Large distributed development. Multiple point check ins. (Our divisional build is around 100 execuables and 300 dlls. Corporate level build would easily exceed 1000 executables). Our build group will launch builds on every library every hour and immediately report compilation failures and link failures. But that is just the beginning

Then comes the installation and packaging failures. The dynamic libs get out of synch, wrong dll gets packaged in, etc

Then the build is good, it does not crash on every project. But it fails daily validation suite. After clearing that hurdle the build fails certification (same as validation but more detailed comparison with golden results).

So typically our last daily build is about one day old, last validated build is two or may be three days old. Last certified build could be three to five days old.

And this is a great improvement compared to the past.

Biggest advancement that helped us were dirt cheap prices for storage. So we are able to keep multiple older working builds for the developers. Not all of them need the latest build. Second biggest thing was the multicore machines with enough horsepower to launch all the library builds simultaneously. Third was the drop in network bandwidth prices, we are able to consolidate and synch the source code repo with very small (for a developer I mean, not for a video watcher) latencies.

I don't know why they are making such a big deal about 22 Gigawatts briefly. Is it really worth bragging in this day and age? In 2014? It is on the record someone generated 1.21 Gigwatts briefly at 10:04 PM November 5, 1955 using some home made contraptions, extension cords and a lightning conductor, in Hill Valley California. By Moore's law, we should be generating so much more than mere 22 Gigawatts.

OK, OK, Higgs field is quite dangerous, and right now we seem to be sitting in the just-the-right-value. And if the Higgs field gets more energy the whole universe might collapse. But the most important question is, "Is the lower Higgs field energy anthropogenetic?". Do we have any kind of plans to absorb sudden injection of high energy into Higgs field in Andromeda galaxy? I never trusted the Andromedans and we are just trusting them not to energize the Higgs field? Just bomb them just to be safe.

You are correct in those aspects. Speed limits are violated by 100% of the people 80% of the time. And all the violations you mention are common. But stop sign compliance is quite high if you count rolling through at below 5 mph as a reasonable approximation of stopping.

EEE for Embrace, Extend and Extinguish was the old strategy that worked in the PC era when Microsoft leveraged its monopoly on OS to kill the competition that played by the old rules. For it to work, Microsoft needs to have a monopoly to begin with.

EGA is the name of the game in the Android. Embrace & Get Assimilated.

All your bases are now belong to us.

It appears that way. And I do my fair share of calling other drivers idiots and imbeciles. But by and large Americans obey traffic laws very well, the compliance rate is very very high. I know for a fact that the violations are at least two orders of magnitude higher in India. The accidents/fatalities/injuries per 1000 passenger kilometer stats tell the whole story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Jamming signals is illegal, and it could affect lots of legitimate use of cell phone use without being distracted. Data link for emergency and police vehicles, streaming in music, passengers using cell phones etc. So what he did was wrong.

But he could could have bought one of those russian style dash cams. Mounted it on near the roof line, looking sideways and downwards. May be two such cams on either side of the vehicle. Record it continuously and report the actual distracted drivers, along with the video footage to police. Or without even going to police upload them into some kind of YouTube channel and shame them into compliance. When they see how seriously long, their "momentary" glance at the texts, the distance covered when they were distracted, most sane people will feel compelled to comply. After all, 99.9% of the people do come to full stop at stop signs even when there is no other vehicle is in sight, without any one policing it.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/171... is what this report is based on.

18000 is a very high number for phone interviews. I think most were internet polls. So 18000 people who clicked on and took a survey while casually surfing said they are not influenced by social media? If such click-any-dialog-that-pops-up-randomly people are not influenced by social media, what about the people who are actually skeptical of the "series of tubes"?

I go one step further. I tune out Facebook and Twitter entirely, not just brand-related content.

Parallel processing has made big strides, but only in some limited areas. Graphics rendering where each pixel can be updated independent of other pixels. Or in fluid mechanics (CFD) using time marching techniques where updating the solution at one point needs data from a limited set of neighbors, or in iterative solvers of matrices. Even something very structured without if statements like inverting a matrix, parallel methods have suffered.

Basic problem is this, even if just 5% of the work has to be serial, the maximum speedup is 20x, that is the theoretical maximum. YMMV, and it does. Internet and search has opened up another vast area where a thread can do lots of work and send just very small set of results back to the caller. Hits are so small compared to misses, you can make some headway. Even then we have found very few applications suitable for massively parallel solutions.

We need a big breakthrough. If you divide a 3D domain into a number of sub domains, the interfaces between the subdomains is 2D. The volume of 3D domain represents computational load, and the area interfaces represent the communication load. If we could come up with domain-division algorithms that guarantee the interfaces would be an order of magnitude smaller, even as we go from 3D to higher number of dimensions, and if we could organize these subdomains into hierarchies, we would be able to deploy more and more of computational work, and be confident the communication load would not overwhelm the algorithm. This break through is yet to come. Delaunay Tessellations (and its dual Voronoi polygons) have been defined in higher dimensions. But the number of "cells" to number of "vertices" ratio explodes in higher dimensions, last time we tried, we could not even fit a 10 dimensional mesh of 10 points into all the available memory of the machine. It did not look promising.

You didn't get the "you insensitive clod" meme, you insensitive clod!

Right the policies, laws and contracts of auto dealerships allow for only two models: Direct sale by manufacturer without any dealerships or All sales via dealership without any direct sales.

If NADA believes dealers are great let them relax the contracts and allow direct sales by manufacturer and also sales through dealerships. It is the auto dealers who seek monopoly and misuse the term competition and choice.

My first language is FORTRAN and now I speak C++, they are all designed languages, you insensitive clod.

Tesla is not producing affordable family car yet. He needs a gigafactory to make batteries first. Then got side tracked into packing people into some sort of tubes used by the tellers in drive through banking window. Then he is going on to Solar city that hopes to become a distributed power supplying utility that does not need any public rights of way. That requires mega billions in investments. Now suddenly putting a man in Mars.

Musk, any one project you have done would earn you a lasting place in history. If you successfully complete the solar city and electric passenger car alone, you will be compared to the likes of Ford, Bell, Edison... Please focus on finishing what you started instead of constantly shifting focus like someone afflicted with attention deficit disorder.

Sun diskless workstations. Knew motif window manager inside out. Had taught a unix course using a strange Sony workstation that had a TV card in it displaying live TV in X windows. Eventually became the root (of all evil, according to my students) of the lab.

Employer morphed from being a Unix shop (1990-2000) to Microsoft + Mainwin (2000-2010) shop, then slowly coming back to display agnostic (2011 - till date) (but limited to X11+OpenGL or MSWin) shop.