Might it be a good analogy to say they are buying the engine from Honda (an engine that Honda sells only with an agreement that it goes into Honda bodies) and placing it in some new, cheap car of their own design?
With this analogy, it seems a little less obvious what the answer is, but you certainly haven't seen any cases of a car manufacturer doing this (at least I don't think you have).
This no-brand company selling some POS car that they advertise has a "100% honda engine", that seems like it might hurt Honda's brand a little, but not much.
Honestly it seems legit no matter how you look at it--Apple's just being butt-hurt because they have always been able to charge whatever they want for their hardware without fear of competition.
This is just to reduce the cases where gMail is being used to send spam (that's what their cpacha tries to do). It in no way addresses mail sent from your office.
I'm just saying that they really need a small crew doing nothing but coming up with creative solutions to adapt to this problem. A group that takes little steps that identify patterns and try to come up with both quick patch and long-term solutions.
On gMail some simple rules should suffice. Don't allow a brand-new account to send out more than a few (20?) emails a day. Make sure that most of the email varies. Make sure the account gets and reads email as well as sends it, and that the email is accessed.
The trick is, you keep rotating these measures and don't tell anyone just what they are. You don't automatically disable anyone who breaks the rules, you just hold on to any large number of similar messages until a human reviews them--possibly through some mechanism similar to the "picture matching game" where multiple people identify a message as spam.
If it's determined to be spam, never tell them you caught on, just stop email from that account from being sent, silently. Log the ip addresses and use them to help you identify other accounts from the same computer if possible.
You could also use the ip addresses to notify people that they are a spambot next time that IP address is used to look up something on any google service.
Wow, that's a broad action with a lot of chances for failure, but I bet it could be refined enough to work--and worst case failure isn't bad at all--just one time when you go to search google you get a warning page back instead of your search results.
Really this just takes some dedicated effort and creative thinking by a strong, creative engineer with some power within google (I know there are quite a few of those)
There is absolutely no point in bidding before the last 5 seconds of any auction. This makes it really irritating.
I'd really like to see them say "Bidding will continue until at least (some time) plus up to 24 hours (randomly set).
Paying them as much as they want is also kind of silly--craig's list gives you the ability to meet the person you are buying from and examine the product. You can also avoid shipping.
Ever notice how a bunch of stuff on ebay is $0.02 + $5.00 shipping?? Honestly that's got to be a scam--someone is getting a cut of that shipping cost. Another nice policy would be that a buyer always has the option to arrange all shipping himself--(For instance: Just put it in an envelope and drop it in the mailbox, I'll take the responsibility, or "I'll have UPS show up at your door" or "I'll pick it up myself").
I've seen quite a few embedded systems, and in general most people can't code.
A few can, and a while ago, programming was hard enough that most code was written by one of these few, but now that Java, VB and C# are so wide spread, companies are able to hire bunches of people with marginal programming abilities and get something that looks like it kind of works.
It's easier to imagine if you consider how many people are master artists or musicians and how many people can play an instrument.
In programming there are very similar ratios, but since most people are utterly incapable of differentiating which code is great art and which is someone playing an instrument, they end up hiring the session players (which tend to be much cheaper) every time.
End result? Routers need rebooting every week or so.
I ask this every time I see a post like yours. I virtually never get a reply...
Can you tell me what motivates you to feel so strongly about nuclear energy?
I understand the arguments and I'm somewhat torn myself, but the potential savings are pretty minimal. Even if it did save bunches of money, the power companies wouldn't charge you less.
And the potential for really really high costs exists (however minor you might feel it is, it's probably a bigger chance than winning the lottery).
So what is the personal motivation to feel so strongly pro-nuclear. Is it personal, do you think you will get some gain? Is it anti-hippie? Do you think it will save the country from being buried under smoke or windmills?
I understand thinking windmills/solar might not work and nuclear may be the only solution--fine but that's not something to get motivated over unless you run a major power company, and developing wind/solar/tidal/... can't hurt even if it doesn't solve 100% of our energy needs, so being against them isn't really a great motivation.
I really have a lot of trouble with this particular motivation when it seems so strong in some people--seriously can you help?
I think it's something else. There is something that makes certain people hate things that other people love if the first group sees the love as unreasonable.
I've seen groups of people with an unfounded hate for iPhones, VWs, Google, cell phones, text messaging, social websites, instant messaging,...
So honestly, I think there is just a blind reactionary backlash when some people don't understand why a product, service, company or concept has "Fanboys".
I try to avoid both sides, but I admit that in the 70's-80's I felt a little irrational hate for VWs now and then (even though I've owned more than one). If you're talking this century I've got a hell of a lot of love for Google, and lately I get a little warm fuzzy for Apple every now and then--but I try to be realistic and criticize them as much as praise (something fanboys seem completely incapable of doing--I think that would be the definition of a "Fanboy", the inability to seriously criticize the target of your infatuation).
They are, I just don't think (from my ignorant American point of view) that Sweden has the resources to solve the problems it might find--on top of that, they tend to keep their noses out of other peoples business.
I'm not trying to be a "USA SUCKS" guy (in this case). We obviously have legitimate concerns with Russia and if we aren't doing everything we can to monitor their traffic, we're really screwing up in the intelligence arena (again).
So, if we decided to monitor them, we'd go for the choke point, a place where all the Russian traffic flows, right? Of course Sweeden is a fairly open society (as opposed to ours) and I'm guessing they wouldn't attempt to help us without doing at least the bare minimum "above the covers".
So I suppose I'd be awfully surprised if we weren't behind all this.
Or if you think about it from the other direction--what use would Sweden itself have for intelligence about Russia beyond that of selling/giving it to governments that could do something with it?
I like the "Democratic Leadership" bit. Makes her sound like a bit of a lunatic trying to force all the conservatives to stop blogging so she can control all public opinion herself.
I'm guessing that it's actually saying that a senator shouldn't be posting online without approval of senate leadership--the same exact policy they gladly subject military personal to (allow military personal to be subjected to?).
Not that it's right in either case or anything--I just don't see the need to bias a summary like that.
Re:easy way to fill a book
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 1
C was created to make compiler writing easy. Items like Pointers are completely unnecessary if your compiler optimizes correctly, but if you can't write a good optimizing compiler, then pointers give you pretty good performance.
Header files are there because C compilers couldn't be bothered to scan multiple files to resolve a single file. At the time, it was the only thing that made sense. You might not have the entire codebase on your system, and back when I wrote in C it would have been miserable to scan multiple source files to compile a single C file, but headers allowed you to play a lot of tricks that would let you compile under any conditions.
Memory management is hard. A solution like Malloc is easy, but extremely poor. Malloc can fragment your memory and, without help, cannot recombine the fragments.
C++ kept a lot of these traits from C for no reason. The primary difference between C++ and C#/Java could be viewed as: C#/Java threw out the garbage and started over with the concept of "Let the compiler do the work".
>"...and in many cases faster"... you really believe that?
Yes. C++ cannot do runtime performance enhancements--if a given method can be determined to be a function (always returns the same value for the same input), C++ cannot store that value and short-circuit the entire routine on subsequent calls.
C++ memory management is inefficient when applied to OO problems. To develop good OO, every time you create an object it needs its own memory allocated (not put on the stack). This leads to millions of tiny calls to malloc, and the same number of calls to free. Read up on Java's allocation, particularly the concept of "Eden"--virtually impossible to fragment and most calls to "free" don't happen (Eden constantly bulk-frees small, short-lived memory allocations at virtually no cost).
> Operator overloading can help you create some really compact and readable code with algebraic types not directly supported by the compiler, generating efficient code.
Compact code is not at all relevant (do you name your variables and methods as short as physically possible? f(a)? That's compact!). DRY code is. Readability and predictability are very important, to know exactly what happens when you see A+B when you see it is also important, but saving a few keystrokes? Not at all.
Readability of the operator overloading is HIGHLY dependent on the situation, in most conditions it makes code less readable. is list+="hello" equivalent to list.add("hello") or list.append("hello")? Or did the author of "list" actually mean something completely different by overloading +? Perhaps it means "Send value to port". The desire of authors to make a "Cool looking" api can be terribly dangerous if you give them a lot of cute tricks--most developers have a REALLY HARD time looking at their API from the other side.
Also, operator overloading is not for "generating efficient code"--in fact, it doesn't do a thing except hide the syntax of a method call--and does so in a pretty frightening way. For instance, A + B can be a completely different operation from B + A. This is not obvious from looking at the code that says "a + b".
Finally, I really feel that the most critical part could be that as long as you have to deal with memory allocation/freeing, it's virtually impossible to learn to think in OO. One of the critical concepts in OO is that each object is independant--no object would define the lifecycle of another--that would be horrid. And yet in C++ without implementing reference counting or some other uglyness, it's absolutely required.
After having used everything from C to C++ to Java and a few dozen others over the past 20 years, I'm pretty happy with the syntax of Java, it gets out of your way and is pretty minimal--less tricks to trip you up, the GC is efficient and for most applications it's 1/2 the speed of C++, if C++ was coded "OO", allocating, passsing around and freeing millions of objects in a few seconds, Java would probably b
Oh, I totally agree that we need embedded apps. My disagreement was with someone who said they didn't believe in ANY browser apps, I think that's really cutting yourself off at the knees--just like it would be to go 100% browser right now.
They are for socializing. Since that is a non-issue for most geeks (or a side-quest in WOW) these things don't make any sense to us. You also won't see us flocking to FaceSpace or MyBook or whatever--but if you look at the shear numbers you have to admit that for someone, somewhere, there is a point to all of it.
I know that it's cool now to hate google and all, but I have NEVER seen anything from them that I didn't admire at least somewhat, and for most things I find them unbeatable.
If they came out with gClippy I'd have to give it a try, and I'll give you 3:1 odds that it would be surprisingly useful.
>Or you could have a sensible package system which does updates (eg, one of the Linux package managers), or have the program itself do the updates (eg, Firefox). Your problem is solved.
There are a couple apps that I will never run outside a browser again.
Mostly Gmail and Google docs.
You literally cannot offer any significant improvement by running it native, and you remove their primary abilities when you do so.
I can access my gmail on virtually every platform, from a PC in my local coffee shop to almost any phone to any "non-mine" computer in the world.
Google apps gets to be the same way--I keep notes on their word-processor (like snippets of code I might need elsewhere), share documents/spreadshets for collaboration, and keep important documents with information that I may need to refer to from elsewhere.
Finally google maps.
All these apps have native alternatives--and I have used them. I never will again.
Although there are issues with the way they are usually implemented--a toolkit like GWT reduces quite a few of the variables since something like a browser incompatibility or security issue can be addressed in one place (within the toolkit) and not in 30 places within your app.
I'm not saying that browser apps are the only way to go--there are obviously issues--but you certainly would block yourself off from a lot of extremely appropriate usage scenarios if you took an absolute stance against them.
Re:easy way to fill a book
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Please don't start with C++. It is terribly hard to actually get any good understanding of OO concepts in C++. I'd recommend Java, C# if you must.
I'm not saying to make your career in that language or anything, but to figure out OO--get a language that gets out of your way and lets you see what you are doing. It should have almost no "Syntax" to worry about in itself.
C++ is the opposite. And I've yet to see actual OO C++ code.
Also, GUI programming in C++ (even if you ignore OO) is horrific. It's error prone and completely unnecessary. If you are really really stuck on being as close to the Windows GUI as possible, use C#, otherwise maybe Java.
Sorry, but C++ was the last language created with a legacy where creating the compiler was so hard that you had to adapt the language towards compiler creation/optimization. Many of the features in C++ are simply there so that compilers are easy to write (or are there for legacy to be compatible with compilers made for that reason). A modern compiler/runtime is able to do all the stuff C++ could, and more--and in many cases faster.
On the other hand, if you really want to understand computers and how a programming language works--if you want at the nuts and bolts--go to C, forgo C++ altogether.
That leads to a really interesting question. When you can manage a dialup system so easily, and yet a DSL Modem is so opaque (to a certain group of people), does it mean that the DSL-style hardware has failed somewhere?
I'm wondering if more hard switches, lights and noises might help in some situations...
Let's see, a few different suggestions might be: --A on/minimal/off switch to indicate if you are using the router (when in minimal, all inbound connections are denied)? --A sound when you have excessive traffic, maybe a click every few mb (with a disable switch of course, I know how computer people hate distractions)? --A red light that comes on when you have continuous outbound traffic? --A meter to show traffic loads --Toggle switches to disable specific types of traffic...
Of course, a lot of these aren't practical, but I really am getting tired of the "Cheap gray box" solution to all problems computer.
I don't pay a repeating fee to play anything--learned my lesson a long time ago, so think the good games with open servers will still be available, and the lame ones or ones with closed pay per month servers, I'd have done without anyway.
If you like to pay money to waste time playing, however, I suppose my entire theory falls apart.
It would be so much easier to hack into a car directly and shut it down when assholes follow too close--the old way is just too inefficient: http://xkcd.com/440/
It's been a while since I bought a video card. I totally splurged and got a $90 card! Worked for the stupid game I was trying to play I guess, but now that game is lame and I'm out $90! I wouldn't do it again--$90 is a silly amount to spend to replace existing functionality.
If I just wait a few years, any games I might still be interested in will be cheap and play on commodity hardware--and all I've lost is, well, nothing--actually gained a little extra time.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be buying a mac sticker and putting it on some generic x386. This is more like the engine, wouldn't you agree?
Might it be a good analogy to say they are buying the engine from Honda (an engine that Honda sells only with an agreement that it goes into Honda bodies) and placing it in some new, cheap car of their own design?
With this analogy, it seems a little less obvious what the answer is, but you certainly haven't seen any cases of a car manufacturer doing this (at least I don't think you have).
This no-brand company selling some POS car that they advertise has a "100% honda engine", that seems like it might hurt Honda's brand a little, but not much.
Honestly it seems legit no matter how you look at it--Apple's just being butt-hurt because they have always been able to charge whatever they want for their hardware without fear of competition.
This is just to reduce the cases where gMail is being used to send spam (that's what their cpacha tries to do). It in no way addresses mail sent from your office.
I'm just saying that they really need a small crew doing nothing but coming up with creative solutions to adapt to this problem. A group that takes little steps that identify patterns and try to come up with both quick patch and long-term solutions.
On gMail some simple rules should suffice. Don't allow a brand-new account to send out more than a few (20?) emails a day. Make sure that most of the email varies. Make sure the account gets and reads email as well as sends it, and that the email is accessed.
The trick is, you keep rotating these measures and don't tell anyone just what they are. You don't automatically disable anyone who breaks the rules, you just hold on to any large number of similar messages until a human reviews them--possibly through some mechanism similar to the "picture matching game" where multiple people identify a message as spam.
If it's determined to be spam, never tell them you caught on, just stop email from that account from being sent, silently. Log the ip addresses and use them to help you identify other accounts from the same computer if possible.
You could also use the ip addresses to notify people that they are a spambot next time that IP address is used to look up something on any google service.
Wow, that's a broad action with a lot of chances for failure, but I bet it could be refined enough to work--and worst case failure isn't bad at all--just one time when you go to search google you get a warning page back instead of your search results.
Really this just takes some dedicated effort and creative thinking by a strong, creative engineer with some power within google (I know there are quite a few of those)
There is absolutely no point in bidding before the last 5 seconds of any auction. This makes it really irritating.
I'd really like to see them say "Bidding will continue until at least (some time) plus up to 24 hours (randomly set).
Paying them as much as they want is also kind of silly--craig's list gives you the ability to meet the person you are buying from and examine the product. You can also avoid shipping.
Ever notice how a bunch of stuff on ebay is $0.02 + $5.00 shipping?? Honestly that's got to be a scam--someone is getting a cut of that shipping cost. Another nice policy would be that a buyer always has the option to arrange all shipping himself--(For instance: Just put it in an envelope and drop it in the mailbox, I'll take the responsibility, or "I'll have UPS show up at your door" or "I'll pick it up myself").
I've seen quite a few embedded systems, and in general most people can't code.
A few can, and a while ago, programming was hard enough that most code was written by one of these few, but now that Java, VB and C# are so wide spread, companies are able to hire bunches of people with marginal programming abilities and get something that looks like it kind of works.
It's easier to imagine if you consider how many people are master artists or musicians and how many people can play an instrument.
In programming there are very similar ratios, but since most people are utterly incapable of differentiating which code is great art and which is someone playing an instrument, they end up hiring the session players (which tend to be much cheaper) every time.
End result? Routers need rebooting every week or so.
I ask this every time I see a post like yours. I virtually never get a reply...
Can you tell me what motivates you to feel so strongly about nuclear energy?
I understand the arguments and I'm somewhat torn myself, but the potential savings are pretty minimal. Even if it did save bunches of money, the power companies wouldn't charge you less.
And the potential for really really high costs exists (however minor you might feel it is, it's probably a bigger chance than winning the lottery).
So what is the personal motivation to feel so strongly pro-nuclear. Is it personal, do you think you will get some gain? Is it anti-hippie? Do you think it will save the country from being buried under smoke or windmills?
I understand thinking windmills/solar might not work and nuclear may be the only solution--fine but that's not something to get motivated over unless you run a major power company, and developing wind/solar/tidal/... can't hurt even if it doesn't solve 100% of our energy needs, so being against them isn't really a great motivation.
I really have a lot of trouble with this particular motivation when it seems so strong in some people--seriously can you help?
I think it's something else. There is something that makes certain people hate things that other people love if the first group sees the love as unreasonable.
I've seen groups of people with an unfounded hate for iPhones, VWs, Google, cell phones, text messaging, social websites, instant messaging, ...
So honestly, I think there is just a blind reactionary backlash when some people don't understand why a product, service, company or concept has "Fanboys".
I try to avoid both sides, but I admit that in the 70's-80's I felt a little irrational hate for VWs now and then (even though I've owned more than one). If you're talking this century I've got a hell of a lot of love for Google, and lately I get a little warm fuzzy for Apple every now and then--but I try to be realistic and criticize them as much as praise (something fanboys seem completely incapable of doing--I think that would be the definition of a "Fanboy", the inability to seriously criticize the target of your infatuation).
They are, I just don't think (from my ignorant American point of view) that Sweden has the resources to solve the problems it might find--on top of that, they tend to keep their noses out of other peoples business.
America has a history of being the opposite.
Again, from a somewhat isolated POV.
I'm not trying to be a "USA SUCKS" guy (in this case). We obviously have legitimate concerns with Russia and if we aren't doing everything we can to monitor their traffic, we're really screwing up in the intelligence arena (again).
So, if we decided to monitor them, we'd go for the choke point, a place where all the Russian traffic flows, right? Of course Sweeden is a fairly open society (as opposed to ours) and I'm guessing they wouldn't attempt to help us without doing at least the bare minimum "above the covers".
So I suppose I'd be awfully surprised if we weren't behind all this.
Or if you think about it from the other direction--what use would Sweden itself have for intelligence about Russia beyond that of selling/giving it to governments that could do something with it?
I like the "Democratic Leadership" bit. Makes her sound like a bit of a lunatic trying to force all the conservatives to stop blogging so she can control all public opinion herself.
I'm guessing that it's actually saying that a senator shouldn't be posting online without approval of senate leadership--the same exact policy they gladly subject military personal to (allow military personal to be subjected to?).
Not that it's right in either case or anything--I just don't see the need to bias a summary like that.
C was created to make compiler writing easy. Items like Pointers are completely unnecessary if your compiler optimizes correctly, but if you can't write a good optimizing compiler, then pointers give you pretty good performance.
Header files are there because C compilers couldn't be bothered to scan multiple files to resolve a single file. At the time, it was the only thing that made sense. You might not have the entire codebase on your system, and back when I wrote in C it would have been miserable to scan multiple source files to compile a single C file, but headers allowed you to play a lot of tricks that would let you compile under any conditions.
Memory management is hard. A solution like Malloc is easy, but extremely poor. Malloc can fragment your memory and, without help, cannot recombine the fragments.
C++ kept a lot of these traits from C for no reason. The primary difference between C++ and C#/Java could be viewed as: C#/Java threw out the garbage and started over with the concept of "Let the compiler do the work".
>"...and in many cases faster"... you really believe that?
Yes. C++ cannot do runtime performance enhancements--if a given method can be determined to be a function (always returns the same value for the same input), C++ cannot store that value and short-circuit the entire routine on subsequent calls.
C++ memory management is inefficient when applied to OO problems. To develop good OO, every time you create an object it needs its own memory allocated (not put on the stack). This leads to millions of tiny calls to malloc, and the same number of calls to free. Read up on Java's allocation, particularly the concept of "Eden"--virtually impossible to fragment and most calls to "free" don't happen (Eden constantly bulk-frees small, short-lived memory allocations at virtually no cost).
> Operator overloading can help you create some really compact and readable code with algebraic types not directly supported by the compiler, generating efficient code.
Compact code is not at all relevant (do you name your variables and methods as short as physically possible? f(a)? That's compact!). DRY code is. Readability and predictability are very important, to know exactly what happens when you see A+B when you see it is also important, but saving a few keystrokes? Not at all.
Readability of the operator overloading is HIGHLY dependent on the situation, in most conditions it makes code less readable. is list+="hello" equivalent to list.add("hello") or list.append("hello")? Or did the author of "list" actually mean something completely different by overloading +? Perhaps it means "Send value to port". The desire of authors to make a "Cool looking" api can be terribly dangerous if you give them a lot of cute tricks--most developers have a REALLY HARD time looking at their API from the other side.
Also, operator overloading is not for "generating efficient code"--in fact, it doesn't do a thing except hide the syntax of a method call--and does so in a pretty frightening way. For instance, A + B can be a completely different operation from B + A. This is not obvious from looking at the code that says "a + b".
Finally, I really feel that the most critical part could be that as long as you have to deal with memory allocation/freeing, it's virtually impossible to learn to think in OO. One of the critical concepts in OO is that each object is independant--no object would define the lifecycle of another--that would be horrid. And yet in C++ without implementing reference counting or some other uglyness, it's absolutely required.
After having used everything from C to C++ to Java and a few dozen others over the past 20 years, I'm pretty happy with the syntax of Java, it gets out of your way and is pretty minimal--less tricks to trip you up, the GC is efficient and for most applications it's 1/2 the speed of C++, if C++ was coded "OO", allocating, passsing around and freeing millions of objects in a few seconds, Java would probably b
Oh, I totally agree that we need embedded apps. My disagreement was with someone who said they didn't believe in ANY browser apps, I think that's really cutting yourself off at the knees--just like it would be to go 100% browser right now.
Actually, as geeks these are fairly useless.
They are for socializing. Since that is a non-issue for most geeks (or a side-quest in WOW) these things don't make any sense to us. You also won't see us flocking to FaceSpace or MyBook or whatever--but if you look at the shear numbers you have to admit that for someone, somewhere, there is a point to all of it.
I know that it's cool now to hate google and all, but I have NEVER seen anything from them that I didn't admire at least somewhat, and for most things I find them unbeatable.
If they came out with gClippy I'd have to give it a try, and I'll give you 3:1 odds that it would be surprisingly useful.
>Or you could have a sensible package system which does updates (eg, one of the Linux package managers), or have the program itself do the updates (eg, Firefox). Your problem is solved.
There are a couple apps that I will never run outside a browser again.
Mostly Gmail and Google docs.
You literally cannot offer any significant improvement by running it native, and you remove their primary abilities when you do so.
I can access my gmail on virtually every platform, from a PC in my local coffee shop to almost any phone to any "non-mine" computer in the world.
Google apps gets to be the same way--I keep notes on their word-processor (like snippets of code I might need elsewhere), share documents/spreadshets for collaboration, and keep important documents with information that I may need to refer to from elsewhere.
Finally google maps.
All these apps have native alternatives--and I have used them. I never will again.
Although there are issues with the way they are usually implemented--a toolkit like GWT reduces quite a few of the variables since something like a browser incompatibility or security issue can be addressed in one place (within the toolkit) and not in 30 places within your app.
I'm not saying that browser apps are the only way to go--there are obviously issues--but you certainly would block yourself off from a lot of extremely appropriate usage scenarios if you took an absolute stance against them.
Please don't start with C++. It is terribly hard to actually get any good understanding of OO concepts in C++. I'd recommend Java, C# if you must.
I'm not saying to make your career in that language or anything, but to figure out OO--get a language that gets out of your way and lets you see what you are doing. It should have almost no "Syntax" to worry about in itself.
C++ is the opposite. And I've yet to see actual OO C++ code.
Also, GUI programming in C++ (even if you ignore OO) is horrific. It's error prone and completely unnecessary. If you are really really stuck on being as close to the Windows GUI as possible, use C#, otherwise maybe Java.
Sorry, but C++ was the last language created with a legacy where creating the compiler was so hard that you had to adapt the language towards compiler creation/optimization. Many of the features in C++ are simply there so that compilers are easy to write (or are there for legacy to be compatible with compilers made for that reason). A modern compiler/runtime is able to do all the stuff C++ could, and more--and in many cases faster.
On the other hand, if you really want to understand computers and how a programming language works--if you want at the nuts and bolts--go to C, forgo C++ altogether.
That leads to a really interesting question. When you can manage a dialup system so easily, and yet a DSL Modem is so opaque (to a certain group of people), does it mean that the DSL-style hardware has failed somewhere?
I'm wondering if more hard switches, lights and noises might help in some situations...
Let's see, a few different suggestions might be:
--A on/minimal/off switch to indicate if you are using the router (when in minimal, all inbound connections are denied)?
--A sound when you have excessive traffic, maybe a click every few mb (with a disable switch of course, I know how computer people hate distractions)?
--A red light that comes on when you have continuous outbound traffic?
--A meter to show traffic loads
--Toggle switches to disable specific types of traffic...
Of course, a lot of these aren't practical, but I really am getting tired of the "Cheap gray box" solution to all problems computer.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
Inigo Montoya
My wife got ripped off by a counterfeiter. Ebay was 100% unresponsive and Paypal was even more useless.
In this case, I have no sympathy for ebay at all.
Not saying the ruling was right or wrong, just have trouble feeling for them.
I don't pay a repeating fee to play anything--learned my lesson a long time ago, so think the good games with open servers will still be available, and the lame ones or ones with closed pay per month servers, I'd have done without anyway.
If you like to pay money to waste time playing, however, I suppose my entire theory falls apart.
It would be so much easier to hack into a car directly and shut it down when assholes follow too close--the old way is just too inefficient: http://xkcd.com/440/
It's 100% exactly what you are asking for. So exact, in fact, that I wonder why somebody didn't just answer you before this even became a story.
$300? $400? $600? wtf!
It's been a while since I bought a video card. I totally splurged and got a $90 card! Worked for the stupid game I was trying to play I guess, but now that game is lame and I'm out $90! I wouldn't do it again--$90 is a silly amount to spend to replace existing functionality.
If I just wait a few years, any games I might still be interested in will be cheap and play on commodity hardware--and all I've lost is, well, nothing--actually gained a little extra time.
Totally O/T, but I saw your sig and it really made me think:
>Scientology is a greedy cult founded by a second rate science fiction author. It is bad fiction.
Isn't this true of virtually every religion except The One(s) you happen to believe in?