Name one good "Metro" app. It has to be good, and it has to do more than the same thing in a web browser. Even Microsoft was not able to do this with its own sample apps.
"Apps"? I have no apps on OSX. I have applications. There is no advertising anywhere on the OSX machine I use. Maybe on the apple store, but I never go there except for the "upgrade" tab, and I don't even have an apple ID and never will have one.
Devs have always been able to monetize their work on Windows. We don't need some idiotic ad-centric model to support cheap ass broken apps There are millions of apps on smart phones, but only 10 are ever worth using. Why would we want to support those lame apps through the cesspool of the advertisement model? If you're on Windows you may as well use a web browser because all of the apps I ever saw on Windows did not work as well as the same thing done in a browser. Even the Bing on the web works better than the Bing app from Microsoft, it's as if Microsoft went out of its way to make the worst possible sample apps (but more likely assigned interns to write them).
Does Apple care about ARM chips other than what's in their phones? Probably not. But still, Clang/LLVM is too new, if you want stability right now you stick to GCC instead of jumping ship because some PC users are in love with something else.
In the embedded world it's a massive hassle to upgrade compilers even to a new version, you need buy off from everyone on the team, you still need to keep the old ones around to support older releases, you have to put the new tools on every dev and build machine, and you're never allocated any time to do this.
It looks like you were in an accident. Do you want me to write a letter to put under their windshield? How's this:
Dear auto owner. I hit your car. The onlookers think I am writing down my contact and insurance information.
I'm not. Ha ha sucker!
My previous job we used C++ with template heavy usage and I ended up being the unofficial translator of G++ error messages. This is really the only part of GCC I dislike (and it's only on the C++ side which I'm not using now).
Number 1 is important. The primary reason Apple is supporting Clang is that they got a snit over the new GPL license.
Now Clang/LLVM do work on more than just PC architectures, but there aren't as many developers and users for them compared to GCC users. So the more users you have the more feedback, the more feedback the better the end product. Especially with something like ARM with lots of processor and instruction set variants you really want to make sure you're not inadvertently the beta tester for the compiler support for your chip.
C++ (in GCC at least) is vastly slower than C, for the same input source. That's without doing the complicated stuff. You can speed a lot of with parallel builds, but a lot of people don't set up their build systems to make that easy (just passing -j to a recursive make can break).
A decade ago I had an 18 hour build. So bad that people would start shouting if someone tweaked a major header file. Much of the slowdown was from the commercial compiler, and part of the slowdown was by using Visual Studio as a build system which called out to the external compiler. Swap to GCC+make and the build times got down to 20 minutes.
Also for builds, don't forget the continuous builds that are common these days. Any source code change checked in kicks off a build. You want to see the results of that sooner than later, so you don't get the phone call a few hours later asking you to fix the build. Then the nightly builds will often rebuild every permutation of the project which can take a very long time.
Apple migrated over to Clang, but they left a bastardized GCC in it's place as a "transition". The preprocessor swears up and down that it's GCC but if you use inline assembler it barfs. So it's basically lying. It's a GCC front end and LLVM back-end, and the solution is to manually install a real GCC in its place (easier than porting the code, easier than ifdef OSX vs Linux, etc). And it's a major pain in the ass for new developers to set up a development environment, and inevitably someone eventually screws up their PATH to pick up the broken compiler...
Anyway screw it. Clang may be ok, but there's production code that assumes GCC, it's cross-platform code so having stability on x86 doesn't necessarily mean anything about all those other CPUs that GCC supports well. Ie, GCC supports ARM, and ARM supports GCC, so if I go to the team and say "hey guys, I'm going to mix things up for a few months and try out a different compiler, things might break unexpectedly but in the long run you might like it, what do you think?" then I won't get positive feedback.
Until there are drawbacks to GCC there's no much reason to change.
Who said it's ok for other companies? Apple gets away with it because it has a fanboy army. Google gets away with it because they're the anti-Microsoft.
(and with my free or low cost OSX upgrades I have seen zero advertisements)
Is anyone buying apps from the Microsoft store? The last I looked they were all amazingly stupid, broken, or stupid and broken. They're like smartphone apps but dumber (at least with a smartphone the mobility convenience is useful, but on a desktop to have an app that is not as good as the same thing on a web page is just silly. Maybe it makes sense on a tablet, but who cares about Windows on a tablet, and why should desktop users be punished because of it?
With antivirus you can almost always opt out, and yet their database upgrades are essential to the proper functioning of the key features. I've never seen an antivirus do more than request that you install or pay for a new upgrade itself (as separate from malware database updates). For Windows, you do not need to upgrade for the operating system to keep working properly. Nothing breaks if you don't upgrade it, you still get security updates if you opt out of Windows 10, etc. There is no valid comparison between an antivirus database upgrade and an operating system upgrade here.
For Windows, doing nothing was the right approach when the only alternative they came up with was to ignore the users and go full steam ahead with their smartphone like operating system. Microsoft has a very long history of removing options from users, each new release has less customization ability. I've never seen any hint that they are willing to work with users except in the case of a major publicity backlash. Their whole attitude is that they are smarter than we are and we should just sit back and be grateful to accept their lame offerings. They know that there is nothing useful in Windows 10 that anyone on Windows 7 or 8.1 would want (Cortana? Give me a break), so they are resorting to unusual marketing tactics. This may be the right thing for the future of "Microsoft dominated PCs" but it is not the right thing for their customers.
It's easier to understand once you write the compiler for a functional language, which is more about reducing expressions, combinators, or lambda calculus, where there's no flow of control of "do A, then do B, then do C,..." like you see in procedural languages.
What ten pages? I learned C without that book. You can learn C well from a cheat sheet one page long if you already know another low-to-medium level programming language; well enough to read and write simple programs, you'll certainly need to learn more for more complex stuff (pointer arithmetic). But almost every language is mastered by learning just a little bit at first, then a little more later, then a little more, etc.
I had a boss once who learned C in 21 days, he had the book on his shelf as proof. He did not know C very well at all. Similarly, we used to have a phrase in grad school about bad programmers, we'd say "he can write Fortran in any language". The point being that knowing the language is not the same as knowing how to use the language well or properly. You should not think the same way when writing Lisp code as you do when writing C, which is a different way of thinking when you write in Python, etc.
We have most certainly had terrorists arise due to government force. Bombing other countries is a more modern affair though, in the past they'd just occupy a country instead which would create home grown non-muslim terrorists in droves. The US uses bombings instead of occupations because it's more palatable to the voters. They don't care if someone foreign dies as long as no soldiers die (especially if they're draftees).
Although it's possible that the some terrorists groups in the 60s/70s were inspired by bombings in Vietnam. Such as the BaaderMeinhof gang or Weather Underground.
Yes. The worst parts of Firefox is when it copies Chrome; evolving to the same look, using the same ridiculously fast upgrade cycle, etc. Any browser I use must have noscript and adblock plugins, and that eliminates a lot of browsers. So I have firefox on the phone (where it's not very good, but the default google browser is braindead), Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Wrongful termination almost never works these days. They can fire you for having the wrong shirt color and there's nothing you can do in most states. Even if there was a chance in Georgia, he'd still need absolute proof that this was the reason for his firing (ie, were the reasons for his termination put into writing). You can make inferences but that won't often work if you've got big lawyers versus small lawyers.
So really the best bet to get the job back or get compensation is to make it public, because elected officials may pay attention to that. Even if he doesn't get the job back he may be able to take down some officials with him.
Slashdot Mirror
Name one good "Metro" app. It has to be good, and it has to do more than the same thing in a web browser. Even Microsoft was not able to do this with its own sample apps.
"Apps"? I have no apps on OSX. I have applications. There is no advertising anywhere on the OSX machine I use. Maybe on the apple store, but I never go there except for the "upgrade" tab, and I don't even have an apple ID and never will have one.
Devs have always been able to monetize their work on Windows. We don't need some idiotic ad-centric model to support cheap ass broken apps There are millions of apps on smart phones, but only 10 are ever worth using. Why would we want to support those lame apps through the cesspool of the advertisement model? If you're on Windows you may as well use a web browser because all of the apps I ever saw on Windows did not work as well as the same thing done in a browser. Even the Bing on the web works better than the Bing app from Microsoft, it's as if Microsoft went out of its way to make the worst possible sample apps (but more likely assigned interns to write them).
Hmm, what? GCC can be built natively on windows thus it is a native app, it can be built without cygwin libraries.
Does Apple care about ARM chips other than what's in their phones? Probably not. But still, Clang/LLVM is too new, if you want stability right now you stick to GCC instead of jumping ship because some PC users are in love with something else.
In the embedded world it's a massive hassle to upgrade compilers even to a new version, you need buy off from everyone on the team, you still need to keep the old ones around to support older releases, you have to put the new tools on every dev and build machine, and you're never allocated any time to do this.
It looks like you were in an accident. Do you want me to write a letter to put under their windshield? How's this:
Dear auto owner. I hit your car. The onlookers think I am writing down my contact and insurance information.
I'm not. Ha ha sucker!
My previous job we used C++ with template heavy usage and I ended up being the unofficial translator of G++ error messages. This is really the only part of GCC I dislike (and it's only on the C++ side which I'm not using now).
It's a Dice article. It's therefore intentionally click bait.
I keep telling the users that, run the program correctly the first time and you shouldn't have to run it a second time!
Number 1 is important. The primary reason Apple is supporting Clang is that they got a snit over the new GPL license.
Now Clang/LLVM do work on more than just PC architectures, but there aren't as many developers and users for them compared to GCC users. So the more users you have the more feedback, the more feedback the better the end product. Especially with something like ARM with lots of processor and instruction set variants you really want to make sure you're not inadvertently the beta tester for the compiler support for your chip.
C++ (in GCC at least) is vastly slower than C, for the same input source. That's without doing the complicated stuff. You can speed a lot of with parallel builds, but a lot of people don't set up their build systems to make that easy (just passing -j to a recursive make can break).
A decade ago I had an 18 hour build. So bad that people would start shouting if someone tweaked a major header file. Much of the slowdown was from the commercial compiler, and part of the slowdown was by using Visual Studio as a build system which called out to the external compiler. Swap to GCC+make and the build times got down to 20 minutes.
Also for builds, don't forget the continuous builds that are common these days. Any source code change checked in kicks off a build. You want to see the results of that sooner than later, so you don't get the phone call a few hours later asking you to fix the build. Then the nightly builds will often rebuild every permutation of the project which can take a very long time.
Apple migrated over to Clang, but they left a bastardized GCC in it's place as a "transition". The preprocessor swears up and down that it's GCC but if you use inline assembler it barfs. So it's basically lying. It's a GCC front end and LLVM back-end, and the solution is to manually install a real GCC in its place (easier than porting the code, easier than ifdef OSX vs Linux, etc). And it's a major pain in the ass for new developers to set up a development environment, and inevitably someone eventually screws up their PATH to pick up the broken compiler...
Anyway screw it. Clang may be ok, but there's production code that assumes GCC, it's cross-platform code so having stability on x86 doesn't necessarily mean anything about all those other CPUs that GCC supports well. Ie, GCC supports ARM, and ARM supports GCC, so if I go to the team and say "hey guys, I'm going to mix things up for a few months and try out a different compiler, things might break unexpectedly but in the long run you might like it, what do you think?" then I won't get positive feedback.
Until there are drawbacks to GCC there's no much reason to change.
My smartphone most certainly does not auto-update anything.
Who said it's ok for other companies? Apple gets away with it because it has a fanboy army. Google gets away with it because they're the anti-Microsoft.
(and with my free or low cost OSX upgrades I have seen zero advertisements)
Is anyone buying apps from the Microsoft store? The last I looked they were all amazingly stupid, broken, or stupid and broken. They're like smartphone apps but dumber (at least with a smartphone the mobility convenience is useful, but on a desktop to have an app that is not as good as the same thing on a web page is just silly. Maybe it makes sense on a tablet, but who cares about Windows on a tablet, and why should desktop users be punished because of it?
With antivirus you can almost always opt out, and yet their database upgrades are essential to the proper functioning of the key features. I've never seen an antivirus do more than request that you install or pay for a new upgrade itself (as separate from malware database updates). For Windows, you do not need to upgrade for the operating system to keep working properly. Nothing breaks if you don't upgrade it, you still get security updates if you opt out of Windows 10, etc. There is no valid comparison between an antivirus database upgrade and an operating system upgrade here.
For Windows, doing nothing was the right approach when the only alternative they came up with was to ignore the users and go full steam ahead with their smartphone like operating system. Microsoft has a very long history of removing options from users, each new release has less customization ability. I've never seen any hint that they are willing to work with users except in the case of a major publicity backlash. Their whole attitude is that they are smarter than we are and we should just sit back and be grateful to accept their lame offerings. They know that there is nothing useful in Windows 10 that anyone on Windows 7 or 8.1 would want (Cortana? Give me a break), so they are resorting to unusual marketing tactics. This may be the right thing for the future of "Microsoft dominated PCs" but it is not the right thing for their customers.
I sense a bias towards Microsoft. This is clearly unacceptable behavior for any reasonably ethical company, yet you defend these actions.
It's easier to understand once you write the compiler for a functional language, which is more about reducing expressions, combinators, or lambda calculus, where there's no flow of control of "do A, then do B, then do C, ..." like you see in procedural languages.
What ten pages? I learned C without that book. You can learn C well from a cheat sheet one page long if you already know another low-to-medium level programming language; well enough to read and write simple programs, you'll certainly need to learn more for more complex stuff (pointer arithmetic). But almost every language is mastered by learning just a little bit at first, then a little more later, then a little more, etc.
I had a boss once who learned C in 21 days, he had the book on his shelf as proof. He did not know C very well at all. Similarly, we used to have a phrase in grad school about bad programmers, we'd say "he can write Fortran in any language". The point being that knowing the language is not the same as knowing how to use the language well or properly. You should not think the same way when writing Lisp code as you do when writing C, which is a different way of thinking when you write in Python, etc.
New languages are a hobby, old languages are where work gets done.
Oh man, it's like everyone's got a realistic plan for retirement except me.
We have most certainly had terrorists arise due to government force. Bombing other countries is a more modern affair though, in the past they'd just occupy a country instead which would create home grown non-muslim terrorists in droves. The US uses bombings instead of occupations because it's more palatable to the voters. They don't care if someone foreign dies as long as no soldiers die (especially if they're draftees).
Although it's possible that the some terrorists groups in the 60s/70s were inspired by bombings in Vietnam. Such as the BaaderMeinhof gang or Weather Underground.
But that would decimate the bomb making industry!
Don't forget the home grown self-radicalized terrorists like McVeigh and Kaczynski.
Yes. The worst parts of Firefox is when it copies Chrome; evolving to the same look, using the same ridiculously fast upgrade cycle, etc. Any browser I use must have noscript and adblock plugins, and that eliminates a lot of browsers. So I have firefox on the phone (where it's not very good, but the default google browser is braindead), Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Wrongful termination almost never works these days. They can fire you for having the wrong shirt color and there's nothing you can do in most states. Even if there was a chance in Georgia, he'd still need absolute proof that this was the reason for his firing (ie, were the reasons for his termination put into writing). You can make inferences but that won't often work if you've got big lawyers versus small lawyers.
So really the best bet to get the job back or get compensation is to make it public, because elected officials may pay attention to that. Even if he doesn't get the job back he may be able to take down some officials with him.