I sort of agree, if we could snap our fingers and make the transition to 100% robots today. The problem in my mind is the transition period, like there will be a lot of problems with the humans 'losing their fucking minds' over all the robots on the road.

Let me preface this by saying .. I could be wrong, but .. I seem to recall that ZIP files, even when password protected, have the filenames themselves 'in the open', which would mean they could be easily scanned. Your contents are protected by the password, but as others have already pointed out, the strength of that password might be weak in many cases. I believe the only way out here is to use a different technology, for example 7zip's password mechanism will encrypt the filenames themselves in addition to the content (IIRC).

China is widely recognized as being 'ahead' in the AI 'race'. But .. their Internet is also dissociated from the rest of the world. So I have to wonder what an AI trained on the "Chinese Internet" would be like, I suspect it would have a rather different personality than ChatGPT.

Google's search service has always been my go-to service for many years (actually almost since I started reading slashdot, many years ago). All of their tweaks and enhancements, I felt could be justified. But this? This is not really a fair process. I can't see how this will benefit users to find the things they need on the web. As such I will be reconsidering the search engine I'm using in my firefox search widget. Duck Duck go these days seems pretty good.

Certainly UI is a matter of opinion, and you may argue about responsiveness. But "doesn't use as many resources" has pretty much been proven at this point to be utter BS.

http://wanem.sourceforge.net/

" - We identified a number of factors that mitigate the impact of this bug. In particular, we discovered that it was fixed on May 21, 2013 (between the releases of glibc-2.17 and glibc-2.18). Unfortunately, it was not recognized as a security threat; as a result, most stable and long-term-support distributions were left exposed (and still are): Debian 7 (wheezy), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 & 7, CentOS 6 & 7, Ubuntu 12.04, for example. "

So it's actually already been fixed. All that's needed here is for some distributions to push the fix out.

Has anyone else noticed how much nicer Microsoft has been getting (with respect to supporting open standards) now that their market share is dropping? Smells like hypocrisy to me (I say that, but of course I want native support for these formats).

MKV and FLAC are not "geeky". MKV is simply a superior container format for video. Xvid has been on the way out for awhile now, and FLAC is necessary for people that truly care about audio quality, so it's more of an audiophile format. It could be said those people are "audio geeks", I suppose.

I prefer my Turkey, about a month ago. (missing option!) :)

Speaking as a Canadian, where it gets dark at 4:30pm, I hate you.

OK. :) Here's your $0 back.

Cranky 9 to 5ers are what make the software industry go 'round! More seriously, management practice (among other things) are what generally cause the pessimism and cynicism to set in. IF you want to prevent this, the best way is to be your own manager; i.e. start your own business. But of course this comes with other personal costs.

Ah.. I wish it were that simple!

Unfortunately, because of third party libraries, you don't actually have a choice whether or not you want to use templates.

Because of STL, you don't actually have a choice either.

There are enough libraries using that junk that,as any developer of a large C++ system can attest, at some point you are forced to use them, unless you take the extreme stance that you are going to program everything yourself. That approach may work fine for (some) open source projects, but not in the real world.

Also, most people will berate you if you try to write your own list or hash map, instead of the STL. So in essence, there is also a peer pressure to use them.

So yes, while it is "techanically" possible to not use them, in practice, they always find a way into your project, like it or not. And I choose not to like it. :)

What follows is all IMHO, of course you are welcome to your own opinion as well.

I've struggled with large C++ codebases on a number of different projects, and while I admit that it is a powerful language, the problem is that there are a half a dozen different ways to do things. The fact that they are trying to give the language even more expressive power is just adding to the amount of rope that we as developers can hang ourselves with.

I yearn for a language which is functionally complete, compiled, small, fast, cross-platform, and oh, NO TEMPLATES PLEASE! Templates/Generics are a blight (a blight I say!) on modern programming -- to say I was pissed when they added them to C# and Java was an understatement. I like my languages without too much syntactic sugar, thanks.

In general, OO programming was never fully grokked by the masses. People spent far too much time trying to make their objects re-usable, and not enough time solving the problem at hand. At least with a language like C you are not fooling yourself, you can write in a procedural style and be happy.

Don't get me wrong, C has a lot of short-comings as well. D is almost perfect, but again, the template blight has reared its ugly head.

I know, a lot of people love templates, and they will argue that they are faster, or they are safer because of type-safety. Faster? Maybe .. slightly .. but not enough for me to want them. Safer? Well not if you take into account the fact that you are using C++, probably the most dangerous language to work with of all. I'll cast the result of my collection operation manually, thanks.

Plus, you make the compiler work really hard, and your project now takes 40 minutes to compile instead of 5. Thanks for the productivity gains, but no thanks!

That sounds complicated.

Are you really sure you want to jump into that without a review first?