I bought two PIs. One for me and one for my son. The purpose was to have a inexpensive piece of hardware on which we can learn the mechanics of embedded Linux development. I noticed all of the above problems on the boards that I bought. As a beginner, I wasn't sure if I was doing something wrong. We spent an entire Saturday working through the power issues, like the crew working on Apollo 13. We did get it worked out, but when you are learning something, it is best to learn on a platform that isn't presenting intermittent problems. The student isn't going to recognize the demarcation between their ignorance and hardware problems. If the board can't be built reliably for $35, get better chips and raise the price. In order for the board to do what is says it does, USB better provide 500ma or it isn't a USB connector. The upside to all this is that I've learned more about Linux in two weeks than I have tinkering with Linux for 10 years.

What does it mean to game the system? The game paper, while not pertaining to the subject, is a well written paper. It is not gibberish. It would take some talent to produce the gamed paper and probably more time. Given that, why wouldn't the student just write an on topic paper?

Given the bigger picture, writing is an art form. An essay is an art form. Even a human grading the paper might miss the nuances of what is being written. Who can truly say what the author has written is incorrect, when in writing, there is no incorrect or correct. There is just a continuum from bad to good writing.

I had the same result, so I started reading the comments to see if others were able to read the article. And then...oh yeah...this is Slashdot. At least the posters read the title or the comments would be off topic. :-)

You dismissed the one framework that would do what you want. LGPL and if really necessary, Digia does not charge that much for a commercial license. I've been doing cross platform work for 20 years. Java was my first foray. Star Framework (Star Office was written with this) was a pretty good framework. But QT beats them all hands down.

Except that CEOs run companies three months at a time. Every time there is an earnings call, I have to determine if I want to reallocate my assets. I'm only responding to the markets. Markets are outside of my control. What equities I own are within my control. Buy and Hold can quickly become a losing strategy. MP3.com or RedHat anyone? If you want to define it as speculative, then so be it.

If your skill level is so high, get a better job and let someone who "fits" this job have it. If the reality is, you are not able to obtain another job, then you should be thankful for this one. There are a number of unemployed SAs that can write scripts that would like your job. Bringing this extra level of expertise to the job should just make it so your employer does not find someone cheaper to do your job. I've written extra things for my employer "Just for the fun of it" I enjoy what I do and I like doing the work and seeing it deployed just for bragging rights. My guess is that you don't contribute to open source. I have two open source projects. Rethink your attitude.

...so that we could remove ourselves from the cloud. Years ago when I started my career, I was a mainframe programmer. We operated through terminals that sent commands to the central mainframe. It was constraining and the machine high priests prevented individuals from being productive. Then the Apple II came out and we got a few of them past IT. Then the PC with dBase and Lotus 123. The Apple Laserwriter is what pushed the tipping point as then everyone became a publisher. We were freed from the tyranny of the controlled server. I laugh because here we are 30 years later and we are being sold that the cloud is freedom. Yes, freedom for the company to mine your data and market you. What does the individual get out of the cloud? If your network goes down, no cloud. The cloud is a stupid idea foisted and fostered by a generation too young to remember the old cloud. No thanks, I'll keep my personal data on my laptop.

I'm not posting as an anonymous coward.

  I've been coding for 25 years. I rarely have memory leaks, and I NEVER have double frees. IF I have a memory leak, it is because I am doing something novel and specialized. That leak is caught before the app goes out the door. These applications that I've developed are among a number of commercial titles that shipped to retail stores. I use patterns for memory management and memory ownership. I also make use of well tested frameworks. I don't use Boost but have opted for QT instead. It works for me.

I can't speak for the Coverity open source scan effort but I know a number of developers who would make the same statement that I am making. Most of the developers I know don't do it for the passion of programming. They do it because they can make a lot of money coding for others. Their code....usually sucks. I find that most developers excel at being clever and I've seen some pretty wacky coding practices on the C++ side of things. But just because that exists, doesn't mean there are C++ developers who truly excel at coding C++.

I once wrote a commercial, a specialized app, but there were 10s of thousands of users that only had one reported bug. That bug occured when there were no printers attached to the machine. It never occurred to me to test that use case. I wrote a server app that ran for 2 1/2 years before they took it down and restarted it. They were moving the servers to a different location. That app followed the producer/consumer pattern and is obviously multi-threaded. It used TCP/IP to retrieve data from a server and then populated a database with that data. If the data queue leaked memory, it wouldn't have run for 2 1/2 years.

Posting on Slashdot against another developer and imposing your "facts" on him...is pretty brazen. Oh wait, this is Slashdot.

If you have circular references, there is a problem with your design. Usually people have circular dependencies when object a needs to talk to object b, and object b needs to talk to object a. Take a look at signals and slots. That will help decouple your classes.

I completely concur. I don't experience memory crashes or memory leaks in my programs. There are well documented best practices that make this a thing of the past. Adding QT to the mix has made the C++ experience extremely pleasant.

I work for a large cellular firm. Not more than a handful of employees use our software products but instead use the Apple iPhone. It shows in the software quality side of our product. If we actually used our own product, those errors would disappear because they are obvious and the developer would fix his own phone.

I suspect the same thing happens at Nokia. I am currently running a Nokia N8. Hands down, the best cell hardware available. I can make calls, from my office, will full bars indicated. My iPhone 4 could not make the connection and appeared out of service while I work in the middle of a large city. I can drive through the local mountains with no dropped calls on the N8. The iPhone, constant drops. Why do people put up with the hardware, because they think the software is so good. Can't make a phone call, no biggie because I have this neat bird rage game from the easy to use app store. My N8, takes amazing photos and videos, but moving the media is as straight forward as it should be.

So I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that Nokia employees are not using Nokia products. If they were, the simplest app errors I find on my N8 would not exist. The owner of that software component would soon feel the problem and fix it. My N8 has basic problems with Bluetooth functionality. Screens popup when no user action triggered it. My ear can hangup a phone call because when I answer it and put my head to the phone, my ear touches a button and the software happily complies. Did the developer check the orientation sensor and disable the buttons? The dialer is inconvenient. How many automated systems are out there Nokia? And whenever I encounter one, it is a pain in the butt to punch in the dialer. How about when the orientation is more horizontal, pushing the dialer button puts it into speaker mode. But, only if you aren't on a connected blue tooth. I could go on an on.

Maybe that isn't enough to convince? I worked for Nokia a while ago. Many engineers had Nokia branded phones. They would write custom software and re-flashed their phones for even more innovative functionality. Then the Motorola Razor came out. Within a month, every engineer, in the meetings I attended, had a Razor. The Razor was perhaps the beginning of the end of good Nokia software. They just can't seem to catch up and even my N8, which as an updated UI drops back to an old school UI when I push the button.

When Nokia bought Trolltech, I was a little apprehensive and felt they would probably kill the framework. When they started working hard on the phone platform, I really started to get into it. My desktop QT code was reusable on my devices. But Nokia didn't disappoint. After a record QT Dev Days event, which seems to indicate a swelling interest by developers, Elop mothballs QT. Figures, Elop isn't a visionary. He is a snakeoil salesman trying to get his next bonus at the expense of a long range vision and plan. Everyone thinks they can be a Steve Jobs, but when you tie your products to your month to month, and quarter to quarter results, you get rushed, poor products.

At Microsoft, many of the Engineers do use the Windows 7 phone. It's not bad and is usable....for 2004. but Microsoft will slowly evolve the platform and will probably carve out a large piece of the market. If they put native code back in, I will develop for it. but none of this is going to help Nokia. What's going to be their value add? Their employees will still probably not use the phone so their rendition will just be a poor copy of a Windows 7 device while they try to sell their GSM chips.

If I were Elop, I would have tied bonuses to owning the company products. You own a device not branded by Nokia? You forgo bonuses and promotions. Apple produces compelling technology because your employees have a passion in it. They live and breathe the brand and work to produce the best product available. My guess is that Elop has a Blackberry or a Windows 7 phone. It starts at the top. He should own and use the N8. His VPs should all own and use the product. Every designer and engineer should own and use a Nokia branded product. The software would quickly improve. It would have to. I think the phone hanging up a call because my ear hit the end call button, when taking a call would have been resolved with rev 1.1.

QT wasn't the problem. It was and is the solution.

From Bloomberg:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-02/nokia-microsoft-must-join-forces-to-fight-iphone-berenberg-analyst-says.html

and one quote in particular:
        Nokia Oyj and Microsoft Corp. need to join forces to avoid the dinosaur fate of mainframe makers,
        Berenberg Bank analyst Adnaan Ahmad wrote in an open letter to the chief executive officers of the two companies.

What does a bank analyst know about technology? Nokia and Microsoft aren't going to save each other. The upper management at both companies appear to be inept. Steve Jobs once did a deal with Microsoft to keep Apple alive. Now, do you think Steve Jobs would have made the same decision as Stephen Elop? Nokia is no where near in bad a shape as Apple was when Steve took over. Apple's share price was $12. But Steve got to working on a very long range plan and brought in people to execute it. That seemed to work out for them.

Nokia started to muck with QT badly with Meego. I have a long history of developing with QT. I started to look into it and found that they were "branding" the code. The new slogan was going to be "QT everywhere except Meego." I think the embedded Linux base that Trolltech did for their GreenPhone would have been a good place to start. People complained that performance was lacking. The newer ARM processors would work very well now. Nokia has/had a large contingent of developers in the KDE/QT communities that could develop for their platform. Now all they are going to offer is developing in a MS sandbox using Silverlight and no native code. That means nothing interesting would be developed.

So Elop will probably become a Harvard Business study in how to take the largest mobile cell company down.

This decision is a disaster. Apparently, the market agrees with me. NOK is down %15 as I write this.

I have been writing with C++ for 20+ years as well. Started with cfront in 87.

I'll second what Flawed Logic just said. I know and use other technologies as necessary, i.e. PHP for web development, Python for scripting...ect. But for embedded and desktop, C++ rocks. Use a framework like QT with the language and you can be every bit as productive as C#. When developers talk about all of the pitfalls of C++, it just tells me that they lack design principles and discipline. I learned object orient design from Neil Goldstien at Apple Developer University. I just bought his book, "Objective C for Dummies" (never stop learning) and he conveys some of his coding principles in that book. Those ideas have served me well. I also learned C++ at Apple Developer University. I don't remember that instructor, but if I dug through the boxes in the garage, I'm sure I could find the course work. That guy rocked and taught the principles and techniques needed for coding sanely. I can't remember that last time I referenced a null pointer, double dereferenced a pointer, over wrote the stack or other things that people complain about C++. If you do these things, you have not developed a consistent set of rules of engagement. Yes you can have garbage collection but I find I just don't need it. People often ask how I get my programs to run so fast. C++ on today's processors are blinding fast. If someone were to say that they must not have been very complex application, I would tell you that they were consumer applications for large companies: Intuit, Wind River; Qualcomm, Sony Entertainment and others. (I was a contractor.) Many of you used applications that I wrote...along with other talented people.

What I see today are developers learning a niche and then railing against anything that might threaten that niche. What is lacking is passion and the desire to learn different technology solely because it is fun. The company I am currently has Java guys who insist that Java is the end all and be all. We have C# guys who insist that the language is the end all and be all. We have Python guys who swear it is the only language one needs. When I hear the language wars between them, I just sense that maybe they do it for the money, not because of the joy of it.

If you find yourself here pontificating that your language is superior to another, maybe technology isn't your thing.