Fair enough, you and GP make some interesting points regarding a conversation but ACs can sometimes make some interesting standalone points/posts IMO (that doesn't necessarily warrant a reply though). I was just curious...

My understanding is their market capitalization or whatever tanked after Elop and, although a well-known brand, they were really struggling -- Elop just buried the dagger and shamelessly sold them out (figuratively and literally). Your advice is valid though, I think smaller companies have never benefit long-term from a close partnership with MS.

Couldn't remember and google was no help. Let me think more about the context I read it...

why not? anyone can register a /. account and there are plenty of sockpuppets around here.

Haha, cry us a river Microsoft. I'm all for an open platform but this investment is just step 1 of their embrace, extend, extinguish operating procedure. What's that quote about how smaller companies should NEVER work with MS?

I said that as well ("Both sets look synonymous"), but if your non-programmer was told 22 div 3 and 22/3 each did different things, while 22/3 and 22/3.0 did analogously different things, which set would they correctly understand?

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying at the beginning about a "bad" compiler because the outcome should be 7.333333333333333 as expected. If you meant, (int)22 / (int)3 then that makes more sense that you would get 7 because of truncation. Especially if for some bizarre reason the 3.0 was immediately treated as an int (because of the 22?) and you got 7 unexpectedly. Erring on the side of int->floats seems far less dangerous than float->int conversion in math operations because only an experienced programmer would even want/expect a 7.

Wow, I hope you're not suggesting 22 div 3 vs. 22/3 is more intuitive to a novice for what it does compared to 22/3 and 22/3.0! Both sets look synonymous but if someone told you/me that the first and second of each were different I think the second set is MUCH more clear. **HINT: there's a decimal point in the second set, so it would be natural to assume the return value would have one as well -- no such luck on the first set**

Step 1: Embrace Step 2: Extend. Step 3: Extinguish. Step 4: Profit! I think this brings us between 2 and 3, which is not the greatest news for open source R.

Don't mind him. Just sounds jealous to me and didn't realize there was other good opportunities outside his myopic bubble.

That's because this site is just designed to feed clicks to their real bread and butter. Now keep clicking over there peon.

The denialists will still come up with an alternate interpretation of cherry-picked data from some crackpot blog, to prove you wrong.

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The same data has been used to claim men landed on the moon, and that the moon landing was a hoax. Therefore all data related to the moon landing should then be ignored. As it's proven flawed on both counts.

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Gaia is living, breathing, self stabilizing organism. Gaia actively maintains optimum conditions for live to thrive. If the sun fluctuates hotter, Gaia will keep us cool. If the sun fluctuates cooler, Gaia will keep us warm. We have released two quadrillion pounds (2,000,000,000,000,000) of CO2 into the atmosphere and the laws of physics say that will trap heat.... and Gaia will.... umm I dunno... but Gaia will do it's super-smart-Gaia-thing to to actively counter it and keep us in a loving protective embrace of shielded stability. If we have a nuclear war, Gaia will cleanse the environment and protect us from that nasty radiation-stuff. Gaia loves all life, gaia loves us and protects us. Gaia loves broadway shows and long walks on the beach. Gaia has profiles on eHarmony.com and JDate.com.

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My emphasis. This is exactly what the OP is running into and he/she sounds like a buggy manufacturer in the age of automobiles. However, at least they recognize they need to finally learn some new tools after becoming too expensive for their clients if they want to stay in business. Hence the lazy Ask Slashdot question. I say "lazy" because they just need to do their homework since only they know what their needs are.