The test isn't claimed to be inaccurate, it's claimed to be non-representative of real-world usage.

If you're inside the car then you ARE toast at the end of it all.

I remember that one vividly. It's when the following phrase was coined "XML is like violence. If it's not working, you're not using enough of it yet.".

They really aren't that far behind anymore for an enormous amount of uses, some pretty graphics-intensive. From the HD integrated graphics onwards Intel has been making great strides with every iX generation, catching up in most ways that matter in all but the most demanding areas (high end games and GPGPU). And I'm not saying that because I love these guys, I spent a decade telling customer after customer that Intel just straight up lied (as did the driver) about the graphics capabilities of the 9XX series of integrated graphics, that our software would never, ever work properly on these cards, and they should have read the minimum specs that clearly stated that we didn't support these chipset (this is software that was an order of magnitude more expensive than the laptops they were buying to run it on, but customers can be a silly bunch). Having that same argument with management every two years "because thousands of people have these chipsets!" (they'd usually shut up after a realistic time estimate of the work to support these cards, along with a table of probable performance and visual quality).

No, the HD-series integrated chipsets make me quite happy, because now we can at least have minimal support for people who buy these laptops (it's nearly always laptops), and their experience will actually be pretty good.

As an aside, it's easy to tell that TFA is absolutely true by how few major gaming titles ship. Oh, wait.

The Sony MDR's are highly regarded in pro audio circles. I hate Sony-the-company with a vengeance, but I have a pair of ancient MDR-V900s that are incredible. I've used them for tracking, monitoring, live sound (where they really shine, because they lock out a LOT of external noise), and occasional mix reference. They were recommended to me by a person who tracks some of the biggest Belgian rock bands, and runs live sound at festivals of up to 60.000 people.

Downside: they fit so well around the ear that they aren't very comfortable for long periods of time (hot, sweaty ears), they are a professional, specialist tool. My day-to-day portable music headphones are Pioneer in-ears - where it doesn't really matter all that much because I want to *hear* what's going on around me when I'm hiking/jogging/commuting, so my audiophile experience is severely compromised anyway. When I'm really listening to music, I do it on speakers (Adam A5x).

Taking a page out of badanalogyguy's playbook, I compare it to a hand-built high performance racing car. It's really fast, but when you're driving it close to the edge of its performance it's twitchy as hell and you need a lot of experience to keep it from breaking out and careening off the track. A professional driver can make it do things you didn't even know were possible, and when you try to do the same following a detailed description you spin it out of control time and time again. It doesn't start with an ignition key, you need to flick a bunch of arcane switches in a complicated order to start all the car subsystems. When something goes wrong an unlabeled lights display looking straight out of Space:1999 lights up, and while the errors are described in the huge manual they are still so vague that you only begin to understand the errors after about the 10th time you've seen the same one. And whenever it needs maintenance or extension it turns out that someone manually hammered and bent the standard parts inside to fit, and nothing you can buy fits straight in without adaptation.

But man, it feels great when you run that thing around fast bends doing a great lap time. It doesn't really get you anywhere, but it makes you feel invincible.

And isn't it awesome? More stuff to learn, new things to unearth! One of the coolest science shows I've seen recently is Neil deGrasse Tyson's "the inexplicable universe" lectures - all about things we do not understand yet.
It doesn't matter all that much that quite a few people think that science being wrong is a bad thing, as long as enough actual scientists know that science being wrong is how it works. Without science finding wrong bits or inexplicable bits how would we know where to keep digging and looking for better explanations?

And in the mean time, those of us who know how it works can keep enlightening those that don't with stories of the coolness of our universe and science. Every kid I know is fascinated by many cool things they can find out about in science. Dinosaurs, flight, space travel, the variety of life forms, menthos bottle rockets, slow motion explosions and car crash physics, growing things in the garden, there is SO MUCH out there that doesn't even take an effort to get them interested in. Take a 6-year old around the Science Museum in London, and you'll find their curiosity will inspire you to learn more about everything. They'll come up with questions you can't answer, and you'll have to look things up together and figure it out, and it's just totally awesome.
Mankind is inherently curious. Don't let a minority of (admittedly very vocal) conservative (lifestyle, not politics) old fogeys drain you of your curiosity and excitement about being wrong.

Could have been worse. If it had been a Ford, it might have turned into a penguin.

I'm not sure there's THAT much room for legitimate criticism in C++, if you know the basic inviolate root principles of the language. Or to put it another way, anything that fixes those particular problems would not be C++ anymore. I think D attempted to fill that niche, and it has failed to gain traction, no matter how good it seems. My implication in posting that quote was "if D was popular, people would be complaining about it too", because all languages have a determined set of detractors (anti-Java "not everything fits into OO", anti-Python "whitespace isn't a substitute for program structure", anti-Lisp "how many brackets do you need")....

Popularity and quality aren't linked (I compared C++ to PHP in another comment), and I don't mean to imply that D is rubbish. I've given it a cursory glance several times over the years. It just doesn't seem to have a compelling argument for my use - I'm already in C++, and if I have enough leeway to go higher-level I tend to end up in Python, with the massive library of useful stuff behind it.

That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking of yes. But then using it as a hammer 90% of the time.

I assume what GP means is std::unique_ptr, std::shared_ptr, std::make_shared, and then your own custom make_unique because they forgot that in the standard and a bunch of std::moves to convert the canonical unique_ptr from your factory functions into the shared_ptrs that you are actually using everywhere else.

And then fighting with the several iterations of only half-done C++11 implementations in recent versions MSVC compared to the better support in Clang while trying to keep your code compiling across 4 different platforms with as little use of #ifdefs as possible. May the noodley-appendaged one help you if you were hoping for easy multi-threading or unicode support.

I keep telling myself I like this language, but who am I kidding ;-). Seriously though, the language has made strides with C++11 and C++14, but it will always remain a minefield of ways to stab, shoot, detonate, incinerate and irradiate yourself in the foot, with some implicit casting to hands and other appendages thrown in.

It was Bjarne himself who said that there are two kinds of programming languages: those everyone complains about, and those that nobody uses.
On-topic, lots of people are going to hate C++, for its multi-paradigm "everything and the kitchen sink" approach combined with near-C-compatibility and low-levelness. It's the kind of language where two programmers come up with five different ways to do the same thing, and four of them are probably wrong in non-obvious ways. It's fun though, in the way that a high-performance sports car is fun to drive, but easy to wipe out.
I've been using it professionally for 15 years now, and if I observe anything, it's that the longer I use it, the more my stuff looks like C. I keep shaking my head at younger colleagues mis-using templates all over the place ("re-usability!", and hour-long compile times, coupled with really non-obvious implicit conversions and instantiations, never mind the error messages), and object-oriented hierarchies where each object is such a tiny part of the system that you need to remember 10 classes at the same time just to have a slight inkling of what this thing is actually supposed to do.
I still have that nearly irresistible urge to defend the language whenever discussions like these come up, but so much of that is because it's the language I use all bloody day. And then I write something incredibly useful in 10 lines of Python.....

C++ has its place, a masochistic place, ostensibly programming a higher-level abstraction than the people writing plain C ("troglodytes!", but most of them actually seem to know what they are doing and rustle up the higher-level abstractions directly in C, I have respect for you guys), and the people who don't have that much need for low-level features, the last drops of performance or cross-platform compilation (you're probably working in Java, C#, Python, Ruby, and *enjoying it* most of the time. And yes, you Java guys have every right to tear into me about cross-platformness, it's not like it's just hand-waving in C++ either). It's sort of a similar niche to PHP I guess. You know full well that a lot of the reasons for the hate are true, but all you have is this swiss-army-knife of a hammer and everything must be a nail.

My interpretation on the first reading of that quote was "dear retail investor, you should be happy you're getting what we've decided to allow you, and now shut up", or in Darth Vader terms "We are altering the deal, pray we don't alter it any further".

No, but what happens is that the architect comes along and tells you that the foreman picked the wrong side of the plot markers when telling you where to dig the ditch, so it's exactly a ditch-breadth off from where it should be. Please fill it up again and dig a new one to the side before the concrete for the foundation is poured, and by the way, the cement truck is arriving in 30 minutes.

Look at the name - Quality Assurance. QA can only tell you it's bad, it doesn't make anything better. And what they can look at is usually only the external, visible part, which may seem to be working nicely but built from spit and wire on the inside, ready to fall apart at the next version update of the printer driver. That doesn't mean QA is useless, it's just a final double-check to see that you've built the right thing.
No, writing good quality software is a team effort of everyone involved. As a developer in the middle, you should be able to smile at the great design documents given to you by the system analysts, telling you what's needed and how, while having enough freedom to do it in the best way given the tools and frameworks you work with. And you should be able to high-five the QA people when they fail to find anything wrong when you deliver it, because you know that if they give their OK you can sleep on both ears and the users will be able to do what they need to do. And that's a good month's work if you managed to get there on the third try :P.