How about the EE coders that write the control algorithms for the power grid?
Let's hope those "EE coders" are actually software engineers. Those "EE coders" were responsible for some of the most monstrous unmaintainable crap I've seen over the years. I'm sure they're great at their own job(*), but when they try to do mine... (shudder)
Among the horrors were the notion that polling something at a rate of ~10KHz (as opposed to having a working interrupt system) would be a fine solution for a desktop app (it wasn't, and it didn't even fully catch the hardware bug they were trying to overcome), and a multitude of time delay loops (just empty for loops that take "just long enough" - on x86, where both compilers and CPU manufacturers conspire to make that cathegorically not true).
(*)...although there is a troubling tendency to think that any hardware problem can be solved in software, aka "let's throw our broken hardware over the wall and make it somebody else's problem". Power supply broken? Why, just fix that in software...
The PS4 is now a cut-down PC with a closed operating system, and the vast majority of games that it gets are "remasters" (nudge nudge, wink wink) of older PC titles.
Interesting point of view. It might also be proof that software quality has improved a lot, and there aren't so many 'normal' holes to drive through anymore...
How come there is so much noise and heat about a small piece of software that runs maybe 2-3 times per year?
All of this is anger, just to be angry. It serves no purpose other than giving you that heady rush of Socially Justified Rage. And as the great master said, it only leads to suffering...
That one has always surprised me. You'd think a database vendor would be proud to show of the results of its flagship product. That prohibition suggests, to me, that they have something to hide.
Hey, since we're here, here is a little benchmark I ran on the Oracle systems. In the 3-4 years we ran on top of Oracle, we had a database corruption twice. We needed (and received) help from Oracle support to recover from both corruptions. In the 15 or so years we ran on top of PostgreSQL since then, we had zero database corruptions. If one were to occur we are not sure we can get help, but we believe our data recovery procedures are good enough that it won't matter anyway.
And yes, we test that on a regular basis. Thanks for asking.
You must live in a urban rabbit warren. Try saying that when you live in the largest town for 50 miles in any direction and it's 11,000 people.
Do you not care about the planet? Do you wish for everything to die?
Seriously, this is what bothers me about all those eco-fanatics: they are delighted for _others_ to make sacrifices on behalf of the planet, but even a minor change in their own lifestyle? Noooo...
As it happens you do have a choice. That choice is moving closer to work, closer to shops, and closer to other people. It might inconvenience you slightly to live like the rest of humanity, but unless you have a pressing need to be way out there, you really shouldn't be.
It would also have been nice to include information as how the new elements can actually be used. For example, would it be possible to power a new giant robot using one of those four? And would you at least have enough power to seriously mess up Tokyo before radioactive decay wiped out your power source?
I'm in a hotel in Delhi _right now_, and there were ***three*** power outages in the last twelve hours alone! That I know of, at least - I was asleep for most of the night...
What I find interesting is why apparently this exploit is only possible on Facebook and LinkedIn. Is there something unique about the way they handle images that doesn't occur on other websites?
Hillary established a precedent that high-placed officials do not have to follow any rules. Does not prosecuting her still sound like a marvellous idea now?
Do you have any ideas how could the process be made more rigorous? Preferably in a way so as not to multiply the cost of the process by a factor 1000 or more?
Sure, I know about timezones. But is "last week" really so specific that we must be told that it happened at a 'local time'? Whose local time is that anyway: mine, or the time of the place where the event happened?
Let me put forth a simple challenge: based on the budget data of 2015 for your own country, show where the money is going to come from.
The final equation should show this: (number of recipients) * (yearly sum paid) = (total income state) - (other expenditures state)
Show the following ***numbers*** (i.e. no handwaving):
- Number of recipients: this is either the total number of adults, or the total number of people (i.e. adults and children). Tell us how many there are. - Yearly sum paid: this is what each recipient gets paid every year. How much will this be? What is considered a reasonable amount to live on in your country? - Total income state: this is how much money the state drags in every year. This is usually only taxes but sometimes also include things like oil sales. Show what tax pressure looks like for the average person. If you plan to tax people who receive _only_ UBI, show how much they have left to live on after taxes. - Other expenditures state: this includes such things as education, healthcare, having an army, building roads, etc. This figure should pretty much be the same as it is today.
Most of these discussions end with a bit of handwaving and a vague statement like "oh, the other 2 trillion will come out of improved efficiency", which is plainly ridiculous (it's more than the whole nation spends on salaries combined). This makes me suspect the proponents of UBI have not actually sat down and done the math, despite this being fairly straightforward.
If you do these things you will quickly find that either UBI will be far, far too small to live on, or that there is a very significant shortfal on the income side.
UBI may be a great idea. We have lots of great ideas, as a species, but unfortunately not all of those ideas can be realistically realized.
That lack of enthousiasm is not because we have done it for 30 years, it is because we have put in that effort many times in the past, and received nothing in return for it. I've done my share of heroics - and getting a pat on the back was usually already too much. Financial compensation? Never. Bonus for job well done, above and beyond? Never. Time compensation? Only under the direst of circumstances. Additional carreer prospects? Don't make me laugh - they know I'm a lousy manager and an excellent engineer, so they'll never willingly move me out of engineering.
You are getting some grief from the other posters, but in truth there is nothing that separates you from so many other bosses: you think of engineers not as people, but as tools. And in return they think of themselves not as valued members of the team, but as mercenaries.
They don't. My Powers of Programming have not diminished as I grew older (and by now I have reached the magic age of 45, i.e. I am entitled to tell you all how I was chased by dinosaurs uphill in my youth - at least that's what employers believe anyway).
But the problem is not that you somehow become less capable technically. The problem is that you become less accepting of bullshit. When I was 25, my boss asked me to fix a problem that required me to _stand_ (not sit) in a cooling cell (4 C; 39 F) for a day because there was a program running there that needed debugging. I did it without asking questions. All around me were guys wearing warm clothing who were carrying boxes in and out of the cooling cell, but noone thought to offer me any protection from the cold. When I walked out to warm up a little every once in a while they would in fact comment on my obvious lack of stamina and suggest I work harder to stay warm (again, this was a programming job).
And a few years after that, at a different employer, they hung a computer from a crane and had me stand next to it for a few days because that was the only way we could reach the relevant hardware - although moving it to a desk would only have been a few hours worth of work. I stood right next to a 10m drop for day, without any kind of safety in place - one wrong step and I would have fallen about 3 floors down.
Would I still do these things? No f'ing way! It's not that I _cannot_ stand for a day, or that my body feels the cold more, or that I'm scared of heights now, it's simply that I no longer think of myself as the lowest peon in the organisation - if they want my services, they need to at least marginally accomodate my needs as well. Also, I discovered somewhere along the line that my job is essentially a mercenary position: I rent out my skills for money, but there isn't any loyalty either way beyond the short term. There are in fact things in life I rate higher than spending hours in the office.
Employers very much prefer someone who only cares for proving himself to the big bad world, and is happy to do idiotic jobs without asking any questions - and has those things as the highest priority in life. Those people are generally speaking below 40, so someone over 40 finds it harder to get a job. And no amount of training or online courses will change this.
There is this generally accepted principle in discussion that if you claim something, it is up to you to provide the evidence of the claim. Just pointing at the audience and shouting "you are all idiots for not looking this up yourselves" is not only not done, but it is in fact a pretty damn sure indication that whatever claim you are making is bogus. Your blustering, idiotic response about "learn how to use Google" clearly indicates your claim is without merit. If it had merit, you would have provided a link to one of those studies you claim exist.
Oh wait, you did. You linked to the well-known scientific journal The Guardian, known for only publishing the highest quality of peer-reviewed studies... Which itself links to a study that has neither been reviewed nor published, and uses a questionable methodology to make an extremely click-baity claim.
In particular, the entire claim seems to rest on the performance of the gender-neutral/outsider group, where women score slightly higher than men. The study does not make clear how it managed to divide the gender-neutral group into men and women, and in fact it can be argued that for anyone they could positively identify one way or the other, so can others, so that individual should no longer count as gender-neutral.
I work for a company that writes those simulations. Generally a simulation consists of a CPU emulator that runs the onboard software, and a whole bunch of models for each aspect of the spacecraft and environment: the orbit model, the communication model, various instrument models, etc.. These systems are generally set up to allow gradual replacement of each model with real hardware as it becomes available, so the software development is already underway long before the spacecraft hardware has even been built. Each model is a hard real-time program (to allow drop-in replacement of hardware), and has extensive capabilities for error injection in order to simulate things like flipped bits, broken communication channels, broken sensors, etc.
I don't know what happened on Schiaparelli and they weren't a customer of ours anyway, but a scenario where a sensor breaks and sends bogus information could and should have been tested for during development.
I'm not sure what the software engineer:QA ratio is - most of that happens internally by the spacecraft people. You run into their QA people everywhere though, while I have yet to personally meet my first flight software engineer.
Oh, and back in the day I wrote the very first software-only environment for testing flight software on the ground. Up until then, the test environment used real hardware for the flight computer, thus requiring an expensive second set of flight computers just for doing the onboard software development. I hacked together a proof of concept that showed that you _could_ in fact model and simulate the flight computer as well, leading to a substantial cost saving on space projects since...
The flight computer _simulator_ generally speaking runs on Linux. I'm not sure what the models use these days, but I have seen IRIX and Sun systems around for this purpose. As for the flight computer itself, VxWorks is not an uncommon choice of OS, and the on-board CPU is usually something like ERC32 or Leon - both are radiation-hardened SPARCs.
Does the concept of ranking things bother you? Do you feel every country should be ranked the same, just to be more fair? Why, if I may ask? What is a country to you, other than just an administrative division of land with some local rules? Are you some kind of nationalist?
Countries like the US or most places in Europe are objectively better places to live than most countries in Africa. It's why so many people want to migrate there.
While I wouldn't go quite that far, I do keep a spray of screen cleaning fluid near my desk. At one point, a colleague famous for leaving fingerprints on screens around the office (some people can only read things they point at, apparently) touched my screen, and was mightily surprised when I immediately sprayed both the screen and his finger...
Presumably anyone who lives in a country that is mentioned in sentences like "I think a preemptive nuclear strike against [countryname] would be a good idea."
The next question would of course be, "what kind of inhuman piece of shit would even consider a preemptive nuclear strike?"
Slashdot Mirror
How about the EE coders that write the control algorithms for the power grid?
Let's hope those "EE coders" are actually software engineers. Those "EE coders" were responsible for some of the most monstrous unmaintainable crap I've seen over the years. I'm sure they're great at their own job(*), but when they try to do mine... (shudder)
Among the horrors were the notion that polling something at a rate of ~10KHz (as opposed to having a working interrupt system) would be a fine solution for a desktop app (it wasn't, and it didn't even fully catch the hardware bug they were trying to overcome), and a multitude of time delay loops (just empty for loops that take "just long enough" - on x86, where both compilers and CPU manufacturers conspire to make that cathegorically not true).
(*) ...although there is a troubling tendency to think that any hardware problem can be solved in software, aka "let's throw our broken hardware over the wall and make it somebody else's problem". Power supply broken? Why, just fix that in software...
The PS4 is now a cut-down PC with a closed operating system, and the vast majority of games that it gets are "remasters" (nudge nudge, wink wink) of older PC titles.
Interesting point of view. It might also be proof that software quality has improved a lot, and there aren't so many 'normal' holes to drive through anymore...
So how will the request filter know who is and is not an MP?
Simple. A special bit is dedicated for traffic from MPs: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc35...
How come there is so much noise and heat about a small piece of software that runs maybe 2-3 times per year?
All of this is anger, just to be angry. It serves no purpose other than giving you that heady rush of Socially Justified Rage. And as the great master said, it only leads to suffering...
The GDP of China is 9.2 trillion USD. The GDP of the UK is 2.7 trillion USD. It's not all about warm bodies, you know...
How can lousy performance possibly be a trade secret?
That one has always surprised me. You'd think a database vendor would be proud to show of the results of its flagship product. That prohibition suggests, to me, that they have something to hide.
Hey, since we're here, here is a little benchmark I ran on the Oracle systems. In the 3-4 years we ran on top of Oracle, we had a database corruption twice. We needed (and received) help from Oracle support to recover from both corruptions. In the 15 or so years we ran on top of PostgreSQL since then, we had zero database corruptions. If one were to occur we are not sure we can get help, but we believe our data recovery procedures are good enough that it won't matter anyway.
And yes, we test that on a regular basis. Thanks for asking.
You must live in a urban rabbit warren. Try saying that when you live in the largest town for 50 miles in any direction and it's 11,000 people.
Do you not care about the planet? Do you wish for everything to die?
Seriously, this is what bothers me about all those eco-fanatics: they are delighted for _others_ to make sacrifices on behalf of the planet, but even a minor change in their own lifestyle? Noooo...
As it happens you do have a choice. That choice is moving closer to work, closer to shops, and closer to other people. It might inconvenience you slightly to live like the rest of humanity, but unless you have a pressing need to be way out there, you really shouldn't be.
It would also have been nice to include information as how the new elements can actually be used. For example, would it be possible to power a new giant robot using one of those four? And would you at least have enough power to seriously mess up Tokyo before radioactive decay wiped out your power source?
I'm in a hotel in Delhi _right now_, and there were ***three*** power outages in the last twelve hours alone! That I know of, at least - I was asleep for most of the night...
What I find interesting is why apparently this exploit is only possible on Facebook and LinkedIn. Is there something unique about the way they handle images that doesn't occur on other websites?
Hillary established a precedent that high-placed officials do not have to follow any rules. Does not prosecuting her still sound like a marvellous idea now?
I don't know why the Netherlands is in that list, but I do know a new coal plant was opened there last april...
Do you have any ideas how could the process be made more rigorous? Preferably in a way so as not to multiply the cost of the process by a factor 1000 or more?
I have the same thing with time information.
"The event occurred last week (local time)"
Sure, I know about timezones. But is "last week" really so specific that we must be told that it happened at a 'local time'? Whose local time is that anyway: mine, or the time of the place where the event happened?
http://www.americanthinker.com...
http://www.killclimatedeniers....
http://www.climatedepot.com/20...
Calling upon the government to execute those with a different point of view is something I'd consider a death threat.
Let me put forth a simple challenge: based on the budget data of 2015 for your own country, show where the money is going to come from.
The final equation should show this: (number of recipients) * (yearly sum paid) = (total income state) - (other expenditures state)
Show the following ***numbers*** (i.e. no handwaving):
- Number of recipients: this is either the total number of adults, or the total number of people (i.e. adults and children). Tell us how many there are.
- Yearly sum paid: this is what each recipient gets paid every year. How much will this be? What is considered a reasonable amount to live on in your country?
- Total income state: this is how much money the state drags in every year. This is usually only taxes but sometimes also include things like oil sales. Show what tax pressure looks like for the average person. If you plan to tax people who receive _only_ UBI, show how much they have left to live on after taxes.
- Other expenditures state: this includes such things as education, healthcare, having an army, building roads, etc. This figure should pretty much be the same as it is today.
Most of these discussions end with a bit of handwaving and a vague statement like "oh, the other 2 trillion will come out of improved efficiency", which is plainly ridiculous (it's more than the whole nation spends on salaries combined). This makes me suspect the proponents of UBI have not actually sat down and done the math, despite this being fairly straightforward.
If you do these things you will quickly find that either UBI will be far, far too small to live on, or that there is a very significant shortfal on the income side.
UBI may be a great idea. We have lots of great ideas, as a species, but unfortunately not all of those ideas can be realistically realized.
That lack of enthousiasm is not because we have done it for 30 years, it is because we have put in that effort many times in the past, and received nothing in return for it. I've done my share of heroics - and getting a pat on the back was usually already too much. Financial compensation? Never. Bonus for job well done, above and beyond? Never. Time compensation? Only under the direst of circumstances. Additional carreer prospects? Don't make me laugh - they know I'm a lousy manager and an excellent engineer, so they'll never willingly move me out of engineering.
You are getting some grief from the other posters, but in truth there is nothing that separates you from so many other bosses: you think of engineers not as people, but as tools. And in return they think of themselves not as valued members of the team, but as mercenaries.
They don't. My Powers of Programming have not diminished as I grew older (and by now I have reached the magic age of 45, i.e. I am entitled to tell you all how I was chased by dinosaurs uphill in my youth - at least that's what employers believe anyway).
But the problem is not that you somehow become less capable technically. The problem is that you become less accepting of bullshit. When I was 25, my boss asked me to fix a problem that required me to _stand_ (not sit) in a cooling cell (4 C; 39 F) for a day because there was a program running there that needed debugging. I did it without asking questions. All around me were guys wearing warm clothing who were carrying boxes in and out of the cooling cell, but noone thought to offer me any protection from the cold. When I walked out to warm up a little every once in a while they would in fact comment on my obvious lack of stamina and suggest I work harder to stay warm (again, this was a programming job).
And a few years after that, at a different employer, they hung a computer from a crane and had me stand next to it for a few days because that was the only way we could reach the relevant hardware - although moving it to a desk would only have been a few hours worth of work. I stood right next to a 10m drop for day, without any kind of safety in place - one wrong step and I would have fallen about 3 floors down.
Would I still do these things? No f'ing way! It's not that I _cannot_ stand for a day, or that my body feels the cold more, or that I'm scared of heights now, it's simply that I no longer think of myself as the lowest peon in the organisation - if they want my services, they need to at least marginally accomodate my needs as well. Also, I discovered somewhere along the line that my job is essentially a mercenary position: I rent out my skills for money, but there isn't any loyalty either way beyond the short term. There are in fact things in life I rate higher than spending hours in the office.
Employers very much prefer someone who only cares for proving himself to the big bad world, and is happy to do idiotic jobs without asking any questions - and has those things as the highest priority in life. Those people are generally speaking below 40, so someone over 40 finds it harder to get a job. And no amount of training or online courses will change this.
There is this generally accepted principle in discussion that if you claim something, it is up to you to provide the evidence of the claim. Just pointing at the audience and shouting "you are all idiots for not looking this up yourselves" is not only not done, but it is in fact a pretty damn sure indication that whatever claim you are making is bogus. Your blustering, idiotic response about "learn how to use Google" clearly indicates your claim is without merit. If it had merit, you would have provided a link to one of those studies you claim exist.
Oh wait, you did. You linked to the well-known scientific journal The Guardian, known for only publishing the highest quality of peer-reviewed studies... Which itself links to a study that has neither been reviewed nor published, and uses a questionable methodology to make an extremely click-baity claim.
In particular, the entire claim seems to rest on the performance of the gender-neutral/outsider group, where women score slightly higher than men. The study does not make clear how it managed to divide the gender-neutral group into men and women, and in fact it can be argued that for anyone they could positively identify one way or the other, so can others, so that individual should no longer count as gender-neutral.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016...
I work for a company that writes those simulations. Generally a simulation consists of a CPU emulator that runs the onboard software, and a whole bunch of models for each aspect of the spacecraft and environment: the orbit model, the communication model, various instrument models, etc.. These systems are generally set up to allow gradual replacement of each model with real hardware as it becomes available, so the software development is already underway long before the spacecraft hardware has even been built. Each model is a hard real-time program (to allow drop-in replacement of hardware), and has extensive capabilities for error injection in order to simulate things like flipped bits, broken communication channels, broken sensors, etc.
I don't know what happened on Schiaparelli and they weren't a customer of ours anyway, but a scenario where a sensor breaks and sends bogus information could and should have been tested for during development.
I'm not sure what the software engineer:QA ratio is - most of that happens internally by the spacecraft people. You run into their QA people everywhere though, while I have yet to personally meet my first flight software engineer.
Oh, and back in the day I wrote the very first software-only environment for testing flight software on the ground. Up until then, the test environment used real hardware for the flight computer, thus requiring an expensive second set of flight computers just for doing the onboard software development. I hacked together a proof of concept that showed that you _could_ in fact model and simulate the flight computer as well, leading to a substantial cost saving on space projects since...
The flight computer _simulator_ generally speaking runs on Linux. I'm not sure what the models use these days, but I have seen IRIX and Sun systems around for this purpose. As for the flight computer itself, VxWorks is not an uncommon choice of OS, and the on-board CPU is usually something like ERC32 or Leon - both are radiation-hardened SPARCs.
Um.
"lesser countries"?
Does the concept of ranking things bother you? Do you feel every country should be ranked the same, just to be more fair? Why, if I may ask? What is a country to you, other than just an administrative division of land with some local rules? Are you some kind of nationalist?
Countries like the US or most places in Europe are objectively better places to live than most countries in Africa. It's why so many people want to migrate there.
While I wouldn't go quite that far, I do keep a spray of screen cleaning fluid near my desk. At one point, a colleague famous for leaving fingerprints on screens around the office (some people can only read things they point at, apparently) touched my screen, and was mightily surprised when I immediately sprayed both the screen and his finger...
Presumably anyone who lives in a country that is mentioned in sentences like "I think a preemptive nuclear strike against [countryname] would be a good idea."
The next question would of course be, "what kind of inhuman piece of shit would even consider a preemptive nuclear strike?"