I'm trying to edit something on a windows system right now and it crashes four to five times an hour
Ever consider it's not Windows' fault? I dual boot Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 R2. Granted, I used to get occaisional crashes playing games in XP - until I disabled the Realtek integrated sound chip and got an Audigy.
The only crashes I ever get are when I'm using beta nVidia graphics drivers, or when I make a stupid programming mistake, like off-by-one errors or checking pointers. The latter happens rarely, due to my incredible programming skill:D, and is caught by my IDE and never affects system stability. All in all, when I have programming classes, call it less than 4 crashes a month.
I'm still trying to find out what people do to their poor machines in order to make them so horribly unstable, or what people do to their e-mail accounts to get so much spam. (I've had a free netscape account since I was 11 - never any spam.) Maybe it's not Windows?
I've had my current, free netscape address (look above) ever since I was 11 - call it about 5 years. (The mathematically inclined amongst you may be able to guess my age now!) Although a Hotmail account I held briefly got the occaisional spam, I actually never got spammed on my netscape. For a bit over a year now, I've had a secondary college address, which has also received no spam in the year it's been active.
I must have existed outside the bell curve since my pre-teens.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
The user doesn't have to read the readme, they're entitled to assume it will not contain anything they need to know about unless their attention is drawn to it.
Usually I try not to be rude, but this is the most ignorant comment I have heard in a long time - even on Slashdot. Do you assume that you never need to learn or know anything, because if it was important enough, someone would learn it for you? Do you not read contracts - be they with a bank, landlord, or other party - because if there was something "important" in a document that controls your future, someone would read it and explain it to you? Do you assume that no one on the face of this earth is the least bit malicious? This is dangerous - for your sake, stop thinking that way.
Intelligent Design -- that idea that life was created by a Really Smart Thing, as opposed to life just randomly showing up -- is supporting by things being very complex, not by things being unknown.
True. The "things being unknown" part, however, is used not to prove Intelligent Design, but to disprove Evolution.
Until its easy (not merely 'possible') to run limited accounts & control permissions, we're going to see major problems.
The use of limited accounts only goes so far. It will prevent a virus from doing damage to some areas of the machine; it will not prevent the creation of "zombie" DDOS networks, infection by spyware, or OS exploits. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the WMF exploit will work regardless of whether or not you're running with full or nil permissions.
"I wonder if the booming number of sales will have an impact on the prices, they could either lower the prices to encourage sales or increase prices to try to increase their profits... Or keep the prices the same... Hopefully it will be the former."
Supply and demand. Greater demand, in the short term, tends to drive the price of something up - especially the prices of traditional, physical goods that can "run out" and become scarce.
With higher prices come greater profits - and more people wanting a slice of the pie. These people start producing the good in question, increasing supply.
This increase in supply means the good is no longer scarce, and will drive the price back down again. This cycle continues until an equilibrium price is reached.
Or, at least, with classical economics. With digital music, there's no scarcity, per se - it's not like iTunes only has 50 copies of Nickelback's "Photograph" and 20 of Disturbed's "Stricken." It's equally hard to increase supply of something with a near infinite supply and the demand for music tends to be very inelastic - charge over $1.00 per song and people will go to iTunes. Charge much under $1.00, and you're bankrupting yourself on licensing, merchant, and bandwidth fees.
So... the economics of digital music are rather interesting, without even considering the effects of piracy. I'll leave that discussion to ill-informed, rabid, music-"sharing"-is-good people, because their explanations are a lot more entertaining than "piracy lowers demand somewhat."
" [...]digital music stores all provide their wares in lossy formats."
Generally because the difference between a good, lossy format and a lossless format is negligible - think the difference between bitmaps and jpegs. This is especially true with iTunes - the service is designed for iPods, which the majority of people listen t on headphones anyway.
Also consider bandwidth - the one and only cost other than licensing and merchant fees an online music store faces. The format used by Apple's iTunes, for example, has some incredible compression, giving "CD-quality" audio at around a megabyte per minute. Lossless formats can easily need 30MB a minute, and that's at the low end. Where do you think Apple (or anyone) is going to get the money to increase their bandwidth by 30? How many consumers will sit through a 70MB download, compared to a 3MB one?
CDs have better quality, do not have DRM*, comes with liner notes, and is itself a physical backup
I'll give you that CDs have prettier packaging, but the rest isn't really true. Whether or not CDs have "better" quality depends on what service you use. The CD format in and of itself is pretty low quality compared to some other digital formats available.
online music needs to be much cheaper to make up for these shortcomings
$1 a song may seem pricey, up until the fact that you consider the average $10-$15 CD has around ten songs on it - meaning you pay $1 (or more) for each song on the CD anyway.
the only benefit it has is immediate delivery
Nope. With iTunes and other services, you can listen to clips (or on Yahoo, you can "rent" as many songs as you want and listen to them in their entirety) before you buy the full song. Or - here's the biggest benefit - if you don't like the entire CD and only want a few of the songs on it, you end up paying $15 for your one song and the privilege of owning garbage. With online services, you buy only the songs you want and don't get railroaded into paying extra for the rest of the trash on the disc.
"You are essentially paying for a product and receiving nothing in return. The files don't even fully belong to you (DRM) and the quality on the ITMS sucks compared to other sources."
Although I haven't used the "other sources," the iTunes music is at least passable. No music "fully belongs to you" or even "belongs to you." The artists own their music, grants rights to the record industry to publish it, and you, in turn, buy a license to listen to one (1) copy of the music for personal, non-profit use. DRM simply enforces the licensing.
Oh, and by the way, you can burn any of the songs you buy in iTunes to a CD, and then rip them again to remove the DRM. If you rip to a lossless/high-quality MP3 format, the quality degredation is negligible - so it's really a moot point anyway.
"To the music industry, and the RIAA in particular, the internet envisions a future [...] with the promise of unlimited profit"
Jinkies. The internet makes publishing music (or almost anything) cheaper than the traditional method of putting a CD in a store. As bandwidth and computing costs continue to fall, this will become even cheaper, putting online publishing into the grasp of more and more people. Given time, this Radiant Future will inevitably lead to competition with the oligopoly that is the RIAA. If they push copy protection to the extremes you suggest, someone will realize the millions that a non-DRM alternative would provide - and that alternative is getting cheaper to create with every passing day.
[C]opyrights are not about artists, writers, developers, incentive, or "property", or even profit, they are only about control
I would've believed any of those, minus "control." I sincerely doubt the idea that an entire industry is out for enslaving people to iTunes instead of $money. The industry's interest in "control" is limited to how it can increase their profits - the one and only legitimate goal of any business.
The truth is that copyrights, patents, and other forms of intellectual property protection, when properly implemented, can be great incentives for innovation. The debate should be on whether or not these artificial burdens on the consumer are worth the extra innovation of the producer.
Nope. Mass is independent of all other variables - even gravity, which is why "mass" is not the same as "weight." So, no, mass does not depend on anything other than the quantity of matter in an object, which shouldn't really be changing (excepting your mosquitos.
Perhaps you meant a car's velocity depends on it's mass? I dunno, both statements are kinda weird.
Otherwise they might end up on welfare and we will have to share the burden of assisting them through taxes.
Y'see, in India, they have no such thing as "welfare." They have the choice between starvation and lab rat. Neither is a dignified option, although I would at least give them the dignity of the choice.
One of Newton's laws is that Force = Mass * Acceleration. Rearrange this a bit and you get acceleration = force / mass. Decrease the weight/mass of the bullet and it will travel/accelerate faster. Hence, a lighter bullet could actually be good.
(Yes, mass is not the same as weight - weight is a function of mass and gravity. However, they are pretty much interchangeable with a constant gravity, like on Earth where I presume the bullets would be fired.)
True, except that "inertia" is the tendency for an object to resist a change in its motion and is practically one-in-the-same with mass, something that (other than scraping part of your car off) never changes.
Another key is how, exactly, the plates are pressed. In the article, they look like little miniramps which your car must "climb" (at least a little bit) before they'll be fully depressed. Anyone with a working knowledge of triangles will know that the distance the car will have to travel "over" the ramp will be greater than on a flat road and hence, you'd have traveled a greater linear distance over these things to reach the same point on a normal road.
Something interesting - if they made a "road" instead of a "ramp" of these things, would your odometer read ~120 miles after a trip to another city 100 miles away?
Again, a good point. But remember - a lot (?) of people reading militant Communist propaganda are millitant communists, and hence the concern of the government.
Actually, your friend can give you his copy of 2000 if he upgraded to XP. He'd have to completely uninstall it, and would have to destroy any "backup copies." Licenses are property; and unless they explicitly say that they're non-transferable (which is rare) you can, indeed, transfer them. For those licenses you can't, I'll betcha a shiny new nickel that any charges won't hold up in court if you were charged for giving your copy of Windows 2000 to a friend.
And no, technically Microsoft could not shut down every site that published a vulnerability. In fact, Microsoft can't even go after them for libel, nor can they revoke their licenses. And a benefit of closed source is that you don't have to worry about a billion different users releasing billions of different patches, some of them conflicting, too many of them poorly coded.
As for personal tinkering, there's nothing stopping anyone. No company would waste time suing someone who disassembles Photoshop for the fun of it, if the fun never left his home PC. (On a side note, Microsoft makes.NET applications very easy to disassemble for fun - Visual Studio comes with Microsoft Intermediate Language Disassembler (IL DASM).) If they want to churn a profit after years of development, they can't simply release the source, though - there'd be no incentive to buy it.
Modding is one area where tinkering does and IS encouraged, despite the fact that almost no games release their source code. I'm not sure if the Half Life source was ever released (can anyone tell me?) but Counter Strike and Day of Defeat are perfect examples of this. The "Matrix" mods for Max Payne were also a hoot. The tinkerer still has his room - although why you would want to mess with another's creation when you could be writing your own is beyond me.
And, you don't need a lawyer. You just can't share your "backup copies" on the internet. Practically every EULA is the same - you can't disassemble it (the program), use it in a system that runs a nuclear reactor, or make a metric gajillion of "backup copies" online to share with "friends." If you really want to be legit, read what you're agreeing to.
As for changing the EULA, most that I've read (and it's been a few) have an option that you can contact the publishing company directly to ask for a refund if you disagree with the EULA. I'll leave how well these "agreements" actually hold up in court to the lawyers.
If you can write a game in C++, it'll run on a GBA SP ($80).
If you can write a game in C++, it'll work on ANYTHING.:D In fact, I've written games for my IBM Personal System 2 in C++ when I was messing around with learning a little bit of machine language (finding a real-mode compiler for an 80286 was hard, tho) and the operating system for the TI-83/84+ line of graphing calcualtors is written in C. On the other hand, programs can be written very quickly and tidily with MFC or.NET in C++, with nice OO features, too.
As you said, Java programs can only be run on platforms for which a Virtual Machine is written; and there are few of those. For example, I challenge you to write a VM for the graphing calculator.
Therefore I'll always take the "bloated" language that helps me write better code over the "streamlined" one (i.e. C++) that encourages people to write obfuscated crap.
Oy! I was going to forgive you for your idea that the end-user should suffer your incompetence for a faster rig, but C++ does NOT encourage people to write "obfuscated crap." In fact, with.NET and MFC, C++ programs are more object-oriented than Java and I'll argue that point with anyone who draws breath in its opposition. For those who wish it, C++ simply gives greater power. Bad code and bad coders exist in both languages; C++ simply gives more tools to those who wish to use them.
The language that ACTUALLY encourages "obfuscated code" is Java with its garbage collection. Although the effectiveness of garbage collection depends on the program and the collection scheme, etc., etc., it allows programmers to get away with HORRIBLE management of memory, nay, ENCOURAGES it. It's breeding an entire generation of bad programmers who view their sloppy code as not their fault, but the user's for both not sharing their ideology and not having the proper hardware to use their bloatware.
I suffer and learn languages other than C++ because they, too, are useful. But C++ is my favorite for a reason - it's gives both ultra-low level (you can whip out __asm{} blocks in the middle of your source, even in.NET) and ultra-high-level (multiple inheritences, pure virtual classes, and templates) support - all in one fast, easy to use box.
Right here is about where I'd take my second breath, but I'll yield my soapbox.:D There's a reason why my name is "Zealot" and my sig is a Visual C++ 2005 compiler error.
Of course Microsoft wants to appear as the Knight in Shining Armour who saved us from the Evil Sony.
No, it doesn't. Sony broke Microsoft's web browser. Microsoft is responsible for fixing their web browser. Therefore, they did. And "armor" doesn't have a "u" in it.:-D
Punctuation goes inside the quotation block. I.e., you should have "I'm amazed that you can use words like 'oligopoly,' but can't spell simple words like 'concert.'"
If attacking the substance fails, attack the grammar.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm trying to edit something on a windows system right now and it crashes four to five times an hour
Ever consider it's not Windows' fault? I dual boot Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 R2. Granted, I used to get occaisional crashes playing games in XP - until I disabled the Realtek integrated sound chip and got an Audigy.
The only crashes I ever get are when I'm using beta nVidia graphics drivers, or when I make a stupid programming mistake, like off-by-one errors or checking pointers. The latter happens rarely, due to my incredible programming skill :D, and is caught by my IDE and never affects system stability. All in all, when I have programming classes, call it less than 4 crashes a month.
I'm still trying to find out what people do to their poor machines in order to make them so horribly unstable, or what people do to their e-mail accounts to get so much spam. (I've had a free netscape account since I was 11 - never any spam.) Maybe it's not Windows?
Oh, wait, this is Slashdot.
I've had my current, free netscape address (look above) ever since I was 11 - call it about 5 years. (The mathematically inclined amongst you may be able to guess my age now!) Although a Hotmail account I held briefly got the occaisional spam, I actually never got spammed on my netscape. For a bit over a year now, I've had a secondary college address, which has also received no spam in the year it's been active.
I must have existed outside the bell curve since my pre-teens.
I hope it was the exploding grapes in a microwave that got modded "Informative" and not the South Park reference. :D
The Chewbacca Defense
(That link is pretty damned cool, by the way.)
The user doesn't have to read the readme, they're entitled to assume it will not contain anything they need to know about unless their attention is drawn to it.
Usually I try not to be rude, but this is the most ignorant comment I have heard in a long time - even on Slashdot. Do you assume that you never need to learn or know anything, because if it was important enough, someone would learn it for you? Do you not read contracts - be they with a bank, landlord, or other party - because if there was something "important" in a document that controls your future, someone would read it and explain it to you? Do you assume that no one on the face of this earth is the least bit malicious? This is dangerous - for your sake, stop thinking that way.
Intelligent Design -- that idea that life was created by a Really Smart Thing, as opposed to life just randomly showing up -- is supporting by things being very complex, not by things being unknown.
True. The "things being unknown" part, however, is used not to prove Intelligent Design, but to disprove Evolution.
Until its easy (not merely 'possible') to run limited accounts & control permissions, we're going to see major problems.
The use of limited accounts only goes so far. It will prevent a virus from doing damage to some areas of the machine; it will not prevent the creation of "zombie" DDOS networks, infection by spyware, or OS exploits. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the WMF exploit will work regardless of whether or not you're running with full or nil permissions.
"I wonder if the booming number of sales will have an impact on the prices, they could either lower the prices to encourage sales or increase prices to try to increase their profits... Or keep the prices the same... Hopefully it will be the former."
Supply and demand. Greater demand, in the short term, tends to drive the price of something up - especially the prices of traditional, physical goods that can "run out" and become scarce.
With higher prices come greater profits - and more people wanting a slice of the pie. These people start producing the good in question, increasing supply.
This increase in supply means the good is no longer scarce, and will drive the price back down again. This cycle continues until an equilibrium price is reached.
Or, at least, with classical economics. With digital music, there's no scarcity, per se - it's not like iTunes only has 50 copies of Nickelback's "Photograph" and 20 of Disturbed's "Stricken." It's equally hard to increase supply of something with a near infinite supply and the demand for music tends to be very inelastic - charge over $1.00 per song and people will go to iTunes. Charge much under $1.00, and you're bankrupting yourself on licensing, merchant, and bandwidth fees.
So... the economics of digital music are rather interesting, without even considering the effects of piracy. I'll leave that discussion to ill-informed, rabid, music-"sharing"-is-good people, because their explanations are a lot more entertaining than "piracy lowers demand somewhat."
" [...]digital music stores all provide their wares in lossy formats."
Generally because the difference between a good, lossy format and a lossless format is negligible - think the difference between bitmaps and jpegs. This is especially true with iTunes - the service is designed for iPods, which the majority of people listen t on headphones anyway.
Also consider bandwidth - the one and only cost other than licensing and merchant fees an online music store faces. The format used by Apple's iTunes, for example, has some incredible compression, giving "CD-quality" audio at around a megabyte per minute. Lossless formats can easily need 30MB a minute, and that's at the low end. Where do you think Apple (or anyone) is going to get the money to increase their bandwidth by 30? How many consumers will sit through a 70MB download, compared to a 3MB one?
CDs have better quality, do not have DRM*, comes with liner notes, and is itself a physical backup
I'll give you that CDs have prettier packaging, but the rest isn't really true. Whether or not CDs have "better" quality depends on what service you use. The CD format in and of itself is pretty low quality compared to some other digital formats available.
online music needs to be much cheaper to make up for these shortcomings
$1 a song may seem pricey, up until the fact that you consider the average $10-$15 CD has around ten songs on it - meaning you pay $1 (or more) for each song on the CD anyway.
the only benefit it has is immediate delivery
Nope. With iTunes and other services, you can listen to clips (or on Yahoo, you can "rent" as many songs as you want and listen to them in their entirety) before you buy the full song. Or - here's the biggest benefit - if you don't like the entire CD and only want a few of the songs on it, you end up paying $15 for your one song and the privilege of owning garbage. With online services, you buy only the songs you want and don't get railroaded into paying extra for the rest of the trash on the disc.
"You are essentially paying for a product and receiving nothing in return. The files don't even fully belong to you (DRM) and the quality on the ITMS sucks compared to other sources."
Although I haven't used the "other sources," the iTunes music is at least passable. No music "fully belongs to you" or even "belongs to you." The artists own their music, grants rights to the record industry to publish it, and you, in turn, buy a license to listen to one (1) copy of the music for personal, non-profit use. DRM simply enforces the licensing.
Oh, and by the way, you can burn any of the songs you buy in iTunes to a CD, and then rip them again to remove the DRM. If you rip to a lossless/high-quality MP3 format, the quality degredation is negligible - so it's really a moot point anyway.
"To the music industry, and the RIAA in particular, the internet envisions a future [...] with the promise of unlimited profit"
Jinkies. The internet makes publishing music (or almost anything) cheaper than the traditional method of putting a CD in a store. As bandwidth and computing costs continue to fall, this will become even cheaper, putting online publishing into the grasp of more and more people. Given time, this Radiant Future will inevitably lead to competition with the oligopoly that is the RIAA. If they push copy protection to the extremes you suggest, someone will realize the millions that a non-DRM alternative would provide - and that alternative is getting cheaper to create with every passing day.
[C]opyrights are not about artists, writers, developers, incentive, or "property", or even profit, they are only about control
I would've believed any of those, minus "control." I sincerely doubt the idea that an entire industry is out for enslaving people to iTunes instead of $money. The industry's interest in "control" is limited to how it can increase their profits - the one and only legitimate goal of any business.
The truth is that copyrights, patents, and other forms of intellectual property protection, when properly implemented, can be great incentives for innovation. The debate should be on whether or not these artificial burdens on the consumer are worth the extra innovation of the producer.
Of course, full functionality would be enabled after the free hotfix:p>
[UP][UP][DOWN][DOWN][LEFT][RIGHT][LEFT][RIGHT][B][ A][START]
The only buttons you really need are as follows:
[UP] [UP] [LEFT] [RIGHT] [LEFT] [RIGHT] [B] [A] [START]
Pair the 30 lives with a little context-sensitive programming, and you have your remote.
First, a car's mass depends on its velocity.
Nope. Mass is independent of all other variables - even gravity, which is why "mass" is not the same as "weight." So, no, mass does not depend on anything other than the quantity of matter in an object, which shouldn't really be changing (excepting your mosquitos.
Perhaps you meant a car's velocity depends on it's mass? I dunno, both statements are kinda weird.
Good point - vertical distance != horizontal distance. Kinda depressing that I missed that.... >.<
Otherwise they might end up on welfare and we will have to share the burden of assisting them through taxes.
Y'see, in India, they have no such thing as "welfare." They have the choice between starvation and lab rat. Neither is a dignified option, although I would at least give them the dignity of the choice.
One of Newton's laws is that Force = Mass * Acceleration. Rearrange this a bit and you get acceleration = force / mass. Decrease the weight/mass of the bullet and it will travel/accelerate faster. Hence, a lighter bullet could actually be good.
(Yes, mass is not the same as weight - weight is a function of mass and gravity. However, they are pretty much interchangeable with a constant gravity, like on Earth where I presume the bullets would be fired.)
True, except that "inertia" is the tendency for an object to resist a change in its motion and is practically one-in-the-same with mass, something that (other than scraping part of your car off) never changes.
Another key is how, exactly, the plates are pressed. In the article, they look like little miniramps which your car must "climb" (at least a little bit) before they'll be fully depressed. Anyone with a working knowledge of triangles will know that the distance the car will have to travel "over" the ramp will be greater than on a flat road and hence, you'd have traveled a greater linear distance over these things to reach the same point on a normal road.
Something interesting - if they made a "road" instead of a "ramp" of these things, would your odometer read ~120 miles after a trip to another city 100 miles away?
Again, a good point. But remember - a lot (?) of people reading militant Communist propaganda are millitant communists, and hence the concern of the government.
According to Wikipedia, the record amount of time one person has stayed awake is 12 days. 20 Would've been a most impressive accomplishment.
Actually, your friend can give you his copy of 2000 if he upgraded to XP. He'd have to completely uninstall it, and would have to destroy any "backup copies." Licenses are property; and unless they explicitly say that they're non-transferable (which is rare) you can, indeed, transfer them. For those licenses you can't, I'll betcha a shiny new nickel that any charges won't hold up in court if you were charged for giving your copy of Windows 2000 to a friend.
And no, technically Microsoft could not shut down every site that published a vulnerability. In fact, Microsoft can't even go after them for libel, nor can they revoke their licenses. And a benefit of closed source is that you don't have to worry about a billion different users releasing billions of different patches, some of them conflicting, too many of them poorly coded.
As for personal tinkering, there's nothing stopping anyone. No company would waste time suing someone who disassembles Photoshop for the fun of it, if the fun never left his home PC. (On a side note, Microsoft makes .NET applications very easy to disassemble for fun - Visual Studio comes with Microsoft Intermediate Language Disassembler (IL DASM).) If they want to churn a profit after years of development, they can't simply release the source, though - there'd be no incentive to buy it.
Modding is one area where tinkering does and IS encouraged, despite the fact that almost no games release their source code. I'm not sure if the Half Life source was ever released (can anyone tell me?) but Counter Strike and Day of Defeat are perfect examples of this. The "Matrix" mods for Max Payne were also a hoot. The tinkerer still has his room - although why you would want to mess with another's creation when you could be writing your own is beyond me.
And, you don't need a lawyer. You just can't share your "backup copies" on the internet. Practically every EULA is the same - you can't disassemble it (the program), use it in a system that runs a nuclear reactor, or make a metric gajillion of "backup copies" online to share with "friends." If you really want to be legit, read what you're agreeing to.
As for changing the EULA, most that I've read (and it's been a few) have an option that you can contact the publishing company directly to ask for a refund if you disagree with the EULA. I'll leave how well these "agreements" actually hold up in court to the lawyers.
If you can write a game in C++, it'll run on a GBA SP ($80).
If you can write a game in C++, it'll work on ANYTHING. :D In fact, I've written games for my IBM Personal System 2 in C++ when I was messing around with learning a little bit of machine language (finding a real-mode compiler for an 80286 was hard, tho) and the operating system for the TI-83/84+ line of graphing calcualtors is written in C. On the other hand, programs can be written very quickly and tidily with MFC or .NET in C++, with nice OO features, too.
As you said, Java programs can only be run on platforms for which a Virtual Machine is written; and there are few of those. For example, I challenge you to write a VM for the graphing calculator.
Therefore I'll always take the "bloated" language that helps me write better code over the "streamlined" one (i.e. C++) that encourages people to write obfuscated crap.
Oy! I was going to forgive you for your idea that the end-user should suffer your incompetence for a faster rig, but C++ does NOT encourage people to write "obfuscated crap." In fact, with .NET and MFC, C++ programs are more object-oriented than Java and I'll argue that point with anyone who draws breath in its opposition. For those who wish it, C++ simply gives greater power. Bad code and bad coders exist in both languages; C++ simply gives more tools to those who wish to use them.
The language that ACTUALLY encourages "obfuscated code" is Java with its garbage collection. Although the effectiveness of garbage collection depends on the program and the collection scheme, etc., etc., it allows programmers to get away with HORRIBLE management of memory, nay, ENCOURAGES it. It's breeding an entire generation of bad programmers who view their sloppy code as not their fault, but the user's for both not sharing their ideology and not having the proper hardware to use their bloatware.
I suffer and learn languages other than C++ because they, too, are useful. But C++ is my favorite for a reason - it's gives both ultra-low level (you can whip out __asm{} blocks in the middle of your source, even in .NET) and ultra-high-level (multiple inheritences, pure virtual classes, and templates) support - all in one fast, easy to use box.
Right here is about where I'd take my second breath, but I'll yield my soapbox. :D There's a reason why my name is "Zealot" and my sig is a Visual C++ 2005 compiler error.
Of course Microsoft wants to appear as the Knight in Shining Armour who saved us from the Evil Sony.
No, it doesn't. Sony broke Microsoft's web browser. Microsoft is responsible for fixing their web browser. Therefore, they did. And "armor" doesn't have a "u" in it. :-D
Punctuation goes inside the quotation block. I.e., you should have "I'm amazed that you can use words like 'oligopoly,' but can't spell simple words like 'concert.'"
If attacking the substance fails, attack the grammar.