So they're not even based on Broadwell yet; when are they expecting to get Xeons based on Skylake out - next year?

I use the MessagEase keyboard on a few devices, and I can't imagine a better input system for small screens. It is unconventional, and it takes a bit of learning. Small enough to fit on a dime? Probably not. But for a watch, absolutely.

http://www.exideas.com/ME/inde...

Iain M. Banks had the notion of a 'mind state abstract', where you'd send a copy of (part of) your mind and then either discard it or reintegrate. It would either be downloaded into a drone or biological construct, or just used in VR. It made a lot more sense to me than the transporter, as long as you solve the reintegration problem. Especially on a dangerous mission, I'd prefer to send a copy down and then merge their memories into mine if they survived...

You do raise an excellent point, but MS has never put "free" behind one of their upgrade efforts before, and Win 7 is already out of mainstream support. NOBODY wants to go through another migration at this point (XP-32 -> 7-64 was a massive effort, and many of us are still recovering from the hangover) but I think this is really a "get on the bus, or get left behind" moment.

People with the buying power will probably beat on Microsoft to give them more time and delay, but in the SMB space, it's going to happen.

It might have been that he was just a clever guy, but let me offer an alternate possibility -- the new guy recognized the problem precisely because he was the new guy.

Specifically, it's common for people not to think about minor annoyances they have grown used to. It's the boiling-frog effect -- a programmer who has been working on that app every day since the very beginning, as more image assets were slowly added, might not notice the gradual slowdown of the app's startup phase, because at first it was fast enough, and eventually he/she just got used to the slow startup because "that's just how it is with this program".

The new guy, OTOH, sits down with the app and because he's had little or no previous experience with the delay, finds himself noticeably annoyed and says to himself, "that is a problem... maybe I can find a way to improve that".

tl;dr -- a person with fresh eyes can often see problems that the old hands have grown too accustomed to, to notice.

That's an ingenious way to accomplish layoffs without having to pay for any severance packages...

Apparently I've not had enough coffee yet (or have spent too long staring at MIPS CPU traces to spot the error) and thought that you said the exact opposite of what you said.

More general hint: The principle of minimum scope exists for a reason. Declare your variables at the point where they can be initialised, not at some arbitrary point and you make life easier for people trying to understand the lifetime of the variable.

The issue is only when you pass standard library objects across a library boundary between two libraries compiled for different standard library implementations. It's perfectly safe to pass C and Objective-C values between libraries that use libc++ and libstdc++ internally.

There is actually a good precedent that will predict the answer to your question. 50 years ago, interracial marriage was in a position similar to the position of gay marriage now -- widely considered "unnatural" and banned by many states, but becoming increasingly accepted and the bans were increasingly being found unconstitutional.

So the interesting question is, 50 years later, are churches that disapprove of interracial unions being forced by the law to hold marriage ceremonies for mixed-race couples?

AFAIK the answer is "no"... but what's more interesting is that it's largely a non-issue, since there are so few churches that actually disapprove of interracial marriages anymore. My prediction, then, is that 50 years from now we will see a similar situation regarding gay marriage.

Says the guy that won't even put a pseudonym behind what he has to say.

I've got some news for you, AC: just because someone expresses a viewpoint you happen to disagree with doesn't make them a shill. I've been a UNIX user since the 80s, a Linux user since 94 or so, a postfix and sendmail admin for over fifteen years, and helped run a dozen MMOs back when they had text interface and were called MUDs. GPL beats BSD, vi beats Emacs, and my windows desktop runs Xming so I can do real work from time to time.

What I said was not marketing, and is not even an endorsement. I was not claiming that win 10 is the best thing since sliced bread, but rather simply stating that the economics are impossible to ignore. Win 10 adoption is GOING to happen fast, and it's going to be driven by the "free upgrade, but only if you do it right now" bandwagon. That was my only point, and wishing it were otherwise isn't going to change what's going to happen.

Do you point your desktop Linux users (okay, so I'm kidding) toward the bleeding edge/preview yum repos? No? Then why harp on MS for aiming their previews at IT people rather than end users?

Who the hell was screaming to keep VB6 around? Even the VB programmers I know almost universally hate it.

I believe that's going to change, drastically. Microsoft's path with Windows 10 (free updates from Windows => 7, as long as you do it within a year of release) is going to drive the fastest corporate OS migrations ever--for better, or for worse.

I know we're planning for it. It scares the hell out of us, but the incentive to move forward is so powerful there really isn't any other viable path.

If that's correct, who cares if it takes a few centuries for the thing to warm up? It would completely solve the problem of how you get the crew from point A to point B alive... no suspended animation, no generation ships, etc, just board at the right time and be there after a relatively short period. YOU won't ever get to see Alpha Centauri, but frankly, from the perspective of the species, that's really not a problem.