I'd be curious to know if it actually is a bad thing to have... In the context of a rocket, there isn't exactly a lot of spare mass, spare volume, or engineers just sitting around and wallowing in boredom because the design is trivially simple and every niggling problem has been worked out.

If you skipped the launch escape system, you'd be able to transport more in the same number of launches(or the same amount in fewer) and your craft would be less complex, allowing you to focus on making the remaining systems less likely to need an escape.

Even if you don't fancy a look at our (honestly somewhat curious) level of risk aversion around space activity, it's not clear that adding an escape pod is a better investment, in terms of lives saved, than spending the resources on more extensive testing, improved reliability, and similar for the main systems. It's very much unlike the car scenario, where even 100% perfect engineering doesn't change the fact that other people are going to screw up and crash into you, and that a fair number of your drivers are going to be incompetent, drunk, or distracted; so you fairly quickly run out of improvements to the drive and steering system and have to achieve further survival gains by building in crash resistance. With a rocket, building a launch system that doesn't destroy itself and/or kill the passengers some of the time is quite challenging; but there isn't the same presence of ineradicable external danger, if your system doesn't kill the passengers, they'll survive.(Until you get them into orbit, where the micrometeorites can take them out...)

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.

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.

I don't recall which comment mode this works with, but also try <ecode> instead of <code>. This also makes it unnecessary to escape < and > between the tags.

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.

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.

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 <...>.

OP is likely confusing the special exception that int main() gets for a general rule. For main, you can indeed return nothing, despite its return type, and that is equivalent to returning 0. This works in both C and C++.

It's still not the same thing. In C, you can declare a function without specifying the argument types, but then define it with specific types in a different translation unit. In C++, the definition and the declaration must match - if you declare it as int foo(...), then you must also define it in the same way (which renders it effectively useless, since without any named arguments you won't have anything to pass to va_*).

that's called taxes, moron, which all people are required to pay to society to keep it running

you can disagree with how your money is spent, that's fine. then vote for someone who will spend it in another way. but you don't get to make up on your own how much you owe according to your dimwitted uneducated "ideas"

money doesn't magically get in your bank account, dependent only on you, as if you live in an island. in fact, money is nothing more than an abstract value of human society itself. money only exists in the context of a human society, and is directly valuable in reflection of how well run that society is. money for broken down societies where no one pays taxes is worthless, inflation ridden junk. by your thinking, that's what you want your money to be: junk. can you eat your money in an isolated cabin in the woods where you never go to town? but you want to keep your money for yourself, and not give a portion to keep the society running in which your money actually means anything. this is simply revealing how fucking stupid you are about this topic

luckily, no one sane is going to let a stupid douchebag like yourself or the other puerile crackptos like you prevail on this notion, because we like being rich, and we don't morons like yourself making us poor

again, remedial education: your income depends upon a well functioning society. if no one maintains that society, your income shrinks, along with everyone else's. therefore, you must contribute in order to keep society functioning. understand loser?

and, indeed, if you're too stupid or selfish to understand this basic fact of your existence, then yes, men with guns should be sent to take from you what you owe, you freeloading asshole. and if you shoot back, drop your ignorant useless ass dead, please, and liquidate what you own to pay what you owe, the world a better place with one less stupid freeloading loser

the base assumption is that we are dealing with human beings, not factory specifications

there is no civil disagreement between two valid opinions here, there is acceptance of the obvious on my part and a quasireligious blindly exuberant faith in technology on your part that is ruinously insane

let us hope you or anyone who thinks like you never gets near a classroom. those poor kids

everyone is entitled to their own beliefs but no one is entitled to their own facts. you can not educate a human being from an AI which at best is limited to whatever crude specs you fill it in with, in whatever limited timeframe and context, it can never make up for the complex interplay and social feedback of a real human being in the moment

i have no respect for you and your position as a respectful disagreement depends upon both parties acknowledging basic facts and reality beforehand, which you do not

at best, you need a remedial education, ironically, on the basics of human social interaction and information transmission before it can be said you have a respectable, informed opinion on the subject matter

adios, starry eyed cotton candy head futurist

stick to science fiction fantasy please

you're a harmless nutjob at best, and damaging to children's development at worst

I don't know much about Rust besides that the Wikipedia entry says, however just because some other people use it for comparisons with some other languages doesn't mean you can bash Rush just because it isn't as good as some other language at some arbitrary feature; you're just doing the exact same thing as them in that case. Besides, what other languages are they comparing to anyway?

It's one thing to compare Rust to a language which maybe it was intended to compete against, such as C++. It's another thing to compare it to some entirely different language, such as Lisp or Haskell or COBOL or even Perl; Rust certainly wasn't intended to directly compete against any of these.

Is there any reason to suspect that the version of dosbox compiled into javascript is more vulnerable to having programs inside punch their way out than the version of dosbox compiled for your platform of choice is?

I doubt that it is god's gift to efficiency; but it isn't obvious why dosbox would be a more permeable VM in-browser than it is on the desktop(how permeable it is, or isn't, I don't know, it probably gets less testing than the more heavily used and often publicly exposed VMs; but it is also emulating something relativley simple compared to those).

When pretty much every other language out there, including C and C++, can do string handling better than Rust can, the problem isn't with the fact that competition is happening. The problem is solely that Rust's string handling is total shit.

You're kidding, right? I've never used Rust, so I can't testify to its string handling, but I'm very familiar with C and C++ and using strings in both, and they both completely suck. C is absolutely horrible, and C++ is terrible too if you use the standard library. You only get good string-handling in C++ by switching to a library like Qt.

As for what it's competing against, that's just ridiculous. No language is competing against every language out there; every language has its strengths and weaknesses. C is really good at low-level programming that's one step above assembly, but it sucks at a lot of things (including string handling). Perl is excellent at string parsing, but sucks at performance and readability. R is really good at math, but completely unusable for writing an OS. I'm sure Rust fits in there too somehow. The point is, you can't just compare Rust, or any language, against any other arbitrary language and then bash it because it fails. Is C unusable because it sucks at text parsing? If text parsing is what you need, then yes, but if you're writing an OS kernel, then no.

we should adopt the finnish model, they have one of the best if the not the best education system in the world

and your denigration of the prussian model is correct, but your lesson form that is counterintuitive. i'm certain the zeal for the mass production successes of the 1800s informed its development in ways that should not be celebrated... so your conclusion is we should pursue automation and remove the teacher from decision making even more? i'm not sure you have thought that out completely

we should never depend on algorithms to analyze and proscribe any model of learning for any student. it is absolutely impossible for such an algorithm to do a better job than a moderately involved, competent teacher, who should be the only one involved in any decision making in any capacity for any student. technology is wonderful as a supplementary tool in many ways, but it must be a teacher behind the what, when, where of how that is invoked

i cannot understand someone who thinks an algorithm, any algorithm, can do better than a decent teacher in a classroom. such a belief defies reason and only tells us about your unbridled technophilia. you really need to rethink what avenues of society are and aren't applicable for improvement by automation and technology

i can think of one parallel that is instructive here: compstat form the 1980s and 1990s that saw the USA break the back of an intense crack ridden crime wave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

but the technology was only used to improve reporting and tracking

it was more of management philosophy change than a technology overhaul that, in parallel to what you are proposing, moved computers at the heart of decision making in police work

that's kind of insane actually

it was still cop grunts that had to fight crime with blood and sweat, and police brass that made decisions

no one, outside of a dystopian robocop fantasy movie, would have suggested that an actual computer make decisions about crime fighting. in fact, you should watch that movie as a good lesson about blindly optimistic technophilia and how simple human corporate greed and shortsightedness makes a mockery of that

i'm sorry but it really is just plain insane that you assert AI should drive the classroom. it might make a good science fiction premise. a miserable, depressing, maddening science fiction premise

write a dystopian fantasy book. don't fuck with kids heads to prove something to yourself that you need to learn the hard way, not them. please