I'm pretty sure that some respected Computer Scientist said something about premature optimization
I think there is a balance to be struck, putting too much effort into optimising early on is a waste of time but that doesn't mean that languages that make inefficient soloutions easy and efficient soloutions painful are a good thing. Unsigned types are just one of many cases where java does this.
Unsigned types are a good thing for several reasons.
1: They are easier to bounds check. If you have an unsigned type you only have to worry about making sure it is not too large. If you only have a signed type then you either have to make sure all your bounds checks cover the negative case or be very careful not to accidently generate negative values. 2: They can store values twice as large. Sometimes that is the difference between fitting the number you want in one size of data element and being forced up to the next size (which is likely to double your memory requirements). 3: Some algorithms (particulally in crypto) are designed arround unsigned integers of a specific size. 4: the interoperability requirement you mention. Sometimes you have to work with another system where it has been decided by someone outside your project that say a 32-bit signed integer is sufficient.
Don't get me wrong all these things CAN be worked arround but those workarrounds mean lower efficiency AND more potential for mistakes.
P.S. Java does have an unsigned 16 bit integer type despite lacking unsigned 8 , 32 and 64 bit types. It calls that 16 bit unsigned type "char".
But if you really need them, perhaps that should be a signal that a lower-level language is more appropriate for that particular component in the system.
Mixing languages adds extra complexity, especially with stuff like java. So IMO a good critera for a language is what range of "levels" it can cover without having to resort to mixing languages.
My objection to this technique has always been that by doing this, you essentially lose the people that have skills and can get jobs, and keep the people who don't have skills and can't get jobs, weakening your company.
Most techniques for getting rid of unneeded workerssuffer that problem to some degree. Even if you keep the redundancies secret right up to the time you make them people will still wonder "am I in the next round".
Much of which conflicts with either the EMMC (the onboard flash you talk about) or the HDMI framer.
mounting holes aren't a fucking afterthought.
Indeed
has two microcontrollery type peripherals (on die) for delegating low level IO stuff to. I haven't played with that, but it sounds like it could be pretty useful.
Indeed though when I did a quick search it seems you have to program them in their own assembler:/
The modern GTA games are fundamentally built arround a story, you sometimes get a little bit of choice in how you carry out the story or what order you do bits of it in but fundamentally you are following a story. Putting a "major choice" in at the start would mean basically writing two seperate stories.
P.S. ever played LA noire? it has many of the aspects of GTA but has you playing as a detective.
To be fair Microsoft and their partner's idea of a tablet was a latop with a touchscreen that could be flipped arround so it was on the outside when closed. This DID appeal to some niches but for the most part it was considered a pain to use. You pretty much had to put the thing on a desk because there was no reasonable way you could hold and use it at the same time and the interface still needed a stylus to use.
Apple's idea of a tablet (later copied by many andriod vendors) was a larger version of their smartphone platform. This meant it was much smaller and lighter than the tablet laptops and came with apps that worked well with finger (not stylus) touch.
Yes both fit the definition of "tablet" but they came at the problem from totally different directions and the direction apple took worked far better for most consumers given the constraints at the time.
Now where things get interesting is where the two meet in the middle. ASUS has come out with the EEEPAD transformer but it was crippled by the fact that the OS was not designed as a laptop OS. MS had a FANTASTIC oppertunity here. Processors had started to appear with enough power to put in a reasonablly thin tablet and powerful enough to run a fully fledged desktop/laptop OS. MS spent a lot of money adding a tablet focussed interface to thier desktop/laptop OS and porting it to arm.
But they blew it.. They crippled the arm port of windows so that third party desktop apss could not be run. They put out advertising that showed people screwing arround with docking and undocking the keyboard rather than actually showing people WHY they should choose the surface over it's competitors. Apparently there was a surface pro commercial (though I never saw it on this side of the pond) and it did show some officey stuff but it was too stylised to tell it was the "real thing" and not some crippled version like other tablets have.
Mining difficulty adjusts based on the number of active miners. So if miners give up because they no longer find it profitable to mine the difficulty will go down. Of course this DOES make the network more vulnerable to a "51% attack".
Note that miners get paid in two ways, there is the "mining reward" which creates bitcoins out of thin air and tapers off over time and there are transaction fees paid by clients for getting their transactions included in a block. The theory is that transaction fees will keep mining power at a level where the bitcoin network is reasonablly hard to attack after the mining rewards stop. Whether it actually will or not only time will tell.
Deflation is, in economics, generally considered A Very Bad Thing.
It is by mainstream economists.
Others see inflation as a form of "theft" or "tax" taking spending power away from those who decide to keep hold of their money rather than investing it.
I believe that's why Bitcoin was designed to have an inflationary pressure built right in (the mining process should continually increase the pool, making every Bitcoin worth slightly less over time).
The designers of bitcoin were obviously pretty rabidly anti-inflation. Yes mining rewards do exist but they are seen as merely a bootstrapping mechanism to distribute the coins initially and to provide miners with some incentive to mine in the early stages set to taper off over time. The total bitcoins in circulation will max out at about double the current level.
The chances of that happening are negligable. The number of bitcoins (which are very finely divisible and could likely be made more divisible if needed) lost each year is likely to be roughly proportional to the number circulating. Assuming the community size stays roughly the same this will cause gradual deflation but nothing earth shattering compared to other pressures on bitcoin.
They claim that restaurants that are licensed to sell alchol in england scotland and wales are obliged to provide free tap water but that restaurants in northern ireland and restaurants that are not licensed to sell alchol are not. Furthermore while they can't charge for the water itself they apparently can charge for the "service" and the "use of the glass".
There are a few reasons for adding a small "IO processor" to a system. Firstly more IO. The BBB looks like it has lots of IO on first glance but on closer inspection you realise that much of that many of the IO pins conflict with either the HDMI output or the EMMC. Secondly the small processor can do the ugly bit-banging stuff (for example driving a multiplexed LED display) without bothering the main CPU too much. Thirdly the characteristics of the IO pins on microcontrollers are often more friendly to hobbyist experimentation (more current drive, less sensitive to abuse). Fourthly if something goes wrong you have only fried the cheap IO processor, not the relatively expensive and very difficult to replace application's processor (though from the pictures i've seen replacing the AVR on the TRE doesn't exactly look easy:( ).
So by putting the AVR on the TRE they can provide all the IO needed for arduino shields (allowing the "maker" noobs to build stuff just by plugging boards together) without having any of it conflict with the onboard hardware and they can easilly support it with their existing software stack (unlike the PRUs).
The missing information at the moment is price. If it's basically the same price as a BBB with a AVR thrown in virtually "for free" then it might be quite attractive. If it's much more epensive than a BBB it will be a lot less attractive.
No, the US government has a lot of debt but that debt is denominated in US dollars. The US government has the power to create US dollars out of thin air. So if they want they can trivially pay their debts.
If the US government defaults it will be because internal conflicts prevented them from agreeing how to pay the debts, not because they were unable to pay them.
There are but many home/small buisness customers are pretty much forced into using an ISP that is vertically integrated with the provider of their access connection and have very few choices (often only one) for reasonablly performing access connections. This seems to be especially a problem in the USA.
Afaict enterprise customers who pay for dedicated bandwidth can still usually choose their infrastructure and internet providers seperately in most places.
AIUI what happens is they send the paper to a small group of reviewers who they regard as experts in the field. The reviewers aren't supposed to know whose paper they are reviewing but they can often figure it out anyway just from prior knowlage of who is doing what.
Some of those reviewers will do their job as honestly as they can (though I bet they will still be more faourable to stuff that confirms their beliefs), others will deliberately try to discredit any paper they see as being from a rival so they can later publish their own paper in the area with less competition.
I don't know where he lives but I do know a lot of older developments here in the UK have combined sewers. From looking at wikipedia it seems the same is true of parts of the US. Separate sewers are much better from an environmental point of view because they don't wastefully put surface water through the sewage treatment system and are much less likely to end up releasing raw sewage during storms but are rather hard to retrofit.
Also even where the sewer and storm water systems are supposed to be separate people do sometimes misconnect them through laziness, ignorance or just plain mistakes.
It is however fairly easy to see if someone has created a forged cert with an alternate CA, as the cert thumbprint and CA chain would be different.
It in indeed easy to see when a cert has changed.
The difficult bit is deciding whether that cert change is legitimate or not. Sites do change their certs for a wide variety of reasons (upcoming expiry, dumb admin loses the keys, need a different selection of domains on the cert) and larger sites often end up with different load balanced/geolocated instances using different certs. So seeing a different cert from other people isn't nessacerally an indication of foul play.
No one outside valve is sure but the suspicions are that what was originally targeted to be episode 3 grew and evolved into a project too large to be called an "episode"
Some natural gas reseves contain helium and if the price is right (how high the price has to be depends on how much helium is in the gas) that helium can be extracted from the natural gas by liquifying the other gasses in the mixture.
Many years ago the USA decided helium was strategically important for airships (and later nukes) and stockpiled it in a depleted gas well. However in 1995 they decided it was no longer strategically important enough to stockpile and started selling off the reserves.
I guess the question is in terms of "thowing whatever it is that is being cut up arround" is this better or worse than more traditional soloutions like cutting discs, thermal lances, plasma cutters and so-on.
AIUI a couple of years back the phone vendors were basically told "sort this out among yourselves or we will legislate to sort it out"
The vendors agreed to standardise on "USB battery charging" delivered through micro USB connectors. However Apple chose to only support this through optional (and overpriced) adaptors. Not as a core part of their product. Worse they recently switched from the dock connector which just needs a passive wiring adaptor to the lightning connector which . Then when companies worked out how to circumvent this apple put out a software update to lock things down again.
Didn't everybody in Europe switch to Micro USB a couple of years ago?
Everyone significant except Apple did. Apple decided to keep using custom connectors for the phone end. They make adaptors but they don't include them as standard, genuine apple ones are fairly pricey and they don't really solve the problem (who wants to carry an adaptor arround with them all the time, that's barely better than carrying the USB cable for the phone arround all the time).
I wonder if this is related (unofficially of course) to apple's recent aggressive move over third party lightning (apples current charge/data port) cables.
Sigh - if they could still use 12V we could just use simple car adapters
Note that car electrics are only nominally 12V. For reasonably reliable operation you need to be able to run continuously anywhere from about 10V to about 15V and to tolerate significant dips and spikes outside that range.
It's actually easier to produce a stable 19V from a car supply than a stable 12V. For a stable 19V you just need some surge protection upfront and then a boost converter. For a stable 12V you would need a converter that can convert both up and down which is quite a bit more complex.
It's a publication that the phone company produces listing the names of people and buisnesses in your local area and their landline phone numbers.
Here in the UK buisnesses who want to stand out from the basic listings can buy space for larger adverts. When you get a phone line you can choose whether or not you want it to be included in the phone book. I presume similar systems operate in other areas.
At least round here phone books are a heck of a lot smaller than they used to be. Afaict this is due to a lot of people choosing not to be included and due to buisnesses not buying anywhere near as many adverts.
pedestrian underpasses also have the problem that they can easilly end up being dirty smelly horrible places due to a combination of homeless people using them for shelter and the fact they get less natural cleaning than an exposed pavement does.
Is that drivers will stop paying attention and/or take their hands off the controls. Then when something bad happens that the automatic system can't handle they will be in a much worse position to deal with it than if they had been driving the car manually.
The same is true to an extent of autopilots in planes but with a plane you usually have much more time to respond to problems than in a car. Still at least one plane has crashed because the pilots accidentally disabled the autopilot and failed to notice.
I much prefer the more flush D-pad of a DualShock controller for the types of games I play.
Afaict in the days of the Playstation and early playstation 2 games (at least the ones I played) left stick and DPAD were usually equivalent since the game could not rely on the stick being present but i've noticed in more recent games i've played (ratchet gladiator and later in the ratchet and clank series, GTA4 and later in the GTA series) this is no longer the case. You have to use the left stick for movement and the DPAD is either unused or used as extra function buttons.
If i'm going to be forced to use the left stick for movement then i'd rather have it in the primary position.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that some respected Computer Scientist said something about premature optimization
I think there is a balance to be struck, putting too much effort into optimising early on is a waste of time but that doesn't mean that languages that make inefficient soloutions easy and efficient soloutions painful are a good thing. Unsigned types are just one of many cases where java does this.
Unsigned types are a good thing for several reasons.
1: They are easier to bounds check. If you have an unsigned type you only have to worry about making sure it is not too large. If you only have a signed type then you either have to make sure all your bounds checks cover the negative case or be very careful not to accidently generate negative values.
2: They can store values twice as large. Sometimes that is the difference between fitting the number you want in one size of data element and being forced up to the next size (which is likely to double your memory requirements).
3: Some algorithms (particulally in crypto) are designed arround unsigned integers of a specific size.
4: the interoperability requirement you mention. Sometimes you have to work with another system where it has been decided by someone outside your project that say a 32-bit signed integer is sufficient.
Don't get me wrong all these things CAN be worked arround but those workarrounds mean lower efficiency AND more potential for mistakes.
P.S. Java does have an unsigned 16 bit integer type despite lacking unsigned 8 , 32 and 64 bit types. It calls that 16 bit unsigned type "char".
But if you really need them, perhaps that should be a signal that a lower-level language is more appropriate for that particular component in the system.
Mixing languages adds extra complexity, especially with stuff like java. So IMO a good critera for a language is what range of "levels" it can cover without having to resort to mixing languages.
My objection to this technique has always been that by doing this, you essentially lose the people that have skills and can get jobs, and keep the people who don't have skills and can't get jobs, weakening your company.
Most techniques for getting rid of unneeded workerssuffer that problem to some degree. Even if you keep the redundancies secret right up to the time you make them people will still wonder "am I in the next round".
1GHz arm of some sort,
Specifically a cortex A8.
512MB RAM, 2GB flash storage onboard, more through SD slot.
Correct
Ethernet that isn't a hackjob attached to USB
Though there were some teething problems with the driver when I tried it, not sure if they have been sorted yet.
USB (host and device)
Indeed and unlike the original white beaglebone there isn't a stupid hub sitting between the device port on the IC and the connector.
HDMI
It does but the capabilities of that port are somewhat limited compared to the one on the Pi, some discussion at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beagleboard/4vge3Zs8dYE
an asston of i/o compared to pi.
Much of which conflicts with either the EMMC (the onboard flash you talk about) or the HDMI framer.
mounting holes aren't a fucking afterthought.
Indeed
has two microcontrollery type peripherals (on die) for delegating low level IO stuff to. I haven't played with that, but it sounds like it could be pretty useful.
Indeed though when I did a quick search it seems you have to program them in their own assembler :/
The modern GTA games are fundamentally built arround a story, you sometimes get a little bit of choice in how you carry out the story or what order you do bits of it in but fundamentally you are following a story. Putting a "major choice" in at the start would mean basically writing two seperate stories.
P.S. ever played LA noire? it has many of the aspects of GTA but has you playing as a detective.
To be fair Microsoft and their partner's idea of a tablet was a latop with a touchscreen that could be flipped arround so it was on the outside when closed. This DID appeal to some niches but for the most part it was considered a pain to use. You pretty much had to put the thing on a desk because there was no reasonable way you could hold and use it at the same time and the interface still needed a stylus to use.
Apple's idea of a tablet (later copied by many andriod vendors) was a larger version of their smartphone platform. This meant it was much smaller and lighter than the tablet laptops and came with apps that worked well with finger (not stylus) touch.
Yes both fit the definition of "tablet" but they came at the problem from totally different directions and the direction apple took worked far better for most consumers given the constraints at the time.
Now where things get interesting is where the two meet in the middle. ASUS has come out with the EEEPAD transformer but it was crippled by the fact that the OS was not designed as a laptop OS. MS had a FANTASTIC oppertunity here. Processors had started to appear with enough power to put in a reasonablly thin tablet and powerful enough to run a fully fledged desktop/laptop OS. MS spent a lot of money adding a tablet focussed interface to thier desktop/laptop OS and porting it to arm.
But they blew it.. They crippled the arm port of windows so that third party desktop apss could not be run. They put out advertising that showed people screwing arround with docking and undocking the keyboard rather than actually showing people WHY they should choose the surface over it's competitors. Apparently there was a surface pro commercial (though I never saw it on this side of the pond) and it did show some officey stuff but it was too stylised to tell it was the "real thing" and not some crippled version like other tablets have.
Mining difficulty adjusts based on the number of active miners. So if miners give up because they no longer find it profitable to mine the difficulty will go down. Of course this DOES make the network more vulnerable to a "51% attack".
Note that miners get paid in two ways, there is the "mining reward" which creates bitcoins out of thin air and tapers off over time and there are transaction fees paid by clients for getting their transactions included in a block. The theory is that transaction fees will keep mining power at a level where the bitcoin network is reasonablly hard to attack after the mining rewards stop. Whether it actually will or not only time will tell.
Deflation is, in economics, generally considered A Very Bad Thing.
It is by mainstream economists.
Others see inflation as a form of "theft" or "tax" taking spending power away from those who decide to keep hold of their money rather than investing it.
I believe that's why Bitcoin was designed to have an inflationary pressure built right in (the mining process should continually increase the pool, making every Bitcoin worth slightly less over time).
The designers of bitcoin were obviously pretty rabidly anti-inflation. Yes mining rewards do exist but they are seen as merely a bootstrapping mechanism to distribute the coins initially and to provide miners with some incentive to mine in the early stages set to taper off over time. The total bitcoins in circulation will max out at about double the current level.
The chances of that happening are negligable. The number of bitcoins (which are very finely divisible and could likely be made more divisible if needed) lost each year is likely to be roughly proportional to the number circulating. Assuming the community size stays roughly the same this will cause gradual deflation but nothing earth shattering compared to other pressures on bitcoin.
According to http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/tap-water-rights that is not true.
They claim that restaurants that are licensed to sell alchol in england scotland and wales are obliged to provide free tap water but that restaurants in northern ireland and restaurants that are not licensed to sell alchol are not. Furthermore while they can't charge for the water itself they apparently can charge for the "service" and the "use of the glass".
There are a few reasons for adding a small "IO processor" to a system. Firstly more IO. The BBB looks like it has lots of IO on first glance but on closer inspection you realise that much of that many of the IO pins conflict with either the HDMI output or the EMMC. Secondly the small processor can do the ugly bit-banging stuff (for example driving a multiplexed LED display) without bothering the main CPU too much. Thirdly the characteristics of the IO pins on microcontrollers are often more friendly to hobbyist experimentation (more current drive, less sensitive to abuse). Fourthly if something goes wrong you have only fried the cheap IO processor, not the relatively expensive and very difficult to replace application's processor (though from the pictures i've seen replacing the AVR on the TRE doesn't exactly look easy :( ).
Interestingly the chip on the TRE and BBB has an onchip IO processor known as the "PRU" but it seems at the moment at least it's a bit of a pain to develop for http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/single-board_computers/next-gen_beaglebone/blog/2013/05/22/bbb--working-with-the-pru-icssprussv2
So by putting the AVR on the TRE they can provide all the IO needed for arduino shields (allowing the "maker" noobs to build stuff just by plugging boards together) without having any of it conflict with the onboard hardware and they can easilly support it with their existing software stack (unlike the PRUs).
The missing information at the moment is price. If it's basically the same price as a BBB with a AVR thrown in virtually "for free" then it might be quite attractive. If it's much more epensive than a BBB it will be a lot less attractive.
Is it bankrupt?
No, the US government has a lot of debt but that debt is denominated in US dollars. The US government has the power to create US dollars out of thin air. So if they want they can trivially pay their debts.
If the US government defaults it will be because internal conflicts prevented them from agreeing how to pay the debts, not because they were unable to pay them.
Are there still such thing as "ISPs"?
There are but many home/small buisness customers are pretty much forced into using an ISP that is vertically integrated with the provider of their access connection and have very few choices (often only one) for reasonablly performing access connections. This seems to be especially a problem in the USA.
Afaict enterprise customers who pay for dedicated bandwidth can still usually choose their infrastructure and internet providers seperately in most places.
AIUI what happens is they send the paper to a small group of reviewers who they regard as experts in the field. The reviewers aren't supposed to know whose paper they are reviewing but they can often figure it out anyway just from prior knowlage of who is doing what.
Some of those reviewers will do their job as honestly as they can (though I bet they will still be more faourable to stuff that confirms their beliefs), others will deliberately try to discredit any paper they see as being from a rival so they can later publish their own paper in the area with less competition.
I don't know where he lives but I do know a lot of older developments here in the UK have combined sewers. From looking at wikipedia it seems the same is true of parts of the US. Separate sewers are much better from an environmental point of view because they don't wastefully put surface water through the sewage treatment system and are much less likely to end up releasing raw sewage during storms but are rather hard to retrofit.
Also even where the sewer and storm water systems are supposed to be separate people do sometimes misconnect them through laziness, ignorance or just plain mistakes.
It is however fairly easy to see if someone has created a forged cert with an alternate CA, as the cert thumbprint and CA chain would be different.
It in indeed easy to see when a cert has changed.
The difficult bit is deciding whether that cert change is legitimate or not. Sites do change their certs for a wide variety of reasons (upcoming expiry, dumb admin loses the keys, need a different selection of domains on the cert) and larger sites often end up with different load balanced/geolocated instances using different certs. So seeing a different cert from other people isn't nessacerally an indication of foul play.
No one outside valve is sure but the suspicions are that what was originally targeted to be episode 3 grew and evolved into a project too large to be called an "episode"
Some natural gas reseves contain helium and if the price is right (how high the price has to be depends on how much helium is in the gas) that helium can be extracted from the natural gas by liquifying the other gasses in the mixture.
Many years ago the USA decided helium was strategically important for airships (and later nukes) and stockpiled it in a depleted gas well. However in 1995 they decided it was no longer strategically important enough to stockpile and started selling off the reserves.
I guess the question is in terms of "thowing whatever it is that is being cut up arround" is this better or worse than more traditional soloutions like cutting discs, thermal lances, plasma cutters and so-on.
http://www.cultofmac.com/246236/ios-7-killed-off-unlicensed-lightning-cables-but-heres-a-fix-that-might-work-for-you/
AIUI a couple of years back the phone vendors were basically told "sort this out among yourselves or we will legislate to sort it out"
The vendors agreed to standardise on "USB battery charging" delivered through micro USB connectors. However Apple chose to only support this through optional (and overpriced) adaptors. Not as a core part of their product. Worse they recently switched from the dock connector which just needs a passive wiring adaptor to the lightning connector which . Then when companies worked out how to circumvent this apple put out a software update to lock things down again.
Didn't everybody in Europe switch to Micro USB a couple of years ago?
Everyone significant except Apple did. Apple decided to keep using custom connectors for the phone end. They make adaptors but they don't include them as standard, genuine apple ones are fairly pricey and they don't really solve the problem (who wants to carry an adaptor arround with them all the time, that's barely better than carrying the USB cable for the phone arround all the time).
I wonder if this is related (unofficially of course) to apple's recent aggressive move over third party lightning (apples current charge/data port) cables.
Sigh - if they could still use 12V we could just use simple car adapters
Note that car electrics are only nominally 12V. For reasonably reliable operation you need to be able to run continuously anywhere from about 10V to about 15V and to tolerate significant dips and spikes outside that range.
It's actually easier to produce a stable 19V from a car supply than a stable 12V. For a stable 19V you just need some surge protection upfront and then a boost converter. For a stable 12V you would need a converter that can convert both up and down which is quite a bit more complex.
It's a publication that the phone company produces listing the names of people and buisnesses in your local area and their landline phone numbers.
Here in the UK buisnesses who want to stand out from the basic listings can buy space for larger adverts. When you get a phone line you can choose whether or not you want it to be included in the phone book. I presume similar systems operate in other areas.
At least round here phone books are a heck of a lot smaller than they used to be. Afaict this is due to a lot of people choosing not to be included and due to buisnesses not buying anywhere near as many adverts.
pedestrian underpasses also have the problem that they can easilly end up being dirty smelly horrible places due to a combination of homeless people using them for shelter and the fact they get less natural cleaning than an exposed pavement does.
Is that drivers will stop paying attention and/or take their hands off the controls. Then when something bad happens that the automatic system can't handle they will be in a much worse position to deal with it than if they had been driving the car manually.
The same is true to an extent of autopilots in planes but with a plane you usually have much more time to respond to problems than in a car. Still at least one plane has crashed because the pilots accidentally disabled the autopilot and failed to notice.
I much prefer the more flush D-pad of a DualShock controller for the types of games I play.
Afaict in the days of the Playstation and early playstation 2 games (at least the ones I played) left stick and DPAD were usually equivalent since the game could not rely on the stick being present but i've noticed in more recent games i've played (ratchet gladiator and later in the ratchet and clank series, GTA4 and later in the GTA series) this is no longer the case. You have to use the left stick for movement and the DPAD is either unused or used as extra function buttons.
If i'm going to be forced to use the left stick for movement then i'd rather have it in the primary position.