Re: Confusing headline?

Forge:

verb (used with object)

1. to form by heating and hammering; beat into shape.

2. to form or make, especially by concentrated effort: to forge a friendship through mutual trust.

3. to imitate (handwriting, a signature, etc.) fraudulently; fabricate a forgery.

(source: Dictionary.com:)

Re: WTF is with that bar chart?

'What am I missing here?'

It's a Tuesday?

Re: API, not language

Have you ever tried writing any significant amount of code in C using GTK+'s bloated piece of crap GObject system? I shudder to think how many hours of my life I've wasted manually specifying vtables and handling GObject properties. Glad I jumped that ship 20 months ago.

Yes, C is a vastly easier language to understand compared to C++ and can even be a more productive language in some circumstances... But not when you use it to manually implement everything C++ gives you out of the box minus the syntactic sugar.

Re: Lack of faith

Guessing you're aware of the vast array of rep-rap variants out there though right?

Re: red herring

Well of course it was overpriced - That's how retail works! You think I don't know that a camera I pay £400 for costs bugger all for Samsung to manufacture?

There is barely anything inside a tablet computer. In the quantity Samsung makes stuff, the mark up they put on wholesale would cover the production cost of a 7" tablet several times over.

Televisions, phones, tablets and cameras are all essentially the same thing in different form factors these days and are becoming better at inter-operating. Samsung giving away tablets with purchases of other Samsung gear both makes it more likely that a consumer would chose a Samsung product over some other make - Especially at Christmas.. and it also means that a consumer with two inter-operating Samsung products (e.g. a tablet and camera) is likely to buy another Samsung product (e.g. a television) later on or maybe even at the same time.

Re: red herring

I didn't have to trade in anything. Bought a new camera from Amazon, got a Tab 2.0 with it for free + £50 cash back. Looks okay on paper to me.

Re: Intel chip?

For all 3 minutes before it burnt down to the bone.

Re: Get it right next time

How do you make teaching attractive to the talented? Those who are talented in a particular field want to get on with exploring it and pushing boundaries, because they can. Would money really be enough to compensate people of that mindset for the dying inside that they would experience, regurgitating the same old shit, year in year out?

Re: @Phil O'Sophical Sounds good

I can't tell if you're being serious or not.

Re: C++ put me off programming

The only time raw pointers have any place in C++ is when you're wrapping up legacy C code. In some ways, I wish C++ had never attempted to be backwards compatible with C - So many programmers treat C++ as C with classes (aka structs with functions), which doesn't even come close to utilising the language properly.

It also probably doesn't help that there are very few well written C++ libraries/frameworks out there to at least serve as an example of how C++ should be done properly. The STL is fantastic these days, especially with all that C++11 has added. Boost libraries aren't bad, but even having been a C++ programmer for 12 years, I sometimes find the complexity rather irritating. The problem is that, for the most part, the STL and Boost are libraries of generic classes and functions. Generics are absolutely right for containers, algorithms and such, but do nothing to serve as examples of how framework level or end application code should be structured. That isn't a criticism of the STL or Boost by the way - Certanily, as far as the STL is concerned, it is entirely appropriate that it be a library of generics and not much more because C++ is a systems language and its standard library must minimize its dependencies on any particular underlying platform.

At least with languages like Java, Ruby, Python etc. there are plenty of libraries (for better or worse) which beginners can both use and draw inspiration from when designing their own code. C++ is always going to be bewildering to the beginner without good real world examples to illustrate the language. Unfortunately, some of the more prevalent C++ frameworks, such as QT and wxWidgets treat C++ like it's still 1998 (arguably for legitimate reasons) and are, I think, examples of how things should NOT be done in modern C++.

Yes. I was just observing that the USB interface was the one in use and the MIDI ports were being left redundant. Geez you're a hard crowd sometimes.

Re: a version 1 release of ARM

There's probably about as much chance of that happening as them basing IE on WebKit!

Re: Ummm

Didn't spot the 'Joke Alert' icon huh?

Re: Hello Intel

Intel has already been there and got the t-shirt. They inherited StrongARM from DEC, then went on to develop their XScale implementation of the ARMv5 architecture before flogging it to Marvell so that they could focus fully on x86. Can't see them doing a u-turn any time soon (even though they still hold some sort of ARM license apparently).

Re: Not always about trust

I agree, that is what I wished she had done. But having not experienced being 70 yet, I can't say for sure that I, in her position, would have the clarity of mind for that solution to occur to me.