I have a few objections to that, as nice as it is for what it's trying to be.

The first is covered by the "Is there any kind of Âpresenter screen in Impressive?" FAQ. (Or more directly, the "No, and there is currently no proper way (or plans) to implement such a thing" answer.) There's sort of a half-assed workaround that gets some of the way there, but a half-assed workaround is still half-assed.

The second is that I don't think PDF is a good delivery medium for a lot of presentations. A lot of people (especially here) will decry things like fancy effects and animations, and when used without purpose they're distracting and obnoxious. However, they can also be used very well, to clarify relationships or show how a system transitions from state-to-state and stuff like that. I get the feeling that PDF is a bit more capable here than I give it credit for, but I still think it's pretty poor in comparison to something in the PPT/Impress/Keynote genre.

Third, it's only a viewer, which leaves open the question of what you author the PDFs in. The example slides are Beamer, and as much of a fan of Latex as I am for documents*, I think it's a pretty poor fit for most presentations. Partly this goes to my previous point, but I also think that presentations are a medium that minimizes most of Latex's strengths and maximizes its weaknesses.

(* Actually this is untrue. I hate Latex. :-) But like PPT, it stands out as being by far the best of a bad lot.)

Like you say, to each their own, but I think it's not for me.

Keynote is free now with Macs and iOS devices and free online for everyone.

Are you sure about that? I tried signing into iCloud with the credentials I use for iTunes, and it said "Your Apple ID must be used to set up iCloud on an OS X or iOS device before you can use iCloud.com."

Did I go to the wrong place? Or can I set up an account even if I don't own a machine?

it's easier to type "17 25 4 12" than "17 25 4 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.

Let's try that again not making up new HTML tags: ...it's easier to type "17 [enter] 25 [enter] 4 [enter] 12" than "17 [comma] 25 [comma] 4 [comma] 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.

I would vote Excel in that contest. To me, comparing Excel to Python/matplotlib harkens a lot of the comparison of something like Python to a compiled language. The former gives you a REPL that lets you interact with your language easily, you can make changes and see them reflected without recompiling, etc. Well, Excel takes that one step further: with it, you don't have to do anything: as you change the input data, the calculated data changes immediately. With Python and matplotlib (at least as much as I've seen it), you don't have to recompile but you do have to re-run your script or take some other action besides just changing the data to get it to regraph (or else start writing your own wrapper).

Or not everything is graphing either. For instance, suppose you're picking between different mortgages and want to compare a few different scenarios. You can have cells for the interest rate, nominal loan time, points, extra prepayments, etc. and then have cells to calculate the total interest paid, actual loan time, etc. Want to see what an additional 1% does to your rate? Change 3.5% to 4.5% and... you see the effect.

Finally, I think spreadsheets often make data entry easier as well as just looking at tables easier. You can just grab and resize columns if something doesn't fit, as opposed to go and manually respace things. Entering data going down in a spreadsheet column is about as easy as it gets because you have an enter button on your 10-key: it's easier to type "17 25 4 12" than "17 25 4 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.

At least personally, when I use a spreadsheet instead of going to Python/matplotlib or something else, those are usually the reasons why.

Second, he for your analogy basically stood outside and asked for some secrets and the homeowner yelled them back at him.

That's like saying someone who breaks into a house by throwing a brick through the window merely lets go of a brick when it has a particular trajectory and the glass just got out of their way.

Sure there were some incremental changes that took advantage of newer technologies, some new UI changes that I am not sure if it makes things better

This is going to sound like a shill, but I promise it's not; I've actually been really impressed with the Office UI changes post-2007. (For purposes of this discussion, let's forget about whether the ribbon itself was a good idea (I am actually pretty indifferent, to be honest) and just assume it's here to stay.) A few years back I went to work on a PowerPoint presentation in 2010 on a shared computer, than later continued work using 2007 on my own. And I definitely missed some of the changes -- where 2010 made much more accessible some operations that were more buried in 2007. And recently I was doing some collaborative work in Word 2013, and there were a couple minor but still nice changes to the way comments and track-changes were displayed in comparison to what I was used to (and have reason to believe changed since 2010).

I'm by no means a heavy Office user -- there will be weeks that go by where I almost don't open any Office programs. But at the same time, (1) they are making UI improvements and (2) I definitely don't think you can dismiss UI improvements for programs like these -- in some sense, 98% of the program is the UI for something like Word. Word's not doing any heavy computation behind the scenes that's the real thing you're interested in.

OTOH, it is my wish that no one use MS Powerpoint anymore. It is dated and ugly

There's not a lot of good choices. And by "not a lot", I mean... pretty much 0, to be honest. Keynote might be one, but I haven't really used it and my standard line is that I don't want to spend a thousand dollars on presentation software, even if it does come with a free computer. (My other standard line -- re. Hackintoshes -- is that I try to have grown out of pirating and if Apple doesn't want me to give them money for a working legit copy, then fine, I wont.) Some other options like some of the HTML presentation libraries are kind of intriguing, and I haven't had cause to play around with them -- but I'm tempted they wouldn't be worth the added hassle of using separate programs to make a bunch of images and then having those images sit around in separate files.

And as tired as PPT is, Impress is still basically shit in comparison. PowerPoint is pretty much the best of a bad lot, IMO.

Seriously, for performance reasons this dev-team bypassed malloc of all things; do you really want to assert that they wouldn't have bypassed a bounds-checker?

How would they have bypassed the bounds-checker? About the only way would have been to say int[] all_my_programs_data = new int[1000000000] and then write an interpreter for their own language that uses that array as its data store!

Let's take the example from XKCD: "HAT (500 letters)". To read past the end of the "HAT", they would have had to manually copy that string to some communal store, like all_my_programs_data, and then read past the end. Aside from completely ignoring the language runtime and implementing your own on top, in a language with enforced bounds checking you would not have been able to read past the end of "HAT"!

I've only clicked on your reply a couple minutes ago, but aside from "change the language runtime to no longer enforce bounds checks", I literally cannot think of any other way you would bypass a language's bounds checks.

Everything else, like overruns, overreading, etc is a result of that decision.

No it isn't! It's almost entirely orthogonal!

The OpenBSD malloc that they bypassed makes exploits of already compromised programs harder; that's why Theo refers to "exploit mitigation". If OpenSSL didn't have the overread to begin with, the fact that they replaced malloc would be a questionable decision but wouldn't have led to any exploit. And even with a hardened allocator (or most hardened allocators, anyway), the exploit is still there, it's just much harder to get anywhere near as much confidential information.

That's the only way that they aren't orthogonal: the two mistakes reinforce each other on OpenBSD. In all other respects, they are completely independent.

While I broadly agree with your argument, I have to point out that the heartbleed exploit was due to the OpenSSL devs forgoing the system's malloc implementation and rolling their own abstraction for performance reasons.

No. No it wasn't. The Heartbleed exploit was a classic buffer overread bug that would have been prevented by any language with bounds checking.

On OpenBSD only (for some definitions of only), this bug would have been rendered harder to exploit because of OpenBSD's hardened allocator. An additional problem was OpenSSL's custom allocator and their lack of testing with the system one. Had they not done that, it would have been much harder to exploit on OpenBSD -- but only OpenBSD would have been helped (again, for some definitions of only), and the root cause of the Heartbleed bug was still there.

Show me an OS with more than 1% market that has a kernel and network stack that is not written in C/C++.

I'd argue that's bad too. (Some sample evidence: Linux kernel buffer overflow (2013). Linux KVM buffer overflow (2013). Remote Linux buffer overflow that could potentially lead to arbitrary code execution (2014). Integer overflow seemingly leading to buffer overflow in FreeBSD (2013). Windows 8 double free vulnerability (2014). etc.) There needs to be a small kernel of code that is in something very low-level, but honestly most of what is in current OS "kernels" (and I don't think that term applies to a piece of software with tens of millions of lines of code) doesn't have to be. Java isn't the right thing and maybe you don't even want something GC'd, but I also think C isn't either.

With so called "safe" languages people are less vigilinte because they can get away with being lazy and not really understanding what is going on.

[Citation needed]

In my experience, this might be true if you start talking about performance. It becomes easy to create and discord oodles of objects on the heap unnecessarily or whatever.

But I don't find myself becoming less vigilant when I'm working in a more abstract language. I find myself thinking more about the problem and less about implementation details.

Don't know... I got it from here. I'm not even sure I clicked the link. Anyway, the article doesn't include either "EITC" or "earned" in it.

Considering that 47% of Americans have a true tax liability of zero or less and that is caused mainly because of those "credits and stuff", then yes, the vast majority aren't straightforward but it is true that the IRS has all the necessary info once you enter all the required SSN.

First, the 47% is unusually high because of the recession; usually, it's a bit lower. Second, while you're true that most of the remainder will get the zero income-tax liability from credits, there's a substantial minority who don't have income enough to get above the standard deduction (e.g. students and non-workers). Finally, like you acknowledge, I don't think that "has credits" even maps very well to saying the return isn't straightforward for purposes of this discussion.

A good coder with skills in secure coding will do fine with C.

I conclude from this and the list of security vulnerabilities in real life that there is no such thing as "a good coder with skills in secure coding."

Or at least no such thing as a project that only employs or accepts contributions from such programmers.