The main reason why people recommend it is because of what happens if you mix signed and unsigned. If they are of the same size (e.g. signed int and unsigned int), then according to the spec, the result will be unsigned. So you divide, say, -2 by 1u, and get something very unexpected. If you always use the same signedness, then you can dodge this problem, and in general you do want to represent negative numbers every now and then, hence the default is signed.

In practice it doesn't work so well simply because so much of the language and the standard library uses unsigned anyway. For example, sizeof is unsigned, and so is strlen(), and in C++, size() on all the standard container types, including string. So if you want to write C or C++, you have to deal with signed/unsigned mismatch anyway.

You want to play this game? Fine. I'm well within the 1% of US by income, and while the majority of my income isn't from capital gains, they are a sizable contribution due to stock bonuses and such. I'm quite okay with making personal income tax more progressive, and raising capital gains tax to match personal income, even though that would mean more money taken out of my pocket every year. Why? Well, perhaps because I don't want another Baltimore in my neighborhood?

He doesn't necessarily need to win to produce some tangible change. If he gets enough votes in the primaries, that alone will send a clear signal to mainline Dems that they should pay more attention to the left.

This implies that communists would be against worker cooperatives, which isn't true in general. Marxist-Leninists are, but there are other kinds of communists, including anarcho-communists and Luxembourgists who like cooperatives just fine.

The real difference is in the ultimate goal. Communists are a subset of socialists who believe that it is possible to create a classless society, thereby resolving the class conflict once and for all, and removing the need for any form of state and societal oppression (and hence the state itself - communism is supposedly a classless and stateless socioeconomic system). They typically believe that this is only possible by undergoing through a transitional socialist period, but how that period looks varies depending on the brand of communist, and pretty much any socialist form of organization is claimed as the best by some group somewhere.

Socialists who aren't communists don't generally believe in that future perfect society, and for them socialism is a way to achieve socioeconomic justice and fairness (as they see it) here and now more so than just a means to advance to the point where said justice and fairness is inherent and self-sustaining.

I'm a liberal here in US on an H1B visa, and I'd support Sanders if I could (obviously I cannot vote, and I cannot legally contribute to his campaign). I disagree with his position on the visas, but it's one thing out of many, and there is way more important fish to fry short term.

A big part of it is support for electoral reform. I may disagree with a candidate on 99% of his platform, but if his 1% includes making it easier for me to get the candidate that I actually like into office in the future, that's the 1% I'll care about most. And this usually comes from the fringes of both left and right, from people like Pauls or Sanders.

Heh. That shows what I get for relying on my memory rather than looking it up again.

I'm particularly embarrassed that I followed a previous poster's lead in mispelling Gary Kildall's name.

Though, as the article you linked explains, Kildall did have a chance to make this deal and blew it, leaving it to Gates to pick up. Had Kildall been a better businessman Microsoft would never have become what it did, regardless of Gates' mom's connections.

On the topic of vacuum robots...

Has anyone seen any vacuum robot that integrates with central vacuum? I'd love to have the robot's base station connected with my central vac so when the robot returns to charge the central vac empties the robot and maybe even cleans its filters a little. The combination would be true launch-and-forget ongoing carpet cleaning.

You're referring to CCleaner and Avast, I assume? The AV industry is certainly a plague on the world.

Anyway, thanks for the specifics. I found some information that says CCleaner's installer asks if you'd also like to install Chrome -- it isn't bundled; it prompts for an additional download, AFAICT. I don't see anything about Chrome related to Avast other than that Avast has a Chrome extension.

Even assuming those are true, are the any other packages bundling Chrome? Is it just AV vendors? The claim is that it's added to a "lot" of products, and that that explains its growth and its presence on millions of machines. I don't think CCleaner and Avast are enough to move the needle significantly, even if they both always installed Chrome.

Maybe. But IBM approached Kindall first. I strongly suspect that if he'd said "Sure! I'll license it to you for $5 per machine", IBM would have done the deal with him. There really weren't any "back room" negotiations required; it was a pretty straightforward deal.

It is perhaps possible that Mary Gates learned that IBM would be interested in a licensing deal, but I'm skeptical that John Opel would even have known that much about the project. IBM was an enormous company and the PC project was a small effort that nearly all of the company thought was irrelevant. It occurs to me that perhaps Mary Gates talked to Opel and found out that he didn't know much about it, and realized that the project didn't have much internal support, and from that deduced that the execs in charge were fighting internal opposition and might see a licensing deal as a way to get to market faster and cheaper before they could get shut down.

But all of that is purely speculation. What is clear is that (a) IBM did approach Kindall first and he ignored them, and (b) an OS licensing deal was good for the PC project. I see nothing to indicate that IBM wouldn't have accepted such an offer from Kindall.

I don't think it's so strange. IBM didn't expect the PC to be a success. It was a niche project pushed by a few execs over the objections of more -- who saw it as undercutting IBM's real business, to whatever degree it was successful -- and ignored by most of the company as irrelevant. Other parts of the company were actively trying to kill the project. The group developing the PC needed an operating system and needed it quickly. They couldn't take the time to build one, assuming they could find the budget, and likewise couldn't pay a lot of cash up front. Licensing an existing OS for a low per-unit cost was an obvious win.

And, of course, by the time it became clear that the PC was a success, it was too late to change OSes, and by then Gates would've been a fool to sell. Besides, the cost to IBM was low and the machines were selling well. As long as IBM was the only company selling PCs, there really was no significant downside to IBM, and IBM was confident in its legal teams' ability to shut down clones... until Compaq performed a successful clean-room reverse engineering of the PC BIOS.

It ultimately boils down to lack of foresight, that the PC would be so important, and that IBM couldn't prevent clones. Without understanding those, IBM had no reason to insist on ownership of the OS.

No, Mary Gates was never on IBM's Board of Directors. She was on the United Way board, along with John Opel, then CEO of IBM. This may have helped Gates. Still, I don't see any reason Kindall wouldn't also have been able to get a licensing deal. There's no evidence he tried.

Interesting. What products include Chrome?

It's the default browser in many Android devices, is that what you're talking about?

Nicely done.

I expect this may turn into something of an arms race between phishing page authors and Google. The cleverest phishers may be able to stay consistently ahead of the extension, but I expect that they'll have to work for it... or would if significant numbers of people used the extension. I just checked the Chrome Web Store and so far there have only been 67K downloads. That's something but it's a long, long way from universal coverage.

The positive aspect of that is that as long as usage remains low, it won't make sense for phishers to bother trying to defeat it, which means it will offer good protection to the few who do.

You'd need an uncompressed image, so jpeg is right out.

The classics are here Lena, mandrill, etc.