Presumably the "crappy and simple" compiler is written directly in machine language. That's the only way the GP's thesis works out.
However, I highly doubt that you can write even a crappy and simple C compiler in machine language "in a few weeks". Unless "few" is measured in the hundreds.
(FWIW, I don't claim to be the world's foremost expert in this stuff, but I did my master's thesis on compiler construction, so I do at least know a little bit on this topic).
The OS, loader and CPU are minor issues, as they do not have the power to analyze your code.
You mean are not supposed to have. You are being awfully trusting here of un-analyzed code.
And getting a compiler you trust is simple: Write it yourself.
In what universe is that simple? Writing a functional C compiler takes on the order of man-decades. C++ is a factor of 10 longer. For a large team, you'd have to somehow be able to trust your entire team (and your network security!) for that entire time. For a single person, it would be a lifetime's work (or more).
It doesn't do anything about the same issue with linkers, the OS's executable loader, your CPU, etc. I suppose you could also try to apply the same concept to then, but them you get to my next issue...
If your problem is that you don't know if you can trust your compilers, a solution that starts with "first, go get a trusted compiler" is kind of an infinitely recursive solution.
According to Ken Thompson, if you don't also analyze all the tools involved in the software build and load process at the machine code level, you still can't really trust the code. That means compilers, linkers, loaders, etc. Someone who knows what they are doing, and has enough motiviation to go through the effort, could insert code into a compiler that does whatever they want when your code is built with it, and hides itself at the source level.
These days CPUs are sophisticated enough that you probably would need to check them (and any microcode layer they may have) as well.
Steve Jobs' gifts were mostly in the areas of industrial design and marketing. He was not really all that much of a techie.
A much better comparison would be with Steve Wozniak. He's an actual techie who designed important things. How many moves have been made of that guy (not counting supporting parts in those 8 Steve Jobs movies)? Or perhaps Jay Miner, who was central to the design of both the old Atari video game system (the machine that popularized home gaming), their 8-bit computer line, and the Amiga. Not a lot of folks I knew growing up had Apple II's (I think I knew of one), but all my friends had Atari's and Amigas. So how many movies have been made about that guy? None that I know of.
There is an issue here, but its that techies like Grace Hopper aren't nearly as interesting to the general public as charasmatic salesmen like Jobs.
bogus profiles of attractive women and even created a fake online news organization to get digitally closer to more than 2,000 U.S. military members, defense contractors and lobbyists it wanted to spy on,
Wait! So the Iranians actually created Fox News as a way to mess with the minds of American right wingers, and undermine the country?
Why, that's just...well...actually it explains a lot.
I've got two kids and a third due in about 9 weeks. My best advice to parents-to-be is to ignore all the advice you'll get (small joke there.) Everyone you meet will think they know better than you what being a parent will be like, and that they know best how you should raise your child. Many of them will then offer that advice in strong terms, even when you clearly don't want/need it. Listen to them, nod politely, and go on doing it the way you think best.
Father of three now all in "endgame" (college, high-school, and jr. high) here. This is the single best piece of advice that can be given IMHO. Some of us have a personality that is naturally inclined this way anyway. However, you may have a partner who is not. Some people live for praise and really take any criticism to heart. If so, its part of your job to help them deflect the bullshit. Believe me, it is incoming from every quarter.
2 - he gets less hen-pecking and judging that I do. With our first-born, family would let me know that I "was doing wrong", and I'd believe it (see number one). But a caring father is like a super-hero here and does not get that much crap.
This one is huge IMHO. Probably people who aren't looking at it from the outside like I do as a dad don't notice this so much, but society is just insanely judgmental toward mothers. There are shelves full of books with contradictory things in them that mothers are told they have to follow exactly, or risk their kids turning into mental defectives and/or serial killers. TV and radio is chock full of these snake-oil salesmen too. Anybody who listens to all that crap is guaranteed to be driven insane. Other parents are horrible too, as they are constantly telling you about their kid's latest exploits, or the ridiculous amount of activities they have the poor little bastards doing. And then grandparents, teachers, and random people in general expect that you've somehow got a magic remote control for all your little mentally-developing rugrats, and thus any misbehavior or unseemly exuberance on their part is somehow the mom's fault.
But not a single one of these folks knows your specific kids very well, or the context in which they are operating. Only you know that, and thus only you really have all the information to know how to deal with them properly. Everyone else should really be told to pound sand. Daily.
The fact is that kids are their own people. They aren't our slaves, parents don't get to tell them what to think, and have only very limited control over their behavior. The best we can really do is try to steer them in the right directions as they slowly (painfully slowly) learn how to behave in the world in a way that won't get them beaten up, fired, or arrested as adults. Every single one of them will screw up, no matter how awesome their parents are. You can't program them, and the right source code for them isn't in a book somewhere.
Some are even flat out doomed from the start. Everyone is born with different brains, and it takes a certain amount of empathy and self-control to be a functioning human being in our society. If you don't have that capacity, no amount of great parenting is going to fix it. Its a hardware problem, not a software problem. Beating up their parents, who often raise multiple other wildly successful kids, doesn't do anyone a lick of good.
Guillotine, Hanging, Firing Squad and the Electric Chair.
All those are bad news, not because they hurt the subject*, but because they make the viewers uncomfortable. This country has overwhelming support for the Death Penalty, but only if the people are killed in a completely bloodless antiseptic way, like we all see on TV cop shows every week.
(*Not that I'm saying none of the above actually hurt the subject. They all probably do. However, we just call them "criminals" or "monsters" rather than human beings, and then nobody cares any more. Its really just a definitional problem).
This sounds like a good idea to me. But if they are going to start using social media, why not take it one step further and actually post their inspections as "reviews" on Yelp? Send tweets out when they shut a place down. ("Shutting down @LaSemonlia for falsely labeling as "Chicken Quesadilla" their cucaracha surprise. #NoBueno")
, the Mayor, the Army, and the Fire Department all pointed fingers at each other, adding fuel to the administrative confusion that reigned during the fire
Quick note to the folks at buffalo.edu: As a matter of English sentence design, perhaps it isn't the best idea to use a fire metaphor smack dab in the middle of a sentence talking about real-life fires. Unless what they mean was that the Mayor, the Army, and the Fire Department all burned to death in the fire while they were arguing.
Is it sad that we've come so far as to have a company make a press release assuring customers and peering partners, that they will continue to abide by industry practices
Not assuring so much as adversiting. Like our old industry practices are now a great new differentiator between Google and their competitors.
This is precisely how Google kicked their search engine competitors to the curb 15 years ago; by treating their users as their customers who have choice, rather than as sheep to be sheared. The sad thing is that this is apparently some amazingly complex business concept that is far too exotic for typical companies to wrap their greedy little minds around.
Why not? Where elephants live, they are a keystone species [wikipedia.org].
That's because they have lived there for millions of years, so the rest of the species in their environment have had plenty of time to adapt ways to deal with the destruction they cause. We have another word for "keystone species" when they are dropped into a different environment that hasn't any adaptations to deal with them: Invasive species.
And of course they're all teaching to the state end of course tests too, probably because those are used to measure administrators' performances.
Parent of 3 school-age kids here, and this right here really bugs the bejeebers out of me. For normal school tests, the ones that count for my own kids grades during the year, and their own ability to get into college, etc., I don't hear a peep out of a teacher ever. I don't even know they are happening unless I interrogate my kids every day.
But when those EOI tests come around, which are important for the teachers and schools but don't do squat for my own kids, they damn sure let me know all about it! I get voicemails. I get emails. I get robocalls. Their grandparents get called. I messages sent home with the kids. All informing me how important it is that this one day they get lots of sleep and a good morning breakfast.(!) Even worse, the kids come home all stressed about it, so I know the teachers have been beating on them about it at school too. Over a test that doesn't help them at all.
This is actually one of the "better" school districts in the state too. But after a 15 years of this, its pretty clear that the system is not set up in a way that makes my kid's grades a priority for the school or for their teachers. Its gotten to the point that I've set the caller picture for the school's robo-calls to the album cover for Queen's News of the World, so I can instantly recognize them.
Next we'll see pictures of a whole bunch of different celebrities holding up white cards with #bringbackourspot written on them.
My first guess would be Madonna, since her cheek seems to have lost a spot sometime around 1992. Also, Lady Gaga seems to keep losing hers and finding it again on another part of her face. So they can empathize.
If you think this joke went over badly with actual Nuclear Physicists, you should have seen the blank stares I got when I tried it out on a crowd of English majors.
You really enjoyed a Web development class? That's wonderful. But who's to say you won't enjoy your Junior year Operating Systems development class even more? Or your Programming Languages class? Or VLSI design? Or Database design? Or...
Now's your time to learn. Don't put everything you have into a swing on the very first pitch across the plate.
Well it more like that the "rules" set out in the EO are just a description of the goals of the EO, which Treasury uses as a guideline when they are deciding exactly which people and organizations will get their money blocked. However, its still Treasury deciding on a person-by-person and company-by-company basis who is getting blocked. If they feel like not blocking a specific company, and the POTUS (whose order they are following) is OK with that, that's currently their prerogative.
Again, if we want an actual rule that can be applied rather than a list subject to the whims of one guy, that's what laws are for. I'm sure Congress will be getting around to that any day now.
Maybe the US Government should stop issuing overreaching executive orders.
For that to happen, it would have to start producing laws again. All Congress produces right now is campaign events, and days off for themselves. Passing a law that the POTUS supports might make him look good, and we can't have that. Passing a law that the POTUS doesn't support would require a 2/3 majority, which would require working with a lot of Democrats, who might also end up looking good, so we can't have that either.
In the meantime, executive orders are the only way left to keep the government staggering along in a manner vaguely resembling a real functioning government.
SpaceX said that since Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin was the head of their space agency, payments to the agency were effectively payments to him. The U.S. departments of Commerce, State, and the Treasury all sent letters to the court saying this was not the case, and the court agreed
Please nobody get worked up arguing against this statement, because that's not really what their arguments were.
The key phrase from the Judge's ruling is:
These letters collectively explain that, “to the best of [the relevant Department’s]
knowledge, purchases from and payments to NPO Energomash currently do not directly or
indirectly contravene Executive Order 13,661.”
However, that's not how I read the attached letters at all. The first three all effectively say, "Yes, if Rogozin controls Energomash, that looks like it would qualify, but only the Treasury Department can officially make that call."
The Fourth is actually from the Treasury Department (so its the important one), and it essentially says "it looks like something that technically falls under the order. However, we have to officially say that an entity is blocked before it is, and we don't want to say that about Energomash right now." So basically they get to pick and chose each and every entity to be affected by the Executive Order, and this isn't (yet) one they've picked.
That makes a certain amount of sense. Because all of this comes from an Executive Order, its really up to the "Executive" (the POTUS), and those under him, who or what gets blocked. If we'd like a general rule that can be applied broadly, that's what laws are for.
"Computer" used to be a job description, not a piece of machinery. Businesses that had to do a lot of number crunching would hire rooms full of people who did nothing but arithmetic all day. Now we can do that easily with machines.
Sometimes, its a good thing that certain careers are going away. It means we can reserve our human brainpower for more important problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably the "crappy and simple" compiler is written directly in machine language. That's the only way the GP's thesis works out.
However, I highly doubt that you can write even a crappy and simple C compiler in machine language "in a few weeks". Unless "few" is measured in the hundreds.
(FWIW, I don't claim to be the world's foremost expert in this stuff, but I did my master's thesis on compiler construction, so I do at least know a little bit on this topic).
The OS, loader and CPU are minor issues, as they do not have the power to analyze your code.
You mean are not supposed to have. You are being awfully trusting here of un-analyzed code.
And getting a compiler you trust is simple: Write it yourself.
In what universe is that simple? Writing a functional C compiler takes on the order of man-decades. C++ is a factor of 10 longer. For a large team, you'd have to somehow be able to trust your entire team (and your network security!) for that entire time. For a single person, it would be a lifetime's work (or more).
According to Ken Thompson, if you don't also analyze all the tools involved in the software build and load process at the machine code level, you still can't really trust the code. That means compilers, linkers, loaders, etc. Someone who knows what they are doing, and has enough motiviation to go through the effort, could insert code into a compiler that does whatever they want when your code is built with it, and hides itself at the source level.
These days CPUs are sophisticated enough that you probably would need to check them (and any microcode layer they may have) as well.
Steve Jobs' gifts were mostly in the areas of industrial design and marketing. He was not really all that much of a techie.
A much better comparison would be with Steve Wozniak. He's an actual techie who designed important things. How many moves have been made of that guy (not counting supporting parts in those 8 Steve Jobs movies)? Or perhaps Jay Miner, who was central to the design of both the old Atari video game system (the machine that popularized home gaming), their 8-bit computer line, and the Amiga. Not a lot of folks I knew growing up had Apple II's (I think I knew of one), but all my friends had Atari's and Amigas. So how many movies have been made about that guy? None that I know of.
There is an issue here, but its that techies like Grace Hopper aren't nearly as interesting to the general public as charasmatic salesmen like Jobs.
Don't forget to audit the compilers too. And the compiler's compilers...
bogus profiles of attractive women and even created a fake online news organization to get digitally closer to more than 2,000 U.S. military members, defense contractors and lobbyists it wanted to spy on,
Wait! So the Iranians actually created Fox News as a way to mess with the minds of American right wingers, and undermine the country?
Why, that's just...well...actually it explains a lot.
MSGBOX( "Fuck You, America" )
This must be the much-vaunted "replace" portion of the Republican "Repeal and Replace" slogan.
I've got two kids and a third due in about 9 weeks. My best advice to parents-to-be is to ignore all the advice you'll get (small joke there.) Everyone you meet will think they know better than you what being a parent will be like, and that they know best how you should raise your child. Many of them will then offer that advice in strong terms, even when you clearly don't want/need it. Listen to them, nod politely, and go on doing it the way you think best.
Father of three now all in "endgame" (college, high-school, and jr. high) here. This is the single best piece of advice that can be given IMHO. Some of us have a personality that is naturally inclined this way anyway. However, you may have a partner who is not. Some people live for praise and really take any criticism to heart. If so, its part of your job to help them deflect the bullshit. Believe me, it is incoming from every quarter.
2 - he gets less hen-pecking and judging that I do. With our first-born, family would let me know that I "was doing wrong", and I'd believe it (see number one). But a caring father is like a super-hero here and does not get that much crap.
This one is huge IMHO. Probably people who aren't looking at it from the outside like I do as a dad don't notice this so much, but society is just insanely judgmental toward mothers. There are shelves full of books with contradictory things in them that mothers are told they have to follow exactly, or risk their kids turning into mental defectives and/or serial killers. TV and radio is chock full of these snake-oil salesmen too. Anybody who listens to all that crap is guaranteed to be driven insane. Other parents are horrible too, as they are constantly telling you about their kid's latest exploits, or the ridiculous amount of activities they have the poor little bastards doing. And then grandparents, teachers, and random people in general expect that you've somehow got a magic remote control for all your little mentally-developing rugrats, and thus any misbehavior or unseemly exuberance on their part is somehow the mom's fault.
But not a single one of these folks knows your specific kids very well, or the context in which they are operating. Only you know that, and thus only you really have all the information to know how to deal with them properly. Everyone else should really be told to pound sand. Daily.
The fact is that kids are their own people. They aren't our slaves, parents don't get to tell them what to think, and have only very limited control over their behavior. The best we can really do is try to steer them in the right directions as they slowly (painfully slowly) learn how to behave in the world in a way that won't get them beaten up, fired, or arrested as adults. Every single one of them will screw up, no matter how awesome their parents are. You can't program them, and the right source code for them isn't in a book somewhere.
Some are even flat out doomed from the start. Everyone is born with different brains, and it takes a certain amount of empathy and self-control to be a functioning human being in our society. If you don't have that capacity, no amount of great parenting is going to fix it. Its a hardware problem, not a software problem. Beating up their parents, who often raise multiple other wildly successful kids, doesn't do anyone a lick of good.
Make the firing squads circular, and you'd solve a few more problems.
Guillotine, Hanging, Firing Squad and the Electric Chair.
All those are bad news, not because they hurt the subject*, but because they make the viewers uncomfortable. This country has overwhelming support for the Death Penalty, but only if the people are killed in a completely bloodless antiseptic way, like we all see on TV cop shows every week.
(*Not that I'm saying none of the above actually hurt the subject. They all probably do. However, we just call them "criminals" or "monsters" rather than human beings, and then nobody cares any more. Its really just a definitional problem).
This sounds like a good idea to me. But if they are going to start using social media, why not take it one step further and actually post their inspections as "reviews" on Yelp? Send tweets out when they shut a place down. ("Shutting down @LaSemonlia for falsely labeling as "Chicken Quesadilla" their cucaracha surprise. #NoBueno")
, the Mayor, the Army, and the Fire Department all pointed fingers at each other, adding fuel to the administrative confusion that reigned during the fire
Quick note to the folks at buffalo.edu: As a matter of English sentence design, perhaps it isn't the best idea to use a fire metaphor smack dab in the middle of a sentence talking about real-life fires. Unless what they mean was that the Mayor, the Army, and the Fire Department all burned to death in the fire while they were arguing.
In which case, well done. Carry on.
Is it sad that we've come so far as to have a company make a press release assuring customers and peering partners, that they will continue to abide by industry practices
Not assuring so much as adversiting. Like our old industry practices are now a great new differentiator between Google and their competitors.
This is precisely how Google kicked their search engine competitors to the curb 15 years ago; by treating their users as their customers who have choice, rather than as sheep to be sheared. The sad thing is that this is apparently some amazingly complex business concept that is far too exotic for typical companies to wrap their greedy little minds around.
Why not? Where elephants live, they are a keystone species [wikipedia.org].
That's because they have lived there for millions of years, so the rest of the species in their environment have had plenty of time to adapt ways to deal with the destruction they cause. We have another word for "keystone species" when they are dropped into a different environment that hasn't any adaptations to deal with them: Invasive species.
And of course they're all teaching to the state end of course tests too, probably because those are used to measure administrators' performances.
Parent of 3 school-age kids here, and this right here really bugs the bejeebers out of me. For normal school tests, the ones that count for my own kids grades during the year, and their own ability to get into college, etc., I don't hear a peep out of a teacher ever. I don't even know they are happening unless I interrogate my kids every day.
But when those EOI tests come around, which are important for the teachers and schools but don't do squat for my own kids, they damn sure let me know all about it! I get voicemails. I get emails. I get robocalls. Their grandparents get called. I messages sent home with the kids. All informing me how important it is that this one day they get lots of sleep and a good morning breakfast.(!) Even worse, the kids come home all stressed about it, so I know the teachers have been beating on them about it at school too. Over a test that doesn't help them at all.
This is actually one of the "better" school districts in the state too. But after a 15 years of this, its pretty clear that the system is not set up in a way that makes my kid's grades a priority for the school or for their teachers. Its gotten to the point that I've set the caller picture for the school's robo-calls to the album cover for Queen's News of the World, so I can instantly recognize them.
Next we'll see pictures of a whole bunch of different celebrities holding up white cards with #bringbackourspot written on them.
My first guess would be Madonna, since her cheek seems to have lost a spot sometime around 1992. Also, Lady Gaga seems to keep losing hers and finding it again on another part of her face. So they can empathize.
If you think this joke went over badly with actual Nuclear Physicists, you should have seen the blank stares I got when I tried it out on a crowd of English majors.
uranium 233 has been created, and 96 kilograms of the stuff (enough to fuel 12 nuclear weapons) is now missing from the US national inventory
In addition, they have about 96 kilograms of lead that they don't remember ordering. And the situation gets worse every day!
You really enjoyed a Web development class? That's wonderful. But who's to say you won't enjoy your Junior year Operating Systems development class even more? Or your Programming Languages class? Or VLSI design? Or Database design? Or...
Now's your time to learn. Don't put everything you have into a swing on the very first pitch across the plate.
Well it more like that the "rules" set out in the EO are just a description of the goals of the EO, which Treasury uses as a guideline when they are deciding exactly which people and organizations will get their money blocked. However, its still Treasury deciding on a person-by-person and company-by-company basis who is getting blocked. If they feel like not blocking a specific company, and the POTUS (whose order they are following) is OK with that, that's currently their prerogative.
Again, if we want an actual rule that can be applied rather than a list subject to the whims of one guy, that's what laws are for. I'm sure Congress will be getting around to that any day now.
Maybe the US Government should stop issuing overreaching executive orders.
For that to happen, it would have to start producing laws again. All Congress produces right now is campaign events, and days off for themselves. Passing a law that the POTUS supports might make him look good, and we can't have that. Passing a law that the POTUS doesn't support would require a 2/3 majority, which would require working with a lot of Democrats, who might also end up looking good, so we can't have that either.
In the meantime, executive orders are the only way left to keep the government staggering along in a manner vaguely resembling a real functioning government.
SpaceX said that since Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin was the head of their space agency, payments to the agency were effectively payments to him. The U.S. departments of Commerce, State, and the Treasury all sent letters to the court saying this was not the case, and the court agreed
Please nobody get worked up arguing against this statement, because that's not really what their arguments were.
The key phrase from the Judge's ruling is:
These letters collectively explain that, “to the best of [the relevant Department’s] knowledge, purchases from and payments to NPO Energomash currently do not directly or indirectly contravene Executive Order 13,661.”
However, that's not how I read the attached letters at all. The first three all effectively say, "Yes, if Rogozin controls Energomash, that looks like it would qualify, but only the Treasury Department can officially make that call."
The Fourth is actually from the Treasury Department (so its the important one), and it essentially says "it looks like something that technically falls under the order. However, we have to officially say that an entity is blocked before it is, and we don't want to say that about Energomash right now." So basically they get to pick and chose each and every entity to be affected by the Executive Order, and this isn't (yet) one they've picked.
That makes a certain amount of sense. Because all of this comes from an Executive Order, its really up to the "Executive" (the POTUS), and those under him, who or what gets blocked. If we'd like a general rule that can be applied broadly, that's what laws are for.
"Computer" used to be a job description, not a piece of machinery. Businesses that had to do a lot of number crunching would hire rooms full of people who did nothing but arithmetic all day. Now we can do that easily with machines.
Sometimes, its a good thing that certain careers are going away. It means we can reserve our human brainpower for more important problems.