Am I legally allowed to reverse-engineer a proprietary device driver and release a free, open-source software replacement?
Well, yes! But!!! Please let me explain. To safely do so:You must be a Virgin. The engineering Virgin has been defined as having no contact with the manufacturer, no relatives who work for said manufacturer, and has ***never*** seen any source code, or design specs of any kind.You must keep copious and extremely detailed notes of your reverse engineering study & work.You must have the financial resources to withstand the inevitable “Copyright Infringement” lawsuit(s). //That free lawyer if you can’t afford one thing is for criminal suits. With a civil suit, you’re on your own.//If you can do all that, then go for it.Two examples of what can go right & wrong:Right: The BIOS in non-IBM PCs was created by a company that did all three above. See: Phoenix Technologies - Wikipedia - Cloning the IBM PC BIOSWrong: A company made a competing Front End Processor (FEP) for IBM Mainframes. The code was proprietary, however, one day, an IBM Rep asked to see a copy of the code from an IBM customer. The code was found to be “plug for plug & bug for bug” compatible. Worse, the comments were nearly identical, too! Lawsuits ensued. OOPS!
What's your saddest Minecraft moment?
I once had what I thought was a really cool minecraft world. This was around the days of 1.5. There were only four types of wood back then, so I made a tower on a hill with four layers, each layer being made out of a different type of wood. The tower was called “four-layer tower.” It looked a bit like this, except with each layer being a different type of wood and a lot less detail:In the hill underneath - as a basement - was a storage room where I kept all my stuff. One day, I decided to put a jukebox in my storage room.I went to play a record…..… and my game froze.I reloaded, and I was suddenly suffocating in a wall. I had my pickaxe on me, so I started digging out to see where I had ended up. Eventually I got to the surface, and I recognized that I was in the same place. But my tower was gone. I looked in the storage room, and most of my storage room was just filled with stone - no chests anywhere.The chunk, for some reason, was regenerated, filling everything I had with new terrain. My tower was replaced with air, and my chests were replaced with stone. All my stuff was in those chests. I can only think of it as a really bad bug, a hardware malfunction, or an act of Herobrine himself. It was literally the worst spot it could have happened in.The Moral of the Story: Make Backups. If you haven’t already, do it right now - it’s as simple as copy/pasting your world file onto your desktop.
If you could only learn a maximum of three programming languages, which would they be?
C# .NET - Great for writing desktop Windows apps, very widely used, very popular, and my personal #1 overall go-to language.C - My #2 go-to language for speedy applications (#1 is CIL/MSIL, but that runs on the .NET CLR). I won't choose C++ because I find it overly complicated (I'd choose D if I needed the benefits of C++). C is also great for working low-level since it's basically Assembly++.TypeScript - Choosing this language was really hard (had to choose between TypeScript, Python, F#, and Haskell), but I eventually chose TypeScript because it's a superset of JavaScript (meaning I'd also learn JS), it compiles to JS (so I can do front-end web development), and I find its class and type system much more powerful than a language such as Python, which was my original third language.In the end, I feel very satisfied with my list. Although I would be missing out on several languages that I benefit heavily from (F#, CIL, Haskell, Python, etc.), I would still keep the languages that really matter to me, and would hopefully be able to pursue my dream career as a compiler engineer.
Is there anyone who uses Linux as their main OS? What is their experience like?
I use Linux as my main OS at home as well as at work in the university.Here are my reasons why I use it at home and experiences that go with it:It is beautiful. Enlightenment, Terminology, a properly configured xfce - all those beat Microsoft Gamestarter by lenghts.It is very fast too boot up.It fulfills most of my needs (reading PDFs, watching Netflix, hobby programming, audio recording, listening to music (audacious and spotify), surfing the internet).In case of audio recording and editing I am completely in love with ardour. Also after setting up jack properly (which is a pain to be honest, if you’re not using something like Ubuntu Studio) I am convinced by this system.Virtual Desktops. You can have the music recording software open on one, a web browser on another, a vocabulary trainer and learning environment on a third and just switch to the one you need.(Ok, MS Windows has this too since Win 10. Finally! Hooray!)And here are some of my reasons why I use it at work and my experiences with it:Try setting up machine learning and computer vision libraries in windows. I dare you. I double dare you. But I won’t be there for you when you cry.Working speed and comfort: g++, clang, command line, make, cmake, bashMicrosoft office products are sometimes needed for communication with non-CS people - even if I prefer classic email, pdf, latex and so on: If the mountain does not go to the prophet, the prophet has to go to the mountain. Even if I’d like to convince the world of my favourite methods, currently MS office is widely used and Open/Libreoffice is not always an equivalent solution. Luckily with Office 365 I can do it all in the browser on Linux!These are problems I currently have with Linux:Gaming. Yeah, steam runs on Linux, the situation is getting better, but still - not a real competition yet.Audible. I like this app and audiobooks, but there is no Linux version and no workaround. That’s a bit sad.(Another point to make this list look bigger)(I’m out of ideas, pls help)
Is it safe to use my computer without an antivirus?
NO. even if you use your usb once outsidetrojans will creep in.it destroys hardware sometimes.atleast use free antivirus.i dont recommend free antivirus.your pc / laptop is rs 30000 to 40000.good antivirus is rs500 .use leading brand.kaspersky makes system slow.i use bit defender for past many years.before buying any AV read reviews.