I'm with you, and I think a lot of what is said boils down to trying to paint scenarios in black and white. The word "allocation" really doesn't mean anything until one specifies how and what is allocated. An allocation can come from a recycling allocator, slab allocator, or just plain old unoptimized malloc(). To say game programmers never alloc during "game level execution" (whatever that means) is just a gross facepalm statement. But it's certainly common for game developers to develop allocators well optimized to their memory usage patterns. I don't think many serious game developers would heavily use vanilla malloc/free in performance critical game loops.

code_quality = time * talent * experience * just_dont_care_factor

If you find code_quality nearing 0, that often means they just didn't care.

Junior programmers will inevitably recreate what you created. It is then your job to grumble and start the task of putting proper locks in their code and running it in valgrind.

I hear you can tune into FM radio stations simply by using your arm as the antenna. You just have to keep it that way while you listen.

Is that how it looks? The thing has gaming specs on par with PS4, motion sensors, and dedicated game controllers. It has its own OS partition to handle games.

How is that an afterthought?

Perhaps you meant:

"Looks like the Xbox One is a home-entertainment center for which gaming is a major feature."

So, should Google jump back into the health data service market, who among you would use it, given a statement like this from Page?

I suspect Page believes Google should be able to analyze your health data and even sell you to advertisers.

No way no how.

In order to construct a virtual brain, doesn't that mean it has to be grown, virtually? What would be the environment in which it grows?

Facebook isn't where users want it to be. We like Facebook in the browser and as an app, but collectively users don't feel it belongs as their shell. Consumers had the same reaction to Chrome OS: phenomenal as a browser, but we're rejecting it as the OS, hence, Chromebook has floundered. Same thing goes for Windows - consumers like it on their desktops and laptops, but so far looks like we don't really want it on a phone and tablets. Same thing for Linux - we flocked to it for server apps, but overall avoided it on our desktops.

It's not that I feel they made a mistake, though. I think it's very worthwhile to bump software experiences up and down the stack to see if there's a better fit. But when consumers reject the positioning, it also makes sense to go back to what works.

Except that wasn't the case here.

http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB6-015AEBB1C052

Sounds like the guy was just frustrated and venting. Lots of us do that sometimes, and this one seems ready made to please the slashdot crowd. But do read the retraction the guy posted.

I think Win 8.1 will be a great step forward for them. Not only will it fix most of the things consumers hate about Win8, it will be timed to coincide with Bay Trail and Haswell, and possibly will tie in with XBox "720" (whatever it will be called). It'll never make fans of the slashdot crowd, but it could well become a major market success. Ridiculing Windows and Microsoft has never seemed to matter very much.

I usually sprinkle in some gratuitous criticism of them and their products as it seems standard protocol for slashdot, but that has gotten tiresome. Win 8.1 and their other products might well be a very strong play this year.

Always hard to read the tea leaves, but I predict a wave of new netbooks that will catch the market by surprise. I believe a wave of $350 netbooks running Bay Trail and Windows 8.1 will prove pretty popular. This will, of course, cannibalize the $1000 ultrabook sales, so this isn't to say it will be a revenue success. But Bay Trail would definitely make Netbook 2.0 pretty compelling.

Often, older developers cannot learn new tricks for one simple reason: They know most of the tricks already, in some form or another.

It has been my experience that older developers don't just adapt just as quickly to a new technology, they bring in knowledge from other areas of experience that a younger developer might not consider.

This isn't to say this is true of all older developers - not even close: there are as many dinosaurs as there are greenies fighting above their weight class. But, as so many will point out, you can't generalize.

I'm turning 40. I need to believe this.

On one hand, as a hyperintelligent super powerful alien, why would you bother introducing yourself to a bunch of mindless apes? If you have questions, just disguise yourself as a human, have a couple of chats, ingest a bit of our media, and whatever passing curiosity you'd have about us would be quickly satisfied.

On the other hand, you could just come down here, forcibly take a few humans for study. Who the hell cares about witnesses (which makes the whole shady-abduction-in-remote-forest thing seem stupid).

I personally think that such aliens, if they exist, do already know about us as well as most other aliens in the universe. And they don't really care, except for the ones that are on par. In that case, they probably greet each other with a yawn and move on.

Oops, "they can complete the picture by bringing their pretty weak Xbox Music and Video offerings" edit:

they can complete the picture by *vastly improving* their pretty weak Xbox Music and Video offerings ...