Except no one is buying Windows Phones. They want iPhones and Androids. One has to wonder how many billions of dollars MS has blown trying to become a big smart device player. How long will their shareholders tolerate them dumping vast sums into dubious projects?

For chrissakes, has the Xbox division actually paid off the huge investments MS threw into that division? I don't mean have the last seven or eight quarters been in the black, I mean has it actually paid for itself?

Yes, it's called Android compatibility. The only successful handsets with any significant market share that don't run Android are iOS devices. In fact, what that tells me is that if you aren't Apple, you pretty much need to be Android. Even BlackBerry, though two or three years too late, has figured that out.

Nokia was already on the way out. They failed to adapt to the new phone market as defined by the iPhone. Perhaps if they had immediately switched to the Android OS and stuck to hardware only they could have kept pace and stayed relevant. Most people (myself included) have never even seen a Nokia phone without a physical keyboard. That shows the era in which they peaked and stagnated. Microsoft would have had to have saved Nokia, as opposed to just letting the Nokia status quo alone and Nokia magically being successful.

Well, next time write:
x = ++x;

I've pretty much trained myself to never use post-increment unless a statement is incorrect without it, and even then I'm unhappy if the statement has any other side effect at all (unless the entire idiom is lifted straight from K&R, and then I ponder why the code is rolling its own iterator loop.)

Post-increment can fail in interesting ways (yes, those darn sequence points). In addition, when using a template metaprogramming library, post-increment can trigger a large state copy that an unwary programmer doesn't expect. It can be horrifically less efficient.

On the other hand, the ternary operator (even a compound ternary operator) has FAR FEWER semantic ass-bites that plain old post-increment.

Post-increment: Visually familiar, but badly behaved.
Ternary: Visually unfamiliar (to some), but well behaved.

In the STL context, an important property of the ternary operator is that you don't have to declare the return type of the expression (whereas with an if/else assignment into an intermediate variable, you do). Maybe this is less important now with better "auto" support.

A prudent ?: will also keep you on the straight and narrow with respect to the ODR. You can avoid re-typing shared sub-expressions. Anyone ever debugged a program where consecutive lines of code intended to contain an identical subexpression, but actually didn't? No, I didn't think so.

Really, when someone complains about the ?: operator as some form of diabolical trickery, I flip the bozo bit. But you just can't get a programmer to embrace it for The Right Reasons who won't first master sequence points and the horror show of post-increment.

Grasshopper, this is your debugger.

Debugger, this is your new grasshopper. Enjoy your tasty meal.

This is incorrect.

The rate at which heat enters a building from warmer outside air is proportional to the difference between the temperatures. If there's a five-degree difference half as much heat energy per unit of time enters the building than if there's a ten-degree difference. The amount of heat that must be removed Monday morning is the integral of that heat flow function. If you keep the office cool all weekend, you keep the interior/exterior temperature differential large and the heat flow high. If you allow the interior to warm up then the differential decreases and heat flow decreases. Less heat in means less to pump out.

This effect is maximized in the scenario you describe, where interior temperature rises to match exterior temperature, because when the temperatures are the same heat transfer ceases, but it's useful even if the difference never falls to zero. Actually, it's even better when the temperature differential goes negative and heat starts naturally flowing out of the building (e.g. interior temperature rises during the day and exterior temperature falls enough at night to be below the elevated interior temperature). Heat that flows out naturally is heat you don't have to remove. Smart buildings should be able to improve this effect by facilitating beneficial heat transfer (e.g. opening windows or pumping exterior air through the building) and impeding undesired heat transfer (e.g. insulation, keeping doors and windows closed).

Come on guys, what the hell are you doing posting URLs with so much tracking crap embedded in it?

The third URL is arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2015/08/we-can-rebuild-him-philadelphia-hackers-offer-brotherly-love-to-fallen-robot/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content)

And the entirety of "?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content)" is just tracking crap which shouldn't even be incluced.

Are you guys getting affiliate clicks? Or are you just too damned lazy to not give us URLs full of this crap?

To the guys offering to fix this, kudos and good on 'ya.

It's 102 degrees in there, the women all have it adjusted to insane warm levels and are STILL wearing sweaters in the summer.

I swear that I saw a couple of geckos running across the floor last time I dropped off company credit card receipts.

Most time consuming bug - The AMD cpu stack corruption bug. Errata 721. It took me a year to track it down. Half that period I thought it was a software bug in the kernel, for a month I thought it was memory corruption in gcc. And most of the rest of the time was spent trying to reproduce it reliably and examine the cores from gcc to characterize the bug. Somewhere in there I realized it was a cpu bug. It took a while to reduce the cases enough to be able to reproduce the bug within 60 seconds. And the last week was putting the whole thing together into a bootable USB stick image to send to AMD so they could boot up the test environment and reproduce the bug themselves.

Bug that was the most fun - The 6522 I/O chip was a wonderful multi-feature chip with a lot of capability. There was a hardware timer bug which could jam the timer interrupt if it timed out at just the wrong time.

My general advice: Add assertions for complex pre-conditions instead of assuming that said complex pre-conditions are always properly in place. The more non-stupid assertions you have in your code, the earlier you detect the bug and the easier it is to fix.

-Matt

It was developed some 20 years earlier in the 60s.
Hell, the concept of linking documents together was done up before Berner-Lee.
What Tim did, was create an open language based on SGML's standard.

He said if someone is a poor performer they should be compensated accordingly.

So, no more golden parachutes?

So what does it mean that capitalism is founded on that very idea, that everyone will do what is in their own best interest?

It means that the ideological structure of capitalism will eventually get in the way of human progress, which seems to be happening now, and needs to be replaced. The question is, will this happen through reform or revolution?

Look, O got loads of money from the nuke industry. Why? Because he is a fan of nukes.
The problem was that the dems were opposed to it, and the GOP is opposed to ANYTHING that O tries to do.

Right now, is the PERFECT time for the GOP to get off their fucking ass and put forward a bill to really fund nukes. O would back it.
BUT, you nut jobs will not do it.

And those prices have NOTHING to do with the costs of wind. It has EVERYTHING to do with making PROFITS from idiots.
Utilities through out the nation are adding wind to replace coal. In particular, they are doing it because the electricity is much cheaper than coal.

sorry, but wind is cheaper than coal, and with the next iteration of wind generators, they should be cheaper than nat gas.
EIA, and others all show this. You can not show ANYPLACE where Coal is actually cheaper than wind.

Basically, it is the extremists that are killing America, and even the west.
Many ppl note the fact that the far right HATES science and pick and choose what they want to. And they are correct.
However few ppl have noticed the fact that the far left HATES science and pick and choose what they want to.
Take the case of AGW. A rational person says that the science is overwhelming in favor of AGW. Therefore the smart thing is to drop our CO2 and relatively soon.

BUT, if you run the numbers, you will see that we NEED nukes. In particular, we need gen IV nukes since they can not meltdown. In addition, these can make use of the nuke waste/ aboveground thorium, rather than mining for U.
Yet, the far left fights it. And the far right, really has not done SQUAT for the nuke industry.

Then you have the fact that the far left screams about America's emissions. Yet, current calculated numbers from 2013 show that China accounts for more than 30% of CO2, while the entire west accounts for less than 28%. In addition, China's emission far outweigh even America's emissions. Both in current, as well as total since 150 years ago, or even 1000 years ago.
And that does not include what OCO2 is showing. OCO2's numbers are showing that CHina's emission is well over 40%, and probably closer to 45%. That is HUGE. Absolutely fucking HUGE.
BUT, what does the far left do? They scream that America needs to buy wind/solar from China and continue to drop our emissions. At the same time, they claim that China's growing their Wind/solar faster than America, while ignoring the fact that China's % of electricity from Coal grows EVERY YEAR, and is now in the high 80s.