Not with the latest version, Ethernet was gone several revisions ago. Most people really don't need it. I generally only use it at work, and leave the dongle connected to the Ethernet cable, so it's no harder to plug in than connecting the cable itself.

The idea is that you'll just have one cable coming from your monitor, providing power and a USB hub. Currently you can only get that with Thunderbolt from an Apple display, but a number of display manufacturers have signed up to do the same with USB-C. I'd love to be able to have a single cable to connect power, ethernet, display, keyboard and mouse to my laptop. About the only place where I connect more than one cable is at my own desk. I generally have to carry a dongle for projectors, because in most places they're VGA only (if you give a talk at Apple, they have an impressive array of adaptors connected to their projectors, for every display connector that Apple has ever sold. I really wished I'd lugged a G4 PowerMac tower with me to be able to use the ADC adaptor).

That's no different from closed source development. Do you think Microsoft or Apple care about the opinions of people who aren't going to buy their products? There is basically only one way to contribute to a closed source project: pay money to the developers. That works for open source too, but you can also produce code, documentation (please!), artwork, detailed and reproducible bug reports (please!). People who contribute in any of these ways are valuable to the project and their opinions should be considered. People who don't contribute anything are only valuable in the sense that they may eventually become contributors.

The difference between open source and closed development is that open source projects allow non-contributors to use the product for free, whereas most closed projects will use legal means to prevent this.

For HCI, this usually isn't difficult. There is a huge body of research that can be cited. Some of it changes. For example, we used to think that cancel buttons should go on the left and okay buttons on the right in left-to-right reading order countries, because the reading order influences how people perceive the direction that forward and backward buttons go. More recent research has shown that this doesn't depend on reading order: people perceive left as back and right as forward whatever their reading order. GNOME and Windows are particularly bizarre in this respect, putting okay on the left, cancel on the right, but having forward on the right and back on the left - they're not even consistent within the same dialog box!

As a FreeBSD developer, I have a lot of respect for the work Poettering. Every time he releases a new piece of software, we gain a load more users and developers. I can't wait for his next project.

Clearly you have never visited GitHub.

You might want to look at the std::array template in C++11. It lets you do exactly this, only with compile-time checking of the arguments that the lengths match. Actually, you can skip the A, B, C parameters because your function template would be able to extract them from the .size() of the matrix parameters.

This is a feature, not a bug. If uninitialised variables were default-initialised to some value, then this code would still be buggy, but now your compiler / static analyser would not be able to tell you that it contained a bug.

If you don't want that behaviour, then initialise the value at the declaration. Coding styles typically discourage initialising with a sentinel though, because you lose the ability for your compiler to check that you've assigned the correct value on every code path.

This is true. On Linux, the only compilers that I know of that use the same C++ ABI as gcc are clang, ICC, XLC, ARMcc, Open64 and Path64. If you're using something else then you may encounter problems.

Absolutely not! ABIs are part of the definition of a platform. The Itanium C++ ABI is more or less the same on all (non-AArch32) *NIX systems, but the C ABIs are very different. For example, the C ABI on x86-32 on FreeBSD will pass a union of a pointer and an integer in a register, the Linux ABI will pass it on the stack.

The EU rule requires that you either provide a Micro USB port or an adaptor. A USB-C port and a USB-C to Micro USB adaptor would fit that, though there is an effort underway to allow just USB-C. The design requirements of USB-C included making chargers and adaptors very cheap (there's an interesting story of how the two resistors that it uses to select the voltage were chosen).

That's an explicit requirement for USB-C. For Micro USB, I've seen several devices where the port is damaged, but never seen one cable with a damaged connector.

If your monitor / TV uses the HDCP DRM crap than it adds a few frames latency and so you need the audio to be delayed in the monitor by the same amount, even if it's going to external speakers. This was the main reason for pushing audio into the HDMI spec, though there are some other processing steps (e.g. upscaling using inter-frame information) that can also introduce latency and make being able to delay the audio by a fixed, display-controlled, amount useful.

If you're buying an Apple screen, then it will have the USB hub in the display and will provide power. If USB-C connectors become mainstream, then I'd hope that other manufacturers will too.

No, they require a dongle and Apple will sell you one for $80. Just as existing Apple laptops require a dongle to talk to VGA projectors and Apple will sell you one for $20, meanwhile third party vendors will sell you one for $5. Apple always charges an insane amount for dongles.

You might want to look up what an IOMMU is and for how many generations of x86 processors they've been a standard feature.