Yes, almost certainly. The market for compiler engineers is very much a sellers' market at the moment. Universities neglected it for so long that most people graduate from undergraduate degrees with basically no knowledge of how a compiler works (if they're lucky, the know how compilers worked in the '80s), so there are 10 jobs for every person.
In The Humane Interface, written in 2000, Jef Raskin made the same complaint. The time between turning a computer on and having written a program to add two numbers together on, say, a C64 or a BBC Model B, was about 30 seconds. On a modern computer of the time, you wouldn't even have finished booting - starting the IDE would take even longer. The problem is, this misses the point. There are lots of scripting languages with REPL environments, including a POSIX shell and PowerShell on Windows, that can do this as a single command once the computer is running (on OS X, you can add numbers in Spotlight, so it's even quicker - just hit command-space and type the sum). If you want to write a more complex application, it's vastly easier today. Extend that simple calculator to show an editable history and show equations, and you'll find it a bit easier today. Now extend it to be able to print - if you've ever written applications to print in the era before operating systems provided a printer abstraction then you'll know how painful that was.
I don't understand why you think 'yum install gcc' is somehow different from 'download and run the installer for the VS command-line tools'. Especially on a modern Linux distro, where libraries come with -devel variants to save you the 10KB taken up by the headers in the normal install, so you end up having to install a load of headers as well to get the system useable.
I was a consultant for a few years and didn't find that it did. Most of my customers found me, as a result of my open source work (usually to work on the same projects, sometimes to work on projects in similar fields). Contract negotiation didn't take very long (they list some requirements, you mutually agree on a date, you pick a number, if they haggle then you politely decline).
That's as maybe but we have Healthcare that is FREE at the point of delivery.
That's not quite true for dental work, but the price is capped, so you'll typically pay £18.50 to see a dentist, £50.50 if you need something done, or £219 if you need something serious. It's only free if you qualify for extra assistance, which is automatic if you are under 18, under 19 (25 in Wales) and in full-time education, on income support or similar.
If you think I'm conservative and pro-gun, then you've clearly never read any of my other posts. In fact, if your entire reply is not just an ad hominem, but one attacking views that are diametrically opposed to the ones that I've publicly stated on numerous occasions, I can only assume that you are completely lacking any meaningful responses.
Russia or the separatists in Eastern Ukraine might have done this
That's a distinction without a difference.
although no-one is sure what they would stand to gain from it.
It looks like they thought it was a Ukraine military plane and were a bit too trigger happy, not realising it was a civilian aircraft until too late.
Ukraine's own military might have done it (they've done it before and denied it vehemently until it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt).
Here's the thing: if the Ukraine were responsible, then Russia would have a vested interest in a visibly transparent investigation and be in a position to ensure that it happened. If they could convincingly portray the Ukraine as having shot down a civilian aircraft then that would significantly alter the political sympathies in the current conflict. Instead, they have done everything in their power to block it.
The problem is in your phrasing of it as 'government abuses'. In the most part, it's not 'the government', as a monolithic entity acting based on policy that is abusing the power, it's individuals whose abuses are enabled by the government's programs. There's a political split over whether you can trust 'the government', but both sides agree that you probably can't trust an underpaid civil servant with a napoleon complex.
In general, I'd much rather use the kiosks (or, ideally, check in using the web or a mobile app) than go to a human check-in desk precisely because it presents the information more efficiently and it's a lot faster than a face-to-face interaction would be. The only time I prefer to go to the human-behind-a-desk lines are when I'm doing something unusual (e.g. my flight's delayed enough that I'll miss my connection and I need re-routing[1]) and I need an actual brain on the other side of the conversation (contrary to popular belief, I've found the people at the desks to be very helpful - and quite creative - in this regard). For anything purely routine, don't pretend to be a human, just give me an efficient interface.
[1] Actually, given that this has happened on about 70% of my trips to the USA over the last couple of years, I can't really justify calling it unusual.
Yes, I see a problem with pot cafes. Drug use is not OK, just inevitable
What about cafes that serve coffee? You know, the beverage containing a highly addictive drug? Should we ban those too?
The issue with pot cafes is that it's hard for people to work in them without being exposed to passive smoke, but if you can address that then I don't see the difference between them and normal cafes.
I don't see a contradiction (although I'm not an American). I have no problems with people smoking, snorting, injecting, or otherwise consuming any drugs that they want. I do object if they blow smoke in public areas or leave needles (especially used ones) lying around in public places.
I would be in favour of banning smoking anything in public places (including places of work) and permitting people to take any drugs that they want in their own home. There are some difficult areas (for example, should people with children be allowed to smoke whatever they like at home around their children?) but the general rule of thumb should be that you can do whatever you want to your own body and mind, just don't do it to anyone else.
Not really. Whuffle is more sensible as a currency concept - it's fungible. There's no difference in how you can use Whuffle based on who gave it to you. There are some interesting economics papers based on the idea that anyone can create a mint and the value of its currency would be tracked based on the reputation of the person.
It's difficult to rate-limit login attempts from a botnet. The attack pattern I see on my server is one IP making three login attempts, then another IP making three login attempts, and so on. I do rate limit (via temporary IP blocking) attempts from one IP, but it doesn't help much. Of course, they're all doing password-based login attempts and I disable password-based SSH logins for all Internet-connected machines...
Yup. Compiling for the Burroughs architecture was easier than many segment-based systems, because they allowed segment descriptors to be placed in main memory, with the CPU responsible for tracking the value type by updating a tag. We adapt this slightly so that we only require one tag bit per 256 bits of main memory (the paper describes the implementation of this in some detail, but I'm happy to answer questions) to be able to safely store capabilities in main memory. Our design also allows normal C data structures to work as expected. You can mix C code compiled for MIPS and C code compiled for CHERI in the same binary (though you only get coarse-grained protection in the MIPS code).
The Burroughs architecture had very little impact on the computer architecture community, but was enormously influential in the design of VMs for high-level languages. One of our goals is to pull out the aspects of such VMs that are required for memory protection and put them back in the hardware, so a buggy VM has a far more limited security impact. My student's work on JNI dramatically reduced the amount of C code in the trusted computing base for the JVM implementation that he used.
The flippant answer is all that your paranoia deserves. The work was undertaken by SRI and The University of Cambridge. The funding was provided by DARPA, but that's the extent of their involvement (other than creating a program with the goal of being able to redesign any aspect of computing with security in mind).
The code is no more or less meriting an independent audit than any other open source code. Less, actually, because we don't anticipate anyone actually using our open source reference implementation in production, we hope that CPU vendors will take the ISA extensions and apply them to their own chips, but we expect that (if they do) they'll do independent reimplementations. At the ISA levels, we have PVS / SAL proofs that we'll be publishing soon that the ISA does provide the desired security properties and you're welcome to audit those too.
Systemd definitely solves a problem that exists. Unfortunately, it solves it in the same way that a nuclear warhead solves the problem of rat infestation.
My Windows NT 4.0 disk had a PowerPC installer on it. I never found a CHRP machine to run it on though. I tried it on a PowerPC Mac once, but couldn't get it to boot. Windows 2000 only shipped for IA32.
The most obvious example is the byte-swapping load instructions. There are some other examples if you can find the papers by the VirtualPC authors, which explain them in detail. It's been quite a few years since I paid attention to anything PowerPC related.
THE goal of PowerPC was not to make it easy to emulate 68K and x86. It wasn't even A goal.
You might want to go back and read some press releases from the AIM alliance at that time. Or even look at the ISA: there are a lot of things in there that only make sense if you want to emulate m68k or x86. They were positioning PowerPC as a migration path from m68k and i386 systems and being able to emulate both at a reasonable speed was part of this strategy.
Spoken like someone who has no idea about the market at the time. The PowerPC was introduced in 1992, announced in 1991. At the time, Intel's flagship x86 part was the 486 but they were trying to kill the x86 line. They'd released the i860 (RISC, not x86-compatible) in 1989 and tech magazines were saying it would kill x86. Windows NT was originally written for the i860 and only later ported to x86, so even Windows looked like it might not be tied to x86 in the long term.
1992 saw the launch of the Alpha and MIPS R4K, and 1993 saw the SPARCv9 ISA. It didn't look like a 32-bit architecture that was hacked onto a legacy 16-bit ISA had much of a long-term future. IBM and Motorola were two of the biggest players in CPU manufacturing and they teamed up to produce something that would provide a migration path for m68k and i386 software. The PowerPC architecture was based on IBM's POWER architecture but extended to make it easy to emulate m68k and i386 at reasonable speeds. Microsoft was signed up to port Windows NT and it looked like you'd be able to run Windows and MacOS (the two most popular desktop operating systems) and possibly some of the other less-popular ones (most of which were m68k-based) on the same hardware. IBM and Motorola were both going to produce chips, so there was guaranteed to be competition, which would bring down prices, and they were soliciting other companies to produce implementations of the architecture. Within a few years, PowerPC would be faster and cheaper than x86 and would run more software. At least, that was the theory. It sounded quite plausible, but history didn't quite work out like that.
Those numbers don't tell the whole story. iBooks doesn't exist to make a profit selling books, it exists to make the iPad seem like a plausible platform for reading books. Similarly, Amazon gets a significant benefit from locking people into the Kindle ecosystem. The $180M in cash that Apple gets is nice, but it's nothing compared to having a load of people who have bought books that will only work on an Apple device.
Slashdot Mirror
I, for one, am in favour of removing bread from the human gene pool.
Yes, almost certainly. The market for compiler engineers is very much a sellers' market at the moment. Universities neglected it for so long that most people graduate from undergraduate degrees with basically no knowledge of how a compiler works (if they're lucky, the know how compilers worked in the '80s), so there are 10 jobs for every person.
In The Humane Interface, written in 2000, Jef Raskin made the same complaint. The time between turning a computer on and having written a program to add two numbers together on, say, a C64 or a BBC Model B, was about 30 seconds. On a modern computer of the time, you wouldn't even have finished booting - starting the IDE would take even longer. The problem is, this misses the point. There are lots of scripting languages with REPL environments, including a POSIX shell and PowerShell on Windows, that can do this as a single command once the computer is running (on OS X, you can add numbers in Spotlight, so it's even quicker - just hit command-space and type the sum). If you want to write a more complex application, it's vastly easier today. Extend that simple calculator to show an editable history and show equations, and you'll find it a bit easier today. Now extend it to be able to print - if you've ever written applications to print in the era before operating systems provided a printer abstraction then you'll know how painful that was.
I don't understand why you think 'yum install gcc' is somehow different from 'download and run the installer for the VS command-line tools'. Especially on a modern Linux distro, where libraries come with -devel variants to save you the 10KB taken up by the headers in the normal install, so you end up having to install a load of headers as well to get the system useable.
I was a consultant for a few years and didn't find that it did. Most of my customers found me, as a result of my open source work (usually to work on the same projects, sometimes to work on projects in similar fields). Contract negotiation didn't take very long (they list some requirements, you mutually agree on a date, you pick a number, if they haggle then you politely decline).
Let me guess, they outsourced this particular code to EDS?
That's as maybe but we have Healthcare that is FREE at the point of delivery.
That's not quite true for dental work, but the price is capped, so you'll typically pay £18.50 to see a dentist, £50.50 if you need something done, or £219 if you need something serious. It's only free if you qualify for extra assistance, which is automatic if you are under 18, under 19 (25 in Wales) and in full-time education, on income support or similar.
Your comment would be much more insightful if you're read all of the way to the end of the first sentence of the post that you replied to.
If you think I'm conservative and pro-gun, then you've clearly never read any of my other posts. In fact, if your entire reply is not just an ad hominem, but one attacking views that are diametrically opposed to the ones that I've publicly stated on numerous occasions, I can only assume that you are completely lacking any meaningful responses.
How many factory workers were middle class, during this heyday of which you speak?
Russia or the separatists in Eastern Ukraine might have done this
That's a distinction without a difference.
although no-one is sure what they would stand to gain from it.
It looks like they thought it was a Ukraine military plane and were a bit too trigger happy, not realising it was a civilian aircraft until too late.
Ukraine's own military might have done it (they've done it before and denied it vehemently until it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt).
Here's the thing: if the Ukraine were responsible, then Russia would have a vested interest in a visibly transparent investigation and be in a position to ensure that it happened. If they could convincingly portray the Ukraine as having shot down a civilian aircraft then that would significantly alter the political sympathies in the current conflict. Instead, they have done everything in their power to block it.
The problem is in your phrasing of it as 'government abuses'. In the most part, it's not 'the government', as a monolithic entity acting based on policy that is abusing the power, it's individuals whose abuses are enabled by the government's programs. There's a political split over whether you can trust 'the government', but both sides agree that you probably can't trust an underpaid civil servant with a napoleon complex.
[1] Actually, given that this has happened on about 70% of my trips to the USA over the last couple of years, I can't really justify calling it unusual.
Yes, I see a problem with pot cafes. Drug use is not OK, just inevitable
What about cafes that serve coffee? You know, the beverage containing a highly addictive drug? Should we ban those too?
The issue with pot cafes is that it's hard for people to work in them without being exposed to passive smoke, but if you can address that then I don't see the difference between them and normal cafes.
I don't see a contradiction (although I'm not an American). I have no problems with people smoking, snorting, injecting, or otherwise consuming any drugs that they want. I do object if they blow smoke in public areas or leave needles (especially used ones) lying around in public places.
I would be in favour of banning smoking anything in public places (including places of work) and permitting people to take any drugs that they want in their own home. There are some difficult areas (for example, should people with children be allowed to smoke whatever they like at home around their children?) but the general rule of thumb should be that you can do whatever you want to your own body and mind, just don't do it to anyone else.
Not really. Whuffle is more sensible as a currency concept - it's fungible. There's no difference in how you can use Whuffle based on who gave it to you. There are some interesting economics papers based on the idea that anyone can create a mint and the value of its currency would be tracked based on the reputation of the person.
It's difficult to rate-limit login attempts from a botnet. The attack pattern I see on my server is one IP making three login attempts, then another IP making three login attempts, and so on. I do rate limit (via temporary IP blocking) attempts from one IP, but it doesn't help much. Of course, they're all doing password-based login attempts and I disable password-based SSH logins for all Internet-connected machines...
Yup. Compiling for the Burroughs architecture was easier than many segment-based systems, because they allowed segment descriptors to be placed in main memory, with the CPU responsible for tracking the value type by updating a tag. We adapt this slightly so that we only require one tag bit per 256 bits of main memory (the paper describes the implementation of this in some detail, but I'm happy to answer questions) to be able to safely store capabilities in main memory. Our design also allows normal C data structures to work as expected. You can mix C code compiled for MIPS and C code compiled for CHERI in the same binary (though you only get coarse-grained protection in the MIPS code).
The Burroughs architecture had very little impact on the computer architecture community, but was enormously influential in the design of VMs for high-level languages. One of our goals is to pull out the aspects of such VMs that are required for memory protection and put them back in the hardware, so a buggy VM has a far more limited security impact. My student's work on JNI dramatically reduced the amount of C code in the trusted computing base for the JVM implementation that he used.
The flippant answer is all that your paranoia deserves. The work was undertaken by SRI and The University of Cambridge. The funding was provided by DARPA, but that's the extent of their involvement (other than creating a program with the goal of being able to redesign any aspect of computing with security in mind).
The code is no more or less meriting an independent audit than any other open source code. Less, actually, because we don't anticipate anyone actually using our open source reference implementation in production, we hope that CPU vendors will take the ISA extensions and apply them to their own chips, but we expect that (if they do) they'll do independent reimplementations. At the ISA levels, we have PVS / SAL proofs that we'll be publishing soon that the ISA does provide the desired security properties and you're welcome to audit those too.
Systemd definitely solves a problem that exists. Unfortunately, it solves it in the same way that a nuclear warhead solves the problem of rat infestation.
My Windows NT 4.0 disk had a PowerPC installer on it. I never found a CHRP machine to run it on though. I tried it on a PowerPC Mac once, but couldn't get it to boot. Windows 2000 only shipped for IA32.
The most obvious example is the byte-swapping load instructions. There are some other examples if you can find the papers by the VirtualPC authors, which explain them in detail. It's been quite a few years since I paid attention to anything PowerPC related.
THE goal of PowerPC was not to make it easy to emulate 68K and x86. It wasn't even A goal.
You might want to go back and read some press releases from the AIM alliance at that time. Or even look at the ISA: there are a lot of things in there that only make sense if you want to emulate m68k or x86. They were positioning PowerPC as a migration path from m68k and i386 systems and being able to emulate both at a reasonable speed was part of this strategy.
Spoken like someone who has no idea about the market at the time. The PowerPC was introduced in 1992, announced in 1991. At the time, Intel's flagship x86 part was the 486 but they were trying to kill the x86 line. They'd released the i860 (RISC, not x86-compatible) in 1989 and tech magazines were saying it would kill x86. Windows NT was originally written for the i860 and only later ported to x86, so even Windows looked like it might not be tied to x86 in the long term.
1992 saw the launch of the Alpha and MIPS R4K, and 1993 saw the SPARCv9 ISA. It didn't look like a 32-bit architecture that was hacked onto a legacy 16-bit ISA had much of a long-term future. IBM and Motorola were two of the biggest players in CPU manufacturing and they teamed up to produce something that would provide a migration path for m68k and i386 software. The PowerPC architecture was based on IBM's POWER architecture but extended to make it easy to emulate m68k and i386 at reasonable speeds. Microsoft was signed up to port Windows NT and it looked like you'd be able to run Windows and MacOS (the two most popular desktop operating systems) and possibly some of the other less-popular ones (most of which were m68k-based) on the same hardware. IBM and Motorola were both going to produce chips, so there was guaranteed to be competition, which would bring down prices, and they were soliciting other companies to produce implementations of the architecture. Within a few years, PowerPC would be faster and cheaper than x86 and would run more software. At least, that was the theory. It sounded quite plausible, but history didn't quite work out like that.
Those numbers don't tell the whole story. iBooks doesn't exist to make a profit selling books, it exists to make the iPad seem like a plausible platform for reading books. Similarly, Amazon gets a significant benefit from locking people into the Kindle ecosystem. The $180M in cash that Apple gets is nice, but it's nothing compared to having a load of people who have bought books that will only work on an Apple device.