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Comment You can run the current version of MacOS on that (Score 2) 248

I have a 2010 6,1 running the current MacOS and the current web browsers. I need to swap the hard drive for an SSD, and RAM is limited to 8GB, but otherwise it works well. It is easy to install current MacOS versions on any Mac: Clone a bootable backup, with Carbon Copy Cloner for instance, boot from that backup on your old laptop, and clone it to the internal drive.

Comment Re:Solve the problem in hardware, have done with i (Score 4, Informative) 208

That's the right direction. Apple already has a pretty good version of it. (See below.)

Bounds checking C like this now is weak and very, very late:
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/199...
https://www.lrde.epita.fr/~aki...
http://blog.qt.io/blog/2013/04...
http://valgrind.org/docs/manua...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But the grand champion memory debugger is the Mac OS X standard malloc libraries. You can simply set environment variables and instantly get better debugging than most methods on all other platforms. I presume this is because Objective C/C++ is such a pain to debug that they just built in features to always be available, even for production apps.

http://www.cocoawithlove.com/2...

Those libraries are clever because when debugging array bounds corruption and used/free, all mallocs get their own mmapped memory block surrounded by unmapped memory. Plus writing patterns into free / allocated memory to detect writing to freed memory, etc. This is great because it triggers a system signal that debuggers can catch deterministically.

I found and used those techniques on my last big project a couple years ago. The Windows desktop app and imaging C++ libraries were full of errors, memory corruption, struct and 32bit/64bit problems, etc. I had to do a lot of debugging and rewriting to port to Mac OS X, then a lot to solve corruption and threading issues. And found out, the hard way, what a mess the "standard" pthreads API / libraries were. Just spurred me on to switch to C++11 to have standard threads. This Mac OS X built-in debugging along with gdb made it a snap to find all of those kinds of errors, even for code meant for Android, Linux, and Windows.

Comment Re:Why does the FBI continue to engage in witchcra (Score 1) 262

It definitely does not work at all for at least some people, like me. If anyone needs an example subject or someone with standing who's career was affected, let me know. Additionally, important medical information was withheld from me for 4 years, drastically increasing my risk of a catastrophic event.

Comment No: Re: They could be death convulsions. (Score 1) 47

Thunderbird is still the best email reader by far. I have many gigabytes of email in 10+ accounts all easily and quickly available on all machines. The editing experience, especially inline threaded replies, is the best. Outlook is a joke here.

And, at least for a power user, Firefox is still the best browser. I commonly have hundreds of tabs open, up to 700+. Only Firefox handles that gracefully, remembers all of them with all of their history, and, at least after a restart, uses a reasonable amount of memory. And with Nightly, now it's multithreaded which is starting to get interesting.

On desktop, Firefox has about equal share to IE and just under half of Chrome. Not terrible. Hopefully they will take IE's share. ;-)

Comment Trust employees, Solve Security, Easy Efficiency (Score 2) 267

Claiming security issues is a cop out and excuse to be controlling. If you are running insecure systems, and you are if you are running Windows, then set up a separate wifi network for personal / misc. Internet access. Users can then use their personal devices, phones, tablets, etc., or you could provide Chromebooks which are cheap, secure, easily wipeable, etc. Set up web printing for tickets or similar. If you need to solve attention problems, it needs to be done at the personal level, perhaps suggesting an easy way to insert frequent short breaks. For most types of work, frequent breaks improves productivity. In the past, people took many smoke breaks and similar, so it's not necessarily the case that a Facebook break is a huge new problem. Losing track of time, keeping things in proportion, those can be an issue. A little structure or hinting of some kind is probably all that is needed there.

Comment C++ and Qt is cross-platform, high function (Score 1) 296

My preferred general purpose C++ solution would be to use Qt when possible. It already has virtually everything you would use in an operating system with baseline networking, GUI, etc. already wrapped for cross-platform use in a clean, powerful way.

If you are writing a utility or a service, there are other choices. If you think you need the widest range of features, you might need a native GUI, GPU access, etc., Qt is the only real choice.

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, Node with C++ modules provides a nice base. It is even used as the basis for desktop apps with web-based GUIs (see Atom editor https://atom.io/ .) You get Javascript scripting, full web server capability, WebSockets for bidirectional communication, etc. Nginx is another possibility for something like that.

You could use Java or C# for portable-ish apps. In some ways, Qt seems even more portable now, especially for GUI and OS-specific features. Java and C# also don't make for great UI without a lot of work, and then it tends to be sluggish. For UIs, you want either a modern web UI, or a well-designed Qt UI. Interestingly, Qt includes a modern web capability embedded. Even the native Qt GUI is styled using CSS.

For a pure server app, Java, Node (Javascript), Python (according to many), and C++ are good. PHP, because Facebook has improved it, may be OK. Perl, Ruby/Rails, Drupal, WordPress, etc. all seem to be fading for app framework use because of developments in Javascript libraries. WebComponents / Polymer SPAs are very interesting.

Comment Re:Because This Worked Out So Well for the 3DS/Wii (Score 1) 15

You don't understand what Tango is. This is not just gyro-based control. The cameras on the back of the unit are mapping out the space visually so that they sense position and movement in a highly detailed way. Tango is capable of real-time understanding of the geometry of the room and whole building it is in as it can see it. Gyro input may also be used, but is secondary to the visual input. Look closer next time.

Comment Old anti-lock can cause accidents (Score 1) 304

I crashed and totaled my 2004 Mazda RX-8 about 18 months ago. A vehicle changed to my lane on the highway, then had to do a panic stop from 70mph to stopped. The normally amazing RX-8 brakes (and I had the high end braking package) failed in that circumstance. I had to do maximum braking. Anti-lock backed it off from a skid but never kicked back in. I rolled into the stopped vehicle in front of me at 30-40mph. You could see evidence on the road behind me: just a six inch skid, then nothing.

It would be good to handle more cases like this rather than the old methods of doing poorly in some braking (like here) to help people not good in snow.

Comment Re:Felonies even if the FBI did'em (Score 1) 168

Based on the statements related above about the judge insisting that the order did not authorize this, this does seem like Verizon and the FBI committed offenses here, probably felony unauthorized access to a computing system and others. Regardless of the outcome of this case, if it were me I would file civil and criminal charges.

Comment Re:Google Apps (Score 1) 210

Yes, I have been running my own mail / web server since 1992. As soon as something is more reliable than that, I might consider switching to it. ;-)

My email archive is about 30GB last I checked. Fully backed up. Very fast to search.

Maildirs are dumb. Imap to mbox folders are the way to go. I roll them over at 200MB. With Thunderbird caching and a good Imap server indexing, it is faster than any available email service.

Of course Thunderbird is great with Gmail, AOL, and Outlook.com too.

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