I agree that the best programmer balances, but you just can't use templates in C, or smart pointers, or inheritance, and C doesn't have a standard supporting modern concepts like threading or regexes. It is always a tradeoff, but the fact that one of the best programmers wants to use C, where doing math on an aribtrary numeric value requires either 10 or 12 depending on platform functions or type coercion that creates unexpected behavior is bad because it is painful.

Also you seem to be setting your expectations too high for a C++ programmer. Every Java, C#, Python, etc -basically, every other language, is already doing virtual function calls in their loops. They create garbage objects all the time. Just because C++ focuses on performance doesn't mean that because performance is hard the average C++ developer is a retard while other language devs are geniuses. I bet 90% of Java developers don't even understand how virtual functions work because it is always on in their language of choice.

If I was writing something low level myself, I would always use C++ because it provides me much more productivity, clarity in code (if I write it properly and don't hack everything together with compiler exploits) and access to paradigms C can't emulate cleanly (OO at the least, but C++ lambdas do functional ok, I'd argue that without pure function enforcement it is lacking, but that is tangential) . If I was working with a development team of competant peers, I would still love C++ because their code will make more sense if they write in the feature set of C++ that promotes clean design and development. But if I was walking into complete strangers? Using C++ is insane, because it has a bottomless pit around every corner to snare a project and has glyphic compiler and runtime errors because the language itself is so hackneyed.

Linus is like Bill Nye or John Carmack. I can listen to what they have to say forever. I absolutely want him to do a ranting podcast or blog rants or something (Linus like Steve Yegge!)

They were sued out for internet explorer because they were using anti-competitive practices to stifle the entire internet ecosystem. MSE is only for Windows and can only be for Windows so Microsoft making it might as well have it considered a part of the OS since it is only there to solve the problem of bad user privileges that have plagued Windows for 20 years.

So don't browse Reddit, Slashdot, etc at -1. The comment rating system has evolved to counter the signal to noise ratio and keep communities going. It is exactly why Reddit does so well (besides the power of hive mind circlejerk and percieved exclusivisty and hipsterdom posting on a site with 15 million daily pageviews... ). Youtube has it, it is how the two top rated comments are picked using an algorithm that considers time since post against upvote count.

If they made it a full blown Reddit style comment system, they wouldn't need bandages like this. But this is not a bandage, it is to try to attach a comment trail to people for advertisers to consume.

I was a lurker on SD for ~5 years, finally decided to make an account, got excellent karma, etc - and realized I can't post in any discussion I do modding in. I find it impossible to spend mod points, because any topic I get engaged enough in to reasonably moderate posts I want to contribute to. I much prefer the reddit system to the SD system in that regard, especially since the quality of posts has fallen since so few people are actively spending their mod points it seems.

FOSS desktops were never meant to be competitive. The argument is flawed from the start because Microsoft sells Windows to make money on the consumer desktop, whereas the Gnome and KDE projects are groups of smart tinkerers building big things in their proverbial back yards. They take their projects the direction they want them in, and don't have to obey market forces because they are not invested in the market.

Of course, at that, Unity is an example of Canonical trying to make a financial gambit out of Linux - it falls flat on its face because it doesn't have the treasure chest to do what Apple did with OSX though to force their desktop style on everyone. I do agree though, Windows 8 is doomed, and I am actively trying to switch anyone in my family I can off the sinking M$ ship to Mint or Ubuntu asap. So far, so good, actually - my mothers eee PC runs Unity 2d just fine, and she actually finds it easier to get software by just clicking software center and searching.

Meanwhile, everybody of any age can learn the fastest and retain the most knowledge when at play, not work. Of course, that predates the most fundamental problem in education, that if the children themselves have no desire to learn and have no engagement with the environment or material, they might as well not be there, because everything you force feed them goes in one ear and usually out the other, and infrequently out onto a standardized test to be forgotten thereafter. And that is a psychological problem, because children today are either emotionally damaged by abusive or absent parents or spoiled into being the center of the universe with very few fitting between the extremes. (experience: around 15 cousins worth of exposure to both ends of the spectrum).

KDE 4 takes too long to start up, Gnome 3 uses javascript to implement the desktop. Both are laughable. I want windows that I can drag, drop, resize, alt-tab between, that will start quickly. All that is missing is good control interfacing / drag and drop dock in XFCE to make me switch.

Intel is observably slowing down since AMD can't keep up. They are using thermal paste in their latest chips, for example, instead of metal solders to cut corners. Likewise, Nvidia is marketing a $300 graphics card on a 200mm die as a $500 top end product because AMD can't match the graphical horsepower of Kepler per square die area.

Unity has evolved into the OSX Dock with less configuration options. The search menu doesn't cover the screen anymore, so its more like the current gen start menu in windows. I agree with the sentiment, I use XFCE on any distro I actively run, but Unity is great for my grandparents who just need application icons to click.

Darn it Intel, and I was looking forward to Ivy Bridge. But if you use the money I give you to try to usurp my freedom and privacy for profit, you are never getting another cent from me.

More PCIE is great for servers. Expect the next 5 - 10 years see all the OpenCL / CUDA tinkering on the supercomputer market trickle down to other easily parallelizable tasks like web page generation, and we will migrate from clusters of 8 core budget processors to one rig with tons of PCIE bandwidth and quad GPUs doing all the work. Especially if they can get a combined ~24 gigs of ram with something like a 7970.5 with double the ram.

Strangely, people remain more partial to giving tax breaks on hybrid cars or recycling that if everyone switched over would produce less than .1% change in our emissions, versus giving a tax credit to anyone without kids. The latter won't stop the catastrophe that will hit us this century, but if everyone got on board maybe we could get our population down to ~5 billion in a couple hundred years in time for everyone to get first world quality living without having the planet go runaway greenhouse on us.

In terms of home power, nuclear power is insanely cheap. Specifically Thorium power. There is not much reason we could not power cars with miniature nuclear generators if we put enough research into it so that crashing into them doesn't leak radiation everywhere, but right now that is not feasible, so mobile power would still be an issue.

The biggest reason it isn't used internationally is mainly because every government is scared of a meltdown even though any modern Nuclear engineer would build a reactor which has a non reactive default state, that even if catastrophic failure happens it can not melt down.

Very few of those reactor designs have ever been put in practice (I don't know of any that have) because of the perpetual banning of new reactors in many parts of the world.

The other reason is the massive up front costs, mainly because we have had this international armistice against it for two decades, nobody has the manfacturing tech to make these reactors in a rigorous patterned way.

So it is a perpetual failure, but if we had sustainable nuclear power with the modern safe reactors, specifically Thorium power, energy costs would probably drop in the long run because a single reactor can last a hundred years and the fuel costs nothing compared to the costs of maintaining the plant or building it in the first place or staffing it properly. But modern designs would not require as much oversight if their failure state is to power down.

I'd rather us just do a great currency conversion, and make the lowest denomination a whole dollar. That might not be fine grained enough now, but in a decade of the increasing inflation we will be getting, that will quickly level out.

More importantly, we could just all around eliminate cents at once. Would be a great switch over. We could print $1, $5, $10, and 20% coins, and have bills for $50 and $100. We wouldn't need a higher currency because any large purchase is already done via credit or check, and checks are going as fast as traditional currencies are.