Per TFA, that sounds like what they may have done:
The French government’s encrypted app has been developed on the basis of free-to-use code found on the Internet and could be eventually made available to all citizens, the spokeswoman said. She declined to give the names of either the codes or the messaging service.
We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week.
Today I learned that Oracle apparently has (had?) a hardware division. I'm amazed it's lasted this long, honestly. As crappy as their overpriced, proprietary software is, I can't imagine *also* trusting them with hardware. Sucks to be one of the workers, for sure, but you have to expect it when you choose to work for such a monolith. The faster we get to Oracle's demise, the better for everyone.
They bought Sun Microsystems waaaaaaay back. That hardware was rock solid for the most part when it was Sun. I'm unclear as to it's actual reliability after the purchase.
It's a right given to you by the government. What's so difficult to understand about that?
There are two ways to look at how a government should work for any group that is being governed:
Permissive: All things are restricted, and the government grants exceptions for things that are generally considered good for the governed.
Restrictive: All things are unrestricted, and the government restricts things that are considered bad for the governed.
Both have problems (amusingly, it's the same problem: There winds up too much that the governed has to keep track of to ensure they don't break law), but when it comes to individual freedoms, I'm exceedingly aware of what I appreciate more.
I was left with two distinct ideas after reading this book that I'd wished I'd had 20 years earlier.
1) It's damn ok, if not mandatory, that a person feel good about making money off their talents
2) Pure unabashed capitalism is an extreme philosophy.
So, the only financial transactions that any business engages in are securities trades? I guess I need to dig deeper to understand exactly how stock trades get involved in my employer making bi-weekly direct deposits into our (mine and my coworker's) accounts. I'll also ask my brother-in-law what stocks he is using to make payments to the corporation he is a franchisee of and to pay his food suppliers and such.
Or maybe CaptSlaq and H3lldr0p should find some other deceased equines to pummel.
When you have an error as massive as the last one caused in part by automation, it might possibly be understandable that such announcements of further automation are suspect until evidence of actual improvement has happened. How much evidence it takes to regain trust in a system is up for debate.
Density and usage matter. Having been to big trade shows and found my cell phone useless, I can attest that cell phones do indeed have this problem if there is insufficient infrastructure available.
If the (then) future hadn't gone the way that it did
If there is anything that I have learned is if something can go wrong it WILL go wrong. Don't let it go wrong in the first place. Spend the extra 1 second and think about your code before you vomit your crap code into production.
It isn't "premature optimization" until it makes it some degree harder to understand than the non-optimized version. Most of what people call "premature optimization" is really just writing correct code. Should I use String.EndsWith or String.Contains to find if a string has a certain suffix? Should I use an explicit cross join and filter in the WHERE clause or use inner joins? These are examples of the level of boneheadedness that most people write code. Don't get me started on multi-threading. If you don't find it intuitive, please don't do it.
Most of the time I can make someone's code several factors faster with virtually zero effort while making it easier to read. And when I say "faster" I don't mean as in micro-benchmarking the code in simplistic situations, I mean production where the entirety of the code is being called many times on many threads. Sure, your "read the entire file into memory and write it back out" works fine in your simple tests, but throw it in production and the 400MiB files put massive pressure on memory when there are hundreds of jobs running at the same time all trying to load the entirety of files into memory before writing them out. STREAM the files.
Then you have the issue of many times good code runs slower in synthetic benchmarks but runs faster in production. Everyone focuses on empirical evidence, but then compare apples and oranges when thinking their dev boxes or servers are the same as prod in that the computers are only running their code in tight loops
Bad code and bad coders exist. The bell curve suggests that some 50% of developers and code fall on the wrong side of that. I may be one of them, who knows.
I don't disagree with your assessment. As I've learned in my years of working as a sysadmin and developer, there's precious little code that can't have some sort work done on it for readability and/or performance's sake. Many (myself included) have lost sight of the forest for the trees time to time. Sometimes you get people doing things that they've never had to do before. Sometimes you wind up with a problem out of your league that has to be solved. It happens. Problems still have to get solved/code written though.
The other thing I've learned is that "Delivered puts food on the table. Perfect is the enemy of delivered." I always try to push the best code I can out the door, but sometimes I just don't have the experience or knowledge to write the perfect solution to everything I work on. I think everyone runs up on this from time to time. Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying or has stagnated in their career/work.
The best way I know to AVOID pushing crap out the door is to have a peer review done, preferably by a peer who is better than you. Many eyes and all. For many years, I had no peers to review and see the potential problems, working as a 1 man code shop.
That said, to address your example, slurping an entire file into RAM is a pretty dumb idea, if it's able to be processed in a window. I'm sure many people have horror stories of "wow, that's a dumb idea" that they can impart, myself included. Fix the problem, move on. If the dev who wrote the offending code is available, ask them what they were trying to do. Make it a teachable moment. Make the world better. [insert something about sunshine and rainbows here].
Or not. I'm just another user account on Slashdot.
The problem is it's the mindset and everyone seems to have it these days. "Oh, bandwidth isn't limited" "processors are more powerful" etc. You get a program built with 10 pieces of separate code that everyone failed to optimize and suddenly it's sucking 3x the bandwidth and 5x the processing power that it would have if everyone involved actually thought about optimization.
Where I work we go back and refactor a lot of our code and queries when we have opportunities to do so and in some cases it's horrifying the waste that's been put up with. A SQL query that "works" but takes 30 seconds gets rewritten properly and now takes.3 seconds. Back when that was the only app on that server it ran faster so it was "no big deal" but now it saves hours of batch processing time per day. And this is EVERYWHERE. People wonder why their octa-core phones run barely faster than phones from 3 years ago? Shitloads of wasteful coding in those app design tools is my guess.
That SQL query that "works" was effective for the time. If the (then) future hadn't gone the way that it did, that 30 seconds may have continued to be completely acceptable. Judging code on CURRENT use case misses the point of skipping premature optimization (and using that time saved on something else) when it's not needed.
That said, there often comes a time when it's required. That's when you do the optimization. Which sounds like it's exactly what you've done.
Ugh, christ, it's people like you screaming "MUH VERTICAL REAL ESTATE" that killed the status bar and prompted Mozilla to push the URL of autocomplete suggestions off to the right side of the UI, completely unjustified relative to the other URLs making it impossible to scan with the eye.
It's people like you pushing UIs towards the lowest common denominator, the phone.
Please take a long walk off a short pier at your earliest convenience.
The 4:3 monitor isn't a thing anymore, and many monitors don't support tilt, so they're stuck in a wide screen orientation. Suggestions on how to preserve vertical real estate and fix your complaint are probably welcome. Code is even better. You sound like a smart guy, lets see some action.
When those 100,000 people are dying of a horrible cancer, I'll make sure to send their families your address and let them know you voted to give them cancer because you were too cheap to pay for cleanup. "You attitude is dangerous and impractical". Those words are the reason the entire planet is polluted and dying. I would argue that you have the dangerous attitude.
The tone deafness of the parent posting this from a computer is delicious.
For what value of "ridiculously"? I don't have a single 3.5 mm jack in the house with bad connection poltergeists.
But then, I'm still running an NAD 7140 from the 1980s as my stereo amplifier. Had to go in there last week with electrical contact cleaner to take the crackle out of the volume and balance pots, but I'm sure the audio jack still works perfectly. I'd have replaced some of the electrolytics, too, if my ears could hear any defects.
Obviously, though, I'm not a desirable Apple customer on several counts (ability to fix things myself, willingness to keep using unfashionable equipment that still works fine, ability to tell whether unfashionable equipment still works fine), so there is that.
Yamaha M4 here, with a Parasound PHP 850 in front of it. Long live the affordable analog!
Slashdot Mirror
The French government’s encrypted app has been developed on the basis of free-to-use code found on the Internet and could be eventually made available to all citizens, the spokeswoman said. She declined to give the names of either the codes or the messaging service.
Cue the alt-right cries of censorship...
Cue the droning on of $FAVORED_PARTY saying $UNFAVORED_PARTY crying about $PERCEIVED_SLIGHT.
I'm sure there's a snap for that...
"Blockchain Brings Business Boom To Big Blue, Big Bad, and Big Brother"
Elon: Another successful launch, team!
(inaudible off screen)
Elon: So apparently the rockets are NOT supposed to catch fire upon landing. Hold up; how about we talk about lowering the bar a little here?
I can picture Elon being Cave Johnson sometimes...
Good luck delivering massive quantities of 4K TV over metered, data-limited lines that most of us are getting now.
Implying this is a bug...
We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week.
"It's been good talking to you, Bob, and Bob."
Today I learned that Oracle apparently has (had?) a hardware division. I'm amazed it's lasted this long, honestly. As crappy as their overpriced, proprietary software is, I can't imagine *also* trusting them with hardware. Sucks to be one of the workers, for sure, but you have to expect it when you choose to work for such a monolith. The faster we get to Oracle's demise, the better for everyone.
They bought Sun Microsystems waaaaaaay back. That hardware was rock solid for the most part when it was Sun. I'm unclear as to it's actual reliability after the purchase.
It's a right given to you by the government. What's so difficult to understand about that?
There are two ways to look at how a government should work for any group that is being governed:
Both have problems (amusingly, it's the same problem: There winds up too much that the governed has to keep track of to ensure they don't break law), but when it comes to individual freedoms, I'm exceedingly aware of what I appreciate more.
I was left with two distinct ideas after reading this book that I'd wished I'd had 20 years earlier. 1) It's damn ok, if not mandatory, that a person feel good about making money off their talents 2) Pure unabashed capitalism is an extreme philosophy.
Anthem by Rand as well.
I saw it four times in the movie theater and it was the first DVD I ever bought. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
Like Moon, Gattaca lets the story be about the characters and not the science and is better for it.
If only for kevin spacey's voice paired with emoji
Moon was a fabulous movie with a wonderful plot twist. I appreciate the fact that the character drives the movie, not the technology.
Now, about that rural broadband thing...
So, the only financial transactions that any business engages in are securities trades? I guess I need to dig deeper to understand exactly how stock trades get involved in my employer making bi-weekly direct deposits into our (mine and my coworker's) accounts. I'll also ask my brother-in-law what stocks he is using to make payments to the corporation he is a franchisee of and to pay his food suppliers and such.
Or maybe CaptSlaq and H3lldr0p should find some other deceased equines to pummel.
When you have an error as massive as the last one caused in part by automation, it might possibly be understandable that such announcements of further automation are suspect until evidence of actual improvement has happened. How much evidence it takes to regain trust in a system is up for debate.
Because speed and automation didn't have any part in the previous fiscal downturn.
Cell phones do not seem to have this problem.
Density and usage matter. Having been to big trade shows and found my cell phone useless, I can attest that cell phones do indeed have this problem if there is insufficient infrastructure available.
If the (then) future hadn't gone the way that it did
If there is anything that I have learned is if something can go wrong it WILL go wrong. Don't let it go wrong in the first place. Spend the extra 1 second and think about your code before you vomit your crap code into production. It isn't "premature optimization" until it makes it some degree harder to understand than the non-optimized version. Most of what people call "premature optimization" is really just writing correct code. Should I use String.EndsWith or String.Contains to find if a string has a certain suffix? Should I use an explicit cross join and filter in the WHERE clause or use inner joins? These are examples of the level of boneheadedness that most people write code. Don't get me started on multi-threading. If you don't find it intuitive, please don't do it. Most of the time I can make someone's code several factors faster with virtually zero effort while making it easier to read. And when I say "faster" I don't mean as in micro-benchmarking the code in simplistic situations, I mean production where the entirety of the code is being called many times on many threads. Sure, your "read the entire file into memory and write it back out" works fine in your simple tests, but throw it in production and the 400MiB files put massive pressure on memory when there are hundreds of jobs running at the same time all trying to load the entirety of files into memory before writing them out. STREAM the files. Then you have the issue of many times good code runs slower in synthetic benchmarks but runs faster in production. Everyone focuses on empirical evidence, but then compare apples and oranges when thinking their dev boxes or servers are the same as prod in that the computers are only running their code in tight loops
Bad code and bad coders exist. The bell curve suggests that some 50% of developers and code fall on the wrong side of that. I may be one of them, who knows.
I don't disagree with your assessment. As I've learned in my years of working as a sysadmin and developer, there's precious little code that can't have some sort work done on it for readability and/or performance's sake. Many (myself included) have lost sight of the forest for the trees time to time. Sometimes you get people doing things that they've never had to do before. Sometimes you wind up with a problem out of your league that has to be solved. It happens. Problems still have to get solved/code written though.
The other thing I've learned is that "Delivered puts food on the table. Perfect is the enemy of delivered." I always try to push the best code I can out the door, but sometimes I just don't have the experience or knowledge to write the perfect solution to everything I work on. I think everyone runs up on this from time to time. Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying or has stagnated in their career/work.
The best way I know to AVOID pushing crap out the door is to have a peer review done, preferably by a peer who is better than you. Many eyes and all. For many years, I had no peers to review and see the potential problems, working as a 1 man code shop.
That said, to address your example, slurping an entire file into RAM is a pretty dumb idea, if it's able to be processed in a window. I'm sure many people have horror stories of "wow, that's a dumb idea" that they can impart, myself included. Fix the problem, move on. If the dev who wrote the offending code is available, ask them what they were trying to do. Make it a teachable moment. Make the world better. [insert something about sunshine and rainbows here].
Or not. I'm just another user account on Slashdot.
The problem is it's the mindset and everyone seems to have it these days. "Oh, bandwidth isn't limited" "processors are more powerful" etc. You get a program built with 10 pieces of separate code that everyone failed to optimize and suddenly it's sucking 3x the bandwidth and 5x the processing power that it would have if everyone involved actually thought about optimization.
Where I work we go back and refactor a lot of our code and queries when we have opportunities to do so and in some cases it's horrifying the waste that's been put up with. A SQL query that "works" but takes 30 seconds gets rewritten properly and now takes .3 seconds. Back when that was the only app on that server it ran faster so it was "no big deal" but now it saves hours of batch processing time per day. And this is EVERYWHERE. People wonder why their octa-core phones run barely faster than phones from 3 years ago? Shitloads of wasteful coding in those app design tools is my guess.
That SQL query that "works" was effective for the time. If the (then) future hadn't gone the way that it did, that 30 seconds may have continued to be completely acceptable. Judging code on CURRENT use case misses the point of skipping premature optimization (and using that time saved on something else) when it's not needed.
That said, there often comes a time when it's required. That's when you do the optimization. Which sounds like it's exactly what you've done.
Working as intended.
Ugh, christ, it's people like you screaming "MUH VERTICAL REAL ESTATE" that killed the status bar and prompted Mozilla to push the URL of autocomplete suggestions off to the right side of the UI, completely unjustified relative to the other URLs making it impossible to scan with the eye.
It's people like you pushing UIs towards the lowest common denominator, the phone.
Please take a long walk off a short pier at your earliest convenience.
The 4:3 monitor isn't a thing anymore, and many monitors don't support tilt, so they're stuck in a wide screen orientation. Suggestions on how to preserve vertical real estate and fix your complaint are probably welcome. Code is even better. You sound like a smart guy, lets see some action.
The articles don't seem to say, or I missed it. But I assume for this to work you would need to have side loading enabled.
And thanks to Amazon, this is enabled on many Android devices. http://www.theinquirer.net/inq...
Legacy security holes are bad. If no one's willing to continue to maintain the interface, it should be removed.
The Ars Technica cross posting is a bit baffling.
Oh man, I would definitely carry a tube smartphone.
This is probably the closest you are going to get today: Woo Audio WA8
Today I learned that portable vacuum tube amplification exists. Holy cow that's gotta be a bit insane.
When those 100,000 people are dying of a horrible cancer, I'll make sure to send their families your address and let them know you voted to give them cancer because you were too cheap to pay for cleanup. "You attitude is dangerous and impractical". Those words are the reason the entire planet is polluted and dying. I would argue that you have the dangerous attitude.
The tone deafness of the parent posting this from a computer is delicious.
For what value of "ridiculously"? I don't have a single 3.5 mm jack in the house with bad connection poltergeists.
But then, I'm still running an NAD 7140 from the 1980s as my stereo amplifier. Had to go in there last week with electrical contact cleaner to take the crackle out of the volume and balance pots, but I'm sure the audio jack still works perfectly. I'd have replaced some of the electrolytics, too, if my ears could hear any defects.
Obviously, though, I'm not a desirable Apple customer on several counts (ability to fix things myself, willingness to keep using unfashionable equipment that still works fine, ability to tell whether unfashionable equipment still works fine), so there is that.
Yamaha M4 here, with a Parasound PHP 850 in front of it. Long live the affordable analog!