Apotheosis is here, at last!

They're quite right not to allow some shimmy shammy clone to register on the merits of it's DNA, just look at what happened with the Storm Trooper fiasco. They took one incredible bounty hunter, with mad skills and fantastic aim - and churned out millions of copies that couldn't hit the side of the huge desert crawling robot factory. They also had no appreciable hand to hand skills or the same muscle tone.

Android - it's just Linux with a shiny front end slapped on it. Most of the work was done by volunteers outside of Google. I doubt even 3% of the code found on any given Android device was made at Google, and that's being very generous. If you count the apps downloaded to it, it would be under 1%.

Chrome - wasn't this a fork of webkit or some other browser written by other people? They did a lot of work on it, but it's by no means a Google product.

Maps - I know they acquired some companies for this, not sure the extent of it though. Streetview might well be their own baby. I don't really see it as a killer app though, it's kinda fun.

I actually switched a little while ago to DuckDuckGo, after using Google for the last...um, when did Altavista start to suck? You're pretty much spot on about the first two result pages, they are filled with paid for placements. I can't seem to search on something without some retailer site(s) coming up willing to sell me the product, and I mean like 30 of them. Search for the manual for your television and you'll have to scroll right down past all the people wanting to sell that model of TV to you.

The reason is because Aero can take up 600MB of very precious video card RAM, depending on screen resolution and other factors. That's a *lot* of RAM to be losing access to just for a desktop you can't see while playing a game. That's 600MB out of the 1-2GB a typical card might have.

It doesn't matter whether the icons have a flat look or a sculpted 3D light sourced look or whatever, they are still just bitmaps that are blasted to the screen using a bitblit operation which is stupidly fast on any card made since the late 80s. Aero sucks for many other reasons, but flat icons in not even remotely one of them.

I'd rather stab myself repeatedly in the thigh with a fork than write web site software or boring old business apps. Web software is a particular kind of super dull hell, and business apps tend to be the same old thing every time, but without the added crap of having to triple handle all the data to get it from the database onto the screen.

These days I work with the CRYENGINE game engine and are working on making my own RPG game with it. There's a *lot* more challenge, and always something new and interesting to learn. I feel like I stagnated while writing all that business software, and am finally getting to grow as a programmer again.

Google, with all their rockrstar 10x programmers and engineers fail yet again. What's the point of hiring "only the best" through a series of day long gruelling interview processes and obscure ego inflating (for the interviewers) exams - when all the software they write ends up in the trash. Their only good products are the search engine, gmail (getting marginal), and youtube (bought from someone else). Two hit products for such a massive company of the world's best software engineers seems like a pretty big let down.

Nothing good ever seems to come out of these massive, lumbering, over managed companies. Their two decent products came at a time when they were much smaller. All the innovation is coming from small, lean and agile companies who take risks. Google is just the next Microsoft, ready to crest the wave any time now.

The behaviour is deterministic, it always provides you with a memory location which contains whatever random garbage was previously there. This is actually a useful feature, since c++ doesn't require you to initialise every single variable prior to use.

Most times I try and declare and initialise a variable at the same time, but there are still cases where you might need to declare it outside an if-else statement and don't want to waste cycles pushing a null value into the memory before you then overwrite it with the actual value you need.

As for marking every variable declaration with "uninitialized" - do we really need more typing in programming? No thanks!

It's pretty hard to say if anyone has tried, since I'm not running any decent intrusion detection, just my router's firewall. They'd have a pretty hard time of it in any case, since it's Linux, it runs on a user space account who's only access is to that home drive and the torrent DL folder, and it's a Power PC CPU, so there's going to be pretty much no hack that will work on it unless someone goes out and makes one for that every small use case.

Looks like I should have qualified that statement saying that if you live outside the US.

Here's the local perspective...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And a global perspective...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Singing racist lyrics as a group in a public place might actually be covered under this caveat, though IANAL, it does seem to apply:

That said, I haven't viewed the video yet, and likely won't, so I can't comment on exactly how injury inflicting their words were.

One way to test it of course, is for a lone person from that group to head to a gospel church and try singing the song there.

Free speech does not extend to hate speech. No rights are being denied here, since you do not have the right to hate speech.

Even art experts can fail at identifying the best fakes, and some paintings that might be originals are branded as fakes due to poor provenance.

I hear they print using plastic.

How could a printed copy possibly be confused with a painting? Printed copies are dead flat surfaces, while paintings have brush marks all over them and uneven application of paint.

...by the nose, straight to his own end goal - a larger pool of cheap labour skilled in the basics needed to produce web applications. By increasing the supply, they can take advantage of market economics to vastly reduce the amount of money they need to offer these people.

I'm not saying they shouldn't learn JavaScript, it's a good place to start and is pretty ubiquitous. It's just lucky for Mark that they are pushing JS and Ruby, very lucky.

Honestly though, saying all those people need to code is like saying I need to learn how to write a sonata in order to listen to music.

Most people would be capable of pushing out a few snippets of code, mostly cribbed from some website - but will flail and cause incalculable damage when they think they have 'da mad skillz bro' and start to write hundreds of lines directly running SQL script from the web page. I've seen the results when an accountant decides their use of Access and Excel means they can code big systems. It wasn't pretty, it broke down frequently, it had dozens of manual steps and adjustments to make each month and it took 5 hours to run. I left that job the second I could.