So, you never have any memory leaks? Or double frees? Convenient for you that you're an anonymous coward, because it would probably be a quick issue to call you on. I've met some extremely careful coders (among other things, the developer of one of the first projects to reach zero defects in Coverity's open source scan effort), and none of them make such ridiculous statements.
I think this is the way forward for truly performance intensive code. Not doing it in C++, but writing dedicated compilers for specific subroutines, churning out C, assembly, or compiler specific intermediate language code. Functional languages should excel at this, they have been ruling the program transformation/analysis space for a long time.
Deming was the main popularizer (though not inventor) of statistical process control. It's a big topic, but in brief it's that its success in manufacturing has led people to assume that it will work everywhere, and then go ahead and ignore Deming's countless warnings.
Yeah, but 1938, at the height of Stalin's paranoia, was not when Soviet science was at its peak, either! Things were a lot better for the academic elite in the sixties.
In the Soviet Union's latter days, our (in the west) accumulated "tools"-advantage certainly trumped their advantages. Especially in fields like computers, where a lot of boring manufacturing work has to go on behind the scenes.
> It should be standard to be able to see the amount of CPU, RAM and network I/O each application is generating so that hogs which cause performance, battery life or network overages can easily be spotted.
Not just that. You can't really expect random end-users to monitor their apps for hogs, so there should be quotas on all of these things, enforced by the OS. And comfigurable, of course, for users who know what they're doing.
Communist countries sucked at stuff like building cars, but they had excellent scientists, doctors, and performing artists. To take the space race as an example: how do you think the Soviet union got the first satellite, the first man in space, the first unmanned orbit around the moon and return to earth, and the first unmanned mood landing, despite the unquestionably inferior economic infrastructure?
I'll tell you why, though it's rather obvious. People in these professions are strongly motivated by things beside economic success. And when economic success isn't really available as a goal, those motivations which you could give yourself (intellectual achievement, helping people and earning their gratitude and admiration, expressing yourself artistically, becoming "People's artist of the Soviet Union", "Hero of the Soviet Union" and the various other medals and awards they offered) become all the more important. It was the boring jobs the poor Soviet citizens sucked at - which unfortunately for them also include some damn important jobs.
Doctors in the wealthy world are inept now (despite their awesome infrastructure, enabled by us hordes of money-motivated individuals willing to do the drudgework to supply them with their tools) because they're not allowed to do what they want to do - help people. The business venture model of medicine is totally worshipped, so that a doctor becomes a conveyor belt-like producer of medical "services", five minutes per patient, I mean CUSTOMER, to follow the script slavishly, and always check the patient's insurance before deciding how and whether to help him.
Worship of business model-thinking is also endemic here in countries with so-called "socialist" countries. It's just that instead of checking the patient's insurance, overcharging and using the minimal amount of time, it's filling out the right kind of forms at every opportunity to make your administrator look good and secure funding, and then using the minimal amount of time.
> Now, ask yourself if you want your doctor to run like a Toyota or a Moskvitch
Funny you should mention Toyota. The success of Japanese cars owed a lot to Edward Deming, a business theorist who was as much a paternalist as a capitalist, and emphasized motivations beside money (in particular, pride in the quality of your work). In short, he tried to give assembly-line producers the kind of motivation doctors, scientists and performing artists already have. The Japanese embraced him, his American countrymen rejected his theories as sentimental, un-capitalistic nonsense (until they were forced to change, since everyone bought superior quality Japanese cars). Deming's theories are now mis-applied in education and medicine and responsible for a lot of the mess there, because the current generation of administators refuse to see how different those domains are from assembly-line production.
As witnessed by you, since you compare the working of a doctor to that of a car engine.
The free emulators for Android tend to suck. Really. Compare ADosBox with AnDosBox for instance. The former doesn't even use Android's input system, and so is unusuable on any device that doesn't have a physical keyboard. The C64 is a simpler system than the SNES, but all the C64-emulators in the marketplace are ported on a non-commercial basis, and... they're not very good. Amiga is in the same boat, basically.
Yong Zhang (and others) have done real work to port emulators to android, that no one else seem willing (or able) to do. They should get paid. (Of course, they should also respect license agreements. At least the AnDosBox guy does now - minimally).
Roughly, it can. You generally use fuel not long after you buy it, and better road quality -> higher speeds -> higher fuel consumption per unit of distance. Also, congestion -> higher fuel consumption, so regular gas tax has a congestion charge built in as well (though not as effective as a toll ring-based one I'd admit, since people are annoyed by those way out of proportion to their economic impact, thus making them more effective).
> nefarious folk can still dust the screen for fingerprints,
I think that lipid-repellent surface of those screens is going to make this impractical. One thing Apple did right (though I hear they don't last forever).
It's ridiculous. If they want to tax car owners based on how much they use the roads/pollute, they don't need to know how far they've travelled. They can just slap a tax on gasoline. Surveillance is the motive behind this - it's no coincidence that the "GPS tracking of all cars for tax purposes" scheme was initially proposed in the UK.
Not at all. It would not have been feasible for him to read through everything and release only what a government lawyer would have deemed acceptable. If you find that the person you're doing confidential work for is a murdering mafia boss, do you release everything you have as quickly as possible, or do you comb through everything to ensure the mafia boss' right to confidentiality about e.g. his dental records isn't breached?
Thing is, if you're a mafia boss, you have to accept the risk that your irrelevant dental records are released along with evidence of your crimes. You can no longer expect that level of confidentiality of someone, once the good faith assumption is broken - for obvious reasons.
The trigger in Manning's case was that he was told to assist in the rounding up of peaceful political dissidents. When his attempt at alerting about this through the proper channels failed, he decided that the system as a whole was corrupt, and that as much as possible about it needed to be exposed.
No, he did not. There are some obligations you can't sign away, among them the obligation to not perform human rights abuses or war crimes.
According to Lamo's logs (a known liar who has every reason to demonize Manning, by the way), Manning was asked to assist in a human rights abuse - rounding up peaceful dissidents who merely published a scholarly article criticizing the Iraqi government. You are not allowed to obey an illegal order, so he tried to alert his superiors. When they told him to shut up and get back to work, rather than blowing the whistle on them, he concluded that the whole system was rotten and needed to be exposed.
Now you may disagree about that (though if you have never been in such a situation, I don't value your opinion much) but it was not done "[out of loyalty to] to [the nations's] enemies, to give them aid and comfort" - which is the ONLY definition of treason the US constitution permits short of declaring war. Manning did what he thought was necessary to uphold his obligations to the US constitution and binding international agreements on human rights, and action taken for that reason, no matter how misguided, can never consitute treason in the US.
... no matter how much they pester you for it. Because a 13-year old typically doesn't know that visitor information is not exposed in the facebook API. (Neither does the typical adult, unfortunately) So, when an app promises to give it to her, she may believe it when she is told [random dude chosen by the app] visits her profile ten times every day. That is bad for an adult, whose friends suddenly thinks he's an obsessive, creepy stalker - but if the app-clicker is underage, those people may think you're a pedophile as well.
It happened to a journalist whose blog I read, I've experienced similar things myself (though not quite that bad).
> So you are suggesting that everyone should keep any potentially controversial opinions to themselves just in case the country they live in is a brutal dictatorship some day?
No, I'm not suggesting that. I suggest that they ought to be free to share them with those they wish to share them - and only those. Government should not have a license to open all your letters. Government's (not to say corporations!) ability to even keep a file on you should be tightly restricted.
There's a rather obvious reason for that: The documents alone are not nearly sufficient for finding BL. However, US intelligence agencies thought they had figured it out, and were thinking about what to do. Then these documents are released.
Now what will OBL&Friends do? They will look over these documents. If they find Abbottabad mentioned, and they're not there, no big deal. However, if that's where they are, they might freak out and try to move, so the CIA reasons. So, they'd better go to that villa in Abbottabad ASAP.
Are you aware how much one can guess about you by the company you keep? Or even your attempts at wittiness?
Imagine a really bad leader having access to this kind of information. Say, a Pinochet. Then imagine one of your friends doing something political, such as working freelance as a photographer, doing some jobs for a left-oriented newspaper. That guy is dragged away, tortured, and disappears. The government knows you knew him. Maybe they see you making the kind of jokes he laughed at. Maybe they just worry that you will be upset at his disappearance, and label you as a potential trouble source for that reason.
So, you trust the current government to not do this, at least not to you. Fair enough. Trust the next one? Trust the one you'll have 30 years from now?
I want to like ToME4, but it's kind of frustrating. It's a bit too slow for my taste - you go through lots and lots of levels of none too challenging monsters, and then you're level... 3. And then you go down another stair, meet not Bill the Troll but that Orc Reaver guy, throw everything you got at him and still die. Dying is OK, the problem is it takes too long time, and unlike Crawl the process of getting there isn't much fun. Yeah, I guess I could farm the levels above that orc reaver guy for a while (an option Crawl doesn't give you), but that would be just more boring grind time before the actual fun stuff.
Diablo is far more like Angband (mostly randarts, non-persistent dungeons, town) than nethack (fixedarts only, persistent dungeons, no town). I have trouble believing the Diablo developers decided on all the Angband innovations to rogue independently.
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I went on interrail in Germany one summer, they have a fantastic rail network.
So, you never have any memory leaks? Or double frees? Convenient for you that you're an anonymous coward, because it would probably be a quick issue to call you on. I've met some extremely careful coders (among other things, the developer of one of the first projects to reach zero defects in Coverity's open source scan effort), and none of them make such ridiculous statements.
> I would be quite surprised if any C++ can execute a FFT as fast as my Leahy FORTRAN95.
Have you looked at the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West (FFTW)? It's written in C - but the funny thing is, it's written in C by an OCaml program.
I think this is the way forward for truly performance intensive code. Not doing it in C++, but writing dedicated compilers for specific subroutines, churning out C, assembly, or compiler specific intermediate language code. Functional languages should excel at this, they have been ruling the program transformation/analysis space for a long time.
On a single algorithm! I hope it was a good one.
Deming was the main popularizer (though not inventor) of statistical process control. It's a big topic, but in brief it's that its success in manufacturing has led people to assume that it will work everywhere, and then go ahead and ignore Deming's countless warnings.
Yeah, but 1938, at the height of Stalin's paranoia, was not when Soviet science was at its peak, either! Things were a lot better for the academic elite in the sixties.
In the Soviet Union's latter days, our (in the west) accumulated "tools"-advantage certainly trumped their advantages. Especially in fields like computers, where a lot of boring manufacturing work has to go on behind the scenes.
> It should be standard to be able to see the amount of CPU, RAM and network I/O each application is generating so that hogs which cause performance, battery life or network overages can easily be spotted.
Not just that. You can't really expect random end-users to monitor their apps for hogs, so there should be quotas on all of these things, enforced by the OS. And comfigurable, of course, for users who know what they're doing.
Communist countries sucked at stuff like building cars, but they had excellent scientists, doctors, and performing artists. To take the space race as an example: how do you think the Soviet union got the first satellite, the first man in space, the first unmanned orbit around the moon and return to earth, and the first unmanned mood landing, despite the unquestionably inferior economic infrastructure?
I'll tell you why, though it's rather obvious. People in these professions are strongly motivated by things beside economic success. And when economic success isn't really available as a goal, those motivations which you could give yourself (intellectual achievement, helping people and earning their gratitude and admiration, expressing yourself artistically, becoming "People's artist of the Soviet Union", "Hero of the Soviet Union" and the various other medals and awards they offered) become all the more important. It was the boring jobs the poor Soviet citizens sucked at - which unfortunately for them also include some damn important jobs.
Doctors in the wealthy world are inept now (despite their awesome infrastructure, enabled by us hordes of money-motivated individuals willing to do the drudgework to supply them with their tools) because they're not allowed to do what they want to do - help people. The business venture model of medicine is totally worshipped, so that a doctor becomes a conveyor belt-like producer of medical "services", five minutes per patient, I mean CUSTOMER, to follow the script slavishly, and always check the patient's insurance before deciding how and whether to help him.
Worship of business model-thinking is also endemic here in countries with so-called "socialist" countries. It's just that instead of checking the patient's insurance, overcharging and using the minimal amount of time, it's filling out the right kind of forms at every opportunity to make your administrator look good and secure funding, and then using the minimal amount of time.
> Now, ask yourself if you want your doctor to run like a Toyota or a Moskvitch
Funny you should mention Toyota. The success of Japanese cars owed a lot to Edward Deming, a business theorist who was as much a paternalist as a capitalist, and emphasized motivations beside money (in particular, pride in the quality of your work). In short, he tried to give assembly-line producers the kind of motivation doctors, scientists and performing artists already have. The Japanese embraced him, his American countrymen rejected his theories as sentimental, un-capitalistic nonsense (until they were forced to change, since everyone bought superior quality Japanese cars). Deming's theories are now mis-applied in education and medicine and responsible for a lot of the mess there, because the current generation of administators refuse to see how different those domains are from assembly-line production.
As witnessed by you, since you compare the working of a doctor to that of a car engine.
The free emulators for Android tend to suck. Really. Compare ADosBox with AnDosBox for instance. The former doesn't even use Android's input system, and so is unusuable on any device that doesn't have a physical keyboard. The C64 is a simpler system than the SNES, but all the C64-emulators in the marketplace are ported on a non-commercial basis, and ... they're not very good. Amiga is in the same boat, basically.
Yong Zhang (and others) have done real work to port emulators to android, that no one else seem willing (or able) to do. They should get paid. (Of course, they should also respect license agreements. At least the AnDosBox guy does now - minimally).
Roughly, it can. You generally use fuel not long after you buy it, and better road quality -> higher speeds -> higher fuel consumption per unit of distance. Also, congestion -> higher fuel consumption, so regular gas tax has a congestion charge built in as well (though not as effective as a toll ring-based one I'd admit, since people are annoyed by those way out of proportion to their economic impact, thus making them more effective).
> If you're using a more complex alphanumeric key, which can be enabled with the iPhone config utility,
So it needs to be enabled? how many users know how to do this, and do it?
This fits the Apple pattern of convincing people they have something cool and powerful, while in reality other people sit with the keys.
> nefarious folk can still dust the screen for fingerprints,
I think that lipid-repellent surface of those screens is going to make this impractical. One thing Apple did right (though I hear they don't last forever).
It's ridiculous. If they want to tax car owners based on how much they use the roads/pollute, they don't need to know how far they've travelled. They can just slap a tax on gasoline. Surveillance is the motive behind this - it's no coincidence that the "GPS tracking of all cars for tax purposes" scheme was initially proposed in the UK.
Wooorld neeet dailyyyyyy! Wohooo! The newspaper still devoted to the idea that Obama was born in Kenya!
Not at all. It would not have been feasible for him to read through everything and release only what a government lawyer would have deemed acceptable. If you find that the person you're doing confidential work for is a murdering mafia boss, do you release everything you have as quickly as possible, or do you comb through everything to ensure the mafia boss' right to confidentiality about e.g. his dental records isn't breached?
Thing is, if you're a mafia boss, you have to accept the risk that your irrelevant dental records are released along with evidence of your crimes. You can no longer expect that level of confidentiality of someone, once the good faith assumption is broken - for obvious reasons.
The trigger in Manning's case was that he was told to assist in the rounding up of peaceful political dissidents. When his attempt at alerting about this through the proper channels failed, he decided that the system as a whole was corrupt, and that as much as possible about it needed to be exposed.
No, he did not. There are some obligations you can't sign away, among them the obligation to not perform human rights abuses or war crimes.
According to Lamo's logs (a known liar who has every reason to demonize Manning, by the way), Manning was asked to assist in a human rights abuse - rounding up peaceful dissidents who merely published a scholarly article criticizing the Iraqi government. You are not allowed to obey an illegal order, so he tried to alert his superiors. When they told him to shut up and get back to work, rather than blowing the whistle on them, he concluded that the whole system was rotten and needed to be exposed.
Now you may disagree about that (though if you have never been in such a situation, I don't value your opinion much) but it was not done "[out of loyalty to] to [the nations's] enemies, to give them aid and comfort" - which is the ONLY definition of treason the US constitution permits short of declaring war. Manning did what he thought was necessary to uphold his obligations to the US constitution and binding international agreements on human rights, and action taken for that reason, no matter how misguided, can never consitute treason in the US.
... no matter how much they pester you for it. Because a 13-year old typically doesn't know that visitor information is not exposed in the facebook API. (Neither does the typical adult, unfortunately) So, when an app promises to give it to her, she may believe it when she is told [random dude chosen by the app] visits her profile ten times every day. That is bad for an adult, whose friends suddenly thinks he's an obsessive, creepy stalker - but if the app-clicker is underage, those people may think you're a pedophile as well.
It happened to a journalist whose blog I read, I've experienced similar things myself (though not quite that bad).
> So you are suggesting that everyone should keep any potentially controversial opinions to themselves just in case the country they live in is a brutal dictatorship some day?
No, I'm not suggesting that. I suggest that they ought to be free to share them with those they wish to share them - and only those. Government should not have a license to open all your letters. Government's (not to say corporations!) ability to even keep a file on you should be tightly restricted.
This is off topic, but comments are bugged. "Get more comments" does not get more comments. Anyone know if /. are aware of the issue?
There's a rather obvious reason for that: The documents alone are not nearly sufficient for finding BL. However, US intelligence agencies thought they had figured it out, and were thinking about what to do. Then these documents are released.
Now what will OBL&Friends do? They will look over these documents. If they find Abbottabad mentioned, and they're not there, no big deal. However, if that's where they are, they might freak out and try to move, so the CIA reasons. So, they'd better go to that villa in Abbottabad ASAP.
Are you aware how much one can guess about you by the company you keep? Or even your attempts at wittiness?
Imagine a really bad leader having access to this kind of information. Say, a Pinochet. Then imagine one of your friends doing something political, such as working freelance as a photographer, doing some jobs for a left-oriented newspaper. That guy is dragged away, tortured, and disappears. The government knows you knew him. Maybe they see you making the kind of jokes he laughed at. Maybe they just worry that you will be upset at his disappearance, and label you as a potential trouble source for that reason.
So, you trust the current government to not do this, at least not to you. Fair enough. Trust the next one? Trust the one you'll have 30 years from now?
It is very strange that you do not recognize sarcasm when you see it, yet still try to use it yourself.
Need to turn on sigs again.
I want to like ToME4, but it's kind of frustrating. It's a bit too slow for my taste - you go through lots and lots of levels of none too challenging monsters, and then you're level ... 3. And then you go down another stair, meet not Bill the Troll but that Orc Reaver guy, throw everything you got at him and still die. Dying is OK, the problem is it takes too long time, and unlike Crawl the process of getting there isn't much fun. Yeah, I guess I could farm the levels above that orc reaver guy for a while (an option Crawl doesn't give you), but that would be just more boring grind time before the actual fun stuff.
Diablo is far more like Angband (mostly randarts, non-persistent dungeons, town) than nethack (fixedarts only, persistent dungeons, no town). I have trouble believing the Diablo developers decided on all the Angband innovations to rogue independently.