Do you hear yourself? He's entitled to representation of his interests because he is a CITIZEN OF THIS COUNTRY. The other guy isn't.

mommy daddy stop fighting

I'm with you, man. Nobody else has problems with cut and paste files, just the Mac. It breaks the metaphor, but so does dozens of other things they've done to add glitz over the years. (btw, select, drag, hold down the apple key and release mouse button to cut and paste across file systems.) I am used to the OS X user interface, but it took me YEARS to get used to it. There are still things I find annoying. I am not sure what to say on the Expose thing. I can hit f9 over and over and the windows will NOT tile into the same place.

Here are some things I would love to have the option of on Mac OS X:

* Solid window border
* no drop shadows or fading
* remove transparency in menus
* Minimize with no effect
* focus follows mouse

The first four are eminently doable and there is no reason for not having the option other than the fact that Apple is a walled garden. The last one, I am told, is not possible to implement fully correctly on OS X because of assumptions the OS API makes about windows being in focus. Oh well.

In defense of Apple, many annoyances have been fixed since back when I first started using OS X 1.2. Adding alt-tab was great, expose is excellent, so is Spaces. The combination of all three of these speed up my workflow tremendously. It is my environment of choice, but I won't kiss Jobs ass. Some things should be configurable and they just aren't because the OS appearance is a marketing tool for them. I don't care much how stupid Gnome on Ubuntu supposedly looks because I can change it to whatever I want and be happy. Not so on a Mac.

No, it's just different than everybody else's code by ignoring C coding standards, so it takes a huge mental context switch to work on one guy's old code. When I code in C, I code to C standards. When I code in Java, I code to Java standards. When I work for a place I adjust my coding style to the company standard. I don't just do everything the same way I've been doing it forever. You might say this isn't a COBOL thing specifically, but I have heard similar complaints elsewhere.

Learning how to not leverage 30 years of COBOL experience by programming in COBOL in every other language you use is hard.

I maintain C code written by a COBOL programmer. You can tell.

If this were a thread about H1B, people would be screaming about how Americans won't work AT THAT PRICE POINT. Devil's advocate, why won't older workers work at that price point? One place I've worked at hired a number of older workers who had made career changes late in life, and came in older but not really experienced. If I looked at our hiring practices it was obvious that they were trying to get a diverse workforce (nothing inherently wrong with that) so it would be really hard to say that we were being discriminatory.

It seems like in a bad economy the _very_ experienced software designers and architects (often older) get screwed because nobody wants to pay that much and are cutting back on the really far reaching products that need that level of talent. That's where I think we are right now.

If you're involved in the game industry then you should know that just because the technology is out there doesn't mean it's cheap to license or even available for a particular platform. 1970's is pushing it way back. If that was true then it should have been no problem for the Sega Saturn or any other platform in the 90's that could use multiple CPU's, but it was an issue because there was no developer support or people didn't want to program games in FORTRAN to take advantage of multiprogramming. OpenMP goes way back to the 1990's but by 1997 we had exactly one fully compliant C++ compiler, cross-platform C++ was a joke, and half the libraries didn't compile here or there or were not lean enough for or supported features that were not practical on embedded or game systems. Library support in general on game platforms, even the devkits, sucked ass all the way through the playstation 2, in particular at launch.

I remember using a set of macros that let you define blocks of C code that could run in separate threads, but it wasn't cross platform at all. There were other products that were too bloaty or we could not incorporate into a game without violating licensing with either the library or with any of the platforms. Nobody I knew was even using C++.

Basically starting in around 2006 as you said, because the PC platform as you said was starting to become multi-core, was when it started that you had all the libraries you might need, C++ was commonly used on every platform, code was pretty portable. Even now it is totally realistic to license a game engine that is still single-core for your game that predated 2003 in origin, like Unreal Engine. What I am getting at is that now is the multiprogramming time, and it didn't really start becoming practical until we got to the convergence C++ ubiquity, C++/library portability ubiquity, C++ feature ubiquity, multiprocessing library ubuiqity, multiprocessing platform ubiquity, and multiprocessing engine ubiquity (still not there yet but close.)

I am not considering client-server and offloading stuff like network/sound to other threads/processes because if you were on a platofrm that supported that that already had been capable for a long time and that is not the stuff that it killing your performance. On older single CPU systems using a multithreaded engine was just stupid because even if you shunt off something you need to another thread you are just gonna wait around for the result or drop frames if it took too long. So why bother changing the model to something confusing and unnecessary and just put everything in a single-threaded loop. That's the way everybody had been doing it since forever, and there was no reason to give a shit until recently so why spend all the money and time. Well as you said, the time is now, and things are changing. But I think saying things like it's been possible FOR THE GAMING INDUSTRY since the 1970's is just ridiculous. I can't see any reason why anybody should have cared until the last couple of years.

I propose a tax on every time someone posts a poorly thought out post on Slashdot.

Past initial development (coding to standards,) sometimes up to another 30% is needed to get one of the sites I work on working correctly in IE without breaking all or some of the other major browsers. Those development costs are the fault of Microsoft. Microsoft is the parasite, not the companies that simply want us to support whatever browser has the most users and then the browser changes on them in a few years. Imagine if the web development world could bill Microsoft directly for the extra costs associated with supporting their crap browsers.

That statement was kind of breathless, but the study he was citing focused on bugs that specifically affected the accuracy of the output, and found that they were a common occurrence. I agree with the author, if you are going to use a computer program to get results, you need to publish code otherwise your methods are packaged in a black box. A lot of people don't want to do this because scientific code is not usually done by people we can say are knowledgeable in how to write reliable, verifiable code. It's usually a pieced together means to an end. Not that there's anything wrong with that, IF it can be available for verification. I HATE reading studies that for example constantly refer to a dataset and then never give you the dataset. I guess unlike many people I don't naturally trust the authors to be perfect.

You're hand-waving. The CRU's data is completely unverifiable, you're just going to have to live with the fact that their research can't actually be used. How about this, how about CRU starts over again with the NOAA data and reproduces THEIR findings which demonstrate THEIR claims, and other people can independently verify them. They are the ones making the claims, the burden of proof is on them.

yeah, that's _alleged_, except for the case where the NSA outed the fact that France's Airbus was bribing people to secure contracts in violation of their own country's laws and international agreement, sorry about making that public. That must have been embarrassing.

Repayment in kind implies that China is doing this because we did it to them, but it hasn't been demonstrated anywhere here that China has that much in the way of intellectual property that we've been stealing over the years. To the contrary it's always been THEM stealing from EVERYBODY, which is not alleged, it's obvious when you see knockoffs of technology pouring out of China. That's what this topic was about, despite attempts to turn it into payback against the USA.

So what you're saying is that mail in NYC is a truck you put things on, not a series of tubes?

That's awesome because pedos versus terrorists could be conceivably construed as "Aliens versus Predators"

This is a rights issue. If you want to be free with your body go ahead, but if the government wants nude pics of me without my permission, that's 1984 shit right there.