Hey, I didn't mean it all to come off that way. What I meant is that someone would have to be at least gullible, green and rich. I personally feel that cleaner diesel would have been a better way to go.

What the poster said was correct. You are Wrong. If the car goes over a certain speed then the GAS engine kicks in and charges the batteries faster than the draw on them. In essence the car is running on gasoline then.

Now for all the problems of this car.
1. You can get the same "gas" powered car for over 10k-20k less. 10k will buy a LOT of gas. I mean a freaking lot of gas.
2. Nobody knows what the EXTRA cost of maintaining the Volt will be. This does not include the batteries, but just the extra crap required for the car.
3. The batteries. I, and many others keep cars 10+ years. Will those batteries remain as good as they do day 1? Day 1000?
4. What happens to all those batteries when they are replaced? Yes GM and others can handle a "small" amount of cars, but what if this went large scale?

In my opinion someone would have to totally hate the environment and be rich to buy one of these things, or they have to be tricked in to thinking that it is actually good for the environment and given incentives to buy it from the government. So this car must be marketed to stupid rich green people.... I guess we will see how many of these things sell VS their gas only counterparts.
   

I don't know C++, and am not trolling here, but my use case is this:
I need to write a client side program with a somewhat good GUI on it. It needs to run well on OSX, Microsoft Windows and Linux. How would I do that in C++? Is there something like SWING for C++? If not is there something like SWT? Also, I would prefer not to worry about specific versions of Linux. What I mean by that is that while I love KDE, I also want the app to run on Gnome or whatever somewhat normal GUI is on Linux. One last point is that I would strongly prefer some WYSIWYG design tool for the GUI layout and a strong IDE support. I have coded enough "Buttons" by hand, and don't really ever want to go back to that again, if I can avoid it. I also would love if it had the ability to understand what platform it is on and adjust to have the "feel" of the native OS. So things like Apple+Q would quit the application.

One last thing is how does Objective C compare to C++? Can either or both do what I mentioned above?

Thanks

You are exactly correct! I would have considered one "if" the economy wasn't totally sucking. An unemployment rate of 10+%, with an administration and congress that seems to hate business is more than enough to make me drop all consideration for buying a new 3D TV. This kind of sucks, because we could really use a new TV now, but we will just have to do without. I have two other co-workers in the same boat.

So I wonder what level of Hell he is on? My guess is 1 :-)

Hey, I have an idea, how about "if" Adobe wanted to go ahead and create FLASH for the Iphone and give it away? Wait they are not allowed to do that. How about if Oracle wanted to develop Java for the iPhone and also give it way? Nope they can't either. There isn't any good technical reason, but just a political one like you mentioned. Apples desire to kill anything that isn't theirs (Sounds like Microsoft to me).

So for those developers of Flash and Java (client side), you have a choice, learn Objective C or move to a different platform. Yes some developers are creating iPhone apps, but others are migrating over to other platforms (Google). Also, yes I know about the cross compilers, but that is an unfortunate workaround.

At the end of the day CUSTOMERS want Flash and Java on their phones but Apple is being a prick about it and not allowing it. Good competition will cause them to change their minds about this.

I hoped that this wouldn't start some type of language war. That was not my intent. If you want to develop a cross platform application that has a GUI and runs on multiple platforms, that can be done with many languages, but not as well as java.

So technically yes C can do cross platform stuff, as I am sure a lot of languages do, but creating a cross platform gui is a quite a bit more of a challenge. Yes I know that you "could" load things like KDE and like on various platforms, but for most people that is a real hassle.

The myth about simple cross-platform development in Java is just that, a myth. Anybody with cross-platform Java experience will attest to this. Java, as a language, has grown stagnant, while C# has continued to evolve.

I and our team of 100+ Java developers will disagree with your statement of Java and cross-platform development. We find it excellent. Is it perfect? Nope, but in my opinion it would be a 9 out of 10 with the next closest competitor being.... Well there isn't really any close competitor but I guess we could give the C language a 2 out of 10. Perhaps Ruby is good but I haven't looked at it. Granted I am talking more about the JVM that Java itself. However, Java like other languages has evolved quite a bit in the last few years.

Does Java have the radical changes that say languages like SCALA have? Nope, but then again it shouldn't have that. Is it stagnant? Not at all.

The core difference you see between any of the Microsoft languages and the JVM languages is that the JVM languages somewhat try to work within the community. They also want to maintain binary (class) backward compatibility. Microsoft is an absolute dictator with their language and even to a large part their tools. This does have it's advantages, in that stuff comes out quicker, but then again, if you are a business and built you lifeblood one VB6 to have it brushed aside by Microsoft, you might be a little angry about that ruthless dictator approach. If you are some contractor type of person who wants constant change in the core framework to make your life easier (at the cost of compatibility), then you would probably like this approach.

So in short things like closures will be in Java 7 (not a small task), and Java the language is not at all stagnant. Cross platform development, testing and support is excellent with Java. We use OSX, Ubuntu, Microsoft Windows XP and 7, and RedHat with no problems.

I agree totally. I also own all the R&C games for the PS3, and LBP. The sad part is how hard you Sony pushed LBP to have it sell like it did. Granted the game has some great legs but it is still sad. Then you compare R&C to Resistance and you see why Insomniac would focus on FPS for the PS3.

I believe what Sony really hopes is that it will help developers create games for the Wii and PS3. The difference between the two will not be that huge other than one has HD. However, the huge problem for Sony is that this controller isn't in the hands of the 32+ MILLION PS3 owners. The other problem is that the vast majority of PS3 owners currently don't really buy the "casual" games and thus the games don't reflect the market base. Now Sony getting the PS3 down to 300 in the U.S.A has helped a ton, but the market here still buys the hard core games for the PS3 a lot more.

Nahh, your screwed either way.

I worked for a large corporation. Not huge, but large enough to find shortcuts to covering employees. Instead of having insurance, they acted as the insurer and had Aetna act as a "manager" of the plan. Not only was this cheaper for them, they got out of all the regulations governing insurance. I had a kid, and they denied coverage because he wasn't a member at the time of his receiving care. But, I couldn't make him a member without a birthdate, so I fought with them for months. They I got canned, and lost access to mechanism to continuing fighting.

Long story short: State bureau of insurance couldn't do anything. Hospital hit me with $5,000 in bills, and the corporation probably got a tax write off.

I used to be capitalist until I saw capitalism in action.

Dude that is only one small part of Capitalism, the other part is having competition among employers willing to pay good people what they are worth. The great thing about it vs the government trying to take care of you is that you have some (little) control of the situation. In your case you quit that place and probably went to a better job. Someone smart is probably thinking of a way to provide healthcare (this would be my company), at a cheaper and better way. Without competition there will be 0 innovation. You may be too young to remember, but the phone company use to have a monopoly in the U.S.A. and a LOT of people used similar arguments back to try and stay that way. Thank God that didn't happen.

Lastly, I was never a Socialist, but have seen it in action. It sucks bad. On paper it may look good but in practice it sucks.