Total_Meltdown

Remember, economics assumes rational actors. We have loads of students in school because they think they have to be, but don't treat it as an investment. For most fields, tuition is already way above equilibrium, because schools and students alike believe that demand is inelastic: either you get a degree, or you're a second-class laborer. By not having this information, they can't be rational, and continue to "buy degrees" even though MC > MB.

There was a comment earlier in this thread:

> Nerds are unpopular in forced social settings like secondary schools because they're huge assholes, the kind of people that even 25 years later write essays about how really it was everybody else's fault that nobody got along with them.

Get over your grudges, seriously. I bet the people who used to make fun of you don't even remember why. They'll run into you someday in the grocery store and go "Hey man, what's up? How's life?" Now you can either make a new friend, or stay in middle school where you still get picked on for your terrible social skills.

Also fun: The only one of these that works when a callback removes itself from the event list in its own callback routine is C#. You get a hanging iterator in C++, and removing items from a table mid-iteration in Lua is undefined (though in practice usually works).

To make this case work properly, the place I work for has a 335 line C++ template class. This is all time that the developer could have spent actually building our product.

I think you're misunderstanding the point here. It is perfectly possible to write awesome software in Java. With the amount of software out there, it would be completely insane for anyone to say that you can't do awesome things in Java.

> You should stand up, be confident, and realize that it is the programmer that creates awesome software. Not the language.

This highlights the misunderstanding. You're right. We should be spending our time making awesome software, not typing letters and building boilerplate code.

Full disclosure: I work with eropple on a fairly regular basis, I favor C#, I write C++ at my day job. I spent a few months doing Java, was able to do what I wanted to with it, but missed a lot of features from more featureful languages.

I said what I meant. When you buy an iPhone, not only are you paying for the hardware, you're committing to a monthly fee. A $0.99 app is not even a day of cell service, let alone a 2 year phone contract.

But an app isn't an everyday purchase either. An iPhone, with the required data plan, is an everyday purchase. The hardware is more expensive once, and the plan is more expensive every month. Apps are purchased once.

> It's like assuming that owning a Ferrari means you can afford to eat at a $20 restaurant meal every night.

Fixed that for you. iPhones are a luxury item. Cellphones are arguably necessary, but nobody's forcing you to drop $400 on a smartphone when there are perfectly free (subsidized) feature phones on every single carrier.

So yeah, I agree with the assumption that iPhone users have a little extra cash to burn.

Edit: Ok, maybe Ferrari wasn't quite a fair comparison, but certainly a car that's a little more than just getting from point A to point B.

You're talking about two different issues. If you're maintaining UDK or something, then yes, C++ is absolutely required. But people who maintain UDK aren't learning to program anymore. They know how to write solid C++ in their sleep, so they can focus on the challenges that game development throws at them.

What eropple was saying - and I completely agree - is that C++ is a difficult language to learn on, especially when writing games. I say this as someone who learned C++ mostly by working on games. The language can tend to distract you from the problems you're trying to solve, and vice versa. The time I spent hunting segfaults could have been used building a more stable codebase or getting my product to the players.

I understand what the intent is, and I think it could be a useful mechanism, but as I've said in other posts, I disagree that exceptions are the way to go about it. I think something similar to exceptions, but intended for this kind of indirection would be good. But I'm strongly of the opinion that all exceptions should be treated as problems to be fixed, not just another pattern.

Yes, first-class functions are what I mean. (I come from a lot of C# development, where functions-as-variables are called delegates.)

As for sugar, I agree that it's nice sometimes, but I disagree with extending exception handling specifically. Exceptions are for errors, such as sending data over a closed stream, or indexing an array out of bounds. This "condition system" pattern encourages using exceptions for logic flow. Because why pass a function all the way down the call stack when you can just throw an exception to request that data from higher in the call stack, right?

Exceptions are errors, and they should be treated as such in all cases.

This seems like a solution looking for a problem. There is a whole class of code smell around using exceptions to direct logic flow. The only thing this does that can't be done with if statements and delegates is lower the importance of exceptions from "definitely an error" to "maybe an error, maybe normal behavior". Maybe there are less contrived examples that better show off what this feature could do, but it still smells fishy to me.

Edit: I realize that Java doesn't have delegates, but I would say that's a point against Java, not a point in favor of this method.

Right. I mean, I'm not the biggest Apple fan, but in the interest of fairness I thought it was worth pointing out that gaming isn't as much of an anti-mac argument as it used to be, which is what the mtw seemed to be implying.

Google Docs is Office's closest competitor, but not outside individuals and small organizations, simply BECAUSE it's all stored on "the cloud". BitBucket and GitHub have the same problem. It's not that they're not good products, it's that there are many, many, many very large companies that want to keep their data to themselves.

And by the way, being "encrypted" on the cloud doesn't usually mean what most people seem to think it means. Example: http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/security/2295006...

Steam.

I think we need to realize that PCs (laptops or desktops) and mobile devices (tablets and mobile phones) are good at different things, and going forward will be used for different things. For example, I'm sure everyone (especially on this site) has noticed that software development is kind of a big thing. I don't see any indication that I'll be developing any software on a mobile device any time soon (especially not an iOS device, as far as I know running user-written code is still against the App Store TOS).

As for the "three years" projection, I'm not sure what the article is saying. Our (mobile) data will be in the cloud within three years? Probably. That Apple will kill Microsoft in three years? Absolutely not. No way. Don't underestimate the power of inertia. Even if Apple manages to entirely kill Microsoft's consumer market share (unlikely) they can survive off enterprise customers just fine. I mean, what do you use on a Mac to compose documents? Word. Are there any others? (I don't have a Mac, so feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken.)

I don't think PCs are going anywhere. People will always need to get serious work done, and larger systems will always be better at that than smaller systems of the same era, if only for the sheer amount of numbers they can crunch. Mobiles are great products with a tremendous amount of utility, but they're complements, not substitutes.

> A wireless network is essentially a hub, rather than a switched network, and as such all hosts on one leg of the network get to see all the packets transported through it no matter what their source or destination

The article claims that it works on WPA-2, but WPA-2 doesn't work the same way. WPA-2 uses individual encryption between the router and the device. This happens to be one of the biggest reasons it's recommended over unencrypted or WEP encryption, which are both passively sniffable. With WPA-2, you don't get all traffic on the network, you have to trick hosts on the network to explicitly send it to you.

To sniff WPA-2 traffic, this app must generate some kind of active MITM attack, probably ARP spoofing or flooding. I feel [very slightly] bad for the poor guy who tries this on his campus network and gets nailed in about four seconds.

Oh, absolutely. It'd be awful if they did this. But it'd be fun to watch Lodsys try to fend off Apple's legal team.

I'm not sure what code you write or what it's for, but in the real world, sometimes we deal with buggy, archaic and downright bizarre code that we didn't write, and sometimes we have deadlines.

So, yes. I use a debugger, so that I can spend some time at home too. Because as nice as the office is, it's summertime, and there's beer in my fridge.

Back when I was seventeen and staying up all night writing a video game engine though, I definitely would have been onboard with the whole print debugging idea.

I stopped reading when I got to your "Comments" section:

> I don't comment every line of code, but I comment in large quantities.

Ok, I can relate to this.

> I am of the mind set that code [...]

You mean "mindset."

> [...] should speak for it self when you write proper names for what the variable or method actually does.

You mean "itself." Also, that's a really awkward way of saying "self-documenting code."

> But comments are still needed outside of what I like to call Codese.

What?

> The language of coders.

This is a sentence fragment, and I know nothing more about what "Codese" is, or why you call it that.

Proofread. Spellcheck. Read it aloud to yourself multiple times. Seriously.