Chris M.

As a follower of technology companies and products I've been watching Tesla Motors  for years. With the Model S , Tesla has produced a luxury car that has raised the bar in terms of usability, features, performance, and safety and scored a near perfect score in Consumer Reports review. Tesla appears to be putting significant pressure on luxury car brands. The Model S  outsold, in the first half of 2013, Porsche, Jaguar and Land Rover  in California and in the first quarter of 2013  some models of Audi, BMW and Lexus . At this point, demand for the Model S appears to be outpacing production capacity. The current delivery wait on the Model S is two months or more, as indicated on the Tesla website. Today, at ~$70k USD, the Model S is in a different market segment and significantly more expensive than the the biggest selling EVs on the market. The  Toyota Plug-in-prius  (US$32,000),  Nissan Leaf  (US$29,650), and  Chevy Volt  (US$34,995 in the 2014 model year) cost less than half

c++11 has been officially released since August 2011. I'm not sure if other compilers are planning or have added c++11 support but I primarily use gcc. Even though gcc   still classifies c++11 support as experimental  their support appears nearly complete. At my day job we've been doing some prototyping and early development of a next generation platform and have started to try out c++11. So far I've been happy with the improvements in c++11 over c++98 . After a handful of months of using c++11 here are the things that have stood out. auto The ' auto ' keyword mirrors one of my favorite language features in c#, the 'var' keyword. auto  indicates that the compiler should perform type-inference. With auto I'm not going to miss having to type dozen of letters twice to declare and create a verbosely named template. Two pitfalls of auto are the lack of a specific type that might require a programmer to look at the function prototype to determine the typ