Well, yes, there are plenty of crappy programmers out there. And some developers always are looking for ways to make things simpler for everyone by creating all-encompassing frameworks, but in the end, almost invariably, it does lead to a lot of cargo cult programming practices with an over-reliance on frameworks and little understanding of how things work internally.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with using higher-level systems and frameworks so long as you understand the tradeoffs you're making. I'm an expert C++ programmer (videogame development), but I always turn to C# /.NET for internal tools, because I'm so much more productive in that language. The tradeoff, of course, is that the tools tend to be much less efficient, as well as some extra work for writing interop with native code. It's not as much of an issue since I can assume we have more powerful development machines using those tools, and high-speed is less critical than efficient workflow, functionality, and safety.
I think it's the same sort of tradeoff you'd be making when using this sort of framework. It's never going to be as optimal as a carefully tuned, custom crafted solution. As such, for extremely large or complex systems, or anything that absolutely demands extreme efficiency, you'd be better off with custom solutions written by experts. However, for projects with more modest goals, it could be that the requirements in productivity outweigh the costs of a custom, low-level solution. As long as the decision is made knowing these tradeoffs, it's fine.
The problem is that the vendor never tells us about these tradeoffs. For years, Microsoft touted C# /.NET as the next big thing, and told us that "pretty soon" we were going to see performance comparable to native code. It never happened. Natively compiled C++ still kicks the crap out of managed code in real world scenarios. Most major client-side applications are still written in native code. I suspect it will be similar for this sort of platform. Yes, it will work, but it's never going to be nearly as optimal or flexible as a custom solution expertly designed and optimized for the particular task at hand.
and China's one child policy is probably the best long term action for the environment.
And yet, in most developed first world countries, birth rates have pretty much plateaued, or are on the way there. The US, China, Japan, Singapore, Russia, most of Europe - all currently below population sustaining birth rates at the moment. Check out this chart, sorted by fertility rates from lowest to highest. You can likely notice a clear trend between the upper portions of the chart and the lower regions.
Economics and education (especially of women) is the key, not police state policies that encroach on more of our personal liberties. We need to get everyone to first-world economic status as fast as we can, because then:
1) People will stop pumping out kids en mass, since at that point they're an economic liability, not an advantage, and 2) People will start caring more about the environment when they're not trying to figure out where they'll get they're next meal, or if they will have a roof over their heads tomorrow.
Seriously, exploding population was the boogieman twenty or thirty years ago. If we forecast using today's trends, it seems pretty likely that the world's population will most likely peak and then decline. Take a look at the actual data trends (the recent ones - and don't extrapolate linearly), then draw your own conclusions.
They build amazing structures, write inspiring music, invent fantastic technology, care deeply for others, and sacrifice their lives to save a friend. I've seen people risk their lives to save a dog drowning in a frozen lake, or to save complete strangers from a burning building. The world holds it's breath when miners are trapped in a cave in, and if they are miraculously saved, we weep tears of joy at the happy reunions with their loved ones. When tragedy strikes in the form of a hurricane, flood, tsunami or earthquake, we come together to donate our money and our time to help those affected. People have returned thousands of dollars lost to their owners when they had nothing to gain from it. Some people devote their entire lives to helping the least fortunate among us.
Sure, the world has plenty of evil people that do evil things. But if you can't see the good in humanity as well, you're not looking hard enough.
Indeed there is probably something going on at large scales, where gravity doesn't work as it does on small scales.
I've often wondered about that. It's pretty well known that classical Newtonian physics tends to break down at the quantum level. I wonder if the same thing happens at the largest scales - galaxy-sized measurements. I'd never go so far as to argue against the prevailing theory with people that study these things their entire lives, but it does make for interesting reading and/or discussion to consider some of the proposed alternatives.
I think perhaps you're overestimating the value of *what* they know, and underestimating the value of *who* they know. The latter knowledge is not going to be obsolete in a year, and the former can be easily gained by inviting an old colleague out to a nice lunch (at company expense, of course), and discussing out what's going on back at the old office.
All scary sounding as hell. All very good for you.
I've seen people give poor reviews to medical food bars (that's where I got this list) that contained these ingredients because they apparently thought those were a bunch of unhealthy chemical additives. Well, yes, they're chemical additives, but they're things your body needs to stay alive and healthy. *facepalm* We have a massive government bureaucracy dedicated to making sure companies aren't feeding us poison. At some point, you just need to trust that they're doing their damned job.
Yeah, unfortunately, many lay-persons are horrible at exercising good judgment about such matters (including vaccines). I say let them keep their vaccine treatments, but require kids in public schools to be vaccinated. If they want to benefit from publicly-funded education, then they need to be responsible for the general public's well being as well. If private schools don't want to require vaccinations, then it's on them.
As an old(er) fart, I would respectfully disagree. Shitty firmware and an abandoned or poorly supported product is a perfectly good reason to throw something out and get new hardware. If you're dissatisfied enough with your phone to complain about it to other people, don't then turn around and grumble that people are telling you to get a better one. What else are they supposed to suggest? Just don't make the same mistake and buy a product that doesn't work well out of the box, or buy from the same company, thus rewarding their poor after-sales service.
The way I figure it, my time and satisfaction level are both valuable to me, and I'm willing to pay for a product that performs to my satisfaction. Of course, once I find a device that's working well for me, I'll hold onto it for a long time - typically long into obsolescence. I'm not into the "replace my gadget every year or two" race, but I don't see the point in putting up with unnecessary annoyances when better alternatives exist for a very modest price.
I wouldn't worry too much about the "throwaway" culture and the desire to get a new phone every year. The real reason this has been happening is because the technology is advancing so bloody fast. Phones will eventually reach a quality level and degree of market saturation so that it's no longer necessary or even desirable to upgrade so rapidly.
Look at what's happened with PCs. I feel people misunderstood the "decline" of the PC market significantly, declaring the era of PCs over, PCs are dead, blah, blah. Nonsense. What happened was a convergence of several factors: PC speed, power, and storage reached such a level that it was no longer necessary to upgrade every few years, since PCs even six or seven years old are perfectly capable of running most business software. CPUs became so small and powerful that a lot of previous tasks only performed by PCs could now be performed by phones or tablets. Nowadays, there's no reason to expect that a decent mid-grade PC will last you less than five years at a minimum, and maybe even a decade or more if you want to stretch it's life out.
I think a similar "market peak" will eventually occur with phones in the near future - maybe within the next five years or so. I think we're already starting to see it with tablets. At some point, people will stop caring about faster processors, more memory / storage. We've already reached the saturation point with graphics resolution, of course. More importantly, the novelty will wear off, and people will tire of spending hundreds of dollars each year for a new gizmo that does pretty much what last year's gizmo does, only a tiny big better.
So you give someone a bunch of money for a year long vacation, and THEN they can start collecting their payola? Sounds like a sweet deal. I'm not sure I understand how this is supposed to solve anything. A year-long cooldown won't make much of a difference in the long term for them. It's also a bit unfair, because it blocks entry into the private sector with a pretty onerous restriction - presumably on the employer, as it would be insane for the government to have to cover that. That means only the top few percent of government employees ever have a shot at making the jump to the private sector successfully if they desired to do so. Presumably everyone else would have to take temp jobs at McDonalds to get by for a year, because they can't get a job in their actual field of expertise.
Look, as much as we hate to admit it, the person you'd want to hire at a private firm would be the person that knows the ins and outs of the government agencies your company deals with. That's common sense, but if you look at it from a cynical angle, it smacks of corruption and payoffs. Lobbying the government in it's best form is simply letting your representatives know what your industry concerns are and trying to convince them to see things your way. Everyone passionate about a cause does it all the time. Lobbying in its worst forms is outright bribery, and that happens plenty of times as well.
I'm not sure what we can do about this. If you restrict or eliminate lobbying via draconian laws, you're essentially limiting access to our representative government, and that's probably unconstitutional anyhow. The only way to counter this is with a transparent government and media, public watchdog groups, and an engaged electorate that closely watches the government and exposes corruption where it occurs. I don't think there are any magic bullets or laws we can pass to "solve" this issue, to be honest.
I hope Snowden sends a note telling Assange to leave him the hell out of his egomaniacal delusions. God, how embarrassing it would be to be associated with that guy for all eternity - and literally as his "right hand man", of all things?
Everyone thinks horrible things at time, but most of us have a mental barrier that blocks those things from being blurted out loud. If you've ever been around someone who lacks an effective brain-to-mouth filter, you know things can get really awkward really fast. If he hid those comments from you growing up, then it perhaps means he knew they were wrong and shouldn't be uttered in front of his grandchildren. Have you talked to your parents about this?
After I became an adult, I learned that my grandfather was actually a rather horrible father (think The Great Santini), and caused a lot of grief for his family. My dad never told us about this when me and my siblings were younger, because he wanted us to be able to form our own unprejudiced relationships with them - and indeed, he always behaved himself when we were visiting. It certainly changed my view of him, of course, and it was sad for me to learn of such things, but we still had great memories of him while I was growing up, and I'm glad for that.
I'm a videogame programmer, and Ogg Vorbis is actually a very popular format for game audio. It's not only license free, but it supports multichannel audio and seamless sample-accurate looping, which standard MP3 can't do. It was great for videogame companies, but did little to really promote the file format itself. So, sure, the fact that we have usable reference libraries means anyone can add support to their products, but I don't think that makes much of a difference, unfortunately.
Don't get me wrong - I think it's a great format (obviously technically superior) and would love to see it succeed. You say that if the format "becomes a standard implemented by browsers and major graphics tools, it will get adopted". Well, sure, but that's sort of the hard part, right?
Don't think of it as "low end" graphics. The smallest pictures are demonstrating the worst artifacting possible in order to demonstrate the compression techniques being used. In the case of JPG, we can see the block-based artifacts very clearly. In PNG's case, you can see that the compression works differently, by reducing details and colors where it can, creating a "photoshopped" effect, as you put it.
Just like you never really see a JPG image compressed that badly, you'll probably also never see a BNG graphic with highly visible artifacts like that. The important point to take from this is that for the same image quality, you'll get images that look far less compressed. Alternatively, for the SAME bandwidth, you can get images that have much less visible artifacts. This format also supports high bit depths as well as transparency, so it's very much at home in the high-end side of graphics as well.
Yes, national security agencies probably think at that level, because they can afford to think at that level - same with top industry security experts such as Bruce Schneider. Even so, I'd still posit that it's still very much a hypothetical threat or method of attack. It's fun to theorize about what-ifs, but we should probably recognize it as such, with the understanding that it's not really relevant to nuts-and-bolts security issues in the real world. There's a pretty significant difference between "this is theoretically possible" versus "this has a reasonable chance of ever occurring".
BTW, even early and very rudimentary viruses such as the old "happy99" virus replaced a Windows DLL to inject itself into outbound traffic. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't think that's really an example of what we're talking about here. Stuxnet was hella impressive for a lot of other reasons, of course.
Because JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, WebP and others don't work in browsers without specifically added support, BGP does (via javascript).
Is there something about those formats that prevents someone from writing a Javascript-based visualizer? It's helpful that it's available, but frankly, it seems like an interim step to help in promoting the format - allowing people to see it on the web it it's native format instead of converted to a lossless PNG.
It does look like a great format, but until it's adopted as a web standard, all the browsers support it, and the major image editors can export it, it will remain among the many technically superior yet unused formats we've seen over the years. Too bad if it doesn't gain traction, but it's hard to fight the sheer inertia of popular formats.
I'm not sure how you can argue that after looking at the pictures in the link. It's clearly superior to JPG, because *everyone* can see the JPG artifacts. You only tend to notice the artifacts with BPG if you're comparing to a high quality picture or the original, or else looking really hard. It seems similar in principle to good audio compression that saves space by removing details the human ear is unlikely to miss.
It's too bad, because we really could have used this years ago while we were still on dialup - it would have saved us from seeing many beautiful images compressed all to hell. Yes, bandwidth matters to some degree nowadays, but not nearly as much as it used to. This format will, unfortunately, probably get little traction for one reason. JPG is here and it's "good enough". Audiophiles chafe at MP3 as well. Technically speaking, Ogg Vorbis was a superior format in nearly every way, but it's widely ignored in favor of MP3, which is "good enough". There's a small movement with FLAC and hi resolution sound, but most people can't hear or don't care about the difference. It will probably be the same for this.
Who knows... maybe I'll be proven wrong. It would help if the browser makers actually got behind it early and supported it fully - PNG suffered poor adoption because IE lagged so far behind with support for many years. Adobe, Corel, and other makers of image software will also need to offer native support as well. A format is worthless unless people are actually using it.
Never underestimate a government's ability to keep doggedly charge forward with a policy even in the face of obvious failure. After all, we've been conducting a "war on poverty", "war on drugs", and more recently, a "war on terror" for many years without effective results. No, they'll just claim that they're not getting enough funding to do a proper job, or that new laws are needed to close loopholes.
And even with being able to compile everything yourself, you're still at the mercy of the build chain and all of its dependencies (unless you audit/build them yourself too).
It seems a bit foolish to worry about purely theoretical security issues when we've got so many real ones to deal with. Ken Thompons' compiler infection demonstration was an interesting experiment designed to make a particular point, but I don't think it's wise to consider tool-chain hacking a legitimate threat, as we've never seen anything remotely like this in the wild, as far as I'm aware. And frankly, I question whether it's even realistically possible beyond a very simplistic demonstration.
At some point, theory has to give way to practicality, and you have to use some good judgment and common sense. Humans have to use a "chain of trust" at some point, because if you took the time to independently verify everything yourself (even assuming you had the expertise), you'd never get anything practical done. In fact, just about everything we do in our society at a high level of technology or craftsmanship ultimately requires relying on and trusting in others to assist you, at least to some degree. Security is no different. You have to weigh the probabilities of hypothetical threats versus limited resources to deal with those threats and do the best you can with the resources available. Diverting your attention on unrealistic threats will ultimately make you less secure, not more.
Even beyond that, e-mail can be encrypted client-side when necessary, meaning you don't have to trust anyone. There's no reason to trust your e-mail provider in the first place if the contents are truly sensitive. For everything else, e-mail should be considered about as secure as a postcard.
If you need to protect the metadata as well as the content, then e-mail shouldn't even be used for that sort of correspondence. E-mail has never been secure. It probably never will be either, at least not for what we consider "e-mail" today, because there's too much legacy crap that would break if we lock it down (at least if we are trying to secure metadata).
If we're OK with simply encrypting content as needed, then there are ways of building that sort of infrastructure into the system. We're seeing a lot of 3rd party messaging solutions that are using very good "trust no one" client-side encryption technologies and methods, such as What's App (now that they've integrated Open Whisper Systems security) or Threema.
I think such techniques may tend to be highly locale-specific.
For instance, in desert regions, there's no shortage of waste heat, so the idea of trapping and re-using it elsewhere may not make any sense. In those environments, it's probably much more effective to try to make use of abundant solar resources to offset energy costs used. Liquid cooling make make more sense to try to offset the cooling costs here.
For data centers in colder climates, you've essentially got a big helping hand from mother nature in the cooling department, especially in the winter. Any generated waste heat can be gladly reused by someone else to offset normal heating costs they'd otherwise incur. Also, it seems like this heat may only going to be useful in a limited area around the data center, as I'd imagine it would be difficult to transport waste heat over long distances - at least without investing so much in infrastructure that it negates any potential advantage.
I suppose one potential solution is to utilize distributed data center clusters that can be located in building basements, and act as supplementary heating elements, rather than the giant data centers we see today. We've seen some companies moving in this direction, though of course, this would have challenges of it's own.
There are a few significant advantages I can think of for lasers off-hand. Near perfect accuracy with any line of sight to the target is essentially assured. That is, if you can see the target, you can hit it. That's extremely important for fast, inbound targets like anti-ship missiles, in which you may only get one real shot at it. The speed of the laser assures that the inbound target will be hit as far away from the ship as possible. Additionally, there are no limitations of ammunition - it doesn't have to be stored and it can't run out. The only limitation is the power requirements, presumably generated by the ship itself.
You're probably underestimating the difficulty of making targets perfectly reflective enough to actually deflect a high powered laser beam. You're not going to be able to coat flight surfaces with optics-grade mirrors easily - low grade mirrored surfaces would likely be all but worthless as defense in actual practice, especially since they'd need to protect equally against all viable laser weapon frequencies. Moreover, warplanes and drones would not be good candidates for being covered with highly reflective surfaces for rather obvious reasons.
I don't think the Navy is reckless enough to replace all weapons with lasers, especially early in their life cycle while they're still unproven. Even though current warplanes have guided missiles, most still also carry guns or cannons as well. The military is pretty big on defense-in-depth, since all different weapons types have advantages and disadvantages. Lasers are no different. Downsides are degraded capabilities in poor conditions, less power on target then bullets or chemical explosives, and probably a few others.
I know too many learned-C++-first-and-stuck-with-it programmers who make every class of theirs a kitchen sink class. I know many programmers who started with C who can do OO much better than most C++ veterans.
You say that like you're arguing with me, but I make almost this exact same point, just with different words. I was just providing a counter-anecdote, but I've seen plenty of bad C++ programmers too. Good programmers write good code, and bad programmers write crappy code. I personally think it doesn't matter which language you start with.
One problem though is that if you're used to writing efficient code then it takes a strong mental effort to get used to writing inefficient C++ code style. C is still used in contexts where code efficiency (time and/or space) is still important, whereas most C++ programmers are in an environment where efficiency is considered a distraction.
Oh? I can't speak for other industries, but that certainly doesn't describe my job of videogame programming, where C++ is used almost exclusively for large-scale games. C++ compilers do an excellent job at turning higher-level abstractions into very efficient code. Otherwise, the videogame industry would still be using C, as we're pretty fanatical about performance and highly optimized code.
The C++ committee has generally adhered to C's original zero-cost (i.e. "you only pay for what you use") principles when designing new language features. Good C++ programmers understand which abstractions actually incur a runtime cost and which don't, and know how to use them appropriately. In many cases, the higher-level abstractions C++ provide are actually compiled away to zero or negligible runtime costs. Sorry, but characterizing C++ as some slow, inefficient, high-level language seems a bit of a stretch to me.
A good point, but it's too early to say if it's sustainable, or what the longer-term results will be. We've seen a lot of very generous social-welfare programs enacted in European countries, and many of them have since had to roll back some of those programs once their economies dried up - usually resulting in massive protests and strikes over "austerity measures", or the collapse of economies of countries with politicians too cowardly to propose such measures.
Granted, I think one advantage a basic income has rather than means-testing social programs is that a lot of bureaucratic overhead can go away - at least in theory. You shouldn't need as many civil servants to simply mail out checks, and a large number of various programs could be consolidated into this single program. The end result might cost more, but would likely put a greater ratio of tax money into the hands of people that would spend it rather than being filtered away as overhead inside government institutions, as social services overhead tends to be ridiculously high. The question is whether that cost is ultimately too high to be sustained by the working population - or rather, whether they feel the actual results are worth the inevitable costs.
Either way, I say let Finland experiment with their economy and let the program simmer for a while before we evaluate the program based on actual results, rather than political promises and rosy forecasts.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes, there are plenty of crappy programmers out there. And some developers always are looking for ways to make things simpler for everyone by creating all-encompassing frameworks, but in the end, almost invariably, it does lead to a lot of cargo cult programming practices with an over-reliance on frameworks and little understanding of how things work internally.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with using higher-level systems and frameworks so long as you understand the tradeoffs you're making. I'm an expert C++ programmer (videogame development), but I always turn to C# / .NET for internal tools, because I'm so much more productive in that language. The tradeoff, of course, is that the tools tend to be much less efficient, as well as some extra work for writing interop with native code. It's not as much of an issue since I can assume we have more powerful development machines using those tools, and high-speed is less critical than efficient workflow, functionality, and safety.
I think it's the same sort of tradeoff you'd be making when using this sort of framework. It's never going to be as optimal as a carefully tuned, custom crafted solution. As such, for extremely large or complex systems, or anything that absolutely demands extreme efficiency, you'd be better off with custom solutions written by experts. However, for projects with more modest goals, it could be that the requirements in productivity outweigh the costs of a custom, low-level solution. As long as the decision is made knowing these tradeoffs, it's fine.
The problem is that the vendor never tells us about these tradeoffs. For years, Microsoft touted C# / .NET as the next big thing, and told us that "pretty soon" we were going to see performance comparable to native code. It never happened. Natively compiled C++ still kicks the crap out of managed code in real world scenarios. Most major client-side applications are still written in native code. I suspect it will be similar for this sort of platform. Yes, it will work, but it's never going to be nearly as optimal or flexible as a custom solution expertly designed and optimized for the particular task at hand.
and China's one child policy is probably the best long term action for the environment.
And yet, in most developed first world countries, birth rates have pretty much plateaued, or are on the way there. The US, China, Japan, Singapore, Russia, most of Europe - all currently below population sustaining birth rates at the moment. Check out this chart, sorted by fertility rates from lowest to highest. You can likely notice a clear trend between the upper portions of the chart and the lower regions.
Economics and education (especially of women) is the key, not police state policies that encroach on more of our personal liberties. We need to get everyone to first-world economic status as fast as we can, because then:
1) People will stop pumping out kids en mass, since at that point they're an economic liability, not an advantage, and
2) People will start caring more about the environment when they're not trying to figure out where they'll get they're next meal, or if they will have a roof over their heads tomorrow.
Seriously, exploding population was the boogieman twenty or thirty years ago. If we forecast using today's trends, it seems pretty likely that the world's population will most likely peak and then decline. Take a look at the actual data trends (the recent ones - and don't extrapolate linearly), then draw your own conclusions.
Yes, watch what humans do.
They build amazing structures, write inspiring music, invent fantastic technology, care deeply for others, and sacrifice their lives to save a friend. I've seen people risk their lives to save a dog drowning in a frozen lake, or to save complete strangers from a burning building. The world holds it's breath when miners are trapped in a cave in, and if they are miraculously saved, we weep tears of joy at the happy reunions with their loved ones. When tragedy strikes in the form of a hurricane, flood, tsunami or earthquake, we come together to donate our money and our time to help those affected. People have returned thousands of dollars lost to their owners when they had nothing to gain from it. Some people devote their entire lives to helping the least fortunate among us.
Sure, the world has plenty of evil people that do evil things. But if you can't see the good in humanity as well, you're not looking hard enough.
It just doesn't add up to me.
"Not adding up" was the reason dark matter was invented. ;)
Indeed there is probably something going on at large scales, where gravity doesn't work as it does on small scales.
I've often wondered about that. It's pretty well known that classical Newtonian physics tends to break down at the quantum level. I wonder if the same thing happens at the largest scales - galaxy-sized measurements. I'd never go so far as to argue against the prevailing theory with people that study these things their entire lives, but it does make for interesting reading and/or discussion to consider some of the proposed alternatives.
I think perhaps you're overestimating the value of *what* they know, and underestimating the value of *who* they know. The latter knowledge is not going to be obsolete in a year, and the former can be easily gained by inviting an old colleague out to a nice lunch (at company expense, of course), and discussing out what's going on back at the old office.
Some people are just scared of any chemical name but they're perfectly fine if the label lists it by it's common name.
Fun quiz time! Which of these are poisonous, and which can be ingested safely:
pyridoxine HCl
copper gluconate
L-5-methyl tetrahydrofolate
cholecalciferol
cyanocobalamin
polynicotinate
retinyl palmitate
biotin
niacinamide
.
.
.
All scary sounding as hell. All very good for you.
I've seen people give poor reviews to medical food bars (that's where I got this list) that contained these ingredients because they apparently thought those were a bunch of unhealthy chemical additives. Well, yes, they're chemical additives, but they're things your body needs to stay alive and healthy. *facepalm* We have a massive government bureaucracy dedicated to making sure companies aren't feeding us poison. At some point, you just need to trust that they're doing their damned job.
Yeah, unfortunately, many lay-persons are horrible at exercising good judgment about such matters (including vaccines). I say let them keep their vaccine treatments, but require kids in public schools to be vaccinated. If they want to benefit from publicly-funded education, then they need to be responsible for the general public's well being as well. If private schools don't want to require vaccinations, then it's on them.
As an old(er) fart, I would respectfully disagree. Shitty firmware and an abandoned or poorly supported product is a perfectly good reason to throw something out and get new hardware. If you're dissatisfied enough with your phone to complain about it to other people, don't then turn around and grumble that people are telling you to get a better one. What else are they supposed to suggest? Just don't make the same mistake and buy a product that doesn't work well out of the box, or buy from the same company, thus rewarding their poor after-sales service.
The way I figure it, my time and satisfaction level are both valuable to me, and I'm willing to pay for a product that performs to my satisfaction. Of course, once I find a device that's working well for me, I'll hold onto it for a long time - typically long into obsolescence. I'm not into the "replace my gadget every year or two" race, but I don't see the point in putting up with unnecessary annoyances when better alternatives exist for a very modest price.
I wouldn't worry too much about the "throwaway" culture and the desire to get a new phone every year. The real reason this has been happening is because the technology is advancing so bloody fast. Phones will eventually reach a quality level and degree of market saturation so that it's no longer necessary or even desirable to upgrade so rapidly.
Look at what's happened with PCs. I feel people misunderstood the "decline" of the PC market significantly, declaring the era of PCs over, PCs are dead, blah, blah. Nonsense. What happened was a convergence of several factors: PC speed, power, and storage reached such a level that it was no longer necessary to upgrade every few years, since PCs even six or seven years old are perfectly capable of running most business software. CPUs became so small and powerful that a lot of previous tasks only performed by PCs could now be performed by phones or tablets. Nowadays, there's no reason to expect that a decent mid-grade PC will last you less than five years at a minimum, and maybe even a decade or more if you want to stretch it's life out.
I think a similar "market peak" will eventually occur with phones in the near future - maybe within the next five years or so. I think we're already starting to see it with tablets. At some point, people will stop caring about faster processors, more memory / storage. We've already reached the saturation point with graphics resolution, of course. More importantly, the novelty will wear off, and people will tire of spending hundreds of dollars each year for a new gizmo that does pretty much what last year's gizmo does, only a tiny big better.
So you give someone a bunch of money for a year long vacation, and THEN they can start collecting their payola? Sounds like a sweet deal. I'm not sure I understand how this is supposed to solve anything. A year-long cooldown won't make much of a difference in the long term for them. It's also a bit unfair, because it blocks entry into the private sector with a pretty onerous restriction - presumably on the employer, as it would be insane for the government to have to cover that. That means only the top few percent of government employees ever have a shot at making the jump to the private sector successfully if they desired to do so. Presumably everyone else would have to take temp jobs at McDonalds to get by for a year, because they can't get a job in their actual field of expertise.
Look, as much as we hate to admit it, the person you'd want to hire at a private firm would be the person that knows the ins and outs of the government agencies your company deals with. That's common sense, but if you look at it from a cynical angle, it smacks of corruption and payoffs. Lobbying the government in it's best form is simply letting your representatives know what your industry concerns are and trying to convince them to see things your way. Everyone passionate about a cause does it all the time. Lobbying in its worst forms is outright bribery, and that happens plenty of times as well.
I'm not sure what we can do about this. If you restrict or eliminate lobbying via draconian laws, you're essentially limiting access to our representative government, and that's probably unconstitutional anyhow. The only way to counter this is with a transparent government and media, public watchdog groups, and an engaged electorate that closely watches the government and exposes corruption where it occurs. I don't think there are any magic bullets or laws we can pass to "solve" this issue, to be honest.
My bad - I meant to say BNG, not PNG in the first paragraph.
I hope Snowden sends a note telling Assange to leave him the hell out of his egomaniacal delusions. God, how embarrassing it would be to be associated with that guy for all eternity - and literally as his "right hand man", of all things?
Everyone thinks horrible things at time, but most of us have a mental barrier that blocks those things from being blurted out loud. If you've ever been around someone who lacks an effective brain-to-mouth filter, you know things can get really awkward really fast. If he hid those comments from you growing up, then it perhaps means he knew they were wrong and shouldn't be uttered in front of his grandchildren. Have you talked to your parents about this?
After I became an adult, I learned that my grandfather was actually a rather horrible father (think The Great Santini), and caused a lot of grief for his family. My dad never told us about this when me and my siblings were younger, because he wanted us to be able to form our own unprejudiced relationships with them - and indeed, he always behaved himself when we were visiting. It certainly changed my view of him, of course, and it was sad for me to learn of such things, but we still had great memories of him while I was growing up, and I'm glad for that.
I'm a videogame programmer, and Ogg Vorbis is actually a very popular format for game audio. It's not only license free, but it supports multichannel audio and seamless sample-accurate looping, which standard MP3 can't do. It was great for videogame companies, but did little to really promote the file format itself. So, sure, the fact that we have usable reference libraries means anyone can add support to their products, but I don't think that makes much of a difference, unfortunately.
Don't get me wrong - I think it's a great format (obviously technically superior) and would love to see it succeed. You say that if the format "becomes a standard implemented by browsers and major graphics tools, it will get adopted". Well, sure, but that's sort of the hard part, right?
Don't think of it as "low end" graphics. The smallest pictures are demonstrating the worst artifacting possible in order to demonstrate the compression techniques being used. In the case of JPG, we can see the block-based artifacts very clearly. In PNG's case, you can see that the compression works differently, by reducing details and colors where it can, creating a "photoshopped" effect, as you put it.
Just like you never really see a JPG image compressed that badly, you'll probably also never see a BNG graphic with highly visible artifacts like that. The important point to take from this is that for the same image quality, you'll get images that look far less compressed. Alternatively, for the SAME bandwidth, you can get images that have much less visible artifacts. This format also supports high bit depths as well as transparency, so it's very much at home in the high-end side of graphics as well.
Yes, national security agencies probably think at that level, because they can afford to think at that level - same with top industry security experts such as Bruce Schneider. Even so, I'd still posit that it's still very much a hypothetical threat or method of attack. It's fun to theorize about what-ifs, but we should probably recognize it as such, with the understanding that it's not really relevant to nuts-and-bolts security issues in the real world. There's a pretty significant difference between "this is theoretically possible" versus "this has a reasonable chance of ever occurring".
BTW, even early and very rudimentary viruses such as the old "happy99" virus replaced a Windows DLL to inject itself into outbound traffic. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't think that's really an example of what we're talking about here. Stuxnet was hella impressive for a lot of other reasons, of course.
Because JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, WebP and others don't work in browsers without specifically added support, BGP does (via javascript).
Is there something about those formats that prevents someone from writing a Javascript-based visualizer? It's helpful that it's available, but frankly, it seems like an interim step to help in promoting the format - allowing people to see it on the web it it's native format instead of converted to a lossless PNG.
It does look like a great format, but until it's adopted as a web standard, all the browsers support it, and the major image editors can export it, it will remain among the many technically superior yet unused formats we've seen over the years. Too bad if it doesn't gain traction, but it's hard to fight the sheer inertia of popular formats.
I'm not sure how you can argue that after looking at the pictures in the link. It's clearly superior to JPG, because *everyone* can see the JPG artifacts. You only tend to notice the artifacts with BPG if you're comparing to a high quality picture or the original, or else looking really hard. It seems similar in principle to good audio compression that saves space by removing details the human ear is unlikely to miss.
It's too bad, because we really could have used this years ago while we were still on dialup - it would have saved us from seeing many beautiful images compressed all to hell. Yes, bandwidth matters to some degree nowadays, but not nearly as much as it used to. This format will, unfortunately, probably get little traction for one reason. JPG is here and it's "good enough". Audiophiles chafe at MP3 as well. Technically speaking, Ogg Vorbis was a superior format in nearly every way, but it's widely ignored in favor of MP3, which is "good enough". There's a small movement with FLAC and hi resolution sound, but most people can't hear or don't care about the difference. It will probably be the same for this.
Who knows... maybe I'll be proven wrong. It would help if the browser makers actually got behind it early and supported it fully - PNG suffered poor adoption because IE lagged so far behind with support for many years. Adobe, Corel, and other makers of image software will also need to offer native support as well. A format is worthless unless people are actually using it.
Never underestimate a government's ability to keep doggedly charge forward with a policy even in the face of obvious failure. After all, we've been conducting a "war on poverty", "war on drugs", and more recently, a "war on terror" for many years without effective results. No, they'll just claim that they're not getting enough funding to do a proper job, or that new laws are needed to close loopholes.
And even with being able to compile everything yourself, you're still at the mercy of the build chain and all of its dependencies (unless you audit/build them yourself too).
It seems a bit foolish to worry about purely theoretical security issues when we've got so many real ones to deal with. Ken Thompons' compiler infection demonstration was an interesting experiment designed to make a particular point, but I don't think it's wise to consider tool-chain hacking a legitimate threat, as we've never seen anything remotely like this in the wild, as far as I'm aware. And frankly, I question whether it's even realistically possible beyond a very simplistic demonstration.
At some point, theory has to give way to practicality, and you have to use some good judgment and common sense. Humans have to use a "chain of trust" at some point, because if you took the time to independently verify everything yourself (even assuming you had the expertise), you'd never get anything practical done. In fact, just about everything we do in our society at a high level of technology or craftsmanship ultimately requires relying on and trusting in others to assist you, at least to some degree. Security is no different. You have to weigh the probabilities of hypothetical threats versus limited resources to deal with those threats and do the best you can with the resources available. Diverting your attention on unrealistic threats will ultimately make you less secure, not more.
Even beyond that, e-mail can be encrypted client-side when necessary, meaning you don't have to trust anyone. There's no reason to trust your e-mail provider in the first place if the contents are truly sensitive. For everything else, e-mail should be considered about as secure as a postcard.
If you need to protect the metadata as well as the content, then e-mail shouldn't even be used for that sort of correspondence. E-mail has never been secure. It probably never will be either, at least not for what we consider "e-mail" today, because there's too much legacy crap that would break if we lock it down (at least if we are trying to secure metadata).
If we're OK with simply encrypting content as needed, then there are ways of building that sort of infrastructure into the system. We're seeing a lot of 3rd party messaging solutions that are using very good "trust no one" client-side encryption technologies and methods, such as What's App (now that they've integrated Open Whisper Systems security) or Threema.
I think such techniques may tend to be highly locale-specific.
For instance, in desert regions, there's no shortage of waste heat, so the idea of trapping and re-using it elsewhere may not make any sense. In those environments, it's probably much more effective to try to make use of abundant solar resources to offset energy costs used. Liquid cooling make make more sense to try to offset the cooling costs here.
For data centers in colder climates, you've essentially got a big helping hand from mother nature in the cooling department, especially in the winter. Any generated waste heat can be gladly reused by someone else to offset normal heating costs they'd otherwise incur. Also, it seems like this heat may only going to be useful in a limited area around the data center, as I'd imagine it would be difficult to transport waste heat over long distances - at least without investing so much in infrastructure that it negates any potential advantage.
I suppose one potential solution is to utilize distributed data center clusters that can be located in building basements, and act as supplementary heating elements, rather than the giant data centers we see today. We've seen some companies moving in this direction, though of course, this would have challenges of it's own.
There are a few significant advantages I can think of for lasers off-hand. Near perfect accuracy with any line of sight to the target is essentially assured. That is, if you can see the target, you can hit it. That's extremely important for fast, inbound targets like anti-ship missiles, in which you may only get one real shot at it. The speed of the laser assures that the inbound target will be hit as far away from the ship as possible. Additionally, there are no limitations of ammunition - it doesn't have to be stored and it can't run out. The only limitation is the power requirements, presumably generated by the ship itself.
You're probably underestimating the difficulty of making targets perfectly reflective enough to actually deflect a high powered laser beam. You're not going to be able to coat flight surfaces with optics-grade mirrors easily - low grade mirrored surfaces would likely be all but worthless as defense in actual practice, especially since they'd need to protect equally against all viable laser weapon frequencies. Moreover, warplanes and drones would not be good candidates for being covered with highly reflective surfaces for rather obvious reasons.
I don't think the Navy is reckless enough to replace all weapons with lasers, especially early in their life cycle while they're still unproven. Even though current warplanes have guided missiles, most still also carry guns or cannons as well. The military is pretty big on defense-in-depth, since all different weapons types have advantages and disadvantages. Lasers are no different. Downsides are degraded capabilities in poor conditions, less power on target then bullets or chemical explosives, and probably a few others.
I know too many learned-C++-first-and-stuck-with-it programmers who make every class of theirs a kitchen sink class. I know many programmers who started with C who can do OO much better than most C++ veterans.
You say that like you're arguing with me, but I make almost this exact same point, just with different words. I was just providing a counter-anecdote, but I've seen plenty of bad C++ programmers too. Good programmers write good code, and bad programmers write crappy code. I personally think it doesn't matter which language you start with.
One problem though is that if you're used to writing efficient code then it takes a strong mental effort to get used to writing inefficient C++ code style. C is still used in contexts where code efficiency (time and/or space) is still important, whereas most C++ programmers are in an environment where efficiency is considered a distraction.
Oh? I can't speak for other industries, but that certainly doesn't describe my job of videogame programming, where C++ is used almost exclusively for large-scale games. C++ compilers do an excellent job at turning higher-level abstractions into very efficient code. Otherwise, the videogame industry would still be using C, as we're pretty fanatical about performance and highly optimized code.
The C++ committee has generally adhered to C's original zero-cost (i.e. "you only pay for what you use") principles when designing new language features. Good C++ programmers understand which abstractions actually incur a runtime cost and which don't, and know how to use them appropriately. In many cases, the higher-level abstractions C++ provide are actually compiled away to zero or negligible runtime costs. Sorry, but characterizing C++ as some slow, inefficient, high-level language seems a bit of a stretch to me.
A good point, but it's too early to say if it's sustainable, or what the longer-term results will be. We've seen a lot of very generous social-welfare programs enacted in European countries, and many of them have since had to roll back some of those programs once their economies dried up - usually resulting in massive protests and strikes over "austerity measures", or the collapse of economies of countries with politicians too cowardly to propose such measures.
Granted, I think one advantage a basic income has rather than means-testing social programs is that a lot of bureaucratic overhead can go away - at least in theory. You shouldn't need as many civil servants to simply mail out checks, and a large number of various programs could be consolidated into this single program. The end result might cost more, but would likely put a greater ratio of tax money into the hands of people that would spend it rather than being filtered away as overhead inside government institutions, as social services overhead tends to be ridiculously high. The question is whether that cost is ultimately too high to be sustained by the working population - or rather, whether they feel the actual results are worth the inevitable costs.
Either way, I say let Finland experiment with their economy and let the program simmer for a while before we evaluate the program based on actual results, rather than political promises and rosy forecasts.