Well honestly, if you ignore the whole Metro UI fiasco, Windows 8 is a nice update to Windows 7. There a lots of little improvements. It may sound silly, but I think the dialog boxes for copying/moving files alone would be worth a $20 upgrade for my own use.

My two main qualms with Windows at this point are (a) forcing users to use a touchscreen UI on the desktop; and (b) the requirement of stupid/annoying copyright protection schemes. I don't pirate and I don't have any problem paying for software, but product activation needs to go.

It really makes me wonder if Ballmer was somehow the source of the problem. I feel like Microsoft has been a little less evil since the new guy took over.

I'm not sure how you think they changed the tone, timing, delivery, or emphasis of the messages. Apparently they used real posts and posted the entire content of each post without alteration. From what I understand, though I'm interpreting from a few different stories that I read, all they did was to alter the algorithm that Facebook already uses to choose which posts to show in your feed. They didn't insert or remove words from the posts. They didn't do anything to really re-contextualize them.

Whether people realize it or not, Facebook already filters and resorts your feed to emphasize posts that they think you're interested in. If you pay attention, you'll notice that when you have a friend that you "Like" a lot of their posts, then more of their posts will show up in your feed, and they'll appear higher up. I suspect that they also do things like prioritize posts with links from friends who you follow their links. I think they probably even do things like, if you've looked at a persons' profile a lot, or perhaps even if they look at yours a lot, the posts will be more likely to show up. I doubt that Facebook has made this algorithm clear, but it's clear that they're doing things like this.

So it seems that all they did was to add into the algorithm for some users to favor posts with happy words, and for other users posts with unhappy words. I don't think they're altering anything about the tone or emphasis of any individual message. I don't say this to really defend them.

Maybe Google should be working with a company like Tesla instead. It seems like Google would need to find a partner that a background in manufacturing cars, but was a little more innovative and forward-thinking than the big guys in Detroit have historically been.

Along with everything else, my guess is that if this technology really becomes commonplace, it will be disruptive and it will likely result in fewer people actually owning cars. In cases like this, sometimes getting businesses with entrenched interests onboard is not only difficult, but counter productive.

As far as I could tell from reading about this, they didn't change what people said.

Here's the thing, Facebook already filters what you see with the default setup. Your 500 friends each post 10 posts today, and when you load up your page on a social networking site, the page only displays 15. So how are those 15 chosen? (I'm making up numbers here, obviously)

The obvious choice would be to show the 15 most recent posts, but that means there's a good chance you'll miss posts that are important and that you'd like to see, since you're only getting a brief snapshot of what's going on in that social networking site. Facebook instead has an algorithm that tries to determine which of those 5,000 posts you'll care most about. I don't know the specifics, but it includes things like favoring the people who you interact with most on Facebook.

So what Facebook did in this study is they tweaked that algorithm to also favor posts that included negative words. The posts were still from that 5,000 post pool and the contents of the posts were unedited, but they subjected you to a different selection in order to conduct the research.

It's still an open question as to whether this sort of thing is appropriate, but it's important to note that this is something Facebook does all the time anyway. I think where is gets creepy is that Facebook is also an ad-driven company, so you have to wonder what the eventual goal of this research is. I can imagine Facebook favoring posts that include pictures of food to go along with an ad campaign for Seamless. Maybe they'll make a deal with pharmaceutical companies to adjust your feed to make you depressed, while at the same time plastering your feed with ads for antidepressants.

Okay, there's the misunderstanding - I hadn't understood you were talking about automated pre-checkin testing. I still am not seeing the need for "multiple compilers, multiple OSes, and multiple binary architectures" mentioned by the original poster for a product that is intended for a single platform

Different compilers on the same platform find different bugs (warnings, errors).

Different static analysis tools also find different defects.

Different numbers of CPUs/Cores find different timing bugs, deadlocks, race conditions, corruption etc. on concurrent code.

Different binary architectures show up endianness bugs and subtle corruption bugs due to alignment of data in memory.

Different OSs find different run-time behaviour problems and dependency problems. They also find problems in any OS abstraction code.

The more compilers. analysers, machines, architectures and OSs you use, the more bugs you find, and the more bugs you find and fix, the higher the quality of your product.

It's always easiest to develop on top of a high-quality code base. That's when you're fastest.

You don't need a QA department. Automation can get you 80-90% of the benefit.

You don't need to do everything all at once. Start adding new tests, builds and platforms as you go, a bit at a time. You should see your velocity increase very soon.

C and C++ were designed on the principle that the fundamental language constructs should be as fast as possible.

C was designed to be as simple (and flexible) as possible. It (the compiler) had to run on tiny machines, by modern standards. Speed (of the object code) is a consequence/coincidence of the simplicity of the language and the fact that simpler languages tend to produce tighter (and faster) object code when compiled.

C's simplicity can be summed up by the following rule of thumb: if something can be calculated at compile time, the language usually supports it. Everything else (like handling array dimensions and strings) are left up to the programmer.

When computers were small and slow, C was ideal for programming them when FORTH wasn't big enough.

This means nothing. It is not detecting time per se. It is detecting things violations like objects don't fall up, or other such experienced pattern that is the result of time.

c++ is great.

Keep repeating it often enough and people will believe you.

A build system can help you modularize your build so that a complete recompile does not occur after a syntax or linker error.

For C++? Are you nuts?!

What you should be doing outside the CS class and in the so-called "Real World" is "being productive". That usually means screw the warnings, it has to be completed ASAP or we'll find someone "more productive" than you are.

I'm having a sense of humour failure at the moment, so apologies if this was not taken in the spirit it was intended but: that sort of attitude tends to get you eaten by the Real World for breakfast.

I've very recently found myself working for a company that has gone in that direction due to incompetent management and greedy VPs. I and my colleagues have been pressure into fixing bugs with no proper bug report, no access to the production hardware and no integration and test facilities "by lunch time" with all the corner-cutting that implies.

The company is now paying for it, and I am on the verge of accepting a new job with another company.

I don't think you understand the study

I didn't RTFA because I could tell from the summary that it was a lot of nonsense.

or c++

I understand enough about C++ to know to avoid it wherever possible. I freely admit that my brain isn't big enough to fight against C++ with enough perseverance to get it to do anything useful correctly. I'll stick to C and scripting languages thank you very much.

or unit testing.

*cough* Test Driven Development *cough*

To become half way good at C++ you either need to devote you entire life to it over decades (somewhat like a monk) or have an IQ of at least 200. Life's too short and my IQ is miles too low.