Not so much, no. USB2 is way more common than Firewire on modern motherboards. In fact, if you can find a new motherboard without USB2, you're doing well.
It's trivial to find a motherboard without firewire. I know, I've just been choosing a motherboard. I was looking for a microATX board, with firewire - I had some other criteria, but those two are sufficient to cut the choices right down...well, actually it's the Firewire criterion that does that. There seem to be about 4 such boards on the market (there are about 300 mATX boards currently available in total, according to Intel's motherboard search tool). Things are a bit better if you go for an ATX board.
It really is quite uncommon for motherboards to have integrated firewire.
My Dad used to work in the British Air Force, where some officers would routinely refer to "Standard SOP Operating Procedures".
Go on, guess what SOP stands for:)
(And then there was the Squadron Leader who demonstrated how to jump out of a troop carrier when the safety harness cable wasn't attached, but I digress...)
There was an unhappy ATM machine near where I live that (for a period of a few weeks) every day by about 10pm would be displaying a "Visual C++ runtime error!" windows dialog:)
Well, actually, I was sort of agreeing with your point, in that we can probably take the level of education out of the equation when it comes to what the common characteristics are of people who become terrorists.
At least, that certainly fits with my general experience that well-educated people can be as obnoxious and insensitive as anyone else.
Yeah, I just went there to see what he had to say on the subject, and I get a big fucking spoiler. I'm not an avid HP fan (still haven't even read the previous one yet) but I will read them sometime, and I'd appreciate RMS not acting like an annoying geek shouting out the endings of films and books.
But apparently it's ok, because he has no interest in Harry Potter. Maybe other people will start to use that argument as to why they don't listen to him.
What a goddamn muppet.
(And before you get all "but no HP fans would go to stallman.org" on me, the blog entry is entitled Don't Buy Harry Potter Books - so if they're all such rock hard geeks would never even think of buying HP books, wtf is the point of this entry?)
And, of course, no smart western caucasians with PhD's would ever do anything like that.
I know you didn't explicitly say that but the original (moderated off the face of the earth) comment was propogating the "Looks Muslim, probably a terrorist" rubbish.
From the FTA:
The situation illustrates "another side" of Pakistan, said Anand Yang, director of the University of Washington's Jackson School of International Studies. "That's another reason to celebrate someone like her."
The only way to stop norton from rebooting was to open Notepad and write some txt. Then it would goto shut down and you click cancel and it would stop. (yeah silly hack but it worked).
That doesn't work with Windows Update shutdowns (at least on SP2). It just shuts Windows down. No WM_QUERYENDSESSION messages or any of that touchy-feely caring about the user crap, it just shuts down, and you will lose data if you've not saved. I know, I've done the same notepad trick and watched XP reboot without asking me if I want to save stuff first.
A stroke of fucking genius on Microsoft's part, imho - what better way to convince people to disable auto-updates?
All the traditional things that are restricted to root, like running services on ports 1024 or accessing another user's files, are pretty much irrelevant in the world of the single-user desktop.
There's also stuff like firewalls and anti-virus software. If you're always running as 'root', then a trojan can kill those processes off and replace them with something else. A lot harder to do if you yourself are not allowed to kill your AV process for instance.
And if you're running an outgoing firewall (which can't be killed/disabled by a regular user) then it's also a lot harder to to do DDOS attacks, send out credit card details, etc.
This is going to be a real problem for Mac software, because most of it isn't frame limited, and isn't designed to run this fast. You'll be typing a sentence in a word processor, and before you know it, the cursor will have zoomed off and crashed into the right hand edge of the window.
It's not exactly new. Years ago, Dr Solomon's had a trainset on their boardroom table that you could control from their website.
It was part of their whole 'trains' theme, which you'll remember if you went to any computer shows around that time.
The reason for the trains, btw, was because their product was 'multi-platform'. I believe nobody ever got that link without it being explained to them.
...that the sort of people who get upset about surveys like this are exactly the same people who want you to work evenings and weekends without compensation/overtime?
My favourite of recent times was having worked 5 weekends in a row or something, I wanted to work from home one day because I was getting a new PC delivered (I had no holiday allowance left). You wouldn't believe the excuses that came out as to why that couldn't happen.
I keep looking at wxWidgets every now and again, but I can never shake off the feeling that I will just be annoyed by it.
This is quite possibly because I've been writing my own abstracted GUI library over the past few years - as both a learning exercise and to produce a useful library, so I admit that I'm biased.
To take an example - for UI/GDI stuff, MFC is just a very thin wrapper over most Win32 objects/calls. It basically takes care of object destruction and has a few (crap) convenience functions, but that's it.
One of my pet hates is that the standard listbox control works differently to the 'new' listview control (introduced in Win95). Again, in MFC, the APIs are different. Another pet hate is that to clear a listbox of all items, clear a listview of all items, or clear a combobox list of all items is like 3 different calls, ClearContents(), DeleteAll(), or whatever.
In my own GUI library, you instantiate the same listbox class and attach it to the control in a dialog, and it automagically handles the rest. You use the same API to manage the two types of list control - this is as it should be, imho.
When I checked wxWindows a while back, it failed to even manage this for unifying the API of two basically similar objects. They just copied the Win32 function names. This kind of thing doesn't inspire confidence that the higher level stuff isn't of a similar quality.
Another pain about list controls in Windows is that for one of them (forget which - I have a library to do all this shit for me now), it's non-trivial to find which is the selected item in the list (or some similar operation that should be easy). By non-trivial, I mean it's more than one function call. Again, my library abstracts away stuff like that, but I checked wxWindows and it was still just copying the Win32 interface, even for something as obviously broken as that. I think there was even a note in the comments as to how dumb this was.
I guess my point is: if the list control class in a GUI library isn't even nice to use, I don't want to know about the rest of it.
Both Java and C++ are fundamentally object-oriented languages, so what, if I may ask, is wrong with forcing you to use OO design?
C++ supports object-oriented programming, but it is intended to be agnostic in terms of OO, procedural, generic programming, etc. It's up to the user how they use these features.
Tell Stepanov that C++ should only be used for OO, and see how far you get...
STL, at least for me, represents the only way programming is possible. It is, indeed, quite different from C++ programming as it was presented and still is presented in most textbooks.
But then, he is a bit of a zealot, so add salt as required:
STL is not object oriented. I think that object orientedness is almost as much of a hoax as Artificial Intelligence. I have yet to see an interesting piece of code that comes from these OO people.
Also, XP doesn't actually leave the processes running when switched out. I think it dumps the contents of the user-space memory to disk, in effect "freezing" the user's session in suspended animation. Once the user switches back in, it's like nothing changed. At least that's how I understand it. If someone has specifics, please feel free to correct / elaborate on my comments.
I think you're a bit mixed up there. XP doesn't stop the processes running (proved by a trivial test I just did). It just stops giving them input, etc. If they're not used for a while, they'll get swapped out in the normal course of Windows' paging algorithms, but the processes aren't stopped.
And I get heat for moaning about Cmd-Tab behaviour on Jaguar!:-)
So yeah, Microsoft crossed the finish line first, but like sex, it's not about who gets there first. It's about how good it is when you do get there.
I innovated. You finished first. He made it usable.
(unless it's been fixed in later versions of OS X)
I was simply clarifying what I thought the screwed-upness of it was. As I don't have 10.3 (got fed up of an annual OS tax for a machine I don't use very often) I figured someone would politely tell me if that was one of the things that got fixed in 10.3. Well, I got that half right, I guess.
And as I said:
in a stroke of genius they screwed up that feature when they copied it
I believe that statement to be true, regardless of whether they fixed it later. (c.f. the usual comments about MS copying Apple but screwing it up)
Slashdot Mirror
Being told by a website that you've randomly won half a million dollars would fall under that category, I think.
That may just be too clever for you to get moderated up :-)
Not so much, no. USB2 is way more common than Firewire on modern motherboards. In fact, if you can find a new motherboard without USB2, you're doing well.
It's trivial to find a motherboard without firewire. I know, I've just been choosing a motherboard. I was looking for a microATX board, with firewire - I had some other criteria, but those two are sufficient to cut the choices right down...well, actually it's the Firewire criterion that does that. There seem to be about 4 such boards on the market (there are about 300 mATX boards currently available in total, according to Intel's motherboard search tool). Things are a bit better if you go for an ATX board.
It really is quite uncommon for motherboards to have integrated firewire.
How do you not fall down more?
My Dad used to work in the British Air Force, where some officers would routinely refer to "Standard SOP Operating Procedures".
:)
Go on, guess what SOP stands for
(And then there was the Squadron Leader who demonstrated how to jump out of a troop carrier when the safety harness cable wasn't attached, but I digress...)
There was an unhappy ATM machine near where I live that (for a period of a few weeks) every day by about 10pm would be displaying a "Visual C++ runtime error!" windows dialog :)
Well, actually, I was sort of agreeing with your point, in that we can probably take the level of education out of the equation when it comes to what the common characteristics are of people who become terrorists.
At least, that certainly fits with my general experience that well-educated people can be as obnoxious and insensitive as anyone else.
But apparently it's ok, because he has no interest in Harry Potter. Maybe other people will start to use that argument as to why they don't listen to him.
What a goddamn muppet.
(And before you get all "but no HP fans would go to stallman.org" on me, the blog entry is entitled Don't Buy Harry Potter Books - so if they're all such rock hard geeks would never even think of buying HP books, wtf is the point of this entry?)
I know you didn't explicitly say that but the original (moderated off the face of the earth) comment was propogating the "Looks Muslim, probably a terrorist" rubbish.
From the FTA:
Well, not for some people, I guess.
Ahem.
That doesn't work with Windows Update shutdowns (at least on SP2). It just shuts Windows down. No WM_QUERYENDSESSION messages or any of that touchy-feely caring about the user crap, it just shuts down, and you will lose data if you've not saved. I know, I've done the same notepad trick and watched XP reboot without asking me if I want to save stuff first.
A stroke of fucking genius on Microsoft's part, imho - what better way to convince people to disable auto-updates?
There's also stuff like firewalls and anti-virus software. If you're always running as 'root', then a trojan can kill those processes off and replace them with something else. A lot harder to do if you yourself are not allowed to kill your AV process for instance.
And if you're running an outgoing firewall (which can't be killed/disabled by a regular user) then it's also a lot harder to to do DDOS attacks, send out credit card details, etc.
This is going to be a real problem for Mac software, because most of it isn't frame limited, and isn't designed to run this fast. You'll be typing a sentence in a word processor, and before you know it, the cursor will have zoomed off and crashed into the right hand edge of the window.
Not good.
"It's easy to criticise, Homer."
"Fun, too!"
It's not exactly new. Years ago, Dr Solomon's had a trainset on their boardroom table that you could control from their website.
It was part of their whole 'trains' theme, which you'll remember if you went to any computer shows around that time.
The reason for the trains, btw, was because their product was 'multi-platform'. I believe nobody ever got that link without it being explained to them.
...that the sort of people who get upset about surveys like this are exactly the same people who want you to work evenings and weekends without compensation/overtime?
My favourite of recent times was having worked 5 weekends in a row or something, I wanted to work from home one day because I was getting a new PC delivered (I had no holiday allowance left). You wouldn't believe the excuses that came out as to why that couldn't happen.
("Well, what if everyone wanted to do that?")
Of course, the thing to do is take advantage of all of this :-)
Maybe Rob's on vacation, and he's just running "Best of Taco"? :)
I keep looking at wxWidgets every now and again, but I can never shake off the feeling that I will just be annoyed by it.
This is quite possibly because I've been writing my own abstracted GUI library over the past few years - as both a learning exercise and to produce a useful library, so I admit that I'm biased.
To take an example - for UI/GDI stuff, MFC is just a very thin wrapper over most Win32 objects/calls. It basically takes care of object destruction and has a few (crap) convenience functions, but that's it.
One of my pet hates is that the standard listbox control works differently to the 'new' listview control (introduced in Win95). Again, in MFC, the APIs are different. Another pet hate is that to clear a listbox of all items, clear a listview of all items, or clear a combobox list of all items is like 3 different calls, ClearContents(), DeleteAll(), or whatever.
In my own GUI library, you instantiate the same listbox class and attach it to the control in a dialog, and it automagically handles the rest. You use the same API to manage the two types of list control - this is as it should be, imho.
When I checked wxWindows a while back, it failed to even manage this for unifying the API of two basically similar objects. They just copied the Win32 function names. This kind of thing doesn't inspire confidence that the higher level stuff isn't of a similar quality.
Another pain about list controls in Windows is that for one of them (forget which - I have a library to do all this shit for me now), it's non-trivial to find which is the selected item in the list (or some similar operation that should be easy). By non-trivial, I mean it's more than one function call. Again, my library abstracts away stuff like that, but I checked wxWindows and it was still just copying the Win32 interface, even for something as obviously broken as that. I think there was even a note in the comments as to how dumb this was.
I guess my point is: if the list control class in a GUI library isn't even nice to use, I don't want to know about the rest of it.
Game programmers have free time? News to me! :)
C++ supports object-oriented programming, but it is intended to be agnostic in terms of OO, procedural, generic programming, etc. It's up to the user how they use these features.
Tell Stepanov that C++ should only be used for OO, and see how far you get...
But then, he is a bit of a zealot, so add salt as required:
Seconded. Then again, I'm British, and was introduced to Strunk & White by a Canadian :)
As for learning your craft, reminds me of that joke:
A couple of my favourites:
"Could you join me for a brief scuba in my thinktank?"
"Can we pool our brainspaces in a centre of excellence?"
More here
I think you're a bit mixed up there. XP doesn't stop the processes running (proved by a trivial test I just did). It just stops giving them input, etc. If they're not used for a while, they'll get swapped out in the normal course of Windows' paging algorithms, but the processes aren't stopped.
And I get heat for moaning about Cmd-Tab behaviour on Jaguar! :-)
I innovated. You finished first. He made it usable.
etc.
I was simply clarifying what I thought the screwed-upness of it was. As I don't have 10.3 (got fed up of an annual OS tax for a machine I don't use very often) I figured someone would politely tell me if that was one of the things that got fixed in 10.3. Well, I got that half right, I guess.
And as I said:
I believe that statement to be true, regardless of whether they fixed it later. (c.f. the usual comments about MS copying Apple but screwing it up)