Given how this is supposed to be a community of nerds, I'm surprised at how many people here are proudly stating that they don't even have a wireless router (or they choose not connect anything to it, or they don't even have an internet connection).

I mean, the whole point of technology is to improve quality of life, right?

You're missing the point. I don't have any of that technology in your list. I have a desktop PC and a phone. Having wi-fi is not going to improve the quality of my life.

The Metro screen *is* basically the start menu. You've been able to type things in the start menu to find them since at least Vista. God damn, did you even try to think your reasoning through before posting it?

Um, if you're on the Metro screen you type "notepad" and press enter. Gosh Windows is complex.

I don't have home wi-fi. (You insensitive clod.)

Except Ubuntu has a bazillion customizations.

You're entirely missing the point while getting hung up on 'repeating'.

Why should I have to write something like this:

std::map<std::string, std::map<std::string, foo_t>>::const_iterator ci = some_complex_map.begin()

...when the compiler already knows what the type of 'ci' has to be and in fact will bitch at me if I get it wrong (perhaps it's supposed to be bar_t instead of foo_t)? At that point you're just jumping through hoops to tick some box in the parser's innards.

A lot of the time, as in your example, you don't even care what the type is. You're just looking for a thing in a thing container.

Please explain how a helper class is trivial compared to a simple inline initialization.

I don't blame the guy, why stay on a sinking ship?

Especially when you're the one who blasted the holes in the hull.

but they seem to get it pretty well, at least as well as Windows.

No, they don't, it's just that the Linux enthusiasts think they do. Which is kind of the point. One personal example: I was trying to figure out how to turn on focus-follows-mouse in Ubuntu, and I couldn't find anything obvious, so I googled it. Turned out there's like 3 different way to do it, at least one of which requires installing additional packages. Who thinks that's user-friendly?

Nah, 500.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5...

Missed a lot of classes in college playing that.

now that we have a fast, cheap and ubiquitous network.

We do?

Will my software run on 7 or 8? NO.

Sorry about your crappy software. I have yet to find something that won't run on 8.

So you're saying Russia is doing this out of concern for the privacy of their beloved citizens? Would you be interested in a beautiful antique bridge in Brooklyn I have for sale?

it is difficult to get working with various Enterprise Java applications without disabling Protected Mode and completely unsecuring it

Wait, are you complaining IE is too secure?

I think it's not just about memory management but more about understanding what's really going on in the CPU while your program is running, and memory management is just a part of that.

Some of this stuff is still very relevant today. If you want to understand how a buffer overflow exploit works you need to understand what's happening in your program at the level of bits and bytes in the processor.

It wouldn't hurt to take an assembly language course, preferably one that uses some small 8-bit processor. Nothing gives you an appreciation for the mountain of layers of software piled on top of the CPU these days like having to write your own function to divide two numbers.