Whenever yet another...
...of these stories break, I feel a decidedly un-gentlemanly smugness in my C/C++ world.
Apologies to all.
198 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2009
...old shtuff.
My favourite books in this area are:
Barbarians Led by Bill Gates
On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore - (My copy is from 2006. Later versions have been re-edited and split into two volumes. I don't know if they're better or worse.)
UNIX: A History and a Memoir
Any other recommendations?
...until "line numbers good - files bad".
Beginners should definitely not care about line numbers. And some sort of storage is needed.
My favourite beginner platform for teaching to code is Makecode Arcade.
Drsg and drop code that isn't gimped but pretty fully functional.
It does support multiple files, but that's well hidden at first. Just name your project and go.
Sure, it's by Microsoft, but it's great for getting kids interested and the graphical coding concepts map directly to "real code" ideas. In fact, you can toggle between (a subset of) TypeScript and the graphical representation.
Must admit it's been years since I last browsed USENET.
Quite a nostalgia trip just listing the groups again. comp.lang.c, rec.arts.sf.tv,babylon5, alt.music.enya, ...
Not as bereft of life as I expected, but not exactly about to nuzzle up to the bars, bend 'em apart with its beak, and VOOM.
WinUI3.
As well as every other new UI stack eagerly promoted at the future of Windowsy applications.
But whenever I need a Windows GUI, I still reach for wxWidgets.
Looks old^H^H^Habout as modern as I think desktop apps ought to, rather than looking like a web page.
And I've paid for Total Commander some time ago. Only file manager I need on Windows.
..."trust" Steam?
Honest question.
Personally, I consider anything with DRM as a form of rental, whether Steam, Microsoft/Xbox/Apple-App/Google-Play Store or, the honestly labelled rental model, Game Pass.
The vast majority of PC game purchases I've made over the past decade have been at gog.com. (Though I certainly recognise most people's game preferences aren't properly served by them.)
...are kinda useless.
I rented a VPS on Azure for a couple of months for running a Minecraft server for my son, as I already knew how Azure admin worked. The price was OK, but I spun it up on demand and had it auto shutdown each night.
Then I noticed Hetzner weren't as expensive as I had assumed, and I could get a VPS with the same specs as the Azure one.
While the servers had the same specs, the Hetzner server has consistently been much, MUCH more responsive than the Azure one at the best of times.
Updating new areas on the Azure Minecraft stalled regularly. On Hetzner it's always buttery smooth.
And while my total monthly cost is the same, the Hetzner server is kept running 24/7. That many hours of up-time on Azure would have been horribly expensive.
...for me.
I remember my sequence of main distros as: Red Hat (good), SuSE (better) which came with an impressive selection dead-tree literature, Slackware (best, but time-consuming), Debian (good enough for the lazy^Wtime constrained).
But I also recall giving Mandrake a shot. (Probably partly due to liking the old Mandrake the Magician comics.) I wonder if that was between SuSE and Slackware...
>>>Huawei phones were not only better than iPhones in value for money terms but also better quality<<<
Err. no.
Huawei's Bluetooth was (still is?) notoriously incompatible/troublesome to work with.
And their non-OLED screens were cheap looking too, IMHO
I'm on Android, but Huawei would be on my no-buy list, sanctions related issues regardless.
What's crap about this one?
At my pre-corona employer I had an Air M1 to play with, and it was an absolutely amazing machine.
That kind of speed (including emulated Windows 3D games) in a fan-less laptop with instant (not just the near-instant seen on the best Windows laptops) wake-up, was fscking amazing.
When I left, was tempted to buy one for myself. I 100% would have if I trusted Apple to maintain the Rosetta Intel emulation layer for any length of time. Apple's track record didn't leave me with confidence in that regard, so I opted for a Ryzen 4700U powered HP Envy 13 convertible.
Forget about those crappy gaming <insert anything vaguely computing related>.
For a proper office chair (also good for extended gaming sessions, if you have that sort of time to spare), get a HÅG Creed 6002.
Pricey but built to last, and at least you don't look like you're using your teenage kid's chair in Zoom^WTeams meetings.
My older model is well over 20 years old and still as comfy as ever.
Your back will thank you.
..."A Pyramid, properly viewed as a device for manipulating time, doesn't so much keep a razor blade sharp as remind it of a time in its life when it wasn't blunt, and to make a suggestion that this would be a nice time to revisit, for just long enough to do Pharaoh's legs."
...tedious.
But it's stories like these that make me love even these deficiencies of the C++ ecosystem.
It does mean reinventing the wheel more often than developers who exclusively code in Rust, Python, Go, Java, C#, JavaScript, Perl, Ruby, OCaml, Haskell, ... *sigh* (wipes tear away) *sniffle*
But at least the risc of catching, and distributing, something nasty is lessened.
init
option in sixth birthday release
I ran Slackware Current for some years.
It was the most stable OS, I've ever used.
But as it didn't come with a huge set of packaged applications, it did take more time to manage and keep current than most distros. Not helped by me compiling everything non-core from original sources.
The thing really was rock-solid, though.
When that PC needed replacing, general life had gotten in the way, so I went the way of the lazy and installed Debian.
... classified as "little" memory in a phone, these days?
Chr*st al-effin-mighty!
SW devs need to step back and... well, I would have said optimise, but if a phone needs 6GB of RAM to not be sluggish, it's beyond optimisation to fix, it's more like time to “unlearn what you have learned".
...but getting the exact incantations right for including some of the popular dependencies is pure hell.
Kotlin and even Java itself these days are actually pretty nice languages (Clojure is better, IMHO), but Gradle is a big no. Just No!
Even the C++ ecosystem's way of tracking down, downloading and building by hand each library feels less onerous.