DOS batch files don't have their own TLD, but I'm using a Perl one...

The moment this filter has been first mentioned, schools and counties passed resolutions requiring the use of such filter and making it illegal to turn it off. This included proposals for mandatory proxies that hijack connections to Wikipedia to make sure no one tries to work around the filter.

So I say such a filter even existing is not an option, even if it sounds good on the first glance.

Depends on the country. The last time I had to create a Google Docs account, they required typing in a code sent via SMS to the phone number you provided, without a way to skip it. The message included the words "in your country", so I guess the rules differ in different parts of the world.

Fortunately, I had an old SIM card from DebConf in Bosnia that still worked :)

The whole concept of a "species" is broken. Being able to produce fertile offspring (even if it was a strict 1/0 value), is not fully transitive. For example, there are ring species which form a continuum where individuals at ends can't interbred even though they live in the same geographical area.

Except that we're talking about C++, WinRT doesn't have C++ bindings in any of Microsoft's languages. There is something called C++/CX, which is a yet another language incompatible with anything else (and somehow advertised by Microsoft as real C++).

C++11 requires them.

Except where they don't, and that seems to be the majority of calls I used recently. For example, all console calls (WriteConsoleOutput(), etc). Or, character classification (iswupper(), towupper()).

This is supported only in a couple of conversion functions, you can't do I/O, fopen(), etc via it. Lengthier discussion.

Mostly a waste of time -- instead of wrangling with just a bizarre platform, you need to fight both a bizarre platform and a bizarre compiler.

Microsoft keeps doing strange things with no obvious purpose other than reducing portability. For example, using their proprietary APIs where a better ANSI C version already exists. Or, using a two-byte encoding instead of UTF-8 (this breaks characters above U+FFFF, with badly incomplete hacks to re-fix them, C++ streams, etc). Or, those "security enhanced" replacements for most ANSI C functions that are actually less secure than originals (fopen_s(), etc). All while withholding basic standard features, like inttypes.h.

If you're developing something Windows-only, MSVC might be adequate, but for anything portable, forget it.

You can't use a browser without adblock these days and retain sanity. And unless you decide to throw away your privacy, you'll block trackers like Google Analytics or StatCounter.

So join me on the mission: drive apparent Firefox usage stats to 0.

The issue was, POSIX does not guarantee any ordering of writes unless you call fsync(). A lot of folks wrongly thought that writing a new version of a file, closing it then renaming over the old name is perfectly safe and atomic, guaranteeing there's either the old version or the new one. The rename call indeed guarantees that the directory has either both the old and temp file, or only the new one, but does not say anything about the new file's contents -- you need to at least fdatasync() it.

So unless a new barrier call is added, there is no way around fsync() - and the ext3 slowness that was after big flamewars ported to ext4 is the kernel fsyncing stuff behind your back even if you don't request it, to pander to buggy code.

I don't know what MythTV keeps fsycing for, but I guess they had something that requires consistency, which currently can't be done without fsync. All you can do are clever tricks like WAL in sqlite, or filesystem specific calls like btrfs' features.

It's long overdue for POSIX to get a call that says: "all writes to descriptor A which happened before must be no less durable than all future writes to descriptor B (possibly A == B)". This way, it's possible that after a crash neither A nor B hits the platters, A but not B, or both -- but it's impossible to get B but not A. Such a call has been proposed a few times, but never actually got added.

When spying on your own family (you asshole!), you have access to client computers, and can install your own SSL certificates, or an outright keylogger. Common software can detect keyloggers and that can get you into trouble when shit hits the fan, so a SSL certificate with a proxy on the router, while being more Rube Goldbergesque, is safer.

(Sorry for potentially helping a home despot, but in order to be secure, you need to know what the enemy can do, so hiding this discussion wouldn't help.)