I've been an embedded engineer for decades as well, writing my first code on a TRaSh-80 model 1 back in 1977 or 1978. I too was connecting things to the internet back in the early days before most everyone had heard of it. Maybe that's our problem. We're too old to "get it". It must be a hipster thing.
It's not a poor excuse. It's a valid reason. Everyone of the engineers I worked on Ada projects with in the past won't touch Ada projects now unless they were desperate for work. We just find it so unpleasant to work on. Sorry but you, as a fan of Ada, are in a very small minority.
Only parts of C++ are non-deterministic. You can write deterministic code in C++ if you limit yourself to a subset of the language.
Thing is, pretty much every language has non-deterministic features. Even Ada. Every language that allows dynamic memory allocation off the heap has the potential for non-deterministic behavior.
I would say that since the FAA dropped the Ada mandate near on 20 years ago, there are few to no new projects being developed in Ada. As a former Ada programmer who has worked on avionics systems, the only jobs I see out there are for maintenance and upgrading of legacy software. Every new avionics project I've seen is done in C or in some cases, C++, depending on whether or not they went to the trouble of getting C++ accepted by risk-averse project management.
I've spent a career in the safety critical world, both in military and defense. Coincidentally, I did a short stint in train control as well. I haven't written a line of Ada code since 1998 and it's becoming increasingly rare to see any project still written in Ada. I have not even heard of any train control systems being written in Ada (though that doesn't mean there aren't). All of the new Positive Train Control upgrades being added to train systems are all written in C/C++. That much I can say for certain.
While Ada has some useful features, I found it was more than a bit tedious and cumbersome to use day to day. And while the development environment is solid and bug free, it doesn't get around the fact that bad programmers write bad code in any language. Sure, Ada puts road blocks in front of you but bad programmers are adept at getting around them with surprising frequency. That's not to say bad programmers writing bad code is exclusive to Ada. Bad programmers write bad code in any language. But the whole notion that a language can "prevent" bugs is ludicrous. The best it does is to "help you avoid" bugs. But adherence to a quality coding standard, along with competent people performing code reviews will do that for you no matter what language you use.
In this day and age, Ada certainly qualifies as "little known" because it is a dying language that most young people are never exposed to. It is slowly being displaced by more ubiquitous languages. Sure, there are some passionate adherents who will keep it alive for decades to come. But it will linger on only in a few niche environments, slowly fading into history.
That's a start, but there is also value in having this traffic light know that up the street there's a backup so it might as well let the cross traffic go despite what the sensor is telling it. Or conversely, that light up the street might want to turn green for the group of cars that just went though this one.
Sure. Assuming they have good enough traffic management prediction software that at the very least doesn't make it any worse those things could be a good idea. But that's a "very hard" problem to solve and there are just some times where you have so much cross flowing congestion that there's not much you can do to clear it effectively.
Internet connected appliances are dumb. That was tried during the last bubble.
I don't know about you but quite a few, if not most or all traffic lights in modern America are triggered either by metal sensors or cameras. They already respond to traffic load and have for decades.
However, I can see the point of having smart cars be aware of traffic patterns, including lights, to help traffic flow and to ease congestion. That would be a "good thing".
But what does that have to do with why I would want to plug my toaster into the internet?
Because there simply is no answer. It's literally people trying to get other people to pay for the development costs to find out what it is and what it's good for.
That's really what I thought it is.
There is no consistent definition, no standards, not even any really good use cases.
It's something people have latched onto, and decided that, even if they have no idea what it means, they want to cash in on it.
People have come up with some things around it, but they've not addressed any real world issues like privacy, security, or what the hell to do with it. It's like in the late 90's, where the frenzy happened around "teh dot com" -- if you had a frickin' website, you had VCs throwing you enough money to make some people rich, and ensure there would be a healthy resale market for Herman Miller Aeron chairs.
You didn't need a business plan, a product, or any actual skills in running a business. It was simply a feeding frenzy of stupidity.
IoT is a bunch of people trying to capitalize on a buzzword nobody can define, with technology nobody has yet built, and trying to find other people to help pay for it. It's a though experiment by people who have read far too much science fiction.
Nobody can answer any of these questions because they're still making it up. It's a gold rush to build vapor ware.
It's breathless futurists telling us this is the future without being able to tell us why or how or what we'd do with it. As I said, it's snake oil, nothing more.
It's literally years away from anybody even being able to give plausible use cases, and several years further away from anybody giving a damn about it.
So really, what you're saying is that this is the next big empty bubble that some people will get rich off of. And really, the best way to capitalize on it is to do exactly what they did in the 90's and hire a double-talking marketer to sell vapor ware long enough to get bought out by someone else and walk away with millions.
I think I now have a rough plan to fund my retirement...
What? You thought it was to benefit you? Really? Then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
Well, I knew that couldn't be true since that's what the marketing literature was pushing. I just didn't (and really, still don't) know what it really is for.
Every idiot who says "Yarg, teh internet of things" should get swiftly smacked in the head. Because other than they want a piece of the action, not a single one of them can tell you what it is and why you actually want it.
I've been trying to keep my job skills fresh so I can keep up with the "next big thing". But I'll be damned if I can figure out what the hell IoT really is and why it's taking off. Yes, I know it's connecting things to the internet. But to what end? What real benefit does any of this give you? What makes an internet connected widget worth so much more? What value does connecting it to the internet give you?
I always set my expectations low for things like this. That way it's hard to be disappointed when my expectations are met. But if the show is good I can be pleasantly surprised.
I don't condone hacking but I have to wonder if the original intent was to find specific people of prominence to blackmail. But when they found out that there were basically no women on the site and all the men were being systemically defrauded, they decided to expose the whole company instead. That to me makes a certain amount of sense.
No matter the original intention of the hackers and how it led to the release of the records, I have to wonder how long it will be until the class action lawsuit is filed by the subscribers. And, with as much evidence of widespread and organized fraud as has been released, I have to wonder if the FBI is looking into pursuing any investigation under the RICO statues. Regardless, I have a feeling this story is not going to be over any time soon.
So you think that the Xfinity router without this sharing functionality has no vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Interesting.
Really? "I know you are but what am I?" Seriously? Are you 12 years old?
But to answer your challenge, I know it has vulnerabilities. Anything connected to a network is vulnerable. But I also know that by disabling wifi on the Xfinity router I have disabled one more attack vector. One that any technician at Comcast can easily log into. And if those technicians can get in, hackers can pretty easily do the same. The more attack vectors you can disable, the better. By relegating the Xfinity router to playing nothing more than the role of cable modem and not giving them easy access to the rest of my network, I have made it that much more difficult to attack me.
How is that relevant? I pay for a phone and data service that gives me very good coverage.
How much are you paying for gigabytes of data that you could shift to a cable company's public hotspot, either immediately or by waiting a reasonable time until you're in coverage?
Xfinity wants me to pay to run their infrastructure for a network that gives me zero net gain over what I already have.
In theory, the "net gain" would be dollars that you don't have to pay to your 4G carrier because you are using Xfinity Wi-Fi instead.
Again, what's your point?
This sharing of your home connection is largely irrelevant outside of densely packed neighborhoods where a vast majority of people are sharing wifi. Just getting out onto a major throughway gets you out of range of just about all Xfinitiy wifi and you have no option other than some kind of cell plan. Having "free" wifi doesn't help you when their "network" covers about as much as Kim Kardashian's swimsuit.
How is that relevant? I pay for a phone and data service that gives me very good coverage. Far better coverage than Xfinity. Xfinity wants me to pay to run their infrastructure for a network that gives me zero net gain over what I already have.
I would much prefer the service to require an "opt in", rather than be enabled by default. I get great 4G coverage and don't need to use the very sparse coverage offered by Xfinity home routers. And I don't want to share my bandwidth with others, nor do I want to pay the money for the additional electricity that it takes to turn on the wifi, even if it's just a few cents a month. I'm not going to let the cable company take advantage of me to build their network. If they want to build a network, they should pay for it, rather than suckering everyone into paying to lease the equipment and paying to run it.
I have Comcast internet and I was able to jump through a couple of easy hoops to disable my shared wifi connection. I was even able to completely turn off the wifi they integrated into their modem. For me, it's only a cable modem and nothing more. I run a connection directly to my own personal router that I control.
Sadly, most Comcast/Xfinity customers have no idea they have a really vulnerable wifi connection. They're just happy they can connect their tablet and play their online games. I bet the same will be said for Virgin Media customers as well.
YouTube moving away was indeed a big step. The bigger step that is needed will be when porn moves away from Flash. Until they do, the installed base of flash will not significantly diminish and there will be little incentive for anyone else to move away.
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I've been an embedded engineer for decades as well, writing my first code on a TRaSh-80 model 1 back in 1977 or 1978. I too was connecting things to the internet back in the early days before most everyone had heard of it. Maybe that's our problem. We're too old to "get it". It must be a hipster thing.
It's not a poor excuse. It's a valid reason. Everyone of the engineers I worked on Ada projects with in the past won't touch Ada projects now unless they were desperate for work. We just find it so unpleasant to work on. Sorry but you, as a fan of Ada, are in a very small minority.
Only parts of C++ are non-deterministic. You can write deterministic code in C++ if you limit yourself to a subset of the language.
Thing is, pretty much every language has non-deterministic features. Even Ada. Every language that allows dynamic memory allocation off the heap has the potential for non-deterministic behavior.
I've spent a career in the safety critical world, both in military and defense.
That should be "civilian and defense"...
I would say that since the FAA dropped the Ada mandate near on 20 years ago, there are few to no new projects being developed in Ada. As a former Ada programmer who has worked on avionics systems, the only jobs I see out there are for maintenance and upgrading of legacy software. Every new avionics project I've seen is done in C or in some cases, C++, depending on whether or not they went to the trouble of getting C++ accepted by risk-averse project management.
I've spent a career in the safety critical world, both in military and defense. Coincidentally, I did a short stint in train control as well. I haven't written a line of Ada code since 1998 and it's becoming increasingly rare to see any project still written in Ada. I have not even heard of any train control systems being written in Ada (though that doesn't mean there aren't). All of the new Positive Train Control upgrades being added to train systems are all written in C/C++. That much I can say for certain.
While Ada has some useful features, I found it was more than a bit tedious and cumbersome to use day to day. And while the development environment is solid and bug free, it doesn't get around the fact that bad programmers write bad code in any language. Sure, Ada puts road blocks in front of you but bad programmers are adept at getting around them with surprising frequency. That's not to say bad programmers writing bad code is exclusive to Ada. Bad programmers write bad code in any language. But the whole notion that a language can "prevent" bugs is ludicrous. The best it does is to "help you avoid" bugs. But adherence to a quality coding standard, along with competent people performing code reviews will do that for you no matter what language you use.
In this day and age, Ada certainly qualifies as "little known" because it is a dying language that most young people are never exposed to. It is slowly being displaced by more ubiquitous languages. Sure, there are some passionate adherents who will keep it alive for decades to come. But it will linger on only in a few niche environments, slowly fading into history.
That's a start, but there is also value in having this traffic light know that up the street there's a backup so it might as well let the cross traffic go despite what the sensor is telling it. Or conversely, that light up the street might want to turn green for the group of cars that just went though this one.
Sure. Assuming they have good enough traffic management prediction software that at the very least doesn't make it any worse those things could be a good idea. But that's a "very hard" problem to solve and there are just some times where you have so much cross flowing congestion that there's not much you can do to clear it effectively.
Internet connected appliances are dumb. That was tried during the last bubble.
Then why are they still talking about it?
Yes, we have networked traffic monitoring already and it already goes right to the GPS in your car through the satellite connection.
What does that have to do with connecting my toaster, washing machine, and thermostat to the internet?
I don't know about you but quite a few, if not most or all traffic lights in modern America are triggered either by metal sensors or cameras. They already respond to traffic load and have for decades.
However, I can see the point of having smart cars be aware of traffic patterns, including lights, to help traffic flow and to ease congestion. That would be a "good thing".
But what does that have to do with why I would want to plug my toaster into the internet?
Do you know anything besides marketing-speak? Because I read that and all I hear is the Charlie Brown "Wah Wah" speak.
...and selling it to suckers.
Because there simply is no answer. It's literally people trying to get other people to pay for the development costs to find out what it is and what it's good for.
That's really what I thought it is.
There is no consistent definition, no standards, not even any really good use cases.
It's something people have latched onto, and decided that, even if they have no idea what it means, they want to cash in on it.
People have come up with some things around it, but they've not addressed any real world issues like privacy, security, or what the hell to do with it. It's like in the late 90's, where the frenzy happened around "teh dot com" -- if you had a frickin' website, you had VCs throwing you enough money to make some people rich, and ensure there would be a healthy resale market for Herman Miller Aeron chairs.
You didn't need a business plan, a product, or any actual skills in running a business. It was simply a feeding frenzy of stupidity.
IoT is a bunch of people trying to capitalize on a buzzword nobody can define, with technology nobody has yet built, and trying to find other people to help pay for it. It's a though experiment by people who have read far too much science fiction.
Nobody can answer any of these questions because they're still making it up. It's a gold rush to build vapor ware.
It's breathless futurists telling us this is the future without being able to tell us why or how or what we'd do with it. As I said, it's snake oil, nothing more.
It's literally years away from anybody even being able to give plausible use cases, and several years further away from anybody giving a damn about it.
So really, what you're saying is that this is the next big empty bubble that some people will get rich off of. And really, the best way to capitalize on it is to do exactly what they did in the 90's and hire a double-talking marketer to sell vapor ware long enough to get bought out by someone else and walk away with millions.
I think I now have a rough plan to fund my retirement...
So, all you're saying is that "it's going to help you" without providing any details whatsoever on how or why it will be useful and helpful...
Thanks a pant load, Chet
What? You thought it was to benefit you? Really? Then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
Well, I knew that couldn't be true since that's what the marketing literature was pushing. I just didn't (and really, still don't) know what it really is for.
Every idiot who says "Yarg, teh internet of things" should get swiftly smacked in the head. Because other than they want a piece of the action, not a single one of them can tell you what it is and why you actually want it.
I've been trying to keep my job skills fresh so I can keep up with the "next big thing". But I'll be damned if I can figure out what the hell IoT really is and why it's taking off. Yes, I know it's connecting things to the internet. But to what end? What real benefit does any of this give you? What makes an internet connected widget worth so much more? What value does connecting it to the internet give you?
No one has ever really given me a good answer.
It could be that the report of "shut down or we'll reveal the info" really was "pay us a bunch or we'll reveal the info".
I always set my expectations low for things like this. That way it's hard to be disappointed when my expectations are met. But if the show is good I can be pleasantly surprised.
I don't condone hacking but I have to wonder if the original intent was to find specific people of prominence to blackmail. But when they found out that there were basically no women on the site and all the men were being systemically defrauded, they decided to expose the whole company instead. That to me makes a certain amount of sense.
No matter the original intention of the hackers and how it led to the release of the records, I have to wonder how long it will be until the class action lawsuit is filed by the subscribers. And, with as much evidence of widespread and organized fraud as has been released, I have to wonder if the FBI is looking into pursuing any investigation under the RICO statues. Regardless, I have a feeling this story is not going to be over any time soon.
Technology can solve problems technology creates.
You won't see this happen until someone figures out how to profit off the solution.
So you think that the Xfinity router without this sharing functionality has no vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Interesting.
Really? "I know you are but what am I?" Seriously? Are you 12 years old?
But to answer your challenge, I know it has vulnerabilities. Anything connected to a network is vulnerable. But I also know that by disabling wifi on the Xfinity router I have disabled one more attack vector. One that any technician at Comcast can easily log into. And if those technicians can get in, hackers can pretty easily do the same. The more attack vectors you can disable, the better. By relegating the Xfinity router to playing nothing more than the role of cable modem and not giving them easy access to the rest of my network, I have made it that much more difficult to attack me.
How is that relevant? I pay for a phone and data service that gives me very good coverage.
How much are you paying for gigabytes of data that you could shift to a cable company's public hotspot, either immediately or by waiting a reasonable time until you're in coverage?
Xfinity wants me to pay to run their infrastructure for a network that gives me zero net gain over what I already have.
In theory, the "net gain" would be dollars that you don't have to pay to your 4G carrier because you are using Xfinity Wi-Fi instead.
Again, what's your point? This sharing of your home connection is largely irrelevant outside of densely packed neighborhoods where a vast majority of people are sharing wifi. Just getting out onto a major throughway gets you out of range of just about all Xfinitiy wifi and you have no option other than some kind of cell plan. Having "free" wifi doesn't help you when their "network" covers about as much as Kim Kardashian's swimsuit.
How is that relevant? I pay for a phone and data service that gives me very good coverage. Far better coverage than Xfinity. Xfinity wants me to pay to run their infrastructure for a network that gives me zero net gain over what I already have.
I would much prefer the service to require an "opt in", rather than be enabled by default. I get great 4G coverage and don't need to use the very sparse coverage offered by Xfinity home routers. And I don't want to share my bandwidth with others, nor do I want to pay the money for the additional electricity that it takes to turn on the wifi, even if it's just a few cents a month. I'm not going to let the cable company take advantage of me to build their network. If they want to build a network, they should pay for it, rather than suckering everyone into paying to lease the equipment and paying to run it.
So you think there are no vulnerabilities in the Xfinity router that can be exploited. Interesting.
I have Comcast internet and I was able to jump through a couple of easy hoops to disable my shared wifi connection. I was even able to completely turn off the wifi they integrated into their modem. For me, it's only a cable modem and nothing more. I run a connection directly to my own personal router that I control.
Sadly, most Comcast/Xfinity customers have no idea they have a really vulnerable wifi connection. They're just happy they can connect their tablet and play their online games. I bet the same will be said for Virgin Media customers as well.
YouTube moving away was indeed a big step. The bigger step that is needed will be when porn moves away from Flash. Until they do, the installed base of flash will not significantly diminish and there will be little incentive for anyone else to move away.