I'm developing for Windows first where the general practice is for applications to ship with whatever DLLs they need rather than install them in shared folders, the windows\system directory or somewhere else on the PATH. Otherwise DLL-hell will surely follow.

Ultimately the application may end up an embedded device, where space is at a premium. In that instance I'll probably have to static link but it depends on licencing issues.

Is there really a large audience demand to see a dramatisation about a sociopath whose company made computers and gadgets?

It breaks down to about 25MB icu and 13 MB of QT on QT 5.4 on Windows.

Most desktop OSes would have services that could provide that information and do encodings and transformations between character sets. I don't see that QT needs to ship all of it. Aside from that my app is localizable so I can't do away with the way its implemented either.

My, aren't you the patronising one?

It's modular but it's still got bloat. I'm writing an application which has a fairly modest UI that has a main window, some tabs and dialogs. The weight of the runtime I have to ship with it - icu*, Qt5core, Qt5Guid.dll, Qt5Widgets runtimes is nearly 38MB. Most of the modular bits with the exception of webkit - (multimedia, networking, OpenGL, SVG etc.) are comparatively lightweight compared to the slab of unavoidable "core" stuff that you need whether you like it or not.

For a while chrome was better than safari but not any more. Safari consumes much less resources than chrome and it handles multiple tab loads much better on my boxen. The final straw was when chrome deleted every single bookmark during a synch. Lost everything and no way to recover it. I tried restoring a backup but chrome just resynched and erased it again . With safari time machine works beautifully.

My faborite browser is Firefox but that's only because it has the zotero plug in.

This article is total rubbish

They're still dog fighting. There's even an educable show about this. Some of that included the last Iraq war.

...except they haven't "wasted a trillion dollars". The trillion dollar figure is for the cost of the plane for it's entire lifetime including the 20 or 30 so years from today it's supposed to remain operational.

Yep that's the problem. Drilling down on this one sees how slippery this greased pig is. Example. Company zflix offers consumers a swell deal: they will pay the consumers bill for anything over their current data cap up to the number of bytes they stream from zflix. This if the consumer has a low end 1gb data cap and streams 4gb from zflix then zflix pays the differential to the consumer (at some winky wink preferred bulk rate to Comcast). The net effect is the same as if Comcast had ransomed zflix but that would be barred by the net neutral ruled while the scheme above would not.

Since consumers already can purchase different data caps and different late cues and different up down symmetries none of that shenanigans is disallowed. The only thing that saves our collective asses is possible competition for ISPs.

I suspect that for conventional services that the easy to apply rule is that if a competing ISP can deliver a service without exemptions then woe to the ISP trying to claim exemption. It's smart to keep it end-user-pays to keep the com casts from ransoming the net flixes,

Even so it's hard to see how this works automatically even under U.S. Rules. Let's assume that in a neutral world there is some advantage to be had for a better stream. Would not a Netflix competitor want to gain that? And the way they can do that is by offering to pay the consumers bill for a them to get a better connection over a private network backbone.

In a related note I just had a surprising experience with HBO Now. The picture quality and startup buffering time were massively better than I'm used to from amazon or Netflix. I'm puzzled why. In doubtful that HBO has figured out some superior codec all on their own. So this means either they are getting some privileged delivery channel or that what I get from amazon or Netflix is less than the best because they are trying to save money with lower data rates or more overloaded servers.

I should mention I have only a 6mbs Comcast connection. This it's not like Netflix and amazon are trying to serve the lowest common denominator. That connection is the lowest Comcast teir.

Finally I want to dump the odious Comcast and go to DSL but I have to sign up for a year and I'm afraid DSL might suck. Any opinions?

Only the very lowest levels of programming as a profession are so simple that you can get away with being a completely untrained bricklayer. Once you actually get to the point of building anything remotely interesting, ideas you would have been exposed to in academia quickly become relevant.

Even in the more interesting skilled skilled trades you can't get away from "academic" instruction of some kind.

Sure. Lets pander to the flavor of the month corporation just because they are the trendy thing today. Let's forget about the DECADES of work and progress that has gone into the collective body of Free Software. Let's also give a big "fuck you" to all of the nice contributors while we are at it.

It's Apple that's the newcomer playing the jerk imposing restrictions that are entirely unnecessary.

Freedom is not a Mad Max free-for-all where Apple can try to be the boss of the Thunderdome.

You must be a sociopath then, or work for one.

That's really the only reason to not use something with a copyleft license.

All the GPL does is enforce that "everyone plays nice" with a shared resource. If you can't do that, then you're an anti-social jackass that should be shunned.

Stick to the LGPL and it's not even any more viral than anything else.

Was it all uniform though? As an IT guy, I can relate to black listing certain types of updates and preventing Microsoft from just force feeding updates to everyone.

It's the perpetual problem of Microsoft not really being responsible with the hardware vendor really being the one on the hook. They are likely to suffer for Microsoft's mistakes.