There are already a few successful 10 minute delivery startups like Zepto, Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart etc which are eating into Amazon's business because they're even delivering electronics like phones and microwave ovens in 10 mins. Amazon has no choice to respond to competition.

And yes, unfortunately, this will exploit low paid drivers for the delivery but they're already being exploited today by the likes of Zepto, Blinkit etc :-(.

This is totally incorrect. bpftrace (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fbpftrace%2Fbpftrace) based on eBPF is in fact comparable to dtrace. It's a shame that licensing issues prevented wider adoption of dtrace on Linux but eBBF and tools based on eBPF like bpftrace have caught up with dtrace capabilities on Linux. Unfortunately bpftrace pulls in the full llvm tool chain into it compared to dtrace which is much more elegant and light weight. I hope more distros adopt dtrace for Linux. Competition is a good thing :-).

I have also been a BSD fan since the early 1990s but the reality is Linux has just taken over, there's just no contest these days :-(. Even the switch gear and router vendors you talk about have moved to Linux now because of lack of support for drivers (including chip vendor SDKs). Take for example, Juniper has JUNOS based on BSD but their "next gen" Evo is based on Linux.

This is so true. Indian tech industry is bimodal, the best talent ends up working for what we call "product" companies, i.e directly employed by offshore centers of the Amazons, Googles, Cisco's of the world. The other end is the mass of engineers who have the bare minimum "talent" and end up at outsourcers like TCS, Wipro or Infosys. It's not that everyone at these companies are bad, there are many decent and some really smart engineers in these companies. They end up working on products (for example TCS and Infosys have good banking products) or moving to one of the product companies.

However you do have many of the decent guys sticking around because they like the lifestyle, they get "on site" opportunities and other perks. Typically in a given "project" you will find one or two of these guys who get it and can get the job done and the rest are "bodies" as you mentioned.

You can literally just import a C header file and call a C function directly (and link to the C library, of course). The C interop is much, much easier than in Go or Rust.

Tough audience :-). If you consider Rust as a modern C++ replacement, Zig is your modern C replacement. I think that 's its unique selling point in the sea of programming languages seemingly invented ever day. I've been learning Rust for the last year or so and to be honest I'm drowning in the complexity, maybe that's a reflection on my competence but Zig is a much simpler language and I could consider myself fairly proficient within weeks.

It's still very early, the language is still evolving, the documentation is sorely lacking, the standard library is immature etc etc. But even with all that, I've been playing around with it the last few months and really enjoying it. comptime is really neat. Don't diss it till you try it. The community is super friendly and respect other programming languages/communities.

I've been spending time on rust for the last 6 months to a year and it's not an easy language to pick up. Zig is an upcoming language that's worth watching. It has great C interoperability (in either direction) and while it doesn't have all the memory safety features that rust has, it's much easier to learn and has significantly saner memory safety features than C/C++. At least I found it much easier to learn.

http://ziglang.org/

1. Indicator from Planet Money
2. Planet Money
3. Short Wave by NPR
4. Freakanomics Radio

All three in our family love ebooks on our Kindles, mainly for reading fiction. We also love our "real books" especially when the smaller format of the Kindle doesn't work or when the book has a lot of pictures. We gave our daughter her Kindle first when she was 7 and her reading habit has really taken off. She's now nearly 10 and still considers her Kindle one of the best gifts she ever had.

The convenience of taking a whole library with you wherever you go and the front lit option for reading in your bed make a huge difference for all of us. Some how book lights never worked very well for me.

ebook pricing is definitely a disaster, in India I often find physical books cheaper than ebooks, so I end up buying whatever version is cheaper. So I can understand why ebook sales can drop but that doesn't necessarily mean ebook reading is dropping. We subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and plenty of free (and legal) or cheap ebooks are available if you know where to look (Bookbub for example).

As to digital detox, what do you the idiot box is? If the Kindle keeps my daughter away from the TV (and it did), I'm all for it!
 

That certainly puts things in perspective since a rocket launch is no different from a flight taking off.

The "don't care" option is winning right now (6632 votes / 58%) probably because most Americans are not back from their long weekend. I guess the results should change within the next 12 hours (posted at 16:26 IST).

+1. I don't know if the majority of Slashdot readers really understand the scale of this effort. Indian administration is generally poor at a lot of things - but the Pulse Polio Programme (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_Polio) has been a true success. Most middle and upper class population rely on private practitioners for their medical needs because of overcrowding, poor serviced and rampant corruption at Govt hospitals. However, participation in this particular programme was close to 100%. My daughter was administered the vaccine in a booth at the corner of our street for every Pulse Polio drive and I continue to be surprised how efficiently this is done. The only comparable exercise is the way elections are run in the country.

But, this does turn water into a _whine_ when expelling it but it's just that you can't hear it in space :-).

An article that expresses the same skepticism:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=5A2C0BF6-9626-6CF9-119A812483E44613

Is not a strategy unique to Microsoft. Cisco proves that it can also play the game. Cisco is likely the biggest loser if SDN takes off in a big way. This is Cisco's way of making sure they're in the play with their proprietary extensions.