streams code overloads to use to output stuff. This makes outputting stuff a little more concise but also means you have to manually keep track of variable types to tell the difference between outputting stuff and shifting bits. To make things even more confusing they made the operator return the stream so users can chain the operations.
auto_ptr uses = for assignment but has rather weird symantics which break the normal assumptions that people are likely to make about the behaviour of an assignement operator. In particular assigning something to an auto_ptr effectively destroys the original (either immediately in the case of an assingment from one auto_ptr to another or when the auto_ptr goes out of scope in the case of an assingment from a plain pointer to an auto_ptr).
Indeed but IIRC they have with some releases deliberately picked the same version as redhat so they can cherry pick redhats fixes rather than having t do the backporting themselves.
The only reason NAT is a problem for VOIP is because the standard VOIP protocol (SIP) was designed as a peer to peer system. This gives lower costs and slightly better performance but it also makes it very fragile in the case of NAT.
It's perfectly possible to implement VOIP as a traditional client-server protocol (for example IAX) which should work fine with NAT. Downside is that all calls have to be routed via a server but often that is desirable anyway.
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Already wind and solar are cheaper per watt of installed power
Please define what exactly you mean by "installed power" and/or cite your sources. Assuming you mean per watt of maximum output power bear in mind that comparing cost per watt of maximum output power for two power sources with very different characteristics is misleading at best and outright deceptive at worst.
In particular a coal/gas/nuclear plant will be able to generate at near it's maximum capacity most of the time. Occasionally it will need to be shut down planned maintenance and very occasionally there might be an emergency shutdown but by and large it can provide it's maximum output when the grid needs it.
A solar panel or wind turbine generates when the weather is right. When the weather is wrong it generates only a small fraction of it's maximum output power if anything.
Dam based hydro can generate power on demand but afaict most of the good sites for it in the west are either already in use for hydro or have sufficiant other development that using them is politically impossible.
Solar thermal with heat storage looks interesting but afaict is still in it's infancy.
Symbian was a horrible platform to code for (they basterdised C++ by removing exceptions and replacing them with these things called "leaves" which didn't work correctly with RAII type structures, then they introduced another hack to try and deal with that) and while it had a web browser afaict wasn't much good. In the days before the iPhone sybian was tolerated because the alternatives weren't much better but with iOS and andriod (which is in some ways a clone of iOS) arround it rapidly started looking like crap. I don't recall their being an app store for symbian either and if there was it certainly wasn't promoted.
Even before the MS guy got involved nokia was looking at moving away from symbian, they just couldn't seem to decide where they were going. They did several linux based experiments but couldn't seem to stick with one for long enough to make it matter.
GPL - you can freely use my code as long as you pass that freedom on and don't mix it with code that while similarly or more free differs in certain technicalities
Not that i'm against the GPL per-se but I think that certifying as "free" licenses that are incompatible with their flagship "free" license and not making the "or later" thing a part of the license itself (leading to all the fun from GPLv3 being incompatible with GPLv2) really sends out strabge messages "you are free to use and modify program X" and "you are free to use and modify program Y" but "you aren't free to mix code from program X with code from program Y"..
Plus at least with O2 3G connections are behind ISP level NAT.
It measures the time to send a packet to the target and get a reply back.
While I could see this technique working in some cases there are several factors that work against it.
One is jitter, afaict you can't directly measure the time from a router to the target. You can only measure the time from yourself to the router and from yourself to the target. A subtraction should yeild the difference BUT only if the time from you to the router is stable.
Things are further complicated by the fact that afaict you can only trace the outbound route of a packet and there is no gaurantee that the return path will match the outbound path and more importantly in particular there is no gaurantee that two users who share a router in the outbound path will take the same return path..
Finally I don't know what internet infrastructure is like in the US but there is no way they would achive that accuracy on average here in the UK. Too many people are on ADSL connections that are effectively tunneled to london.
java has function pointers.
In most langauges you can build a clunky equivilent to a feature the language doesn't have. That doesn't mean the language isn't missing a useful feature.
Or at least, something that is functionally identical, if requiring more complex code
What you really want in GUI work is a "method pointer" (method pointer is the delphi name for them, I dunno what other languages call them) which points to both an object and a method. There are a couple of ways of creating something like this in java.
One way is to use an interface and write an implementation (possiblly as an inner class or anonymous class) that calls the method. You have to write such an implementation for each method you want to be able to point your method pointer at. This is roughly the approach the java standard libraries take though they like to combine multiple functions onto one interface (meaning you need to write an implementation of that interface for each combination of targets, not just for each target).
The other way is to use reflection . Based on this you can very easilly build a class "MethodPointer" which has a constructor that takes an object reference, a method name and a set of argment types (to disambiguate overloaded methods). But there will be no compile time checking of parameter types and afaict reflection is a lot slower than features built into the langauge.
Either way what should be a simple process is made far more complex in terms of either programmer effort (for the first method) or run time overhead (for the second method).
hmm, the embedded devices I worked on the "debricking" procedure was to use JTAG to rewire the flash (AIUI the programmer software uses JTAG to take control of the CPUs address/data lines and uses those address/data lines to program the flash). It was a bit slow but it didn't rely on any functional code being on the device at all.
Indeed, while intel did introduce 8-core xeons the clock speeds sucked so much that really the only reason to use them was if you wanted a 4-socket system or had some other weird requirements (e.g. INSANE ammounts of ram). For two socket systems with up to 96GB of ram the 4/6-core 56xx series xeons were the best option, especially if the system is to be used as a workstation.
I suspect the next major revision on the mac pro will use some form of sandy bridge based LGA2011 xeon. Probablly with up to 8 cores per socket and two sockets (up to 16 cores total).
Some ships have onboard cranes that can lift containers onto smaller vessels, I saw them doing it on an episode of "salvage code red" (they were removing the containers to reduce weight and get the beached ship out)
Meh, phone cameras suck in general, high mega-pixels are mostly just for advertising (the optics are too poor to really take advantage of them). Apple has enough other good points to advertise on and enough fanboys that they really don't need to play the game of inflating a headline spec while actually reducing what that spec is thought the represent (put too many megapixels on for your optics and you just increase noise without increasing details).
What apple really got right was the interface and in particular the web browser. Mobile phones have had web browsers before but afaict they sucked and were little used. By combining a really good multi-touch screen with a good browser engine apple created a mobile browser that people actually wanted to use.
Similarly symbian could support user apps but it was horrible to code for (based on a basterdised version of C++) and there was no central place to distrubute apps. The iphone didn't initially support user apps at all but when they did add support they did it in a way that brought them a huge number of developers.
I don't like the way apple locks their phones down or the way they make the batteries difficult to replace but they got many things right with the iPhone. Things other smartphone vendors rushed to copy.
If a drug is freely and legally available the patent owner (though patent licensing fees) if there is one and/or the governement (through taxes or lack of taxes) will largely control the price and provided they aren't too greedy will get the lions share of the profit. Illegal sources that want to survive will have to undercut the legal source.
Patent holders will set the price at what the market will bear, clearly they have determined that the american market (where the buyers are largely private insurance companies) will bear a higher price than the canadian market (where afaict the main buyer is the government).
Most of the well known illegal drugs are too old to be under patent protection and/or where developed by entities with no interest in patenting so if legalised and not taxed (beyond normal taxes that apply to any goods) they would become much cheaper. If legalised and taxed (like tobacco and alcohol are) then their price would be largely under government control.
Afaict that is easy enough to do with "regular" users but much harder with sysdmins (and at a hosting provider a large proportion of the employees are probablly sysadmins of some sort). They tend to know passwords that are poorly documented and/or shared. A disgruntled admin may even go as far as creating extra accounts specifically for the purpose of maintaining access after they are fired.
True, even a huge chunk of the classic Doctor Who episodes would have been lost, had it not been for archives abroad.
Even with the foreign "archives" (which afaict were often just rolls of film forgotten somewhere) some are still missing and many were recovered in poor condition requiring heavy restoration.
And IIRC we only still have the famous silent film "metropolis" because people who were contractually obliged to destroy their copies didn't actually do so.
not because of any slowness on his part
He banged out volumes 1, 2 and 3 over about 5 years. It's been nearly 40 years since then with relatively little progress. Something has slowed knuth down big time whether it is other commitments, reduction in mental capacity, inceasing complexity of the work or some combination thereof.
The whole CA system is fundamentally broken, your browser trusts a huge list of CAs and further those CAs have the power to delegate their authority (either through signing a cert that delegates authority or by allowing those people to request certificates with little to know further checking). The result is a huge number of people who have the power to sign certificates that your browser will treat as evidence that a web site is who they say they are. Further the CAs don't really have much interest in security beyond doing the minimum nessacery to keep themselves in the browsers root certificate lists.
When you have a large number of people and/or entities with such a power there is a significanct chance that some of them will be corrupt, open to coersion, lax about security or some combination of those attributes.
Commodo claimed that there were no further mis-issued certificates as a result of this but I'd be very wary of such a claim.
It might very well hose up your profile, but it isn't going to take over the entire machine unless you actually allow it to.
"Hosing up your profile" includes stuff like modifying your menus and modifying the executable path your shell windows use.
And with those powers it's pretty easy to set things up so that the next time you use su, sudo, the root terminal menu entry or whatever other means you have of launching root processes the malware gets root too.
Not nessacerally.
Why doesn't the earth fall into the sun? because it's moving perpendicular to the sun and that movement is curved into an orbit by the suns gravity.
Decrease the speed of perpendicular movement and you will move towards the sun increase the speed of perpendicular movement and you will move away from the sun until you eventually reach a velocity where you escape into interstellar space.
In space there is nothing significant to push against. Therefore in space all changes in velocity cost energy and propellant. There is a trade-off between energy cost and propellant cost, a high exhaust velocity gives better propellant efficiency but worse energy efficiency.
This contrasts to our regular experiance on earth where we are constantly fighting forces trying to make us stationary relative to the earth. So deceleration relative to the earth can be achieved by simply turning off the power and waiting. It can also be sped-up in many cheap ways. This causes us to intuitively think of deceleration as cheap.
In five years when everybody is unrolling/unfolding an awesome, lightweight 30" display, are you still going to be happy with your 15" laptop?
Will that be a display that actually gives me the pixels to make full use of those 30 inches or will it be a mere 1920x1080 like the better 15 inch laptops?
If it's a mere 1920x1080 then the only use I see for it would be presentations and frankly a projector is probably just as convenient for that as long as you can find a reasonably flat and neutral peice of wall. If it's higher res then I could see it being useful in a mobile office scenario.
Either way for actual use on the go I tend to think even 15 inch is too big, for that use 10 inch seems to be the sweet spot though getting a 10 inch with an acceptable* screen resolution is a PITA.
*I do not consider anything lower than 1024x768 in either dimension to be acceptable.
Agreed rolling certainly has advantages for packing certain types of object. With clothes the advantage is it makes it much easier to pack them tightly because the clothes friction with themselves contains most of the compressive force you have applied whereas with a flat fold you have to apply the force to the package as a whole (which you can do but you risk damaging other more delicate items in the suitcase when you sit on it).
With a screen the poential advantage would be that by reducing the surface area you could reduce the amount of volume spent on protection for the screen and/or give the screen better protection. With a modern thin laptop even a fairly thin sleeve can end up with a volume that is a significant percentage of the laptops volume, more protective cases will have significantly greater volume.
RAM is cheap
Checking one of my favorite suppliers (there are probablly cheaper ones out there)
Ram is about £10 per gig and if you want to go beyond 16GB it's time to bend over and pay a lot more for your CPU/MB to get support for that extra ram.
SSD is about £1.50 per gig
HDD is about 10p per gig
Superfetch sounds great if you have a regular schedule every day switching between programs at known times, for those whose usage patterns aren't so consistent it doesn't seem so useful (still mostly on XP mysefl, wondering whether to try and get a copy of XP for my next computer somehow or bite the bullet and go win7).
The one thing I learned from the accident in Japan is that our storage pools require active cooling
The reason those pools have such a heat problem is because they are storing fuel rods that were only recently removed from the reactor and are still very "hot" (that is undergoing a LOT of decay events which translates to lots of radiation and lots of heat). In that state they are considered too dangerous to move very far so they are kept close to the reactor until they cool off a bit (that is the elements with short half lives decay).
I agree the pools should have a big buffer of water so they can go without active cooling for a while but it's a totally seperate problem to the long term waste problem that yucca mountain aims to solve.
I used an 8210 (slightly older than a 3310 but much higher end when it came out and IMO the nicest phone I have ever used) for years and when it finally died I bought more secondhand, the problem is I found they were becoming unreliable, the phones would sometimes cut out when trying to connect a call especially in low signal areas. I suspected a power problem but didn't have any way to track things down further. IIRC I tried a new battery and that didn't make any difference.
It got replaced with a modern low end nokia and yeah the games are a little better, it's a little lighter, it has some data functionality (though i've never used it) and it has a large color screen and a camera. However as a basic phone it sucks compared to the 8210, there is little to no gap between the front cover and the screen so it's much easier to smash the screen (mine is on it's third screen) and the color screens are vritually unreadable with the backlight off. With the black andwhite LCD of the old phones there was really no need for the backlight at all and I generally turned it off in the settings.
Do you really know what postfix_increment(C) does anymore than operator++?
Yes, unless the programmer was deliberately setting out to obfuscate things it is very unlikely they would call a function postfix_increment unless that is what it actually did and even then it would be a pretty strange way to name a function and an immediate red-flag.
In all the langauges I have experiance with there is a very limited set of operators. The result is where there is no operator that is a good fit the programmer must either give up on operator overloading entirely or (ab)use an existing operator which is a poor fit. This forced descision make operator overloading a dangerous tool. Used properly and sparingly it can make code clear and concise. Overused it will make code smaller but harder to follow.
Below are a couple of examples from the standard library of what I consider to be bad uses of operator overloading:
The streams code overloads to use to output stuff. This makes outputting stuff a little more concise but also means you have to manually keep track of variable types to tell the difference between outputting stuff and shifting bits. To make things even more confusing they made the operator return the stream so users can chain the operations.
auto_ptr uses = for assignment but has rather weird symantics which break the normal assumptions that people are likely to make about the behaviour of an assignement operator. In particular assigning something to an auto_ptr effectively destroys the original (either immediately in the case of an assingment from one auto_ptr to another or when the auto_ptr goes out of scope in the case of an assingment from a plain pointer to an auto_ptr).
Indeed but IIRC they have with some releases deliberately picked the same version as redhat so they can cherry pick redhats fixes rather than having t do the backporting themselves.
The only reason NAT is a problem for VOIP is because the standard VOIP protocol (SIP) was designed as a peer to peer system. This gives lower costs and slightly better performance but it also makes it very fragile in the case of NAT.
It's perfectly possible to implement VOIP as a traditional client-server protocol (for example IAX) which should work fine with NAT. Downside is that all calls have to be routed via a server but often that is desirable anyway.