The day will come when people will grumble their old 64-bit computers are still working fine and yet they are being forced to replace everything with 128-bit computers.
That seems unlikely, even even with a bus speed of 1 terabytes per second it would take over 200 days to visit all bytes in a 64-bit address space once, and with processor frequencies being stuck in the GHz range it seems unlikely we'll have processors that can consume terabytes of memory per second. Of course we can simply keep adding more processors, but transistors simply can't get smaller than one atom so there is a hard limit to Moore's law.
There are various annoying physical limitations that limit how powerful computers can be. There is a maximum information density (bits per volume), the minimum required energy to process information, etc. You can't count to 2^256.
Since you feel so strongly about this subject, and you're posting on slashdot, I'm sure you (or someone you hired?) have audited the 29k lines of code at https://a.fsdn.com/sd/all.js which get loaded on this very page (well, actually https://a.fsdn.com/sd/all-minified.js gets loaded, but I'm dangerously assuming that the former is the original version of the latter). So did you find anything suspicious? When was the last time those files got updated?
If you haven't actually inspected that JavaScript file, would you agree that your concerns are completely theoretical and that nobody is really going to bother to spend hours reading JavaScript for every new domain they visit (or spend thousands of dollars hiring a consultant to do so)? Given that the vast, vast, vast majority of people have come to like and expect the kind of behavior that scripts in the browser provide, wouldn't it be much more effective to do things such as lobby for user/browser tracking to be outlawed, inventing better tracking protection, etc.? Opposing scripts in the browser sounds like a technical solution to a social problem, which rarely work.
If you can minimized JavaScript I'm sure you can learn to read WebAssembly (with a bit of effort).
I'm speaking to the point that they will be exploited for their processing power by WebAssembly. It wasn't until recently that it became a real option.
If it's the processing power you fear, I'm sure it's trivial for browsers to slow down WebAssembly execution so it matches that of comparable JavaScript code. If cryptocoin mining through WebAssembly/JavaScript becomes so widespread that average users really start to suffer, I'm sure browser vendors will find some sort of solution. E.g. throttling scripts that originate from a different domain than the website you're currently visiting, or throttling all scripts by default and having a button that enables unthrottled execution, which can be toggled per domain or url. Or perhaps they'll take some inspiration from virus scanners and build scanners that detect cryptocoin mining code and refuse to run it (with an opt-out for the false positives?).
WebAssembly will probably change some things about the web, but I don't think the future is as dark as you predict. Perhaps we'll go through a period where things will be a bit worse, but I fully expect the browser vendors to strike back when/if things get too bad: there is market share to be gained there.
It's the most important because it's the final nail in the coffin for readable JavaScript.
Clearly you haven't been reading minified JavaScript recently. JavaScript hasn't been readable for years, and the world didn't end.
JavaScript as we know it is now over
I'd love to hear how you "know it" today, because the JavaScript served by most websites might as well have been a big binary blob.
Downthread you mention:
You're missing the point, this about more than just advanced users.
Surely that is a completely separate concern? Non-advanced users have never been able to read JavaScript. And when WebAssembly becomes more popular, the non-advanced users won't be able to read that, too. So from their perspective nothing changes.
Hence their adoption of Rust, and using it to completely rewrite the ECMAScript engine.
What are you talking about? As far as I'm aware nobody is working on rewriting Firefox's javascript in engine in Rust. Various other parts? Yes, but not IonMonkey.
And sometimes when talking directly to hardware, array[-1] is exactly what is needed.
And if that index would be 'out of bounds' for the object as the C abstract machine understands it, that's UB, and an optimizing compiler can do very unexpected things.
In the Netherlands it used to be the case that you could buy booze with less than 15% alcohol (so beer and wine) from age 16+, and the stronger stuff was 18+. Sadly the law was changed a few years ago, and now all alcohol is 18+.
Yes, but would the EU have done this to one of their own companies? Obviously not. They just want to stick it to the foreigners - especially Americans. It's a big "fuck you" straight from the EU.
Surely Apple isn't an American company! It's head office is in Ireland, and almost all of its profits are made there.
The only thing a firewall should be doing is to detect and block (D)DoS-attacks and connections to and from ip on ports you don't want or you are sure you don't need, while allowing connections from other ip's and ports you actually do need.
But outbound connections to port 80 and 443 are guaranteed to be allowed in almost every environment, and an attacker can usually control the remote server, including on which port it listens and which protocol it speaks. And an attacker could also easily disguise communication as normal http or https traffic. In addition, a protocol has been created, standardized, and implemented in all modern browsers designed to work around the annoying port blocking restriction: websockets. So can we all stop pretending that blocking outbound connections to certain ports is actually helpful, rather than just making things harder and less efficient for everyone, without posing a significant barrier to actual attackers?
If GP was already under arrest, wouldn't they simply take them with them and wait outside, rather than release them again until they obtained the warrant?
GP might be a minority by not being heterosexual, or being transsexual, or being different in some other way that is not immediately apparent but could be discovered by, for example, stalking them online.
Not going to happen, and it never was. The rules that applied then apply now. Companies do not pay to rewrite all their applications in the latest new technology which does all the same stuff their old one did - and nothing more.
So be it, if that is what these companies desire. But they should keep in mind that it will become increasingly expensive to keep their software running on newer machines (and their old ones will fail, eventually), and if they even require new features, it might be very hard and expensive to find someone who is willing and able to implement them. I'm not saying they should rewrite everything in a new language every few years (which would be expensive and foolish busywork), but if you're stuck to one vendor and they announce they will no longer support the language you're using, that seems like a great time to start moving on. The longer you delay updating, the more expensive it gets.
Hell, we're still talking about bloody JavaScript after all these years.
How is JavaScript even remotely comparable to a dead languages like VB or COBOL? Sure, no language will truly be dead as long as there are still applications running and being supported, but nobody in their right mind would start a new project in 'classic' VB or COBOL. Some might say the same about JavaScript, but even they must admit they hate JavaScript for a different reason.
Secondly, appeal to authority fallacy much? Who cares what Stephen Hawkins thinks about the real world? He is totally divorced from reality (not his fault, but it's a fact nevertheless). How many times does he have to go down a street at night, in an 'enriched' area, and worry about being mugged or raped?
Well given that he is paralyzed, I imagine even a small child wielding a pillow could kill him quite easily. So why don't you ask him what it's like going down any street at any time of the day, in any area, and having to worry about being mugged or raped or killed by anyone who isn't also in a wheelchair.
It's hypocritical and contradictory of them to state that they want to provide "a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all", yet they turn around and almost right away use a very unfriendly and unwelcoming threat like "We will exclude you from interaction".
And how would you maintain a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment without removing people who would make that environment unfriendly, unsafe, or unwelcoming?
The moderation policy even states that anyone could be "indefinitely excluded". That's also not not creating a "welcoming environment for all"!
I think it's quite clear that 'all' involves only those people who obey the rules. If the code of conduct stated "We will exclude you from interaction if you murder anyone", would you then be complaining that they are such hypocrites because they fail to provide a "friendly, safe, and welcoming environment" for people who really like to murder?
It's a total lack of justice, as far as I'm concerned. Arbitrary judgment, arbitrary enforcement, arbitrary punishment, and no public appeal process all reek of injustice.
Yes it's so terrible, that's probably why so many people who try out Rust mention how friendly and helpful the community is.
A code of conduct is not like the law. When you are banned from the community (or leave it voluntarily) the code stops applying to you and you can happily complain about how unfairly you were treated on your blog, or slashdot, or wherever. There is no Rust-police that will come to your house and kidnap you. And the whole project is open source, anyone is free to fork it and start their own community.
My integrity is very accommodating in this regard, it only really pays attention when it matters. My attitude towards mythical creatures falls in the same category as white lies.
Being a theist may be a fundamental belief, but I'm not sure the same applies to atheism. If the majority of humans believed in unicorns and I had to state that I believed in unicorns as well to get a job (which does not involve any equines, horned or otherwise) I wanted, I would happily lie about believing in unicorns without feeling I've "betrayed a fundamental belief".
It's not a clever idea at all. Criminals will simply exchange their bitcoins for another currency, possibly multiple times, immediately after committing their crimes. Unless you think the right response after a theft of $X is grabbing some random people from the street, taking a total of $X from them, and then burning it is the correct way to stop crime?
And why would anyone cooperate with this crazy scheme? Perhaps you are willing to say that (using the numbers from your example) a bitcoin tainted by a particular crime is worth only 90% of its former value. The rest of the world might not agree that the value has reduced and pay full price (well, not to you of course, since you'll accept 90% of full price), but among one another. At the end of the day a bitcoin is only worth what others are willing to trade for it, and unless you manage to get most of the world on board with your scheme, it's just not going to happen.
LLVM is pretty smart, it will probably be able to remove dead stores most of the time. Using iterators in Rust will avoid bounds checks. I think the benchmarks game shows that Rust need not be slower than C or C++.
Nope, Rust is being used by Mozilla to develop the experimental layout engine Servo, but there are (as far as I am aware) no plans to completely rewrite Firefox in Rust. There are plans to gradually replace some components in Firefox written in C/C++ with Rust, e.g. a url parser and a mp4 parser, but I don't think these are part of the current Firefox release.
Commerce? Are you mad? What could the moon possibly produce that, after the cost of moving it from the moon to the earth, couldn't be produced for a fraction of the cost here on earth?
Slashdot Mirror
That seems unlikely, even even with a bus speed of 1 terabytes per second it would take over 200 days to visit all bytes in a 64-bit address space once, and with processor frequencies being stuck in the GHz range it seems unlikely we'll have processors that can consume terabytes of memory per second. Of course we can simply keep adding more processors, but transistors simply can't get smaller than one atom so there is a hard limit to Moore's law.
There are various annoying physical limitations that limit how powerful computers can be. There is a maximum information density (bits per volume), the minimum required energy to process information, etc. You can't count to 2^256.
Since you feel so strongly about this subject, and you're posting on slashdot, I'm sure you (or someone you hired?) have audited the 29k lines of code at https://a.fsdn.com/sd/all.js which get loaded on this very page (well, actually https://a.fsdn.com/sd/all-minified.js gets loaded, but I'm dangerously assuming that the former is the original version of the latter). So did you find anything suspicious? When was the last time those files got updated?
If you haven't actually inspected that JavaScript file, would you agree that your concerns are completely theoretical and that nobody is really going to bother to spend hours reading JavaScript for every new domain they visit (or spend thousands of dollars hiring a consultant to do so)? Given that the vast, vast, vast majority of people have come to like and expect the kind of behavior that scripts in the browser provide, wouldn't it be much more effective to do things such as lobby for user/browser tracking to be outlawed, inventing better tracking protection, etc.? Opposing scripts in the browser sounds like a technical solution to a social problem, which rarely work.
If you can minimized JavaScript I'm sure you can learn to read WebAssembly (with a bit of effort).
If it's the processing power you fear, I'm sure it's trivial for browsers to slow down WebAssembly execution so it matches that of comparable JavaScript code. If cryptocoin mining through WebAssembly/JavaScript becomes so widespread that average users really start to suffer, I'm sure browser vendors will find some sort of solution. E.g. throttling scripts that originate from a different domain than the website you're currently visiting, or throttling all scripts by default and having a button that enables unthrottled execution, which can be toggled per domain or url. Or perhaps they'll take some inspiration from virus scanners and build scanners that detect cryptocoin mining code and refuse to run it (with an opt-out for the false positives?).
WebAssembly will probably change some things about the web, but I don't think the future is as dark as you predict. Perhaps we'll go through a period where things will be a bit worse, but I fully expect the browser vendors to strike back when/if things get too bad: there is market share to be gained there.
Clearly you haven't been reading minified JavaScript recently. JavaScript hasn't been readable for years, and the world didn't end.
I'd love to hear how you "know it" today, because the JavaScript served by most websites might as well have been a big binary blob.
Downthread you mention:
Surely that is a completely separate concern? Non-advanced users have never been able to read JavaScript. And when WebAssembly becomes more popular, the non-advanced users won't be able to read that, too. So from their perspective nothing changes.
Hence their adoption of Rust, and using it to completely rewrite the ECMAScript engine.
What are you talking about? As far as I'm aware nobody is working on rewriting Firefox's javascript in engine in Rust. Various other parts? Yes, but not IonMonkey.
I could see the point of having a compiler in C/C++, but what would be the point of having a bootstrap compiler written in C/C++?
And sometimes when talking directly to hardware, array[-1] is exactly what is needed.
And if that index would be 'out of bounds' for the object as the C abstract machine understands it, that's UB, and an optimizing compiler can do very unexpected things.
In the Netherlands it used to be the case that you could buy booze with less than 15% alcohol (so beer and wine) from age 16+, and the stronger stuff was 18+. Sadly the law was changed a few years ago, and now all alcohol is 18+.
Yes, but would the EU have done this to one of their own companies? Obviously not. They just want to stick it to the foreigners - especially Americans. It's a big "fuck you" straight from the EU.
Surely Apple isn't an American company! It's head office is in Ireland, and almost all of its profits are made there.
The only thing a firewall should be doing is to detect and block (D)DoS-attacks and connections to and from ip on ports you don't want or you are sure you don't need, while allowing connections from other ip's and ports you actually do need.
But outbound connections to port 80 and 443 are guaranteed to be allowed in almost every environment, and an attacker can usually control the remote server, including on which port it listens and which protocol it speaks. And an attacker could also easily disguise communication as normal http or https traffic. In addition, a protocol has been created, standardized, and implemented in all modern browsers designed to work around the annoying port blocking restriction: websockets. So can we all stop pretending that blocking outbound connections to certain ports is actually helpful, rather than just making things harder and less efficient for everyone, without posing a significant barrier to actual attackers?
If GP was already under arrest, wouldn't they simply take them with them and wait outside, rather than release them again until they obtained the warrant?
GP might be a minority by not being heterosexual, or being transsexual, or being different in some other way that is not immediately apparent but could be discovered by, for example, stalking them online.
Not going to happen, and it never was. The rules that applied then apply now. Companies do not pay to rewrite all their applications in the latest new technology which does all the same stuff their old one did - and nothing more.
So be it, if that is what these companies desire. But they should keep in mind that it will become increasingly expensive to keep their software running on newer machines (and their old ones will fail, eventually), and if they even require new features, it might be very hard and expensive to find someone who is willing and able to implement them. I'm not saying they should rewrite everything in a new language every few years (which would be expensive and foolish busywork), but if you're stuck to one vendor and they announce they will no longer support the language you're using, that seems like a great time to start moving on. The longer you delay updating, the more expensive it gets.
Hell, we're still talking about bloody JavaScript after all these years.
How is JavaScript even remotely comparable to a dead languages like VB or COBOL? Sure, no language will truly be dead as long as there are still applications running and being supported, but nobody in their right mind would start a new project in 'classic' VB or COBOL. Some might say the same about JavaScript, but even they must admit they hate JavaScript for a different reason.
Secondly, appeal to authority fallacy much? Who cares what Stephen Hawkins thinks about the real world? He is totally divorced from reality (not his fault, but it's a fact nevertheless). How many times does he have to go down a street at night, in an 'enriched' area, and worry about being mugged or raped?
Well given that he is paralyzed, I imagine even a small child wielding a pillow could kill him quite easily. So why don't you ask him what it's like going down any street at any time of the day, in any area, and having to worry about being mugged or raped or killed by anyone who isn't also in a wheelchair.
It's hypocritical and contradictory of them to state that they want to provide "a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all", yet they turn around and almost right away use a very unfriendly and unwelcoming threat like "We will exclude you from interaction".
And how would you maintain a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment without removing people who would make that environment unfriendly, unsafe, or unwelcoming?
The moderation policy even states that anyone could be "indefinitely excluded". That's also not not creating a "welcoming environment for all"!
I think it's quite clear that 'all' involves only those people who obey the rules. If the code of conduct stated "We will exclude you from interaction if you murder anyone", would you then be complaining that they are such hypocrites because they fail to provide a "friendly, safe, and welcoming environment" for people who really like to murder?
It's a total lack of justice, as far as I'm concerned. Arbitrary judgment, arbitrary enforcement, arbitrary punishment, and no public appeal process all reek of injustice.
Yes it's so terrible, that's probably why so many people who try out Rust mention how friendly and helpful the community is. A code of conduct is not like the law. When you are banned from the community (or leave it voluntarily) the code stops applying to you and you can happily complain about how unfairly you were treated on your blog, or slashdot, or wherever. There is no Rust-police that will come to your house and kidnap you. And the whole project is open source, anyone is free to fork it and start their own community.
My integrity is very accommodating in this regard, it only really pays attention when it matters. My attitude towards mythical creatures falls in the same category as white lies.
Being a theist may be a fundamental belief, but I'm not sure the same applies to atheism. If the majority of humans believed in unicorns and I had to state that I believed in unicorns as well to get a job (which does not involve any equines, horned or otherwise) I wanted, I would happily lie about believing in unicorns without feeling I've "betrayed a fundamental belief".
It's nothing like that, because users choose to install an add-blocker, and ABP is not the only add-blocker out there.
Since you can't actually block the students from accessing facebook, isn't attempting to do so a waste of taxpayer money?
Seems pointless, don't they all have phones with mobile internet these days?
It's not a clever idea at all. Criminals will simply exchange their bitcoins for another currency, possibly multiple times, immediately after committing their crimes. Unless you think the right response after a theft of $X is grabbing some random people from the street, taking a total of $X from them, and then burning it is the correct way to stop crime?
And why would anyone cooperate with this crazy scheme? Perhaps you are willing to say that (using the numbers from your example) a bitcoin tainted by a particular crime is worth only 90% of its former value. The rest of the world might not agree that the value has reduced and pay full price (well, not to you of course, since you'll accept 90% of full price), but among one another. At the end of the day a bitcoin is only worth what others are willing to trade for it, and unless you manage to get most of the world on board with your scheme, it's just not going to happen.
LLVM is pretty smart, it will probably be able to remove dead stores most of the time. Using iterators in Rust will avoid bounds checks. I think the benchmarks game shows that Rust need not be slower than C or C++.
Nope, Rust is being used by Mozilla to develop the experimental layout engine Servo, but there are (as far as I am aware) no plans to completely rewrite Firefox in Rust. There are plans to gradually replace some components in Firefox written in C/C++ with Rust, e.g. a url parser and a mp4 parser, but I don't think these are part of the current Firefox release.
Commerce? Are you mad? What could the moon possibly produce that, after the cost of moving it from the moon to the earth, couldn't be produced for a fraction of the cost here on earth?