though I agree it was a colossally stupid mistake on his part to not do backups for such a long period of time. seriously WTF! But even assuming reasonable timely backups of the frequency of say a week, losing a weeks worth of work is still horrible for the rest of [semi-reasonable] us. I am no willing to let MS off the hook for such pathetic UX screwup. Hell even losing a days worth of work in the middle of some critical firefight week can have serious consequences. its not reasonable to assume a BUYER BEWARE attitude with something as basic & solidified as version control. So the FU Microsoft is warranted. Now had it been a plugin from some 3rd party then its completely on you Not the editor.

this is a very myopic view of the whole information tech revolution. I'd argue pretty much every business in the pre internet world had a component of information asymmetry as key enabler. whether you take stock brokerage or real-estate sale or arbitrage the bushels of wheat between rural & urban markets etc. Its easy to dismiss internet as porn glut but do you know that because of internet the way traditional arranged marriages used to happen in India has changed significantly. Its because earlier the 'market' was restricted to friends and family & now suddenly it is much bigger plus it has many more positive societal effects. do you know that middle-man cannot gouge the little farmer nearly as much because now the farmer has much clearer picture of going rates for grains in urban markets (An IIT Bombay prof actually created an app for that). I can go on.. But here's the problem, IMO, the effects of information asymmetry going away are very ephemeral (so far) because our society/government/law is still structured in very old school ways so it leads to something else with positional advantage expanding and eating away the gains (for instance google eating newspaper revenues).

I would even argue that a guy like trump is actually a product of information age as so long as its no longer possible to subdue any public information anymore, just try imagining Hitler create a mass apparatus like he did in information age. Trump just took this thing to next level of troll-ism.

one more thing, 'supercomputers in your pocket' are just getting started, just wait till you see the self driving cars on streets.

I wish I could give you mod points for saying that. there is way too much hate for the guy for essentially trying to move us in the right direction. I mean look at the contrast, traditional automakers have been sitting on their asses on even basic things like touchscreen and navigation plus they all want to charge huge premiums for it. lets not forget that this is the guy who got a freaking rocket to land back on earth! making a car drive itself is not rocket science!!

overall i am fine with him taking calculated risks in both self driving & EV space.

never mind .. got it .. just click the title

has slashdot acquired the technology to collapse a thread ? seriously how the f**k you do that.

what I really like about c++ exception handling is that it unwinds your stack neatly. so all the objects on your stack get destroyed appropriately. its especially important for releasing any locks you may be holding.
If interested take a look at how boost lib uses it it to for thread cancellation.

BTW all the complaining about c++ not being good for string processing goes out the window when using boost with c++11. really try it, it feels very much like java!

logged in just to say I can relate to your sig.