Do we still take what Musk says seriously? I mean, how many times has he said something will happen at some time, and how many times has he actually followed on? For example, just last month he said he said he's taking Tesla private. Or the manned space flight, he has been saying "in two years" for past ten years. Or the Falcon Heavy test flight slipping multiple times, or the other flights of FH that were supposed to happen this year.
Don't get me wrong, he is doing amazing stuff, and I understand there are objective reasons for the deadline slips, and I am a big fan and wish him success. But it has come to the point where I will wait until he actually delivers something before getting excited. And I will definitely get excited when the Moon flight happens.
(How are we on criticizing Musk here? Am I good? Am I going to get crucified? Stay tuned to find out.)
"Many computer users don't allow outside or unprivileged users to run on their CPUs"
Your browser is running some outside unprivileged JavaScript for almost every page you visit. One of the exploits was specifically described for JavaScript running in a browser. You don't even need to be able to execute code. Even code that would traditionally be considered harmless could potentially be used for side channel attacks if you e.g. control the input data. That invoice your ISP sent you as a PDF could potentially use a harmless piece of code inside Adobe Reader to do something harmful. The fact that it has not been demonstrated yet does not mean it can't be done.
A good programmer can write good code in any language. That said, an average or bad programmer has the tendency to write really horrible code in PHP. Let's say the nature of the language leads you to bad code, more so than say C# or Python. You have to fight the nature in order to avoid it.
It doesn't have to be customer data, since GDPR applies to employees as well, or any other physical person. So that shared excel file where you tracked who chipped in for coffee in your break room is now GDPR relevant. There is simply no way this can be realistically done to 100% accuracy. Companies will do the best they can, but everyone will be not compliant to some extent.
I'm all for privacy, but GDPR will impossible to follow in practice. One of the big issues is the right to be forgotten. We are a company with 50000 employees worldwide, with tons of information systems that are not completely integrated. If you call and tell me you want the whole company to forget that you exist, I am somehow supposed to access an excel file on a shared folder in Thailand that somebody created 10 years ago and delete your address from it even though your name was misspelled or you changed it in the meantime. That's not realistic and will not happen, even with best effort. This is one of those regulations where everyone will be violating it and the government will just choose who to punish and who not.
We have been working on getting our software GDPR compliant for past 6 months, with a huge effort in both analysis and development. And these guys think they will just shrug it of by waiting until the deadline and then writing a letter to the point of "we can just ignore this, right?" I literally LOLed.
That said, GDPR is complete nonsense, nobody will be fully compliant, and EU will not be able to punish everyone who is not compliant and will either have to ignore its own rules or amend them very soon.
...and Slashdot has just stripped the letter I am talking about from the comment, making it look like nonsense. Which kind of illustrates what kind of problems I'm talking about.
From the article it looks like they will be using the Turkish (i without a dot). Just goes to prove how much research went into the decision, since that is the one of the most problematic letter for computers to process correctly. It makes it impossible to determine the lower case of letter "I" without knowing the locale, and very easy to do it wrong when using the incorrect locale. And obviously the letter I/i is everywhere, including the text of programming languages and data interchange formats. You will get into hilarious situations like trying to lower case "RESPÝBLIKASY" and having to use a different locale for the tags and for the contents, or else you end up either with with the wrong I or the incorrect spelling of Respýblkasy with i.
You are already trusting corporations for your water and food. Closer to computing, you are likely also trusting Intel for your chipset with their beautiful IME nonsense. Trusting someone for malware protection is not so special.
Apple is a company. A company cannot like or dislike something. Any emotions you ascribe to a company are actually the emotions of whoever is in charge. You change the leader and the emotions of the company can reverse in a minute.
People often make this mistake of "trusting a company" or "believing in a company". You can trust the current leaders, but you can't trust a company. A company is not a person, it's a legal construct. Personifying companies too much only results in disappointment.
So, they want you to run a kernel that is younger than two years old, and they want to be able to see which features it has enabled. Both perfectly reasonable requirements, most likely based or real engineering issues.
Ah, JavaScript. The Visual Basic of our time. Using a language that everyone can program in just means you will have to deal with a lot of code written by people who don't completely understand how a 'while' cycle works.
The only reason everyone uses JavaScript in the browser is that it is the only language supported by major browsers. If browsers supported Visual Basic instead, everyone would be using Visual Basic. There is no choice. The popularity of JavaScript under these circumstances is no measure of the quality of the language. There was no "test of time", since there was no competition.
That's a problem I have seen many times. A developer has a favorite language, and when he is asked to develop something, he downloads the latest version of the compiler from git and here we go. Then you have to explain that no, we really can't ask the customers to install a 250 MB runtime just to run your small utility. And we really can't maintain something written in a programming language that changes every few months. Developing something in C++ is more pain than in many other languages, but maintaining it for 20 years afterwards seems much easier.
Well doctors really fail at immortality, so blame them for that as well. You can't fine a doctor every time a patient dies. It's not always the doctor's fault. People die. We don't understand human body enough to prevent that.
Software engineers (usually) do the best we can. Software systems are some of the most complex systems humans have created. We go into software development knowing we will never fully understand how the software works. But we can still create something that is useful, even with that limitation. It will not be completely bulletproof, but it will improve the quality of human life. Either we accept that limitation, or stop using software at all.
If you disagree, please do show me a practical way how to write completely secure code.
"a task that requires the power and thrust contained in a huge rocket"
You actually don't need a big rocket to escape Moon's gravity. You know, as proved by the Apollo program. If we are talking about the situation after we colonize Moon, at that point we will obviously have the technology needed to send a rock back to Earth from Moon. It will be needed for the colonization. So she is not scientifically wrong, although worrying about people throwing rocks from Moon to Earth has got to be in the top 10 least important problems humanity needs to solve.
Slashdot Mirror
Irrelevant project is irrelevant.
Notice they are saying "out of China", not "to the US". They will most likely move it to India or Vietnam or Mexico, or somewhere else cheap.
Do we still take what Musk says seriously? I mean, how many times has he said something will happen at some time, and how many times has he actually followed on? For example, just last month he said he said he's taking Tesla private. Or the manned space flight, he has been saying "in two years" for past ten years. Or the Falcon Heavy test flight slipping multiple times, or the other flights of FH that were supposed to happen this year.
Don't get me wrong, he is doing amazing stuff, and I understand there are objective reasons for the deadline slips, and I am a big fan and wish him success. But it has come to the point where I will wait until he actually delivers something before getting excited. And I will definitely get excited when the Moon flight happens.
(How are we on criticizing Musk here? Am I good? Am I going to get crucified? Stay tuned to find out.)
You're holding it wrong.
"Many computer users don't allow outside or unprivileged users to run on their CPUs"
Your browser is running some outside unprivileged JavaScript for almost every page you visit. One of the exploits was specifically described for JavaScript running in a browser.
You don't even need to be able to execute code. Even code that would traditionally be considered harmless could potentially be used for side channel attacks if you e.g. control the input data. That invoice your ISP sent you as a PDF could potentially use a harmless piece of code inside Adobe Reader to do something harmful.
The fact that it has not been demonstrated yet does not mean it can't be done.
Whenever taxi drivers start giving you investment tips, it's a bubble.
A good programmer can write good code in any language. That said, an average or bad programmer has the tendency to write really horrible code in PHP. Let's say the nature of the language leads you to bad code, more so than say C# or Python. You have to fight the nature in order to avoid it.
First global warming and now this.
I knew it! Arrakis IS Earth after all!
It doesn't have to be customer data, since GDPR applies to employees as well, or any other physical person. So that shared excel file where you tracked who chipped in for coffee in your break room is now GDPR relevant. There is simply no way this can be realistically done to 100% accuracy. Companies will do the best they can, but everyone will be not compliant to some extent.
I'm all for privacy, but GDPR will impossible to follow in practice. One of the big issues is the right to be forgotten. We are a company with 50000 employees worldwide, with tons of information systems that are not completely integrated. If you call and tell me you want the whole company to forget that you exist, I am somehow supposed to access an excel file on a shared folder in Thailand that somebody created 10 years ago and delete your address from it even though your name was misspelled or you changed it in the meantime. That's not realistic and will not happen, even with best effort. This is one of those regulations where everyone will be violating it and the government will just choose who to punish and who not.
We have been working on getting our software GDPR compliant for past 6 months, with a huge effort in both analysis and development. And these guys think they will just shrug it of by waiting until the deadline and then writing a letter to the point of "we can just ignore this, right?" I literally LOLed.
That said, GDPR is complete nonsense, nobody will be fully compliant, and EU will not be able to punish everyone who is not compliant and will either have to ignore its own rules or amend them very soon.
...and Slashdot has just stripped the letter I am talking about from the comment, making it look like nonsense. Which kind of illustrates what kind of problems I'm talking about.
From the article it looks like they will be using the Turkish (i without a dot). Just goes to prove how much research went into the decision, since that is the one of the most problematic letter for computers to process correctly. It makes it impossible to determine the lower case of letter "I" without knowing the locale, and very easy to do it wrong when using the incorrect locale. And obviously the letter I/i is everywhere, including the text of programming languages and data interchange formats. You will get into hilarious situations like trying to lower case "RESPÝBLIKASY" and having to use a different locale for the tags and for the contents, or else you end up either with with the wrong I or the incorrect spelling of Respýblkasy with i.
So, good luck with your change, you'll need it.
[This][post][originally][said][something][completely][different][.]
Will someone knowledgeable please explain, what does "legal tender" mean if it does not mean they have to accept cash to settle my debt?
You are already trusting corporations for your water and food. Closer to computing, you are likely also trusting Intel for your chipset with their beautiful IME nonsense. Trusting someone for malware protection is not so special.
"Apple really did like my dad."
Apple is a company. A company cannot like or dislike something. Any emotions you ascribe to a company are actually the emotions of whoever is in charge. You change the leader and the emotions of the company can reverse in a minute.
People often make this mistake of "trusting a company" or "believing in a company". You can trust the current leaders, but you can't trust a company. A company is not a person, it's a legal construct. Personifying companies too much only results in disappointment.
So, they want you to run a kernel that is younger than two years old, and they want to be able to see which features it has enabled. Both perfectly reasonable requirements, most likely based or real engineering issues.
Ah, JavaScript. The Visual Basic of our time.
Using a language that everyone can program in just means you will have to deal with a lot of code written by people who don't completely understand how a 'while' cycle works.
The only reason everyone uses JavaScript in the browser is that it is the only language supported by major browsers. If browsers supported Visual Basic instead, everyone would be using Visual Basic. There is no choice. The popularity of JavaScript under these circumstances is no measure of the quality of the language. There was no "test of time", since there was no competition.
Learn to use proper source control. Learn to back up. Learn not to experiment with new tools on the single copy of priceless data.
That's a problem I have seen many times. A developer has a favorite language, and when he is asked to develop something, he downloads the latest version of the compiler from git and here we go. Then you have to explain that no, we really can't ask the customers to install a 250 MB runtime just to run your small utility. And we really can't maintain something written in a programming language that changes every few months. Developing something in C++ is more pain than in many other languages, but maintaining it for 20 years afterwards seems much easier.
Well doctors really fail at immortality, so blame them for that as well. You can't fine a doctor every time a patient dies. It's not always the doctor's fault. People die. We don't understand human body enough to prevent that.
Software engineers (usually) do the best we can. Software systems are some of the most complex systems humans have created. We go into software development knowing we will never fully understand how the software works. But we can still create something that is useful, even with that limitation. It will not be completely bulletproof, but it will improve the quality of human life. Either we accept that limitation, or stop using software at all.
If you disagree, please do show me a practical way how to write completely secure code.
"It's become abundantly clear that passwords are an untenable way to secure our data online."
Can you please provide some evidence for this "abundantly clear" claim?
"a task that requires the power and thrust contained in a huge rocket"
You actually don't need a big rocket to escape Moon's gravity. You know, as proved by the Apollo program. If we are talking about the situation after we colonize Moon, at that point we will obviously have the technology needed to send a rock back to Earth from Moon. It will be needed for the colonization. So she is not scientifically wrong, although worrying about people throwing rocks from Moon to Earth has got to be in the top 10 least important problems humanity needs to solve.