Personally I wouldn't choose C++ or C unless there was very a strong justification. If your code spends more time waiting for something to happen than actually doing something, then you shouldn't be using a low level language. If reliability is more important than raw performance then you shouldn't be using a low level language. If portability is important then you shouldn't be using a low level language. Conversely if you need to do lots of IO and / or control the file format, or interact with system / kernel services, then perhaps a low level language is suitable.

Boost is a very powerful addition to C++ but that doesn't mean it's as easy to write code as it is in a high level language. e.g. boost's asio is extremely complex and even doing something simple with it like setting a timer is far more pain than other languages. Boost doesn't implement stuff like web sockets or other things either so it's no good on its own without other libraries. If I had to write something in C++ which was performing in a role that would more naturally fall to something like C# or Java, I'd probably use the QT library instead but only after being certain that I needed C++ to begin with.

And that in a nutshell is what's wrong with C++. It has bloated and bloated over the years, never deprecated anything of note and now its this behemoth that few compilers implement in its entirety and few programmers now how to use including all the gotchas, weird semantics and vast complexity.

It's unsurprising that most application development jumped ship to something higher level. It will be interesting to see if languages like rust eat into the systems programming aspect.

They've made it clear in past statements that they want to go to a software as a service model. So I think it is very likely that at least some consumer versions of Windows will do some insidious things - advertising, artificial ringfencing of "premium" features that can be unlocked for a low, low price, cloud services & storage, moving functionality out to the app store (games, backup software etc.).

I don't think professional and enterprise users will be happy about this so they'll have to sell a conventional licenced version too.

I don't see it as evil. Paint the horn a danger colour to indicate it's poisoned and if anyone is fucking stupid enough to consume it, then they get what they deserve. No different than if they decided to imbibe any other poisonous plant or animal. As for the poison, I'm sure there are numerous options given that a horn is just keratin.

This is China, home of counterfeit products, up to and including counterfeit medicine, baby formula, oil and every thing else. I am quite certain that nobody will give a damn if it's real or not providing they can fool the next person up the supply chain. And in this case, it's not like using the counterfeit would have the slightest difference from the real thing since they're both placebos.

So yeah, let them flood the market with the phony item. Personally I don't think it would work though. It would be more effective for China to stop promoting this bullshit and for countries around the world to crack down on Chinese medicine in general.

A single engine sounds great until a few years down the line and you realise the browser you've been using all this time is broken as fuck, filled with bugs, quirks, and other undocumented behaviour. And there is so much code relying on those things that THERE IS LITTLE YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. Which is why some companies are still hamstrung by code which only works on IE6/7.

It is far better to specify the standard and code against the standard. If there are problems with a particular browser they can be discretely worked around.

I thought the Seaworld idea worked really well. It's easy to see how the idea of dinosaurs would suddenly become less about habitat and more about making them perform for amusement. But then it jumped the tracks with all that nonsense about about military projects, a rogue military contractor, and a genetically spliced monster that nobody had thought would be a problem until it was.

The movie could have been made a lot more sense with some fairly minor alterations that wouldn't have materially impacted on the overall plot:

1. Stick some feathers on the dinosaurs. I thought it was neat that Wu acknowledged they were different from real dinosaurs because they patched them up, but he's a geneticist and it seems hard to believe he couldn't have done more to make the animals conform to recent knowledge given that the park was supposed to contain... dinosaurs.
2. Ex-navy dude trains velociraptors for a far more obvious reason - this place is like Seaworld - so training raptors to produce for a Shamu-style show would actually make sense. Training them for some vague plan to fight insurgents? Not so much.
3. Henry Wu can just be a scientist rather than some evil genius he appears to have morphed into. He acknowledges Indominus was a failure, is open about the reasons and that the animal is under observation to see what they can learn from it.
4. Indominus is kept alive in safely at the north end of the island while the park decides what to do with it. Ex-navy dude could still be asked up to inspect the pen to see if it was sufficient for the task.
5. Evil military contractor is instead the asshole head of security whose own lacklustre military career (cut short in some demeaning way) means he's a glorified park guard and he has a bug up his ass about ex navy dude.
6. Park security staff should be seen as competent and capable. They're armed with weapons and armoured vehicles but asshole head of security orders them to do something stupid against the advice of ex-navy dude, e.g. trying to coral the animal with their vehicles who then smashes them to bits.
7. Product placement is is constrained to concessions and shops in the theme park. It makes sense there is a Samsung Learning Centre in a park. Not so much that every fucking car shot has a mercedes logo prominently featured and similarly brazen placements (Beats, Coke etc.)
8. Make the female lead actually personable and friendly instead of some ice queen. She actually likes her nephews but she has a park to run so she trusts them to enjoy the day with VIP passes and she'll meet up with them later.
9. Make the kids actually likeable instead of a sullen dick and his annoying brother with some divorce sob story.

It's okay to hope neither side wins. May they spend many years in litigation fighting over the right to sell overpriced bullshit like cables and headphones.

It's more the fact that people are buying fire sticks to use as cheap XBMC players with no intention of using Amazon's services in any way shape or form. That's the bottom line.

/. mangled my response at a greater than symbol, so again...

Ooh 100 devices. Wow that's a huge enterprise! And even if it were greater than 100, it's still a huge intrusion and hassle. My own company writes a safety checklist app for industrial plants and factories. The amount of extra bullshit required to make that app (which is written in cordova) work on Apple thanks to provisioning, submission, approval + dedicated development hardware is a significant waste of time and money.

It is not a non sequitur because it is self evident from the people who jail break their phones, install firmware and all the rest.

Ooh 100 devices. Wow that's a huge enterprise! And even if it were IOW, that .0000005% of apps I was talking about...

No. Amazon's store is very popular as are many other app stores / downloaders. e.g. Humble Bundle sells games for android and distributes them through its own software.

Maybe you look up what a vertical application is then. They are very specialised applications, may cost a lot of money to make, may cost a lot of money to buy, might have specialised revenue streams which don't work within the rules of the app store and the vendor (and customers) might strongly resent Apple / Google stealing a 30% cut of everything.

Don't be ridiculous. Lots of open source apps are prevented from listing on Apple's stores. Anything related to shells, scripting, su, compilation, proxies / filters, emulation, file transfer stands little chance. Even Google has some limitations and would probably respond to takedown notices whether fair or no. But that isn't a worry since there are stores such as F-droid where open source apps are available from. Frankly your excuses are pathetic. The reality is that being able to install APKs from external sources is a strong benefit of android and many people legitimately use it. Freedom doesn't mean common sense, but it not should be taken away because some people lack common sense.

It's not a useless comparison because most games wouldn't use native APIs for the reasons I said. Writing code against raw OpenGL ES is a horribly, horribly painful experience. Maybe a few learners or indies might hit the raw APIs (I've done it myself), but it's not for the faint hearted and it's a problem already solved by various open and closed solutions. Go through the top free / paid game list on the Apple / Android store and there are very few exclusive to one platform because they are all written with middleware of one kind or another.

Yes because freedom is a good thing. I'm sure if I was locked up in a walled compound all day that my chances of being hit by a bus would be greatly diminished. It does not mean that I should be denied to leave my compound if I so wish, even if it's generally a nice place.

There are lots of extremely good reasons someone may wish to install an APK which is not listed on Google's store - enterprise or in-house apps, rival stores such as Amazon's, vertical applications, open source apps, apps that violate Google store policies for whatever reason (emulators. etc.) and so on.

If someone is stupid enough to frequent a warez site to avoid paying a few euros for a game then they get what they deserve. Should we take away everyone else's freedom for that?

It's still an important comparison. And most games are written over middleware for various reasons - Cross platform is just one of them, but others would include time to market, tools, learning curve, code quality etc. Even if iOS is the only target, it still makes sense to use middleware of some kind and Unity happens to be very popular middleware.

Cyanogenmod lets you control app permissions, e.g. to deny or be asked for access by apps that want to send an SMS, get location etc.

Personally I think vanilla Android's upfront permissions model is a disaster though and it's not reasonable to expect people to install custom firmware to fix it. That said, Google do police their store, and can remote kill them, and they could (if they so wished) minimize harm by downranking apps that ask for too many permissions. Probably the biggest risk to users if they get their apps from a warez site where they are basically asking for trouble.