I should have read the linked questions before replying...

Stupid, stupid, STUPID! Why have numRows and numCols in a sparse array? Things with unnecessary, arbitrary bounds annoy me. My implementation of Conway's Game of Life runs on a sparse array precisely because that allows the world to stretch arbitrarily in any direction a glider goes, limited only by the capacity of the bignum library and the total store available to the program.

And this is how we teach computer science?

Sigh.

Who knew?

Seriously, I personally know the difference between sponsored and unsponsored links. I use the short-cut links in the sponsored section when the same place shows up near the top of the unsponsored section. Otherwise, I take those links with a big block of salt.

Folks, Google is about as good as we can expect to get for a company that makes its money off of advertising-supported services. They need to be watched and called out when they do marginal things, but they aren't deliberately evil as corporate policy goes.

Facebook, on the other hand...

As a commuter vehicle, even the Renault Twizy would serve my purpose. The problem is that with depreciation, insurance, parking and all those other costs it's not worth having two cars and having to pick up a rental every time I do something outside the commuter box is hassle, though it'd probably make economic sense. My ICE car covers 100% of my needs, except when it's so far that I'm flying. Somehow the cost/benefit - or rather saving/benefit isn't very compelling.

Well, Windows doesn't run Linux applications but AMD CPUs do run the same software as Intel CPUs. That sort of thing matters. To use a car analogy, it's one thing to use a competitor's trucks because you don't make trucks even though they also have cars that compete with yours. It's another thing if your sales reps show up in a competitor's car. I'd wager the people at Samsung use Windows and Office, but I don't expect to see many Lumia phones. Last I heard AMD is still making desktop CPUs. Now they're making a desktop without their own desktop CPU. That's as clear a case of not eating your own dog food that you're going to get.

I guess nobody here at /. took the Nokia lesson. No matter how badly your product sucks, you never, ever admit that to the market. It doesn't matter if you got less credibility than the Iraqi information minister, it's still better than the alternative. Do you know how much ridicule they're going to get for this with funny fake ads with the "Intel inside" logo and jingle? It's brand suicide. The only plausible explanation is that AMD is in "screw tomorrow, we need sales NOW" mode. It's not a shocker if the market pairs an Intel CPU with an AMD dGPU if that makes sense, but if I was head of marketing at AMD I'd rather resign than have this to my name.

They're both pretty awful, I was updating a laptop I recently bought for travel (firesale before Win10, will update for free), 2GB to update on a 5400 rpm spinning rust disk. Oh. My. God. Fortunately it got 8GB of RAM, so most things run well once loaded into memory. I wanted some space for a media collection on the go, but boy will I miss an SSD as boot drive.

Well, in that respect what's the bandwidth between the user and the computer over the keyboard? If the primary purpose was communication and not implementation, you have a thousand tools for that which at best are equal to a meeting room with a whiteboard. They're trying to mash up the traditional system where you agree on what to build then go off to build it so that you're doing both at once all the time. To me it smells like jack of all trades, king of none where you need to deal with everything from high-level design to low-level implementation issues all the time. I guess it works if you have the right people, but then nearly every system works if you have the right people.

Okay, I didn't actually mean just typing but the headline was too short to explain. We have at least one, maybe two people in our group who actually produce fairly decent solutions but who are just s...l...o...w at ad hoc work. For example we're in a meeting discussing something, I can whip out a query in a minute to answer and he'll have to take it back to his office after the meeting and work on it for ten minutes to find the same. He's slow at typing. He's poor at using auto-complete. He constantly needs to reference documentation and diagrams.

The thing is though, he produces solutions that are actually good and work well, unlike some of the others who either make weird designs causing grief down the road or buggy code leading to fire fighting. If I was asked as the manager who I'd like to let go, he wouldn't be near the top of my list. But if I had to sit there fiddling my thumbs while he worked, I'd probably be ready to quit in less than a week. I'm guessing in pair programming he'd hand me the keyboard, but in "mob" programming I'm sure there'd be some enforced round robin system so the one holding the keyboard isn't dominating.

Have you seen the footage where it falls over? Then it hits hard, the remaining fuel sparks and it goes boom way past recovering anything but scrap metal. If they want something that's worth salvaging, it has to land smooth. Also the net wouldn't really help with the first 99%.

Well maybe, but it sounds like the right kind of candidates aren't showing up for the interview which makes it kinda hard to give them offers. Unless they're being overly up-front and present a low and narrow salary range, I'd look into other reasons why they're not attractive enough. If they are scaring them away, be less specific and say you're ready to offer competitive terms for the right candidate. Then you might at least get the right kind of people in the door and maybe sell them on the other benefits, or if not you'll at least know what kind of pay range is necessary.

How does that work if there's multiple candidates? Do you simply hire the first one who passes the "thumbs-up" test or are you flexible enough you'll hire as many good people who shows up at the door? Most places I've worked for you get permission to hire a new person from up high, you get a round of candidates and pick one. If you give the first guy an offer, well you don't really have anything to offer the rest.

Well it was 1995, while he was still studying at the university of Helsinki working on Linux 1.x, long before the dotcom money and any serious corporate interest in Linux, while Microsoft at the time was a $50 billion dollar company. So almost the same ;)

From a user's perspective there's the applications and there's the rest, whether it's done in the kernel or in user mode is not really apparent or important, things like drivers, system daemons, windowing systems, graphics/multimedia and so on. Sometimes it's a division of labor, like pulseaudio with ALSA in the kernel or mesa with KMS in the kernel. While I know you're a practically oriented person, is there any parts where you feel that:

a) Really shouldn't be done in the kernel, but in practice we do
b) Really should be done in the kernel, but in practice we don't
c) Doesn't belong in the kernel, but if you had the time you'd like to change/improve.

Well no, not really. They're hoping to replace the base infrastructure on Linux with the open source "amdgpu" driver, but with separate open and closed source user mode drivers for OpenGL, multimedia and so on. It would get you up to release parity if all you need is a framebuffer and software fallback, but they are still planning to develop Mesa and Catalyst separately. They don't have any plans to give Intel a free high performance OpenGL engine or to let nVidia look at their game-specific optimizations.