I'm using Chromium to type this up in Arch on my Thinkpad, and it works fine here. Quoting a relevant bit from my xorg.conf:

And it works from the X level, so it works in every application that supports scrolling (or at least, it should!). YMMV.

For complex data structures, one free for every malloc can indeed get very tricky to handle. For example, in C++, one can just write a destructor for a tree node that calls delete on it's children before delete'ing itself. Free'ing all memory is as simple as calling delete on the root node. Writing a recursive deallocator in C is trickier to get correct.

There's also issues of pointer ownership, problems that C++ and Java also inherit. Sure, this can be avoided if you have very clear cut guidelines on who owns what, but even these will fall short on some cases and those exceptions will need to be treated very carefully. The Python C interface has such guidelines.

My point is, you can be very intelligent and still manage to leak memory in C. It's completely doable, and as the complexity of your code increases, so do the chances of memory leaks. C++ and Java abstractions go a ways to help, but aren't enough by a long shot. This is why tools like valgrind are still relevant.

BadAnalogyGuy... is that you?

I'm not sure if you're trolling, but the tone of your post is extremely sarcastic. That's an absolutely terrible attitude to have.

Progress isn't defined by large leaps, but by the small steps that allow them.

Heh, imagine throwing away all the heatsink hulla-baloo and using processors to toast bread!

And pray tell me how exactly you're going to encode a "/" in the file name?

wuh-wait... there's a bad kind of money?! Say it ain't so!

Well, there's a great discussion of it on the Arch forums (great before it got bogged down with bickering, although I didn't see Godwin's law being invoked).

Frankly, I think I'll move to offical [extra]/KDE tonight. KDEmod has served me great, but I think I can handle to live without all the extra patching and branding they do if it means I get 4.3 goodness a week early.

Grr, still waiting for KDEmod to catch up!

I use Bell, and I noticed the hijacking maybe a week back. Even thought of submitting a story to /.

But then it magically disappeared later on (next day?). Hasn't come back since, and before posting, i made sure that I was receiving NXDOMAIN's and not Bell's specially crafted "Domain not found" for opera: [eon@enthalpy:~]$ host fadfad.ca Host fadfad.ca not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) [eon@enthalpy:~]$

So, did they change their policy, or am I the only one mysteriously not affected by this?

You get free lube?! Where do I sign up?

I've just recently graduated from high school, and just finished co-teaching a grade 10 computer engineering class (it's a cool program, senior students help teachers teach junior courses).

Anyways, one of the cooler cheap projects we found was building a rudimentary taser from a disposable camera. They cost about $5 (or cheaper if you buy them in bulk), and the ones we used got up to about 300 volts (good zap from that one). Sure, there are concerns of safety (one kid zapped his dad in the neck... and well, things went downhill from there), but it's an easy, quick project that let's you get involved into more interesting electronic components like capacitors and transformers (instead of the standard resistor, diode, and LED). You can even talk about how the amperage becomes minimal as 1.5 volts from a battery is stepped up to 300 volts.

Plus there's an instant cool factor to building a taser. From personal experience, the grade 10's loved it.