Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:c++? (Score 1) 407

You make it sound like having a non-stupid, modern string class is a monstrosity that needs 16 cores to run.

You can split a string in any language. If you want to write in C++, write in C++. If you want to write in VB.Net, write in VB.Net.

C++ doesn't need to look like VB.Net just because you don't like the syntax.

Submission + - Mississipppi Attorney General Conspires With MPAA To Revive SOPA (itworld.com)

jfruh writes: Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood filed a subpoena last October seeking information about Google’s search and advertising practices in areas related to banned substances, human trafficking and copyrighted material. But a Federal judge has now quashed that investigation — and information from last fall's Sony leak made seemed to indicate that Hood had agreed to work with the MPAA to launch it in the first place, as part of a move to revive the reviled SOPA legislation through other means.

Comment Re:Good luck with that. (Score 1) 564

Did you?

Why, I did! Thanks for asking!

"The "mystery" is that nowhere in your code does it mention the word "split".


It's still a stupid argument, because any problem you can solve with a free and common library is not a real problem.

Well, I have to agree with the "stupid" part, insofar as if you can't figure out how to parse a simple delimited string without pulling in multi-MB frameworks, you have no place writing code. Beyond that, though, the whole conversation amounts to a holy war. Do you prefer Emacs or Vi? Top or bottom? Allah or Jesus? Pointy end or round end?


But to get back on topic - Do you prefer extensions or icons? Correct answer: "Why not both?"

Comment "WILL" be too fragmented? (Score 2) 230

Google Wallet / Android Pay. Apple Pay. CurrentC. Samsung Pay.

Competition works well when all players adhere to certain standards. It doesn't work well when everyone does their damnedest to lock out the competition.

Personally, I find Samsung's announcement the most interesting so far; because while Google and Apple require the clearly unreasonable expectation that merchants won't actively disable NFC on their card readers, Samsung plans to work with existing card-swipe readers.

That should lead to an interesting legal showdown, eventually, because CurrentC forces exclusivity terms on their retailers, while retailers can't block Samsung's approach as easily as they could Google and Apple's.

Comment Good luck with that. (Score 3, Informative) 564

it might be time to admit that users need to understand, embrace and responsibly use the only plain-text, obvious indicator of what a file actually is.

Oh man, good one! You had me going until that line. Beautiful!

I just responded in another thread where actual programmers argued about whether or not it counts as "confusing" to split a delimited string without actually using the name "split" for the method that does the work.

And you want to try to get the average end user to understand the difference between ".XLS", ".XLSX", and ".XLSX.EXE"?

May as well swing for the fences, I suppose.

Comment Re:c++? (Score 2) 407

Three includes! Two methods! A loop! Six lines! And he didn't call it "George" like you would have!

...vs pulling in a massive amount of overhead with something like Boost or QT, complete with their own huge list of dependencies... For a program that may well do nothing more than parse a CSV file.

"What if" if needs to work on UTF-16? No, wrong question by a wide margin - What if it doesn't? Do you always use a CNC to cut a 2x4 in half, just because you have access to one? What if you have 5/4 lumber? What if you have cellular PVC? What if you have rebar? All valid questions - And all completely irrelevant if you just need to cut a 2x4 in half.

We can all agree that building some not-strictly-required flexibility into our code generally counts as a good thing, that will frequently save us time and effort down the road. We don't need to build a tilt-a-whirl for someone that wants a tire-swing, though.

Comment Re:Just because they call it pedo doesn't mean it (Score 1) 199

They reported a hosted site where you sign on to exchange child porn. If accurate, that's a good thing for them to go after.

"Hosted" still doesn't mean "knew it existed". It just means that it happened to live on their servers.

For a rare non-car analogy, my GMail account "hosts" thousands of attachments I've received over the years, many encrypted (I don't send personal info through any third party in cleartext). Anyone who "knows the password" can get in and view them. Some of them, I've even shared from my GDrive, so someone doesn't even need to know my password, just have a valid GMail account.

How does that materially differ from the situation in TFA, other than in the nature of the content (which Google has no way to check)?

Submission + - Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules (nytimes.com) 1

HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” says Jason R. Baron. A spokesman for Clinton defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Comment comparison ? (Score 1) 143

Anyone who knows both - how does Unreal compare to Unity? I mean from a developer perspective. I've been using Unity since late 1.x / early 2.x days, and one thing that I like it for is that compared to the other engines I know from that time (e.g. Torque), it was always very easy to use and develop with, especially in the early development phases when you're prototyping and want to see some results, fast, so you can test basic gameplay and mechanics.

How does Unreal compare?

Comment Re: the forces working against us (Score 1) 309

It's not a cop-out.

It's a cop-out if you say "laziness" as if it explains anything. That's like the police finding a crime scene and concluding that the gun killed the man, and then packing up their things and going home.

We need to figure out why people are lazy and check if we can address it. Maybe we're making it too difficult?

Here's an example: Backups. Even I didn't have a good backup regime until Apple came up with Time Machine. It's just too much stupid work. But someone sat his ass down and asked the right question. And that's not "why are these fuckers so fucking lazy?", but "how can we make it easier for the users?".

they usually see as *an obstacle* to fun

That exactly is the point. If people see our work as an obstacle - maybe every once in a while we should climb down from our high horse and admit that they could be right?

Threema is only $1 more than WhatsApp. Pop quiz: how many people buy these over the insecure alternatives? Now you know how much the users care. ;)

Messaging apps are driven purely by networks. If all your friends switched to Threema, you'd do it too. If nobody does it, you're unlikely to be the first. Security doesn't matter enough to lose contact with all your friends.

Comment Re:who cares ? (Score 2) 185

If I am looking for Foobar Inc's website, and I see www.foobar.com, I can be pretty sure that is legitimate.

That's not been true for a decade. Due to overloading (i.e. multiple organisations, same name), the Foobar Inc you are looking for could be at foobar.com - but it could also be at foobar-inc.com or foobarinc.com or foobar-newyork.com or foooobar.com or whatever domain name was still available when they finally went on the Internet.

Comment Re:Greedy bastards. (Score 1) 185

It highlights a problem with the DNS system since ICANN took over.

We used to have a logical, hierarchical system. Any company would be under .com and any university under .edu -- then it broke apart and you would find anything under .com and anyone who couldn't get the .com name under .org, .net or whatever.

Then ICANN came along and greed won. Now you'll find anyone under anything, provided they paid for it. The TLD part has become entirely meaningless as it does not convey meaning anymore. ".dev" does not actually mean anything. You might think it means something if you associate those three letters with a meaning, but actually it only means "owned by Google".

We should just ditch the .tld entirely and that's it.

Comment Re:And no one cares (Score 1) 185

Sarcasm aside, professionals use the right tool for a job. Not necessarily the most complex or expensive or technical. A professional knows when to use the combo-hyper-pro-magic-machine as well as when to take a hammer or a screwdriver.

URLs have a reason to exist, and they will. The same way that IPs have a reason to exist and will, even though we rarely use them today. But 10 years ago, I knew the IPs of all my servers by heart. Today I need them rarely, but sometimes I do and I know where to find them. Today I know all my domains by heart. Maybe in 10 years I will use them rarely, but when I do, I know how to do it.

Slashdot Top Deals

In every non-trivial program there is at least one bug.

Working...