The summary is misleading, I believe the equipment in question is not safety critical but does involve the navigation system. It would be DO-178B level C and/or E, and following ARINC 659(?) guidelines for a partitioned operating system.
With 2 of those in the cockpit, one for pilot, one for copilot, each running 2 Operating Systems Linux/Windows, and all networked together since each box has 6 network interfaces on it. The thing would be a field day for hackers. While they were designing it a bunch of the consultants helping with the coding were ranting about possible security, but were ignored.
I can't go into specifics because of my NDA, but considering it was 4 years ago I worked on it, I doubt that is still in force. Though I believe I can say I worked on it, and that information is all publicly available.
Huckabee is not a Progressive, he's a Traditionalist. Look at any political compass with the candidates placed on it. Even Ron Paul is considered more Progressive than Huckabee and even he isn't on the Progressive side of the Social Issue axis. Clinton is just barely considered Progressive as her dive towards the middle brought her closer to the center of the compass.
Huckabee also isn't very conservative, which refers to the small government end of the Fiscal spectrum. He's right near the middle as far as spending goes, but he would be spending the money to advance a Traditional agenda rather than a Progressive one. Progressives want to improve Health Care and Social Services, whereas the Republicans have been spending money on Abstinence only Sex Ed. in schools, etc. I believe the term they coined for it is "compassionate conservativism", which means they spend as much money as the Dems, just on different programs.
Essentially, it's not much different than that staple of introductory Anthropology courses, Malinowski's description of Trobriand yam cultivation / display.
You're missing a big point, while the display of yams is for status, the purpose of the yams is to prevent starvation. So those who have the largest yams left on display are the most successful (least likely to starve). The difference between that and Apple as a status symbol is that anyone can buy an Apple product regardless of how successful they are. Sure, the high price may screen out the least wealthy among us. However, the bar is still set quite low, so low its not really indicative of success at all, just the desire to appear successful. The rotting of the yams was seen as a good thing, because that meant their emergency stores were more than adequate for the year. Using an iPhone to buy an over-priced shot of espresso or drip coffee is not a practice born of survival, just vanity. In short, its not fair to that tribe to compare their "status symbols" born of frugality with ours which are the result of gluttonous consumption.
When I was using it at work for scripting tests, I could spawn threads from the interpreter command line to dynamically write multi-threaded scripts. Thats right, managing thread synchronization, effortlessly from a command line. Since I was running threads on a half dozen boxes on a test network, spawning threads and rejoining them was important.
Maybe its not that impressive, but from the dozen or so other languages I've used this is the first where I felt comfortable writing multi threaded scripts interactively.
Say what you will about its technical merits, its main strengths have always been in its licensing. It is as intended, very industry friendly, and very extendable with proprietary modules without any licensing worries. This is why many products, specifically in the test and measurement area, will have Tcl bindings for their devices.
I would like one (or more) of these in my town. I know that its just a TV Show, but have you seen Jericho? What happens to civilization if the utilities we are dependent on shut down one day?
A better example would be this, you live in middle america where ice storms often cause massive power outages when lines are damaged. Imagine if your neighborhood or aparment building had one of these babies. You would be the only people in town who wouldn't need to throw out the contents of their freezers when power is restored 5 days later.
This is the best bang for the buck as far as power generation goes, and the fact that this would decentralize power generation is an added bonus. We've had safe reactors for years, look at our Navy. The discipline of nuclear physics is less than 100 years old, but the field has matured considerably over the last 30 years. I want to be the first guy on the block to have my own reactor.
do people out there really have TIME for coding methodologies, reviews and the like?
You have to make time for the important stuff, its not finished until all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed as far as management is concerned. The alternative is much worse, let me describe a typical scenario for you.
Let's say you rush through and get some code that "appears" to work, you tell your boss "Good news, the code works." The next thing you know you need to have it to the customer tomorrow. Turns out your code is a mess, nothing has been thoroughly tested and it breaks when the customer tries it.
Your boss is pretty upset at this point, you've just embarrassed your company in front of a customer. You work with the customer find out how it broke, fix it with a hack, knowing you'll clean it up later and send a new version to the customer. You still haven't fully tested it at this point, but thats okay because they needed this last week.
The software breaks again, the cycle repeats a few more times and now you have something which is stable. You ask your boss for time to clean up the hacks, he says no, I have another project for you. A month later the software breaks again, to fix it you realize you have to rewrite the whole thing because the lack of proper design and hacks layered upon hacks make it necessary to do major rework.
By the end of all this you've lost a customer, they've decided that the price of doing business with you is too great because you're unable to estimate how long and how much a job will really take, and it interferes with their business.
Now consider the alternative, you throw together some code that works and tell your boss "Don't worry, I have some proof of concept code finished and it will take only 3 more weeks to finish this project." You use that code as an example and design, have design reviews, code, have code reviews, and do unit and integration testing. When you deliver it to the customer, it works, is robust, and you have a happy customer.
As a programmer, it is your job to properly manage the expectations of those around you so that plans can be made around your deliveries. If your code always works when delivered, as opposed to almost invariably having easily exposed bugs, you build a reputation for being reliable and having accurate estimations. Sure it takes longer, but a few extra weeks up front can save months of time down the road.
The Q6600's are faster and more efficient because Intel has more money to throw at manufacturing. If AMD had Intel's cash they would be at 45nm already and be handing Intel their ass right now.
I'm not a FanBoy, but from everything I've read, AMD's chips have been much more elegantly designed since going Dual Core, whereas Intel can just throw money at the problem, like buying the company that designed the Core 2 architecture and shrinking their fab process.
Performance-wise Intel is in the lead for the moment, but once AMD is down to a 45nm etch, they will easily be back in the game since they'll be able to clock those chips way past where they currently are. I think I read in the hardware enthusiast review that the chips are capable of higher over clocking but there were some errata which killed performance when over clocked past a certain point. Once AMD gets that all ironed out, they'll have a truly amazing platform.
However, I'm a little sad that their marketing department forced them to release a product which wasn't ready before Christmas, it's going to build a lot of ill will with early adopters.
I've got an idea. If two countries are arguing, each cultivates their best cyber warriors for 1 year. After one year, they have a giant multiplayer team death match in a mutually chosen FPS. At the end of the day, winner takes all. The only problem is that Japan and/or China will become the new super-powers.
Good idea, but instead of an FPS, it will be more like DefCon's Capture the Flag competition. The game is already being played and the only side we'll ever hear about scoring is the Chinese, so us civilians will never know the true score. Since CTF is a fluid game it wont be "winner take all," but more of a "get whatever you can keep."
I don't understand how it can be called his original idea and thus a breakthrough.
He thanks a dozen other scientists at the end, all other non-string theory people. I would imagine that they were in touch with the international team that solved the E8 geometry. He's a particle physicist and the E8 guys all math dudes, he has a very extensive bibliography as well, but I think that there might be some protocol in the science world for who gets credit for what. From the reactions I was reading in physics blogs earlier, none of the science community were questioning his originality, since he added the particle physics to the mix. Plus I noticed a lot of new names in theorems he cited, presumably named after some of the E8 group (they're new to me anyway). IANAPP, so all of this is just idle speculation.
The computers participating in the grid project are not just "desktop" computers. The ones connected from my alma mater were the ones that were maintaining thousands of X-Sessions across campus, on all the library machines and in all of the labs in dozens of buildings, supporting a student population of 40,000 students. Not the same as getting the spare cycles from someone's entertainment system or personal computer.
Actually you have the effect backwards. The two equinoxes are when the sun appears to be over the equator. During the July the sun appears to be over the Tropic of Cancer in the northern hemisphere, which is why it is light all day in Alaska around the summer solstice, then the earth is approximately 152 million kilometers away. During the December the earth is approximately 147 million kilometers away and the sun is approximately over the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere.
Meaning the sun is further away when the northern hemisphere is facing it making entire earth colder when it is summer in the northern hemisphere and hotter on average when it is winter in the northern hemisphere. Hence the northern hemisphere is more temperate and the southern hemisphere has greater extremes.
Unless of course you were referring to the grandparent post's phrasing which does seem a bit geocentric, perhaps he is American and afraid of being called a heretic for suggesting the earth rotates around the sun. Though you would have to be quite the grammar nazi if you're saying he should have phrased it "the earth is closer to the sun" as opposed to "the sun is closer."
Couldn't they redraft the law such that there are several levels of compliance. If you deal with the info of less than 100 individuals you would have the least amount of requirements to meet, 1000 individuals would put you in the next level, and so on. That way the biggest targets are required to be the most secure, and the more information they deal with, the higher their compliance level would be.
There are cheaper multi-master buses for linking micros together with, as the grandparent mentioned CAN 2.0B is one. CAN uses a differential 2 wire bus with built-in CRC's implemented in the hardware. As I have worked in avionics and currently am working doing maritime controls, I can say definitively that CAN is the way to go. However, PC support for CAN is expensive, so use CAN to link the various micros and have one chip with both CAN and Ethernet.
To be honest I don't see why you would need anything more than microcontrollers, since size and power are considerations, one or two MPC555 chips should be more than enough. Microcontrollers also have low power modes to further reduce battery consumption. Even a UPS powering some sort of PC won't last 24 hours without adding considerable weight.
I believe SpeedGoat, a MathWorks partner, has a ruggedized xPC target box we are planning on using in a marine environment. Its expensive, but you're going to have to drop at least 4 grand anyway to get something ruggedized, plus MATLAB/Simulink and the RTW addon, plus the xPC blockset will run you around 10k as well, unless you qualify for student versions.
You will need to make sure that whatever hardware you do pick has analog and digital inputs and outputs, so the PC104 IO expansion cards in a ruggedized PC, with all the drivers already provided will give you the best results.
The other considerations will be its ability to withstand the environment; vibration, humidity, and so forth, which is why an old PC may not be the best choice.
I may be mistaken, but I thought blue pill was similar to a VM, but was actually a hypervisor exploit. It sounds to me like having dedicated root kit support built into the chip via the hypervisor would be different than running an OS image inside a software based virtual machine.
Its not the dead that deserve respect, but the people who cared about them who are currently dealing with their recent loss who do. Obviously many readers of this site cared about his works, but disrespecting his memory so soon after passing could cause those who cared about him undue emotional distress. Its called consideration for others, also known as tact, its a useful skill, you may want to learn it.
This is amazing news, not only that the specifications have finally been opened, but that the open source community has immediately utilized them to update the driver with a turn around time of only 2 weeks.
I guess we can thank Dell for pressuring ATI for better Linux support.
Once those multicore CPU/GPU chips come out, it should be easy to put linux on them. This is great news, I think it fits the new direction post-merger perfectly.
Otherwise they will have a very hard time getting any of the ultra-mobile marketshare.
You're taking the discussion down a tangent. It doesn't matter what number the legal limit is, just so long as the tools we use to determine Guilt or Innocence are correct.
If you are for all intents and purposes "sober" at 0.09 BAC, then good for you. However, the Law states that in most places 0.08 is the legal limit, regardless of your personal limits, so you will only have yourself to blame if you get pulled over and blow a 0.09.
Take some personal responsibility, civilization is about each member making a small number of personal sacrifices so that everyone can live together in a civilized manner. I'm neither defending nor demonizing drunk drivers. That said, this is a discussion about the role of technology and its legal implications, not how many beers you can drink before getting behind the wheel.
Technically its not a dupe, its still in the firehose. Additionally this had the better of the 2 summaries. You'll notice MANY dupes on the firehose, so its not even a big deal.
Learn how slashdot works before telling editors they're doing it wrong. Oh wait, carry on.
Do you think this is going to make the breathalyzer industry one that needs to meet certain standards similar to the avionics and health care industries?
From the sound of it, it would be trivial to bring the code up to snuff. Only a few months worth of work for a software engineer or two. I think the state should have a DER (Designated Engineering Representative) which audits the source code and development practices of these equipment manufacturers (radar guns, breathalyzers, etc).
I definitely think that breathalyzers should be used, drunk driving is bad, but I also believe that if a device has the ability to ruin someone's life, it should be properly developed. I also doubt the devices are as prone to failure as represented, which is why we need better devices to close that loophole for guilty offenders with creative lawyers.
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The equipment in question, the Electronic Flight Bag, was designed for the 777, which had no passenger network and not created with security in mind.
The summary is misleading, I believe the equipment in question is not safety critical but does involve the navigation system. It would be DO-178B level C and/or E, and following ARINC 659(?) guidelines for a partitioned operating system.
With 2 of those in the cockpit, one for pilot, one for copilot, each running 2 Operating Systems Linux/Windows, and all networked together since each box has 6 network interfaces on it. The thing would be a field day for hackers. While they were designing it a bunch of the consultants helping with the coding were ranting about possible security, but were ignored.
I can't go into specifics because of my NDA, but considering it was 4 years ago I worked on it, I doubt that is still in force. Though I believe I can say I worked on it, and that information is all publicly available.
Huckabee is not a Progressive, he's a Traditionalist. Look at any political compass with the candidates placed on it. Even Ron Paul is considered more Progressive than Huckabee and even he isn't on the Progressive side of the Social Issue axis. Clinton is just barely considered Progressive as her dive towards the middle brought her closer to the center of the compass.
Huckabee also isn't very conservative, which refers to the small government end of the Fiscal spectrum. He's right near the middle as far as spending goes, but he would be spending the money to advance a Traditional agenda rather than a Progressive one. Progressives want to improve Health Care and Social Services, whereas the Republicans have been spending money on Abstinence only Sex Ed. in schools, etc. I believe the term they coined for it is "compassionate conservativism", which means they spend as much money as the Dems, just on different programs.
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
Yeah, either that or work with Novell to make an open source implementation for websites running on Linux.
People underestimate Tcl.
When I was using it at work for scripting tests, I could spawn threads from the interpreter command line to dynamically write multi-threaded scripts. Thats right, managing thread synchronization, effortlessly from a command line. Since I was running threads on a half dozen boxes on a test network, spawning threads and rejoining them was important.
Maybe its not that impressive, but from the dozen or so other languages I've used this is the first where I felt comfortable writing multi threaded scripts interactively.
Say what you will about its technical merits, its main strengths have always been in its licensing. It is as intended, very industry friendly, and very extendable with proprietary modules without any licensing worries. This is why many products, specifically in the test and measurement area, will have Tcl bindings for their devices.
I would like one (or more) of these in my town. I know that its just a TV Show, but have you seen Jericho? What happens to civilization if the utilities we are dependent on shut down one day?
A better example would be this, you live in middle america where ice storms often cause massive power outages when lines are damaged. Imagine if your neighborhood or aparment building had one of these babies. You would be the only people in town who wouldn't need to throw out the contents of their freezers when power is restored 5 days later.
This is the best bang for the buck as far as power generation goes, and the fact that this would decentralize power generation is an added bonus. We've had safe reactors for years, look at our Navy. The discipline of nuclear physics is less than 100 years old, but the field has matured considerably over the last 30 years. I want to be the first guy on the block to have my own reactor.
Let's say you rush through and get some code that "appears" to work, you tell your boss "Good news, the code works." The next thing you know you need to have it to the customer tomorrow. Turns out your code is a mess, nothing has been thoroughly tested and it breaks when the customer tries it.
Your boss is pretty upset at this point, you've just embarrassed your company in front of a customer. You work with the customer find out how it broke, fix it with a hack, knowing you'll clean it up later and send a new version to the customer. You still haven't fully tested it at this point, but thats okay because they needed this last week.
The software breaks again, the cycle repeats a few more times and now you have something which is stable. You ask your boss for time to clean up the hacks, he says no, I have another project for you. A month later the software breaks again, to fix it you realize you have to rewrite the whole thing because the lack of proper design and hacks layered upon hacks make it necessary to do major rework.
By the end of all this you've lost a customer, they've decided that the price of doing business with you is too great because you're unable to estimate how long and how much a job will really take, and it interferes with their business.
Now consider the alternative, you throw together some code that works and tell your boss "Don't worry, I have some proof of concept code finished and it will take only 3 more weeks to finish this project." You use that code as an example and design, have design reviews, code, have code reviews, and do unit and integration testing. When you deliver it to the customer, it works, is robust, and you have a happy customer.
As a programmer, it is your job to properly manage the expectations of those around you so that plans can be made around your deliveries. If your code always works when delivered, as opposed to almost invariably having easily exposed bugs, you build a reputation for being reliable and having accurate estimations. Sure it takes longer, but a few extra weeks up front can save months of time down the road.
The Q6600's are faster and more efficient because Intel has more money to throw at manufacturing. If AMD had Intel's cash they would be at 45nm already and be handing Intel their ass right now. I'm not a FanBoy, but from everything I've read, AMD's chips have been much more elegantly designed since going Dual Core, whereas Intel can just throw money at the problem, like buying the company that designed the Core 2 architecture and shrinking their fab process. Performance-wise Intel is in the lead for the moment, but once AMD is down to a 45nm etch, they will easily be back in the game since they'll be able to clock those chips way past where they currently are. I think I read in the hardware enthusiast review that the chips are capable of higher over clocking but there were some errata which killed performance when over clocked past a certain point. Once AMD gets that all ironed out, they'll have a truly amazing platform. However, I'm a little sad that their marketing department forced them to release a product which wasn't ready before Christmas, it's going to build a lot of ill will with early adopters.
The computers participating in the grid project are not just "desktop" computers. The ones connected from my alma mater were the ones that were maintaining thousands of X-Sessions across campus, on all the library machines and in all of the labs in dozens of buildings, supporting a student population of 40,000 students. Not the same as getting the spare cycles from someone's entertainment system or personal computer.
Actually you have the effect backwards. The two equinoxes are when the sun appears to be over the equator. During the July the sun appears to be over the Tropic of Cancer in the northern hemisphere, which is why it is light all day in Alaska around the summer solstice, then the earth is approximately 152 million kilometers away. During the December the earth is approximately 147 million kilometers away and the sun is approximately over the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere.
Meaning the sun is further away when the northern hemisphere is facing it making entire earth colder when it is summer in the northern hemisphere and hotter on average when it is winter in the northern hemisphere. Hence the northern hemisphere is more temperate and the southern hemisphere has greater extremes.
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ritter/geog101/textbook/energy/earth_revolution_rotation.html
Unless of course you were referring to the grandparent post's phrasing which does seem a bit geocentric, perhaps he is American and afraid of being called a heretic for suggesting the earth rotates around the sun. Though you would have to be quite the grammar nazi if you're saying he should have phrased it "the earth is closer to the sun" as opposed to "the sun is closer."
Couldn't they redraft the law such that there are several levels of compliance. If you deal with the info of less than 100 individuals you would have the least amount of requirements to meet, 1000 individuals would put you in the next level, and so on. That way the biggest targets are required to be the most secure, and the more information they deal with, the higher their compliance level would be.
There are cheaper multi-master buses for linking micros together with, as the grandparent mentioned CAN 2.0B is one. CAN uses a differential 2 wire bus with built-in CRC's implemented in the hardware. As I have worked in avionics and currently am working doing maritime controls, I can say definitively that CAN is the way to go. However, PC support for CAN is expensive, so use CAN to link the various micros and have one chip with both CAN and Ethernet.
To be honest I don't see why you would need anything more than microcontrollers, since size and power are considerations, one or two MPC555 chips should be more than enough. Microcontrollers also have low power modes to further reduce battery consumption. Even a UPS powering some sort of PC won't last 24 hours without adding considerable weight.
I believe SpeedGoat, a MathWorks partner, has a ruggedized xPC target box we are planning on using in a marine environment. Its expensive, but you're going to have to drop at least 4 grand anyway to get something ruggedized, plus MATLAB/Simulink and the RTW addon, plus the xPC blockset will run you around 10k as well, unless you qualify for student versions. You will need to make sure that whatever hardware you do pick has analog and digital inputs and outputs, so the PC104 IO expansion cards in a ruggedized PC, with all the drivers already provided will give you the best results. The other considerations will be its ability to withstand the environment; vibration, humidity, and so forth, which is why an old PC may not be the best choice.
I may be mistaken, but I thought blue pill was similar to a VM, but was actually a hypervisor exploit. It sounds to me like having dedicated root kit support built into the chip via the hypervisor would be different than running an OS image inside a software based virtual machine.
Its not the dead that deserve respect, but the people who cared about them who are currently dealing with their recent loss who do. Obviously many readers of this site cared about his works, but disrespecting his memory so soon after passing could cause those who cared about him undue emotional distress. Its called consideration for others, also known as tact, its a useful skill, you may want to learn it.
I can't tell if that was a lame attempt at humor or just a really bad job trolling. Grow a soul and show some respect for the dead.
This is amazing news, not only that the specifications have finally been opened, but that the open source community has immediately utilized them to update the driver with a turn around time of only 2 weeks.
I guess we can thank Dell for pressuring ATI for better Linux support.
Once those multicore CPU/GPU chips come out, it should be easy to put linux on them. This is great news, I think it fits the new direction post-merger perfectly.
Otherwise they will have a very hard time getting any of the ultra-mobile marketshare.
You're taking the discussion down a tangent. It doesn't matter what number the legal limit is, just so long as the tools we use to determine Guilt or Innocence are correct. If you are for all intents and purposes "sober" at 0.09 BAC, then good for you. However, the Law states that in most places 0.08 is the legal limit, regardless of your personal limits, so you will only have yourself to blame if you get pulled over and blow a 0.09. Take some personal responsibility, civilization is about each member making a small number of personal sacrifices so that everyone can live together in a civilized manner. I'm neither defending nor demonizing drunk drivers. That said, this is a discussion about the role of technology and its legal implications, not how many beers you can drink before getting behind the wheel.
Technically its not a dupe, its still in the firehose. Additionally this had the better of the 2 summaries. You'll notice MANY dupes on the firehose, so its not even a big deal.
Learn how slashdot works before telling editors they're doing it wrong. Oh wait, carry on.
Do you think this is going to make the breathalyzer industry one that needs to meet certain standards similar to the avionics and health care industries?
From the sound of it, it would be trivial to bring the code up to snuff. Only a few months worth of work for a software engineer or two. I think the state should have a DER (Designated Engineering Representative) which audits the source code and development practices of these equipment manufacturers (radar guns, breathalyzers, etc).
I definitely think that breathalyzers should be used, drunk driving is bad, but I also believe that if a device has the ability to ruin someone's life, it should be properly developed. I also doubt the devices are as prone to failure as represented, which is why we need better devices to close that loophole for guilty offenders with creative lawyers.