If I recall correctly, the static allocations on the stack, as opposed to the dynamic allocations on the heap, are what took me WAY longer. Every single function call that had a locally declared array also suffered from this "feature." I think. I could be wrong about this, since it was like 20 years ago, and I did not keep a copy of the before-and-after code, but that's what I remember.

I worked at Honeywell as an intern during the summer of 2005 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After I finished everything they'd prepared for me during the first two weeks, they gave me something more difficult. They had a contract for the Basic Input / Output Controlled (BIOC) for the C130-J airplane. The BIOC-builder was built using C code. However, this C code was not written by a rational human being, an irrational human being, or any kind of human being at all, but a compilation process from some other language no one had access to, could remember, or do anything with.

The BIOC worked properly (after being built by the BIOC-builder), but Honeywell was spending something like 200k / year with Sun on a lease for a Sun microcomputer to compile this ONE application. The software team would often times modify the BIOC after it was built, since it was basically impossible for anyone to change the BIOC-builder. This was expensive, time consuming, and sucked big time for applying this ever-increasing sequences of patches.

Sounds like a good project for a summer intern, right?

The nice thing about the Sun compiler Honeywell used was that it zero padded all arrays Like, every single memory allocation routine would return you a bunch of zero'd out memory, even if you specifically did not ask for that. The PC compiler took a much more literal, and less wasteful, approach of only giving you zero'd memory when you'd ask for it. The machine-generated code never asked for memory to be allocated with zeros, which meant every single string copy, memory copy, or pretty much everything that operated over an array died. So I had to rewrite all memory allocation. After I did this, and got to be really good with Valgrind, I changed TWO lines of code that had to do with byte order indexing differences between the Sun and PC, generated the BIOC-builder, generated a BIOC, passed all avionics related tests, had a bunch of high fives and left early to drink a beer, or seven, to celebrate. We got the rest of the team set up later that week, or the week after.

This would have been better in Rust. This would have been even better if the corporate overlords, and all the engineers involved, pushed to understand something they heavily depended on. Yes, they had work-arounds. Yes, those work-arounds sucked big time.

Machine generating code lends itself to a lack of understanding. Sometimes that's desirable, such as the fact that I REALLY don't understand any kind of assembly very well, but can (could?) write C and C++ all right. Sometimes that's not, like when you're paying Sun 200k / year in 2005 dollars for a machine to maintain super critical code that no one understands, and no one can work on.

Honeywell offered me a job. I hate cubicles though, so I turned it down. I was like 22, and if I'd been thinking properly at that time, I'd have countered with an offer to be a contractor.

This article actually had a lot of good points, that were legitimate. However, the fact that printed book sales are globally around 64 billion for 2023 in revenue makes it so the headline is totally wrong.

I experienced this firsthand. Here's my story. I had a client that seriously asked if I was poor because we (my software company of 10+ people) needed to get paid. He was not joking. I'm not poor, but like most people I need money to pay my staff, and the vast majority of my bills. I do have SOME (relatively) passive income, and I could maintain a broke-graduate-student lifestyle off that indefinitely, but it would be pretty close to poverty for me, my wife and three kids. My preference is to earn money.

This guy is a VC out of San Francisco. To him, and all of his friends, anyone that needed to earn money for their work was poor. He had a successful exit, and told me he could only bankroll two or three more companies before he started dipping into his principal, so this time things really needed to work! That was a similar situation for all his VC friends. I think I explained to him that I was most definitely not poor, but somewhere between "poor" and "rich enough to fund multiple companies for multiple years with zero productive output."

He wasn't dumb, and he's good at sales. His exit came from being the first sales person at (what later became) a publicly traded company, and helping them grow all of their sales in about a quarter of the world. For me, it was a first hand lesson in this level of disconnect.

This type of thinking that comes out of San Francisco is something to be aware of, and very cautious around. The polices that result from it are similarly disconnected from any type of reality most people experience on a day to day level.

Sure, but why use the Amazon Linux on Amazon's infrastructure? We use Ubuntu on Amazon's infrastructure, and Ubuntu locally, to avoid incurring hourly charges from Amazon. Amazon's fault is that it was impossible to update the image. Even after EOL, we've had good luck updating Ubuntu images in-place (after installing new SSL certificates, manually, or upgrading SSL if it's REALLY been a while.) I do not believe that Amazon will be able to create as smooth of a package management system, and upgrade path, as Ubuntu. That's my question - why use Amazon Linux at all? Check out the below response from guruevi.

I inherited one of these from a few years ago as the foundation of an EC2 instance, and dealt with tons of outdated packages, and lots of other problems. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it would be much, much easier to reinstall and reconfigure my application inside Ubuntu, so that's what we did. What's the rational for using Amazon Linux, as opposed to a well support distro? I imagine if I needed a super optimized kernel as part of a container deployment system, this might make sense. But as an EC2 base install...?

In this unforeseen, totally unpredictable, completely surprise move, helicopter sales spike in France!

Check this out: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.onlineregister.com... Epson is an ink delivery company. They happen to make printers as a helpful supplement to deliver the ink, but printer sales are non-recurring revenue, while ink sales recur with predictable frequency. If you buy enough original equipment manufacturer ink, they will literally give you a free printer. For anyone surprised by this, you should learn about recurring vs. nonrecurring revenue. This is a justification to shift production from less profitable laser sales to more profitable ink jet sales, with some calculated loss due to transition costs. The same with their bricking of older (less profitable) printers remotely. I like Epson and think they make awesome products. Despite that, anyone actually analyzing these articles needs to have a shred of economic knowledge to make sense of them. Or it's just the same as watching a pro sportsball match. Or American Idol. With my super dinky businesses, I calculate recurring vs. nonrecurring revenue separately, so I can focus on the recurring component. Epson has entire MBA types to do exactly this type of analysis on the data Epson Rewards provides, and similar sales data from their laser product lines, to make recommendations that result in these actions, and then greenwash them, since saying "we can make more money by doing less work by abandoning this entire product line" isn't as trendy as "the environment" right now.

Apple's dream may have been to destroy other people's dreams, and stifle entrepreneurship that threatens them. In this case, they've managed to sacrifice many small dreams, in order to feed into one, larger, nightmare. I am pretty sure Neil Gaiman wrote about something like this in "Sandman...?" I may be confusing the comics and the Netflix series though.

4.0? I still remember 3.0 with Minesweeper and the clock. Or was that 3.1...?

Yeah, I don't understand why they didn't wipe, install AOSP, and run ALL of their data through a VPN, and run encrypted messaging. Ultimately, this idea is based on the Android Open Source Project. I suppose there are opportunities in providing tech support to criminals.... It sounds like there is a market for actually secure, not governmental compromised, phones.

Experts exchange...

As a CEO of a company, I care about my workers and my customers. If I didn't, I don't think I'd have many workers, or customers. This is the basis of competition.

Even if I didn't care about my workers, turnover is expensive. Even for something as basic as box unloading, there are costs associated with bringing someone onboard (getting them into your accounting system, making sure they have their documented training, etc. etc. etc.) as well as costs associated with their leaving, and finding a replacement.

These people probably really work for Amazon. I imagine they are being paid by Amazon, just not to stock shelves... I wouldn't call them "fake" workers, since they're doing very useful work for Amazon, really working!

I believe the term you are looking for is investment opportunity. Both BeauHD and msmash want to make sure everyone is aware of the investment opportunities available.