Sure, you're posting anonymously, but *I'm* cancer.

I get the sentiment, but there's absolutely no basis for what you're saying. There's no anti-trust issue because Apple isn't colluding with a bunch of other manufacturers to make sure they also do this.

There's no FCC issue because this isn't about denial of service or the phone going outside the bounds of what a cell phone is allowed to do in terms of broadcast strength and frequency.

There's no FTC issue because no one is forced to buy an Apple phone and there's no end-user expectation of being able to replace the battery on an Apple phone (which customers know when they buy it). If the FTC were going to get involved in this in any way, they already would have come down on printer manufacturers like a ton of bricks long ago, since they've been running similar toner and inject cartridge scams for years and years. Unless the batteries are exploding or have an unreasonably short lifetime compared to similar products, the FTC doesn't give a shit about whether you can replace them.

I get that it feels super-unfair, but the fact is this is a case where you just have to rely on market forces. Apple will just get shittier and shittier in this kind of behavior as long as people keep buying the phones. I don't and won't buy any Apple products. The only one I have in my home is a work-provided MacBook because I have to do software development and testing on it.

So sure, "fuck Apple", but don't expect the government to step in and fix something because you can't get Joe's Computer Shop to do something that Apple explicitly said only it could do. And before you make an argument that right to repair laws should let you do this, bear in mind that the consequences of installing dodgy high-capacity lithium batteries in phones has been widely demonstrated. All Apple has to do is say that they can't trust random repair shops to have sourced safe, reliable batteries and therefore not disabling the phone would present a danger to their users.

He's either a) using really bad terminology to ask why we're using rasteriszation over ray tracing techniques or b) using somewhat bad terminology to ask why we're using polygons over implicit surfaces. In both cases the answer is really the same.... modern GPU hardware is designed and optimized for doing lots of rasterization work using polygons, and it's a far more efficient use of the GPU hardware than either the use of implicit surfaces or ray tracing. Both ray tracing and the use of implicit surfaces to render a scene share the same problem at a low level. To process a given output pixel on the screen you have to have local knowledge of the *entire* scene that's being rendered, since a given ray or reflection could in theory bounce off any surface at all. Existing rasterization techniques don't have this problem, so while they produce less realistic scenes, they're far more efficient, meaning you can put more content in the scene and have a better overall end use experience.

Not a lot of great reasons to log into Slashdot these days but honoring Roblimo is unquestionably one of them. The man and his editing calculations will be forever missed ...

Yes, thank god we've all converged on the clean, easy to understand x86 / x86_64 architecture.

CMake + Github is about as close as we have in C++ to Maven. Its still pretty ugly though, because C++ doesn't have a consistent build system and the number of options for building and linking is at least two orders of magnitude more than you have to deal with in Java.

Most software is obscure, full-stop. Just because you don't use most (or even any) of the packages on that page doesn't mean that Qt isn't a viable mainstream library, or that there's anything wrong with it.

Qt, like any other large framework, has a learning curve. If you're writing an application that works just fine using whatever libraries you're already using and you're only targeting one OS, then you probably aren't motivated to go climb that mountain. On the other hand if you're writing software (possibly with a complex UI) that is intended to target multiple operating systems, then Qt is probably the single best framework out there for doing so. Otherwise you're in for a long haul of writing your own less functional version of some subset of Qt features in order to abstract platform specific code away from the rest of your application functionality.

He posted a blog post yesterday and it's currently cached but essentially he promises to move BTC from early blocks to do the final verification. This was up yesterday before his stupid wah wah redirect went up. I'm reposting it here in case it's ever removed from google cache (I hate scammers):

If only we had a website the covered this sort of stuff ... oh right, we do! New VPN IP addresses probably take a while for them to identify the traffic on and block. But there are plenty of services like HMA that constantly roll out new ip addresses. So as long as you're a mouse willing to play whackamole with your cat overlords ... Annoying, yes, but that's the definition of the internet in China.

In response to the second part, that is always true regardless of the answer to the first part. Not only are members of the government are treated differently but also their families. The "party" class enjoys many many perks. Unmonitored VPN connections would be laughable compared to their insider trading, disregard for the law and instant attack dogs they routinely utilize.

While you're accepting suggestions, why isn't my aforementioned article linked in the "You may like to read:" section of this page? Those stories seem to have nothing to do with China's firewall yet a simple google search shows a whole slew of those stories on Slashdot. I think you could get timothy's family to help you track that stuff if you would return his body to them. They only want closure, it doesn't matter if it has to be a closed casket funeral!

No one said that. They said that the price of NAND based storage will drop to be competitive with HDDs, but I suspect that there's an unspoken assumption there of HDDs staying static... in other words, NAND storage in a few years will be equivalent to the price per GB of HDDs now.

Even if NAND storage reaches price parity with HDDs, there will probably remain markets for both, since they have different performance behavior for the lifetime of the device, sine NAND cells will die over time. On the other hand, if the price drop is significant enough to make NAND approach optical media in terms of price per GB, we might see the return of cartridge based game consoles, and the death of long load times and waiting while the game is copied to the console internal HDD.

No matter how great your local storage is, you can't carry *all the media*, meaning that at some point you have to pick the subset of media you want and transfer it over the network. There's nothing wrong with that, but I suspect that for the vast majority of consumers being able to browse and choose content at the time of watching will always be more convenient than trying to anticipate everything you're going to want to watch.

*No form of money* has intrinsic value. The US doesn't create value if it prints more dollar bills, nor does the EU if they make more euros. The value that these units represent is mantained via artificial scarcity.

As a software developer here that likes to fiddle with all languages, the second paragraph from Wikipedia seems to answer your question nicely: "It is a statically typed language with syntax loosely derived from that of C, adding garbage collection, type safety, some structural typing capabilities,[2] additional built-in types such as variable-length arrays and key-value maps, and a large standard library."

So from the first few words someone might know C and desire garbage collection to be handled for them? Golang might be a better selection for them than Java.

Personally for me, the built-in primitives for concurrency make it a great language for tinkering in realms of software design that were once onerous to me. But that's only one of a few of the language's goals.

Maybe a better set of questions would be for an elevator pitch on why someone should use golang? Or perhaps if they have dropped some goals of golang for others as development went forward?

In conversation, I refer to it as golang. You are right on your point about potential for confusion but I don't think your example is apt anymore. Googling for programming go appears to yield only results about golang. Also, it is not without tangential benefits like being able to call Go developers "gophers."

I think when I first started programming Groovy long ago I stumbled upon a website promising that software development was groovy ... that's no longer the case when I google for groovy programming resources.

In short the success of your language is a big enough concern than the name of your language is negligible (with the exception of negative words). The search results will follow.