Your programmers might not be very smart if they either a) didn't turn on the warnings or b) ignored the warnings. In both those cases a language won't help - you'd still have bugs due to ignoring the warnings.
That's why you need a compiler ERROR, like the one the OP was complaining about.
I worked on a system in the 90s that had to have at least a fifty year lifespan because REGULATION, though it was assumed that they'd have to replace the hardware now and again and just retain the files and database. I do sometimes wonder what they did when the optical drives we used became obsolete.
Yes. If I have a Linux VM, I can be sure it will run somehow, even if I have to run it through an x86 emulator on a 128-bit 256-core ARM (though that introduces issues of its own). If I have a Windows VM, who knows whether, in twenty years, it will announce that it's no longer activated and won't run?
1. The odds of any of my Android devices getting an upgrade to that version are roughly zero. 2. As I understand it, only apps written for the new OS will have real permission controls.
That would probably have prevented the annoying bug I ran into a few years ago where someone copied a 64-bit time_t to a 32-bit int, did some arithmetic, and then copied it back to a 64-bit time_t, requiring us to update firmware at all customer sites to fix it. If they had to explicitly convert, they'd almost certainly have realized they were doing something wrong.
That bug alone probably cost us more money than the time required for programmers to always explicitly convert types.
Well, for a start, you can deny them permissions when they try to do something you don't expect. When the Happy Kitty Screen Saver wants to access your camera and contacts on an Android tablet, you can't. You already had to accept 'let this app do random crap' when you installed it, or you wouldn't have been allowed to install it.
As far as I'm concerned, Android isn't much use for anything other than a mobile web browser until it gets proper per-app permission controls.
Indeed. I can't understand why people carry these things if they don't have to. Do you really need to check Twitterbook every two minutes, wherever you are in the world?
If I didn't need a smartphone for work, I wouldn't have one. If I didn't need to be available for support calls, it would be turned off when I'm not using it. If you're going to carry a tracking device everywhere you go, you can't be too surprised that people track you.
ISS is a hundred billion dollar investment. Astronauts are cheap.
If Congress actually cared about ISS, they wouldn't worry about losing a few astronauts to save it. Nor would they have a hard time finding volunteers to fly in a Dragon tomorrow.
The whole 'but we can't fly if it's not HUMAN RATED!' thing just demonstrates how little they really care.
the nordic countries and canada have more government than us and far less corruption. the people are happier, more socially mobile, and pay far less for healthcare and education
Canada had this idea that most of the laws would be made in what they call 'Provinces', and only laws that had to be made at a nation-wide level would be made by the national government. This means you have different laws in different parts of the country, which can be tailored to what the people who live there want. Quebec even has its own immigration policy.
If only America had tried something similar, it probably wouldn't be in such a mess.
It's not designed for serious offroading like a Jeep, and the stability control automatically brakes individual wheels when you put it in off-road mode.
I was glad to see that my new SUV automatically cuts the gas if it detects you pressing both pedals at the same time, even if due to a bad sensor or crashed throttle-monitoring process (yeah, I know, that means no left-foot braking, but if you're doing that in an SUV, you're probably doing it wrong).
Space is VERY risky and unforgiving both because of the environmental extremes and because of the huge amounts of energy involved in getting there and getting back - so by nature any responsible program is sufficiently risk-averse that it does not choose lots of additional complexity and many more operations without very solid justification.
Which is another reason NOT to put a $10,000,000 payload on top of a $2,000,000 rocket and send it up in a single launch. Skylab was almost lost due to malfunctions of the Saturn that launched it.
But aviation has gone backwards. When I was young, anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare could fly across the Atlantic in comfort at twice the speed of sound, and military pilots in a close approximation to space suits would be flying above them at nearly twice that speed.
Now we gush about how new airliners save a few bucks on fuel so airlines can make more profit as they cram more and more of us into the same little metal tube.
They're right that reusability doesn't make much economic sense at current flight rates. NASA and Boeing looked at recovering Saturn V stages in the 60s, and determined that they'd need about 60 launches for the development and operational cost of recovering and refurbishing the stages to become lower than just throwing them away. This would probably require less, as they wouldn't be dumping the stage into the sea and trying to clean it up, but it will still probably require quite a few years at current launch rates to pay for itself.
SpaceX seems to be trying to get around that by cutting costs so low that the market grows exponentially. But there's a big gap between rockets a government can afford to launch a satellite on and rockets Joe Sixpack can afford to fly on for a space vacation where there's no clear and proven market.
Thus solving an issue that SpaceX has already shown isn't actually a major problem...they have been regularly bringing entire intact first stages through reentry and down to sea level for some time now.
But, at this point, no-one knows how much work will be required to refurbish those stages and fly them again. Until we actually have one land intact, rather than inpieces, we won't know. It could turn out that this method is actually cheaper than SpaceX returning the entire stage, though I doubt it myself.
Aircraft technology isn't stagnant by any means: a modern 777-ER can carry the same number of passengers 50% farther for a third less fuel than the original 747-100.
Well whoopee-do. That's the computing equivalent of saying 'But DOS 23.5 can now use ONE MEGABYTE of RAM, not the mere 640k you had to live with thirty years ago!'
Now where are the vertical-takeoff hypersonic airliners I used to see on TV as a kid?
If the computer had continued to apply the brakes (not been overridden by the human) would it have allowed the crossing vehicle to pass in front of it?
And, if it had, would the car behind have crashed into it?
Slashdot Mirror
What else do you need to know?
Your programmers might not be very smart if they either a) didn't turn on the warnings or b) ignored the warnings. In both those cases a language won't help - you'd still have bugs due to ignoring the warnings.
That's why you need a compiler ERROR, like the one the OP was complaining about.
I worked on a system in the 90s that had to have at least a fifty year lifespan because REGULATION, though it was assumed that they'd have to replace the hardware now and again and just retain the files and database. I do sometimes wonder what they did when the optical drives we used became obsolete.
Yes. If I have a Linux VM, I can be sure it will run somehow, even if I have to run it through an x86 emulator on a 128-bit 256-core ARM (though that introduces issues of its own). If I have a Windows VM, who knows whether, in twenty years, it will announce that it's no longer activated and won't run?
1. The odds of any of my Android devices getting an upgrade to that version are roughly zero.
2. As I understand it, only apps written for the new OS will have real permission controls.
That would probably have prevented the annoying bug I ran into a few years ago where someone copied a 64-bit time_t to a 32-bit int, did some arithmetic, and then copied it back to a 64-bit time_t, requiring us to update firmware at all customer sites to fix it. If they had to explicitly convert, they'd almost certainly have realized they were doing something wrong.
That bug alone probably cost us more money than the time required for programmers to always explicitly convert types.
And Apple apps don't spy on you?
How can you prove they don't?
Well, for a start, you can deny them permissions when they try to do something you don't expect. When the Happy Kitty Screen Saver wants to access your camera and contacts on an Android tablet, you can't. You already had to accept 'let this app do random crap' when you installed it, or you wouldn't have been allowed to install it.
As far as I'm concerned, Android isn't much use for anything other than a mobile web browser until it gets proper per-app permission controls.
I don't buy Android apps because they all want to spy on me and sell advertising.
Indeed. I can't understand why people carry these things if they don't have to. Do you really need to check Twitterbook every two minutes, wherever you are in the world?
If I didn't need a smartphone for work, I wouldn't have one. If I didn't need to be available for support calls, it would be turned off when I'm not using it. If you're going to carry a tracking device everywhere you go, you can't be too surprised that people track you.
Oh wait... you can't do *any* of those things on it. That's what the extra $500 is for.
If you want to do those things, why would you pay an extra $500, when you can buy a decent laptop for $500 which will do all those things?
Do you really think the upstart will have a man-rated launcher in less than 2 years????
I think they already have a launcher at least as safe as a Soyuz is likely to be, if the Russians' recent launch debacles are anything to go by.
Sending an unmanned cargo capsule is way different.
Why?
ISS is a hundred billion dollar investment. Astronauts are cheap.
If Congress actually cared about ISS, they wouldn't worry about losing a few astronauts to save it. Nor would they have a hard time finding volunteers to fly in a Dragon tomorrow.
The whole 'but we can't fly if it's not HUMAN RATED!' thing just demonstrates how little they really care.
The way the GOP has veered into the insane right
If you think Republicans are 'insane right', then you must be far to the left of Stalin.
the nordic countries and canada have more government than us and far less corruption. the people are happier, more socially mobile, and pay far less for healthcare and education
Canada had this idea that most of the laws would be made in what they call 'Provinces', and only laws that had to be made at a nation-wide level would be made by the national government. This means you have different laws in different parts of the country, which can be tailored to what the people who live there want. Quebec even has its own immigration policy.
If only America had tried something similar, it probably wouldn't be in such a mess.
That's right, the actual same Shuttle engines that they had to refurbish after every flight.
But this time, they'll be cheaper, because they'll just dump them into the sea rather than refurbish them.
The problem was that nobody thinks Space X can really do it before the currently contracted seats with the Russians run out.
SpaceX could fly astronauts tomorrow if Congress actually thought it was important. Just stick them in a cargo Dragon in space suits, and go.
Sooooooo... no offroading for your SUV?
It's not designed for serious offroading like a Jeep, and the stability control automatically brakes individual wheels when you put it in off-road mode.
You mean, people accidentally mashing both pedals at the same time?
Possibly. But there was a published third-party analysis of Toyota's ECU software which made me reluctant to buy one:
http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-...
I was glad to see that my new SUV automatically cuts the gas if it detects you pressing both pedals at the same time, even if due to a bad sensor or crashed throttle-monitoring process (yeah, I know, that means no left-foot braking, but if you're doing that in an SUV, you're probably doing it wrong).
Now, where have I heard that before?
I'm waiting for 640K TVs before I upgrade.
Space is VERY risky and unforgiving both because of the environmental extremes and because of the huge amounts of energy involved in getting there and getting back - so by nature any responsible program is sufficiently risk-averse that it does not choose lots of additional complexity and many more operations without very solid justification.
Which is another reason NOT to put a $10,000,000 payload on top of a $2,000,000 rocket and send it up in a single launch. Skylab was almost lost due to malfunctions of the Saturn that launched it.
But aviation has gone backwards. When I was young, anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare could fly across the Atlantic in comfort at twice the speed of sound, and military pilots in a close approximation to space suits would be flying above them at nearly twice that speed.
Now we gush about how new airliners save a few bucks on fuel so airlines can make more profit as they cram more and more of us into the same little metal tube.
They're right that reusability doesn't make much economic sense at current flight rates. NASA and Boeing looked at recovering Saturn V stages in the 60s, and determined that they'd need about 60 launches for the development and operational cost of recovering and refurbishing the stages to become lower than just throwing them away. This would probably require less, as they wouldn't be dumping the stage into the sea and trying to clean it up, but it will still probably require quite a few years at current launch rates to pay for itself.
SpaceX seems to be trying to get around that by cutting costs so low that the market grows exponentially. But there's a big gap between rockets a government can afford to launch a satellite on and rockets Joe Sixpack can afford to fly on for a space vacation where there's no clear and proven market.
Thus solving an issue that SpaceX has already shown isn't actually a major problem...they have been regularly bringing entire intact first stages through reentry and down to sea level for some time now.
But, at this point, no-one knows how much work will be required to refurbish those stages and fly them again. Until we actually have one land intact, rather than inpieces, we won't know. It could turn out that this method is actually cheaper than SpaceX returning the entire stage, though I doubt it myself.
Aircraft technology isn't stagnant by any means: a modern 777-ER can carry the same number of passengers 50% farther for a third less fuel than the original 747-100.
Well whoopee-do. That's the computing equivalent of saying 'But DOS 23.5 can now use ONE MEGABYTE of RAM, not the mere 640k you had to live with thirty years ago!'
Now where are the vertical-takeoff hypersonic airliners I used to see on TV as a kid?
If the computer had continued to apply the brakes (not been overridden by the human) would it have allowed the crossing vehicle to pass in front of it?
And, if it had, would the car behind have crashed into it?