Fuzzing is a technique where you modify the data sent to a file, protocol or data parser (e.g. code that reads an xml file) by changing random bits. Thus, if you have a 'text' command, a fuzzer could change that to 'next', or if you have a quoted striing "test", the fuzzer could change the end quote to something else, e.g. ' "tests '.
Hence, what you can end up with is something that looks like random garbage.
Also, if Facebook wins, it will set a precedence. It will mean that potentially, anything that modifies a website from what the website author produces will be illegal.
This means all greasemonkey scripts and AdBlock Plus/other ad blocking technologies as these modify a sites look from what is intended.
It may also be applicable to mashup sites that take content from other sites and combine it, although this is different to the above, so would need to be tested in court.
It could also mean that developers are less likely to innovate in these areas for fear of being sued. There is always the possibility of being sued, but having this as a precedence would increase that chance.
There are some options, though.
If I were the developer, I would seek help from the FSF and/or try to find a lawyer willing to do the case pro-bono.
Also, even if ogg is a bad container format that has a lot of overhead, ogg+vorbis files are smaller than the equivalent mp3 files (so matroska+vorbis should be even smaller). So it does not rule out vorbis (or flac) for audio.
Testing a 34m31s (88M) audio data file containing spoken audio generated by a text-to-speech program I found the following (using GStreamer as an encoder):
time gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="source.wav" ! wavparse ! $(ENCODER)
ENCODER = ! audioconvert ! wavenc ! filesink location="destination.wav"
88M (100% of original) -- baseline for the test (no compression)
real 0m1.399s
ENCODER = ! audioconvert ! flacenc ! filesink location="destination.flac"
52M (59.1% of original) -- fast, lossless compression, but produces larger files than the others
real 0m3.077s
ENCODER = ! audioconvert ! lame quality=3 vbr=4 ! filesink location="destination.mp3"
27M (30.7% of original) -- decent compression at a reasonable speed, but has licensing issues
real 0m22.118s
ENCODER = ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux ! filesink location="destination.ogg"
12M (13.6% of original) -- excellent compression (better than mp3) at a reasonable speed
real 0m24.206s
ENCODER = ! audioconvert ! speexenc ! oggmux ! filesink location="destination.ogg"
9.8M (11.1% of original) -- excellent compression, but over twice as slow as ogg/vorbis for not much more gain
real 1m7.979s
I haven't tried matroska as the container format to see how it affects the file size and encoding speed, but from the tests above ogg+vorbis was the clear winner (or flac if you need lossless audio).
I highly recommend Cowon devices (I currently have an S9). They are very good at supporting audio/video formats and have supported ogg and flac for some time now, and I am getting about 45Hrs battery life on the S9 playing ogg files.
For matrostka (mkv and mka support), it looks like you need a newer PMP device (e.g. the A3) -- check the specs on the website (www.cowonglobal.com) for supported formats for a product.
It's like Microsoft Windows being bundled on new PCs, except that Microsoft have paid the OEM companies to do this.
If Microsoft get some of the data from Google or other similar condition from this, then a percentage of computers should ship without Microsoft Windows and instead with GNU/Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva,...), *BSD, OpenSolaris or another Operating System.
Set a limit of 10 years or similar, after which if there are no new games (and even films) then the universe/characters enter into the public domain like is done for copyright.
This gives enough time for a company to continue a series, and allows fans of franchises that have not seen activity by a company free reign.
You are likely to be correct; the question then is how long is it between the auto-saves? And it will still annoy users that have their network connection drop out.
What we don't understand yet (and won't until a game with this in has been out for a month or so) is what the customer reaction, sales, and piracy vs patching vs refund/rejection is going to be. We can only speculate at this point.
Or another ship cuts the trans-Atlantic internet cables. Or a power cut that takes out your router. Or someone adding a wireless router in the same channel as the one you are using. Or microwaves/other device/weather interfering with the wireless signal. Or...
Player: I'm almost there... I've been playing Assassin Creed 2 for almost 12 hours non-stop and am just about finished... the end is in... Game: We have lost connection with the Ubiborg mothership. I'm sorry to say that since you have not saved the game, we have no choice but to start you back at the beginning. Player: AAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!
Even if it is just 1-2 hours playing (e.g. finally making it past a difficult section of the game after many tries), this is still going to burn players.
Next time, the players who have a negative experience of this will not spend their money on Ubisoft games next time.
Also, what about areas that have a crap broadband - or god forbid dial-up - connection. Broadband quality and adoption varies from country to country, and is worse in less populated or remote/isolated areas.
I would like to ask Matt what his intentions are for using and improving FLOSS tools and technologies in Ubuntu, as opposed to tools and technologies derived from proprietary platforms, and his plans for contributing changes/working with upstream projects (e.g. contributing/improving artwork like in the Wine project).
Some examples:
* RedHat help the nouveau project and are helping to get it to a decent working state so that it can act as a viable alternative to the nVidia binary drivers -- what are Ubuntu doing in this space to help people with binary-only driver support, specifically by helping the open source communities provide better support for this hardware?
* IIUC, the Ubuntu art team are using Photoshop to do the artwork instead of free tools like Gimp and Inkscape -- does Ubuntu intend to make use of free tools and help out where necessary (e.g. in the push to improve the Gimp UI)?
* The decisions around mono and the steady influx of more mono-based applications into Ubuntu instead of using applications build on the Linux/FLOSS stack for its default application set.
* What is the status of the various improvements of things like the "papercuts" initiatives to the upstream projects?
I like Gmail for many reasons, one of which is their awesome spam filter. I get only one or two mis-categorised email every couple of weeks, the rest goes to the spam box. Couple that with the coloured labels & filters, and spam/not spam is very easy to identify.
Hotmail on the other hand is terrible. Ages ago when I was using Hotmail, I ended up with the majority of my inbox being spam so I gave up and tried Gmail. I don't know how good Hotmail is at the moment (or others like YahooMail).
How is this going to work with machines that don't have direct access to the internet (e.g. test machines)? Or machines on an isolated network? Or how about Virtual Machines (with or without snapshots)?
It appears that you are having a nightmare. In this nightmare, would you like to...
1. be stabbed to death by a serial killer. 2. drown after seeing pennywise the clown (because we all float down here). 3. be forced to sit through a never ending video stream of lolcats. 4. live in a Being John Clippy world where everyone is clippy (clippy, clippy, clippy clippy, clippy).
Error handing and reporting is very complex. This is mostly due to the complexities involved with different parts of a system interacting with each other.
Windows GetErrorInfo call will return NULL on the second call, despite no other COM calls made in-between. This took a while to understand what was happening.
Do you check that an IErrorInfo object is valid for the method you just called by using ISupportsErrorInfo? Do you check to see if this is a C#/.NET System.Exception (_Exception) and then use ToString to get back the nice stack trace?
Does the Windows API call return a HRESULT, an NT error code, a registry API error code, a BOOL with a corresponding GetLastError call to get the details or something else? Are you checking errno on all C API calls? Or the appropriate error checking call for the API you are working with? Do you realise that some Windows APIs have different return code behaviour on Win9x and NT+ (e.g. the GDI calls)?
Do you guard all your COM calls written in C++ to ensure that a C++ exception does not leak outside the COM boundary? Do you report said exception as a HRESULT and IErrorInfo that lets you track down the problem?
Do you ensure that an exception is not thrown from outside a destructor? A thread function? A Windows/GTK/Qt/... event handler? Across language boundaries?
How do you present an error to the user? Are you showing the exception message (e.g. displaying E_UNEXPECTED as "Catastrophic failure")?
It is not always possible to write perfect code. Developers will forget to check for access permissions to a file before writing to it, or just ignore any errors (did you know that std::ofstream will not report an error if the file it is writing to is read-only (at least with the Microsoft C++ implementation and Windows, without any fancy std::ios flags?)).
Have you ever dealt with infinite recursions that involve 3 or more functions? Do your COM/DBus/... calls check for/handle network failures? Do you report these in a friendly way to the user? Do you try to recover/reconnect in this case?
Knowing exactly what a system call does is also impossible, unless you have access to the source code for that particular configuration. The MSDN documentation is not reliable for Windows APIs, as it leaves a lot of the important stuff out. The POSIX documentation only covers the important/most common error cases.
Re:It's not art, it's basic engineering
on
The Art of Unit Testing
·
· Score: 3, Informative
When testing a system, if you cannot put a given component under test (or do so by "faking" its dependants -- e.g. by the things that talk to the database) then the architecture is wrong.
I strive never to have any "fake" parts of the system in a test. It makes it harder to maintain (e.g. changing some of the real components will break the tests). You cannot easily change the data you are testing with, or having a method generate an error for a specific test. You are also not really testing the proper code; not all of it, at any rate.
You should implement interfaces at the interface boundaries, and have it so that the code under test can be given different implementations of that interface. This means that you don't need to fake any part of your codebase -- you are testing it with different data and/or interface behaviours (e.g. exceptions) that are designed to exercise the code under test. The code under test should not need modification in order to run (aside from re-architecturing the system to make it testable).
The main goal of testing is to have the maximum coverage of the code possible to ensure that any changes to the code don't change expected behaviour or cause bugs. Ideally, when a bug is found in manual testing, it should be possible to add a test case for that bug so that it can be verified and so that future work will not re-introduce that bug.
Start where you can. If you have a large project, put the code that you are working on under test first to verify the existing behaviour. This also works as an exploratory phase for code that you don't fully understand.
Also remember that tests should form part of the documentation. They are useful for verifying an interface contract (does a method accept a null string when the contract says it does? does the foo object always exist like the document says it does?)
1. A unit test is a test that can fail if (a) the code under test is wrong, or (b) the test itself is wrong.
2. An integration test is a test that can fail if (a) the code under test is wrong, (b) the test itself is wrong, or (c) the system environment has changed (e.g. the user does not have permission to write a file to a specific folder).
John Lakos refers to individual things under test as components. In his model, there are layers of components that build on each other and interact with each other, but these are well-defined components that just happen to depend on other components.
On the web space, there is ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) [http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.php] that is bridging that gap -- even Microsoft IE8 supports it.
For HTML5, there is the CSS speech specification [http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-css3-speech-20041216/] and others [http://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted/Overview.html].
In addition, there are guidelines to creating accessible web pages -- things like having an alt tag on images.
Quoting from a comment I made on the ostatic blog:
""" Few companies realise the benefits of accessibility. If your product is accessible, you can take advantage of that API to perform tests on the GUI -- that is, driving the GUI through the accessibility layer.
Being accessible means respecting the users colour scheme preferences, fonts and other system settings. This makes the application fit better into the users preferences. This does not just affect accessibility -- try using most applications with a black window background and white text (some applications ignore the text colour and render text black!).
Being accessible also means using keyboard shortcuts that fit with the system and being able to use the application without using a mouse. While some applications (like drawing applications) will require mouse or a tablet to draw with, having the application be drivable through the keyboard means that it is faster to use for the people who know those key sequences (e.g. it is faster to press Ctrl+O to open a file than to move the mouse to the menu/toolbar option for it). """
Also, I use text-to-speech software (accessibility) to listen to stories. I am not (yet) blind, I just find it easier. I also use that software to help with proofreading.
And, if I am in a terminal, without access to an X11 server, I can use links to browse the web (the part that supports accessibility, that is).
Allowing a program to be used through a command-line API as well as a GUI also helps with accessibility (a blind user can use it through a command shell, or Braille TTY), while it also makes scripting easier for admins or power users.
Using plain-text configuration files makes it easier to correct and fix issues, or just edit by hand, while it helps with accessibility for the same reason.
So, no... accessibility doesn't only benefit a tiny minority, it is just that people are not usually aware of it.
So F# is for scientists and the finance industry, yet it cannot run on most mainframes (GNU/Linux or Unix), but there is mono that can, but does not work for computationally intensive applications.
That means that it will not be able to be used for Quantum Mechanical calculations or General Relativity calculations or any other calculation that scientists would like to perform. Nor would it scale to the large amount of real-time transactions that a bank or stock trading company would need to perform.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuzzing is a technique where you modify the data sent to a file, protocol or data parser (e.g. code that reads an xml file) by changing random bits. Thus, if you have a 'text' command, a fuzzer could change that to 'next', or if you have a quoted striing "test", the fuzzer could change the end quote to something else, e.g. ' "tests '.
Hence, what you can end up with is something that looks like random garbage.
perse ==> per se [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_se]
Ah, this is a trademark issue, not a "we don't want the script modifying our site" issue.
I can kind of see this for "Facebook", but then the developer is not creating a "FaceBook2" or "NewFaceBook" site that competes with Facebook.
Like others here, I don't see Fluff Busting (FB) being a trademark infringement though. If it is, it is rather tenuous.
Also, if Facebook wins, it will set a precedence. It will mean that potentially, anything that modifies a website from what the website author produces will be illegal.
This means all greasemonkey scripts and AdBlock Plus/other ad blocking technologies as these modify a sites look from what is intended.
It may also be applicable to mashup sites that take content from other sites and combine it, although this is different to the above, so would need to be tested in court.
It could also mean that developers are less likely to innovate in these areas for fear of being sued. There is always the possibility of being sued, but having this as a precedence would increase that chance.
There are some options, though.
If I were the developer, I would seek help from the FSF and/or try to find a lawyer willing to do the case pro-bono.
Not to mention that reading a byte would be faster than performing a mask check (with additional checks if the version bit is 1).
Also, even if ogg is a bad container format that has a lot of overhead, ogg+vorbis files are smaller than the equivalent mp3 files (so matroska+vorbis should be even smaller). So it does not rule out vorbis (or flac) for audio.
Testing a 34m31s (88M) audio data file containing spoken audio generated by a text-to-speech program I found the following (using GStreamer as an encoder):
time gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="source.wav" ! wavparse ! $(ENCODER)
ENCODER = ! audioconvert ! wavenc ! filesink location="destination.wav"
88M (100% of original) -- baseline for the test (no compression)
real 0m1.399s
ENCODER = ! audioconvert ! flacenc ! filesink location="destination.flac"
52M (59.1% of original) -- fast, lossless compression, but produces larger files than the others
real 0m3.077s
ENCODER = ! audioconvert ! lame quality=3 vbr=4 ! filesink location="destination.mp3"
27M (30.7% of original) -- decent compression at a reasonable speed, but has licensing issues
real 0m22.118s
ENCODER = ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux ! filesink location="destination.ogg"
12M (13.6% of original) -- excellent compression (better than mp3) at a reasonable speed
real 0m24.206s
ENCODER = ! audioconvert ! speexenc ! oggmux ! filesink location="destination.ogg"
9.8M (11.1% of original) -- excellent compression, but over twice as slow as ogg/vorbis for not much more gain
real 1m7.979s
I haven't tried matroska as the container format to see how it affects the file size and encoding speed, but from the tests above ogg+vorbis was the clear winner (or flac if you need lossless audio).
I highly recommend Cowon devices (I currently have an S9). They are very good at supporting audio/video formats and have supported ogg and flac for some time now, and I am getting about 45Hrs battery life on the S9 playing ogg files.
For matrostka (mkv and mka support), it looks like you need a newer PMP device (e.g. the A3) -- check the specs on the website (www.cowonglobal.com) for supported formats for a product.
Lots of casual games (from Awem, Big Fish Games, etc.) make use of ogg+vorbis for audio.
Also:
http://wiki.xiph.org/Games_that_use_Theora
http://wiki.xiph.org/Games_that_use_Vorbis -- lots more games using vorbis than theora
It's like Microsoft Windows being bundled on new PCs, except that Microsoft have paid the OEM companies to do this.
If Microsoft get some of the data from Google or other similar condition from this, then a percentage of computers should ship without Microsoft Windows and instead with GNU/Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, ...), *BSD, OpenSolaris or another Operating System.
Set a limit of 10 years or similar, after which if there are no new games (and even films) then the universe/characters enter into the public domain like is done for copyright.
This gives enough time for a company to continue a series, and allows fans of franchises that have not seen activity by a company free reign.
Does that mean that pirates are Swedish (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkWMcRlE1mQ -- The Two Ronnies)?
Is this "quack typing" a new approach to programming?
You are likely to be correct; the question then is how long is it between the auto-saves? And it will still annoy users that have their network connection drop out.
What we don't understand yet (and won't until a game with this in has been out for a month or so) is what the customer reaction, sales, and piracy vs patching vs refund/rejection is going to be. We can only speculate at this point.
Or another ship cuts the trans-Atlantic internet cables. ...
Or a power cut that takes out your router.
Or someone adding a wireless router in the same channel as the one you are using.
Or microwaves/other device/weather interfering with the wireless signal.
Or
I can just see the following happening:
Player: I'm almost there... I've been playing Assassin Creed 2 for almost 12 hours non-stop and am just about finished... the end is in...
Game: We have lost connection with the Ubiborg mothership. I'm sorry to say that since you have not saved the game, we have no choice but to start you back at the beginning.
Player: AAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!
Even if it is just 1-2 hours playing (e.g. finally making it past a difficult section of the game after many tries), this is still going to burn players.
Next time, the players who have a negative experience of this will not spend their money on Ubisoft games next time.
Also, what about areas that have a crap broadband - or god forbid dial-up - connection. Broadband quality and adoption varies from country to country, and is worse in less populated or remote/isolated areas.
I would like to ask Matt what his intentions are for using and improving FLOSS tools and technologies in Ubuntu, as opposed to tools and technologies derived from proprietary platforms, and his plans for contributing changes/working with upstream projects (e.g. contributing/improving artwork like in the Wine project).
Some examples:
* RedHat help the nouveau project and are helping to get it to a decent working state so that it can act as a viable alternative to the nVidia binary drivers -- what are Ubuntu doing in this space to help people with binary-only driver support, specifically by helping the open source communities provide better support for this hardware?
* IIUC, the Ubuntu art team are using Photoshop to do the artwork instead of free tools like Gimp and Inkscape -- does Ubuntu intend to make use of free tools and help out where necessary (e.g. in the push to improve the Gimp UI)?
* The decisions around mono and the steady influx of more mono-based applications into Ubuntu instead of using applications build on the Linux/FLOSS stack for its default application set.
* What is the status of the various improvements of things like the "papercuts" initiatives to the upstream projects?
I like Gmail for many reasons, one of which is their awesome spam filter. I get only one or two mis-categorised email every couple of weeks, the rest goes to the spam box. Couple that with the coloured labels & filters, and spam/not spam is very easy to identify.
Hotmail on the other hand is terrible. Ages ago when I was using Hotmail, I ended up with the majority of my inbox being spam so I gave up and tried Gmail. I don't know how good Hotmail is at the moment (or others like YahooMail).
How is this going to work with machines that don't have direct access to the internet (e.g. test machines)? Or machines on an isolated network? Or how about Virtual Machines (with or without snapshots)?
It appears that you are having a nightmare. In this nightmare, would you like to...
1. be stabbed to death by a serial killer.
2. drown after seeing pennywise the clown (because we all float down here).
3. be forced to sit through a never ending video stream of lolcats.
4. live in a Being John Clippy world where everyone is clippy (clippy, clippy, clippy clippy, clippy).
Error handing and reporting is very complex. This is mostly due to the complexities involved with different parts of a system interacting with each other.
Windows GetErrorInfo call will return NULL on the second call, despite no other COM calls made in-between. This took a while to understand what was happening.
Do you check that an IErrorInfo object is valid for the method you just called by using ISupportsErrorInfo? Do you check to see if this is a C#/.NET System.Exception (_Exception) and then use ToString to get back the nice stack trace?
Does the Windows API call return a HRESULT, an NT error code, a registry API error code, a BOOL with a corresponding GetLastError call to get the details or something else? Are you checking errno on all C API calls? Or the appropriate error checking call for the API you are working with? Do you realise that some Windows APIs have different return code behaviour on Win9x and NT+ (e.g. the GDI calls)?
Do you guard all your COM calls written in C++ to ensure that a C++ exception does not leak outside the COM boundary? Do you report said exception as a HRESULT and IErrorInfo that lets you track down the problem?
Do you ensure that an exception is not thrown from outside a destructor? A thread function? A Windows/GTK/Qt/... event handler? Across language boundaries?
How do you present an error to the user? Are you showing the exception message (e.g. displaying E_UNEXPECTED as "Catastrophic failure")?
It is not always possible to write perfect code. Developers will forget to check for access permissions to a file before writing to it, or just ignore any errors (did you know that std::ofstream will not report an error if the file it is writing to is read-only (at least with the Microsoft C++ implementation and Windows, without any fancy std::ios flags?)).
Have you ever dealt with infinite recursions that involve 3 or more functions? Do your COM/DBus/... calls check for/handle network failures? Do you report these in a friendly way to the user? Do you try to recover/reconnect in this case?
Knowing exactly what a system call does is also impossible, unless you have access to the source code for that particular configuration. The MSDN documentation is not reliable for Windows APIs, as it leaves a lot of the important stuff out. The POSIX documentation only covers the important/most common error cases.
When testing a system, if you cannot put a given component under test (or do so by "faking" its dependants -- e.g. by the things that talk to the database) then the architecture is wrong.
I strive never to have any "fake" parts of the system in a test. It makes it harder to maintain (e.g. changing some of the real components will break the tests). You cannot easily change the data you are testing with, or having a method generate an error for a specific test. You are also not really testing the proper code; not all of it, at any rate.
You should implement interfaces at the interface boundaries, and have it so that the code under test can be given different implementations of that interface. This means that you don't need to fake any part of your codebase -- you are testing it with different data and/or interface behaviours (e.g. exceptions) that are designed to exercise the code under test. The code under test should not need modification in order to run (aside from re-architecturing the system to make it testable).
The main goal of testing is to have the maximum coverage of the code possible to ensure that any changes to the code don't change expected behaviour or cause bugs. Ideally, when a bug is found in manual testing, it should be possible to add a test case for that bug so that it can be verified and so that future work will not re-introduce that bug.
Start where you can. If you have a large project, put the code that you are working on under test first to verify the existing behaviour. This also works as an exploratory phase for code that you don't fully understand.
Also remember that tests should form part of the documentation. They are useful for verifying an interface contract (does a method accept a null string when the contract says it does? does the foo object always exist like the document says it does?)
Kevlin Henny makes the following distinction:
1. A unit test is a test that can fail if (a) the code under test is wrong, or (b) the test itself is wrong.
2. An integration test is a test that can fail if (a) the code under test is wrong, (b) the test itself is wrong, or (c) the system environment has changed (e.g. the user does not have permission to write a file to a specific folder).
John Lakos refers to individual things under test as components. In his model, there are layers of components that build on each other and interact with each other, but these are well-defined components that just happen to depend on other components.
On the web space, there is ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) [http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.php] that is bridging that gap -- even Microsoft IE8 supports it.
For HTML5, there is the CSS speech specification [http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-css3-speech-20041216/] and others [http://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted/Overview.html].
In addition, there are guidelines to creating accessible web pages -- things like having an alt tag on images.
Quoting from a comment I made on the ostatic blog:
"""
Few companies realise the benefits of accessibility. If your product is accessible, you can take advantage of that API to perform tests on the GUI -- that is, driving the GUI through the accessibility layer.
Being accessible means respecting the users colour scheme preferences, fonts and other system settings. This makes the application fit better into the users preferences. This does not just affect accessibility -- try using most applications with a black window background and white text (some applications ignore the text colour and render text black!).
Being accessible also means using keyboard shortcuts that fit with the system and being able to use the application without using a mouse. While some applications (like drawing applications) will require mouse or a tablet to draw with, having the application be drivable through the keyboard means that it is faster to use for the people who know those key sequences (e.g. it is faster to press Ctrl+O to open a file than to move the mouse to the menu/toolbar option for it).
"""
Also, I use text-to-speech software (accessibility) to listen to stories. I am not (yet) blind, I just find it easier. I also use that software to help with proofreading.
And, if I am in a terminal, without access to an X11 server, I can use links to browse the web (the part that supports accessibility, that is).
Allowing a program to be used through a command-line API as well as a GUI also helps with accessibility (a blind user can use it through a command shell, or Braille TTY), while it also makes scripting easier for admins or power users.
Using plain-text configuration files makes it easier to correct and fix issues, or just edit by hand, while it helps with accessibility for the same reason.
So, no... accessibility doesn't only benefit a tiny minority, it is just that people are not usually aware of it.
So F# is for scientists and the finance industry, yet it cannot run on most mainframes (GNU/Linux or Unix), but there is mono that can, but does not work for computationally intensive applications.
That means that it will not be able to be used for Quantum Mechanical calculations or General Relativity calculations or any other calculation that scientists would like to perform. Nor would it scale to the large amount of real-time transactions that a bank or stock trading company would need to perform.
So how is F# better than Fortran & C/C++?