After doing some heavy low-level C coding for many years, I recently decided to look at Rust and see what it's all about. It really is a huge improvement over C.

With C, you need to understand the capabilities of the hardware and low-level operating system features. Shared memory, locks, semaphores, basic memory management, and, of course, pointers for everything.

With Rust, a deeper understanding of how the OS works really helps. The heap and stack for function calls and passing parameters, concurrency, and more advanced usage of the locks and other features. And, or course, all the memory overwrite and bad pointer risks.

It's like Graydon Hoare and the rest of the team that wrote Rust kept a log of every stupid error they ever saw C. They wrote the compiler to detect every one of them and tell you "YOU DON'T DO THAT SH*T HERE!!!" - and give you an explanation of WHY you don't do that.

Then they added structures and features in the language to help you do things better. It's really well thought out, and you need to stop and think about how to move your C code to Rust to take advantage of those features and improve it.

I'm impressed. Looking forward to using more of it.

With diminishing Skype usage, this is a great way of sucking all the Skype conversation histories into the Teams A.I. engines without putting the development effort into Skype.

Heck, they'll automatically create a Teams account for you if you don't have one. I wonder what the A.I. permission defaults will be?

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.

One
Real
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison

Did you build an Excel spreadsheet for the cost comparison? Can you share? Asking for a friend.

There's some great existing research on this by Cesar Hidalgo. showing that people are far more forgiving when the mistake is made by a human vs when made by a machine. Search for "How Humans Judge Machines" and "Cesar Hidalgo" There are youtube videos and you can download his book fpr free with all the research details.

Some operators I am working with use Carrier Grade NAT, which means multiple cable modems can be sharing the same real-world IP address simultaneously.

It's creating havoc when law enforcement is asking to trace IP addresses back to subscribers.

Destroy a hospital's records and patients die? No problem.

Mess up a police department or a city? Sucks to be them.

Mess with US oil supply? Your family is checking the value of your insurance policy. Past measures range up to and including invading a country on the other side of the world, and bringing in a bunch of allies for good measure.

These guys are done.

It saw its shadow!

Six more weeks of winter on Mars!

At my daughter's university here in Canada, the most serious concern is about privacy and disclosure,

The software, provided by a US company, has a user agreement that includes consent to disclose the video and any other information to Department of Homeland Security.

> . It was a time in Moore's Law when year-old machines were arguably obsolete, in that your 20-hour runs could become 15-hour runs if you upgraded your 1990 machine to 1991.

1991? I was part of a Fujitsu team that sold a supercomputer to a Calgary university/oil industry consortium for geological modelling. Vendors at the time claimed that the fastest workstations had 25% of the power of a supercomputer. So why spend the money for the super? The customer said it would take 4 months of computing to get their results. They could not wait the one year or more for a workstation... if they could get the workstation to go that long without crashing.

You know... the forklift truck required to haul those 19" Trinitron or NEC Multisync monitors to your desk.

Dafuq is this guy talking about? Workstations used to cost minimum $10K to over $100K for a heavy duty graphics station.

Everything today is cheaper, more flexible and with a wider range of configurations.

- Two competing Wintel chip vendors regularly increasing performance
- Full operating system compatibility, which choice of Linux or Windows
- Competing providers of graphics cards that work as massively parallel processors
- Massive I/O capacity and variety of peripherals on PCI-whatever and USB
- Form factors ranging from wall-warts to data-center sized supercomputing clusters

Back in the last 80's and early 90's, I used or at least evaluated almost every workstation out there - IBM, DEC, HP, Sun. Exciting times, but we're not going back.

Looks like we need to add a 4th to the story of the Three Little Pigs.

So the Restaurant at the End of the Universe is a Taco Bell?

In past usage of Cisco firewalls and routers, the GUI was at best deficient and at worst defective. To get anything done you had to use what I referred to as their "Assembler for Routers" language. Because of the complexity and the high cost, I eventually applied the ABC rule of networking - "Anyone But Cisco". I've used other top-rated firewalls where GUI is complete and usable and gives a great view of complex configurations.