Software fails catastrophically because one light bulb burning out causes the whole house to disintegrate. Production clusters with redundant servers, network switches and power supplies are a better equivalent of a house built to codes. I hope self driving car control systems follow the later model.
There are also plenty of PC exclusives like "The Stanley Parable", or games that are first released on PC like "Vanishing of Ethan Carter". Those are clever games that take risks, not just generic first person shooters. There is at least a decade of back catalog of games that are perfectly playable and entertaining on today's hardware, and prices drop much more quickly than for console games because of competition.
Steam supports offline play, but whatever - there is GOG like you said, and nobody stops you from buying and trading DVDs. The point is that you have choices, and can incrementally update your hardware without losing them.
Why spend extraordinary effort to run custom apps on a locked down system, when you can get an open by design PC that will cost you less money long term? Top game releases are the same as on console once you buy a controller, but you also have a choice of countless indie and abandonware titles to occupy your time. Can even run Android games with Bluestacks.
You can get usable systems at the same price or cheaper than PS4. But even if you pay several hundred more (not sure what is the GPU equivalence point), you will be able to upgrade to the next generation by just swapping a graphics card rather than having to re-buy entire system and all your games.
I will let employees and shareholders judge Marissa, but Yahoo is going through like one CEO per year. Would you expect any employee to be great before at least 3 years on a job? Why is it different for presumably the most difficult job in the organization?
Plus, some time is needed to turn around a large, bureaucratic company in any given direction. With Marissa, it has been killing of smaller projects and focusing on mobile apps. I give her some credit for at least getting people to talk about the company and putting it in front of customers with Firefox deal.
Now maybe there are other successful directions, like extreme cost cutting and collecting profits as long as they can possibly last. Oracle seems to be doing good job milking RDBMS which was dying longer than Yahoo was around.
But if you never allow a CEO to truly learn how to manage the company and spend time implementing a consistent vision, you are doomed to die as you throw away previous spending to chase the latest wishful thinking.
Why are these things mutually exclusive? We had plenty of smart people who were off the rocker in more recent time - think John Nash or Van Gogh. Babbage himself must have come across as a mad scientist at the time - spending all the money on hundreds of gears and muttering about building a machine than can think. It probably took a person who didn't care much about social norms to associate with him publicly.
Even if she had a lot of help and training from Babbage to publish her book, she was still plenty smart to put all the ideas together. Apparently, she was making serious plans to make a flying machine while in her teens and studied many different materials for wings. That's like someone trying to build a mission to marks in their backyard in this day and age and worth respect for the guts all by itself.
Remember how, back in the days, we used to download PGP from Finland because of US export restrictions? These days are coming again, with resulting renewed public interest in free software and sideloading apps outside the walled garden. As well, it's a chance for a developing country to establish an alternative Silicon Valley exporting truly secure software, even PC and mobile operating systems, worldwide. Hopefully I can move there and live like a king.
I got a raise to INS-published prevailing wage for the area when my practical training was coming to an end and I was applying for H1. Coming from Russia, my salary even before the raise was much more comfortable than my living conditions earlier in life. I am saddened that I was able to afford a nice appartment next to work back then and have to spend 3 hours/day in commute now, earning a large multiple of that salary.
You have not interviewed on behalf a tech company lately. Ask a dozen candidates some rudimentary coding question like finding top N numbers from a large list and cry. Job requirements are total bullshit, no self respecting recruiter makes them a primary criteria. People who give salary range upfront in a job posting are idiots. Which helps explain why those positions are still open.
How about letting market decide rather than big government prescribing exact dollar amounts? Currently, H1B visas immediately run out of quota, and most are snatched by consulting companies like Infosys rather than individuals directly.
Set quota to whatever is desired and grant visa to employees who receive the highest salaries. Americans benefit because bidding drives wages up. Immigrants benefit because anyone can come in with good enough job offer rather than being shut off by quota running out. Plus, tax revenues go up proportionally to salary (and keeping track of tax returns is a great way to detect cheating).
I heard of plenty of teens who were groomed and lured away by an online pedophile or committed suicide after Facebook bullying. And I don't know of a single home invasion where a crook took a single look at PGP icon on owner's computer and ran away.
On the other hand, a gun can easily save your life (mostly criminal getting scared off upon seeing your gun, or knowing that gun ownership is common in the area), while encryption can not. So the bar for denying someone this means of self defense seems to be much higher.
If we decide that some people (like minors or convicted felons) should not use unescrowed encryption, devices on their person or at their home can be examined by police/parents in suspicious circumstances. Skills and diligence needed to consistently avoid detection are not that different than being able to hide a physical object like a gun.
I find that my own positions on encryption mirror a lot of NRA positions on guns. A vast majority of encryption users are responsible and utilize technology for self defense from crime, as do a majority of gun users. On the other hand, guns can be used to commit crimes, as can encryption. Finally, both guns and encryption make it more difficult for an oppressive government to subjugate the population. Guns are more immediately dangerous, but on the other hand they protect people from getting murdered, not just from getting p0wned.
I sincerely believe that benefits of encryption to society outweigh the action of a few lunatics. Therefore I support citizens right to encryption, including military grade encryption with no limits on key size. I certainly do not want a federal database of encryption users.
Yet similar arguments ring hollow coming from NRA. I am not sure what to make of it. On one hand, I could be missing valid perspective of people living in rural or high crime areas, just like encryption opponents do not fully understand how widespread cyber crime and state espionage are.
On the other hand, perhaps I should support common sense legislation to keep strong crypto out of the hands of children and criminals. If you are a convicted pedophile, law can not keep you from encrypting your phone. But if we catch you with an encrypting phone, your parole can be revoked and whatever you are trying to hide stopped.
Or for children's devices, parents should have an escrow key to see if the kids are up to no good, are getting dangerously bullied on Facebook or are contacted by drug dealers/pedophiles. But leave a big banner describing that the device has been accessed, and which apps were used to discourage abuse BY parents.
I have a right and a responsibility to check what my children are doing or to help them if they forget their passwords. If the software notifies them when I take a look and what at, a master key is more respectful of their privacy than sharing the same password.
So why doesn't she address her specific problem of "I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use" rather than trying to create a backdoor for NSA under the guise of protecting children?
Once I checked, clang was not good at generating vector instructions from simple loops. Unless it has improved lately, that would be a show stopper for a class of code.
Source files will be in machine readable format that conveys meaning, while individual programmers will have a choice of textual, graphical and hybrid representations to work on that meaning, So most people will just drag and drop an image into a source editor and start using it without worrying about how it is stored in the application bundle. But if another programmer on your project uses vi and wants to explicitly refer to R.drawable.pacman, they can.
If misuse becomes a problem, we could have have smart license plates that show a periodically changing QR code that contains a random (but validatable) message encrypted with user's key. Then a proper authority can try all the keys in database (could use salt as a hint, but really even a billion keys does not take that long) until they find a valid message after decryption.
One could even discourage random snooping / girlfriend stalking by cops on the beat by giving them instant access to only smaller database of stolen cars or cars of people with whom police has current business. Anything else would be available only when a judge issues a warrant based on evidence that a car is involved in a crime.
First of all, you don't need to be a programmer to benefit from programming skills. Countless small business owners benefited from custom batch files, DBase forms and putting together Excel, Access and a little VB. We should work on modern replacement for these as well as widespread literacy rather than wasting people's money on cloud apps which are not tailored to a specific business.
Second, self-learning is a privilege of growing up with computers, stable/peaceful living arrangement and no other responsibilities. Many only get time to work on themselves only once they get into college with a loan and/or scholarship.
Finally, self learning happens by bits and pieces. I did quite a bit of programming in middle and high school, but certainly filled in many gaps when taking dozens of classes in the college. For example, I did all my previous programming in MS-DOS and UNIX workstations or parallel clusters were not commonly available to individuals at the time.
Even if self learning is the solution, you first need to convince recruiters of all the major employers to accept folks without a degree.
I do believe that C.Sci degrees are ridiculously overpriced and can be completed 100% online, but still with qualified instructors, teamwork and scholarships for those who can not otherwise find money or non-work time.
You are not much of an atheist if you view oblivion as terrifying rather than neutral (worse than being happy, better than being unhappy) or if you believe you have a soul that can survive loss of memories.
Age extension is torture without corresponding lifting of physical and mental limitations. If I live long enough, I will eventually stagnate and not have any really new experiences which make living worthwhile. Eventually I will lose most memories from all but (say) most recent 50 years and earlier versions of me will still effectively die, except without a clear closure or joy of discovery available to a young person.
Give me ability to grow mentally and emotionally beyond my current capacity or let me feel well until around 70-80 and then I am ready to check out. Any self respecting dog would understand.
What I want is a completely sealed phone which is waterproof, dustproof and shockproof. Bluetooth for headphones, wireless charging, sim-free network registration. Plus nice thick form factor and efficient software for weeklong battery life. Only then I can trust the device to fit my life rather than me structuring my life around its limitations.
On the second thought, Apple is the least likely company to help me with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Software fails catastrophically because one light bulb burning out causes the whole house to disintegrate. Production clusters with redundant servers, network switches and power supplies are a better equivalent of a house built to codes. I hope self driving car control systems follow the later model.
There are also plenty of PC exclusives like "The Stanley Parable", or games that are first released on PC like "Vanishing of Ethan Carter". Those are clever games that take risks, not just generic first person shooters. There is at least a decade of back catalog of games that are perfectly playable and entertaining on today's hardware, and prices drop much more quickly than for console games because of competition.
Having money does not give people any magical superpowers when it comes to intelligence or people skills.
Steam supports offline play, but whatever - there is GOG like you said, and nobody stops you from buying and trading DVDs. The point is that you have choices, and can incrementally update your hardware without losing them.
Why spend extraordinary effort to run custom apps on a locked down system, when you can get an open by design PC that will cost you less money long term? Top game releases are the same as on console once you buy a controller, but you also have a choice of countless indie and abandonware titles to occupy your time. Can even run Android games with Bluestacks.
You can get usable systems at the same price or cheaper than PS4. But even if you pay several hundred more (not sure what is the GPU equivalence point), you will be able to upgrade to the next generation by just swapping a graphics card rather than having to re-buy entire system and all your games.
I will let employees and shareholders judge Marissa, but Yahoo is going through like one CEO per year. Would you expect any employee to be great before at least 3 years on a job? Why is it different for presumably the most difficult job in the organization?
Plus, some time is needed to turn around a large, bureaucratic company in any given direction. With Marissa, it has been killing of smaller projects and focusing on mobile apps. I give her some credit for at least getting people to talk about the company and putting it in front of customers with Firefox deal.
Now maybe there are other successful directions, like extreme cost cutting and collecting profits as long as they can possibly last. Oracle seems to be doing good job milking RDBMS which was dying longer than Yahoo was around.
But if you never allow a CEO to truly learn how to manage the company and spend time implementing a consistent vision, you are doomed to die as you throw away previous spending to chase the latest wishful thinking.
Why are these things mutually exclusive? We had plenty of smart people who were off the rocker in more recent time - think John Nash or Van Gogh. Babbage himself must have come across as a mad scientist at the time - spending all the money on hundreds of gears and muttering about building a machine than can think. It probably took a person who didn't care much about social norms to associate with him publicly.
Even if she had a lot of help and training from Babbage to publish her book, she was still plenty smart to put all the ideas together. Apparently, she was making serious plans to make a flying machine while in her teens and studied many different materials for wings. That's like someone trying to build a mission to marks in their backyard in this day and age and worth respect for the guts all by itself.
Remember how, back in the days, we used to download PGP from Finland because of US export restrictions? These days are coming again, with resulting renewed public interest in free software and sideloading apps outside the walled garden. As well, it's a chance for a developing country to establish an alternative Silicon Valley exporting truly secure software, even PC and mobile operating systems, worldwide. Hopefully I can move there and live like a king.
I got a raise to INS-published prevailing wage for the area when my practical training was coming to an end and I was applying for H1. Coming from Russia, my salary even before the raise was much more comfortable than my living conditions earlier in life. I am saddened that I was able to afford a nice appartment next to work back then and have to spend 3 hours/day in commute now, earning a large multiple of that salary.
You have not interviewed on behalf a tech company lately. Ask a dozen candidates some rudimentary coding question like finding top N numbers from a large list and cry. Job requirements are total bullshit, no self respecting recruiter makes them a primary criteria. People who give salary range upfront in a job posting are idiots. Which helps explain why those positions are still open.
How about letting market decide rather than big government prescribing exact dollar amounts? Currently, H1B visas immediately run out of quota, and most are snatched by consulting companies like Infosys rather than individuals directly.
Set quota to whatever is desired and grant visa to employees who receive the highest salaries. Americans benefit because bidding drives wages up. Immigrants benefit because anyone can come in with good enough job offer rather than being shut off by quota running out. Plus, tax revenues go up proportionally to salary (and keeping track of tax returns is a great way to detect cheating).
I heard of plenty of teens who were groomed and lured away by an online pedophile or committed suicide after Facebook bullying. And I don't know of a single home invasion where a crook took a single look at PGP icon on owner's computer and ran away.
On the other hand, a gun can easily save your life (mostly criminal getting scared off upon seeing your gun, or knowing that gun ownership is common in the area), while encryption can not. So the bar for denying someone this means of self defense seems to be much higher.
If we decide that some people (like minors or convicted felons) should not use unescrowed encryption, devices on their person or at their home can be examined by police/parents in suspicious circumstances. Skills and diligence needed to consistently avoid detection are not that different than being able to hide a physical object like a gun.
I find that my own positions on encryption mirror a lot of NRA positions on guns. A vast majority of encryption users are responsible and utilize technology for self defense from crime, as do a majority of gun users. On the other hand, guns can be used to commit crimes, as can encryption. Finally, both guns and encryption make it more difficult for an oppressive government to subjugate the population. Guns are more immediately dangerous, but on the other hand they protect people from getting murdered, not just from getting p0wned.
I sincerely believe that benefits of encryption to society outweigh the action of a few lunatics. Therefore I support citizens right to encryption, including military grade encryption with no limits on key size. I certainly do not want a federal database of encryption users.
Yet similar arguments ring hollow coming from NRA. I am not sure what to make of it. On one hand, I could be missing valid perspective of people living in rural or high crime areas, just like encryption opponents do not fully understand how widespread cyber crime and state espionage are.
On the other hand, perhaps I should support common sense legislation to keep strong crypto out of the hands of children and criminals. If you are a convicted pedophile, law can not keep you from encrypting your phone. But if we catch you with an encrypting phone, your parole can be revoked and whatever you are trying to hide stopped.
Or for children's devices, parents should have an escrow key to see if the kids are up to no good, are getting dangerously bullied on Facebook or are contacted by drug dealers/pedophiles. But leave a big banner describing that the device has been accessed, and which apps were used to discourage abuse BY parents.
I have a right and a responsibility to check what my children are doing or to help them if they forget their passwords. If the software notifies them when I take a look and what at, a master key is more respectful of their privacy than sharing the same password.
So why doesn't she address her specific problem of "I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use" rather than trying to create a backdoor for NSA under the guise of protecting children?
I am pretty sure games of the day managed to both make noise and do other stuff with CPU at the same time.
Once I checked, clang was not good at generating vector instructions from simple loops. Unless it has improved lately, that would be a show stopper for a class of code.
From my cold, dead hands!
Machine language does not capture full meaning intended in the source, although JVM comes close.
Source files will be in machine readable format that conveys meaning, while individual programmers will have a choice of textual, graphical and hybrid representations to work on that meaning, So most people will just drag and drop an image into a source editor and start using it without worrying about how it is stored in the application bundle. But if another programmer on your project uses vi and wants to explicitly refer to R.drawable.pacman, they can.
If misuse becomes a problem, we could have have smart license plates that show a periodically changing QR code that contains a random (but validatable) message encrypted with user's key. Then a proper authority can try all the keys in database (could use salt as a hint, but really even a billion keys does not take that long) until they find a valid message after decryption.
One could even discourage random snooping / girlfriend stalking by cops on the beat by giving them instant access to only smaller database of stolen cars or cars of people with whom police has current business. Anything else would be available only when a judge issues a warrant based on evidence that a car is involved in a crime.
First of all, you don't need to be a programmer to benefit from programming skills. Countless small business owners benefited from custom batch files, DBase forms and putting together Excel, Access and a little VB. We should work on modern replacement for these as well as widespread literacy rather than wasting people's money on cloud apps which are not tailored to a specific business.
Second, self-learning is a privilege of growing up with computers, stable/peaceful living arrangement and no other responsibilities. Many only get time to work on themselves only once they get into college with a loan and/or scholarship.
Finally, self learning happens by bits and pieces. I did quite a bit of programming in middle and high school, but certainly filled in many gaps when taking dozens of classes in the college. For example, I did all my previous programming in MS-DOS and UNIX workstations or parallel clusters were not commonly available to individuals at the time.
Even if self learning is the solution, you first need to convince recruiters of all the major employers to accept folks without a degree.
I do believe that C.Sci degrees are ridiculously overpriced and can be completed 100% online, but still with qualified instructors, teamwork and scholarships for those who can not otherwise find money or non-work time.
You are not much of an atheist if you view oblivion as terrifying rather than neutral (worse than being happy, better than being unhappy) or if you believe you have a soul that can survive loss of memories.
Age extension is torture without corresponding lifting of physical and mental limitations. If I live long enough, I will eventually stagnate and not have any really new experiences which make living worthwhile. Eventually I will lose most memories from all but (say) most recent 50 years and earlier versions of me will still effectively die, except without a clear closure or joy of discovery available to a young person.
Give me ability to grow mentally and emotionally beyond my current capacity or let me feel well until around 70-80 and then I am ready to check out. Any self respecting dog would understand.
What I want is a completely sealed phone which is waterproof, dustproof and shockproof. Bluetooth for headphones, wireless charging, sim-free network registration. Plus nice thick form factor and efficient software for weeklong battery life. Only then I can trust the device to fit my life rather than me structuring my life around its limitations.
On the second thought, Apple is the least likely company to help me with that.