I browse by typing raw HTTP into Telnet sessions on port 80. Text looks fine.

Good, JavaScript is faster. Now where is my in-browser ad blocking engine written in C? Since lots of articles have run that whine about Adblock Plus slowing down browsing due to injecting a massive CSS file into every page, let's see the ad blocking capability put where it really belongs. THAT is a feature that almost every user of Firefox wants: ad blocking in the browser.

I've noticed that a very high number of movies made since Save the Cat! came out follow the three-part formula outlined therein. It was especially apparent having seen Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), then watching the (annoyingly titled) Riddick (2013).

On top of most films following the same general plot format, the buildup of any kind of suspense is practically nonexistent. Everything has to move so damned fast that you don't even have time to come up with something to anticipate based on what has already happened before the next action-packed mostly-CGI-and-obviously-so thing smacks you in the face. A classic film like Halloween where the first 90% of the film is nothing but suspense build-up could never be made today, even if it was set in the same time period so that modern technology couldn't get in the way of the plot. Suspense is largely a thing of the past.

While I'm here on my soapbox, does anyone remember when "special effects" were actually special? (Get off my lawn!)

Women make safer choices. That's better if safety and stability are higher priorities. Men make riskier choices that come with greater potential rewards; some obtain the rewards and some fall flat on their faces. Neither choice is "better" without looking at what matters to the person making that choice.

Freedom of speech exists to protect the most disgusting, offensive, disturbing, and unpopular speech. It does not exist to protect speech that is not objectionable, as such speech does not need protection in the first place. Production of video constitutes a form of speech; content is irrelevant. The concept of "obscenity" does not exist in the First Amendment and its existence anywhere in the body of statutory and case law as an excuse to penalize people for unpopular speech runs strongly against the entire purpose of the First Amendment.

A system administrator can't administrate the system without "that much access." Who controls the access above that sysadmin? Why, it'd have to be another sysadmin...see the problem?

Why couldn't Sony just yank all the Internet connectivity until the machines were fixed?

Oh, I checked. The website made it sound like it was some sort of antivirus program that no one had ever heard of. When asked about it, some customers didn't even know what it was or how it had gotten on their computers. It installed a filter driver for all network adapters and at least two machines weren't getting online at all because of it malfunctioning. All of the customers already had an antivirus solution installed. Rapport started popping up on computers in the era of fake security software.

You should probably get some detail before jumping to conclusions.

I've been uninstalling the crap out of that program every single time a customer walks in with it installed because I didn't know what it was and I didn't like how invasive it appeared. It's good to know I was doing them a favor.

It seems that threading isn't nearly so simple in C++ either; at least, not if you want to get it right. From https://akrzemi1.wordpress.com... and http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/s... it would seem that while initiating a thread as you've discussed within a C++ program is easy, the nuances of C++ threading are uglier than C pthreads threading. Quotes like these make C++11 threading seem a lot less trivial than your initially impressive example suggests:

"If a thread is cancelled no destructors of automatic objects are called; or at least, it is up to the implementation if they are called or not. This would cause too much resource leaks. Therefore, it is not possible to cancel a thread in C++. There is a similar mechanism though: thread interruption. Interruption is coöperative: to-be-cancelled thread must acknowledge the interruption. If interrupted, a special exception is thrown that unwinds child thread’s stack until it reaches the outermost scope. However, interruption mechanism is not available in C++11 either."

"But all those threads computing fib1 are still running! And as they finish, they will write to all those instances of fib1. Which are no longer there, since the stack has been unwound. In its place will be the stack corresponding to the continuing computation that was initiated when the exception was caught. Thus we now have a large number of threads writing to various locations on the user's stack. By the time the user tries to debug the resulting mess, there is a good chance they will all be gone, leaving him/her with nothing but a stack with mysteriously smashed values. Or those might no longer be visible either because a return address may have been overwritten, causing the main program to take a wild branch."

As I am not well-versed in C++, I'm interested in knowing about these things. Perhaps it will give me a reason to seriously look at the language.

It's a kernel, not a userland program. It's never going to be as simple as a userland program, so it's a bad example. Kernels can't have the C standard library or pthreads or the STL. Well, technically they could, but that'd make the kernel code massive for marginal benefit and any kind of library bug would become a kernel crash waiting to happen.

Oh, I forgot to mention: take the hard drive it comes with, buy a USB 3.0 external drive enclosure, and you've got yourself a drive to do backups to!

You can get sub-$500 laptops with SSDs but they're all extremely low-capacity (the HP Stream 11 is $200 and has a minuscule 32GB SSD with ~8GB already eaten with a "recovery partition") and often are netbook-esque machines with drives that cost way too much to upgrade because they're not 2.5" SATA form factor. I have made a fair amount of money buying $350 laptops, slapping a $60 120GB or 128GB SSD in place of the 750GB 5400RPM drive, doing a fresh junkless reinstall of Windows, and reselling the units for $500. When you show someone a cheap-ish laptop with an SSD booting up to a fully started desktop in 20 seconds, they literally see the value of SSD technology.

As you've pointed out, no major manufacturer seems to currently offer a low- to mid-range ($300-$500) laptop with a reasonable SSD as standard equipment. If they did, they couldn't milk the margins on SSD upgrades for their overpriced "enthusiast" laptops. Laptop makers tend to have thin margins on the cheap machines at their base model specifications and make most of their (consumer-grade) profits on sales of accessories (AC adapters, extended-life batteries) and heavy markups for each bullet-point in their "customize this computer" system upgrades.

In my experience, most people also fall into two data usage categories: people with 0GB-50GB of data (mostly iTunes libraries, Word docs, and maybe a few photos) and people with well over 100GB of data (media professionals, obsessive family photo shutterbugs, heavy gamers, people who would download a torrent of "the entire bloody internet," etc.) The majority of them fall into the first category and the ones in the second category will usually spend a lot more money on equipment because they're a different class of user and they know more about computers and how to meet their needs.

Dear publishers who totally missed the point,

Fuck you.

Sincerely,
Everyone who proactively chose to install ABP and thus won't buy shit from your ads in the first place, you dolts.

That doesn't make much sense from a business perspective. Having certifications doesn't automatically make someone an idiot trying to compromise for their lack of knowledge and experience. Sure, it's of limited value (especially A+ and the like) but having an A+ certification doesn't negate a person's capabilities. Why would you actively avoid someone who listed the certifications they've obtained?