QNX. Sigh.

I wish every Google and Apple and Linux and Microsoft engineer will be forced to work with QNX for a week as a training session just to show them how things were supposed to be done. Same with BeOS.

I keep an old Thinkpad from 2000 around just to occasionally boot up BeOS on it and toy around a bit.

Polite? "Stupid people use Ruby?". How is that polite?

" Then we have less-smart people who use Ruby. They don't have the mental capacity or acuity to understand C++, so they see it as being complex."

Jesus, where shall I start?? Less smart people use Ruby??!!! Get real.

Ruby is very LISP like. The smartest programmers I know are into LISP, Clojure and Ruby because it allows you to construct large system by using meta-constructs at a much higher level. Seeing the forest for the trees and stuff.

Most C+ hackers I know can do lots of high-details low leave things because they are just too much control freaked to let the computer take over some of the details. And they achieve much less, however that what they achieve has higher performance, has higher speed and bloody well breaks all the time because the systems are too precisely optimized so any small disturbance causes a crash. Nightmare to work with too.

I do a lot of data logging and sensor work with scientific/engineering people, some who are very very bright. They all use Python, none use C++. It ain't because they are stupid, considering that about half have a PhD in physics.

Sorry but you are just a arrogant little nerd. Go and learn actual computer science, programming language design and software engineering on a systems level.
Hint: It's harder than low-level bitwhacking.

Is that why scp takes so long at the end? It really annoyed me today, had to transfer a file through two tunnels and a modem to Costa Rica. a 5 MB one, took forever.

Bullshit. It is a legacy thing, not a intentional incompatibility thing.

Apple basically bought OS/X from Next together with Job back in the previous century and Next was using Objective C back in the late 80's. All the Apple API's start with NS_. That stands for NextStep. Back ini the mists of time when the C++/Obj C choice was made Apple was not even involved (but Steve Jobs was). In those days a choice between C++ and Objective C was not clear cut, both languages were very new and untried. C++ only became important because Microsoft used it for their Windows API's.

Objective C compiles just fine on any platform, and Apple also uses C/C++ for much of their *NIX userland

Honestly, if Apple/Microsoft/Linus were to rewrite the entire operating system stack from scratch today I doubt that C/C++/Objective C would be used. Or at least someone would think about redesigning the languages. Momentum counts for a lot.

This. The Sykes-Picot Agreements were a bad idea and now, 100 years later, the world is paying. The fighting would have happened sooner or later in any case.

"Lost" and "Won" are very relative things when it comes to wars. The US bogged down and drained the communists in Vietnam. It did not achieve total military victory, no, but not did it did it lose the big-picture fight (the cold war) in the end either.

The heads of several other South East Asian states (Singapore, Malysia) have stated that US presence in Vietnam did state that US action in Vietnam did reduce communist influence. Eliminate, no. Reduce, yes. The US did win die Cold war without much of a shooting war too.

Wars do not have to end with military victory or loss. Nor do they have to be fought in the classic sense either. Witness peacekeeping forces in Africa. They do not (too often) get involved in shooting, nor is there much hope for something like total victory, but they do use the threat of force to limit more serious violence.

In the much larger context of the cold war the US intervention in Vietnam was something like this. A battle that showed other allies that the US was, in fact, prepared to put boots on the ground when it came down to it.

Last year I slipped on ice with my bike and broke my arm. Still hurts.
I was one the way do demo a software system to my boss. He said that usually the program crashes in a demo, not the programmer..

Seems like you took too long to type yipee there. Better luck next time. Try a few e's less maybe?

Intel was heavily invested in VLIW, and developed Itanium. That did not go well, and AMD brought out x64 and ate their lunch. Intel adopted AMD's instruction set and Itanium is basically dead now.

Same reason I cringe at Star Trek battle scenes. I I was Picard (or Worf) I would just beam a big blob of plasma straight onto the enemy bridge. Or beam their warp core out. Or just beam them all straight off their ship into a holding cell. Or to the inside of a star. OR beam the enemy warp core containment into space. Why even launch a photon torpedo? Just beam it there ASAP. I could go on and on on on.

If enemy shields is a problem just beam the photon torpedoes en masse to a point 1 second before impact on their shilds. They can't evade and you can saturate the shield with missiles until it collapses. And then go beaming away.

A transporter beam a la Star Trek is pretty much the ultimate weapon.

Breaking Bad has a classic piece of dialogue between Badger and Skinny Pete about this.

http://www.cinemablend.com/tel...

I got a chemistry set and a best friend's dad who had PhD in chemistry and was a professor at the school for explosives technology.
He brought us a bag full of the stuff put in the casing of a tank shell.

And my GF's father used to be the head of analytical chemistry in a uranium enrichment plant. He actually built a nuclear bomb.

The internet (and a lot of research in general) came from a goverment program that gave money to fairly free universities and research institution. Academic Freedom is a important principle for this reason.

Right wing theory vs left-wing science??!! Have any of you kids ever read actual left-wing stuff? Theory, theory, theory.
Go and read serious left wing things from a world socialist website or even Lenin's works. It is at about the same as the old theological debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

The Soviet Union with all its horrors was created by a bunch of intellectuals. In the end, the only non-intellectual Bolshevik, Stalin, was left standing.

See any liberal arts curriculum involving political philosophy for more examples. The left is just as theoretical as the right, if not more so.

As for quoting Monbiot on the intelligence of people? What next? Hitler claiming that Aryans are more intelligent than Slavs? Staling calling all Capitalists stupid for not understnding Lenin? Bakr al-Baghdadi calling all non-Muslims stupid because they do not understand the Koran?

Calling a whole group of people less intelligent because of their political beliefs is really the worst kind of bigotry. I can well imagine that that particular snob would do this, yes. George Monbiot is one of the most radical columnists alive, he is a nutcase.

You don't know what you are talking about.

"The page" consists of a lot of small components. If one loads the page, high bandwidth or not, just to change some small part just because you pressed a button, the server has to figure out the contents of the whole page. And it has to push back the whole UI in response to a single button.

This is a major PITA because it wreaks havoc with modularity, which is definitely a good principle in Software Engineering.

The old way sucked. And most webpages and interaction sucked for exactly that reason. It is hard to design a server to schlep the whole damn UI over again just because someone pressed a button. Using small, modular components that are updates and treated separately on the server is easier to program, faster, works better and gives you better UI.

Composability is the whole point in engineering and it is high time it is adapted in web design.