In my brief stint in the Military/Industrial complex, I noticed that there were always uniformed personal on the government side of the table, and retired military people on the "civilian" side of the table. When officers retire, they leave and go to the private sector, where they end up managing projects for the military.
I expect that the contractors were staffed with lots of "project planners" and "requirements specialists" who went straight from the service to work on these projects. And you can be sure that the ex-military are extremely unlikely to buck the system and stand up to uniformed types. And those in uniform know that they can climb on the retirement gravy train as long as they don't make life too hard for the contractors who they expect to work for when they get out.
It's a recipe for disaster. Nobody is going to make waves, because they are all too busy looking out for their common interest. It's another example of the endemic corruption that is steadily eroding the fundamentals of US society.
Of course this is small change compared to what goes on in the financial sector...
I read the article (I know it's not considered good form here on Slashdot), and there seems to be a discrepancy: this is described as being a graphene transistor, but the gate uses silicon carbide as the semiconductor. So it seems like a better description would be a hybrid graphene/semiconductor transistor. Is this correct?
If it is a hybrid then what are the limitations and how is it better then current all semiconductor circuits? As far as I know (not very much) there is no reason to build silicon carbide integrated circuits, so why would anyone want to use SIC with graphene? Is this a step to something more useful?
I'm not trolling, I just want to get a better understanding.
If capitalism is functioning correctly, costs are minimized via competition. Wall Street is composed strictly of "middle men". These institutions should be squeezed for profit like every other part of the economy. Instead, they have become the gate keepers, and now skim the bulk of the profits for themselves. The entire economic order has been altered so that Wall Street (and the other global banking institutions) make money without regard to results. Heads they win, tails we loose.
HFT is just one of the skimming methods. It starkly illustrates that the insiders have a strategic advantage and open competition is a myth. How can there be a level playing field when the privileged few who can install their HFT trading hardware right next to the NYSE machines have an intrinsic edge? Effectively, it is a casino and they are the house and everyone else is has a sucker bet. (Don't bother to respond that "anyone can make an investment that indirectly taps into this capability". You and I have to go though so many middle men that we see no meaningful profit.)
Bain Capital is another example. They structured their deals so the Bain insiders always came out ahead. By definition hedge funds use other peoples money. They are not taking the risk, the investors are. If hedge fund insiders come out ahead of investors, it is another case of insiders stripping assets from everyone else. Note that this is a completely separate issue from the impact of Bain on the companies that they acquired.
So suppose you go to Fidelity to invest, and they sell you one of their high end managed portfolios. It's composed of multiple funds also managed by Fidelity. Besides the fee to be in the portfolio (4% annually), each of the funds also charges a fee. The funds trade through the Fidelity brokerage, which also charges a fee. This is at least triple dipping. All the name brand investment firms are the same. If you have a 401K it is almost certain that you have been subjected to this scam.
Beyond this, the bailout from the 2008 crash rewarded the corrupt investment bankers that caused the problem in the first place. The general public in the US saw it's net worth reduced to mid 1990's levels while the stock market has gone up to record highs. This is, in effect, a transfer of wealth from the productive part of the economy to the corrupt insiders. There is class warfare in the US, and the ultra wealthy are winning.
There are two things to keep in mind:
The game is rigged.
All animals are equal, but some are more equal then others.
The ARMed camp has intrinsic advantages over INTEL.
They don't have all the legacy instruction set issues to deal with. Intel must be backward compatible with all previous versions. Remember, the 8080 subset is still alive and well in the INTEL architecture. This comes with a cost.
It's easier to move up from a lower power system to a higher power system. In this context power can be thought of as both electrical power consumption and as compute power. Moving down means something must be simplified/eliminated, and the backwards compatibility issues makes this much harder.
When it comes to mobile devices, ARM owns the market and has the network effect working for it. This is how INTEL kept a stranglehold on the PC market, but it works against them for mobile.
ARM is not monolithic in the same way as INTEL. Because of the license based IP model, there are many more variations of ARM chips then INTEL chips. The resources to make variations comes from the IP user base, not from ARM. A single company, no matter how dominant, cannot afford to support that many variants. If some of the versions fail, the cost is not born by ARM. If INTEL guesses wrong and makes a dud, they have to absorb the cost.
INTEL is no pushover, but I think ARM has the advantage.
First, there is no single right solution. Desktop machines will not disappear, they will/are becoming a niche. Physically small laptops, pads and cellphones will co-exist and overlap in use. Get used to it.
Evolving technology will force change, and the current classifications are not set in stone. In a biological evolution metaphor, a new environment has come into being, and a lot of new niches have opened up, so there is a lot of "try it and see if it works". Most will not last and be forgotten. No big deal. Users will be buying new stuff all the time. Eventually types will emerge that have longer product life spans.
Classes
Classes are the fundamental unit of code in C++. Naturally, we use them extensively. This section lists the main dos and don'ts you should follow when writing a class.
Doing Work in Constructors
In general, constructors should merely set member variables to their initial values. Any complex initialization should go in an explicit Init() method.
Default Constructors
You must define a default constructor if your class defines member variables and has no other constructors. Otherwise the compiler will do it for you, badly.
Explicit Constructors
Use the C++ keyword explicit for constructors with one argument.
Copy Constructors
Provide a copy constructor and assignment operator only when necessary. Otherwise, disable them with DISALLOW_COPY_AND_ASSIGN.
Structs vs. Classes
Use a struct only for passive objects that carry data; everything else is a class.
Inheritance
Composition is often more appropriate than inheritance. When using inheritance, make it public.
Multiple Inheritance
Only very rarely is multiple implementation inheritance actually useful. We allow multiple inheritance only when at most one of the base classes has an implementation; all other base classes must be pure interface classes tagged with the Interface suffix.
Interfaces
Classes that satisfy certain conditions are allowed, but not required, to end with an Interface suffix.
Operator Overloading
Do not overload operators except in rare, special circumstances.
I am particularly struck by the depreciation of inheritance and the promotion of composition (has a rather ithen is a). This is a design decision I very much indorse, and I have done so over the course of many years. It has caused me trouble, because C++ code geeks think that if you are not using inheritance, you are doing a bad job. They're wrong. I know that I even was not hired on a couple of occasions because I expressed this opinion. I was very pleased when I saw that Google uses the same strategy.
My fact are in order. Drone strikes are a hot button political issue in Pakistan domestic politics. It is considered a violation of their sovereignty and an affront to the government and the people.
The Foreign office spokesman has said drone attacks amount to violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and undermine efforts to combat militancy and terrorism.
Pakistan has said that all stakeholders in Afghanistan reconciliation process should demonstrate perseverance patience and sincerity of purpose for durable solution of Afghan issue.
Responding to the queries of media persons at the weekly news briefing in Islamabad on Friday over the suspension of Taliban-US talks Foreign Office Spokesperson Abdul Basit said the Afghan reconciliation process is intricate and ups and downs in it are inevitable. However it is important that all the parties demonstrate patience and perseverance to achieve the objective of a sovereign independent and stable Afghanistan, he said.
He said Pakistan on its part would continue to encourage all the parties towards intra Afghan consensus as was underlined by the prime minister in a statement on February 24.
Responding to a series of questions regarding drone attacks the spokesman said there is no question that these amount to the violation of Pak’s sovereignty.
He said “Pakistan has been using all diplomatic channels to bring an end to the strikes that are damaging our efforts against militancy and terrorism. Voices are also being raised in the West against these illegal drone strike.”
He further added that Pakistan was taking the issue forcefully with the United States and hoped that the US would revisit its policy towards that end. He said it is high time that the illegal use of drone attacks are stopped.
About the options available for stopping the drone attacks the spokesman said “we are waiting for the completion of the parliamentary process on the new terms of engagements with the US. In the guidelines of the parliament he said we will move forward and take up the issue with the US.
Describing the parliamentary process for formulation of new foreign policy guidelines as very important he expressed the confidence that it will represent the true aspirations of the people of the country. He was confident that it will put our foreign policy on sound footing.
To a question he rejected the notion that any of Pakistan's base is being used for the drone strikes.
Remember two things. First, Pakistani government institutions say one thing to western media and entirely different things in the Arabic press. This is common for all Middle Eastern governments. So when a military spokesman says that mostly militants are being killed, it is not necessarily reliable information.
Secondly, it is about perception and politics, not reality. Even if the number are as you suggest, anti-US sentiment plays well with domestic politics in the region, and the current rulers play up US intervention to distract the populous from criticizing their poor domestic performance.
Finally, saying that the Taliban are worse then we are, so our actions are justified, is a morally bankrupt argument. It is "two wrongs make a right" written in bloodshed. Also, it fails as foreign policy. How do we win hearts and minds in the region with the argument "the USA: not nearly as bloody as the Taliban!" The history of asymmetrical conflicts between the US and locals invariably ends up with radicals in country using hatred of foreign invaders to grab power, no matter how vile and violent they are. Just look at Southeast Asia post VIet Nam for horrible examples.
In the first Iron Man film, Tony Stark is in a village in the Middle East and he kills a bunch of "bad guys" who are mixed in with a bunch of innocent civilians. He trivially distinguishes between his targets and the rest of the population.
This is bullshit. In real drone strikes, there is no guarantee that only "terrorists" are the victims. All the press reporting in the US takes the military at their word, and casualties are never identified as "collateral damage", i.e. innocent bystanders.
It's a real war, and there are always non-combatants who are killed and injured. Pretending this never happens may be good to keep support up at home, but it is a damned lie. Honesty is a better policy in the long run.
One of the reasons that Pakistan is not letting NATO resupply convoys go through it's territory is because of the toll taken by drone strikes. It is a huge issue with the Pakistan population. By not admitting to any civilian casualties in the US press, there can be no meaningful debate about how our policy is effecting US standing in the Middle East.
Personally, I think that the Pakistan government is not worth spit as an ally, and they are directly supporting our enemies. We would be better off if we cut most military aid because of their backstabbing behavior. Even so, the practical, ethical and political effects of our use of drones should be much more publicly debated, rather then being swept under the rub by what is effectively military propaganda.
There is another way of reading this: Jaczko was rocking the boat, and interfering with the cozy relationship between the regulators and the nuclear industry. Therefore he was forced out, because he was challenging the status quo.
Note that none of the criticism was about technical issues, it was all about "style". Jaczko was publicly critical about failings in the safety culture at the NRC and the industry, and his position became more pronounced after Fukushima. He was saying that we were at risk for a similar accident because the NRC was not holding the reactor operators to a high enough standard. So if his concern about poor risk management is correct, and they want to get rid of him, the best option is a personal attack, which is exactly how this is playing out.
In that vein, there were just a reports on KCBS in Southern California about serious safety lapses at the now closed San Onofre nuclear plant:
The NRC allows San Onofre to compensate for its failure to keep enough separation between the main and back up cables by hiring workers to conduct hourly fire inspections in the areas where the cable are too close together. But some of those fire watches were never done.
We’ve obtained a previously classified report which shows one worker “deliberately failed to conduct required fire protection surveillances and falsified fire watch logs.”
And the report says it went on for five years between the dates of April 2001 and December 2006.
Then in 2009, another fire watch employee was “observed smoking what appeared to be marijuana in the licensee’s protected area.”
In both cases, the fire watch employees were fired – but the NRC did not fine or discipline Southern California Edison for its part in failing to recognize five years of non-existent inspections.
If that isn't bad enough, the NRC is now cutting back on evacuation planning requirements.
Without fanfare, the nation's nuclear power regulators have overhauled community emergency planning for the first time in more than three decades, requiring fewer exercises for major accidents and recommending that fewer people be evacuated right away.
Nuclear watchdogs voiced surprise and dismay over the quietly adopted revamp — the first since the program began after Three Mile Island in 1979. Several said they were unaware of the changes until now, though they took effect in December.
At least four years in the works, the changes appear to clash with more recent lessons of last year's reactor crisis in Japan. A mandate that local responders always run practice exercises for a radiation release has been eliminated — a move viewed as downright bizarre by some emergency planners.
...
The Web archives of FEMA and the NRC show no news releases on the changes during December 2011 and January 2012. The revisions took effect Dec. 23, at the peak of the holiday season when Americans tend to focus on last-minute gift shopping and social gatherings.
Given this context, there is a good case to be made that Jaczko being forced out is an example of how meaningful criticism is punished by inbred bureaucrats. This is exactly the same mechanism that lead the Japanese regulators to ignore tsunami warnings at Fukushima and make equally bad decisions about on site back up power.
Don't be surprised when we have a serious nuclear accident here in the US. With this kind of broken regulation, it is inevitable.
Are they going to have milk and cookies, nap time. and craft hour?
Grow up, you thumb sucking, diaper wearing 20 year old over-privileged snots. It's a fucking business, not a social networking site or a video game. Your motivation is to do the job and get paid.
This is the result of helicopter parents. College grads are showing up for job interviews with their parents, or having their mom call and chew out the boss when they don't get a big enough raise. This crap happens at big New York financial firms, for God's sake.
The US will be screwed when this generation takes over. I can just see them trying to negotiate with Chinese or Indian firms and calling their doddering parents to whine that the people on the other side of the table are not playing fair.
All the negative comments about this project are astounding. I keep assuming that the Slashdot crowd looks to the future, and in reality many readers here have their heads firmly buried in the sand.
If a Slashdot equivalent existed during the time of the Wright brothers, and someone talked about human flight, the equivalent negative responses would all be about how they should stick to bicycles or improving trains, and how flight was not economically feasible, and that steamships and trains were the only long distance transport worth working on.
Time to change the Slashdot motto to "Whatever it is, we're against it!" (with apologies to the Marx brothers).
Someone could go on Kickstarter and raise some money for an open source project to do it for them. They could hand out tee-shirts saying "I helped fix the Internet".
Although technically correct, this is picking nits. There's this little hill called The Himalayas in the way. That would be a serious impediment keeping direct contact to a minimum. Unless, of course, you have the secret map to the hidden railway tunnels.
The international powder keg that is N. Korea is a political problem. No technical fix will "solve" it.
The regime exists because of draconian internal control. It is not self sustaining, and gets the extra resources it needs (mostly food) by blackmailing the international community. The blackmail is not solely based on their nuclear capabilities.
For S. Korea and the US, conventional warfare is a meaningful threat. At a minimum the north could take Seoul, and it would be very bloody and costly to push them back to the DMZ. This could cause the collapse of the N. Korean state, so the leadership knows it is likely a suicidal act.
For China, a collapse of the N. Korea regime would be a nightmare, because of the wave of refugees that would pour over the border. They are currently dealing with a low level refugee problem with defectors, and it is a destabilizing force in their border area with N. Korea. This is how the regime blackmails China.
China also wants to avoid having a land border with a modern Western capitalist style state. A takeover by the south is the certain outcome of the end of the northern state, just like east and west Germany. Even with the Chinese embrace of capitalist economics, the Communist Party is still the sole source of political power, and they want to keep it that way. A functioning modern Democracy on a land border would be a direct challenge to their political legitimacy. China needs a functioning N. Korea.
None of this is directly caused by N. Korea nuclear weapons. The elite leadership knows that they would be personally doomed by the use of nuclear weapons. Even if they escape alive from the conflict that would follow, there is literally no place in the world they could hide.
Nuclear weapons in N. Korea are an bargaining chip for their game of blackmail. Without them the world world would not pay them nearly as much attention, so their ability to manipulate events would be seriously diminished.
Ballistic missile defense is a US political issue first and foremost. This has been true ever since Regan's Star Wars program. Despite all the money spent and all the claims, the chances that the system works is virtually zero. The "tests"that have been done are exercises in organized lying.
Remember the first Gulf War and the Scuds? After all the claims of success, the truth finally came out, and the Patriot system was a failure. The current versions are just as broken. How do we know this? Because the number of tests needed to prove a system like this is in the hundreds, or thousands. The number of tests they actually run is in the tens. And they are all rigged to succeed. Just think of how much testing they do on jets or other missiles. And if they did real meaningful testing, then potential adversaries could observe the results and have all the information they would need to defeat it.
So this done system is ultimately more DOD pork. Therefore, we'll end up building it despite the fact that it will be completely unreliable. A non-working solution to the wrong problem.
This is another good documentation tool, and a way of avoiding bugs. It is surprisingly hard to do.
If you can't think of a good reasonably short and descriptive name then you don't understand the concepts as well as you should.
I only use variable names like i,j,k for loops. I use x1,x2,y1,y2 and similar names only for numeric values. This is applicable when I am implanting math algorithms. If I have a lot of similar variables differing by their last digit and I'm not doing equations, I know I am writing code that I won't be able to read later.
I tend to declare one variable per line, and describe what I am using it for as a comment. If I have a lot of variables I split them into groups, which I separate by blank lines.
I try and avoid reusing intermediate variable names, unless they are in different lexical scopes. It is fine to have similar name inside loops that doing similar work, but make sure that you are not confusing concepts when reusing variable names thie way.
I have been working on algorithms, and have stopped and spent an hour or more thinking about what to call the variables. I do this when I get confused. It always pays off. When you have a good descriptive name and you see it in it's use context, you can actually see the mistakes before you make them.
If there is no sexism in software development, then where are the women on Slashdot? According to all the men posting here, there are plenty of qualified women working in the field. It would be rational to assume that they would respond to this thread with their personal experiences. Sound of crickets...
There are posts by men saying that they don't have a problem in their work place, or the women that they know don't have a problem. I expect that this is accurate, for the most part. However, there is self censorship in play. If there is a problem, there would be a tendency for it to be under-reported. If there is a hostile culture, one way to fit in is to deny that the problem exists. Pushing back is a sure fire way to be labeled a "bitch" or worse.
I know women who left the field because they got fed up with the macho culture. They could do it and be successful, but they didn't want to. They were always having to prove themselves, and they just got tired of the bullshit.
If you go back and read the denials that make up most of the comments, you will see a direct example of the problem that does exist. The comments exhibit lots of hostile language. The default position is that there is no problem, and anyone who says otherwise is a whiner and/or a self serving idiot.
Slashdot itself is an example of current software culture, and it exhibits a lot of hostility. When this post gets modded down to -11 and/or I get a lot of comments that attack me, it will prove my point.
Calvin Moores used trademark to enforce control over the language TRAC, which he invented in the early 1960's. This led to other people copying the TRAC model but using a different set of primitive names to avoid infringement. This discouraged use of his concepts. and it might be part of the reason that his work did not have a greater impact.
Mooers trademarked the name TRAC in an effort to maintain his control over the definition of the language, an unusual and pioneering action at the time. At one point, he brought an intellectual property infringement suit against DEC, alleging that a contract to deliver a mini-computer with a TRAC interpreter violated his rights. However, despite the trademark status, the name has been used several times for unrelated information technology projects, including a current open source project management system called Trac.
There have been various languages inspired by TRAC. To avoid any trouble with Mooers, they renamed primitives and/or used different metacharacters. In SAM76's case, primitives were added, according to Claude Kagan, "because TRAC is baby talk". In MINT's case, primitives were added to give access to a sophisticated text editor machinery.
TRAC is an interesting language. It a functional macro language and operates directly on strings, which are the only data type. It was also one of the first interactive languages to run on small computers, preceding BASIC.
Why is it that the only antitrust enforcement I hear about in the EU is against non-EU based companies? Is it really that case that no corporations inside the EU are big enough to be anti-competitive? Or is it that there are cases with EU companies that are not reported very much? Or is it that the EU differentially goes after foreign concerns? I truly have no idea, I was just wondering.
You're just not understanding the mindset of systemic corruption. They charge a premium for the "latest greatest" device, so they make more money on that end. This is effectively what happens with the long term contract that go with most plans. Then once they have the lock in, they can provide as much crappy service as they want, and the customer is stuck. Also, they get a lot more money when the user exhausts their base plan data amounts, and has to pay through the nose for additional data amounts.
Just keep in mind this simple image: the consumer is krill. We only exists to feed the enormous appetites of the corporate leviathans. They get fat and we get consumed. This is end stage capitalism, where profit come from market manipulation, i.e. theft. It is always more profitable to steal money then honestly make money. Marx was right in his observations, he was just wrong with his proposed solutions.
News Corp already has a track record of computer crime in the US in 2004.
News America Marketing, the division of News Corp. that was going head-to-head with Floorgraphics, later admitted that someone in its office had illicitly accessed its competitor’s password-protected website. But an internal investigation, as well as subsequent probes by the FBI and the Secret Service, failed to pinpoint the person responsible.
Years later, after Floorgraphics’ lawsuit against News Corp. was settled and Henderson had received what he called a handsome exit payout, he openly talked about getting a peek at Floorgraphics’ forthcoming ad campaigns. Henderson’s co-workers didn't always know how much faith to put in their boss’s claims, but he certainly wasn’t one to mince words.
“He admitted he had information from inside Floorgraphics’ computer system. He knew how to get into their passwords,” one former News America staffer told New York. "He said he had the blessings of his bosses."
This incident followed the same pattern as the News of the World phone hacking scandal. An overly aggressive manager broke the law and was rewarded, and News Corp crushed the competition. When the bad deeds were found out the internal investigation was a joke:
As for News Corp.’s internal investigation, he concluded that it “falls far short of any standards in this area." The company made a cursory check of Henderson’s e-mail — “The only search conducted was a limited Outlook 'find' command" — but Cats concluded the company never interviewed Henderson or any other employees. Nor did it preserve a record of the investigation.
Then for some strange reason when the authorities investigate they decide not to press criminal charges (can you say political pressure, i knew you could). In the final stage, there is a civil case and it is settled out of court. In this case the total payout was $650 million. Note this figure includes some other wrongdoing besides the Floorgraphics case.
This is exactly what happened in the News of the World scandal, until The Guardian newspaper in England did some investigation and found out how massive the phone hacking was. Given these two cases, one in the US and one in the UK, what are the odds that News Corp is blameless in this situation.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect that the contractors were staffed with lots of "project planners" and "requirements specialists" who went straight from the service to work on these projects. And you can be sure that the ex-military are extremely unlikely to buck the system and stand up to uniformed types. And those in uniform know that they can climb on the retirement gravy train as long as they don't make life too hard for the contractors who they expect to work for when they get out.
It's a recipe for disaster. Nobody is going to make waves, because they are all too busy looking out for their common interest. It's another example of the endemic corruption that is steadily eroding the fundamentals of US society.
Of course this is small change compared to what goes on in the financial sector...
It is reasonable that they could detect colorblindness, but that's not a prediction...
If it is a hybrid then what are the limitations and how is it better then current all semiconductor circuits? As far as I know (not very much) there is no reason to build silicon carbide integrated circuits, so why would anyone want to use SIC with graphene? Is this a step to something more useful?
I'm not trolling, I just want to get a better understanding.
Imagine a parking lot full of vans filled with Raspberry Pi as a ...
If capitalism is functioning correctly, costs are minimized via competition. Wall Street is composed strictly of "middle men". These institutions should be squeezed for profit like every other part of the economy. Instead, they have become the gate keepers, and now skim the bulk of the profits for themselves. The entire economic order has been altered so that Wall Street (and the other global banking institutions) make money without regard to results. Heads they win, tails we loose.
HFT is just one of the skimming methods. It starkly illustrates that the insiders have a strategic advantage and open competition is a myth. How can there be a level playing field when the privileged few who can install their HFT trading hardware right next to the NYSE machines have an intrinsic edge? Effectively, it is a casino and they are the house and everyone else is has a sucker bet. (Don't bother to respond that "anyone can make an investment that indirectly taps into this capability". You and I have to go though so many middle men that we see no meaningful profit.)
Bain Capital is another example. They structured their deals so the Bain insiders always came out ahead. By definition hedge funds use other peoples money. They are not taking the risk, the investors are. If hedge fund insiders come out ahead of investors, it is another case of insiders stripping assets from everyone else. Note that this is a completely separate issue from the impact of Bain on the companies that they acquired.
So suppose you go to Fidelity to invest, and they sell you one of their high end managed portfolios. It's composed of multiple funds also managed by Fidelity. Besides the fee to be in the portfolio (4% annually), each of the funds also charges a fee. The funds trade through the Fidelity brokerage, which also charges a fee. This is at least triple dipping. All the name brand investment firms are the same. If you have a 401K it is almost certain that you have been subjected to this scam.
Beyond this, the bailout from the 2008 crash rewarded the corrupt investment bankers that caused the problem in the first place. The general public in the US saw it's net worth reduced to mid 1990's levels while the stock market has gone up to record highs. This is, in effect, a transfer of wealth from the productive part of the economy to the corrupt insiders. There is class warfare in the US, and the ultra wealthy are winning.
There are two things to keep in mind:
The game is rigged.
All animals are equal, but some are more equal then others.
They don't have all the legacy instruction set issues to deal with. Intel must be backward compatible with all previous versions. Remember, the 8080 subset is still alive and well in the INTEL architecture. This comes with a cost.
It's easier to move up from a lower power system to a higher power system. In this context power can be thought of as both electrical power consumption and as compute power. Moving down means something must be simplified/eliminated, and the backwards compatibility issues makes this much harder.
When it comes to mobile devices, ARM owns the market and has the network effect working for it. This is how INTEL kept a stranglehold on the PC market, but it works against them for mobile.
ARM is not monolithic in the same way as INTEL. Because of the license based IP model, there are many more variations of ARM chips then INTEL chips. The resources to make variations comes from the IP user base, not from ARM. A single company, no matter how dominant, cannot afford to support that many variants. If some of the versions fail, the cost is not born by ARM. If INTEL guesses wrong and makes a dud, they have to absorb the cost.
INTEL is no pushover, but I think ARM has the advantage.
First, there is no single right solution. Desktop machines will not disappear, they will/are becoming a niche. Physically small laptops, pads and cellphones will co-exist and overlap in use. Get used to it.
Evolving technology will force change, and the current classifications are not set in stone. In a biological evolution metaphor, a new environment has come into being, and a lot of new niches have opened up, so there is a lot of "try it and see if it works". Most will not last and be forgotten. No big deal. Users will be buying new stuff all the time. Eventually types will emerge that have longer product life spans.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/the-23-most-depressing-leaked-linkedin-passwords
I am particularly struck by the depreciation of inheritance and the promotion of composition (has a rather ithen is a). This is a design decision I very much indorse, and I have done so over the course of many years. It has caused me trouble, because C++ code geeks think that if you are not using inheritance, you are doing a bad job. They're wrong. I know that I even was not hired on a couple of occasions because I expressed this opinion. I was very pleased when I saw that Google uses the same strategy.
This article is from March 16th 2012. http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2012/03/16/news/national/drone-attacks-against-pakistans-sovereignty-basit/
Remember two things. First, Pakistani government institutions say one thing to western media and entirely different things in the Arabic press. This is common for all Middle Eastern governments. So when a military spokesman says that mostly militants are being killed, it is not necessarily reliable information.
Secondly, it is about perception and politics, not reality. Even if the number are as you suggest, anti-US sentiment plays well with domestic politics in the region, and the current rulers play up US intervention to distract the populous from criticizing their poor domestic performance.
Finally, saying that the Taliban are worse then we are, so our actions are justified, is a morally bankrupt argument. It is "two wrongs make a right" written in bloodshed. Also, it fails as foreign policy. How do we win hearts and minds in the region with the argument "the USA: not nearly as bloody as the Taliban!" The history of asymmetrical conflicts between the US and locals invariably ends up with radicals in country using hatred of foreign invaders to grab power, no matter how vile and violent they are. Just look at Southeast Asia post VIet Nam for horrible examples.
This is bullshit. In real drone strikes, there is no guarantee that only "terrorists" are the victims. All the press reporting in the US takes the military at their word, and casualties are never identified as "collateral damage", i.e. innocent bystanders.
It's a real war, and there are always non-combatants who are killed and injured. Pretending this never happens may be good to keep support up at home, but it is a damned lie. Honesty is a better policy in the long run.
One of the reasons that Pakistan is not letting NATO resupply convoys go through it's territory is because of the toll taken by drone strikes. It is a huge issue with the Pakistan population. By not admitting to any civilian casualties in the US press, there can be no meaningful debate about how our policy is effecting US standing in the Middle East.
Personally, I think that the Pakistan government is not worth spit as an ally, and they are directly supporting our enemies. We would be better off if we cut most military aid because of their backstabbing behavior. Even so, the practical, ethical and political effects of our use of drones should be much more publicly debated, rather then being swept under the rub by what is effectively military propaganda.
Note that none of the criticism was about technical issues, it was all about "style". Jaczko was publicly critical about failings in the safety culture at the NRC and the industry, and his position became more pronounced after Fukushima. He was saying that we were at risk for a similar accident because the NRC was not holding the reactor operators to a high enough standard. So if his concern about poor risk management is correct, and they want to get rid of him, the best option is a personal attack, which is exactly how this is playing out.
In that vein, there were just a reports on KCBS in Southern California about serious safety lapses at the now closed San Onofre nuclear plant:
If that isn't bad enough, the NRC is now cutting back on evacuation planning requirements.
Given this context, there is a good case to be made that Jaczko being forced out is an example of how meaningful criticism is punished by inbred bureaucrats. This is exactly the same mechanism that lead the Japanese regulators to ignore tsunami warnings at Fukushima and make equally bad decisions about on site back up power.
Don't be surprised when we have a serious nuclear accident here in the US. With this kind of broken regulation, it is inevitable.
Grow up, you thumb sucking, diaper wearing 20 year old over-privileged snots. It's a fucking business, not a social networking site or a video game. Your motivation is to do the job and get paid.
This is the result of helicopter parents. College grads are showing up for job interviews with their parents, or having their mom call and chew out the boss when they don't get a big enough raise. This crap happens at big New York financial firms, for God's sake.
The US will be screwed when this generation takes over. I can just see them trying to negotiate with Chinese or Indian firms and calling their doddering parents to whine that the people on the other side of the table are not playing fair.
If a Slashdot equivalent existed during the time of the Wright brothers, and someone talked about human flight, the equivalent negative responses would all be about how they should stick to bicycles or improving trains, and how flight was not economically feasible, and that steamships and trains were the only long distance transport worth working on.
Time to change the Slashdot motto to "Whatever it is, we're against it!" (with apologies to the Marx brothers).
Someone could go on Kickstarter and raise some money for an open source project to do it for them. They could hand out tee-shirts saying "I helped fix the Internet".
Some software wisdom: Just because it worked once doesn't mean it will ever work again.
Although technically correct, this is picking nits. There's this little hill called The Himalayas in the way. That would be a serious impediment keeping direct contact to a minimum. Unless, of course, you have the secret map to the hidden railway tunnels.
The regime exists because of draconian internal control. It is not self sustaining, and gets the extra resources it needs (mostly food) by blackmailing the international community. The blackmail is not solely based on their nuclear capabilities.
For S. Korea and the US, conventional warfare is a meaningful threat. At a minimum the north could take Seoul, and it would be very bloody and costly to push them back to the DMZ. This could cause the collapse of the N. Korean state, so the leadership knows it is likely a suicidal act.
For China, a collapse of the N. Korea regime would be a nightmare, because of the wave of refugees that would pour over the border. They are currently dealing with a low level refugee problem with defectors, and it is a destabilizing force in their border area with N. Korea. This is how the regime blackmails China.
China also wants to avoid having a land border with a modern Western capitalist style state. A takeover by the south is the certain outcome of the end of the northern state, just like east and west Germany. Even with the Chinese embrace of capitalist economics, the Communist Party is still the sole source of political power, and they want to keep it that way. A functioning modern Democracy on a land border would be a direct challenge to their political legitimacy. China needs a functioning N. Korea.
None of this is directly caused by N. Korea nuclear weapons. The elite leadership knows that they would be personally doomed by the use of nuclear weapons. Even if they escape alive from the conflict that would follow, there is literally no place in the world they could hide.
Nuclear weapons in N. Korea are an bargaining chip for their game of blackmail. Without them the world world would not pay them nearly as much attention, so their ability to manipulate events would be seriously diminished.
Ballistic missile defense is a US political issue first and foremost. This has been true ever since Regan's Star Wars program. Despite all the money spent and all the claims, the chances that the system works is virtually zero. The "tests"that have been done are exercises in organized lying.
Remember the first Gulf War and the Scuds? After all the claims of success, the truth finally came out, and the Patriot system was a failure. The current versions are just as broken. How do we know this? Because the number of tests needed to prove a system like this is in the hundreds, or thousands. The number of tests they actually run is in the tens. And they are all rigged to succeed. Just think of how much testing they do on jets or other missiles. And if they did real meaningful testing, then potential adversaries could observe the results and have all the information they would need to defeat it.
So this done system is ultimately more DOD pork. Therefore, we'll end up building it despite the fact that it will be completely unreliable. A non-working solution to the wrong problem.
If you can't think of a good reasonably short and descriptive name then you don't understand the concepts as well as you should.
I only use variable names like i,j,k for loops. I use x1,x2,y1,y2 and similar names only for numeric values. This is applicable when I am implanting math algorithms. If I have a lot of similar variables differing by their last digit and I'm not doing equations, I know I am writing code that I won't be able to read later.
I tend to declare one variable per line, and describe what I am using it for as a comment. If I have a lot of variables I split them into groups, which I separate by blank lines.
I try and avoid reusing intermediate variable names, unless they are in different lexical scopes. It is fine to have similar name inside loops that doing similar work, but make sure that you are not confusing concepts when reusing variable names thie way.
I have been working on algorithms, and have stopped and spent an hour or more thinking about what to call the variables. I do this when I get confused. It always pays off. When you have a good descriptive name and you see it in it's use context, you can actually see the mistakes before you make them.
There are posts by men saying that they don't have a problem in their work place, or the women that they know don't have a problem. I expect that this is accurate, for the most part. However, there is self censorship in play. If there is a problem, there would be a tendency for it to be under-reported. If there is a hostile culture, one way to fit in is to deny that the problem exists. Pushing back is a sure fire way to be labeled a "bitch" or worse.
I know women who left the field because they got fed up with the macho culture. They could do it and be successful, but they didn't want to. They were always having to prove themselves, and they just got tired of the bullshit.
If you go back and read the denials that make up most of the comments, you will see a direct example of the problem that does exist. The comments exhibit lots of hostile language. The default position is that there is no problem, and anyone who says otherwise is a whiner and/or a self serving idiot.
Slashdot itself is an example of current software culture, and it exhibits a lot of hostility. When this post gets modded down to -11 and/or I get a lot of comments that attack me, it will prove my point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAC_(programming_language)
TRAC is an interesting language. It a functional macro language and operates directly on strings, which are the only data type. It was also one of the first interactive languages to run on small computers, preceding BASIC.
When it grows up, it will be a light saber.
Why is it that the only antitrust enforcement I hear about in the EU is against non-EU based companies? Is it really that case that no corporations inside the EU are big enough to be anti-competitive? Or is it that there are cases with EU companies that are not reported very much? Or is it that the EU differentially goes after foreign concerns? I truly have no idea, I was just wondering.
Just keep in mind this simple image: the consumer is krill. We only exists to feed the enormous appetites of the corporate leviathans. They get fat and we get consumed. This is end stage capitalism, where profit come from market manipulation, i.e. theft. It is always more profitable to steal money then honestly make money. Marx was right in his observations, he was just wrong with his proposed solutions.
This incident followed the same pattern as the News of the World phone hacking scandal. An overly aggressive manager broke the law and was rewarded, and News Corp crushed the competition. When the bad deeds were found out the internal investigation was a joke:
Then for some strange reason when the authorities investigate they decide not to press criminal charges (can you say political pressure, i knew you could). In the final stage, there is a civil case and it is settled out of court. In this case the total payout was $650 million. Note this figure includes some other wrongdoing besides the Floorgraphics case.
This is exactly what happened in the News of the World scandal, until The Guardian newspaper in England did some investigation and found out how massive the phone hacking was. Given these two cases, one in the US and one in the UK, what are the odds that News Corp is blameless in this situation.