I do know how to use Ada, and in fact, for some tasks it is pretty good (protocol decoding for example).
But you have to basically define your record type twice in order to do this.
My assertion is that it sucks for low level hardware access because you need to write arbitrary data to hardware (yes it is possible, but it is cumbersome), some time (a lot of times actually), you need to do type punning, and this is just cumbersome in Ada (yes you can do it, but it is painful), and sometimes you need to add inline assembly (yes, you can do that in GNAT, but finding the documentation for this is not the easiest task).
Also, most low level issues are horribly badly documented (such as calling conventions), and there are no shift operators, meaning that your code will be littered with X / 2**Y (making the code more or less unreadable), there is also no way to properly do an arithmetic shift in Ada on a modular type.
Further, the language does not separate the keywords for bitwise or and logical or, which leads to statements that are not very easy to grasp on the first view. The language also actively encourage a ridiculously verbose code style, that actually makes the code more difficult to read, since you need to read more lines (or longer lines) for what can be expressed in a more compact form.
Further the rules for pointers and whether they can be passed into other functions in Ada are encouraging the use of global variables (a guaranteed way to fail if your program is using multiple threads).
Not to forget the idiocies with the package system, causing weird issues like circular package dependencies (Java did it right in this aspect).
Other complaints I may add is that all the Ada compilers that I have played around with are horribly slow.
Also, I would not write hardware simulation in Ada if i want performance, you are chasing constants in that case, and then C is the only way (and I have worked with implementing dynamically recompiling CPU-simulators, so I have a certain perspective on that).
There are a lot of things that you can do in Ada, but the syntax that have been adopted is designed to force programmers to write two times as much code as is actually necessary.
I write code in Ada at the moment. It is part of the data handling used in a satellite.
Although it is decent for the application side, the parts I am writing deals with low level access to the hardware, and for this Ada absolutely SUCKS big-time.
Also the typing system is ridiculous, basically, you define a new type for everything, with certain constraints (this is part of enhancing safety). But, this means that you have several hundreds of types to track, it would be better if the constraints were enforced in contracts for the functions and procedures, but no, that is not how Ada works, instead I spend about 30% of my time looking up type definitions for various integer types.
It is a very sucky language that force you to write more lines of code and makes it difficult to write unit-tests for your code (without having the unit test in the same package as the code, but we are of-course not allowed to embed the unit tests in the flight software).
"This is pure, unadulterated, urban legend. A hold over from the days when Microsoft would blame the hardware manufacturers for all their software bugs."
Sorry, but all current research on operating systems place something like 80% of all kernel bugs in crappy device drivers. Check the papers from the MINIX team if you want to know more.
"innumerable operating systems out there which are stable as a rock, and yet support a vast range of hardware"
Sorry, but Linux is not fully stable on all machines, I have a Dell laptop which refuse to wake up from sleep for example, well, it wakes up, but the screen is black. This is exactly because of all the plurality of the PC hardware, I would not have this problem with a machine running windows (where they do a lot of testing for these issues), or OS X where the hardware is limited (in terms of different configuration). Also, BeOS had a very limited driver support and was lacking support for a lot of different hardware units.
(Disclaimer: I try to avoid windows like fire in normal cases, so don't see this as microserfism).
"No matter what kind of hardware you have, 2+2=4 (Intel CPU bugs aside). Crashes should not happen."
Well, if you look at some of the device driver code available, you see that this is not the case. The quality is really scary sometimes and bad drivers tend to do: too complicated interrupt processing, end up in infinite loops, corrupt pointers due to incorrect assumptions of data returned from hardware or other idiocies.
So, in order to sum this up, you really have no idea what you are talking about.
Yes, but the Swedish telecom market works well, because it is extremely competitive.
It is also privatised. For example, Vodaphone sold off their mobile phone branch in Sweden, citing to much competition in the market. The fact is that the market is working exactly as it should do in Sweden when it comes to telecom and Internet; and it is due to fairly well handled privatisation and regulation on the points where it is needed that it works so well.
This extremely aggressive and almost perfect market, has lead to ridiculously low prices (I think a text is roughly about 2-3p on some of the mobile pre-payed options) when compared to the rest of Europe. When I first moved from Sweden to the Netherlands I was chocked by the high prices for Internet and mobile contracts, when I moved to the UK I was equally chocked, mostly since this is a rather backward place when it comes to technology.
Although I would really like to have a replicator at home, I believe that these early models will generate tea with a very plastic taste. So for now I will stick to tea bags and my water boiler. And yes I drink Earl Gray, for precisely the reason that you would:)
Well, retina scans are problematic since you have to look inside the eyes, but I have not seen any reports of people going blind from them (they are used daily at some places). I would however say they are quite invasive, almost like logging in by leaving dental marks (not exactly, but you get the point, you look inside your body basically). More interesting though are iris scans, those do not need to look inside the eye, only on the exterior surface.
Of course, when super-HD cameras are everywhere, you will leave those around as well, but at least they (the iris scans) are at the moment better than anything else as you dont leave them around on whatever you touch.
Iris scans also do not require you to touch anything that thousands of others have touched (fingerprint authentication is disgusting with respect to desease control, and I am really surprised that the council of ministers (note, the parliament had nothing to say in this), decided on having fingerprints in passports, despite the health hasards with the fingerprinting devices).
Preventing pass-port fraud is something that should be done, note that a negative match on your biometrics will not necessarily get you arrested, but rather have your papers examined in detail by humans,. So, the point with the new passports are to speed up and automate the border checkpoints as much as possible, and also ensure that the passports are hard to fake.
The passports are difficult to forge, because they contain all the information printed in the passport (with a weak access protection I agree), but they are signed cryptographically with a secret key held by the issuing authority. But for this goal (preventing forgery, no fingerprints are needed, the signature is enough), the biometrics are only needed for automated border controls, and for that iris scans and / or facial recognition are the least invasive.
Yes, but without the Hawkins radiation, energy conservation would be violated by any black hole (IANAP, just quoting Hawkins), this is one of the key points in favour for the Hawkins-radiation.
"so a Muslim soldier (we call them terrorists because we don't like Muslims)"
No, they are called terrorists since they are not legal combatants, and their targets are explicitly civilians. A legal combatant is not allowed to conceal his identity as such prior to an attack.
No you do not. Continental Europe is virtually passport free. Some states requires that you carry a national id card though (but I have never in my life been asked for one by any government official), and there are no check on the borders. This also include the newer EU members (except Bulgaria and Romania), since January this year.
"Finally, a distinction should be drawn against the EU and "Europe", such as there is a distinction between the USA and "North America". One is a country, the other is a continent."
Indeed, but America commonly means the USA and not the two continents. I often consider that Norway is in Northern Europe, but not in Europe, and let's face it. The distinction between saying EU and Europe is really thin these days.
Most high end machines support ECC RAM if that is what you mean. Recovering from failures in CPUs is on other issue.
In the space sector we have fault-tolerant CPUs that have ALUs and register in triple redundant configurations.
It is exciting that the large CPU manufacturers are taking this seriously now, this might mean that we can fly COTS CPUs in the future space missions (a system I am working on is using a 25 MHz SPARC v7 (you cannot even get the v7 manual anymore), so you can immagine of how big difference it would be to have Intel stamping out 2-3 GHz rad-tolerant CPUs compared to what we are using now).
"Because the universe is everything that exists, the belief that beings outside the universe exist is not even self-consistent."
Well, this in not necessarily true. However, the universe is everything that we can observe (of course, due to the expansion we have an event horizon of the universe and the universe is actually a bit larger).
It is a possibility that the universe is the running computer simulation created by some extra-universe scientists. However, in any case, if that was true, it would not really matter, since we cannot observe it anyway.
Working for one of the companies that were involved in the Beagle 2, what is believed now is that the Beagle 2 made an orthogonal impact against the wall of a meteorite crater. The airbags and the rest of the landing system were designed to cope with a nice impact at an angle against flat ground. In the end it just flew straight into a wall.
Well, you make a few good points, but the origins of honour comes from preliterate societies where trust and being true to ones word ment everything (as the only contracts you had were oral). Honour is not necessarily a battlefield issue, but can be a social one.
In Swedish, there are two words that translate roughly to the English "honour", they are "heder" and "ära". "Ära" is closely related to "glory", but is not necessarily exactly the same, and is often translated as "honour".
So while what you were saying is true, it does not paint the whole picture due to the ambiguity of the English word "honour". Further, the germanic pre-christian notion of honour had nothing to do with being good to your king, but being true to ones word. If you made a pledge to the king, you were of course bound to that, but making that pledge were something you decided about and not something you had to do.
Confusing chips and fries can certainly be annoying. How about the word football, it is naturally a game where you try to play a ball with your feet, not a game where you are carrying a ball to the goal (this game should be called armball or something like it).
But when it comes to the driving, you will find that it is the Brits that are driving on the wrong side as the continentals and the Americans are clearly driving on the right side.
Bio is not perfect, there is not a 100% cycle in it, and it produces a lot of not so nice waste that kills people. But, yes the net CO2 contribution is less than coal and oil.
The only solution viable today is nuclear, but waste can be dealt with for most part, and it is more or less a temporary solution till we have fusion up running.
It is also possible to use the excess heat from nuclear reactors to do heat catalysed electrolysis and produce massive amounts of hydrogen, which is the clean way forward with cars.
New scientist is a _little_ bit better in the area you are talking about, but on the other hand you have to cope with the fact that half the magazine if classifieds for scientific jobs in the UK and not actually about science.
Not only do micro organism evolve, but evolution as a theory can be used to make predictions, and these predictions are testable, and the predictions you can make from evolutionary theory are very interesting and useful for humankind.
Two examples follows.
Prediction 1: There must be an underlying mechanism to pass on the traits of the ancestors to the offspring. If no such underlying mechanism can be found, evolution have been disproven (at least as we know it).
Proof 1: DNA discovered, fit in with the predictions exactly.
Prediction 2: Chimpansee and Humans are closely related, following DNA analysis one can see that Humans are missing one chromosome. No species can survive the ripping out of so much DNA, so logically the chromosome must have been merged with another one. If no such merged chromosome can be found, evolution is disproven.
Proof 2: The merged chromosome pair have been found (just recently), and evolutionary theory is still valid, and useful for predicting how biological organisms work.
And to make a comment about TFA. She was not making a statement that was away from neutrality. She was taking in the facts and current best understanding of the world and made an assessment of ID. Sort of like criticizing the flat earth society when you have overwhelming evidence for the earth being round, would that be considered as non neutral and enough to fire her?
I do not think that businesses will avoid Japan, they are not really avoiding the U.S. at the moment, despite the same applies there.
Hopefully more Americans will now see what their own policies instills on tourists and business travelers, and maybe people will start calling for change in the U.S.
In the EU, we do not have this yet. On the other hand in the EU they will soon start fingerprinting all citizens that want a passport (though according to at least the state that I come from, the prints will only be stored on the passport).
"We applaud Apple for the exciting licensing changes"
Is it just me? But I hardly find a license change exciting, not even the the slightest bit. They should really send the PR person who wrote this to a shrink or a psychiatrist.
I suggest the unit Bm/s to determine what transmission medium should be used.
E.g. one shipload of DVDs (say 100 000 discs), transmitted over the atlantic (5 572 km), during a one month trip gives us: 100 000 * 4.7GB * 5572km / (3600s/day*30days) = 2.42485185*10^17 = 242.5 P Bm/s.
Slashdot Mirror
I do know how to use Ada, and in fact, for some tasks it is pretty good (protocol decoding for example).
But you have to basically define your record type twice in order to do this.
My assertion is that it sucks for low level hardware access because you need to write arbitrary data to hardware (yes it is possible, but it is cumbersome), some time (a lot of times actually), you need to do type punning, and this is just cumbersome in Ada (yes you can do it, but it is painful), and sometimes you need to add inline assembly (yes, you can do that in GNAT, but finding the documentation for this is not the easiest task).
Also, most low level issues are horribly badly documented (such as calling conventions), and there are no shift operators, meaning that your code will be littered with X / 2**Y (making the code more or less unreadable), there is also no way to properly do an arithmetic shift in Ada on a modular type.
Further, the language does not separate the keywords for bitwise or and logical or, which leads to statements that are not very easy to grasp on the first view. The language also actively encourage a ridiculously verbose code style, that actually makes the code more difficult to read, since you need to read more lines (or longer lines) for what can be expressed in a more compact form.
Further the rules for pointers and whether they can be passed into other functions in Ada are encouraging the use of global variables (a guaranteed way to fail if your program is using multiple threads).
Not to forget the idiocies with the package system, causing weird issues like circular package dependencies (Java did it right in this aspect).
Other complaints I may add is that all the Ada compilers that I have played around with are horribly slow.
Also, I would not write hardware simulation in Ada if i want performance, you are chasing constants in that case, and then C is the only way (and I have worked with implementing dynamically recompiling CPU-simulators, so I have a certain perspective on that).
There are a lot of things that you can do in Ada, but the syntax that have been adopted is designed to force programmers to write two times as much code as is actually necessary.
I write code in Ada at the moment. It is part of the data handling used in a satellite.
Although it is decent for the application side, the parts I am writing deals with low level access to the hardware, and for this Ada absolutely SUCKS big-time.
Also the typing system is ridiculous, basically, you define a new type for everything, with certain constraints (this is part of enhancing safety). But, this means that you have several hundreds of types to track, it would be better if the constraints were enforced in contracts for the functions and procedures, but no, that is not how Ada works, instead I spend about 30% of my time looking up type definitions for various integer types.
It is a very sucky language that force you to write more lines of code and makes it difficult to write unit-tests for your code (without having the unit test in the same package as the code, but we are of-course not allowed to embed the unit tests in the flight software).
Anyhow, Ada suck!!!
"This is pure, unadulterated, urban legend. A hold over from the days when Microsoft would blame the hardware manufacturers for all their software bugs."
Sorry, but all current research on operating systems place something like 80% of all kernel bugs in crappy device drivers. Check the papers from the MINIX team if you want to know more.
"innumerable operating systems out there which are stable as a rock, and yet support a vast range of hardware"
Sorry, but Linux is not fully stable on all machines, I have a Dell laptop which refuse to wake up from sleep for example, well, it wakes up, but the screen is black. This is exactly because of all the plurality of the PC hardware, I would not have this problem with a machine running windows (where they do a lot of testing for these issues), or OS X where the hardware is limited (in terms of different configuration). Also, BeOS had a very limited driver support and was lacking support for a lot of different hardware units.
(Disclaimer: I try to avoid windows like fire in normal cases, so don't see this as microserfism).
"No matter what kind of hardware you have, 2+2=4 (Intel CPU bugs aside). Crashes should not happen."
Well, if you look at some of the device driver code available, you see that this is not the case. The quality is really scary sometimes and bad drivers tend to do: too complicated interrupt processing, end up in infinite loops, corrupt pointers due to incorrect assumptions of data returned from hardware or other idiocies.
So, in order to sum this up, you really have no idea what you are talking about.
They weren not random, they were roughly the number of atoms in the observable universe and the planck time.
This is slashdot, you should understand that these jokes are very common here.
Yes, but the Swedish telecom market works well, because it is extremely competitive.
It is also privatised. For example, Vodaphone sold off their mobile phone branch in Sweden, citing to much competition in the market. The fact is that the market is working exactly as it should do in Sweden when it comes to telecom and Internet; and it is due to fairly well handled privatisation and regulation on the points where it is needed that it works so well.
This extremely aggressive and almost perfect market, has lead to ridiculously low prices (I think a text is roughly about 2-3p on some of the mobile pre-payed options) when compared to the rest of Europe. When I first moved from Sweden to the Netherlands I was chocked by the high prices for Internet and mobile contracts, when I moved to the UK I was equally chocked, mostly since this is a rather backward place when it comes to technology.
Although I would really like to have a replicator at home, I believe that these early models will generate tea with a very plastic taste. So for now I will stick to tea bags and my water boiler. And yes I drink Earl Gray, for precisely the reason that you would :)
But, lets give it a few years...
Well, retina scans are problematic since you have to look inside the eyes, but I have not seen any reports of people going blind from them (they are used daily at some places). I would however say they are quite invasive, almost like logging in by leaving dental marks (not exactly, but you get the point, you look inside your body basically). More interesting though are iris scans, those do not need to look inside the eye, only on the exterior surface.
Of course, when super-HD cameras are everywhere, you will leave those around as well, but at least they (the iris scans) are at the moment better than anything else as you dont leave them around on whatever you touch.
Iris scans also do not require you to touch anything that thousands of others have touched (fingerprint authentication is disgusting with respect to desease control, and I am really surprised that the council of ministers (note, the parliament had nothing to say in this), decided on having fingerprints in passports, despite the health hasards with the fingerprinting devices).
Preventing pass-port fraud is something that should be done, note that a negative match on your biometrics will not necessarily get you arrested, but rather have your papers examined in detail by humans,. So, the point with the new passports are to speed up and automate the border checkpoints as much as possible, and also ensure that the passports are hard to fake.
The passports are difficult to forge, because they contain all the information printed in the passport (with a weak access protection I agree), but they are signed cryptographically with a secret key held by the issuing authority. But for this goal (preventing forgery, no fingerprints are needed, the signature is enough), the biometrics are only needed for automated border controls, and for that iris scans and / or facial recognition are the least invasive.
Yes, but without the Hawkins radiation, energy conservation would be violated by any black hole (IANAP, just quoting Hawkins), this is one of the key points in favour for the Hawkins-radiation.
"so a Muslim soldier (we call them terrorists because we don't like Muslims)"
No, they are called terrorists since they are not legal combatants, and their targets are explicitly civilians. A legal combatant is not allowed to conceal his identity as such prior to an attack.
No you do not. Continental Europe is virtually passport free. Some states requires that you carry a national id card though (but I have never in my life been asked for one by any government official), and there are no check on the borders. This also include the newer EU members (except Bulgaria and Romania), since January this year.
"Finally, a distinction should be drawn against the EU and "Europe", such as there is a distinction between the USA and "North America". One is a country, the other is a continent."
Indeed, but America commonly means the USA and not the two continents. I often consider that Norway is in Northern Europe, but not in Europe, and let's face it. The distinction between saying EU and Europe is really thin these days.
Yes, but a simpler way is to bombard the machine with heavy lead pellets or cut the power... :)
Most high end machines support ECC RAM if that is what you mean. Recovering from failures in CPUs is on other issue.
In the space sector we have fault-tolerant CPUs that have ALUs and register in triple redundant configurations.
It is exciting that the large CPU manufacturers are taking this seriously now, this might mean that we can fly COTS CPUs in the future space missions (a system I am working on is using a 25 MHz SPARC v7 (you cannot even get the v7 manual anymore), so you can immagine of how big difference it would be to have Intel stamping out 2-3 GHz rad-tolerant CPUs compared to what we are using now).
"Because the universe is everything that exists, the belief that beings outside the universe exist is not even self-consistent."
Well, this in not necessarily true. However, the universe is everything that we can observe (of course, due to the expansion we have an event horizon of the universe and the universe is actually a bit larger).
It is a possibility that the universe is the running computer simulation created by some extra-universe scientists. However, in any case, if that was true, it would not really matter, since we cannot observe it anyway.
Working for one of the companies that were involved in the Beagle 2, what is believed now is that the Beagle 2 made an orthogonal impact against the wall of a meteorite crater. The airbags and the rest of the landing system were designed to cope with a nice impact at an angle against flat ground. In the end it just flew straight into a wall.
Well, you make a few good points, but the origins of honour comes from preliterate societies where trust and being true to ones word ment everything (as the only contracts you had were oral). Honour is not necessarily a battlefield issue, but can be a social one.
In Swedish, there are two words that translate roughly to the English "honour", they are "heder" and "ära". "Ära" is closely related to "glory", but is not necessarily exactly the same, and is often translated as "honour".
So while what you were saying is true, it does not paint the whole picture due to the ambiguity of the English word "honour". Further, the germanic pre-christian notion of honour had nothing to do with being good to your king, but being true to ones word. If you made a pledge to the king, you were of course bound to that, but making that pledge were something you decided about and not something you had to do.
Confusing chips and fries can certainly be annoying. How about the word football, it is naturally a game where you try to play a ball with your feet, not a game where you are carrying a ball to the goal (this game should be called armball or something like it).
But when it comes to the driving, you will find that it is the Brits that are driving on the wrong side as the continentals and the Americans are clearly driving on the right side.
Bio is not perfect, there is not a 100% cycle in it, and it produces a lot of not so nice waste that kills people. But, yes the net CO2 contribution is less than coal and oil.
The only solution viable today is nuclear, but waste can be dealt with for most part, and it is more or less a temporary solution till we have fusion up running.
It is also possible to use the excess heat from nuclear reactors to do heat catalysed electrolysis and produce massive amounts of hydrogen, which is the clean way forward with cars.
New scientist is a _little_ bit better in the area you are talking about, but on the other hand you have to cope with the fact that half the magazine if classifieds for scientific jobs in the UK and not actually about science.
Not only do micro organism evolve, but evolution as a theory can be used to make predictions, and these predictions are testable, and the predictions you can make from evolutionary theory are very interesting and useful for humankind.
Two examples follows.
Prediction 1: There must be an underlying mechanism to pass on the traits of the ancestors to the offspring. If no such underlying mechanism can be found, evolution have been disproven (at least as we know it).
Proof 1: DNA discovered, fit in with the predictions exactly.
Prediction 2: Chimpansee and Humans are closely related, following DNA analysis one can see that Humans are missing one chromosome. No species can survive the ripping out of so much DNA, so logically the chromosome must have been merged with another one. If no such merged chromosome can be found, evolution is disproven.
Proof 2: The merged chromosome pair have been found (just recently), and evolutionary theory is still valid, and useful for predicting how biological organisms work.
And to make a comment about TFA. She was not making a statement that was away from neutrality. She was taking in the facts and current best understanding of the world and made an assessment of ID. Sort of like criticizing the flat earth society when you have overwhelming evidence for the earth being round, would that be considered as non neutral and enough to fire her?
Does ocaml support multiprocessing now days? Last I heard the GC couldn't handle it, hence it is a rather useless language.
Do not take this wrong, ocaml is a nice language, but the lack of SMP support really kills of the usability of the language these days.
I do not think that businesses will avoid Japan, they are not really avoiding the U.S. at the moment, despite the same applies there.
Hopefully more Americans will now see what their own policies instills on tourists and business travelers, and maybe people will start calling for change in the U.S.
In the EU, we do not have this yet. On the other hand in the EU they will soon start fingerprinting all citizens that want a passport (though according to at least the state that I come from, the prints will only be stored on the passport).
There is a new song, as far as I am concerned, that is one of the more exciting features in OpenBSD 4.2. :)
"We applaud Apple for the exciting licensing changes"
Is it just me? But I hardly find a license change exciting, not even the the slightest bit. They should really send the PR person who wrote this to a shrink or a psychiatrist.
I suggest the unit Bm/s to determine what transmission medium should be used.
E.g. one shipload of DVDs (say 100 000 discs), transmitted over the atlantic (5 572 km), during a one month trip gives us: 100 000 * 4.7GB * 5572km / (3600s/day*30days) = 2.42485185*10^17 = 242.5 P Bm/s.
Try to beat that with a wire...