Yeah but really who uses them?

95% of .NET is in c#. All the VB jobs are still for legacy 5.x and 6.x code that I see. Take it back 85% c# and 10% c++. Just because it can be done COBOL doesn't mean people use it other than to see if they can write a hello world program.

In essence it is a c# based environment.

I welcome it if it is more open and cheaper. 100k to start a website for unlimited licenses is freaking nuts.

But that was a few years ago.

MS is changing because they have lost and can no longer use leverage like they once did. Witness IE and visual studio where lots of free competition exists?

I welcome an alternative to java and hopes it encourages python and php to get their acts together. More competition the better for everyone

The old gray beards today might say the same with IBM or Digital but once market forces correct a monopoly the company either whithers or adapts.

Doesn't mean MS is no different than any other corporation even if that opinion is unpopular here on slashdot. Timewarner/AT&T/Comcast are far more evil and God forbid what Jobs would have in store if Apple won the Pc wars in the 1980s and achieved 90% marketshare! MS would be tame in comparison.

Under a free market people play nice or loose out.

Today I like Microsoft even though I hated them hence my name 13 years ago. Here are the facts in late 2014
1. IE is not a bad browser anymore. It used to be both feared and loathed in the old days as it was a threat to win32 applications. Today they no longer will ever have the control they did in 2004 when you needed to go to a library to use IE 6 if you used a mac or linux to fill out job apps. Yes I remember doing that. Monster.com was optimized for IE 6 quirks back then.IE 11 is modern and has great debugging tools and behaves like a real browser behaves and has the best security with sandboxing. IE 12 will even have an add-on framework ala Chrome/Firefox. I use adblock on IE today
2. Visual Studio 2015 supports Android and Linux Xiarmin development?? No I am lying. Go google it as emulators are included including CLANG support.
3. Office is available for Android and IOS. Full suite is coming soon
4. MS more liberal with pricing for non corporations. Google VS Community edition. It is pro and free!
5. MS is opening sourcing .NET and lots of frameworks
6. Azure supports non win32 operating systems.
7. MS is putting more effort in security and stabilizing and fixing bugs now that competition exists.

Am I a fanboy? No. I am agnostic this day but I find MS getting much better and if it were not for Metro I would be a fan even of their desktop products. Windows 7 is a very stable desktop oriented OS. It is not and I repeat not the POS slashdotters who have not run Windows in 15 years remember.

MS woke up and realized oh shoot. IOS and Android are eating our lunch! Eclipse will eat our lunch! Amazon will eat our lunch! Firefox and now I should say Chrome has eating our lunch! Ms has so much competition today on so many fronts it can't go back and use leverage of a monopoly in one area for another. Blocking Android on Windows? Who cares about Windows blah. Block W3C standards iwth IE? Fine I will use another browser etc.

This was unthinkable in 1999. So Linux did not win the desktop wars like we hoped but open source software did win everything else. Browsers are competitive. Mobile operating systems competitive. Development environments are competitive. Clouds and virtual services for legacy win32 apps scare the crap out of them so soon if mega corps want to leave they can.

MS is done. I welcome the new MS. As some (I did not say all folks) products are fairly decent and play well with others.

Exponential refers to the amount of resources, not the type. It basically means it takes e^n resources to simulate. While the GP left n unspecified, lets assume it is either particles or wave functions.

I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I have to say this.

This has been my life for the past couple decades. I am often the "voice of reason", and I don't have the heart to tell folks "No, I'm the voice of common sense", although I suspect they wouldn't get it.

Castro died several years back but got replaced by another Castro, though this new one isn't the Castro people refer to when they refer to Castro.

But it works in IE 6?!!

Seems very hypothetical as I wouldn't normally go to the mall.

But the chance for excitement would bring in a lot of people I bet.

Well, I follow pcc development pretty closely and still use it for a few small projects.

To be sure there are some pretty significant advancements in compiler design that are important for someone who is working on a compiler in a professional or research capacity. But for me it was more of an exercise in understanding enough to hack a little bit on pcc, lcc and now llvm. I really only got as far as graph coloring for register allocators, and type inference for non-C ML-like language (a flawed approximation of HM type inference).

Some people are moving back to hand written compilers, at least hand written recursive descent parsers in place of compiler generators like yacc/bison. My own experiments formalized the grammar with PEG to generate and confirm test cases, then hand written recursive descent from the PEG (very easy to do).

I don't think I hand optimize C to suit some ancient assumptions of what a compiler can do. A modern C compiler can do a lot of amazing substitutions to turn a well organized set of small functions into a very fast monolithic block of machine code.

These days, pretty much the best thing when writing C is to avoid doing things that are undefined so the compiler can do optimization instead of falling back to some legacy behavior hacked into it.

If that was the goal, we failed horribly at it.

Because it worked so well for Sun Microsystems.

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.