slededit

The problems arise when you start getting into double digit core counts. At 4 you can make pretty reasonable MUXes still. Above that you need to start making serious trade-offs to either Fmax or latency.

With their tight grip on the internet ad market, this is trundling dangerously close to anti-competitive behavior. They must feel very secure in their lobbying efforts.

The common refrain I hear from hardware guys is that the uncore is the hardest part by far. The bulk of design time is spent connecting multiple cores together. Great single thread perf doesn't imply an easy path to multicore.

These most recent optimizations are nowhere near 10x faster. The only one that can even come close is autovectorization and that can be done without heavy reliance on UB.

If your loop is worth autovectorizing the 2 instructions to check for pointer aliasing, and other showstoppers is not material.

I see it a lot. "Oh, your an accountant! Let's chat later I have some questions about XYZ". Those with less tact will ask then and there usually with a response to meet them at the office next week.

MS Office was ported to the browser 10 years ago. You can go use web Excel right now, and could have since forever.

A WASM version of the local apps would be interesting though.

AD is all about group policy, logins are merely table stakes. If you want to distribute firewall rules to every machine in your arg AD is the way to go. Ditto for forcing updates (or preventing them), and any other manner of mass configuration. Then there is also centralized logging and auditing.

Linux has most of this in an ad-hoc fashion, but the key benefit comes from the centralization.

Their distributed build system is better, and they have better tools for debugging distributed system problems.

My impression is that for local stuff their tooling is not much better than public. They have a lot more reliance on logging.

I’ve never worked there so this is just all second hand info.

Windows Performance Explorer is an example of something public. It’s like dtrace on steroids. Page Heap is really helpful for finding buffer overflows. I’ve never used a debugger with a better UI than the VS one. WinDbg’s reverse debugging is super powerful and fast enough to be useable.

Not public: the best instrumented profiler I’ve ever used. Smaller things like Assert tags so you can uniquely ID them. A massive distributed test system (love hate with that one). Profiling and optimization tools to answer pretty much any question about how your product behaves.

I always thought MSVC’s dialect of C++ was a little more programmer friendly. E.g. you can construct an object inline and pass it by reference. The compiler doesn’t do ridiculous things once it finds out you sign overflowed - it’s designed to support applications not meet synthetic benchmarks. PDBs make a lot more sense to me than packing debug info directly in the binary.

Software developers were never the hero’s of the story. It was always the prettier people egging them on for the greater good while they talked about how smart they were.

That’s changed lately. With the need for ever more developers the average skill has gone down but that is orthogonal to status in society.

Yea but think how fast your Z80 interrupts can be with those shadow registers!

One of the things I miss most about working for Microsoft was all the great internal tooling. There's stuff that blows away what's available on Linux. I wouldn't trade it for apt-get any day of the week but it would be nice to see a lot of it get ported.

Status normally follows money (with enough gestation time). For the simple reason to get money you need to convince someone who already has it to give it to you.

The inverse is also true, while a Noble title will get you a good spot at a traditional restaurant in London - for the most part nobody cares now that they don't employ half the village.

They do work in the softer case. Canada never would have agreed to a weakened NAFTA without the screws being turned the way they had. Although in this case Trump came very close to a full backlash.

There was collateral, I get milk commercials explaining how the other brand is American, and this one is Canadian. The better one is left for me to decide...

That has a common use case of not wanting your phone ringing in a meeting.

People expect their computers not to listen to them when not actively using the mic. Your switch is the program that records you, a second is redundant and confusing.

Yea that could work. I think this is cheaper for them surprisingly enough. Switches are expensive.

Who controls the switch? You need an entire secure system distinct from the untrusted CPU - or a manual switch on the side. The latter goes against everything Apple believes in design wise.

Gates liked to make strong definitive statements and have his employees convince him he was wrong. Arguing back was rewarded with promotions provided you were right. It was a culture that selected heavily for type A personalities.

The uncomfortable fact is other professions treat their employees like cogs (hiring booms then mass layoffs), or their customers like crap (ever wait an hour for your set time appointment at the doctor?). The determining factor is really the price of the professional.

Software development is in a real interesting situation as its transitioning from a low status job to a high status one. As this progresses you'll see more and more "the customer is always wrong" style blog posts. They are already pretty common already.

TDD is really one of those things you either like or don't. I for one hate working that way and would be happy to know about it as early as possible. No amount of training will change that.

Cartridge starters are common on Jet engines too for cases where you need to get them started ASAP (i.e. military).

Fun fact: most airplanes have a smaller turbine used to start their larger ones. The ones that don't use a mobile turbine cart for the same purpose. It takes a lot of energy to get them started.

I don’t see how you can “fix” it without breaking a ton of stuff. I guess they could do a compatibility shim.

I went back and did a project in C, but its just so restricting. Particularly common things like lack of dynamic arrays really start to get on my nerves. I've worked on a product with a C heritage and they had horrible hacked dynamic arrays made with macros. Templates made them much better.

Working in a C "style" can be a nice compromise sometimes.

They explicitly claim the opposite when taking their DMCA safe harbor provision.

According to the article the Iranians used advanced Google techniques like the "AND", and "OR" operators. Truly sophisticated work.

APT and dpkg really makes it different. Changes the whole character vs say redhat and their RPMs.

The main difference between then and now is the government made real efforts to clean up its act. Post watergate and pentagon paper scandals it seemed like the government was actually willing to change.

These days we don't even get lip service to that effect. Civil wars happen when people think change is not possible any other way.

Its pretty clear that America is the country it wants to be despite protests to the contrary.

None of those compare to Napoleon’s rampages or the subjugating of half the world by the British Empire. In the classical world raizing entire cities was not uncommon.

We went through this in the early days of movie theaters. Laws were passed forcing separation as you are mentioning. Its a shame we to revisit this over and over again each time technology changes slightly.