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Comment Re:Sort of dumb. (Score 1) 553

It's lot easier to convince someone to work a 12-15 hour day if they don't have to pick up the kids from school.

Any company that works that way is bound to fail anyway. Working people that hard doesn't make them productive, it makes them exhausted and prone to mistakes. Those mistakes compound into needing more time to fix - so it's generally an advanced sign of failure.

Comment Re:$50 billion is not Huge, anymore (Score 3, Interesting) 58

That's mostly because we've cut taxes on corps so much that they've got more cash than they know what to do with. I miss the 90% tax bracket. It kept corporate power in check and made them think about where they were investing their money. Now they can just casually toss $50 billion here and there and it's no skin off anyone's back.

Comment Re:Technically C++ (Score 1) 230

My Slashdot username predates my current employment arrangement by about 5 years, I think. But, yeah. Back then I ran FreeBSD (which is where the name is from) on my servers, and Gentoo on my desktop. Things change :) (well, some of them; some of my home servers are still FreeBSD - ain't broken and all that...)

By now, though, it's not really all that surprising, given the amount of work specifically targeting other platforms (Linux among them) happening throughout the company. My team, for example, is actually specifically looking for people with a Linux background right now, because we're building a service running on it, using Docker containers for isolation.

Comment Re:Technically C++ (Score 1) 230

In this particular case I just happen to know exactly what they were thinking when they were implementing this feature, because they are my colleagues (even if I don't work on the team that works on C++) :) The list of features that they did was based on some specific libraries that they had most complaints about on Windows, and then filtered down further based on ease of implementation. If I remember correctly, one major beneficiary of those changes is supposed to be ffmpeg.

This all might make more sense if you remember that Office in some incarnation or the other now ships across three non-Windows platforms (OS X, iOS and Android), then there is the OneDrive client etc. Basically there's a whole bunch of stuff that has suddenly gone cross-plat in the past couple of years, and that's a lot of C++ code that now has to play ball with the libraries that are the de facto standard outside of the MS ecosystem. In many cases, once you start doing that, it makes sense to use the same library on Windows as well, but then you start running into those conformance issues with C99.

The other aspect is that we want people to write cross-platform C and C++ code, because it's the kind that, right now, is most easily portable between all mobile platforms - and seeing where Windows phones and tables are in terms of popularity relative to iOS and Android, MS has to encourage portability as a way to get more apps ported to Windows. You see things like Apache Cordova tools and Clang/LLDB support in VS 2015 for the same reason - they make it easier to write Android apps, for example, but more importantly, the way they encourage writing those apps just happens to be the one that emphasizes portable code. Now that is more geared towards C++, but the question of popular libraries written in C also comes up there.

Comment Re:Technically C++ (Score 1) 230

VS2013 seems to understand a bit more or C99, but that isn't because Microsoft would suddenly have started caring about their C compiler. Their C++ compiler got a bit of an upgrade wrt. more recent changes to the C++ standard, and the C compiler understanding a few C99 idioms is largely a side-effect/waste-product of that process.

Not quite. VS 2013 actually saw a bunch of C-specific C99 features such as designated initializers for structs. The main reason why this was done is because there are now quite a few popular open source libraries that use those features, and VC is the only compiler that cannot handle them, which made it a pain to port them to Windows.

Comment Re:I know a better headline I'd like to see ... (Score 1) 227

Do you consider giving schools enough money to do their jobs properly a "weird experiment"? I think of it more as an eminently sensible policy...

You want know what I'm saying? I'm saying you're an argumentative git who can come up with something deeper and more relevant to say than that, but you didn't. What exactly do you think 'weird experiment' refers to here?

Comment Re:That's C code (Score 1) 230

stdio.h and cstdio are both valid in C++. However, there is a slight difference - cstdio is only guaranteed to define the identifiers that it provides in namespace std, while stdio.h makes the same guarantee only for the global namespace. In practice, they are usually both backed by the same header that does both, so you'll get both - but relying on that is non-portable. Since he doesn't use std:: to refer to those identifiers, "stdio.h" is the correct header for him to include.

Comment Re:Technically C++ (Score 1) 230

Well he might be following Uncle Bob's Clean Code concepts and not filling his code with comments that could become crufty and misleading over time.

I've never bought that argument. Comments simply need to be properly maintained along with the code. If you're not updating the comments when you change the code, you're doing a half-assed job.

Besides, my take is that comments are generally most useful when they explain *what* you're attempt to do rather than *how* exactly you're doing it, and that tends to change far less frequently. The only exception to that general rule is when the code is particularly complex or tricky, and at that point, you should be writing comments in paragraphs.

Comment Re:That's C code (Score 1) 230

"stdio.h" searches the directory containing the current source file first, then the include directories.

The standard itself doesn't have any notion of "directory containing the current source file" or "include directories", actually. It just says that "..." does some form of implementation-defined search, which, if it fails, falls back to <...>.

Comment Re:I cut my teeth on the ARPANET. (Score 1) 553

Go really retro and have token ring and round robin instead of ethernet....

No, that's for after I've sold them all ThickNet. Then I'll have them bying STP-A cable by the spool to run to the MAO. Maybe I'll package a whole concentrator rack inside a vintage Frigidaire unit so that anytime anyone wants a Pabst they'll see you're more retro than thou.

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