My Sony alarm clock has been my most robust piece of gear (I recently had to replace my Logitech gaming mouse, so that's off the list). The Sony clock is particularly ironic.
Therefore the best solution is to public release so everyone has the information at the same time. Let them compete for the patch; Awful software publisher will be the one caught with bugs. Good one will be patch and secure while everyone else suffer their bad choice.
Over time the best software will prevail and only idiots will still be using Microsoft products... that the theory. In practice there is corruption and bad software will linger for decades.
It's not about how fast you patch, it's about how fast you can get patches to your customers. And for the OpenSSL flaw, there were devices where the patch process is "throw it away and buy a new one".
Anyhow, Microsoft is far and away the worlds leading expert at distributing security patches - no one really has more experience or such a well-tuned corporate ecosystem. MS pushed a critical security patch out to WU, and every major corporation knows just what to do, and understand the urgency, and has a well-travelled path for it. The more modern players are good at patching consumer endpoints, but haven't really addressed corporate customers.
Yahoo's directors MUST (not "should") do whatever maximizes profit for shareholders. This isn't an opinion, nor what's socially correct, but those are the rules when you issue shares to the public on U.S. stock markets.
That's wrong in a couple of ways. What's legally required is that the board member put the shareholders interests above their own personal interests (fiduciary responsibility). But those interests are defined by the corporate charter, and to a large extent by the board itself. It's perfectly legal to create a publically traded corporation that sets social responsibility, or green blah blah blah, or some other such hippie nonsense above profit, and then that's what the board must pursue. You might struggle to get investors, or you might find a welcome market, but in any case it's allowed (and rarely happens).
More commonly, there's no requirement at all for the board to chase short term profit. That's where most the corporate infighting comes. Some corporations have firm 20 and 50 year growth plans, and sacrifice the short term for those plans, and sometimes those companies have a shareholder revolt because the owners lose patience and want everything monetized now. Sucks when that happens, but the downside of being a publically traded corporation is that you're ultimately controlled by your owners, and that can end up being anyone.
That's changing though (except for Government Motors, which retains that build quality of say a Trabant). Ford has made huge strides in reliability, they're really pretty good now. And Tesla is, after all, an American car. We were too corrupt to let GM and Chrysler die, but had market forces actually done their thing, Ford and Tesla would be the surviving American brands (well, Tesla is heavily subsidized, but in a quite different way).
The notion that you can't have code without these flaws (buffer overruns, dangling pointers, etc) is just asinine. I've worked on significant codebases without any such flaws. You just have to adopt a programming style that doesn't rely on being mistake-free to avoid the issues.
Want to end the danger of buffer overruns? Stop using types where it's even possible.
Want to end the danger of dangling pointers? Managed code doesn't do anything to solve this problem, and is often the worst offender since coders often stop thinking about how memory is recycled, and well-formed objects can hang around in memory for quite some time waiting on the garbage man. So you have to write code where every time you use an object you check that it hasn't been freed, and importantly hasn't been freed and then re-used for the same object! (That happens on purpose in appliance code, where slab allocation is common.)
Heck, for embedded code I simply wouldn't use dynamic allocation at all. All objects created at boot, nothing malloced, nothing freed. Everything fixed sized and only written to with macros that ensure no overruns. I wrote code that way for 5 years - we didn't even use a stack, which is just one more thing that can overflow. That style is too costly for most work, but it's possible, and for life-safety applications it's irresponsible to cheap out.
I expect to save enough in my life to afford such things, but then my tastes in other areas are cheap. We probably all have something we'd spend too much on, given the resources.
But yeah, the complexity is starting to bite car makers in the ass. However, luxury car makers learned in the 80s that "reliability" was a really important feature. I remember a great Toyota add with a golf quartet where the first 3 each bragged about their luxury cars and the last just said "my Camry's not in the shop". Hopefully the luxury car makers will remember this, too.
Enlighten me - some things aren't obvious from a quick ride. Does the Model S have:
* A night vision hud with pedestrian highlighting * Automatic lane departure detection with options to warn or steer back into the lane * Radar in the blind spots and a warning light near the side view mirrors? * Distance-calibrated path guides on the backup camera view (I heard this is coming w/ a F/W upgrade) * A button that jacks up the front end a couple extra inches so that you can pull up to the parking curb without scraping anything? (I know it has some ride heght adjustment, maybe that works here?) * Airline-style fold-out tables for the back seats so you have a desk to work at if you like * Automatic detection of interior air quality with auto flip between exterior and recycled interior air for ventilation (recycle the air through the carbon filters till any smell is gone, but not so long that CO2 builds up inside). * Vent fans that vary in speed a bit over time, like a breeze gusting a bit, so that the air feels less stale without a constant in-your-face blower? * Two sun visors for the driver for roads that wind back and forth? * A motor to open/close the trunk remotely when your hands are full? * An umbrella slot in the door?
That's just a few features off the top of my head. And dammit, my car needs that umbrella slot more than anything - get on it mid-tier luxury car makers!
The simple fact is, for the moment Tesla is an expensive car but not a luxury car. It gets the smooth ride part right, thanks to the non-reciprocating motor and no gearshifts to manage, and that's great, but compared to a similarly piced Merc or Lexus it's lacking (and at the unsubsidized price, where the S-Class lives, it's embarrassing).
But that being said, Tesla company-wise is like nothing the industry has ever seen. They keep improving cars they've already sold. No one does that. Many of the "luxury features" on a luxury car aren't actually very expensive, they're just a matter of seeking every possible improvement, from better window laminates to keep the car cool in the sun, to a slightly better feel to the sun visor when you swing it thanks to not using the cheapest possible part. I'd bet that Tesla will catch up fast - I've never seen such rapid incremental improvement in a model line in my life.
While some features do add a bunch to the cost of the car, I think Tesla, thanks to it's top-notch ride, could be fine alongside the E-Class / GS / Dozen or so other cars in it's price range in just a few years, of Tesla's rate of improvement continues. Unsurprisingly I guess to us geeks, they take a software-company view of "1000 incremental improvements? no problem, here's how we'll roll em out" that may leave the execs at Mercedes et al wondering what hit them.
We've done that for most military action. Note that there's no requirement that the bill have the title "Declaration of WAR !!elenety-one!". "Authorization of use of military force" works just as well.
USA Today has stealth-edited the story to be less alarming since I linked it. I'd be annoyed, except it's wonderful the problem is smaller than was thought.
Screw you, warmonger. Stop trying to police the world. The only way it matters is if there's clear evidence that they're going to attack America.
Hitler had no immediate plans to attack America. Sometimes shit just gets out of hand and you have to do your part. The longer you wait, the higher the cost in lives and money when you do.
Looks like this flyer is being denied by everyone in the government now: whether or not it was sincere in the first place, the threat from basically everyone in the civilized world is the needed deterrent to stop shit like this before it gets started.
America learned once why it can't let dictators like Putin just invade their neighbors with impunity. How quickly we forgot where this all goes. It will take more than a sternly worded letter, or laughable sanctions, to stop this shit. And it must be stopped. It's on all of us, otherwise.
You nailed it. I found EP 1 tolerable, despite being overly gimmicked, but it did use up my patience. EP 2 was just the camel that broke the straw's back.
Well, monopoly is the wrong word. The problem is barrier to entry. Established large companies just suck in general, never seem to move technology forward even when it's in their best interests. Most progress comes from small companies who embrace every cool new advance just to stay alive, and succeed in changing customer expectations. If the big guy then buys the small guy for that tech, and moves to meet those raised expectations, everyone wins. That happens often in, say, software, but big telcos have always been too steeped in tradition to do anything right, so it all sucks.
Yep - they really suck at coverage. I respect their quality-over-quantity decision, but it's useless to most people. Still, they've been the lead at no-contract phones, practical pay-as-you-go, and so on.
Claiming the tax breaks themselves results in increased revenue is horribly conflating correlation with causation. It's much more likely the increased revenue was in fact due to the increased deficit spending, of course.
Well, I don't try to argue the Left out of its notion that for every problem the solution is government spending, but the point of voodoo economics was that lowering the frankly abusive top tax rates would stimulate a lot of spending and new investment, and that seems to have happened. Also, tax revenue went up in a very straightforward way: the rich have much flexibility in when, where and how they get compensated. Dropping tax rates caused a bunch of income and gains to "magically appear", as people stopped playing games to hide it. It's much like dropping the price of a computer game below the "easier to buy than pirate" price point can result in 10x sales.
Broadcast TV is a howling wasteland and its arguments that it offers some sort of valuable public service aren't exactly getting more convincing as time goes on.
Sadly true, and truly sad. But it would be a shame if we auctioned off all the cool frequencies this year, then invented some amazing new wireless tech 5-10 years from now, and had no place to put it.
Well, I use T-Mobile. I love T-Mobile. It would be awesome if they could get some actual high-speed wireless coverage that was worth a damn. Thus I conclude they won't end up with any new bandwidth - fate is just taunting me.
Well, to begin with, if the big players want that bandwidth they'll just buy whoever buys it. Problem solved. If some of the bidders are shell companies created for just such a contingency, so much the better.
ill. Ron reagon shut them down to give tax breaks to wall street assholes, and tossed them onto the streets.
Ronald Reagan's tax breaks resulted in increased government revenue, is the thing. Voodoo economics actually worked. Was can argue about where we are now on the Laffer curve, but we know the Carter-era tax brackets were past the point of negative returns.
Why the asylums were closed is anyone's guess. It seems a huge mistake to me, and it cost very little in the scope of government social programs. I could never make sense of that - not even a tinfoil hat theory.
Shantytowns are also a disaster waiting to happen. While there are certainly cynical reasons for outlawing them, a fire that sweeps a shantytown and kills several people, or a flood where a shantytown was built on a floodplain, is a non-cynical reason (and these things have happened). So now we have trailer parks instead, which are harder to afford to be sure, but not by much. You can be pretty far down on your luck and still manage a trailer - I should know.
Interesting assertion. I think the government (or parts of it) benefits greatly by creating a permanent underclass dependent on government assistance (giving a man a fish while trying to prevent him from learning to fish). We've seen plenty of clear historical and current evidence of people in power using aid to the poor to create a supply of loyal followers. There's little that's more creepy than a "free" school with the patron's picture everywhere and lessons everyday on what a good person the patron is and so on - this is still common today in parts of the world, as is becoming a powerful government/religious leader because of it. And to me, a poorly structured government charity (one that actually penalizes moving to a minimum wage job) has the same creepy vibe, if to a lesser degree.
I give to charities that focus on improving communities become self-sufficient and breaking these kinds of traps (though I do have one religious charity I'm slightly skeptical of, they have a solid reputation). Precisely providing that kind of aid without the "and you only have to me my loyal follower" strings attached.
Do we have much evidence of government assistance that actually fixes underlying problems, rather than help keep people satisfies with things as they are? I like to see some rays of hope in that area, somewhere!
The biggest problem as I see it is that so many people think it's the government's job now. After all, we pay a lot of taxes and the government has a lot of social programs. Why do more? I used to think that way myself.
But these days, I just accept my taxes as a total loss, and only count as charity what I give to good charities that I trust. I also prefer charities focused on fixing the underlying issues, over the merely palliative.
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My Sony alarm clock has been my most robust piece of gear (I recently had to replace my Logitech gaming mouse, so that's off the list). The Sony clock is particularly ironic.
The Japanese use the phrase SOny timer for planned obsolescence, both in a general sense and a specific assertion that all Sony products have such a timer to kill the device one day after the warrantee is up (except the PS, because they need to sell the games). Funny that the clocks are the only Sony product without the "Sony timer".
Therefore the best solution is to public release so everyone has the information at the same time. Let them compete for the patch; Awful software publisher will be the one caught with bugs. Good one will be patch and secure while everyone else suffer their bad choice.
Over time the best software will prevail and only idiots will still be using Microsoft products... that the theory. In practice there is corruption and bad software will linger for decades.
It's not about how fast you patch, it's about how fast you can get patches to your customers. And for the OpenSSL flaw, there were devices where the patch process is "throw it away and buy a new one".
Anyhow, Microsoft is far and away the worlds leading expert at distributing security patches - no one really has more experience or such a well-tuned corporate ecosystem. MS pushed a critical security patch out to WU, and every major corporation knows just what to do, and understand the urgency, and has a well-travelled path for it. The more modern players are good at patching consumer endpoints, but haven't really addressed corporate customers.
Ask the former CEO of Mozilla how that worked out for him.
Yahoo's directors MUST (not "should") do whatever maximizes profit for shareholders. This isn't an opinion, nor what's socially correct, but those are the rules when you issue shares to the public on U.S. stock markets.
That's wrong in a couple of ways. What's legally required is that the board member put the shareholders interests above their own personal interests (fiduciary responsibility). But those interests are defined by the corporate charter, and to a large extent by the board itself. It's perfectly legal to create a publically traded corporation that sets social responsibility, or green blah blah blah, or some other such hippie nonsense above profit, and then that's what the board must pursue. You might struggle to get investors, or you might find a welcome market, but in any case it's allowed (and rarely happens).
More commonly, there's no requirement at all for the board to chase short term profit. That's where most the corporate infighting comes. Some corporations have firm 20 and 50 year growth plans, and sacrifice the short term for those plans, and sometimes those companies have a shareholder revolt because the owners lose patience and want everything monetized now. Sucks when that happens, but the downside of being a publically traded corporation is that you're ultimately controlled by your owners, and that can end up being anyone.
That's changing though (except for Government Motors, which retains that build quality of say a Trabant). Ford has made huge strides in reliability, they're really pretty good now. And Tesla is, after all, an American car. We were too corrupt to let GM and Chrysler die, but had market forces actually done their thing, Ford and Tesla would be the surviving American brands (well, Tesla is heavily subsidized, but in a quite different way).
The notion that you can't have code without these flaws (buffer overruns, dangling pointers, etc) is just asinine. I've worked on significant codebases without any such flaws. You just have to adopt a programming style that doesn't rely on being mistake-free to avoid the issues.
Want to end the danger of buffer overruns? Stop using types where it's even possible.
Want to end the danger of dangling pointers? Managed code doesn't do anything to solve this problem, and is often the worst offender since coders often stop thinking about how memory is recycled, and well-formed objects can hang around in memory for quite some time waiting on the garbage man. So you have to write code where every time you use an object you check that it hasn't been freed, and importantly hasn't been freed and then re-used for the same object! (That happens on purpose in appliance code, where slab allocation is common.)
Heck, for embedded code I simply wouldn't use dynamic allocation at all. All objects created at boot, nothing malloced, nothing freed. Everything fixed sized and only written to with macros that ensure no overruns. I wrote code that way for 5 years - we didn't even use a stack, which is just one more thing that can overflow. That style is too costly for most work, but it's possible, and for life-safety applications it's irresponsible to cheap out.
I expect to save enough in my life to afford such things, but then my tastes in other areas are cheap. We probably all have something we'd spend too much on, given the resources.
But yeah, the complexity is starting to bite car makers in the ass. However, luxury car makers learned in the 80s that "reliability" was a really important feature. I remember a great Toyota add with a golf quartet where the first 3 each bragged about their luxury cars and the last just said "my Camry's not in the shop". Hopefully the luxury car makers will remember this, too.
Enlighten me - some things aren't obvious from a quick ride. Does the Model S have:
* A night vision hud with pedestrian highlighting
* Automatic lane departure detection with options to warn or steer back into the lane
* Radar in the blind spots and a warning light near the side view mirrors?
* Distance-calibrated path guides on the backup camera view (I heard this is coming w/ a F/W upgrade)
* A button that jacks up the front end a couple extra inches so that you can pull up to the parking curb without scraping anything? (I know it has some ride heght adjustment, maybe that works here?)
* Airline-style fold-out tables for the back seats so you have a desk to work at if you like
* Automatic detection of interior air quality with auto flip between exterior and recycled interior air for ventilation (recycle the air through the carbon filters till any smell is gone, but not so long that CO2 builds up inside).
* Vent fans that vary in speed a bit over time, like a breeze gusting a bit, so that the air feels less stale without a constant in-your-face blower?
* Two sun visors for the driver for roads that wind back and forth?
* A motor to open/close the trunk remotely when your hands are full?
* An umbrella slot in the door?
That's just a few features off the top of my head. And dammit, my car needs that umbrella slot more than anything - get on it mid-tier luxury car makers!
The simple fact is, for the moment Tesla is an expensive car but not a luxury car. It gets the smooth ride part right, thanks to the non-reciprocating motor and no gearshifts to manage, and that's great, but compared to a similarly piced Merc or Lexus it's lacking (and at the unsubsidized price, where the S-Class lives, it's embarrassing).
But that being said, Tesla company-wise is like nothing the industry has ever seen. They keep improving cars they've already sold. No one does that. Many of the "luxury features" on a luxury car aren't actually very expensive, they're just a matter of seeking every possible improvement, from better window laminates to keep the car cool in the sun, to a slightly better feel to the sun visor when you swing it thanks to not using the cheapest possible part. I'd bet that Tesla will catch up fast - I've never seen such rapid incremental improvement in a model line in my life.
While some features do add a bunch to the cost of the car, I think Tesla, thanks to it's top-notch ride, could be fine alongside the E-Class / GS / Dozen or so other cars in it's price range in just a few years, of Tesla's rate of improvement continues. Unsurprisingly I guess to us geeks, they take a software-company view of "1000 incremental improvements? no problem, here's how we'll roll em out" that may leave the execs at Mercedes et al wondering what hit them.
We've done that for most military action. Note that there's no requirement that the bill have the title "Declaration of WAR !!elenety-one!". "Authorization of use of military force" works just as well.
USA Today has stealth-edited the story to be less alarming since I linked it. I'd be annoyed, except it's wonderful the problem is smaller than was thought.
Screw you, warmonger. Stop trying to police the world. The only way it matters is if there's clear evidence that they're going to attack America.
Hitler had no immediate plans to attack America. Sometimes shit just gets out of hand and you have to do your part. The longer you wait, the higher the cost in lives and money when you do.
Looks like this flyer is being denied by everyone in the government now: whether or not it was sincere in the first place, the threat from basically everyone in the civilized world is the needed deterrent to stop shit like this before it gets started.
Not to Godwin the thread, but the new government in east Ukraine is actually registering Jews right now today.
America learned once why it can't let dictators like Putin just invade their neighbors with impunity. How quickly we forgot where this all goes. It will take more than a sternly worded letter, or laughable sanctions, to stop this shit. And it must be stopped. It's on all of us, otherwise.
You nailed it. I found EP 1 tolerable, despite being overly gimmicked, but it did use up my patience. EP 2 was just the camel that broke the straw's back.
Oh, yeah. DNF is special. But it's such a unique gem that it doesn't represent anything going on when it was released. Balls of steel!
Well, monopoly is the wrong word. The problem is barrier to entry. Established large companies just suck in general, never seem to move technology forward even when it's in their best interests. Most progress comes from small companies who embrace every cool new advance just to stay alive, and succeed in changing customer expectations. If the big guy then buys the small guy for that tech, and moves to meet those raised expectations, everyone wins. That happens often in, say, software, but big telcos have always been too steeped in tradition to do anything right, so it all sucks.
Yep - they really suck at coverage. I respect their quality-over-quantity decision, but it's useless to most people. Still, they've been the lead at no-contract phones, practical pay-as-you-go, and so on.
Claiming the tax breaks themselves results in increased revenue is horribly conflating correlation with causation. It's much more likely the increased revenue was in fact due to the increased deficit spending, of course.
Well, I don't try to argue the Left out of its notion that for every problem the solution is government spending, but the point of voodoo economics was that lowering the frankly abusive top tax rates would stimulate a lot of spending and new investment, and that seems to have happened. Also, tax revenue went up in a very straightforward way: the rich have much flexibility in when, where and how they get compensated. Dropping tax rates caused a bunch of income and gains to "magically appear", as people stopped playing games to hide it. It's much like dropping the price of a computer game below the "easier to buy than pirate" price point can result in 10x sales.
Broadcast TV is a howling wasteland and its arguments that it offers some sort of valuable public service aren't exactly getting more convincing as time goes on.
Sadly true, and truly sad. But it would be a shame if we auctioned off all the cool frequencies this year, then invented some amazing new wireless tech 5-10 years from now, and had no place to put it.
Well, I use T-Mobile. I love T-Mobile. It would be awesome if they could get some actual high-speed wireless coverage that was worth a damn. Thus I conclude they won't end up with any new bandwidth - fate is just taunting me.
Well, to begin with, if the big players want that bandwidth they'll just buy whoever buys it. Problem solved. If some of the bidders are shell companies created for just such a contingency, so much the better.
ill. Ron reagon shut them down to give tax breaks to wall street assholes, and tossed them onto the streets.
Ronald Reagan's tax breaks resulted in increased government revenue, is the thing. Voodoo economics actually worked. Was can argue about where we are now on the Laffer curve, but we know the Carter-era tax brackets were past the point of negative returns.
Why the asylums were closed is anyone's guess. It seems a huge mistake to me, and it cost very little in the scope of government social programs. I could never make sense of that - not even a tinfoil hat theory.
Shantytowns are also a disaster waiting to happen. While there are certainly cynical reasons for outlawing them, a fire that sweeps a shantytown and kills several people, or a flood where a shantytown was built on a floodplain, is a non-cynical reason (and these things have happened). So now we have trailer parks instead, which are harder to afford to be sure, but not by much. You can be pretty far down on your luck and still manage a trailer - I should know.
Interesting assertion. I think the government (or parts of it) benefits greatly by creating a permanent underclass dependent on government assistance (giving a man a fish while trying to prevent him from learning to fish). We've seen plenty of clear historical and current evidence of people in power using aid to the poor to create a supply of loyal followers. There's little that's more creepy than a "free" school with the patron's picture everywhere and lessons everyday on what a good person the patron is and so on - this is still common today in parts of the world, as is becoming a powerful government/religious leader because of it. And to me, a poorly structured government charity (one that actually penalizes moving to a minimum wage job) has the same creepy vibe, if to a lesser degree.
I give to charities that focus on improving communities become self-sufficient and breaking these kinds of traps (though I do have one religious charity I'm slightly skeptical of, they have a solid reputation). Precisely providing that kind of aid without the "and you only have to me my loyal follower" strings attached.
Do we have much evidence of government assistance that actually fixes underlying problems, rather than help keep people satisfies with things as they are? I like to see some rays of hope in that area, somewhere!
The biggest problem as I see it is that so many people think it's the government's job now. After all, we pay a lot of taxes and the government has a lot of social programs. Why do more? I used to think that way myself.
But these days, I just accept my taxes as a total loss, and only count as charity what I give to good charities that I trust. I also prefer charities focused on fixing the underlying issues, over the merely palliative.