bambam12897

Looks like I have a lot to read up on. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction.

Thanks for taking the time to address my questions. Memory management hasn't been a major stumbling block in my line of work, but I'll read up and give it a whirl if I have the appropriate project.

I've been working C++ professionally for a couple of years and honestly I'm a huge fan - So I was excited to read about an alternative. After reading your 5 posts, I get the impression that RUST is mostly mildly useful syntactic sugar on top of C++.

Here is my feedback:

1 - If memory management is a serious problem for the software you work on, I've never found the boost library lacking. This seems like the main selling point for RUST. Given the scope of the project: you guys must be doing something that is so different that it couldn't be rolled into a library - so I'm looking forward to your future posts to see if there is something here that I really am missing out on.

2 - I'm not a fan of the implicitness and I personally don't use 'auto' b/c it makes scanning code harder. I guess this is more of a personal preference.

3 - A lot of things are renamed. auto->let, new->box, switch->box You get the feeling that effort was put in to make the language explicitly look different from C++

4 - the Rust switch statement don't fall through... This one was truly mind blowing. The one useful feature of switch statement got ripped it out! If you don't really need the fall through, I'd just avoid using them completely...

5 - I've never really seen an equivalent to boost (in combination to the STL) in other languages (maybe I didn't look hard enough). Could you maybe make a post about the RUST standard library? Libraries are always the deal breaker

To that point, my last comment is maybe a little more wishy washy. The main reason I'm consistently happy with using C++ (and why I put up with the header files) is that everything is available. If you need to do X, and X has at some point been put into library by someone: you can be sure that that library will be available in C++. Since Rust seems so close to C++, does this mean that linking to C++ code is trivial? If I can seamlessly start programming parts of our codebase in RUST, that could potentially make a huge impact.

I don't think you pay several thousand dollars to stand in a backyard... Though I could be wrong.

He's there to raise money. If he wanted to talk to Sam Altman he'd just buy him a ticket to DC

I can't be the only one that finds it pathetic that the president needs to prostitute himself in such a way to make a few thousand dollars for a political party.

You'd think they have more important things to do - given they're running a nation and all..

Anecdote: Joe Biden visited our town recently. I'd bet the amount of money spent on flying him out here far exceeds the amount he raised at the dinner. There is a huge security apparatus that travels with them. Not just the presidential/VP jets, but a few days before he arrived a plane carrying the armored car(s), a whole ton of people in charge of security and god knows what else.

I wonder what the author thinks of ESOPs and cooperatives.

"IPO/acquisition"

that's not the only option. The company could remain privately owned - in which case you want to have below 100 shareholders so that you can remain a C corp

It's amazing how short people's memories are. They behaved in a very scummy way back when that all happened. I was sure they would have to close their doors within 6 month.

But it's exactly one year since the hack and everyone is back to talking about how amazing Linode is

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Hackers-Claim-to-Have-Gained-...

Sure you can claim that getting hacked is "nature of the game" - but that's not the real issue.

The issue was with how they handled the public disclosure of the hack. Instead of immediately alerting their clients that there has been an issue (so that - as you say - people could take mitigating actions) they stalled on giving information and tried to cover up the whole fiasco. This should give people ZERO confidence in their moral integrity.

If you run a service like Linode or DO, you need to provide certain guarantees on disclosure of security failures and maybe get an externally audit from time to time.

Wouldn't this just provide an opening for a investment firm to swoop in, buy Yahoo, sell all their assets and cash out?

Because no one is doing that... I'd have to guess there is more going on

Definitely! I'm just being realistic - These press releases are basically the tea ceremony everyone is expected to perform.

If you just made several mil I honestly doubt you're thinking about making the "transition as smooth as possible". You're thinking "should I buy a Lambo or a Ferrari?"

They probably got a memo from Dropbox saying "now that we own your ass, here is a press release that you'll publish asap"

"We are sooooo filthy rich now. So long suckers!"

I'd be more honest =)

If my boss hugged people in meetings, I think he'd be reported to HR. That's just weird and creepy...

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't openSSH more or less a done deal? How many man hours are they honestly putting into that now-a-days?

Without the "Please" the phrase sounds like an order. You don't really want a terminal ordering/telling you what to do.

The "Please" reframes it into a request.

While the language definitely has it's problems (I'm not a fan of the syntax at all), I think dropping it for something marginally better like R is a little silly. So many man hours have been put into writing MATLAB/Octave code - redoing it seems like mostly a waste.

I don't know if you have similar experiences, but I often find that I want to use X feature in MATLAB in combination with Y feature in R and there isn't any easy way to do it. The bifurcation of coding efforts is vastly more frustrating than some bad/inconsistent syntax.

The toolboxes are great. I haven't used them much, but I feel like a lot of the time you can get away without using them. If you really need them, then it's not unreasonable to pay a license for the documentation and robustness - which you won't get in open source most of the time.

But like.. that's just my opinion man =)

Both issues are solved by Octave... which doesn't require the bifurcation of the community of people writing new code.

It's funny how domain dependent this is. In controls/filters/vision/applied-math no one don't takes anything other than MATLAB seriously.

There are of course the C/C++/FORTRAN gurus that write LAPACK/BLAS/OpenCV etc. , but they're kinda in their own world. MATLAB is the de-facto wrapper for these libraries, and all prototyping is done in it.

My general opinion has settled on:

Doing linear algebra -> Matlab/octave

Twiddling data tables around and making plots -> R

You honestly think Microsoft it trying to shift to a RedHat-like business plan? That they'll switch to becoming a support provider?

I think what RedHat is doing is nice, but it's really not on the same scale to what Microsoft does; not to mention that they essentially have no monopoly/lockin - b/c anyone can start doing what they do (ie. start providing support for CentOS).

The synergy of microsoft services is closely tied to their ability to lock in developers and customers. Devs like C#, they write code to run on windows, windows gets more OS-exclusive software, more people buy Windows and Office, etc. etc.

Mono means people can run their C# work on free software, which mean they stop looking any better more appealing than the competition

I guess I left out the obvious connection.

It's all part of the same thinking. RMS et al think - not unreasonably - think that this is Microsoft's business plan, so they really don't want the open source community investing their time on a platform they think will get clamped down to work only on a proprietary system.

You honestly don't get it?

I really like microsoft products and I use them every day, however the business model is too lock people in to their ecosystem so that you have to purchase licenses for their products.

Mono clearly undermines that b/c it allows you to "easily" jump ship to a free platform.

Unless I'm somehow completely misunderstanding their business model - killing Mono just makes business sense.

We've known for a long time that for instance road noise causes health issues.

I don't see road noise being all that different from white noise. Outside of the dump truck at 5AM, it's not so loud as to cause damage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_health_effects

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadway_noise

"Microsoft realizes mobile moves faster than the traditional desktop world it is used to, and asking the industry to wait for Windows 9 and Windows Phone 9 is simply not an option."

Other than being a bigger number, what radically different changes is the author expecting for Windows Phone 9? It seems like all the fundamentals are there. The changes to the OS at this point are rather incremental

"You have to write your design in an HDL language"

What???? There is a very mature set of tool for converting MATLAB to HDL.

http://www.mathworks.com/products/hdl-coder/

http://www.mathworks.com/products/hdl-verifier/

http://www.mathworks.com/products/filterhdl/

I'm sure there are similar tools for other languages. It requires you to program in a slightly different way (certain operations aren't optimal for FPGAs), but is extremely user-friendly.

At the company I work for, all FPGA programming is done in MATLAB. Unfortunately I work in a different department so I can't give you any technical details, but from what I understand, no one has written things directly to HDL in years.

"And access to source code for this price? Damn"

That's pretty standard. I spoke to a guy working with the Cryengine, and he said that it was so full of unfinished features and bugs that you were absolutely forced to work on the engine's codebase.

That's more of a management issue. If you decide to be (or are assigned to be) the "box guy" then it may be mind numbing. However, reasonable management would shift you around to different projects to keep work stimulating.

So is selling stuff before it actually exists the new norm?

I get it when you have a kick-starter, but when you're already established doesn't it come off as a bit shady and scummy?

Are they low on money and desperately need to cash-in asap? Are they worried their product will be poorly reviewed b/c they aren't confident in the quality - so they're trying to lock-in buyers?

EDIT: I'm just putting out the question "Why do they have a preorder system? What's the rational behind it? Why just announce it when it's available?"

Preorders are a way of locking in buyers. You can trick a few people into buying it, that may have otherwise not bought it when it was actually released (maybe due to negative reviews, or a change in their financial position). Except... why would you ever want to do that with developers? So why are they trying to do that? I don't get it