(And belaboring the obvious: If we had even simple AI constructs we could automate much of out work force, freeing us up for more leisurely pursuits. Whether this leads to a post-scarcity utopia or unemployment/welfare apocalypse depends on your political affiliation.)
Or what it means to be rich and poor will be redefined. Having performances by skilled musicians in your home all the time used to be the mark of the fabulously wealthy, but now virtually anyone can afford to do it (provided you're satisfied with radio or recordings).
Why can't they do it the way that satellites do - all control operations are sent encrypted.
Because the SCADA vendor probably had encryption as an option that you had to pay extra for, and management wanted to chisel another few bucks off the setup costs.
There is an old-school engineering mentality that is pervasive based on the old adage "if it ain't broke don't fix it".
The problem with that is, by putting it on the internet, they've broken it (even if the breakage hasn't hit home yet). Nobody wants to admit that they've done that, but it's their own damn fault. A good start to fixing things would be to airgap the SCADA network from the internet, and if connecting is necessary at all, to use a good double firewall with hardened DMZ machine in between. The DMZ can be locked down hard and updated carefully, and it doesn't need to ever hold systems that need careful certifying as it should never be in the control loop; just out of band monitoring.
The GP was saying that credit cards were better than cash (for larger stores at least, where he's seen the evidence), oh AC who doesn't even read the message he is replying to. That's a new low, even for Slashdot.
Only in cultures where the dominant cultural gestalt is white-male and insists that everyone conform to that model, and then only because when you've got a culture that insists that everyone conforms, to insist on being different at all is to be a dissenter. You're just reacting as would be expected by someone who is a fully conforming minor member of the dominant culture, defending against any threat you perceive, no matter how small.
Like many people, I have Java installed but don't have the browser plugin enabled. This means that the remote-exploitable attack surface is zero; if you don't provide a route for the attacker to get to anything vulnerable, you're totally defended from that whole class of attacks. With applications where you've already installed them locally and which don't download extra code from random locations, the nature of these issues is entirely different. (Any language which it is impossible to deliberately write an insecure program in is a language that's been castrated to the point where you can't write an interesting program at all.)
So, what about the problems in Java that are not part of the plugin? Those are the ones which it is important to know about, but TFA was extremely light on detail.
The big problem is that we don't ship languages with telemetry that reports when they fail to work.
If you ever get that sort of thing turned on, you'll get a shitstorm of people complaining about how you're doing the work of the NSA/stealing their commercial ideas/etc. Yes, it does mean that you can't see the problems directly, but you've got to put up with it.
And telemetry probably wouldn't help you detect the case where someone is trying to do something and failing because they can't figure out where to begin. Those are some of the cases that you really want to catch; merely seeing what exceptions get thrown (or something like that) is nothing like as useful.
What part of "we can't squeeze any more transistors onto a chip" do you not understand?
If you drop the requirement to have them all work together on a single problem in a coordinated fashion, you can squeeze more on. For example, you can use larger chips (duh!) and have a way to cope with some of the cores being non-functional due to manufacturing flaws (as the number of defects per wafer is approximately constant). But that's a very different way of working.
there are no languages so bad that someone has not built a large application with it
Actually, there are loads of them. They're typically called toys, usually on the grounds that they lack a full interface to the OS or a proper library mechanism (you won't go very far without those). But they're still programming languages, and if you exclude them you've strongly biased your sample.
I doubt you'll find many people who have written a web browser in Befunge...
Slashdot (which is overwhelmingly comprised of the comments made by its members) appears to have remained approximately static in terms of its politics, preferring to value people who can make a coherent argument backed by proper facts to favouring any particular party or political theory. If you're interpreting this as "increasingly leftist", that's probably due to your politics lurching rightwards far more rapidly than you think.
Is this just the normal drift right that usually (but not always) comes with age? Or is someone in your environment encouraging this attitudinal shift for their own ends? (If the latter, are you sure they've got your best interests at heart? Chances are not, assuming my thesis has some weight...)
That's an over-simplification due to the widespread prevalence of multi-core CPUs and operating systems with preemptive (i.e., clock-driven and environment-driven) multitasking and interrupts. These things make even things that are clearly computers be non-deterministic. That "computers are deterministic" is merely a useful model of the world, not reality.
They are going to have a problem with mice on the roads. What will the spray to deal with the mice? Fish. The fish will attract cats who will eat the mice. But then there will be a cat problem, so they will have to spray...
You obviously don't know cats; they like cheese too. Or at least our cats do. That means you can save on the fish spray...
It seems unlikely that half of FedEx and UPS board of directors are actively trying to sabotage their company for ideological reasons.
No, but it's certainly been the case in the past that companies have effectively-sabotaged themselves just to make the next quarter's numbers on Wall St look good. I wouldn't say that that's necessarily happened in this case, but it's unwise for you to assume it can't. Stupidity trumps ideology (well, it does when ideology isn't just stupidity in a silly hat; stupidity never trumps stupidity, it just adds together).
Yes, because a general CPU can handle much more complex code efficiently than a GPU can. Using a GPU well requires writing code in a form that is suitable for it; this works well for some algorithms, others can be twisted to work that way, and yet others simply will never be a good fit.
What's holding them back? I'd have thought it was obvious!
The big issue with GPGPU for DB work is that you have to have the DB entirely in memory or your performance will suck (even SSDs aren't that fast). To get a big database to work in such a scenario, you have to split it into many smaller pieces, but that makes working with these sorts of things expensive even with an open source DB. The paper even says this. That makes this sort of work only really interesting for people with significant budgets, and they can easily use a commercial DB; the additional cost isn't prohibitive in that scenario.
Without general hardware availability, there's just that not many people pushing to have the feature; OSS thrives on having many people want it and many developers able to work on it.
Slashdot Mirror
behold the infinite loop is born!
Good. Any language that can't do an infinite loop is rubbish.
(And belaboring the obvious: If we had even simple AI constructs we could automate much of out work force, freeing us up for more leisurely pursuits. Whether this leads to a post-scarcity utopia or unemployment/welfare apocalypse depends on your political affiliation.)
Or what it means to be rich and poor will be redefined. Having performances by skilled musicians in your home all the time used to be the mark of the fabulously wealthy, but now virtually anyone can afford to do it (provided you're satisfied with radio or recordings).
Why can't they do it the way that satellites do - all control operations are sent encrypted.
Because the SCADA vendor probably had encryption as an option that you had to pay extra for, and management wanted to chisel another few bucks off the setup costs.
There is an old-school engineering mentality that is pervasive based on the old adage "if it ain't broke don't fix it".
The problem with that is, by putting it on the internet, they've broken it (even if the breakage hasn't hit home yet). Nobody wants to admit that they've done that, but it's their own damn fault. A good start to fixing things would be to airgap the SCADA network from the internet, and if connecting is necessary at all, to use a good double firewall with hardened DMZ machine in between. The DMZ can be locked down hard and updated carefully, and it doesn't need to ever hold systems that need careful certifying as it should never be in the control loop; just out of band monitoring.
Just cut up the cards and go back to using cash. A simple solution that has a proven track record of not being able to be hacked.
The methods of hacking cash-based systems are rather older, and tend to start with crimes like armed robbery.
Better than what?
The GP was saying that credit cards were better than cash (for larger stores at least, where he's seen the evidence), oh AC who doesn't even read the message he is replying to. That's a new low, even for Slashdot.
Diversity is code for anti-white-male.
Only in cultures where the dominant cultural gestalt is white-male and insists that everyone conform to that model, and then only because when you've got a culture that insists that everyone conforms, to insist on being different at all is to be a dissenter. You're just reacting as would be expected by someone who is a fully conforming minor member of the dominant culture, defending against any threat you perceive, no matter how small.
You're a cultural lymphocyte. Congratulations!
Like many people, I have Java installed but don't have the browser plugin enabled. This means that the remote-exploitable attack surface is zero; if you don't provide a route for the attacker to get to anything vulnerable, you're totally defended from that whole class of attacks. With applications where you've already installed them locally and which don't download extra code from random locations, the nature of these issues is entirely different. (Any language which it is impossible to deliberately write an insecure program in is a language that's been castrated to the point where you can't write an interesting program at all.)
So, what about the problems in Java that are not part of the plugin? Those are the ones which it is important to know about, but TFA was extremely light on detail.
The big problem is that we don't ship languages with telemetry that reports when they fail to work.
If you ever get that sort of thing turned on, you'll get a shitstorm of people complaining about how you're doing the work of the NSA/stealing their commercial ideas/etc. Yes, it does mean that you can't see the problems directly, but you've got to put up with it.
And telemetry probably wouldn't help you detect the case where someone is trying to do something and failing because they can't figure out where to begin. Those are some of the cases that you really want to catch; merely seeing what exceptions get thrown (or something like that) is nothing like as useful.
How about making Congress a LIFETIME elected position?
Hanging them from a lamppost after a set number of years? Sounds good...
Some implications:
Looks like you had a parallelism problem right there!
What part of "we can't squeeze any more transistors onto a chip" do you not understand?
If you drop the requirement to have them all work together on a single problem in a coordinated fashion, you can squeeze more on. For example, you can use larger chips (duh!) and have a way to cope with some of the cores being non-functional due to manufacturing flaws (as the number of defects per wafer is approximately constant). But that's a very different way of working.
there are no languages so bad that someone has not built a large application with it
Actually, there are loads of them. They're typically called toys, usually on the grounds that they lack a full interface to the OS or a proper library mechanism (you won't go very far without those). But they're still programming languages, and if you exclude them you've strongly biased your sample.
I doubt you'll find many people who have written a web browser in Befunge...
Slashdot's increasingly leftist audience
Slashdot (which is overwhelmingly comprised of the comments made by its members) appears to have remained approximately static in terms of its politics, preferring to value people who can make a coherent argument backed by proper facts to favouring any particular party or political theory. If you're interpreting this as "increasingly leftist", that's probably due to your politics lurching rightwards far more rapidly than you think.
Is this just the normal drift right that usually (but not always) comes with age? Or is someone in your environment encouraging this attitudinal shift for their own ends? (If the latter, are you sure they've got your best interests at heart? Chances are not, assuming my thesis has some weight...)
Obviously he is way off on some things, but that just goes to show how difficult it is to predict future developments.
Of course. Prediction is known to be difficult, especially about the future.
Global governance is "badly needed"?
Sure. We don't seem to be getting very much of it right now. (No, the US's imperial policy of the past 20 years is not a substitute.)
hell is ed.
No, there's also EDLIN, which is a retarded knock-off of ed.
NSA probably has direct access to M$ CVS
That would do the NSA very little good indeed; Microsoft has never used CVS for anything.
Computers are deterministic.
That's an over-simplification due to the widespread prevalence of multi-core CPUs and operating systems with preemptive (i.e., clock-driven and environment-driven) multitasking and interrupts. These things make even things that are clearly computers be non-deterministic. That "computers are deterministic" is merely a useful model of the world, not reality.
What is a much bigger problem is coder schools who teach languages but not methods.
They do teach methods! Classes and inheritance too...
They are going to have a problem with mice on the roads. What will the spray to deal with the mice? Fish. The fish will attract cats who will eat the mice. But then there will be a cat problem, so they will have to spray ...
You obviously don't know cats; they like cheese too. Or at least our cats do. That means you can save on the fish spray...
It seems unlikely that half of FedEx and UPS board of directors are actively trying to sabotage their company for ideological reasons.
No, but it's certainly been the case in the past that companies have effectively-sabotaged themselves just to make the next quarter's numbers on Wall St look good. I wouldn't say that that's necessarily happened in this case, but it's unwise for you to assume it can't. Stupidity trumps ideology (well, it does when ideology isn't just stupidity in a silly hat; stupidity never trumps stupidity, it just adds together).
Yes, because a general CPU can handle much more complex code efficiently than a GPU can. Using a GPU well requires writing code in a form that is suitable for it; this works well for some algorithms, others can be twisted to work that way, and yet others simply will never be a good fit.
Java only creates the threads it's told to create.
But it is often told to create a lot of them. (Plus there's a number of system threads about too, but not that many.)
What's holding them back? I'd have thought it was obvious!
The big issue with GPGPU for DB work is that you have to have the DB entirely in memory or your performance will suck (even SSDs aren't that fast). To get a big database to work in such a scenario, you have to split it into many smaller pieces, but that makes working with these sorts of things expensive even with an open source DB. The paper even says this. That makes this sort of work only really interesting for people with significant budgets, and they can easily use a commercial DB; the additional cost isn't prohibitive in that scenario.
Without general hardware availability, there's just that not many people pushing to have the feature; OSS thrives on having many people want it and many developers able to work on it.