Yeah MtGox was big, and this will almost certainly cause bitcoin to take a slide, but there are other exchanges, and Bitcoin is bigger than just MtGox. My prediction: bitcoin will drop a lot, then slowly recover as other exchanges take the load and people see that this is not, in fact, the end of the world.
That's basically what has happened over the last couple of days. After the joint statement on the insolvency of Mt. Gox, the Bitcoin price dove to ~$400, but started to recover not long after; it's now back up to ~$600, which isn't far from where it was before the most recent round of nonsense.
Maybe this will be an object lesson for the libertarians (a very expensive lesson, for some of them). In the real financial world, we used to have "bank panics" all the time. People could lose their life savings if a bank was run poorly or crookedly. Worse, if there was a recession, people were more likely to need their money immediately, so they'd go to the bank to withdraw it – but of course a large portion of deposits had been loaned out and weren't immediately. And since people knew this could happen, they'd rush to withdraw their deposits at the first sign of trouble, since they didn't want to be the one left out in the game of musical chairs. These "bank panics", then, could happen even to well-run banks, and they made recessions far worse than they might otherwise have been. During the 19th century, the U.S. economy was repeatedly devastated by bank panics.
Finally, after the Great Depression and the mother of all bank runs, the government stepped in, because the "free market" obviously wasn't working well in this area and really never had. The answer was to create the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), funded by insurance premiums charged to banks. This ensured that even if a bank did go broke, the FDIC would reimburse depositors up to a certain amount (originally $2,500, but now a quarter of a million dollars). Stockholders might be wiped out, but depositors would be made whole. As intended, this reform restored confidence in the U.S. banking system. There have been quite a few failed banks that went broke, but people with checking or savings accounts at those banks still get their money back.
But didn't that lead to "too big to fail"? Not really. The whole point of the FDIC is that you can let a bank go broke, let the stockholders be wiped out, sell the bank assets at auction, and the federal insurance will make sure the regular depositors – who didn't sign up for extra risk – will get their money back anyway. So why didn't that happen in 2008? It's extremely complicated, but it basically has to do with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. This was legislation passed in 1933 that basically said because banks are federally insured, risky investment activities have to be cordoned off into separate businesses from ordinary consumer banking. In other words, you weren't supposed to be able to run a bank, gamble on risky high-yield investments with the deposits, and then go running to the federal government for a bailout when things went south. They didn't want bankers privatizing profits and socializing costs. But that law was repealed by Phil Gramm in the 1990s. As a result, everything got intermingled – we had massive insured deposits being used to gamble on derivatives that no one understood, and everything was linked to everything else in such a way that one false move would bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. The fear was that if there was not a general bailout for the investment banks (not covered by FDIC) then the whole economy would collapse. Whether that argument was sensible or just self-serving, it's what happened. Since then there have been several attempts, only partially successful, to rein in the exuberant activities of Wall Street to try to stop this from happening again.
Now back to Bitcoin. People in Mt. Gox thought they were keeping their money in a bank. Well, they were – a pre-1933 bank, with no insurance and no guarantees. There was a de facto bank run on Gox a couple months ago, and now it's gone bust and everyone has lost everything. And the libertarians didn't see this coming because they thought FDR was the devil and that all banking regulations are unnecessary.
The new meme on Reddit seems to be that you need to keep your coins in "cold storage" – if you keep them on an exchange and something bad happens, you have only yourself to blame. Imagine the financial papers saying that you can't trust the banks, so y
Having OTA capability encourages vendors to push out incomplete/buggy firmware ("we can always fix it later") and to push out updates without properly testing them ("if it breaks something, we'll just fix it and re-send"). Suffice to say we definitely do not need these kind of perverse incentives on cars.
And that's without even getting into the trouble that a malicious user could potentially cause if they managed to hack the OTA process and sent out spoofed updates to vehicles...
Spencer's scientific views are being affected by his religious beliefs. He is a signatory to a document called An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which holds that Earth was created by "God's intelligent design" and that ecosystems are therefore "robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting". Whatever you might think of this, it is definitely not a scientific statement. Basically, he refuses to accept, for religious reasons, that humans can have an effect on the Earth's climate – in his theology, only God can do that.
Spencer is also a major proponent of the "intelligent design" scam. And both he and John Christy are based out of Alabama, one of the most backward and scientifically illiterate states in the U.S.
Those were decisions that should have made the Xbox One cheaper. It's basically the same architecture as the original Xbox 360, and is well-understood; by comparison the PS4's GDDR5 is luxuriously expensive. Kinect is definitely to blame.
While GDDR5 is definitely more expensive, the price difference isn't that massive, at least when you are a company as large as Sony or Microsoft with the corresponding bulk purchasing power. This estimate indicates that Sony's 8GB of GDDR5 costs about $62, compared to $39 for Microsoft's 8GB of DDR3. Add to that the fact that Microsoft is paying more for a larger APU die to offset the RAM's weakness: roughly $132 compared to $121. (Those figures are estimates, but we know that the XB1 APU die is 363 mm^2, compared to 348 mm^2 for PS4.)
So when you factor the larger and more expensive die into the equation, Microsoft saved a grand total of $12 a unit by going with DDR3 – and in the process, reduced their graphics performance significantly. Like I said, the only sensible explanation is that the Microsoft designers drastically overestimated the cost savings of skimping on primary system RAM, and probably also underestimated the performance hit it would cause because of the die space trade-off.
The Kinect isn't the primary reason that the XB1 costs more and has worse performance than the PS4. The primary reason is that during the design phase, Microsoft's engineers overestimated the cost of GDDR5 RAM. As a result, they decided to go with DDR3 instead of GDDR5 for the 8GB of system memory, and compensate for the slower speeds by including a 32MB cache ("eSRAM") on the die. This cache is so large in terms of die space that it meant there was much less room for GPU – which is why the XB1 only has 768 shaders, compared to the PS4's 1152. Meanwhile, developers have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get decent performance out of the XB1 by carefully managing allocation of the on-die cache, while on the PS4 they can simply rely on all 8GB of memory being fast enough because it's all GDDR5.
So the result of this miscalculation is that the XB1 is more expensive to build (due to a faster die), more complex, and slower. Oops.
Sure, that's why you sign your updates with decent (open source!) cryptography and embed your public key into the router's firmware.
Yes, but if the people writing the factory firmware were that competent, routers wouldn't need updates every week to remain secure.
How many show-stopper bugs are found in the open source firmwares? How many in firewalls like m0n0wall?
The underlying problem is that 99% of electronics firmware is crap. This isn't limited to routers – the hardware design is usually the primary focus of engineering, and firmware is something slapped together at the last minute to get it out the door. Until that attitude changes, these problems will persist.
By default, routers should ship with automatic firmware updates enabled. This should be difficult to disable and robust enough that it'll *just work* with no user intervention.
The problem is that this kind of automatic update process can be a security hole in and of itself. If there is a way for a remote system to send updates to the router's firmware, then there is the potential for a malicious user to spoof the update and send their own custom-crafted exploit code.
It makes sense to cut down on die space and power usage by removing capabilities that almost no one uses. Why should 99% of gamers have to carry the burden for 1% of HPC users? Presumably Nvidia will create a successor card to Tesla that will include full FP64 capability on the Maxwell platform. It won't come cheap, though.
I had understood that anyone with half a brain was on ASICs now.
That's true for Bitcoin, which uses SHA-256 as its hashing protocol. But for Litecoin, Dogecoin, and a bunch of other knock-off "altcoins", the proof-of-work is Scrypt, and that is difficult to support on ASICs because of the memory requirements.
There are some Scrypt ASICs currently being tested, but hash rates are quite modest and they focus more on saving power than on outgunning the top AMD video cards.
WTF does a ROUTER need a hard drive? That just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
These routers don't have a hard drive included. They have a USB port, to which the user can connect an external hard drive, which will then be made accessible on the router's LAN. This lets inexperienced users have network-attached storage without having to go through the process of sharing a network drive (and without having to leave a particular computer powered on all the time). Unfortunately, it looks like they weren't as careful about security in this instance as they should have been.
How is it then that we can afford so much better medical services, so much better air transportation, so much better everything else, but if we want reliable code its going to cost extreme amounts of money?
Actually, we can't afford these things. Medical costs have been rising faster than inflation for years, to the point where they will swallow the rest of the economy whole if nothing is done to increase supply and reduce costs. Airlines don't make money – this has pretty much been a universal rule since deregulation.
Why do you want to take the rules from two of the most screwed-up parts of our economy and apply them to one of the few areas that actually works pretty well?
I'm sure I'll be called naieve, but at least should move the smallest error free program to a much larger size. But none of that will work when given a timeline half what it should be, and inadequate budget.
One thing you're overlooking is that the people who ask for the program often aren't completely clear on exactly what they want. It can't be a "bug" that the programmer is unable to read minds.
In practice, a lot of real-world coding (especially for internal applications) involves the requestors asking the coders to build something and giving a fairly vague description, then bombarding them with clarifications and change requests throughout. There is no way this is going to involve bug-free output.
In reality, the truth is its impossible for most people to write non-trivial programs without bugs. Just like its impossible for most people to consistently land airplanes without crashing. In air travel, 99.9% of those people are weeded out of pilot programs. In programming, they move on to the next project.
Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century. We don't train programmers to be skilled, efficient, and above all conform to an agreed to set of professional standards. There's no such thing as programmer malpractice. Basically the software development industry is exactly where the medical profession would be if everyone owned a medical text from ancient Greece and treated themselves and their friends based on guesswork and late night infomercials.
That analogy doesn't work. Quack medicine is often worse than no medicine at all (there is evidence that, prior to the 20th century, doctors were as likely to kill the patient as to cure them). In contrast, a buggy and incomplete program may still be better than no program at all.
Most of the time, when code gets screwed up, nobody dies. In those cases where shoddy code actually could put lives at risk (e.g. embedded systems for vehicles, medical equipment, etc.) then there usually is more rigorous quality control, better and more comprehensive testing, and so forth. But if you demand that every piece of code in existence be written to those standards, most people and organizations won't be able to afford having any code written at all.
"Today my boss came to me with what he thought to be a valid point and analogy. A builder builds a wall. A week later, bricks begin to fall out of the bottom, but he continues to build the wall higher. In most cases, he would have to replace those lower bricks at his own expense and on his own time. Comparatively: A software developer writes a piece of software. When bugs are discovered, the developer is paid to fix them by the employer and on the employer's time. I didn't know how to refute the analogy at the time, but it did make me think: why are bugs in software treated differently in this way?"
First of all, if the "builder" is an employee, then no, he doesn't have to fix the problem "at his own expense and on his own time". He is legally entitled, at least under US labor law, to be paid for every hour he works. If the builder is a contractor, then that's different – but contractors obviously price this sort of risk into their contracts.
More to the point, as others have noted, there's a big difference between building a brick wall using techniques that have remained standard procedure for decades (if not centuries), and designing software for the purpose of doing a specific task. When you get to building fancy, innovative, one-off buildings, you get all the same sort of bugs and glitches you do in software development. Frank Lloyd Wright's contractors had a hell of a time stopping Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Building from leaking. When people want to do a routine task on computers, they use out-of-the-box software. That, not custom development, is the equivalent of the "standard brick wall".
Obama has a pen and a phone, and he's not afraid to use them.
The Republicans have been looking for an excuse to impeach President Obama that would pass the laugh test. If Obama openly defied a shutdown of surveillance programs, that would give them not only a good reason, but one that might actually have some bipartisan support.
What I think is more likely is that the NSA would keep operating the way they are anyway, with or without Presidential or Congressional authorization. Short of completely de-funding them, there is little that can be done to make them stop. Some other government agencies have been willing to ignore their nominal leaders – for example, some federal prosecutors have brought cases against medical marijuana distributors despite being specifically told not to do so by their boss, Attorney General Holder.
What we really need is "Firefox Classic": a maintainable fork that takes the Firefox code base and strips it down to the essentials, without social networking add-ons or any of that garbage. Sort of like how Firefox itself originally forked off of the Mozilla Application Suite, come to think of it.
The days where Intel's graphics sucked are long over. It's not the 1990s. Intel's graphics are pretty good. Intel's 3rd generation graphics were decent. Almost comparable at the low end with NVIDIA. The newer 4th generation stuff is pretty impressive although unfortunately Iris Pro has been restricted to integrated CPUs and thus no socketed CPUs have it. As a result motherboard manufacturers have chosen to opt out in protest. Nobody ships an Intel Iris Pro mini itx motherboard. In fact there are very few Iris Pro systems. I have one of the very few that exist in fact. It's an ultrabook-like form factor 14â screen.
Iris Pro is decent by laptop standards – reasonably competitive with Nvidia's mid-range discrete offerings (750M).
But on the desktop, even if you could get Iris Pro (which as you noted, you can't), it is decisively beaten by pretty much every graphics card over $100. You can't game at 1080p or use MadVR with maximum settings on Iris Pro.
To be competitive on the desktop, Intel needs something about as powerful as a Radeon HD 7850 or GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. As of now they aren't even close.
-Tegra 5, renamed the K1. Built on the wrong process (not really Nvidia's fault- TSMC and others have failed to make the shrink progress expected years ago when this part was first planned). Using the wrong ARM core (A15), so Nvidia had to announce a later version of the K1 that will come with Nvidia's own 64-bit ARM core. Of course, this means the first K1 is already obsolete, long before it is on sale. First Tegra with PC class GPU cores, but not the NEW Maxwell GPU architecture Nvidia launches on the desktop in a few weeks time (750TI). So, the GPU is also out of date before the K1 goes on sale.
Who is building a phone or tablet with over 4GB of RAM? That's about the only circumstance where you'd need 64-bit ARM cores. In fact, with low-RAM systems, 64-bit can be a positive disadvantage, due to higher memory requirements (because pointers are double the size). There have been quite a few low-memory crashes reported on the iPad Air, which has a 64-bit CPU but only 1GB of RAM. The iPad 4, in contrast, with its 32-bit CPU, doesn't seem to have these issues.
And calling the GPU "out-of-date" is ridiculous. Maxwell hasn't even been released to the desktop yet – if you buy a Nvidia card today, no matter how expensive, it will be Kepler. More to the point, phone/tablet GPUs can only reasonably be compared against other phone/tablet GPUs, not the much larger and more power-hungry desktop offerings. Of course even a $100 desktop graphics card is probably going to decisively beat a tablet GPU, but so what? They are different devices (despite what Steve Ballmer seems to think), designed to do different things. If Kepler can compete on performance per watt with the other GPUs in the mobile space, then it's a viable product. The fact that something better exists on the desktop is neither here nor there.
Everyone wants a classic desktop, but no vendor wants to provide one. Microsoft wants everyone on Metro so they can take a cut of sales through the App Store. The KDE and Gnome teams want to experiment because it's more fun than maintaining a tried-and-true design. Apple is seemingly holding the line for now, but all it takes is one bad VP in the UI team and OSX will become a clone of iOS.
UI designers don't like the desktop metaphor for a variety of complicated philosophical reasons. They think it would be easier for people to learn how to use computers if it was abandoned. Maybe they're right about that – iOS has been very successful among non-technical users because it simplifies things a lot more than a standard W.I.M.P. design – but once you get beyond casual use and into doing real work, multitasking becomes a necessity, and there is still nothing better than a "classic desktop" for that.
This is an incredibly non-intuitive way to do things. Sorting an array of numbers shouldn't require jumping through special hoops. This is one of the many reasons why non-typed languages suck.
MySQL is neither fast, scalable nor standard. I really don't understand what anyone sees in that piece of shit when at the very least they can have PostgreSQL which excels on all accounts and is open sourced. I blame popularity contests.
People use MySQL because it's very easy to get it running and integrated with PHP quickly on a cheap cpanel-based Linux host. For smaller websites, it's adequate. The problem comes when a startup website using MySQL becomes the next big thing – both Wikipedia and Facebook have had to deal with serious scalability issues as a result of this..
Well if leaked screenshots of Windows 8.1 update 1 are true [twitter.com] as well as the boot to desktop which every tech site but slashdot mentioned is coming I would say MS is doing just that.
Still no confirmation on a return of the real Start Menu. Still no return of Aero Glass transparency. Still no option to left-justify the title bar text, as was done on every OS from Win95 to Win7.
I don't care about the ability to run Metro apps in a window, since I don't ever want to see or interact with any Metro apps at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah MtGox was big, and this will almost certainly cause bitcoin to take a slide, but there are other exchanges, and Bitcoin is bigger than just MtGox. My prediction: bitcoin will drop a lot, then slowly recover as other exchanges take the load and people see that this is not, in fact, the end of the world.
That's basically what has happened over the last couple of days. After the joint statement on the insolvency of Mt. Gox, the Bitcoin price dove to ~$400, but started to recover not long after; it's now back up to ~$600, which isn't far from where it was before the most recent round of nonsense.
Maybe this will be an object lesson for the libertarians (a very expensive lesson, for some of them). In the real financial world, we used to have "bank panics" all the time. People could lose their life savings if a bank was run poorly or crookedly. Worse, if there was a recession, people were more likely to need their money immediately, so they'd go to the bank to withdraw it – but of course a large portion of deposits had been loaned out and weren't immediately. And since people knew this could happen, they'd rush to withdraw their deposits at the first sign of trouble, since they didn't want to be the one left out in the game of musical chairs. These "bank panics", then, could happen even to well-run banks, and they made recessions far worse than they might otherwise have been. During the 19th century, the U.S. economy was repeatedly devastated by bank panics.
Finally, after the Great Depression and the mother of all bank runs, the government stepped in, because the "free market" obviously wasn't working well in this area and really never had. The answer was to create the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), funded by insurance premiums charged to banks. This ensured that even if a bank did go broke, the FDIC would reimburse depositors up to a certain amount (originally $2,500, but now a quarter of a million dollars). Stockholders might be wiped out, but depositors would be made whole. As intended, this reform restored confidence in the U.S. banking system. There have been quite a few failed banks that went broke, but people with checking or savings accounts at those banks still get their money back.
But didn't that lead to "too big to fail"? Not really. The whole point of the FDIC is that you can let a bank go broke, let the stockholders be wiped out, sell the bank assets at auction, and the federal insurance will make sure the regular depositors – who didn't sign up for extra risk – will get their money back anyway. So why didn't that happen in 2008? It's extremely complicated, but it basically has to do with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. This was legislation passed in 1933 that basically said because banks are federally insured, risky investment activities have to be cordoned off into separate businesses from ordinary consumer banking. In other words, you weren't supposed to be able to run a bank, gamble on risky high-yield investments with the deposits, and then go running to the federal government for a bailout when things went south. They didn't want bankers privatizing profits and socializing costs. But that law was repealed by Phil Gramm in the 1990s. As a result, everything got intermingled – we had massive insured deposits being used to gamble on derivatives that no one understood, and everything was linked to everything else in such a way that one false move would bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. The fear was that if there was not a general bailout for the investment banks (not covered by FDIC) then the whole economy would collapse. Whether that argument was sensible or just self-serving, it's what happened. Since then there have been several attempts, only partially successful, to rein in the exuberant activities of Wall Street to try to stop this from happening again.
Now back to Bitcoin. People in Mt. Gox thought they were keeping their money in a bank. Well, they were – a pre-1933 bank, with no insurance and no guarantees. There was a de facto bank run on Gox a couple months ago, and now it's gone bust and everyone has lost everything. And the libertarians didn't see this coming because they thought FDR was the devil and that all banking regulations are unnecessary.
The new meme on Reddit seems to be that you need to keep your coins in "cold storage" – if you keep them on an exchange and something bad happens, you have only yourself to blame. Imagine the financial papers saying that you can't trust the banks, so y
Having OTA capability encourages vendors to push out incomplete/buggy firmware ("we can always fix it later") and to push out updates without properly testing them ("if it breaks something, we'll just fix it and re-send"). Suffice to say we definitely do not need these kind of perverse incentives on cars.
And that's without even getting into the trouble that a malicious user could potentially cause if they managed to hack the OTA process and sent out spoofed updates to vehicles...
Spencer's scientific views are being affected by his religious beliefs. He is a signatory to a document called An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which holds that Earth was created by "God's intelligent design" and that ecosystems are therefore "robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting". Whatever you might think of this, it is definitely not a scientific statement. Basically, he refuses to accept, for religious reasons, that humans can have an effect on the Earth's climate – in his theology, only God can do that.
Spencer is also a major proponent of the "intelligent design" scam. And both he and John Christy are based out of Alabama, one of the most backward and scientifically illiterate states in the U.S.
Those were decisions that should have made the Xbox One cheaper. It's basically the same architecture as the original Xbox 360, and is well-understood; by comparison the PS4's GDDR5 is luxuriously expensive. Kinect is definitely to blame.
While GDDR5 is definitely more expensive, the price difference isn't that massive, at least when you are a company as large as Sony or Microsoft with the corresponding bulk purchasing power. This estimate indicates that Sony's 8GB of GDDR5 costs about $62, compared to $39 for Microsoft's 8GB of DDR3. Add to that the fact that Microsoft is paying more for a larger APU die to offset the RAM's weakness: roughly $132 compared to $121. (Those figures are estimates, but we know that the XB1 APU die is 363 mm^2, compared to 348 mm^2 for PS4.)
So when you factor the larger and more expensive die into the equation, Microsoft saved a grand total of $12 a unit by going with DDR3 – and in the process, reduced their graphics performance significantly. Like I said, the only sensible explanation is that the Microsoft designers drastically overestimated the cost savings of skimping on primary system RAM, and probably also underestimated the performance hit it would cause because of the die space trade-off.
The Kinect isn't the primary reason that the XB1 costs more and has worse performance than the PS4. The primary reason is that during the design phase, Microsoft's engineers overestimated the cost of GDDR5 RAM. As a result, they decided to go with DDR3 instead of GDDR5 for the 8GB of system memory, and compensate for the slower speeds by including a 32MB cache ("eSRAM") on the die. This cache is so large in terms of die space that it meant there was much less room for GPU – which is why the XB1 only has 768 shaders, compared to the PS4's 1152. Meanwhile, developers have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get decent performance out of the XB1 by carefully managing allocation of the on-die cache, while on the PS4 they can simply rely on all 8GB of memory being fast enough because it's all GDDR5.
So the result of this miscalculation is that the XB1 is more expensive to build (due to a faster die), more complex, and slower. Oops.
Sure, that's why you sign your updates with decent (open source!) cryptography and embed your public key into the router's firmware.
Yes, but if the people writing the factory firmware were that competent, routers wouldn't need updates every week to remain secure.
How many show-stopper bugs are found in the open source firmwares? How many in firewalls like m0n0wall?
The underlying problem is that 99% of electronics firmware is crap. This isn't limited to routers – the hardware design is usually the primary focus of engineering, and firmware is something slapped together at the last minute to get it out the door. Until that attitude changes, these problems will persist.
By default, routers should ship with automatic firmware updates enabled. This should be difficult to disable and robust enough that it'll *just work* with no user intervention.
The problem is that this kind of automatic update process can be a security hole in and of itself. If there is a way for a remote system to send updates to the router's firmware, then there is the potential for a malicious user to spoof the update and send their own custom-crafted exploit code.
5-10% better than a cheaper rival card that came out 5 months ago.
This is a mobile-first design. Look at the power consumption figures to see why it is a major advance.
It makes sense to cut down on die space and power usage by removing capabilities that almost no one uses. Why should 99% of gamers have to carry the burden for 1% of HPC users? Presumably Nvidia will create a successor card to Tesla that will include full FP64 capability on the Maxwell platform. It won't come cheap, though.
I had understood that anyone with half a brain was on ASICs now.
That's true for Bitcoin, which uses SHA-256 as its hashing protocol. But for Litecoin, Dogecoin, and a bunch of other knock-off "altcoins", the proof-of-work is Scrypt, and that is difficult to support on ASICs because of the memory requirements.
There are some Scrypt ASICs currently being tested, but hash rates are quite modest and they focus more on saving power than on outgunning the top AMD video cards.
WTF does a ROUTER need a hard drive? That just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
These routers don't have a hard drive included. They have a USB port, to which the user can connect an external hard drive, which will then be made accessible on the router's LAN. This lets inexperienced users have network-attached storage without having to go through the process of sharing a network drive (and without having to leave a particular computer powered on all the time). Unfortunately, it looks like they weren't as careful about security in this instance as they should have been.
How is it then that we can afford so much better medical services, so much better air transportation, so much better everything else, but if we want reliable code its going to cost extreme amounts of money?
Actually, we can't afford these things. Medical costs have been rising faster than inflation for years, to the point where they will swallow the rest of the economy whole if nothing is done to increase supply and reduce costs. Airlines don't make money – this has pretty much been a universal rule since deregulation.
Why do you want to take the rules from two of the most screwed-up parts of our economy and apply them to one of the few areas that actually works pretty well?
I'm sure I'll be called naieve, but at least should move the smallest error free program to a much larger size. But none of that will work when given a timeline half what it should be, and inadequate budget.
One thing you're overlooking is that the people who ask for the program often aren't completely clear on exactly what they want. It can't be a "bug" that the programmer is unable to read minds.
In practice, a lot of real-world coding (especially for internal applications) involves the requestors asking the coders to build something and giving a fairly vague description, then bombarding them with clarifications and change requests throughout. There is no way this is going to involve bug-free output.
In reality, the truth is its impossible for most people to write non-trivial programs without bugs. Just like its impossible for most people to consistently land airplanes without crashing. In air travel, 99.9% of those people are weeded out of pilot programs. In programming, they move on to the next project.
Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century. We don't train programmers to be skilled, efficient, and above all conform to an agreed to set of professional standards. There's no such thing as programmer malpractice. Basically the software development industry is exactly where the medical profession would be if everyone owned a medical text from ancient Greece and treated themselves and their friends based on guesswork and late night infomercials.
That analogy doesn't work. Quack medicine is often worse than no medicine at all (there is evidence that, prior to the 20th century, doctors were as likely to kill the patient as to cure them). In contrast, a buggy and incomplete program may still be better than no program at all.
Most of the time, when code gets screwed up, nobody dies. In those cases where shoddy code actually could put lives at risk (e.g. embedded systems for vehicles, medical equipment, etc.) then there usually is more rigorous quality control, better and more comprehensive testing, and so forth. But if you demand that every piece of code in existence be written to those standards, most people and organizations won't be able to afford having any code written at all.
"Today my boss came to me with what he thought to be a valid point and analogy. A builder builds a wall. A week later, bricks begin to fall out of the bottom, but he continues to build the wall higher. In most cases, he would have to replace those lower bricks at his own expense and on his own time. Comparatively: A software developer writes a piece of software. When bugs are discovered, the developer is paid to fix them by the employer and on the employer's time. I didn't know how to refute the analogy at the time, but it did make me think: why are bugs in software treated differently in this way?"
First of all, if the "builder" is an employee, then no, he doesn't have to fix the problem "at his own expense and on his own time". He is legally entitled, at least under US labor law, to be paid for every hour he works. If the builder is a contractor, then that's different – but contractors obviously price this sort of risk into their contracts.
More to the point, as others have noted, there's a big difference between building a brick wall using techniques that have remained standard procedure for decades (if not centuries), and designing software for the purpose of doing a specific task. When you get to building fancy, innovative, one-off buildings, you get all the same sort of bugs and glitches you do in software development. Frank Lloyd Wright's contractors had a hell of a time stopping Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Building from leaking. When people want to do a routine task on computers, they use out-of-the-box software. That, not custom development, is the equivalent of the "standard brick wall".
Obama has a pen and a phone, and he's not afraid to use them.
The Republicans have been looking for an excuse to impeach President Obama that would pass the laugh test. If Obama openly defied a shutdown of surveillance programs, that would give them not only a good reason, but one that might actually have some bipartisan support.
What I think is more likely is that the NSA would keep operating the way they are anyway, with or without Presidential or Congressional authorization. Short of completely de-funding them, there is little that can be done to make them stop. Some other government agencies have been willing to ignore their nominal leaders – for example, some federal prosecutors have brought cases against medical marijuana distributors despite being specifically told not to do so by their boss, Attorney General Holder.
What we really need is "Firefox Classic": a maintainable fork that takes the Firefox code base and strips it down to the essentials, without social networking add-ons or any of that garbage. Sort of like how Firefox itself originally forked off of the Mozilla Application Suite, come to think of it.
The days where Intel's graphics sucked are long over. It's not the 1990s. Intel's graphics are pretty good. Intel's 3rd generation graphics were decent. Almost comparable at the low end with NVIDIA. The newer 4th generation stuff is pretty impressive although unfortunately Iris Pro has been restricted to integrated CPUs and thus no socketed CPUs have it. As a result motherboard manufacturers have chosen to opt out in protest. Nobody ships an Intel Iris Pro mini itx motherboard. In fact there are very few Iris Pro systems. I have one of the very few that exist in fact. It's an ultrabook-like form factor 14â screen.
Iris Pro is decent by laptop standards – reasonably competitive with Nvidia's mid-range discrete offerings (750M).
But on the desktop, even if you could get Iris Pro (which as you noted, you can't), it is decisively beaten by pretty much every graphics card over $100. You can't game at 1080p or use MadVR with maximum settings on Iris Pro.
To be competitive on the desktop, Intel needs something about as powerful as a Radeon HD 7850 or GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. As of now they aren't even close.
-Tegra 5, renamed the K1. Built on the wrong process (not really Nvidia's fault- TSMC and others have failed to make the shrink progress expected years ago when this part was first planned). Using the wrong ARM core (A15), so Nvidia had to announce a later version of the K1 that will come with Nvidia's own 64-bit ARM core. Of course, this means the first K1 is already obsolete, long before it is on sale. First Tegra with PC class GPU cores, but not the NEW Maxwell GPU architecture Nvidia launches on the desktop in a few weeks time (750TI). So, the GPU is also out of date before the K1 goes on sale.
Who is building a phone or tablet with over 4GB of RAM? That's about the only circumstance where you'd need 64-bit ARM cores. In fact, with low-RAM systems, 64-bit can be a positive disadvantage, due to higher memory requirements (because pointers are double the size). There have been quite a few low-memory crashes reported on the iPad Air, which has a 64-bit CPU but only 1GB of RAM. The iPad 4, in contrast, with its 32-bit CPU, doesn't seem to have these issues.
And calling the GPU "out-of-date" is ridiculous. Maxwell hasn't even been released to the desktop yet – if you buy a Nvidia card today, no matter how expensive, it will be Kepler. More to the point, phone/tablet GPUs can only reasonably be compared against other phone/tablet GPUs, not the much larger and more power-hungry desktop offerings. Of course even a $100 desktop graphics card is probably going to decisively beat a tablet GPU, but so what? They are different devices (despite what Steve Ballmer seems to think), designed to do different things. If Kepler can compete on performance per watt with the other GPUs in the mobile space, then it's a viable product. The fact that something better exists on the desktop is neither here nor there.
Everyone wants a classic desktop, but no vendor wants to provide one. Microsoft wants everyone on Metro so they can take a cut of sales through the App Store. The KDE and Gnome teams want to experiment because it's more fun than maintaining a tried-and-true design. Apple is seemingly holding the line for now, but all it takes is one bad VP in the UI team and OSX will become a clone of iOS.
UI designers don't like the desktop metaphor for a variety of complicated philosophical reasons. They think it would be easier for people to learn how to use computers if it was abandoned. Maybe they're right about that – iOS has been very successful among non-technical users because it simplifies things a lot more than a standard W.I.M.P. design – but once you get beyond casual use and into doing real work, multitasking becomes a necessity, and there is still nothing better than a "classic desktop" for that.
This is an incredibly non-intuitive way to do things. Sorting an array of numbers shouldn't require jumping through special hoops. This is one of the many reasons why non-typed languages suck.
MySQL is neither fast, scalable nor standard. I really don't understand what anyone sees in that piece of shit when at the very least they can have PostgreSQL which excels on all accounts and is open sourced. I blame popularity contests.
People use MySQL because it's very easy to get it running and integrated with PHP quickly on a cheap cpanel-based Linux host. For smaller websites, it's adequate. The problem comes when a startup website using MySQL becomes the next big thing – both Wikipedia and Facebook have had to deal with serious scalability issues as a result of this..
MS gives corp. network admins what they want on the desktop, not users.
If that were true, we would never have gotten Windows 8.
Well if leaked screenshots of Windows 8.1 update 1 are true [twitter.com] as well as the boot to desktop which every tech site but slashdot mentioned is coming I would say MS is doing just that.
Still no confirmation on a return of the real Start Menu. Still no return of Aero Glass transparency. Still no option to left-justify the title bar text, as was done on every OS from Win95 to Win7.
I don't care about the ability to run Metro apps in a window, since I don't ever want to see or interact with any Metro apps at all.