I just purchased a 1TB Xbox One a few weeks ago. I typically purchase most major consoles per generation (although I'd tend to buy for Xbox if it wasn't exclusive), but wasn't impressed enough with any of the new generation until Fallout 4 pushed me over the edge. Here's why:
* I'm an Xbox gold member, and they recently started offering me free Xbox One games, so I already had a library building up * Xbox 360 compatibility means I may be able to ditch my 360 sooner * I prefer the Xbox style controller
That's pretty much it. I've also been purchasing all my games digitally, which means never having to swap discs ever again, although it meant a week straight of downloading on my poor DSL connection. I'm guessing once I fill the internal drive up, I'll then have to start actively managing the remaining space, so there's that downside, but I really like going disc-less so far. I never traded or sold used games, so this is a win for me. My understanding is that you can purchase all games digitally on both platforms. If your kids like to swap / borrow games with friends, then perhaps discs would be better for you.
I'll eventually get a PS4 so I can play some of the exclusive JRPGs that always seem to land there, but for the time being, I'm fine with the Xbox One. The two consoles are, to be honest, *very* similar in specs, with the slight edge going to PS4 - so slight, in fact, you generally need side-by-side comparisons to tell the difference.
MS has the better online experience, from what I've seen (considering I don't have a PS4 yet, it's been a limited view), and for $60 a year you get a number of free games every month, though I understand PS has something similar. More than likely your credentials and credit cards will be safer with MS, as they seem to have a better handle on network security, as demonstrated by repeated Sony breaches, but hopefully they've learned their lesson.
Overall advice: get the one you like, especially if it has an exclusive you really want. Most games will be available for both. I think your kids will be happy either way. If you really dislike MS that much, maybe go for PS4. But really... it's sort of a toss-up.
I think it's fine that PCs are migrating more towards work or content creation type tasks, while phones and tablets are being used for light computing / content consumption for most people. Those smaller devices are much better suited for the masses than PCs ever were. Moreover, their portability and ubiquitous nature means they're going to be a lot more useful in the sort of small, everyday-life sort of situations that most people find practical for their personal needs.
Don't mistake PCs for "relics", though, any more than a pickup truck or utility van is a "relic". They're just industrial-sized vehicles that most average drivers don't need, similar to how full-sized computers are designed for serious work (or play). And like it or not, when people have a PC, they're likely to be using Windows. While it's no longer as relevant as it once was in the computing world, it's very far from being irrelevant.
P.S. High end phones can cost as much as $600-800, while low-end laptops can be bought for as low as $230.
I think we know the answer to that - liability will be strictly limited to the company
There's no need for "get-out clauses" in the purchasing contract, because that's how the law works. Employees are not liable for the products or services of the company they work for. The only exception, from what I understand, is if they do something illegal themselves.
Also, Volvo has clearly stated that they're accepting liability for accidents which their autonomous systems cause. From TFA: "Who will be responsible when an autonomous vehicle causes an accident?" Why would they be responsible when another car broadsides theirs? They haven't even remotely suggested accepting liability in all cases.
You seem to be inferring some conspiratorial vibe here, and I'm not really seeing it. It seems rather straightforward to me.
Have you ever been in an accident? It's pretty rare that you can actually see them coming. Otherwise, you would have avoided it, right? Or put another way... even if you can see it coming, it's likely that had you seen it earlier, there would be no need for last second heroic swerving or braking maneuvers.
Short of some horrible malfunction on multiple levels, a computer is going to start slowing down or braking long before a human is even aware of a potential problem. The autonomous car has the advantage of literally being able to see in all directions at once, and being able to react to that information in the blink of an eye.
Typical future scenario in your autonomous vehicle: "Why the hell is the car slowing d... oh, I see..."
Well, you happen to be wrong. 22% of users is very few? 200 million people worldwide are estimated to use ad-blockers, and the past few years have seen very dramatic increases in these numbers, which is why the ad companies and some website operators are starting to panic.
I've given up on noscript, to be honest, and simply replaced it with an ad blocker. Unfortunately, the web has reached a tipping point where you simply can't view many modern sites with scripting blocked. I spent half my time selectively unblocking noscript trying to get the site to render correctly, I just got tired of the constant fiddling.
Nowadays, there seem to be fewer Javascript-only exploits (although they certainly haven't disappeared). The majority seem to use Flash, Java plugins, PDF viewers, etc.
I use an ad-blocker mostly for security purposes. The fact that it makes the web faster, easier to read, more private, and less obnoxious overall is just a bonus.
A web browser is somewhat of a unique case, as each tab is more or less equivalent to a separate application - or at least, it should be. Chrome certainly proved it can effectively be done that way, I think. I agree - a single page should not be able to slow down the entire browser - that's terrible design.
When I was talking about UI, I was talking more like.NET's WPF or Qt, perhaps, neither of which are thread-safe because of performance concerns. It's critical for the programmer to do the work of handling any potentially long-running tasks to avoid blocking the UI thread.
All I'm saying is that there isn't a magic bullet here. Multi-threaded programming simply requires careful design and implementation.
It's not just the programming languages. Most *tasks* of any complexity tend to be highly sequential in nature. There are some rare exceptions, but the notion that a language can just automatically parallelize loops and get some massive speedup is not very feasible, I hate to say. It tends to work best in highly contrived or specialized situations. You have to be running some serious computation in a LOT of loops for that to pay off in any way, or the overhead is simply a non-starter. Moreover, those computations can't have any global side-effects or interaction with non-thread-safe data.
Your example, a UI library, is the antithesis of this, which is why they tend to be single-threaded. A UI system would need so many locks for all the interacting data that it would be largely pointless to try to make it multi-threaded. Every single property on every single widget would need to be atomic, and every method would need to be lockable or re-entrant. That's a hell of a design constraint, and the net result might be to make the performance significantly worse, not better.
Doesn't help if you can get to a fire, and not have anything to put it out.....
A person trapped in a burning building might disagree. Firefighters do other things besides put out fires, you know.
These are obviously to be used for observation or search and rescue ops, not for fighting fires directly. Since these can be remotely piloted, you could theoretically fly them up, have people strap in, and fly them back down. Unlike a helicopter, you can land these things just about anywhere, even without a dedicated helipad. You might even have a chance at rescuing someone though a window or from a balcony, though that might be pretty dicey.
Let Dubai pay for the expensive first-gen models and try them out. If they're actually useful, maybe they'll get adopted elsewhere. While it's more akin to a tiny aircraft than a jetpack, this is still pretty cool tech.
There are lots of nice suburbs and smaller cities just outside of Seattle. That way, on the occasions you want to go do something in Seattle ("culture"), you have the option, but you don't have to put up with all the negatives (higher living costs, non-existent broadband, higher crime rates, homeless problem, etc).
Of course, the area has a huge tech scene, including Microsoft, Amazon, and thousands of smaller companies surrounding them in the same way medical and dental offices tend to cluster around a big hospital. Still, it's hardly "undervalued" at this point, and the traffic is a nightmare throughout the entire greater Seattle region.
Most people understand and accept the risks of accidental deaths for the sake of modern conveniences, like driving in cars, flying commercial airliners, and of course, taking trains like this. The reason we react the way we do to terrorism is because it's a deliberate, cold-hearted act of barbarity that takes the lives of innocent people for the sake of politics, ideology, religion, or some combination thereof. The tragedy of the Paris attacks is not that so many people died. As you point out, probably more people died in traffic accidents that day in Europe. The tragedy is that those people died so needlessly.
While this presumed accident is sad, particularly for the family and friends of the victim, they can take comfort in knowing that perhaps this will lead to safer operations for others in the future. We tend to learn our hardest lessons from accidents like these. Hopefully future trains will be safer as a result of the investigation into whatever went wrong here.
Not sure why you think you're entitled to have someone entertain you for free, but whatever. Good luck with that.
I'm not sure how you concluded that from my post. The term "double dipping", in case you're not aware, refers to someone illicitly getting paid twice. I'm perfectly willing to pay for content once, either by watching commercials OR by paying a monthly fee. I pay for streaming content, incidentally, which is wonderfully convenient and completely ad-free.
The networks can only get away with double dipping while there's no real competition. They said "Hey, look! We can charge those suck... er... our valued customers boatloads of money (because we don't offer reasonable a la carte services) AND show them more and more advertisements! Win-win!" That resulted in this:
Oops. How about that? Shitting on your customers mean they go elsewhere if there's any chance. No way I'm ever subscribing to cable or any ad-laden service again. I've experienced ad-free on-demand TV, and I'm not going back.
The moment a service starts annoying me with some sort of interactive ad crap, they're gone. At least for me. Maybe it'll work on people who just want a free service.
No, the correct decision of an car's AI is to always prioritize the life and safety of it's occupant. And you can bet that's what every vehicle will be programmed to do. People on the outside can take care of themselves.
Note that this doesn't mean speeding recklessly and then plowing into a crowd to save the driver. That only occurs because of previously made poor choices. Obstacles don't magically teleport in front of cars. It only appears that way to human drivers because we have a bad habit of not paying attention. Computers don't have that little flaw, and so will be braking the car before the human occupant even realizes there's a potential situation ahead.
Car manufacturers are not exactly strangers to litigation. The notion that any single court case will doom an industry is overstating things, I believe.
decide between plowing into a crowd of people to protect the driver, and smashing into a tree to protect the crowd of people
People hold up ridiculous scenarios like this as some sort of hypothetical metric, but how well would a human do with an insane choice like this, presumably with only a split second to make the decision? Not very well, I'd imagine. Don't put AI up against ridiculous situations. Put them up against realistic obstacles, which we might actually have a chance of seeing in our lifetimes. Road construction. Temporary obstacles with police directing traffic. Blizzards. Temporarily flooded road. Parking lots or garages.
There's also this false dicotomy presented, wherein some people seem to think that unless an AI can can handle ALL situations possible, it can't possibly work. I'll tell you what will happen in many situations. The AI will come to a controlled stop and tell the human "Hey, I don't know what's happening. Take over the wheel, please." That seems perfectly reasonable for crazy scenarios that only rarely occur.
The answer to what would likely happen, by the way, is that the AI in the car would have long ago started braking, so as to avoid the problem in the first place.
Exactly. Apple is screwed by the original iOS design, in which they assumed the apps were all trusted first party, so didn't bother to put in a robust permissions system to differentiate API calls from trusted vs untrusted sources. Using Objective-C, with it's flexible runtime calls based on strings, it's trivial to bypass restrictions and gain access to APIs that you're not supposed to have. That is, calls made to app-facing APIs need to call internal APIs, and there's no way to practically prevent apps from calling those internal APIs directly and getting more data than they should.
That being said, Apple has one significant advantage, in that it only takes *one* report to remove all similar malware from any number of apps (assuming it's a library), as there's a single, authoritative source to check against. That's in contrast to PC, server, or router malware with can sit infecting a machine in near perpetuity, even if it's known by the world at large. Of course, that's like detecting a minefield by watching your soldiers blow up as they march across the field. Sucks to be the guy who got blown up, but at least everyone else is safe.
nonsense, plenty of large complex projects are written in C.
Where did I say they weren't? Obviously a lot of great stuff is written in C as well.
Any C++ data structure or algorithm has a fairly straightforward C equivalent, "objects" in pure C are easy.
Oh? I'd love to hear how you'd implement a ref-counted smart pointer in C. Or perhaps a scope based auto-lock/unlock mechanism. Tell me how you implement a reusable, generic container like a key-value map while remaining typesafe? How about any way at all to guarantee that a resource won't leak if you miss a function call due to some unexpected control flow? How about a way to avoid clobbering memory if you forget that you need to account for strlen() + 1?
Look, there's nothing wrong with C, but don't pretend it can do what C++ can. C is manual mode programming - the language itself is wonderfully simple and straightforward, but you have to do everything, including managing raw memory and properly cleaning up after yourself. C++ enables the compiler do a lot of automatic cleanup and safety checks, but has a cost in language complexity and obfuscation.
I was a bit luckier, in that I learned the language using Turbo C++. It was a fantastic compiler/IDE for DOS. I actually still have very fond memories of working on my hobby projects in that environment. Later in my schooling, using gcc on Unix workstations felt really primitive by comparison. By the time I turned pro, it was pretty much all MSVC.
What's funny (or sad, I suppose) is that, to this day, template-generated error messages are as horrible as ever. Hopefully we'll either get concepts or some other system to improve them, but I guess for now it just remains one of C++'s warts.
Heh, nice. I believe it was a Sunday morning, and our family was up and about already. We heard the explosion a few hundred miles north, much further away than you, apparently. My dad joked "well, there went Mt. St. Helens", since it was in the news, and people were anticipating some sort of event. We all chuckled, just figuring it was a sonic boom from the Whidby Island naval air base or something like that.
We were shocked to learn later that day that what we heard was actually St. Helens erupting. Ash got spread thousands of miles away, but we never got anyone of it, since we were north and the wind blew everything east.
About a year later, we got a chance to see the blast zone, which was still mostly barren, at least of large-scale life. It was absolutely a surreal scene, as though a person had swept their arm over a forest of matchsticks.
Certainly every professional C++ programmer I've ever worked with knows what a vtable is. I have no idea what a ptable is though - never heard the term before.
Nope, C++ is still a thing when you need to create really large, complex programs, and when efficiency still really matters. Here in the videogame industry, C++ absolutely reigns supreme. Nothing else even comes close. Large applications like MS Office are still written in C++, from what I'm told, as are *many* large applications. It's not just legacy stuff either.
C++ has the native performance of C, but is able to use powerful zero-cost abstractions that allow programs to scale up safely. For instance, if you write modern C++, it's almost impossible to write code that will stomp on random memory or leak resources, a real issue with C or older style C++ programs, yet that protection is completely optimized away and costs *nothing* at run-time (which I think is something many programmers don't properly appreciate).
An easy language to master? Absolutely not. It's a language that takes a long time to learn well, and it can be rather unforgiving at times, but it's great for what it does. C++ 11/14 has also really breathed new life into things as well, IMO. It's really amazing how much the language feels almost like it's using managed memory (e.g. garbage collection) now that I'm using smart pointers ubiquitously.
C++ is incredibly portable as well. My game engine works across several platforms, only a smallish percentage of the code is different between platforms, mostly for low-level graphics, audio, windowing, or other system calls.
It's stability as a language is legendary as well, and that's important for real-world projects that depend on it. You can probably still compile most the earliest C++ code on a modern compiler and expect it to still work, not to mention most C code as well.
I'd never claim C++ is the end-all, be-all of languages (I sound like I'm gushing, but I have plenty of complaints as well), but it most assuredly has a very long future with us, and for some very good reasons.
I said it would be a thousand times better, not that they would be good. Were I forced to write one for a professional community, I'd probably limit it to:
"Be professional and courteous."
The fact that this CoC actually talk about "micro-agressions" in their code of conduct just makes me die a little inside. The fact that we can discuss or disagree without delving into a raging flame is proof you don't need to be "nice", but just "courteous" (or "polite", as you indicated). We don't have to be best friends, and you don't need a code of conduct saying that you need to try to be the best person you can be (gag).
I might have purchased a copy of that book if there was actually an e-book version of it.
Anyhow, it's important to point out that security bugs aren't exactly like typical bugs. You can't test for security using unit tests... it's something that needs to happen in an audit. You need to be actively searching for ways to break code, and you need to know the techniques with which this is usually done. Most programmers are not trained how to do this. Do you think anyone actually tried to fuzz-test this library? I wonder.
Allowing a multimedia library to play downloaded, untrusted content as elevated privileges is a pretty obvious problem in hindsight. We've seen flaws in many other internet-facing multimedia rendering or playback libraries before. libstagefright is now going to undergo some intense scrutiny by both hackers and security firms alike - I'd be surprised if this is the last we hear of this.
Agreed. This CoC would have been a thousand times better if the entire thing was limited to what they listed in the summary:
Treat everyone with respect and kindness
Be mindful of how your words may be interpreted
Don’t be destructive or antagonistic
If you have an issue, please mail conduct@golang.org
Also, you've undoubtedly just violated the Go CoC with that little joke. Apparently, posting something clever and funny like that on a Go forum could get you a time-out if someone took offense.
Slashdot Mirror
I just purchased a 1TB Xbox One a few weeks ago. I typically purchase most major consoles per generation (although I'd tend to buy for Xbox if it wasn't exclusive), but wasn't impressed enough with any of the new generation until Fallout 4 pushed me over the edge. Here's why:
* I'm an Xbox gold member, and they recently started offering me free Xbox One games, so I already had a library building up
* Xbox 360 compatibility means I may be able to ditch my 360 sooner
* I prefer the Xbox style controller
That's pretty much it. I've also been purchasing all my games digitally, which means never having to swap discs ever again, although it meant a week straight of downloading on my poor DSL connection. I'm guessing once I fill the internal drive up, I'll then have to start actively managing the remaining space, so there's that downside, but I really like going disc-less so far. I never traded or sold used games, so this is a win for me. My understanding is that you can purchase all games digitally on both platforms. If your kids like to swap / borrow games with friends, then perhaps discs would be better for you.
I'll eventually get a PS4 so I can play some of the exclusive JRPGs that always seem to land there, but for the time being, I'm fine with the Xbox One. The two consoles are, to be honest, *very* similar in specs, with the slight edge going to PS4 - so slight, in fact, you generally need side-by-side comparisons to tell the difference.
MS has the better online experience, from what I've seen (considering I don't have a PS4 yet, it's been a limited view), and for $60 a year you get a number of free games every month, though I understand PS has something similar. More than likely your credentials and credit cards will be safer with MS, as they seem to have a better handle on network security, as demonstrated by repeated Sony breaches, but hopefully they've learned their lesson.
Overall advice: get the one you like, especially if it has an exclusive you really want. Most games will be available for both. I think your kids will be happy either way. If you really dislike MS that much, maybe go for PS4. But really... it's sort of a toss-up.
to tell him the Emperor had no Clothes.
Thank you for that particularly horrific vision...
I think it's fine that PCs are migrating more towards work or content creation type tasks, while phones and tablets are being used for light computing / content consumption for most people. Those smaller devices are much better suited for the masses than PCs ever were. Moreover, their portability and ubiquitous nature means they're going to be a lot more useful in the sort of small, everyday-life sort of situations that most people find practical for their personal needs.
Don't mistake PCs for "relics", though, any more than a pickup truck or utility van is a "relic". They're just industrial-sized vehicles that most average drivers don't need, similar to how full-sized computers are designed for serious work (or play). And like it or not, when people have a PC, they're likely to be using Windows. While it's no longer as relevant as it once was in the computing world, it's very far from being irrelevant.
P.S. High end phones can cost as much as $600-800, while low-end laptops can be bought for as low as $230.
I think we know the answer to that - liability will be strictly limited to the company
There's no need for "get-out clauses" in the purchasing contract, because that's how the law works. Employees are not liable for the products or services of the company they work for. The only exception, from what I understand, is if they do something illegal themselves.
Also, Volvo has clearly stated that they're accepting liability for accidents which their autonomous systems cause. From TFA: "Who will be responsible when an autonomous vehicle causes an accident?" Why would they be responsible when another car broadsides theirs? They haven't even remotely suggested accepting liability in all cases.
You seem to be inferring some conspiratorial vibe here, and I'm not really seeing it. It seems rather straightforward to me.
Have you ever been in an accident? It's pretty rare that you can actually see them coming. Otherwise, you would have avoided it, right? Or put another way... even if you can see it coming, it's likely that had you seen it earlier, there would be no need for last second heroic swerving or braking maneuvers.
Short of some horrible malfunction on multiple levels, a computer is going to start slowing down or braking long before a human is even aware of a potential problem. The autonomous car has the advantage of literally being able to see in all directions at once, and being able to react to that information in the blink of an eye.
Typical future scenario in your autonomous vehicle: "Why the hell is the car slowing d... oh, I see..."
On the whole, very few people block ads.
Well, you happen to be wrong. 22% of users is very few? 200 million people worldwide are estimated to use ad-blockers, and the past few years have seen very dramatic increases in these numbers, which is why the ad companies and some website operators are starting to panic.
I've given up on noscript, to be honest, and simply replaced it with an ad blocker. Unfortunately, the web has reached a tipping point where you simply can't view many modern sites with scripting blocked. I spent half my time selectively unblocking noscript trying to get the site to render correctly, I just got tired of the constant fiddling.
Nowadays, there seem to be fewer Javascript-only exploits (although they certainly haven't disappeared). The majority seem to use Flash, Java plugins, PDF viewers, etc.
I use an ad-blocker mostly for security purposes. The fact that it makes the web faster, easier to read, more private, and less obnoxious overall is just a bonus.
A web browser is somewhat of a unique case, as each tab is more or less equivalent to a separate application - or at least, it should be. Chrome certainly proved it can effectively be done that way, I think. I agree - a single page should not be able to slow down the entire browser - that's terrible design.
When I was talking about UI, I was talking more like .NET's WPF or Qt, perhaps, neither of which are thread-safe because of performance concerns. It's critical for the programmer to do the work of handling any potentially long-running tasks to avoid blocking the UI thread.
All I'm saying is that there isn't a magic bullet here. Multi-threaded programming simply requires careful design and implementation.
It's not just the programming languages. Most *tasks* of any complexity tend to be highly sequential in nature. There are some rare exceptions, but the notion that a language can just automatically parallelize loops and get some massive speedup is not very feasible, I hate to say. It tends to work best in highly contrived or specialized situations. You have to be running some serious computation in a LOT of loops for that to pay off in any way, or the overhead is simply a non-starter. Moreover, those computations can't have any global side-effects or interaction with non-thread-safe data.
Your example, a UI library, is the antithesis of this, which is why they tend to be single-threaded. A UI system would need so many locks for all the interacting data that it would be largely pointless to try to make it multi-threaded. Every single property on every single widget would need to be atomic, and every method would need to be lockable or re-entrant. That's a hell of a design constraint, and the net result might be to make the performance significantly worse, not better.
Doesn't help if you can get to a fire, and not have anything to put it out.....
A person trapped in a burning building might disagree. Firefighters do other things besides put out fires, you know.
These are obviously to be used for observation or search and rescue ops, not for fighting fires directly. Since these can be remotely piloted, you could theoretically fly them up, have people strap in, and fly them back down. Unlike a helicopter, you can land these things just about anywhere, even without a dedicated helipad. You might even have a chance at rescuing someone though a window or from a balcony, though that might be pretty dicey.
Let Dubai pay for the expensive first-gen models and try them out. If they're actually useful, maybe they'll get adopted elsewhere. While it's more akin to a tiny aircraft than a jetpack, this is still pretty cool tech.
There are lots of nice suburbs and smaller cities just outside of Seattle. That way, on the occasions you want to go do something in Seattle ("culture"), you have the option, but you don't have to put up with all the negatives (higher living costs, non-existent broadband, higher crime rates, homeless problem, etc).
Of course, the area has a huge tech scene, including Microsoft, Amazon, and thousands of smaller companies surrounding them in the same way medical and dental offices tend to cluster around a big hospital. Still, it's hardly "undervalued" at this point, and the traffic is a nightmare throughout the entire greater Seattle region.
Most people understand and accept the risks of accidental deaths for the sake of modern conveniences, like driving in cars, flying commercial airliners, and of course, taking trains like this. The reason we react the way we do to terrorism is because it's a deliberate, cold-hearted act of barbarity that takes the lives of innocent people for the sake of politics, ideology, religion, or some combination thereof. The tragedy of the Paris attacks is not that so many people died. As you point out, probably more people died in traffic accidents that day in Europe. The tragedy is that those people died so needlessly.
While this presumed accident is sad, particularly for the family and friends of the victim, they can take comfort in knowing that perhaps this will lead to safer operations for others in the future. We tend to learn our hardest lessons from accidents like these. Hopefully future trains will be safer as a result of the investigation into whatever went wrong here.
Not sure why you think you're entitled to have someone entertain you for free, but whatever. Good luck with that.
I'm not sure how you concluded that from my post. The term "double dipping", in case you're not aware, refers to someone illicitly getting paid twice. I'm perfectly willing to pay for content once, either by watching commercials OR by paying a monthly fee. I pay for streaming content, incidentally, which is wonderfully convenient and completely ad-free.
The networks can only get away with double dipping while there's no real competition. They said "Hey, look! We can charge those suck... er... our valued customers boatloads of money (because we don't offer reasonable a la carte services) AND show them more and more advertisements! Win-win!" That resulted in this:
http://www.latimes.com/enterta...
Oops. How about that? Shitting on your customers mean they go elsewhere if there's any chance. No way I'm ever subscribing to cable or any ad-laden service again. I've experienced ad-free on-demand TV, and I'm not going back.
The moment a service starts annoying me with some sort of interactive ad crap, they're gone. At least for me. Maybe it'll work on people who just want a free service.
No, the correct decision of an car's AI is to always prioritize the life and safety of it's occupant. And you can bet that's what every vehicle will be programmed to do. People on the outside can take care of themselves.
Note that this doesn't mean speeding recklessly and then plowing into a crowd to save the driver. That only occurs because of previously made poor choices. Obstacles don't magically teleport in front of cars. It only appears that way to human drivers because we have a bad habit of not paying attention. Computers don't have that little flaw, and so will be braking the car before the human occupant even realizes there's a potential situation ahead.
Car manufacturers are not exactly strangers to litigation. The notion that any single court case will doom an industry is overstating things, I believe.
decide between plowing into a crowd of people to protect the driver, and smashing into a tree to protect the crowd of people
People hold up ridiculous scenarios like this as some sort of hypothetical metric, but how well would a human do with an insane choice like this, presumably with only a split second to make the decision? Not very well, I'd imagine. Don't put AI up against ridiculous situations. Put them up against realistic obstacles, which we might actually have a chance of seeing in our lifetimes. Road construction. Temporary obstacles with police directing traffic. Blizzards. Temporarily flooded road. Parking lots or garages.
There's also this false dicotomy presented, wherein some people seem to think that unless an AI can can handle ALL situations possible, it can't possibly work. I'll tell you what will happen in many situations. The AI will come to a controlled stop and tell the human "Hey, I don't know what's happening. Take over the wheel, please." That seems perfectly reasonable for crazy scenarios that only rarely occur.
The answer to what would likely happen, by the way, is that the AI in the car would have long ago started braking, so as to avoid the problem in the first place.
Exactly. Apple is screwed by the original iOS design, in which they assumed the apps were all trusted first party, so didn't bother to put in a robust permissions system to differentiate API calls from trusted vs untrusted sources. Using Objective-C, with it's flexible runtime calls based on strings, it's trivial to bypass restrictions and gain access to APIs that you're not supposed to have. That is, calls made to app-facing APIs need to call internal APIs, and there's no way to practically prevent apps from calling those internal APIs directly and getting more data than they should.
That being said, Apple has one significant advantage, in that it only takes *one* report to remove all similar malware from any number of apps (assuming it's a library), as there's a single, authoritative source to check against. That's in contrast to PC, server, or router malware with can sit infecting a machine in near perpetuity, even if it's known by the world at large. Of course, that's like detecting a minefield by watching your soldiers blow up as they march across the field. Sucks to be the guy who got blown up, but at least everyone else is safe.
nonsense, plenty of large complex projects are written in C.
Where did I say they weren't? Obviously a lot of great stuff is written in C as well.
Any C++ data structure or algorithm has a fairly straightforward C equivalent, "objects" in pure C are easy.
Oh? I'd love to hear how you'd implement a ref-counted smart pointer in C. Or perhaps a scope based auto-lock/unlock mechanism. Tell me how you implement a reusable, generic container like a key-value map while remaining typesafe? How about any way at all to guarantee that a resource won't leak if you miss a function call due to some unexpected control flow? How about a way to avoid clobbering memory if you forget that you need to account for strlen() + 1?
Look, there's nothing wrong with C, but don't pretend it can do what C++ can. C is manual mode programming - the language itself is wonderfully simple and straightforward, but you have to do everything, including managing raw memory and properly cleaning up after yourself. C++ enables the compiler do a lot of automatic cleanup and safety checks, but has a cost in language complexity and obfuscation.
Yeah, 20 years experience in c++ development here
Congrats. 23 years C++ experience here.
I was a bit luckier, in that I learned the language using Turbo C++. It was a fantastic compiler/IDE for DOS. I actually still have very fond memories of working on my hobby projects in that environment. Later in my schooling, using gcc on Unix workstations felt really primitive by comparison. By the time I turned pro, it was pretty much all MSVC.
What's funny (or sad, I suppose) is that, to this day, template-generated error messages are as horrible as ever. Hopefully we'll either get concepts or some other system to improve them, but I guess for now it just remains one of C++'s warts.
Heh, nice. I believe it was a Sunday morning, and our family was up and about already. We heard the explosion a few hundred miles north, much further away than you, apparently. My dad joked "well, there went Mt. St. Helens", since it was in the news, and people were anticipating some sort of event. We all chuckled, just figuring it was a sonic boom from the Whidby Island naval air base or something like that.
We were shocked to learn later that day that what we heard was actually St. Helens erupting. Ash got spread thousands of miles away, but we never got anyone of it, since we were north and the wind blew everything east.
About a year later, we got a chance to see the blast zone, which was still mostly barren, at least of large-scale life. It was absolutely a surreal scene, as though a person had swept their arm over a forest of matchsticks.
Certainly every professional C++ programmer I've ever worked with knows what a vtable is. I have no idea what a ptable is though - never heard the term before.
Nope, C++ is still a thing when you need to create really large, complex programs, and when efficiency still really matters. Here in the videogame industry, C++ absolutely reigns supreme. Nothing else even comes close. Large applications like MS Office are still written in C++, from what I'm told, as are *many* large applications. It's not just legacy stuff either.
C++ has the native performance of C, but is able to use powerful zero-cost abstractions that allow programs to scale up safely. For instance, if you write modern C++, it's almost impossible to write code that will stomp on random memory or leak resources, a real issue with C or older style C++ programs, yet that protection is completely optimized away and costs *nothing* at run-time (which I think is something many programmers don't properly appreciate).
An easy language to master? Absolutely not. It's a language that takes a long time to learn well, and it can be rather unforgiving at times, but it's great for what it does. C++ 11/14 has also really breathed new life into things as well, IMO. It's really amazing how much the language feels almost like it's using managed memory (e.g. garbage collection) now that I'm using smart pointers ubiquitously.
C++ is incredibly portable as well. My game engine works across several platforms, only a smallish percentage of the code is different between platforms, mostly for low-level graphics, audio, windowing, or other system calls.
It's stability as a language is legendary as well, and that's important for real-world projects that depend on it. You can probably still compile most the earliest C++ code on a modern compiler and expect it to still work, not to mention most C code as well.
I'd never claim C++ is the end-all, be-all of languages (I sound like I'm gushing, but I have plenty of complaints as well), but it most assuredly has a very long future with us, and for some very good reasons.
I said it would be a thousand times better, not that they would be good. Were I forced to write one for a professional community, I'd probably limit it to:
"Be professional and courteous."
The fact that this CoC actually talk about "micro-agressions" in their code of conduct just makes me die a little inside. The fact that we can discuss or disagree without delving into a raging flame is proof you don't need to be "nice", but just "courteous" (or "polite", as you indicated). We don't have to be best friends, and you don't need a code of conduct saying that you need to try to be the best person you can be (gag).
What would yours say?
I might have purchased a copy of that book if there was actually an e-book version of it.
Anyhow, it's important to point out that security bugs aren't exactly like typical bugs. You can't test for security using unit tests... it's something that needs to happen in an audit. You need to be actively searching for ways to break code, and you need to know the techniques with which this is usually done. Most programmers are not trained how to do this. Do you think anyone actually tried to fuzz-test this library? I wonder.
Allowing a multimedia library to play downloaded, untrusted content as elevated privileges is a pretty obvious problem in hindsight. We've seen flaws in many other internet-facing multimedia rendering or playback libraries before. libstagefright is now going to undergo some intense scrutiny by both hackers and security firms alike - I'd be surprised if this is the last we hear of this.
Agreed. This CoC would have been a thousand times better if the entire thing was limited to what they listed in the summary:
Treat everyone with respect and kindness
Be mindful of how your words may be interpreted
Don’t be destructive or antagonistic
If you have an issue, please mail conduct@golang.org
Also, you've undoubtedly just violated the Go CoC with that little joke. Apparently, posting something clever and funny like that on a Go forum could get you a time-out if someone took offense.