You also don't have a low user ID. Back in the day (at least into the '80s), touch-typing was mostly taught in high school for girls wanting to become secretaries. Too bad that I was too nerdy to be into girls in my high school years, that would have been great.
...which is fine if you have fuck-all idea what "home row" means. Those of us who learned to touch type see 6YHN and 7UJM as vertical columns. The main reason that they are shifted left like that is due to mechanical typewriters where each key was connected to a bar, so they had to have the offset for all the bars to fit. I would argue that the offset angle is a major anachronism and should be reduced or eliminated, and many split keyboards actually do that.
When doing a GIS for split keyboards, I noticed that iOS has a split keyboard option for the iPad that puts B on the right side. But it also allows you to use "ghost" keys on either side of the split, so that's okay.
That's still no reason to have it next to the A key. In the early days of computer keyboards, it was a regular-sized key stuck in a corner of the layout. It was only typewriters that had shift-lock (which shifted number keys too!) next to the A key, because it was mechanically simpler to implement. It also took some force to engage it, making it hard to hit by accident, unlike on computer keyboards, where the merest tap on the corner of the caps lock key is enough.
"I use a base 5 numbering system, you insensitive clods!"
But seriously, as someone who properly learned touch-typing in high school in the '80s, left side 45/RT/FG/VB, right side 67/YU/HJ/NM. But I support having the 6 on both sides of those split keyboards.
For the people whining that they can't fit on both sides, most split keyboards are not edge-to-edge, and it would only be a minor inconvenience for manufacturers to make a double-6.. Just GIS for "split keyboard" In fact, it looks like edge-to-edge is actually less common than 6-on-right!
Many years ago during my college years, my mom wanted to go to London for a week with some of her friends, and I went along, too. The flight back to the US went Heathrow->DC->DFW, and most of the passengers got off in DC. So I flew that leg of the flight in a very sparsely populated 747.
The only reason it stuck around so long was because UK and FR had sunk so much money into it. Too big to fail, ya know. Also, when they realized that their customer base was relatively price-flexible, they could charge based on how much it really cost, rather than subsidize it trying to compete with regular jets.
And I don't remember hearing about it having a lot of inland European routes. I doubt Boeing had much ability to ban European overland routes.
Next time you are on a Boeing, notice how loud the wind and engine noise is compared to a Concorde, which was actually criticized for the inaudibility of the sonic boom transition.
Are you trying to imply that passengers would hear the sonic boom? If so, you're an idiot. The sonic boom is external to the plane. It's like saying "what hurricane?" when you're in the eye of the hurricane. And the last time a plane I was on was annoyingly loud, it was because it had propellers.
Of all the things which I would ditch from C++ for embedded systems programming, iostreams is first against the wall. It's not just a pig, it's also a shameful show-off example of "stupid overload tricks".
Of the things I love the most, it's how virtual functions compare to using function pointers. The syntax for C function pointers is mind-bending. Virtual functions replace the best use case for function pointers, with a straightforward syntax, and the vtable means they all get assigned together for a given class, which is important for encapsulation.
As an actual embedded systems programmer, I can tell you that most of them use C because they can't grok (or even actively hate) C++. Sure, you don't want to go nuts with dynamic allocation (a bad thing in the small-system embedded systems world), but a subset of C++ * can be quite effecitvely used for embedded systems programming. Just limiting yourself to C99+classes+virtual method functions and static/auto scope objects can really improve the quality of your code over C.
* Yes, EC++ as a specific C++ dialect may be defunct, but IMHO it was created more for the benefit of compiler vendors who were having trouble getting templates and exceptions working properly back in 2002 or so.
Well, maybe not quite exactly, but Arduino started in 2005. That's ten years ago. Then again, we still have people programming C with/* */ comments, and variable declarations at the top of the function, as though C99 never happened over fifteen years ago. (For instance, STM32 library/sample code is still written that way, but just try to find me an ARM C compiler that doesn't support// comments!)
What bugs me most about Arudino is that it's an 8-bit processor, from the dawn of the Flash-in-CPU era, still being used unironically in 2015. At least the AVR instruction set isn't bad for C (unlike the mess that is pre-32 PIC), but the cost advantage of 8-bit processors is now gone thanks to Cortex-M0. And then when they did try to get into the 32-bit era, they used Atmel's mediocre ARM parts, when the big three (now two) of ST, NXP, and Freescale made better Cortex-M parts. (TI's Cortex-M parts are pretty good now, too, and the MSP430 has a decent niche in the low-power space.)
I skipped Arduino completely and went straight to mbed. Or rather, an NXP guy left one behind after a sales (to us) meeting at work, and it completely opened me up to a whole new paradigm for writing embedded code. (C++ minus the college ivory-tower iostreams shit and templates all over the place.) I'm happy that mbed is still gaining momentum.
if you want to actually build 5 or more of a particular project, would you just get an Arduino for each?
One of the good things Arduino did was create the market for clones, some shield-compatible (now every chip maker's demo boards have shield ports), and others on smaller boards. For the 5-100 crowd, you can get a small board with an ATMega on it, which costs less and takes up a lot less space in your project. Or an ATTiny. Beyond that, since Arduino isn't much more than an Atmel demo board, you can build your own board around just the CPU chip. The Arduino form factor gives you a consistent starting point that you can reduce from, and when you're done, you can re-use it in your next project.
Most importantly, there's a big difference between a new car with electronic paranoia shit like that, and a 5- or 10-year old car with that shit.
I'm going to guess that most new car buyers sell a car before 5 years, for the simple reason that they wouldn't likely be buying new cars if they didn't keep selling their old ones. So guess what, they probably won't have to deal with that shit breaking, and now the people who buy used cars are going to have to deal with it as these cars find their way into the used market. (Same with hybrid or electric car batteries getting old, too.) I don't even like chipped keys, because it means you can't get a cheap replacement.
Well, thanks to TV being digital now, it's easier than ever to time-shift without some cable company's crappy DVR. If the signal is good enough, you could get a dedicated ATSC tuner for her computer.
And if you're up to the task, you could go with an open-source DVR like MythTV. You can even connect from a client on another computer in the house, though the bandwidth of a full HD show takes up a good chunk of 802.11n if you watch it over the wireless (a/b/n or a/b/g/n recommended for the cleaner 5GHz spectrum).
My 4-tuner/4.5TB MythTV makes me a slave to my backlog, not the clock. Also, I can save episodes as long as i want (if I have space), and mark/delete the commercials manually (I don't trust the automatic commercial detection) more for saving space (commercials alone can be a gigabyte for an hour show) than for other reasons. With only an antenna, I've got more TV than I can watch.
For what it's worth, the pumps themselves (the part that delivers fuel) are likely to be barely changed from the late '90s, when they were a simple embedded system with no operating system other than "while (1) dostuff();" The displays were just beginning to change then, though. Gilbarco's new LCD display ran on Linux, and you could see all the boot messages out of a diagnostic port. But there was no TCP/IP stack, just the same RS-485 link to control the display.
The stuff referred to in TFA is about the back-office stuff that runs on "real" PCs. So someone messes up the inventory management stuff that calls for a refill truck? So what? Gas pumps are still (AFAIK) pretty stupid, and customers won't stick around if no fuel comes out, so it doesn't really matter if sucking dry is bad for the pumps. Whoop-de-doo, people will have to go down the block to the next station. Hardly the apocalypse that was these guys premise before they even started.
The only real concern is when people get gas for free. And the pump has to be told by the site controller equipment to turn on for each and every sale. Even then, there's a mechanical flow counter on the pump that can be checked to see if the pump is giving away free gas due to some sort of shenanigans on the site controller side.
And as someone who wrote code to talk to gas pumps back in the late '90s, and had to hang around unattended sites after installs and upgrades, the worst that can happen by attacking tank monitoring is that the site runs dry. At which point the pumps simply stop pumping. The only loss is in missed sales.
If they use blender pumps and regular runs dry, only premium will work, which means only the least popular of three (or more) grades works, plus diesel if they sell that. That happened once when I was at a site, and at first I was worried that it was a bug. Ten minutes later I made a call to the site's maintenance number telling them to send a truck, and left.
Slashdot Mirror
And you still have to look at the keyboard when you hunt-and-peck. The point of touch-typing is to type without having to look at the keyboard.
You also don't have a low user ID. Back in the day (at least into the '80s), touch-typing was mostly taught in high school for girls wanting to become secretaries. Too bad that I was too nerdy to be into girls in my high school years, that would have been great.
...which is fine if you have fuck-all idea what "home row" means. Those of us who learned to touch type see 6YHN and 7UJM as vertical columns. The main reason that they are shifted left like that is due to mechanical typewriters where each key was connected to a bar, so they had to have the offset for all the bars to fit. I would argue that the offset angle is a major anachronism and should be reduced or eliminated, and many split keyboards actually do that.
When doing a GIS for split keyboards, I noticed that iOS has a split keyboard option for the iPad that puts B on the right side. But it also allows you to use "ghost" keys on either side of the split, so that's okay.
That's still no reason to have it next to the A key. In the early days of computer keyboards, it was a regular-sized key stuck in a corner of the layout. It was only typewriters that had shift-lock (which shifted number keys too!) next to the A key, because it was mechanically simpler to implement. It also took some force to engage it, making it hard to hit by accident, unlike on computer keyboards, where the merest tap on the corner of the caps lock key is enough.
"I use a base 5 numbering system, you insensitive clods!"
But seriously, as someone who properly learned touch-typing in high school in the '80s, left side 45/RT/FG/VB, right side 67/YU/HJ/NM. But I support having the 6 on both sides of those split keyboards.
For the people whining that they can't fit on both sides, most split keyboards are not edge-to-edge, and it would only be a minor inconvenience for manufacturers to make a double-6.. Just GIS for "split keyboard" In fact, it looks like edge-to-edge is actually less common than 6-on-right!
If you had read TFA, you would realize (realise?) that the summary was more like "BLOODY YANKS! BLOODY YANKS! BLOODY YANKS!"
700 people
Not sure where you're getting your numbers, because it took two 747s for the deadliest aviation accident in history to kill 583 people.
Many years ago during my college years, my mom wanted to go to London for a week with some of her friends, and I went along, too. The flight back to the US went Heathrow->DC->DFW, and most of the passengers got off in DC. So I flew that leg of the flight in a very sparsely populated 747.
The only reason it stuck around so long was because UK and FR had sunk so much money into it. Too big to fail, ya know. Also, when they realized that their customer base was relatively price-flexible, they could charge based on how much it really cost, rather than subsidize it trying to compete with regular jets.
And I don't remember hearing about it having a lot of inland European routes. I doubt Boeing had much ability to ban European overland routes.
Next time you are on a Boeing, notice how loud the wind and engine noise is compared to a Concorde, which was actually criticized for the inaudibility of the sonic boom transition.
Are you trying to imply that passengers would hear the sonic boom? If so, you're an idiot. The sonic boom is external to the plane. It's like saying "what hurricane?" when you're in the eye of the hurricane. And the last time a plane I was on was annoyingly loud, it was because it had propellers.
Of all the things which I would ditch from C++ for embedded systems programming, iostreams is first against the wall. It's not just a pig, it's also a shameful show-off example of "stupid overload tricks".
Of the things I love the most, it's how virtual functions compare to using function pointers. The syntax for C function pointers is mind-bending. Virtual functions replace the best use case for function pointers, with a straightforward syntax, and the vtable means they all get assigned together for a given class, which is important for encapsulation.
Builds in Go 1.5 will be slower by a factor of about two.
Go! Back! (I should go check TDWTF forums to find some threads about this.)
As an actual embedded systems programmer, I can tell you that most of them use C because they can't grok (or even actively hate) C++. Sure, you don't want to go nuts with dynamic allocation (a bad thing in the small-system embedded systems world), but a subset of C++ * can be quite effecitvely used for embedded systems programming. Just limiting yourself to C99+classes+virtual method functions and static/auto scope objects can really improve the quality of your code over C.
* Yes, EC++ as a specific C++ dialect may be defunct, but IMHO it was created more for the benefit of compiler vendors who were having trouble getting templates and exceptions working properly back in 2002 or so.
Of course they're our overlords, they built this planet to solve the Ultimate Question, or at least to solve it with a better answer than "forty-two".
10 years behind the curve
Well, maybe not quite exactly, but Arduino started in 2005. That's ten years ago. Then again, we still have people programming C with /* */ comments, and variable declarations at the top of the function, as though C99 never happened over fifteen years ago. (For instance, STM32 library/sample code is still written that way, but just try to find me an ARM C compiler that doesn't support // comments!)
What bugs me most about Arudino is that it's an 8-bit processor, from the dawn of the Flash-in-CPU era, still being used unironically in 2015. At least the AVR instruction set isn't bad for C (unlike the mess that is pre-32 PIC), but the cost advantage of 8-bit processors is now gone thanks to Cortex-M0. And then when they did try to get into the 32-bit era, they used Atmel's mediocre ARM parts, when the big three (now two) of ST, NXP, and Freescale made better Cortex-M parts. (TI's Cortex-M parts are pretty good now, too, and the MSP430 has a decent niche in the low-power space.)
I skipped Arduino completely and went straight to mbed. Or rather, an NXP guy left one behind after a sales (to us) meeting at work, and it completely opened me up to a whole new paradigm for writing embedded code. (C++ minus the college ivory-tower iostreams shit and templates all over the place.) I'm happy that mbed is still gaining momentum.
if you want to actually build 5 or more of a particular project, would you just get an Arduino for each?
One of the good things Arduino did was create the market for clones, some shield-compatible (now every chip maker's demo boards have shield ports), and others on smaller boards. For the 5-100 crowd, you can get a small board with an ATMega on it, which costs less and takes up a lot less space in your project. Or an ATTiny. Beyond that, since Arduino isn't much more than an Atmel demo board, you can build your own board around just the CPU chip. The Arduino form factor gives you a consistent starting point that you can reduce from, and when you're done, you can re-use it in your next project.
Darth Vader toooootaly wanted to do that, but when he popped down to the antimatter asteroid shop, they were closed.
The state of California contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer reproductive toxicity.
Most importantly, there's a big difference between a new car with electronic paranoia shit like that, and a 5- or 10-year old car with that shit.
I'm going to guess that most new car buyers sell a car before 5 years, for the simple reason that they wouldn't likely be buying new cars if they didn't keep selling their old ones. So guess what, they probably won't have to deal with that shit breaking, and now the people who buy used cars are going to have to deal with it as these cars find their way into the used market. (Same with hybrid or electric car batteries getting old, too.) I don't even like chipped keys, because it means you can't get a cheap replacement.
Well, thanks to TV being digital now, it's easier than ever to time-shift without some cable company's crappy DVR. If the signal is good enough, you could get a dedicated ATSC tuner for her computer.
And if you're up to the task, you could go with an open-source DVR like MythTV. You can even connect from a client on another computer in the house, though the bandwidth of a full HD show takes up a good chunk of 802.11n if you watch it over the wireless (a/b/n or a/b/g/n recommended for the cleaner 5GHz spectrum).
My 4-tuner/4.5TB MythTV makes me a slave to my backlog, not the clock. Also, I can save episodes as long as i want (if I have space), and mark/delete the commercials manually (I don't trust the automatic commercial detection) more for saving space (commercials alone can be a gigabyte for an hour show) than for other reasons. With only an antenna, I've got more TV than I can watch.
You can probably get Jeopardy with an antenna. Those things still work, you know.
For what it's worth, the pumps themselves (the part that delivers fuel) are likely to be barely changed from the late '90s, when they were a simple embedded system with no operating system other than "while (1) dostuff();" The displays were just beginning to change then, though. Gilbarco's new LCD display ran on Linux, and you could see all the boot messages out of a diagnostic port. But there was no TCP/IP stack, just the same RS-485 link to control the display.
The stuff referred to in TFA is about the back-office stuff that runs on "real" PCs. So someone messes up the inventory management stuff that calls for a refill truck? So what? Gas pumps are still (AFAIK) pretty stupid, and customers won't stick around if no fuel comes out, so it doesn't really matter if sucking dry is bad for the pumps. Whoop-de-doo, people will have to go down the block to the next station. Hardly the apocalypse that was these guys premise before they even started.
The only real concern is when people get gas for free. And the pump has to be told by the site controller equipment to turn on for each and every sale. Even then, there's a mechanical flow counter on the pump that can be checked to see if the pump is giving away free gas due to some sort of shenanigans on the site controller side.
And as someone who wrote code to talk to gas pumps back in the late '90s, and had to hang around unattended sites after installs and upgrades, the worst that can happen by attacking tank monitoring is that the site runs dry. At which point the pumps simply stop pumping. The only loss is in missed sales.
If they use blender pumps and regular runs dry, only premium will work, which means only the least popular of three (or more) grades works, plus diesel if they sell that. That happened once when I was at a site, and at first I was worried that it was a bug. Ten minutes later I made a call to the site's maintenance number telling them to send a truck, and left.
Which is basically what I said seven months ago when the article that this is a dupe of was posted.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/01/23/1856201/us-gas-stations-vulnerable-to-internet-attacks
Give 'em a break, it's only been seven months since this was last posted.