I thought the same about the iPad. I saw no need for myself and as I struggled to find needs for others, I couldn't. I was literally thinking "What the hell are they thinking".

It worked.

Since then I don't make no predictions anymore. And I try to warn occasional bystanders that make broad claims.

We'll see.

Let's say their success ratio (#products successful vs flops) is way above the rest since 2000.

It's not Evil, Bad and Wrong, but it's way too powerful. It's so powerful you can actually write your entire program with macros. This means people (like beginners) might be tempted to get too much logic in there and shit happened right there that anyone maintaining the code will have to stir or rewrite.

It's like operators overload and your numerics analogy. It's nice. Sometimes I wish i had it in Java because nicely used it's powerful. But then you can do crazy stuff with them that will confuse to hell most programmers trying to figure out what you wanted to do in the first place. That's the definition of write-only code.

You don't have to but other people might. And when it's your turn to maintain their code, then, oh shit... But it shouldn't since it's C++, you're supposed to be fluent with it.

You choose not to use them but the day you're asked to maintain someone else's code full of macros, bang, you're in (or out if you choose to leave or refuse the project of course).

.NET and Swing don't change the language, they add APIs. STL and Boost ... Well, let's not even get started. In C++ you can write your entire program with the C99 preprocessor, there is not even any need to write C++ to do things. The preprocessor itself is turing complete. Talk about over engineering.

Are you comparing the complexity of Java vs C++ (as a language, not as a runtime)? Are you kidding?

You can write convoluted code in any language, this is true. But C++ code can be made UNREADABLE as well as convoluted. In Java, there is only the one way of writing things. You can architect them differently if you want, but there's usually one way to write them. In C++, you have a hundred. THIS is the problem with C++. And let's not even talk about macros which is one more way to write things. You can actually write your whole program only through macros. Macros are turing-complete. They're just a language inside the language... This is pure madness.

If the masses could care less, it means they already care a bit. See, it's not all dark and gloomy.

Yes, it is you. 123456 has the same chances of winning than ANY other combination. Maybe you should take statistics.

WM 5/6 was a piece of shit of a great magnitude. You mush be some kind of shill to even pretend it was worth anything. You had to reboot the phone basically on a daily basis to get anything running. The second day the photo app would stop working, the next one the alarm clock and the third day your phone would not even ring when called. I got several of them at the time.

Not mentionning you had to spend your days in the task manager killing the apps that you launched during the last hour to get back some memory and hope to run other apps.

Ah, and updating the OS or apps for that matter would take 205 steps on your computer.

I got an iPhone 1 (a gift) in early 2008 and the difference was just that the shit was working. It was inferior to both my former windows phones in terms of spec (ALL of them save the screen size) but the shit was just running smooth. What a relief! I remember the firs time I updated iOS. I realized the phone had been running for TWO MONTH without a reboot. Whishful thinking coming from WM5/6. And it didn't even have apps !

To all the naysayers that will deny Apple their "revolution", man, there was one and of a great magnitude. But it was not the hardware. It was software that worked on the hardware. This made all the difference.

You do realize the link you shared clearly shows that Windows Phone marketshare is INCREASING ?

The troll force is strong in this one.

I once read an article which was entitled something like "How to win more at lotery". I though it was a fake at first glance, but it turned out pretty informative.

Yes, 123456 has the same chance of winning than any other combination. But if you win, you will share the prize with all the other people that played this very combination. It turned out the article was about choosing combinations that were the least likely to be chosen by someone else.

I thought it was smart at the time.

Also, don't forget they overfucked Iran's nuclear facilities infecting PCs that were on no network at all. It worked for more than 5 years. So all in all, network is just an accelerator, but they can get into anything with plugs. Fill the network plug, USB slots, CD-Rom drives and every other mean of communication from the computer and then it's become worthless.

Well, you're right on one thing: unplugging is probably the only option. Given the gazillion lines of code running on any net-connected machine, there is just no way in hell all this code will ever be 100% secure. Given that anyone in the world can find a flaw and then market it for the others, I'd say the future looks pretty dark on that front.

The paper is interesting but quite idealist. No OS, driver, app is going to be rewritten with this in mind. And we need ALL of them to be rewritten. There is, for all intents and purposes, an infinity of vulnerabilities in every system.

Yeah, today is that kind of a day.

It's all well and good, but how do you propose to do that ?