My father works in an industry that uses a lot of PLCs and such. This is what he's told me:
Quite often, even though the PLCs run on their own locked-down OS, the console to manage it is just a standard Windows desktop. Kind of logical - it's just to display what's going on, maybe issue manual commands, but it doesn't "run" the system. And they're *designed* to be connected only to the LAN, not have any physical connection to the Internet. But quite often, he comes into an installation site and sees that they've plugged that desktop into the Internet, just because it had a port for it (or so the techs monitoring it 24/7 can relieve the boredom, against all procedure). So they end up connected to the internet just because the off-the-shelf desktop the blinking-lights-display runs on has an Ethernet port.
He's also told me pretty much everyone keeps the default password. Three fucking characters.
Would it terrify you to know that many of the sites he works at are power plants, both coal and nuclear? He doesn't touch the "functional" parts, but it still says bad things about their approach to security.
The problem is fuel. We don't have rockets that can fire for months. We have rockets that can fire for minutes. They provide a huge amount of thrust during that time, but you would need far, far more thrust than any existing rocket can provide to move an asteroid off-course.
A vague possibility is an ion engine of some sort. These have much lower thrust, but can run much longer off the fuel they carry. The technology still isn't very proven, though - and trying to land an engine, intact, on an asteroid, it a tough proposition.
The paint idea sounds more feasible. It's basically making it into a cheap, inefficient solar sail. It doesn't require tricky landings, it doesn't require a lot of fuel, you just aim some "paintballs" on a ballistic intercept path. The only downside is that, being inefficient, you have to catch it early. But if you've got a decade's warning or so, you should be good.
Actually, the framework we're using (CodeIgniter) makes that an explicit feature. If a function begins with an underscore, it cannot be called directly from a URL. So if you have a class "Foo" with two functions "bar()" and "_baz()", you can access bar via [hostname]/foo/bar/[arguments], but you can't do the same for [hostname]/foo/_baz/[arguments].
But it's more that he used it for nearly every variable, even function parameters or globals. And that the names were not descriptive. I don't care if you call it $_temp_fh for a temporary filehandle, but don't call it $_t.
Well, there's the full SVN history if we want to be sure, and some comments get tagged with an initial (eg./* @@@@K: this will break if we ever get over 4 million users */ for Kevin saying that we might want to make that a 64-bit int, not 32-bit, at some point). And we use Javadoc (or similar) whenever possible, so we know who's worked on a file.
The code formatting is more of making it *convenient* to know, intuitively, who wrote the code. I can even tell whether it was 2011 Kevin or 2012 Kevin writing the code, because by 2012 Kevin had finally gotten used to the weirder functions of the framework, using the active record classes instead of hand-written SQL.
I don't really care how you *format* your code. Do you put the brackets on the same line as the beginning statement? Do you put a space between the function name and parentheses? Do you double-space your code? I don't give a fuck. That's all syntax. It's easy to figure out.
Coding style is more important to me, how the actual *code* works. Do you initialize your variables as soon as possible? Do you properly use for loops and while loops? If you use recursion, does it make sense? Do you give your variables meaningful names like $activityType, or useless ones like $_a? How do you decide when to break something out into a function?
I work on a project with several other people. We all have our unique styles, both for format and for code. I, for instance, have been told I code with a "LISP accent", rarely storing the return values of a function in a variable, rather using the return value as an argument to another function. Another puts a blank line between nearly any two statements. Another assiduously follows some code formatting standard nobody else in the company has read.
Although it can make it harder to work on each other's code, it has one benefit - you can easily tell who wrote the code. "Putting the braces on a new line? This must be Pete's code!" or "There's an underscore at the front of every variable name? This must be Jimmy's code!" or "There's a for loop that starts ''for (;;){''? This must be Kevin's code!".
And if I do go in to "someone else's code" and change or fix things, I follow their style, more or less. Unless I'm completely rewriting a section, or making enough of a change that it should be considered a rewrite.
We don't know much of anything about the hardware (besides a rough idea of the CPU and some info on the RAM), but from the little I've been able to gather, this is how it is:
The Gamecube, PS2 and Xbox were essentially the same generation. While they were slightly different in terms of power, they're close enough to be the same "generation", tech-wise. Wikipedia labels this as Gen 6.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 were a full generation advance over their predecessors. But the Wii was not - it's essentially an overclocked Gamecube with a new controller. I feel it is best labelled as a half-generation advance (Gen 6.5, not Gen 7). So while it was an advance over the older consoles, it wasn't on par with the "next-gen" consoles. This was actually a pretty savvy move by Nintendo - a Wii could basically reach the peak of graphics on a SDTV, and HDTV was not all that common at the time. So it was "powerful enough". And they took that, and used it to make a power-efficient, small, *cheap* machine. They had the appeal of Apple for the price of Android, so to speak.
The Wii U seems to be a full generation advance over the Wii, putting it about half a generation ahead of the PS3/360. But Nintendo's strategy might backfire here, because the next-gen Microsoft/Sony consoles are probably going to be a full generation advance as well. But Nintendo seems to be focusing a lot on the power of the console (at least, by Nintendo standards), which means they're competing head-to-head with the PS4/Xbox 9000 or whatever they're going to be called. It doesn't matter that those consoles haven't even been announced - people are comparing them already.
But really, I think Nintendo needs to worry more about their games. If they could launch with a new Mario as good as Galaxy or 64, a new Zelda as good as Twilight Princess or Windwaker, a new Metroid as good as Zero Mission or any of the Primes, and either a new Pikmin, new Animal Crossing, or new Smash Brothers, they would not have problems selling the console. The software sells the hardware. But right now, nobody seems to be able to launch a console with good games. The 3DS and Vita had no good new games at launch, and now the Wii U doesn't have any amazing standouts.
I read both articles and the abstract, and couldn't find any actual numbers for how radioactive the fish are. And what I did find only made me want that answer more.
The only number that was being thrown around was "40%", in that 40% of fish caught in the Fukushima area exceed the limit for radiation, which is currently 100Bq/kg. But that's a rather low limit - before the accident, the limit was set to 500Bq/kg, but was tightened to reduce fears of contamination. And in the US (ever a paragon of strict food safety</sarcasm>), the limit is 1200Bq/kg.
So my question is, just how high *are* the radiation levels? Are the ones being rejected as unsafe doing so because the standards were tightened, or because they're genuinely highly radioactive?
"The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases." -- attributed to Josiah Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp, circa 1930
Now the government has cut out the village watchman, in favor of letting the citizenry feed them bullshit directly (only fair, given how much they have fed to us).
Nuclear fission is, at least in my opinion, the least-acceptable technology that is still acceptable. It produces non-trivial waste, it is not infinitely renewable, and it is rather dangerous. It's better than coal/oil/gas, definitely, and we should be expanding on it because it's one of the few "green" techs that is proven to work large-scale.
But, if there are any better alternatives, even if they cannot supply 100% of our power, I believe they are well worth investigating. Geothermal is superior if you're in a region that can use it, as is hydroelectric*. Tidal seems likely to be a similar solution - good in areas that can use it, but unable to work universally. Wind and solar are currently not very efficient, and cannot be used for base load, but by happy coincidence the peak hours for solar are roughly the peak hours for energy consumption. It's a good supplement, at least. And, in the long term (over centuries, not years), fission does enough damage that it might be more logical to avoid it.
And nuclear fusion has the potential to be precisely what you described - too cheap to even meter. It just has the teeny-tiny problem of not actually working. Yet.
* A little idea of mine is to pair nuclear fission with hydro plants, where possible. Put the reactors upstream of the hydro dam, on the reservoir that it creates. This gives you a large supply of cooling water, and if there's ever a leak, you have a controlled point to try to filter it. If something goes wrong, you have power from one to try to help the other (this mainly helps the nuke plant - if the reactor goes to shit, you can run the cooling pumps off power from the hydro plant). And at night, when the reactor is producing more than enough power for your needs, you can use that extra power to pump water back up the dam, turning your artificial lake into a sort of battery - this is done already, but not necessarily with closely-located plants. The only downside I can see is that if the *dam* fails catastrophically, you just lost your coolant water for the reactors.
And? It's essentially free, other than the cost of the actual process. Free raw materials might make it economically viable *now*.
No single solution is going to solve our problems. Even biofuel in general isn't a complete solution. But do the math for this, plus dozens of other types of biofuels, plus geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, wind, solar, hydrogen fuel cells, and potentially nuclear fission and fusion. See if those can replace coal, oil and natural gas.
If they say one specific language, you might be good. And don't count "helper" languages - a PHP app that uses SQL counts as just one language for these purposes. If they mention a few, or one and a few dashes of something else (C with a bit of assembler, PHP with a Python script for one weird bit, C# with a few files of VB.NET), you're possibly good as well. If they list a large number of languages for one project, run.
There's a project I'm thankfully not fully attached to at work. Long story short, we're a small-ish company that got contracted to rewrite and extend this old product, as the original developers were either fired, or sued, then fired. I only work on the "extend" part, turning what was once a module to integrate into other software into a full suite, but I've heard stories from the guys handling the rewrite. The original devs basically used it as a training ground - any time they wanted to learn a new language, they'd take some feature request and implement it in the new language. So the entire thing is basically written "by beginners", since they never really figured out any of the languages. And there's a lot - a mix of PHP4 and PHP5, some Python, some Perl, some C modules that no longer have source, and I think a few others.
And these are for large chunks. The rewrite actually doesn't stick to one language either, but 99.99% of it is PHP (there's one ten-line Python script to act as a proxy for one thing, and a Java tool that was *supposed* to be just for internal load testing, but the higher-ups adopted it for marketing demos since we apparently beat our nearest competitor by two orders of magnitude).
So yeah. If you see a single application where more than one language is used for more than, say, ten files, you should be wary.
Now, it's entirely possible to have a completely horrendous codebase using a single language, but that's been covered by others.
The Phenom IIs were indeed pretty good processors. I was a particular fan of the X3s - they were quad-core dies that had one defective core, but were priced only a hair above their dual-cores. And they usually had all the cache of the quad-core they were based on. A very powerful low-cost processor.
I'm still sort of surprised AMD didn't revert back to the Phenom design, which seemed like it had a good amount of life left in it. Make turbo a universal option, throw some deeper cache into it, see if you can widen the decoder or something, and you'd have something at least as competitive as Bulldozer/Piledriver, I think.
Check some of the benchmarks. In most, you're looking at a 10-15% drop in framerates - and that causes problems in at least a few cases. Starcraft 2, with graphics set low enough that it's purely a CPU bottleneck, the top Vishera gets only 48fps. Last year's much-loved i5-2500K gets 65, and every other Intel processor is higher.
I would have loved to see benchmarks from more CPU-bound games, though. GTA IV is well-known to be a heavy CPU user, but none of the reviews I read used it. Same for Minecraft - although that's often memory-bandwidth-bound, not CPU-bound.
But in any case, yes, it seems AMD processors aren't good for the more dedicated gamers, the ones who will actually be choosing a processor based on its gaming capabilities. Although they do seem to have an edge for the lower-end gaming laptops due to Trinity - their integrated GPU is a competent replacement for medium-low dedicated cards, quite respectable in the smaller gaming laptops, might also be good for pseudo-consoles.
New AMD processor, higher clocks than the last one but no massive improvements performance-wise. Still rocks at multi-threaded, integer-only workloads, still sucks at single-threaded or floating-point performance, still uses a huge amount of power. AMD giving up on the high end, their top-end parts are priced against the i5 series, not the i7. Since Intel's overpricing stuff, they're still roughly competitive. Might be good for server stuff, maybe office desktops if they can get the power down, but not looking good for gaming. Overall mood seems to be "AMD isn't dead yet, but they've given up on first place".
Where in there did I say anything about Windows 8?
All I'm saying is that Microsoft is shockingly being the best vendor at supporting their old products. I'm arguing against the people saying "deprecating XP is just a blatant money-grab by Microsoft".
Honestly, I haven't touched W8, so I'm not in a position to really judge it. I've heard both good and bad things about it. But I vastly preferred Vista to XP, and mildly prefer W7 to Vista. If you really can't stomach W8, but want to stick with Windows, don't stick to XP, just get W7.
Microsoft is end-of-lifing a decade-old OS. It's already 11 years old, and will be declared fully unsupported in another two years. Which means they'll support the OS until seven years after the replacement is released.
Compare this to Apple. OS X 10.1 is the closest in age to Windows XP, and it was end-of-lifed in 2002. In fact, their most recent "supported" OS is 10.6 (Snow Leopard), which is only three years old - approximately the age of Windows *7*. And I can verify that many application vendors seem to consider 10.6 the minimum, some even 10.7.
And let's compare this to Linux. There's not enough space or time to get into every distro, so let's focus on Ubuntu, the most Windows-like distro. The oldest "supported" version is the server variant of Hardy Heron, the 8.04 Long-Term-Support release, which was released in 2008 (around the time of Vista SP1). For a desktop variant, you can only go back to 10.4 LTS, released in 2010 (around the time of W7 SP1). And those are the long-term support versions. "Regular" versions can only go back to 2011.
Come on now, guys. Microsoft does a lot of things wrong, but they've been downright saints about ditching XP, doing far better than pretty much everyone else.
It's as much about what you install as it is about what you DON'T install.
Don't install Java, or if you do, disable the browser plugins. Don't install the "software" that usually comes bundled with any printer drivers. Don't install anything from Norton.
Don't give the kid an admin account. Don't let him install things without asking. And then, because he won't listen to that, tell him about the common things that claim to be legit, but aren't - "media codecs", cheat software, etc. Windows has gotten secure enough (starting with 2000, then further improving with XP, Vista and 7) that it's now easier to hack the user than the software - so add some defenses to the weak point.
Other than that, you should be fine. Slap Firefox/Chrome on there, install MSE and MBAM, and keep everything up-to-date, and you'll be as good as I am.
Oh, and keep a backup of anything important. If you're like me, you'll need to do a full reformat/reinstall every two years or so, due to either a virus or just a slow system.
That would be a good start, but you'd need some further work. Most notably, the scheduler - unless things have changed since 3.8, OpenBSD doesn't have a real-time, hard-constraint scheduler, which is an absolute necessity for such a system. And the scheduler is big and complex enough to be a security risk - so you'll spend quite a bit of effort to make sure your new one is secure.
But yeah, OpenBSD certainly wouldn't be the worst OS to start from for a project like this.
I have no problem with handing more control of a car to a computer, rather than the person. People are stupid, after all - every accident I've seen or been involved in, some stupid person was at fault, and that *includes* the time I wrecked my own car.
I just have one request. Put a big, easily-slapped button, preferably red, on it that completely overrides everything. EVERYTHING. Collision avoidance. Lane-follow. Auto-braking. Fucking cruise control. I should be able to kamikaze the car into a building as long as I'm pressing that button. And there should be no cutoff or limit or penalty - if I duct-tape it down, it should disable everything just as I asked. And the only penalty should be that, if I use that button and cause a crash, it counts as deliberate, not accidental. No "you pushed that button once, your insurance just tripled", no "you pushed that button for no reason on our list of acceptable reasons, you get a fine".
If you do that, I'd even accept more restrictive controls. You could put in a speed cap that cuts the accelerator off when it hits the highest speed limit in the country (85mph, I think). Or something to prevent you from changing lanes without using your turn signals. Or something that cuts the engine if you pull out your phone.
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My father works in an industry that uses a lot of PLCs and such. This is what he's told me:
Quite often, even though the PLCs run on their own locked-down OS, the console to manage it is just a standard Windows desktop. Kind of logical - it's just to display what's going on, maybe issue manual commands, but it doesn't "run" the system. And they're *designed* to be connected only to the LAN, not have any physical connection to the Internet. But quite often, he comes into an installation site and sees that they've plugged that desktop into the Internet, just because it had a port for it (or so the techs monitoring it 24/7 can relieve the boredom, against all procedure). So they end up connected to the internet just because the off-the-shelf desktop the blinking-lights-display runs on has an Ethernet port.
He's also told me pretty much everyone keeps the default password. Three fucking characters.
Would it terrify you to know that many of the sites he works at are power plants, both coal and nuclear? He doesn't touch the "functional" parts, but it still says bad things about their approach to security.
The problem is fuel. We don't have rockets that can fire for months. We have rockets that can fire for minutes. They provide a huge amount of thrust during that time, but you would need far, far more thrust than any existing rocket can provide to move an asteroid off-course.
A vague possibility is an ion engine of some sort. These have much lower thrust, but can run much longer off the fuel they carry. The technology still isn't very proven, though - and trying to land an engine, intact, on an asteroid, it a tough proposition.
The paint idea sounds more feasible. It's basically making it into a cheap, inefficient solar sail. It doesn't require tricky landings, it doesn't require a lot of fuel, you just aim some "paintballs" on a ballistic intercept path. The only downside is that, being inefficient, you have to catch it early. But if you've got a decade's warning or so, you should be good.
Actually, the framework we're using (CodeIgniter) makes that an explicit feature. If a function begins with an underscore, it cannot be called directly from a URL. So if you have a class "Foo" with two functions "bar()" and "_baz()", you can access bar via [hostname]/foo/bar/[arguments], but you can't do the same for [hostname]/foo/_baz/[arguments].
But it's more that he used it for nearly every variable, even function parameters or globals. And that the names were not descriptive. I don't care if you call it $_temp_fh for a temporary filehandle, but don't call it $_t.
Well, there's the full SVN history if we want to be sure, and some comments get tagged with an initial (eg. /* @@@@K: this will break if we ever get over 4 million users */ for Kevin saying that we might want to make that a 64-bit int, not 32-bit, at some point). And we use Javadoc (or similar) whenever possible, so we know who's worked on a file.
The code formatting is more of making it *convenient* to know, intuitively, who wrote the code. I can even tell whether it was 2011 Kevin or 2012 Kevin writing the code, because by 2012 Kevin had finally gotten used to the weirder functions of the framework, using the active record classes instead of hand-written SQL.
I don't really care how you *format* your code. Do you put the brackets on the same line as the beginning statement? Do you put a space between the function name and parentheses? Do you double-space your code? I don't give a fuck. That's all syntax. It's easy to figure out.
Coding style is more important to me, how the actual *code* works. Do you initialize your variables as soon as possible? Do you properly use for loops and while loops? If you use recursion, does it make sense? Do you give your variables meaningful names like $activityType, or useless ones like $_a? How do you decide when to break something out into a function?
I work on a project with several other people. We all have our unique styles, both for format and for code. I, for instance, have been told I code with a "LISP accent", rarely storing the return values of a function in a variable, rather using the return value as an argument to another function. Another puts a blank line between nearly any two statements. Another assiduously follows some code formatting standard nobody else in the company has read.
Although it can make it harder to work on each other's code, it has one benefit - you can easily tell who wrote the code. "Putting the braces on a new line? This must be Pete's code!" or "There's an underscore at the front of every variable name? This must be Jimmy's code!" or "There's a for loop that starts ''for (;;){''? This must be Kevin's code!".
And if I do go in to "someone else's code" and change or fix things, I follow their style, more or less. Unless I'm completely rewriting a section, or making enough of a change that it should be considered a rewrite.
We don't know much of anything about the hardware (besides a rough idea of the CPU and some info on the RAM), but from the little I've been able to gather, this is how it is:
The Gamecube, PS2 and Xbox were essentially the same generation. While they were slightly different in terms of power, they're close enough to be the same "generation", tech-wise. Wikipedia labels this as Gen 6.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 were a full generation advance over their predecessors. But the Wii was not - it's essentially an overclocked Gamecube with a new controller. I feel it is best labelled as a half-generation advance (Gen 6.5, not Gen 7). So while it was an advance over the older consoles, it wasn't on par with the "next-gen" consoles. This was actually a pretty savvy move by Nintendo - a Wii could basically reach the peak of graphics on a SDTV, and HDTV was not all that common at the time. So it was "powerful enough". And they took that, and used it to make a power-efficient, small, *cheap* machine. They had the appeal of Apple for the price of Android, so to speak.
The Wii U seems to be a full generation advance over the Wii, putting it about half a generation ahead of the PS3/360. But Nintendo's strategy might backfire here, because the next-gen Microsoft/Sony consoles are probably going to be a full generation advance as well. But Nintendo seems to be focusing a lot on the power of the console (at least, by Nintendo standards), which means they're competing head-to-head with the PS4/Xbox 9000 or whatever they're going to be called. It doesn't matter that those consoles haven't even been announced - people are comparing them already.
But really, I think Nintendo needs to worry more about their games. If they could launch with a new Mario as good as Galaxy or 64, a new Zelda as good as Twilight Princess or Windwaker, a new Metroid as good as Zero Mission or any of the Primes, and either a new Pikmin, new Animal Crossing, or new Smash Brothers, they would not have problems selling the console. The software sells the hardware. But right now, nobody seems to be able to launch a console with good games. The 3DS and Vita had no good new games at launch, and now the Wii U doesn't have any amazing standouts.
No, they made a brown iPod, not a brown iPhone.
So marketers are about as intelligent as a Myspace-using teenager.
Sounds about right.
Fine.
Is the radiation level of these fish sufficient to produce atomic breath, or is it merely enough to cause laser vision?
I read both articles and the abstract, and couldn't find any actual numbers for how radioactive the fish are. And what I did find only made me want that answer more.
The only number that was being thrown around was "40%", in that 40% of fish caught in the Fukushima area exceed the limit for radiation, which is currently 100Bq/kg. But that's a rather low limit - before the accident, the limit was set to 500Bq/kg, but was tightened to reduce fears of contamination. And in the US (ever a paragon of strict food safety</sarcasm>), the limit is 1200Bq/kg.
So my question is, just how high *are* the radiation levels? Are the ones being rejected as unsafe doing so because the standards were tightened, or because they're genuinely highly radioactive?
I just give completely bullshit names, that a machine is happy to accept but a person would immediately know is false.
I always chuckle when I sign into a site under the name "Anon Ymous".
"The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases."
-- attributed to Josiah Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp, circa 1930
Now the government has cut out the village watchman, in favor of letting the citizenry feed them bullshit directly (only fair, given how much they have fed to us).
Nuclear fission is, at least in my opinion, the least-acceptable technology that is still acceptable. It produces non-trivial waste, it is not infinitely renewable, and it is rather dangerous. It's better than coal/oil/gas, definitely, and we should be expanding on it because it's one of the few "green" techs that is proven to work large-scale.
But, if there are any better alternatives, even if they cannot supply 100% of our power, I believe they are well worth investigating. Geothermal is superior if you're in a region that can use it, as is hydroelectric*. Tidal seems likely to be a similar solution - good in areas that can use it, but unable to work universally. Wind and solar are currently not very efficient, and cannot be used for base load, but by happy coincidence the peak hours for solar are roughly the peak hours for energy consumption. It's a good supplement, at least. And, in the long term (over centuries, not years), fission does enough damage that it might be more logical to avoid it.
And nuclear fusion has the potential to be precisely what you described - too cheap to even meter. It just has the teeny-tiny problem of not actually working. Yet.
* A little idea of mine is to pair nuclear fission with hydro plants, where possible. Put the reactors upstream of the hydro dam, on the reservoir that it creates. This gives you a large supply of cooling water, and if there's ever a leak, you have a controlled point to try to filter it. If something goes wrong, you have power from one to try to help the other (this mainly helps the nuke plant - if the reactor goes to shit, you can run the cooling pumps off power from the hydro plant). And at night, when the reactor is producing more than enough power for your needs, you can use that extra power to pump water back up the dam, turning your artificial lake into a sort of battery - this is done already, but not necessarily with closely-located plants. The only downside I can see is that if the *dam* fails catastrophically, you just lost your coolant water for the reactors.
To extend on GP's title,
Yes, it's just a drop in the bucket. But given enough drips, the bucket will fill.
And? It's essentially free, other than the cost of the actual process. Free raw materials might make it economically viable *now*.
No single solution is going to solve our problems. Even biofuel in general isn't a complete solution. But do the math for this, plus dozens of other types of biofuels, plus geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, wind, solar, hydrogen fuel cells, and potentially nuclear fission and fusion. See if those can replace coal, oil and natural gas.
Ask what language the project was written in.
If they say one specific language, you might be good. And don't count "helper" languages - a PHP app that uses SQL counts as just one language for these purposes.
If they mention a few, or one and a few dashes of something else (C with a bit of assembler, PHP with a Python script for one weird bit, C# with a few files of VB.NET), you're possibly good as well.
If they list a large number of languages for one project, run.
There's a project I'm thankfully not fully attached to at work. Long story short, we're a small-ish company that got contracted to rewrite and extend this old product, as the original developers were either fired, or sued, then fired. I only work on the "extend" part, turning what was once a module to integrate into other software into a full suite, but I've heard stories from the guys handling the rewrite. The original devs basically used it as a training ground - any time they wanted to learn a new language, they'd take some feature request and implement it in the new language. So the entire thing is basically written "by beginners", since they never really figured out any of the languages. And there's a lot - a mix of PHP4 and PHP5, some Python, some Perl, some C modules that no longer have source, and I think a few others.
And these are for large chunks. The rewrite actually doesn't stick to one language either, but 99.99% of it is PHP (there's one ten-line Python script to act as a proxy for one thing, and a Java tool that was *supposed* to be just for internal load testing, but the higher-ups adopted it for marketing demos since we apparently beat our nearest competitor by two orders of magnitude).
So yeah. If you see a single application where more than one language is used for more than, say, ten files, you should be wary.
Now, it's entirely possible to have a completely horrendous codebase using a single language, but that's been covered by others.
The Phenom IIs were indeed pretty good processors. I was a particular fan of the X3s - they were quad-core dies that had one defective core, but were priced only a hair above their dual-cores. And they usually had all the cache of the quad-core they were based on. A very powerful low-cost processor.
I'm still sort of surprised AMD didn't revert back to the Phenom design, which seemed like it had a good amount of life left in it. Make turbo a universal option, throw some deeper cache into it, see if you can widen the decoder or something, and you'd have something at least as competitive as Bulldozer/Piledriver, I think.
Check some of the benchmarks. In most, you're looking at a 10-15% drop in framerates - and that causes problems in at least a few cases. Starcraft 2, with graphics set low enough that it's purely a CPU bottleneck, the top Vishera gets only 48fps. Last year's much-loved i5-2500K gets 65, and every other Intel processor is higher.
I would have loved to see benchmarks from more CPU-bound games, though. GTA IV is well-known to be a heavy CPU user, but none of the reviews I read used it. Same for Minecraft - although that's often memory-bandwidth-bound, not CPU-bound.
But in any case, yes, it seems AMD processors aren't good for the more dedicated gamers, the ones who will actually be choosing a processor based on its gaming capabilities. Although they do seem to have an edge for the lower-end gaming laptops due to Trinity - their integrated GPU is a competent replacement for medium-low dedicated cards, quite respectable in the smaller gaming laptops, might also be good for pseudo-consoles.
New AMD processor, higher clocks than the last one but no massive improvements performance-wise. Still rocks at multi-threaded, integer-only workloads, still sucks at single-threaded or floating-point performance, still uses a huge amount of power. AMD giving up on the high end, their top-end parts are priced against the i5 series, not the i7. Since Intel's overpricing stuff, they're still roughly competitive. Might be good for server stuff, maybe office desktops if they can get the power down, but not looking good for gaming. Overall mood seems to be "AMD isn't dead yet, but they've given up on first place".
There. Now you don't need to read TFAs.
Where in there did I say anything about Windows 8?
All I'm saying is that Microsoft is shockingly being the best vendor at supporting their old products. I'm arguing against the people saying "deprecating XP is just a blatant money-grab by Microsoft".
Honestly, I haven't touched W8, so I'm not in a position to really judge it. I've heard both good and bad things about it. But I vastly preferred Vista to XP, and mildly prefer W7 to Vista. If you really can't stomach W8, but want to stick with Windows, don't stick to XP, just get W7.
Microsoft is end-of-lifing a decade-old OS. It's already 11 years old, and will be declared fully unsupported in another two years. Which means they'll support the OS until seven years after the replacement is released.
Compare this to Apple. OS X 10.1 is the closest in age to Windows XP, and it was end-of-lifed in 2002. In fact, their most recent "supported" OS is 10.6 (Snow Leopard), which is only three years old - approximately the age of Windows *7*. And I can verify that many application vendors seem to consider 10.6 the minimum, some even 10.7.
And let's compare this to Linux. There's not enough space or time to get into every distro, so let's focus on Ubuntu, the most Windows-like distro. The oldest "supported" version is the server variant of Hardy Heron, the 8.04 Long-Term-Support release, which was released in 2008 (around the time of Vista SP1). For a desktop variant, you can only go back to 10.4 LTS, released in 2010 (around the time of W7 SP1). And those are the long-term support versions. "Regular" versions can only go back to 2011.
Come on now, guys. Microsoft does a lot of things wrong, but they've been downright saints about ditching XP, doing far better than pretty much everyone else.
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Your parentheses are mismatched; your argument is invalid.
It's as much about what you install as it is about what you DON'T install.
Don't install Java, or if you do, disable the browser plugins. Don't install the "software" that usually comes bundled with any printer drivers. Don't install anything from Norton.
Don't give the kid an admin account. Don't let him install things without asking. And then, because he won't listen to that, tell him about the common things that claim to be legit, but aren't - "media codecs", cheat software, etc. Windows has gotten secure enough (starting with 2000, then further improving with XP, Vista and 7) that it's now easier to hack the user than the software - so add some defenses to the weak point.
Other than that, you should be fine. Slap Firefox/Chrome on there, install MSE and MBAM, and keep everything up-to-date, and you'll be as good as I am.
Oh, and keep a backup of anything important. If you're like me, you'll need to do a full reformat/reinstall every two years or so, due to either a virus or just a slow system.
That would be a good start, but you'd need some further work. Most notably, the scheduler - unless things have changed since 3.8, OpenBSD doesn't have a real-time, hard-constraint scheduler, which is an absolute necessity for such a system. And the scheduler is big and complex enough to be a security risk - so you'll spend quite a bit of effort to make sure your new one is secure.
But yeah, OpenBSD certainly wouldn't be the worst OS to start from for a project like this.
I have no problem with handing more control of a car to a computer, rather than the person. People are stupid, after all - every accident I've seen or been involved in, some stupid person was at fault, and that *includes* the time I wrecked my own car.
I just have one request. Put a big, easily-slapped button, preferably red, on it that completely overrides everything. EVERYTHING. Collision avoidance. Lane-follow. Auto-braking. Fucking cruise control. I should be able to kamikaze the car into a building as long as I'm pressing that button. And there should be no cutoff or limit or penalty - if I duct-tape it down, it should disable everything just as I asked. And the only penalty should be that, if I use that button and cause a crash, it counts as deliberate, not accidental. No "you pushed that button once, your insurance just tripled", no "you pushed that button for no reason on our list of acceptable reasons, you get a fine".
If you do that, I'd even accept more restrictive controls. You could put in a speed cap that cuts the accelerator off when it hits the highest speed limit in the country (85mph, I think). Or something to prevent you from changing lanes without using your turn signals. Or something that cuts the engine if you pull out your phone.