I got a good laugh when I read the term "god-tard". These warped Texas text books scare the heck out of me. I watched the movie, which concludes with the fact that these insane rules will be in place until 2020.
However, I see a lot of people who are angry, not just about what the god-tards are doing to them, but also just angry in general. It's possible to be a spiritual person without blindly accepting idiotic falsehoods. I would argue that we have evolved a need for spirituality, just like we have a need for friendship, and that rejecting all things spiritual leaves a hole in our lives. Besides, there's clearly something magical about this whole existing thing. That I'm conscious, and not just a bio-robot with no more self-awareness than a rock, is something I can't even prove to you, nor you to me. A child might guess that they have a "spirit" inside, and that they would not expect the rock to have one. Don't give up on spirituality just because of the god-tards.
I'm not a security expert, but isn't ASLR implemented in the dynamic linker? I would expect that the function lookup table you're talking about would be in a system level process, and not accessible in user space. My user level code would have all it's hard-coded function calls updated when loaded, and so long as my executable code is not readable, there's some protection of the actual addresses. However, if all you have to do is call a fixed location, asking for an address of whatever function is in that tale, then ASLR is pretty worthless.
I'm interested in sand-boxing some P2P apps in a way similar to what Chromium does. Basically, the app itself would be a DLL I'd load, and before calling anything in it, I'd drop all privileges to the lowest setting possible. Is it possible in Windows or Linux to disable the ability to dynamically load and link to a DLL or shared library? Preferably, I'd disable all system calls, other than reading from stdin, and writing to stdout.
Yep. I toyed a bit over Xmas with fixed location dynamic arrays. The problem I was trying to solve was that dynamic arrays keep moving around their data as they grow, and multiple threads accessing those arrays can clobber each other. By allocating 32 bits of address space for each dynamic array, I avoid having to relocate it as it grows. It worked OK, but unfortunately, the page table memory is not free. At startup, my code allocated many of megabytes of page table data. It also took several seconds to complete, depending on the number of 4G arrays allocated. Over about 10,000 seemed to be a problem.
Ebooks are expensive. Large print books are expensive and very, very limited in availability.
Bookshare.org membership is $50/year, unless you're a student or too poor, in which case it's free. They have 175K-ish ebooks for anyone with a print reading disability, and they're adding more all the time. I read a book every week or two from them. I strongly recommend having a screen reader play them rather than suffering with something like 40 WPM if your vision is over 20/200. I listen between 600 and 800 WPM, and enjoy books now more than ever. i translate them into wav files, and play them on my Android phone while doing chores or taking a walk. it's awesome.
It saddens me to see such a post get moded 5 "informative," while being so wrong. It shows how ill-informed about education we are on Slashdot.
We white guys tend to think of black and Hispanic cultures as uninterested in education. This is simply not the case, at least not in Chapel Hill, NC, where I live. The truth is that kids who don't get enough to eat and who don't know if their dad will pay the rent this month have much bigger problems to worry about than spelling and math. I visited our local black and Hispanic communities, and found that those where home ownership was high had good test scores. Neighborhoods of shabby rentals where the kids are underfed do poorly. I also found that very poor white families did almost as bad as poor black and Hispanic families. In Chapel Hill, 90% of the achievement gap is explainable by the gap in severe poverty.
A few years ago my neighborhood was redistricted in a way that the school my kids were zoned to could not succeed. Some a-hole in Southern Village "won" the redistricting contest, and while the rest of the district was rezoned mostly wisely, this guy booted most of the blacks and half of the Hispanics out of his daughter's school and concentrated poverty in another one. He threw our upscale neighborhood (not in Southern Village) into the school just to make it look a little better on paper. That's when I decided to check out what was really going on in these schools. By the way, the school is shutting down now, due to poor performance.
Carrboro, where our school is, has some desperately poor areas. The illegal immigrant population is so poor, many of their kids don't get enough to eat. Also, there's old mostly black mill town neighborhoods that are owned by slum lords. I talked to several black families there to get a feel for what they were looking for in a school, and what they felt were the challenges, because at the redistricting meetings, not one parent from any poor neighborhood showed up. I tried and failed to talk to any Hispanic family. When I knocked on their doors, all the Spanish language radio stations were silenced, lights turned off, kids were quieted, and the door was not answered. I assume this is what they have to do to avoid ICE.
On the other hand, in lower-middle class neighborhoods in north Chapel Hill where ownership is high, black and Hispanic kids do very well, almost as well as the white kids, even though they are poorer on average. It seems that once you have a place to live, enough food, and maybe a car, then regardless of cultural and racial background, the next priority is educating your kids.
I keep hearing from liberal friends that we need to spend more on education to give the next generation of black and Hispanic families an equal chance. I hear from conservative friends that spending more money wont help, because the school system is fundamentally screwed up, and because black and Hispanic families fail because they don't try and don't care - it's their fault. Both sides are wrong. The problem isn't that schools are underfunded or teachers aren't good enough, nor is the problem that black and Hispanic parents don't care about educating their kids. The problem is severe poverty. What we need to do is dramatically reduce poverty. We can do this, but as a nation we've decided that it's OK for blacks and Hispanics to be poor. Just like in our days of slavery, we see poor blacks suffering, and do nothing about it. We haven't lifted a finger to help them get ahead, and probably did a lot to hold them down. We're generous with tax dollars when it comes to building jails to lock up them up, and ICE has plenty of funding to deport Hispanics, but we don't do a damned thing to help these people find a way out of poverty. We're OK with blacks commiting crimes in poor black neighborhoods, and we're OK with illegal imigrants picking all our strawberries for us. In short, we do poorly in education because we're still racist. It's not overt racism like before, but whites in the US are OK
This coercion is just marketing. They invented the "ultrabook" label, and to use it, you have to live by their rules. This is no different than Google requiring certain sensors for a phone to use the Android label. Vendors will still be able to put Haswell chips into their "thin and light" laptops without touch screens. However, with some actual leadership, the market will likely move forward to a point where users will wonder how they lived for so long without touch screens.
Seriously, what's with all the crapy trackpads? It sounds like decent trackpads for Windows are just now making it into the market, but why did HP, Dell, and others burden us with such horrible interfaces for so long?
Anyway, my 2 cents about TFA: we all need to go back and rework our software to take advantage of touch screens. I work mostly in the EDA space. Zoom and pan have been a pain in every schematic and layout editor in history. With a mouse in the right hand for drawing lines and rectangles, left hand can flick and pinch the screen to move and zoom at the same time we're drawing or resizing shapes. Even web browsing is better with a touch screen laptop, and it's going to be awesome for gaming. Metro, Gnome 3 Shell, and Ubuntu Unity will all seem a little less stupid in a touch environment. The interface with the computer remains a weak point for computing. We keep getting stuck in a mode where we just decide we're happy with the status quo, and continue for years without innovation on the interface side. We just get used to what we know... how many of us old geezers like me still use vi (ok, vim... and it's waaay better than vi)?!?
I applaud Microsoft and Intel for their decision to finally lead. Someone has to. Here's a quote from a marketing guy at a major PC manufacturer to me: "We don't innovate. Instead, we wait for others to prove that a market is big enough to be interesting, and then crush them with our manufacturing prowess." Well, someone has to innovate, and for a decade, it's been Apple. With Intel finally growing a pair, maybe we can look forward to more great things down the road. I still have linen paper in my wallet, and type on a keyboard designed before computers existed. Someday, maybe we'll enter the information age and start using new technology.
I heard stories about how the requirement to pay taxes in a currency can damage a society. I heard that in Kenya, most people did not use money until the British came and instituted a property tax on all land. Villages around the country had to send their young people to work for the British at insanely low wages, just so they could send their money back to their villages to pay taxes. I probably screwed up this story horribly, but the person telling it seemed to think it resulted in a lot of grief for the people of Kenya. Heck, I could even have the country wrong, but I suspect it was an often repeated pattern.
I worked for HP for a year. I found out that David Packard was the soul of HP. He retired before I hired on, which explains why things sucked more each day. I was at the Cupertino site in the quake of 89, and shortly after I quit, David came back for a while, and things got good again, or so I hear. Then he retired for the last time, and we've had stupid people running HP ever since.
So, the current stupid people running the previously great HP feel like violating California law once again and suing a company that hires HP's suffering workers away. One of the reasons Silicon Valley did so well is due to the wisdom of the California law makers. Now I have to go throw up. "wisdom of the California law makers"... that's sure to result in barf everywhere. However, it's true in this case. They made it illegal to restrict a person from freely seeking employment. Restrictions that a-holes nation wide have passed as law allow companies to restrict a person's future employment without compensation. That's where California law differs. If your old boss wants a non-compete, the company actually has to pay you for it. If they simply say "all our employees have non-competes", then it doesn't hold up.
One result of this was people left stupid jobs in droves and formed new companies. It was not only good, but totally awesome for everyone. I haven't read TFA, but I assume it's some non-California office suing in a typical screw-you state where workers right to work is trampled on. If it's filed in California, it will go nowhere.
I hate to say it, but Lenovo's CEO may be doing something right. I only hate to say that because I prefer to buy American designed products, like those from Dell or HP.
I finally got approval to purchase a new laptop for software development yesterday, so our IT guy e-mailed me, and said, "please pick any Lenovo laptop you like." Lenovo? Really? I was instrumental in shifting two of my previous companies to buy only from Dell because of their outstanding support, up until the early 2000's when Dell decided to fsck their loyal customers with less than useless, yet very expensive support. My solution was to never ever again pay for support, and just always have a spare machine laying around, which saved us tons of money and kept me from having to deal with Dell's morons. When our company was acquired, the CEO more or less banned us from buying from Dell, because his solution to the same problem was to switch to HP. Our HP server support has been fabulous, and they've never dropped the ball. So why switch vendors again? Our IT guy says, "Lenovo has had by far the best customer service." Ok... I know what that's like. I get it.
So, I'm waiting for my new $1,700 Lenovo X1 Carbon ultrabook, with a 250G SSD and 8G RAM - features I need, and which justify the new laptop. It freaks me out a bit that it will have that stupid stick in the middle of the keyboard, but I guess that's just what ThinkPads have. However, this ultrabook is curretly the #1 rated ultrabook on Amazon. It's clearly ThinkPad branded, with that black with red trim, the tiny dick in the middle of the keyboard, and the rim around the screen. I read that it's got the standard clicky ThinkPad keyboard, and in general, seems pretty much like an old IBM ThinkPad.
Is Lenovo screwing up separating it's ThinkPad brand and thinking it can take on Apple? I just paid more for a freaking Chinese designed and built laptop than a state of the art MacBook Air! The specs are similar, though the Carbon X1 is slightly slower. Also, the Lenovo laptop has no graphics accelerator, and is useless for gaming with my kids, unlike the MacBook Air.
Why would I do that?!? First, great support. If they're providing better support than HP, we have no choice but to buy from them. Second, it runs Windows. We'll actually pay more to get a good Windows laptop than for a comparable Apple device, because our customers are on Windows. Third, it's still a ThinkPad. I expected Lenovo to crap on the ThinkPad brand just like what happened to great brands like Singer sewing machines, but they didn't. From what I can tell, ThinkPads are still basically ThinkPads.
I think the TFA is way off base. I read the CEO's memo, and I think he's talking about machines like the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which people are in fact comparing to Apple hardware left and right, and which Lenovo sells successfully for higher prices, even though they have less functionality. They must be printing money, especially when you consider that we're probably paying top dollar for support contracts. I think the Lenovo's CEO's opportunity to screw up the ThinkPad line was 8 years ago, when most would have, but he didn't. I think TFA is seriously misreading Lenovo with premature fear of changing the ThinkPad brand. What the Lenovo CEO means is they are going to make great ThinkPads which are still ThinkPads, tiny dick and all, and they'll compete with Apply by selling them to geeks like me at outrageous prices because they can. That's fine by me... so long as it comes with world class support.
This is a point where I differ with RMS. I would say get the Android phone because you have more freedom there, even if there are non-free components. Android supports development of GNU licensed free software for Android, while GPL v3 isn't even compatible with Apple iOS devices. RMS would say use neither, but life without a smart phone is not an option I want to consider.
Self driving cars will be huge. They'll start changing the world as soon as California allows these cars on the road without licensed rivers. At that point, a fairly expensive self-driving car will have plenty of uses.
Zipcar/taxis: now it picks you up where you want and drops you off where you want. They show up much more reliably and are cheaper.
Old people and people with vision impairments would buy them. The increase in personal freedom is worth a lot.
Working parents could schedule self driving cars to pick up their kids and get them to soccer practice.
Workers who's time is very valuable would by these cars so they could do their work while commuting.
When self driving cars start networking, they could save gas and improve traffic on freeways by linking up like a train.
Instead of having 2 cars in my garage, where they sit unused for 95% of the time, we'll be able to share a small fleet of cars among a large number of owners, saving tons of money.
For real cheapskates, and environmentally concerned citizens, these cars could automatically form car-pools, getting people around with a lot less gas per person, with a fraction of the hassles of carpooling today.
I personally suffer from Stargardt's disease, and am losing central vision. I'm expecting to be in a financial position to buy one of these. My preference would be a self-driving Tesla Model S, though beggars can't be choosers. I'll buy whatever is offered. I'll even move to California to be able to own and use one.
Here's a tough question: Should I start planning to move to California in a couple years, in anticipation of being able to own a car that can drive me around? What's the likelihood that California will be first by enough time to make the move worthwhile?
I agree the ebook store has costs it has to cover, and provides value in terms of marketing titles and so on. If I were allowed to have my own ebook store app on OS X and Android devices, I would complain a lot less, because there would be natural competition and users could price-shop. As it is, there is no competition, and frankly charging 30% is outrageous, and only possible because of anti-competitive practices.
The bottom line is that sluggish ebook sales are due to anti-competitive practices where publishers, Amazon, Apple, and Google are conspiring to take readers and authors for everything they're worth. Ebooks should dominate, simply because of the savings.
True, Amazon is not forcing DRM down our throats. It's actually the big publishers that provide Amazon most of it's popular titles that do that. Had you landed a publishing deal with a major publisher, you're ebook would be DRM-ed.
If you and all the other self-published authors were to begin dominating sales, we'd see a major drop in ebook prices over time, leading to a snowball of more ebook self-publishers and more people with e-readers. Unfortunately, most people still buy paper books, meaning the popular authors are more concerned about being in Barnes and Noble than Amazon. If your ebook does well, you'll likely land a nice publishing contract that gets your book printed and distributed widely. At that point, you'll likely have to sign over ebook rights, and your ebook will become DRM-ed. Thus, this whole rape of authors and readers continues non-stop, as a money printing machine for the middle men who do little to add value.
I really hope Apple, Amazon, and Google get taken to the cleaners by the government anti-trust people. Free competition is being trampled. I should be able to start my own app store for Apple devices which offers many of the same popular apps and ebooks, just 25% cheaper. Just because Dell and HP sell most laptops in the US is no reason they should get 30% of every on-line sale. We'd all freak out if they tried that. Why do we accept this from our tablet vendors?
Exactly! Read Al Jazeera, not because you think it's a good unbiased news source, but because you're better informed if you read all points of view. Honestly, that's why I also read Fox News. Be aware of your news source's bias. I think a lot of today's political polarization is due to the dawn of the Internet and cable news, where we can get any point of view we like 24/7. It used to be that the big 3 felt some responsibility to reporting news in a way that did not cause harm, but all that's out the window. Now individuals are responsible for what news they read and listen to, and for picking their favorite flavor of bias. Unfortunately, most people alive today never learned the skill of piecing together a sloppy mosaic of what possibly might be close to reality from multiple news sources. Instead, they just open their brain and let their favorite news source pour thoughts directly into their heads, as if they were at church learning about God. In our new reality, we need a new kind of citizen, one who knows how to check sources and combine information into a bigger picture.
Excellent post. Mine had already run long, so I didn't mention any of what you just said, but I'm glad you did. Al Jazeera may not be directly responsible for our Lybian ambassador's death, like you say, but they certainly are responsible for fanning flames of anger that result in terrorism and anti-western violence. They have more control over what people think and believe in the Middle East than any other authority. With that power should come some responsibility, and while the Emir is practically a saint compared to most of the other rulers in the area, he's still a Middle East king, and he's warping Al Jazeera as a news source just like Richard Murdoch does to Fox News. People should know when their news source is massively biased.
I found this whole thing so offensive, I started working on Ebooks.coop, to provide a path out of the walled garden. Google, Apple, and Amazon typically charge 30% for nothing other than having sold you the tablet or reader. Apple is the worst, forcing publishers to insure that no ebook store was allowed to offer lower prices than Apple. All three DRM all their ebooks. The basic idea is that users and authors should split most of that 30%, and not have to pay the new middle men who don't even to pretend to add value. With the dawn of ebooks, prices were supposed to drop tremendously. There's no more printing costs and no more brick and mortar store we have to support. The job of the publisher becomes simply editing and publicity, reducing costs dramatically. Instead, Amazon, Apple and Google teamed up with the big publishers to figure out a way to keep all of the savings for themselves.
Authors still want access to readers without these guys in the way, and readers still want non-DRMed low cost ebooks. The demand is there, and if we can find a way to bridge the gap between them, sales of ebooks would skyrocket. The reason only 16% of us have e-readers or tablets is simple: ebooks don't save us enough money, if any. If we could save 50% on every ebook we buy relative to a printed version, everyone would read ebooks.
If candle manufactures got together and demanded that all the savings available through electric lighting had to go to candle makers, electric lighting would still be a novelty item.
Al Jazeera still has actual journalists on the ground in countries making the news, like Egypt, Syria, and Lybia. It's sad, but the New York Times, which still has more live reporting than any other major US newspaper, can't compete with the real life reporting Al Jazeera can do. They just don't have the money to make that possible. Because of it's fantastic presence in the Middle East, I'm happy about Al Jazeera gaining a channel to reach Americans.
However, people reading Al Jazeera should know the background of this source, just like readers of Fox News should know about Rupert Murdoch (which they don't - but that's another post). Al Jazeera is owned and run by the Emir of Qatar. This guy has done some things that impress me, though a lot of it's scary. He overthrew his father as Emir, claiming his father was corrupt and was misusing the government's assets for himself. He was probably right. He did a lot of things to modernize Qatar, and did a very impressive job. He's positioned tiny Qatar as an intellectual leader in the Middle East, much due to Al Jazeera, Qatar now plays a central roll in the Arab Spring and evolution of the Middle East. For Americans to miss out on this influential news source makes us weaker.
Then there's the side of Al Jazeera that pisses me off. When that pretty blond western journalist was brutally raped in Cairo during the Egyptian uprising against Mubarak, Al Jazeera deleted all posts that mentioned it. The Emir has a political agenda, and anything that goes against that agenda is banned from Al Jazeera. That agenda includes making the Middle East the "good guys" while allowing the rest of the world to appear to be the "bad guys". That's why westerners can be raped with no reporting, but if a westerner insults Islam, Al Jazeera is happy to fan the flames of anger - anger that resulted in the death of our ambassador to Libya.
So, by all means, allow Americans to learn what Al Jazeera has to say. There is no better news source to represent the Middle East. At the same time, let's all feel free to be seriously pissed off at Al Jazeera, because they deserve it. How much like Fox News is this?
Requiring source code wouldn't do much to discourage software patents.
I'm listed as an inventor on 22 patents so far. Several of them are software patents. I didn't file any originally, until a competitor patented a key software algorithm we'd used for years at a previous company - an algorithm we could not function without. Now I encourage that we patent all company-critical software ideas. Anyway, I've been filing them since the early '90s. My early patents all included full source code, and one has many thousands of lines from our commercial product - enough to actual run the algorithm on real designs. If you have a new logic optimization idea, have you fully disclosed how to implement it if you haven't included a netlist parser? Early software patents included full source code, which gradually was reduced until now a bit of pseudo code in the patent text is generally enough. The old requirement for source code didn't seem to slow patent applications.
Every patent lawyer knows that you can't violate a patent in your head. The same is true if you write an idea down on paper. You also can't violate a patent by writing it down in Notepad on a computer, or even if you save it, and share it with friends. However, if your idea is a sequence of steps a computer could execute, and you "run" it, chance are high that you've just violated somebody's patent. Being a software developer in America is a bit like being an illegal immigrant. You just keep quite, keep your head down, and hope that nobody bothers looking at what you're doing too closely.
There are other problems besides the expense. EDA companies have patented lots of very obscure algorithms, rather than keep them trade secret. If you take away the patents, then their competitors will be free to use their ideas, which could be fatal to some companies.
Unfortunately, it's a moot point. I went and read the poster's links, and the USPTO has no intention of considering any broad limits on software patents. They're just seeking feedback on nonsense like whether XML can be used in a claim. These meetings wont be worth anyone's time.
Copyrights and trade secrets protected the software industry just fine before the USPTO opened the flood gates on software patents in the early 90's. They should stick to the original intent of the constitution, and protect the free flow of ideas by banning patents on mathematical algorithms (which includes software, IMO). They should not overturn the patents they've granted - that would harm the companies that filed them - but going forward, patents should cover something more than what can be executed in any mainstream computer language. If I can violate your patent simply by writing C code, it should not be patentable.
I'm afraid we're at the point where the anti-software-patent people warned we'd be. Small companies live in terror of being sued over any software they write. Big companies waste billions of dollars in court. Coders like me intentionally "code dumb", to avoid accidentally using a patented software idea. It's a terrible waste, and it makes me very sad to see America throwing away it's software innovation lead in this way. Thank God software patents weren't around when we wrote so much of the software that still powers the world. If they were, we'd all still be renting time on IBM mainframes. Just imagine a world where Donald Knuth patented all his ideas.
Great story. I've never had trouble understanding code I wrote. That's probably because I have one of the world's worst memories, so I always write code with lots of clues to help me decipher what's going on. Also, I got lucky when a programmer from industry taught a structured programming course. He was all about coding best practices. I learned the KISS rule from him, and have avoided clever obtuse code, when a straight forward solution will do. The analog designers I work with might disagree... I'm forcing us to use Python and classes, and you'd think I was murdering kittens from all the complaining. The reaction when I made us all use git... *shudder*
As for the poster's question, feel free to make some noise about his code, and see if it has any impact. Older coders like me rarely change much, but you might get him to adhere to a few team-wide coding guidelines, at least if he's not an analog designer. In a perfect world, you could help him find a better job, one where his coding issues would not be such a liability, and where whatever his real strengths are can come into play.
The best programmer, by far, I ever worked with is Ken McElvain, founder of Synplicity. If you need a problem solved quickly, and better than what all your competitors can do, he's your man. However, his code when I joined the company had some of the issues the poster mentioned, and that made me laugh. He's a very fast typist, but his typing speed is his limiting factor in coding, so he used 1 and 2 letter variables mostly. Writing code inline is faster to type than factoring out a bunch of small functions. Comments just slow him down. The first day working for him, I opened one of his most ingenious pieces of code (responsible for better 2-level logic optimization than what Synopsis had at the time), and tried to understand the 2,000 line file, which is tiny given the job it does. It's core is a brilliant 1,000 line function, and it took me all day to figure it out. I thought there had to be documentation somewhere, so I grep-ed the whole code base, all 350,000 lines of it, for comments. There was one. It said, "This is a hack." Many programmers, including me, will hold that his code is difficult to understand against him in the "best programmer" contest. He wins anyway. He knew that the most important reader of his code was himself, and that being as productive as possible early on was key for Synplicity's success. We were profitable, and had over 20 employees when I joined, yet I was the first programmer he hired. As the coding team grew, he started adding comments and using descriptive names. I heard a lot of complaints about working with some of his code, but he owned nearly 50% of Synplicity at the IPO, and everyone involved made money. Go ask his investors what they think of his coding ability. Anyway, if this co-worker is so smart and experienced, I'm not convinced hes a "bad" programmer. Maybe he just needs a job where he's the right guy.
All very true! I'd wipe Chrome off in a heartbeat, but once I do, i loose the good hardware drivers. The touchpad will suck, and hibernate will break. The graphics accelerator wont work. I'd put pretty much any flavor of Linux on there so long as it worked well on the hardware. As it is, I'll hold off mucking with it.
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I prefer the Halting Problem to Godel, but that's another issue... This is just another brain-dead bill by the god-tard legion.
At a super-charging station, you get most of a charge in 30 minutes, just enough time for a quick breakfast or lunch.
I got a good laugh when I read the term "god-tard". These warped Texas text books scare the heck out of me. I watched the movie, which concludes with the fact that these insane rules will be in place until 2020.
However, I see a lot of people who are angry, not just about what the god-tards are doing to them, but also just angry in general. It's possible to be a spiritual person without blindly accepting idiotic falsehoods. I would argue that we have evolved a need for spirituality, just like we have a need for friendship, and that rejecting all things spiritual leaves a hole in our lives. Besides, there's clearly something magical about this whole existing thing. That I'm conscious, and not just a bio-robot with no more self-awareness than a rock, is something I can't even prove to you, nor you to me. A child might guess that they have a "spirit" inside, and that they would not expect the rock to have one. Don't give up on spirituality just because of the god-tards.
I'm not a security expert, but isn't ASLR implemented in the dynamic linker? I would expect that the function lookup table you're talking about would be in a system level process, and not accessible in user space. My user level code would have all it's hard-coded function calls updated when loaded, and so long as my executable code is not readable, there's some protection of the actual addresses. However, if all you have to do is call a fixed location, asking for an address of whatever function is in that tale, then ASLR is pretty worthless.
I'm interested in sand-boxing some P2P apps in a way similar to what Chromium does. Basically, the app itself would be a DLL I'd load, and before calling anything in it, I'd drop all privileges to the lowest setting possible. Is it possible in Windows or Linux to disable the ability to dynamically load and link to a DLL or shared library? Preferably, I'd disable all system calls, other than reading from stdin, and writing to stdout.
Yep. I toyed a bit over Xmas with fixed location dynamic arrays. The problem I was trying to solve was that dynamic arrays keep moving around their data as they grow, and multiple threads accessing those arrays can clobber each other. By allocating 32 bits of address space for each dynamic array, I avoid having to relocate it as it grows. It worked OK, but unfortunately, the page table memory is not free. At startup, my code allocated many of megabytes of page table data. It also took several seconds to complete, depending on the number of 4G arrays allocated. Over about 10,000 seemed to be a problem.
Ebooks are expensive. Large print books are expensive and very, very limited in availability.
Bookshare.org membership is $50/year, unless you're a student or too poor, in which case it's free. They have 175K-ish ebooks for anyone with a print reading disability, and they're adding more all the time. I read a book every week or two from them. I strongly recommend having a screen reader play them rather than suffering with something like 40 WPM if your vision is over 20/200. I listen between 600 and 800 WPM, and enjoy books now more than ever. i translate them into wav files, and play them on my Android phone while doing chores or taking a walk. it's awesome.
It saddens me to see such a post get moded 5 "informative," while being so wrong. It shows how ill-informed about education we are on Slashdot.
We white guys tend to think of black and Hispanic cultures as uninterested in education. This is simply not the case, at least not in Chapel Hill, NC, where I live. The truth is that kids who don't get enough to eat and who don't know if their dad will pay the rent this month have much bigger problems to worry about than spelling and math. I visited our local black and Hispanic communities, and found that those where home ownership was high had good test scores. Neighborhoods of shabby rentals where the kids are underfed do poorly. I also found that very poor white families did almost as bad as poor black and Hispanic families. In Chapel Hill, 90% of the achievement gap is explainable by the gap in severe poverty.
A few years ago my neighborhood was redistricted in a way that the school my kids were zoned to could not succeed. Some a-hole in Southern Village "won" the redistricting contest, and while the rest of the district was rezoned mostly wisely, this guy booted most of the blacks and half of the Hispanics out of his daughter's school and concentrated poverty in another one. He threw our upscale neighborhood (not in Southern Village) into the school just to make it look a little better on paper. That's when I decided to check out what was really going on in these schools. By the way, the school is shutting down now, due to poor performance.
Carrboro, where our school is, has some desperately poor areas. The illegal immigrant population is so poor, many of their kids don't get enough to eat. Also, there's old mostly black mill town neighborhoods that are owned by slum lords. I talked to several black families there to get a feel for what they were looking for in a school, and what they felt were the challenges, because at the redistricting meetings, not one parent from any poor neighborhood showed up. I tried and failed to talk to any Hispanic family. When I knocked on their doors, all the Spanish language radio stations were silenced, lights turned off, kids were quieted, and the door was not answered. I assume this is what they have to do to avoid ICE.
On the other hand, in lower-middle class neighborhoods in north Chapel Hill where ownership is high, black and Hispanic kids do very well, almost as well as the white kids, even though they are poorer on average. It seems that once you have a place to live, enough food, and maybe a car, then regardless of cultural and racial background, the next priority is educating your kids.
I keep hearing from liberal friends that we need to spend more on education to give the next generation of black and Hispanic families an equal chance. I hear from conservative friends that spending more money wont help, because the school system is fundamentally screwed up, and because black and Hispanic families fail because they don't try and don't care - it's their fault. Both sides are wrong. The problem isn't that schools are underfunded or teachers aren't good enough, nor is the problem that black and Hispanic parents don't care about educating their kids. The problem is severe poverty. What we need to do is dramatically reduce poverty. We can do this, but as a nation we've decided that it's OK for blacks and Hispanics to be poor. Just like in our days of slavery, we see poor blacks suffering, and do nothing about it. We haven't lifted a finger to help them get ahead, and probably did a lot to hold them down. We're generous with tax dollars when it comes to building jails to lock up them up, and ICE has plenty of funding to deport Hispanics, but we don't do a damned thing to help these people find a way out of poverty. We're OK with blacks commiting crimes in poor black neighborhoods, and we're OK with illegal imigrants picking all our strawberries for us. In short, we do poorly in education because we're still racist. It's not overt racism like before, but whites in the US are OK
This coercion is just marketing. They invented the "ultrabook" label, and to use it, you have to live by their rules. This is no different than Google requiring certain sensors for a phone to use the Android label. Vendors will still be able to put Haswell chips into their "thin and light" laptops without touch screens. However, with some actual leadership, the market will likely move forward to a point where users will wonder how they lived for so long without touch screens.
Seriously, what's with all the crapy trackpads? It sounds like decent trackpads for Windows are just now making it into the market, but why did HP, Dell, and others burden us with such horrible interfaces for so long?
Anyway, my 2 cents about TFA: we all need to go back and rework our software to take advantage of touch screens. I work mostly in the EDA space. Zoom and pan have been a pain in every schematic and layout editor in history. With a mouse in the right hand for drawing lines and rectangles, left hand can flick and pinch the screen to move and zoom at the same time we're drawing or resizing shapes. Even web browsing is better with a touch screen laptop, and it's going to be awesome for gaming. Metro, Gnome 3 Shell, and Ubuntu Unity will all seem a little less stupid in a touch environment. The interface with the computer remains a weak point for computing. We keep getting stuck in a mode where we just decide we're happy with the status quo, and continue for years without innovation on the interface side. We just get used to what we know... how many of us old geezers like me still use vi (ok, vim... and it's waaay better than vi)?!?
I applaud Microsoft and Intel for their decision to finally lead. Someone has to. Here's a quote from a marketing guy at a major PC manufacturer to me: "We don't innovate. Instead, we wait for others to prove that a market is big enough to be interesting, and then crush them with our manufacturing prowess." Well, someone has to innovate, and for a decade, it's been Apple. With Intel finally growing a pair, maybe we can look forward to more great things down the road. I still have linen paper in my wallet, and type on a keyboard designed before computers existed. Someday, maybe we'll enter the information age and start using new technology.
I heard stories about how the requirement to pay taxes in a currency can damage a society. I heard that in Kenya, most people did not use money until the British came and instituted a property tax on all land. Villages around the country had to send their young people to work for the British at insanely low wages, just so they could send their money back to their villages to pay taxes. I probably screwed up this story horribly, but the person telling it seemed to think it resulted in a lot of grief for the people of Kenya. Heck, I could even have the country wrong, but I suspect it was an often repeated pattern.
I worked for HP for a year. I found out that David Packard was the soul of HP. He retired before I hired on, which explains why things sucked more each day. I was at the Cupertino site in the quake of 89, and shortly after I quit, David came back for a while, and things got good again, or so I hear. Then he retired for the last time, and we've had stupid people running HP ever since.
So, the current stupid people running the previously great HP feel like violating California law once again and suing a company that hires HP's suffering workers away. One of the reasons Silicon Valley did so well is due to the wisdom of the California law makers. Now I have to go throw up. "wisdom of the California law makers"... that's sure to result in barf everywhere. However, it's true in this case. They made it illegal to restrict a person from freely seeking employment. Restrictions that a-holes nation wide have passed as law allow companies to restrict a person's future employment without compensation. That's where California law differs. If your old boss wants a non-compete, the company actually has to pay you for it. If they simply say "all our employees have non-competes", then it doesn't hold up.
One result of this was people left stupid jobs in droves and formed new companies. It was not only good, but totally awesome for everyone. I haven't read TFA, but I assume it's some non-California office suing in a typical screw-you state where workers right to work is trampled on. If it's filed in California, it will go nowhere.
I hate to say it, but Lenovo's CEO may be doing something right. I only hate to say that because I prefer to buy American designed products, like those from Dell or HP.
I finally got approval to purchase a new laptop for software development yesterday, so our IT guy e-mailed me, and said, "please pick any Lenovo laptop you like." Lenovo? Really? I was instrumental in shifting two of my previous companies to buy only from Dell because of their outstanding support, up until the early 2000's when Dell decided to fsck their loyal customers with less than useless, yet very expensive support. My solution was to never ever again pay for support, and just always have a spare machine laying around, which saved us tons of money and kept me from having to deal with Dell's morons. When our company was acquired, the CEO more or less banned us from buying from Dell, because his solution to the same problem was to switch to HP. Our HP server support has been fabulous, and they've never dropped the ball. So why switch vendors again? Our IT guy says, "Lenovo has had by far the best customer service." Ok... I know what that's like. I get it.
So, I'm waiting for my new $1,700 Lenovo X1 Carbon ultrabook, with a 250G SSD and 8G RAM - features I need, and which justify the new laptop. It freaks me out a bit that it will have that stupid stick in the middle of the keyboard, but I guess that's just what ThinkPads have. However, this ultrabook is curretly the #1 rated ultrabook on Amazon. It's clearly ThinkPad branded, with that black with red trim, the tiny dick in the middle of the keyboard, and the rim around the screen. I read that it's got the standard clicky ThinkPad keyboard, and in general, seems pretty much like an old IBM ThinkPad.
Is Lenovo screwing up separating it's ThinkPad brand and thinking it can take on Apple? I just paid more for a freaking Chinese designed and built laptop than a state of the art MacBook Air! The specs are similar, though the Carbon X1 is slightly slower. Also, the Lenovo laptop has no graphics accelerator, and is useless for gaming with my kids, unlike the MacBook Air.
Why would I do that?!? First, great support. If they're providing better support than HP, we have no choice but to buy from them. Second, it runs Windows. We'll actually pay more to get a good Windows laptop than for a comparable Apple device, because our customers are on Windows. Third, it's still a ThinkPad. I expected Lenovo to crap on the ThinkPad brand just like what happened to great brands like Singer sewing machines, but they didn't. From what I can tell, ThinkPads are still basically ThinkPads.
I think the TFA is way off base. I read the CEO's memo, and I think he's talking about machines like the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which people are in fact comparing to Apple hardware left and right, and which Lenovo sells successfully for higher prices, even though they have less functionality. They must be printing money, especially when you consider that we're probably paying top dollar for support contracts. I think the Lenovo's CEO's opportunity to screw up the ThinkPad line was 8 years ago, when most would have, but he didn't. I think TFA is seriously misreading Lenovo with premature fear of changing the ThinkPad brand. What the Lenovo CEO means is they are going to make great ThinkPads which are still ThinkPads, tiny dick and all, and they'll compete with Apply by selling them to geeks like me at outrageous prices because they can. That's fine by me... so long as it comes with world class support.
This is a point where I differ with RMS. I would say get the Android phone because you have more freedom there, even if there are non-free components. Android supports development of GNU licensed free software for Android, while GPL v3 isn't even compatible with Apple iOS devices. RMS would say use neither, but life without a smart phone is not an option I want to consider.
Self driving cars will be huge. They'll start changing the world as soon as California allows these cars on the road without licensed rivers. At that point, a fairly expensive self-driving car will have plenty of uses.
I personally suffer from Stargardt's disease, and am losing central vision. I'm expecting to be in a financial position to buy one of these. My preference would be a self-driving Tesla Model S, though beggars can't be choosers. I'll buy whatever is offered. I'll even move to California to be able to own and use one.
Here's a tough question: Should I start planning to move to California in a couple years, in anticipation of being able to own a car that can drive me around? What's the likelihood that California will be first by enough time to make the move worthwhile?
I agree the ebook store has costs it has to cover, and provides value in terms of marketing titles and so on. If I were allowed to have my own ebook store app on OS X and Android devices, I would complain a lot less, because there would be natural competition and users could price-shop. As it is, there is no competition, and frankly charging 30% is outrageous, and only possible because of anti-competitive practices.
The bottom line is that sluggish ebook sales are due to anti-competitive practices where publishers, Amazon, Apple, and Google are conspiring to take readers and authors for everything they're worth. Ebooks should dominate, simply because of the savings.
True, Amazon is not forcing DRM down our throats. It's actually the big publishers that provide Amazon most of it's popular titles that do that. Had you landed a publishing deal with a major publisher, you're ebook would be DRM-ed.
If you and all the other self-published authors were to begin dominating sales, we'd see a major drop in ebook prices over time, leading to a snowball of more ebook self-publishers and more people with e-readers. Unfortunately, most people still buy paper books, meaning the popular authors are more concerned about being in Barnes and Noble than Amazon. If your ebook does well, you'll likely land a nice publishing contract that gets your book printed and distributed widely. At that point, you'll likely have to sign over ebook rights, and your ebook will become DRM-ed. Thus, this whole rape of authors and readers continues non-stop, as a money printing machine for the middle men who do little to add value.
I really hope Apple, Amazon, and Google get taken to the cleaners by the government anti-trust people. Free competition is being trampled. I should be able to start my own app store for Apple devices which offers many of the same popular apps and ebooks, just 25% cheaper. Just because Dell and HP sell most laptops in the US is no reason they should get 30% of every on-line sale. We'd all freak out if they tried that. Why do we accept this from our tablet vendors?
Exactly! Read Al Jazeera, not because you think it's a good unbiased news source, but because you're better informed if you read all points of view. Honestly, that's why I also read Fox News. Be aware of your news source's bias. I think a lot of today's political polarization is due to the dawn of the Internet and cable news, where we can get any point of view we like 24/7. It used to be that the big 3 felt some responsibility to reporting news in a way that did not cause harm, but all that's out the window. Now individuals are responsible for what news they read and listen to, and for picking their favorite flavor of bias. Unfortunately, most people alive today never learned the skill of piecing together a sloppy mosaic of what possibly might be close to reality from multiple news sources. Instead, they just open their brain and let their favorite news source pour thoughts directly into their heads, as if they were at church learning about God. In our new reality, we need a new kind of citizen, one who knows how to check sources and combine information into a bigger picture.
Excellent post. Mine had already run long, so I didn't mention any of what you just said, but I'm glad you did. Al Jazeera may not be directly responsible for our Lybian ambassador's death, like you say, but they certainly are responsible for fanning flames of anger that result in terrorism and anti-western violence. They have more control over what people think and believe in the Middle East than any other authority. With that power should come some responsibility, and while the Emir is practically a saint compared to most of the other rulers in the area, he's still a Middle East king, and he's warping Al Jazeera as a news source just like Richard Murdoch does to Fox News. People should know when their news source is massively biased.
I found this whole thing so offensive, I started working on Ebooks.coop, to provide a path out of the walled garden. Google, Apple, and Amazon typically charge 30% for nothing other than having sold you the tablet or reader. Apple is the worst, forcing publishers to insure that no ebook store was allowed to offer lower prices than Apple. All three DRM all their ebooks. The basic idea is that users and authors should split most of that 30%, and not have to pay the new middle men who don't even to pretend to add value. With the dawn of ebooks, prices were supposed to drop tremendously. There's no more printing costs and no more brick and mortar store we have to support. The job of the publisher becomes simply editing and publicity, reducing costs dramatically. Instead, Amazon, Apple and Google teamed up with the big publishers to figure out a way to keep all of the savings for themselves.
Authors still want access to readers without these guys in the way, and readers still want non-DRMed low cost ebooks. The demand is there, and if we can find a way to bridge the gap between them, sales of ebooks would skyrocket. The reason only 16% of us have e-readers or tablets is simple: ebooks don't save us enough money, if any. If we could save 50% on every ebook we buy relative to a printed version, everyone would read ebooks.
If candle manufactures got together and demanded that all the savings available through electric lighting had to go to candle makers, electric lighting would still be a novelty item.
Al Jazeera still has actual journalists on the ground in countries making the news, like Egypt, Syria, and Lybia. It's sad, but the New York Times, which still has more live reporting than any other major US newspaper, can't compete with the real life reporting Al Jazeera can do. They just don't have the money to make that possible. Because of it's fantastic presence in the Middle East, I'm happy about Al Jazeera gaining a channel to reach Americans.
However, people reading Al Jazeera should know the background of this source, just like readers of Fox News should know about Rupert Murdoch (which they don't - but that's another post). Al Jazeera is owned and run by the Emir of Qatar. This guy has done some things that impress me, though a lot of it's scary. He overthrew his father as Emir, claiming his father was corrupt and was misusing the government's assets for himself. He was probably right. He did a lot of things to modernize Qatar, and did a very impressive job. He's positioned tiny Qatar as an intellectual leader in the Middle East, much due to Al Jazeera, Qatar now plays a central roll in the Arab Spring and evolution of the Middle East. For Americans to miss out on this influential news source makes us weaker.
Then there's the side of Al Jazeera that pisses me off. When that pretty blond western journalist was brutally raped in Cairo during the Egyptian uprising against Mubarak, Al Jazeera deleted all posts that mentioned it. The Emir has a political agenda, and anything that goes against that agenda is banned from Al Jazeera. That agenda includes making the Middle East the "good guys" while allowing the rest of the world to appear to be the "bad guys". That's why westerners can be raped with no reporting, but if a westerner insults Islam, Al Jazeera is happy to fan the flames of anger - anger that resulted in the death of our ambassador to Libya.
So, by all means, allow Americans to learn what Al Jazeera has to say. There is no better news source to represent the Middle East. At the same time, let's all feel free to be seriously pissed off at Al Jazeera, because they deserve it. How much like Fox News is this?
Requiring source code wouldn't do much to discourage software patents.
I'm listed as an inventor on 22 patents so far. Several of them are software patents. I didn't file any originally, until a competitor patented a key software algorithm we'd used for years at a previous company - an algorithm we could not function without. Now I encourage that we patent all company-critical software ideas. Anyway, I've been filing them since the early '90s. My early patents all included full source code, and one has many thousands of lines from our commercial product - enough to actual run the algorithm on real designs. If you have a new logic optimization idea, have you fully disclosed how to implement it if you haven't included a netlist parser? Early software patents included full source code, which gradually was reduced until now a bit of pseudo code in the patent text is generally enough. The old requirement for source code didn't seem to slow patent applications.
Every patent lawyer knows that you can't violate a patent in your head. The same is true if you write an idea down on paper. You also can't violate a patent by writing it down in Notepad on a computer, or even if you save it, and share it with friends. However, if your idea is a sequence of steps a computer could execute, and you "run" it, chance are high that you've just violated somebody's patent. Being a software developer in America is a bit like being an illegal immigrant. You just keep quite, keep your head down, and hope that nobody bothers looking at what you're doing too closely.
There are other problems besides the expense. EDA companies have patented lots of very obscure algorithms, rather than keep them trade secret. If you take away the patents, then their competitors will be free to use their ideas, which could be fatal to some companies.
Unfortunately, it's a moot point. I went and read the poster's links, and the USPTO has no intention of considering any broad limits on software patents. They're just seeking feedback on nonsense like whether XML can be used in a claim. These meetings wont be worth anyone's time.
Copyrights and trade secrets protected the software industry just fine before the USPTO opened the flood gates on software patents in the early 90's. They should stick to the original intent of the constitution, and protect the free flow of ideas by banning patents on mathematical algorithms (which includes software, IMO). They should not overturn the patents they've granted - that would harm the companies that filed them - but going forward, patents should cover something more than what can be executed in any mainstream computer language. If I can violate your patent simply by writing C code, it should not be patentable.
Software patents have resulted in: ...
The Open Invention Network
Peer to Patent
Oracle suing Google over Java
37 Android related patent suits
Nearly killing RIM
Linux patent suits
I'm afraid we're at the point where the anti-software-patent people warned we'd be. Small companies live in terror of being sued over any software they write. Big companies waste billions of dollars in court. Coders like me intentionally "code dumb", to avoid accidentally using a patented software idea. It's a terrible waste, and it makes me very sad to see America throwing away it's software innovation lead in this way. Thank God software patents weren't around when we wrote so much of the software that still powers the world. If they were, we'd all still be renting time on IBM mainframes. Just imagine a world where Donald Knuth patented all his ideas.
Great story. I've never had trouble understanding code I wrote. That's probably because I have one of the world's worst memories, so I always write code with lots of clues to help me decipher what's going on. Also, I got lucky when a programmer from industry taught a structured programming course. He was all about coding best practices. I learned the KISS rule from him, and have avoided clever obtuse code, when a straight forward solution will do. The analog designers I work with might disagree... I'm forcing us to use Python and classes, and you'd think I was murdering kittens from all the complaining. The reaction when I made us all use git... *shudder*
As for the poster's question, feel free to make some noise about his code, and see if it has any impact. Older coders like me rarely change much, but you might get him to adhere to a few team-wide coding guidelines, at least if he's not an analog designer. In a perfect world, you could help him find a better job, one where his coding issues would not be such a liability, and where whatever his real strengths are can come into play.
The best programmer, by far, I ever worked with is Ken McElvain, founder of Synplicity. If you need a problem solved quickly, and better than what all your competitors can do, he's your man. However, his code when I joined the company had some of the issues the poster mentioned, and that made me laugh. He's a very fast typist, but his typing speed is his limiting factor in coding, so he used 1 and 2 letter variables mostly. Writing code inline is faster to type than factoring out a bunch of small functions. Comments just slow him down. The first day working for him, I opened one of his most ingenious pieces of code (responsible for better 2-level logic optimization than what Synopsis had at the time), and tried to understand the 2,000 line file, which is tiny given the job it does. It's core is a brilliant 1,000 line function, and it took me all day to figure it out. I thought there had to be documentation somewhere, so I grep-ed the whole code base, all 350,000 lines of it, for comments. There was one. It said, "This is a hack." Many programmers, including me, will hold that his code is difficult to understand against him in the "best programmer" contest. He wins anyway. He knew that the most important reader of his code was himself, and that being as productive as possible early on was key for Synplicity's success. We were profitable, and had over 20 employees when I joined, yet I was the first programmer he hired. As the coding team grew, he started adding comments and using descriptive names. I heard a lot of complaints about working with some of his code, but he owned nearly 50% of Synplicity at the IPO, and everyone involved made money. Go ask his investors what they think of his coding ability. Anyway, if this co-worker is so smart and experienced, I'm not convinced hes a "bad" programmer. Maybe he just needs a job where he's the right guy.
All very true! I'd wipe Chrome off in a heartbeat, but once I do, i loose the good hardware drivers. The touchpad will suck, and hibernate will break. The graphics accelerator wont work. I'd put pretty much any flavor of Linux on there so long as it worked well on the hardware. As it is, I'll hold off mucking with it.