John Henry told his captain
'A man ain't nothin' but a man
But before I let your steam drill beat me
Down
I'd die with a hammer in my hand. Lord
Lord
I'd dies with a hammer in my hand.'

Was in college back in the Dark Ages (pre-WWW), was hit by this. Bought an expensive (used) Physics text from the university bookstore. Tried to "sell it back" at the end of year, "no, that edition has been sunset, we won't buy it back". Right. So picked up the text, flipped through it - literally could find nothing different except the edition, copyright date, and wording in the preface.

(Got 'em though. Put it on the shelf, and tried again the end of next year. Surprise, they took it...because they knew that year's book wasn't sunset they didn't even check editions. Even gave me more $$ because evidently the new text must've cost more and obviously wasn't initially "Used", so my carefully peeling off the "USED" sticker definitely paid dividends.)

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.

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.

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.

Or The Reg: Kraut Craft Conveys Coherent Cannon

*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.

Seriously, how is this a contentious matter?

Hmmm..."Contentious Matter." Now THERE'S a name for this stuff that I could get behind!

Threats of lawsuits are mostly idle. Call his bluff and see what happens when the ACLU gets involved and crowfunding his defense sends the principal looking for a new job..