Those are some insanely low wages. It put the highest level of wages for Software Developer: Applications in the northwest Chicago suburbs at $91,624. While that is well above entry level wages, it is nowhere near what a senior level developer in that area makes. Add another $30k to get into the ballpark.

And the only reason the number of exploits from untrusted sources is 0 on non-jailbroken iOS is because you simply can't install from untrusted sources.

Since you seem to want to compare Apples to Androids, though, here is one that infected 100k+ iOS devices, no jailbreak or untrusted sources required. And another affecting 75k+ jailbroken iOS devices. I stopped searching after finding those two (which took a whole 30 seconds); that it was so easy to find those two tells me there's a lot more to be found if I wanted to invest another half-minute in it.

Let's see, 500k of 900 million Android devices, that's an infection rate of about 5.6%. I'll admit, that's not great, but let's see how iOS fares before we got all uppity, okay? I can't find "in use" numbers, only that Apple has sold over 800k; I know they're not all in use, so I'll do a quick calculation based on market share. Worldwide market share, that is, since the 500k number you're touting is worldwide. So, Android's 81.5% market share means that 1% of the market is a hair over 11 million devices; iOS holds 14.8% of the market, or 163.5 million devices. 175k infected, out of 163.5 million devices, that's a 10.7% infection rate.

So yes, sure, let's assume that other malware exists for iOS, sure there are almost 3x as many infected Android devices, but an iOS device appears to be almost 2x as likely to be infected. Factor in that other malware certainly does exist (every jailbreak is an exploit and many jailbreak utilities have been bundled with malware; little reported but anyone involved in the scene knows, always get your jailbreak tools direct from the author, but even that is no guarantee). In short, the 175k number I used is smaller than it should be, making the 10.7% infection rate I came up with a fair bit smaller than the real infection rate, as well.

As a user of a single phone and a single tablet, running the less-likely-infected platform means I'm less likely to be infected. Period. That said, I greatly prefer iOS over Android on a tablet and absolutely love my iPad. I don't do anything mission critical on either device, so my exposure is limited in any case, but I'm a little more lax with my more secure Android phone than I am with my less secure iPad.

Correct. It really doesn't. unless you consider freedom a bad philosophy. Of course, with freedom comes responsibility, as in you are responsible for what happens when you misuse the freedom to install crap on your phone. Seriously, rather than volunteering to have our own freedoms stripped from us because we refuse to connect our actions with the consequences they bring, why don't we all just behave like the adults that we are and own out own liabilities? Android lets you do that, while iOS does not.

You're not a douche because I loaded the page long before that link was posted (not laziness, BTW), you're a douche for a whole slew of other reasons, many of which also apply to myself. So I didn't refresh the page before posting. We all do that, your point? Welcome to Slashdot.

They also wouldn't own an iPad and two MacBook Pros. I guess you aimed your anti-Fandroid ray at the wrong guy.

Very true. The rational man realizes this, and doesn't hold strong political opinions on the rest of it. We're all going to be ignorant of most science in the modern world - the time has long passed when the educated man could know all of the scientific knowledge there was. It's important to therefore set arrogance aside, and not try to tell others they're idiots, or force your uneducated opinion on others by law, unless you actually care enough to do the diligence first.

Far too many people mistake fashion for education. If you're going to call others fools for trying to stop the teaching of "evolution" in schools, call them fools because you took the time to understand the science, the counter-arguments, and why a smart, ration person could somehow not believe in evolution. Until you understand the other side, and why it's wrong, stay out of the argument. For the evolution case: if you had a solid biology class, this takes just a few days of reading the talk.origins site. It's not an undue burden, and otherwise arrogance about your uninformed opinion is just idiocy.

For newer fields like the climate change debate, it will take longer to dig up the details, as there isn't a handy website that collects all the pro and con arguments. For climate change, can read through the pro and con sites and understand where they're coming from, understand the Vostok ice core data for perspective, spend time pondering the satellite temperature data, and so on.

For any such issue, treat both sides as intelligent people who are in earnest in their beliefs and not trolling, and read enough to understand how this can be true. When you understand how intelligent people can disagree on the issue, and see where both sides are coming from, then you can act out of knowledge instead of arrogance, and stop polluting the debate with idiocy. If your only basis for argument is "everyone knows the smart people believe X, and the losers believe not-X", well, that's fashion, not knowledge. This pretty much applies to anything being debated politically, BTW, not just the science stuff.

sure it does: you can travel 100 light years in less than 100 years. that's the only thing that is meaningful. Arguing about whether you can go faster than light is not meaningful.

That's not C++. That's "C with classes". (No true Scotsman uses C++ that way!) There should really be a new C standard that adds classes, C++-- or something. (BTW, a sure sign that people don't understand C++ is when they argue that the STL is slow.)

It's funny to hear game devs argue that C++ is too abstract, and then in the next breath wonder how they're ever going to get their code to use more than one core. I hope you're not that guy!

I'm in a different world. To me, performance means infinite horizontal scalability. Clarity and performance of work distribution across N machines (for arbitrary N) is where the fun is. Counting cycles and optimizing bytes got boring when machines got fast (a Raspberry Pi blows away the mainframes I started on).

Only catch exceptions that you can fix is the rule. If you can't actually do something useful about an exception, why would you catch it? There's nothing worse than Pokemon code!

catch(...) make perfect sense in one place - in main(), followed by logging the exception and terminating the process.

The whole point of this entire mindset is to stop checking for errors individually after each call. This lets you eliminate about 2/3s of your lines of code, all boilerplate, and reveal the actual business logic of each function by sweeping away the clutter. But there's a whole crowd of devs who like the clutter. They're not actually very good at coding, but mindless repetition they can do. This mindset is anathema to those guys. RAII without exceptions leaves half the clutter, and so doesn't achieve the goal.

If you don't really need to make systems calls, that's absolutely the right answer IMO. I only favor C++ if I need to do platform-specific messing around with filesystem behavior, or low-level netcode. As soon as you need to do any sort of bit-twiddling, or you care at all about asymptotically-constant-time performance improvements, Java stops being useful (and I always prefer C# to Java where practical - same functionality with half as many lines of code).

I really don't see the point of using C (or C-style coding in C++) outside of kernel-mode stuff, however.

A new hire from college is not a "beginner", at least not anywhere I've worked recently. If you choose to interview in C++, you had better know the basic STL classes (string, vector, map) as well. Sure, it's rare to see an interview question that would probe RAII/resource management for entry-level, but knowing that stuff coming in would really help. (We don't care what language someone is good in for an entry level job, but they have to demonstrate some depth in one language of their choice.)

If a product ships broken but has an "unbreak" checkbox, it still ships broken.

I'm a CyanogenMod user, but I don't think they're a serious player in the Android community.

Cyanogen split from their first actual customer, OnePlus, after a partnership that has been described as "rocky." I don't know what the problem was, but that sounds to me like the company isn't capable of meeting its customers needs.

Beyond poor customer service, the developers do not appear, from the outside, to have any experience project management. There was never a stable release of CyanogenMod 12.0, and hasn't been a stable release of 12.1 yet either. A reasonable release process would probably involve a code branch containing their tested, stabilized add-ons that they integrated with AOSP. New features should be developed in a separate branch and merged after they've been through testing, and during a window that's open after a release of the stable branch. None of that appears to be happening. The changelog for their nightly builds is a firehose of bug fixes and new features.

And beyond THAT, I've never heard of Cyanogen working to push any fixes upstream into AOSP. I would love to hear that they do. If not, they're building a patch set that will only grow over time, which will eternally increase their workload of integration with the upstream project

It's unsustainable. And that's sad, because I like one or two of the features they add to AOSP.

Wrong. But you illustrate perfectly what I meant when I said the way relativity is taught confuses people. You are actually a member of the vast majority of people that think you can't travel to a destination in less time than it would take light. You can!

Is a switch from a "feature phone" to a smartphone counted as a switch or a first time?

Each house of Congress also has to act every two years in order to set its rules. The requirement of a periodic formality to prevent copyrights from expiring does not change the practical outcome, just as the requirement of a periodic formality to readopt House and Senate rules every two years does not keep the House and Senate from having rules.

And the Gershwin estate. And the leadership of the Motion Picture Assocation of America (to find sources, search the web for the phrase "forever less one day"). And Dr. Seuss Enterprises, whose argument in its Eldred amicus was that an author and his heirs deserve royalties from adaptations of the author's work to media invented decades after the work's first publication.

I thought the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed indentured servitude. And even if these programs are structured not to qualify constitutionally as indentured servitude, how do they handle a graduate who faces structural unemployment in positions related to his degree?

How many streaming music and video services does your preferred media player support? And how can a new streaming music or video service arrange to be supported in your preferred media player? Finally, how should a browser-based video game play its music and sound effects? Or is the concept of a "browser-based video game" itself abhorrent to you?