Apparently the military had a highly streamlined process for getting waivers to not use ADA. I don't remember the exact statistic but in short order it was close to zero ADA products.

I have used misra autosar and SIL (a train one) for programming mission critical stuff including embedded. I have seen other code being created that was mission critical going out the door that was so bad employees were quitting in order to not have blood on their hands in the case of a mass casualty event.

My general assessment of most code leaving "hard core engineering" shops is that it is crap held together with bandaids and glue. I have exactly zero experience in the world of automotive programming but I have read a few reports that came out along with lawsuits (Toyota accelerator stuff). The assessment of the code was that it was total crap.

I would be curious to know if companies like VW and Ford have a system where they can both produce high quality code while maintaining flexibility. This last is critical as I have seen companies that make super safety critical systems that are so inflexible as to literally become unsafe as they refuse to adapt to reality. A great example was a SIL system involved in an LRT level crossing. The whole setup was both a time wasting disaster and a safety disaster as causing cars to scoot across the tracks after the obviously terrible signalling system had just screwed them for the 5 time in a row. The company that built it totally refused to alter it as it would cause the whole SIL process to restart which was slow and expensive. Their estimate to change a single parameter that would change the wait time was between 500k to 1 million in SIL process related costs alone.

I have read that NASA faced the same challenge. Development got so bogged down that changing anything was brutal. Being flexible was so hard as to literally drive costs of change to exceed the cost of the risks of those changes going wrong. They of course could point to the problem with a multi year mission to mars going wrong because someone went cowboy but the reality was that it was overall making doing any science too hard. They streamlined the process and from what I can tell over the air updates became a thing with this streamlining.

So, I would love to know if these guys are producing the crap that I have seen more often than not in "mission critical safety critical" systems or are they doing things right.

BTW when I say doing things wrong. A simple example of doing things wrong is shipping these systems without proper unit tests, or no unit tests at all; just manual testing. Yes, that bad.

Quite simply Signal offered me what I most wanted from iMessage which was messaging on my phone and desktop that were in sync. Most people I know are now on Signal and thus leaving iMessage would not be a problem. I still prefer iPhones as they don't rape my privacy like most Androids. People keep trying to convince me there are non-rapey alternative OSs but none that I have seen aren't a giant compromise.

There are certain polarizing people like trump and Ayn Rand who I love to use to see if someone is a broken cancer on society or maybe qualifies as human. If they Absolutely love either, or they start making excuses as to how their imperfections are outweighed by where they were right, then I flip the bozo bit.

Ignoring, for a second, the fact that this guy makes a living renting out office space; this guy is just a giant d-bag who is the poster boy for the worst of the worst in tech. The general rule should be, "Do the opposite of anything this guy says."

Kinda sad.

If you are a European "Amazon", you are going to pay taxes. How do you compete with a company that doesn't pay taxes? They can use those untaxed profits to acquire and bully their way to the top, including just buying out European possible competitors.

Europe should not only look at this as missing tax income, but effectively market dumping.

I have spent quite a bit of time in britain, a sizable percentage of the population there takes great pleasure in being really mean when the rulebook allows them to do so. They will gleefully enforce rules that ruin a person's life even when those rules make no sense or are disproportionate responses to the problems being solved.

This sort of insanity doesn't surprise me in the slightest. I suspect that some of the enforcers had a strong suspicion that the computer was wrong but continued to enforce the rules anyway "to maintain order and discipline" "If people start doubting the computer what other chaos will ensue?"

I have long argued that brexit is a great thing for Europe as it removes over 60 million petty minded individuals from holding back the European experiment.

Britain will try to reenter the EU after two things have happened. Spain's GDP has eclipsed the UKs and English is no longer the linqua-franca of the EU. I would suggest that the EU wait a full 20 years after britain is prepared to re-enter before letting them in as they will only start this request when they think they have any cards to play in a negotiation.

I can see these companies screaming that they will anonomyze the data. Don't even let them do this. This is one of those laws that needs to go way beyond into basically, "If you track any aspect of public behaviour or data, then you get punished far beyond any potential gains."

The last number of slashdot polls have had to ask the question "Do you even know what X is?"

This is clearly just clickbait trying to push some stupid tech that nobody cares about and will probably wither into nothing sooner than later.

They should have an option "I don't care at all what X so never mention it again."

This guy has been cancelled. It doesn't matter if you agree with the cancellation or not; he is a parahia. Universities of note haven't had him come by in a long time, etc. If you have an organization that depends on fundraising then you might as well bring in Kevin Spacy or dig up Jeffrey Epstein.

I read a story long ago about microsoft developing their C++ IDE (Pre visual studio). They kept shoving in features the top developers in the US wanted, but nobody would buy their garbage product. Borland continued to rule until a new guy took over the Microsoft effort and focused on features joe average developer wanted like wizards to make setting up a basic windows program. Microsoft then proceeded to dominate.

Don't listen to developers who go to conferences, they are not at all the average developer. Listen to the users who do this as their day jobs. I highly suspect that the only features they are really looking for are related to speed.

As you work through more and more advanced programmers you might find desires like threading friendly features long before static typing. To me static typing is found in other languages that really need it like C++. Not having it is a virtue for python. I would very much say that if you want static typing, use a different language.

The worst argument for static typing is that it is required for speed. This is total BS. Javascript is rocket fast without it. PHP is rocket fast without it. The people who want static typing are people who don't understand what makes python great and just want it to be something it is not.

If solaris was any good people would be using it on new projects all over the place. I don't see it in super computer clusters, or pretty much anywhere.

By any sane measure of actual usage I can say that Solaris is as dead as blackberry phones; A few oddballs out there are still using those as well and the same goes for Solaris; just oddballs who got over certified in a single tech and can't let go. I feel for the organizations that they have fooled into continuing the madness.

If I hire some kids to help me put up a fence, that is a gig. If I hire someone to drive professionally, and they need to go out and get professional driving insurance, that is a job. They should have all the rights of anyone working at any full-time/part-time job.

I

I had the same conversation with the other end of the Sun stick from McNealy. The local rep came in for a board replacement on a $20,000 sun system. He saw that we had a bunch of whitebox linux systems and said, "Oh, I see you are trying out linux and this explains why you haven't bought from us in a while. Don't worry, you'll be back, linux is a fad."

We told him to quickly find better employment. He thought we were being asses instead of helpful to an otherwise great guy.