People are obsolete technology for space exploration. Have been for decades.
If the money wasted on manned exploration such as the ISS has actually been spent of useful things we would have the Webb telescope up and running some time ago, probes on Europa etc.
Get over it, Buck Rogers is just for TV. The real world aint like that. And the ISS is an extremely expensive way of producing a bit of TV.
Remember that turkey that flew through a flock of geese and landed in the Hudson river? Us weekend warriors know that they just let their instruments fly the plane.
Given that is the case the display screens might as well show pretty scenery. Show a nice view over the mountains on a clear day rather than the ugly storm that is actually outside the aircraft. Or maybe just waves rolling in on a beach. Something soothing to pass the time. Airbus is not going to let the pilots actually control the plane anyway given that that often leads to disasters.
The major source of security issues is the bloated, complex software that we use. So as a first step how about a new standard "Secure HTML". It would look a lot like HTML 4.0 but with many things removed. Of course no JavaScript, IFrames or CSS. Very simple formatting. Content on a page would need to come form the same domain (no request forging). Links of page would always show the off page address, in plain ASCII. Etc.
Just enough to provide functional web pages without glitz. The goal being to make the entire browser code no bigger than the original Mosaic code. So that it can be thoroughly reviewed and made really bug free.
Normal users would not touch it. But for anyone with access to a SCADA system, for example, it could be mandatory. That cuts down one major source of infection.
Here in Australia (and I think the UK) a taxi driver license is cheap. But you also need a taxi CAR license costs several hundred thousand dollars. Nobody wealthy enough to own a taxi license actually drives a taxi. So taxi drivers are dirt poor, usually Indians on dubious visas. But the taxi owners love their right to tax fairs. Currently about 55% of a fair goes to the owner.
Well, the Australian system is pretty fraud proof. Ballots are put into sealed boxes. Scrutineers appointed by the candidates supervise the count. I've been a scrutineer, and it is all pretty efficient and friendly in practice. Count is made on election night. And it is much, much cheaper than the computer systems.
The bigger problem is all that the MBAs in charge do is twiddle with the tinsel, and do not address the deeper problems in semantics that people have asked for. Such as being able to break up mangled conversations. Or add notes to an important conversation to summarize it. Or to add a meaningful heading. There are several others.
GMail used to be innovative. Hard core slash dotters will know that all sent mail belongs in one place only, namely a folder called Sent Mail. GMail introduced conversations to emails, producing threads (just like Usenet...). They also introduced the idea that the same email could be put in more than one folder (label) at the same time. So it could go in Sent Mail, CustomerX, ScalingIssues, and Outsanding all at the same time. Way beyond traditional IMAP.
These things were not done as the result of some market research survey. They were done because the engineers involved thought it would be cool. It would be the way that they personally would like to use email.
But that was before the MBA and user interface experts took over. Just change the window dressing, dumb things down, target the idiot user.
I am actually looking to move to Zoho mail.
As to slash dot, how about just recognizing blank lines as paragraph breaks. That would be enough.
I suppose I can live without a key, although I always use a mechanical one.
But I hear that the next model will not have a steering wheel. You just tell it where to go and it goes there in the best way possible. No controls at all.
The model after that knows where it is best for you to go, no need to tell it anything.
+1 I think all common email clients do this and it is awful.
Microsoft still hides folder path names which makes many dialogs hard to follow.
Hiding is evil. It comes from those UI Experts that watch how users interact with machines behind silver mirrors. It dumbs down rather than enlighens. And many of those UI experts do not actually know what a URL is anyway.
Contrary to what all journalists think, the first major internet search indexer was not Google but AltaVista, circa 1995. It was written by just three people at DEC. The goal was not to sell advertising, nor even to make money. The goal was to show off their new Alpha servers that were so powerful that they could index the entire web (which was tiny at the time).
In the early days the web was small, there were no spamers, and things like Meta tags could be depended on. PageRank only became useful when the web grew. It is sensible, but is exactly what academics have used to rank papers for centuries -- citation citations citations... It is also an old idea from the hypertext community.
So the question is, how did Google succeed as a start up several years later? I would have written off their business plan as hopless. Internet search is an obvious thing to do, it has already been done, and if anyone will compete with AltaVista it will be the big boys throwing money at it. Yahoo, Microsoft etc.
But I would obviously have been wrong. Partly the reason is that Google back then was not run by MBAs. They did not try to extract as much advertising out of the search engine as possible. Nor full of flashing banner ads. Main search results relatively untainted by advertising. But it is still weird.
Weirder is the success of Android. There were giants like Nokia with decades of experience and bucket loads of cash. How could Apple and then a nothing company like Android blow them away?!!!
The vast majority of heavy aircraft losses are due to pilots. They are by far the weakest link in the chain. Whether they do something extremely stupid such as hold back the stick in a stall (Air France) or malicious (Malasian Air) the result is the same. Perfectly good aircraft destroyed.
So engineering them out of the cockpit is the next step. Computers have been able to fly entire flights for decades. Expert systems already out perform people at diagnostics. The pilot is just a redundant point of failure.
If you know any pilots put this to them and watch the response;)
The amazing thing is that the IRS today is no more efficient then it was in the 1950s before any computerization.
Certainly in 2007 the Australian tax office's internal budget was AU$11.4 billion, or 1.23% of GDP. In 1955 it performed essentially the same task without automation for A£66.7 million which was 1.33% of the 1955 GDP. The difference is not statistically significant. (Normalizing by GDP (essentially the sum of everyone's earnings) accounts for the growing population and inflation.) US figures will show a similar effect.
The only effect of computerization has been to enable the rules and regulations that govern us to become an order of magnitude more complex.
+1. Non-competes are good for big established companies (like EMC) but bad for the state's economy. Innovation comes from people leaving heavy bureaucratic companies and exploiting opportunities. And of course they continue to work in the same field.
There is no way that any US government will do something that big established companies would not like. So what happens is that more and more successful start ups happen in places like California, and the industry moves.
Those types of heavy non-compete clauses are, of course, generally unenforceable outside the USA. Certainly unenforceable in Australia.
The 777 is totally fly by wire. Control the computers and you control the plane. Like most other SCADA systems the security is rough. They probably do not actually connect the plane to the internet, but it does download flight info, software patches etc. over a radio link to the airline's computer, which is connected to computers that connect to the internet. Remember that Iran had an air gap that did not protect them from Stuxnet. And these days it probably downloads software patches directly from Boeing.
There are two parts to such an attack. First is to get control of the plane, second is to do something with it. The first would have been developed to do something very benign, or nothing at all. They could then just see if it worked on real planes knowing that it could do no harm. Might even use some Boeing installed back doors.
The second would be some semi-intelligent software that had rules to take over at international borders, fly along standard corridors until out of radar range then dump the plane in one of a number of pre determined locations. This would never be run out of a simulation environment.
Then some manager accidentally picked up the wrong files.
The only other plausible explanation was pilot suicide, and yet both pilots appear to be perfectly normal, balanced, individuals. So it must be the NSA. Stands to reason.
That would be impossible. It is not possible to write garbage collected code in C. That's why C++ libraries resort to reference counting etc. That bit about the C++ compiler back end is misleading, it just means some sort of shared compiler.
C is not really a high level assembler. It just enshrines an archaic programming model that was popular in 1978.
Any C programmer that does not really care about how builds work are not going to be developing substantial applications very long!
There are a log of subtlies about what happens when shared dependent modules are updated, and you had better be aware of how the compiler optimizes them.
Yes, it can be made to work, but it cannot just be a black box.
Um, what makes you think that Java/.Net do not use the stack? Indeed since Java 1.6 doing a "new" will actually allocate on the stack if possible. Remember
that Java does not allow crazy pointer arithmetic, so it can tell how objects are referenced, and does a lot of inlining.
One other trick that Java can do that C cannot (without a lot of effort) is store 36 bit long long aligned pointers in 32 bit fields. That makes them very memory efficient for heap sizes up to 64 gig, which is still very large by today's standards.
One thing that.Net can do that C cannot is detect integer overflow with negligible run time overhead. On occasion that has saved me a lot of pain. Its the sort of thing that keeps C programmers up late at night debugging.
The cowboy nature of C enabling things like ptr++ actually makes it difficult for compilers to optimize fully.
C is still widely used in the sense that oxen are still widely used to plough fields. They work, but take a lot more effort.
I don't see how C++ can do global opts. The idea that programs are compiled one file at a time is burnt into C's soul. Within the same source code file certainly, but between files, and between library archives seems impossible without fundamentally changing the way builds work.
Just because.Net/Java etc make garbage collection easy does not necessarily mean that you need to do a lot of it. You can use the same techniques as C to optimize, although reusing objects is generally frowned upon as error prone. Long ago I used a real time system in Lisp that did zero CONS (mallocs) after initialization, worked fine.
That said,.Net/Java programmers tend to be sloppy about producing lots of garbage. Java has an idiot design that makes Strings (the most common object typically allocated) two objects instead of one.
P.S. with this arcaic/. editor is it really necessary to put/P P between each paragraph?!
You miss the point entirely. The vast majority of CPU time in most applications is spent in a relatively few leaf subroutines. What the JIT does is just compile those bits that are found to be CPU intensive.
In tests I had done some time ago with the early compilers,.Net code was actually faster than C implementing the same algorithm. The reason is that it can perform global optimizations, in-lining aggressively. Sure that can be done with C (and you do not even need macros), but it takes extra work, slows down the compiler if too much is put into header files, and programmers usually miss some of the routines that need in-lining.
Modern generational garbage collectors are also faster than malloc/free, and do not suffer fragmentation.
Delaying compilation makes it architecture neutral, same distro for 32, 64bit, ARM etc. What is needed is to cache the results of previous compiles which causes a slight but usually negligible start up penalty.
Compiling all the way to machine code at build time is an archaic C-grade idea that became obsolete thirty years ago for most common applications.
Germany delayed its invasion due to a late thaw in the spring. It was not actually to attack Greece, although that was a silly thing to do.
Splitting forces in Stalingrad avoided road congestion, and Stalin really needed the petroleum further south. The bombing actually helped the defenders somewhat. But the big issue was political, being so nasty that they did not have more ex-soviet troops on their side. (They did have quite a few.)
To win, they just needed to not attack France, which was a crazy gamble that they got away with. Instead, build their military for another year using the phony war as an excuse, and then attack the Soviets. Unlikely that France would have attacked any more than they did for Poland.
As part of that attack, do not be so nasty, an encourage nationalist soviet armies. Stalin was so evil, and the purges and deliberate starvation so severe that many if not most of the soviet armies would be more than happy to join an opposition, and indeed many did join the Germans. Millions were captured early on, most could have been turned around. It was a real achievement of the German SS to treat the soviets even worse than Stalin did and so lose this opportunity.
Why did they do it? Because the Ipod/phone/pad makes money, and some senior MBA pointed at one and said "I want dat, make it do that so we can make money too. Just like that one.". Design process over.
But Ipod/phone/pads do not have an accessible generic file system. Every type of object is treated differently, be it sound, documents etc. So I think we should feel grateful that Windows 8 still has a Windows Explorer!
Remember, these are the people that thought that an "App" must always run full screen, even on a large modern monitor! So I reckon the accessible file system will go sooner than later.
Slashdot Mirror
People are obsolete technology for space exploration. Have been for decades.
If the money wasted on manned exploration such as the ISS has actually been spent of useful things we would have the Webb telescope up and running some time ago, probes on Europa etc.
Get over it, Buck Rogers is just for TV. The real world aint like that. And the ISS is an extremely expensive way of producing a bit of TV.
I'm looking forward to Genuine People Personalities, particularly Marvin.
Remember that turkey that flew through a flock of geese and landed in the Hudson river? Us weekend warriors know that they just let their instruments fly the plane.
Given that is the case the display screens might as well show pretty scenery. Show a nice view over the mountains on a clear day rather than the ugly storm that is actually outside the aircraft. Or maybe just waves rolling in on a beach. Something soothing to pass the time. Airbus is not going to let the pilots actually control the plane anyway given that that often leads to disasters.
The major source of security issues is the bloated, complex software that we use. So as a first step how about a new standard "Secure HTML". It would look a lot like HTML 4.0 but with many things removed. Of course no JavaScript, IFrames or CSS. Very simple formatting. Content on a page would need to come form the same domain (no request forging). Links of page would always show the off page address, in plain ASCII. Etc.
Just enough to provide functional web pages without glitz. The goal being to make the entire browser code no bigger than the original Mosaic code. So that it can be thoroughly reviewed and made really bug free.
Normal users would not touch it. But for anyone with access to a SCADA system, for example, it could be mandatory. That cuts down one major source of infection.
Here in Australia (and I think the UK) a taxi driver license is cheap. But you also need a taxi CAR license costs several hundred thousand dollars. Nobody wealthy enough to own a taxi license actually drives a taxi. So taxi drivers are dirt poor, usually Indians on dubious visas. But the taxi owners love their right to tax fairs. Currently about 55% of a fair goes to the owner.
Uber is great if it breaks up that nonsense.
Surely Google already knows where it is best for you to go. It knows everything else about you...
Well, the Australian system is pretty fraud proof. Ballots are put into sealed boxes. Scrutineers appointed by the candidates supervise the count. I've been a scrutineer, and it is all pretty efficient and friendly in practice. Count is made on election night. And it is much, much cheaper than the computer systems.
The bigger problem is all that the MBAs in charge do is twiddle with the tinsel, and do not address the deeper problems in semantics that people have asked for. Such as being able to break up mangled conversations. Or add notes to an important conversation to summarize it. Or to add a meaningful heading. There are several others.
GMail used to be innovative. Hard core slash dotters will know that all sent mail belongs in one place only, namely a folder called Sent Mail. GMail introduced conversations to emails, producing threads (just like Usenet...). They also introduced the idea that the same email could be put in more than one folder (label) at the same time. So it could go in Sent Mail, CustomerX, ScalingIssues, and Outsanding all at the same time. Way beyond traditional IMAP.
These things were not done as the result of some market research survey. They were done because the engineers involved thought it would be cool. It would be the way that they personally would like to use email.
But that was before the MBA and user interface experts took over. Just change the window dressing, dumb things down, target the idiot user.
I am actually looking to move to Zoho mail.
As to slash dot, how about just recognizing blank lines as paragraph breaks. That would be enough.
I would suggest that being ingested by an engine would be pretty catastrophic for the drone.
I suppose I can live without a key, although I always use a mechanical one.
But I hear that the next model will not have a steering wheel. You just tell it where to go and it goes there in the best way possible. No controls at all.
The model after that knows where it is best for you to go, no need to tell it anything.
+1 I think all common email clients do this and it is awful.
Microsoft still hides folder path names which makes many dialogs hard to follow.
Hiding is evil. It comes from those UI Experts that watch how users interact with machines behind silver mirrors. It dumbs down rather than enlighens. And many of those UI experts do not actually know what a URL is anyway.
Contrary to what all journalists think, the first major internet search indexer was not Google but AltaVista, circa 1995. It was written by just three people at DEC. The goal was not to sell advertising, nor even to make money. The goal was to show off their new Alpha servers that were so powerful that they could index the entire web (which was tiny at the time).
In the early days the web was small, there were no spamers, and things like Meta tags could be depended on. PageRank only became useful when the web grew. It is sensible, but is exactly what academics have used to rank papers for centuries -- citation citations citations... It is also an old idea from the hypertext community.
So the question is, how did Google succeed as a start up several years later? I would have written off their business plan as hopless. Internet search is an obvious thing to do, it has already been done, and if anyone will compete with AltaVista it will be the big boys throwing money at it. Yahoo, Microsoft etc.
But I would obviously have been wrong. Partly the reason is that Google back then was not run by MBAs. They did not try to extract as much advertising out of the search engine as possible. Nor full of flashing banner ads. Main search results relatively untainted by advertising. But it is still weird.
Weirder is the success of Android. There were giants like Nokia with decades of experience and bucket loads of cash. How could Apple and then a nothing company like Android blow them away?!!!
It was running malware written by the NSA that was accidentally released into the wild...
The vast majority of heavy aircraft losses are due to pilots. They are by far the weakest link in the chain. Whether they do something extremely stupid such as hold back the stick in a stall (Air France) or malicious (Malasian Air) the result is the same. Perfectly good aircraft destroyed.
So engineering them out of the cockpit is the next step. Computers have been able to fly entire flights for decades. Expert systems already out perform people at diagnostics. The pilot is just a redundant point of failure.
If you know any pilots put this to them and watch the response ;)
The amazing thing is that the IRS today is no more efficient then it was in the 1950s before any computerization.
Certainly in 2007 the Australian tax office's internal budget was AU$11.4 billion, or 1.23% of GDP. In 1955 it performed essentially the same task without automation for A£66.7 million which was 1.33% of the 1955 GDP. The difference is not statistically significant. (Normalizing by GDP (essentially the sum of everyone's earnings) accounts for the growing population and inflation.) US figures will show a similar effect.
The only effect of computerization has been to enable the rules and regulations that govern us to become an order of magnitude more complex.
See below for the sad details. http://berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html
+1. Non-competes are good for big established companies (like EMC) but bad for the state's economy. Innovation comes from people leaving heavy bureaucratic companies and exploiting opportunities. And of course they continue to work in the same field.
There is no way that any US government will do something that big established companies would not like. So what happens is that more and more successful start ups happen in places like California, and the industry moves.
Those types of heavy non-compete clauses are, of course, generally unenforceable outside the USA. Certainly unenforceable in Australia.
Come on, this is Slash dot.
The 777 is totally fly by wire. Control the computers and you control the plane. Like most other SCADA systems the security is rough. They probably do not actually connect the plane to the internet, but it does download flight info, software patches etc. over a radio link to the airline's computer, which is connected to computers that connect to the internet. Remember that Iran had an air gap that did not protect them from Stuxnet. And these days it probably downloads software patches directly from Boeing.
There are two parts to such an attack. First is to get control of the plane, second is to do something with it. The first would have been developed to do something very benign, or nothing at all. They could then just see if it worked on real planes knowing that it could do no harm. Might even use some Boeing installed back doors.
The second would be some semi-intelligent software that had rules to take over at international borders, fly along standard corridors until out of radar range then dump the plane in one of a number of pre determined locations. This would never be run out of a simulation environment.
Then some manager accidentally picked up the wrong files.
The only other plausible explanation was pilot suicide, and yet both pilots appear to be perfectly normal, balanced, individuals. So it must be the NSA. Stands to reason.
That would be impossible. It is not possible to write garbage collected code in C. That's why C++ libraries resort to reference counting etc. That bit about the C++ compiler back end is misleading, it just means some sort of shared compiler.
C is not really a high level assembler. It just enshrines an archaic programming model that was popular in 1978.
Any C programmer that does not really care about how builds work are not going to be developing substantial applications very long!
There are a log of subtlies about what happens when shared dependent modules are updated, and you had better be aware of how the compiler optimizes them.
Yes, it can be made to work, but it cannot just be a black box.
Um, what makes you think that Java/.Net do not use the stack? Indeed since Java 1.6 doing a "new" will actually allocate on the stack if possible. Remember that Java does not allow crazy pointer arithmetic, so it can tell how objects are referenced, and does a lot of inlining.
One other trick that Java can do that C cannot (without a lot of effort) is store 36 bit long long aligned pointers in 32 bit fields. That makes them very memory efficient for heap sizes up to 64 gig, which is still very large by today's standards.
One thing that .Net can do that C cannot is detect integer overflow with negligible run time overhead. On occasion that has saved me a lot of pain. Its the sort of thing that keeps C programmers up late at night debugging.
The cowboy nature of C enabling things like ptr++ actually makes it difficult for compilers to optimize fully.
C is still widely used in the sense that oxen are still widely used to plough fields. They work, but take a lot more effort.
I don't see how C++ can do global opts. The idea that programs are compiled one file at a time is burnt into C's soul. Within the same source code file certainly, but between files, and between library archives seems impossible without fundamentally changing the way builds work.
Just because .Net/Java etc make garbage collection easy does not necessarily mean that you need to do a lot of it. You can use the same techniques as C to optimize, although reusing objects is generally frowned upon as error prone. Long ago I used a real time system in Lisp that did zero CONS (mallocs) after initialization, worked fine.
That said, .Net/Java programmers tend to be sloppy about producing lots of garbage. Java has an idiot design that makes Strings (the most common object typically allocated) two objects instead of one.
P.S. with this arcaic /. editor is it really necessary to put /P P between each paragraph?!
In tests I had done some time ago with the early compilers, .Net code was actually faster than C implementing the same algorithm. The reason is that it can perform global optimizations, in-lining aggressively. Sure that can be done with C (and you do not even need macros), but it takes extra work, slows down the compiler if too much is put into header files, and programmers usually miss some of the routines that need in-lining.
Modern generational garbage collectors are also faster than malloc/free, and do not suffer fragmentation.
Delaying compilation makes it architecture neutral, same distro for 32, 64bit, ARM etc. What is needed is to cache the results of previous compiles which causes a slight but usually negligible start up penalty.
Compiling all the way to machine code at build time is an archaic C-grade idea that became obsolete thirty years ago for most common applications.
Germany delayed its invasion due to a late thaw in the spring. It was not actually to attack Greece, although that was a silly thing to do.
Splitting forces in Stalingrad avoided road congestion, and Stalin really needed the petroleum further south. The bombing actually helped the defenders somewhat. But the big issue was political, being so nasty that they did not have more ex-soviet troops on their side. (They did have quite a few.)
To win, they just needed to not attack France, which was a crazy gamble that they got away with. Instead, build their military for another year using the phony war as an excuse, and then attack the Soviets. Unlikely that France would have attacked any more than they did for Poland.
As part of that attack, do not be so nasty, an encourage nationalist soviet armies. Stalin was so evil, and the purges and deliberate starvation so severe that many if not most of the soviet armies would be more than happy to join an opposition, and indeed many did join the Germans. Millions were captured early on, most could have been turned around. It was a real achievement of the German SS to treat the soviets even worse than Stalin did and so lose this opportunity.
Why did they do it? Because the Ipod/phone/pad makes money, and some senior MBA pointed at one and said "I want dat, make it do that so we can make money too. Just like that one.". Design process over.
But Ipod/phone/pads do not have an accessible generic file system. Every type of object is treated differently, be it sound, documents etc. So I think we should feel grateful that Windows 8 still has a Windows Explorer!
Remember, these are the people that thought that an "App" must always run full screen, even on a large modern monitor! So I reckon the accessible file system will go sooner than later.