You just blew it. That's the Internet? DNS? Your comment is only one step above folks that think Internet Explorer is the Internet.

No wonder you think "the cloud" is something new.

Unless, of course, all the bridges built by engineers have fallen way below specification.

You don't need a PhD to raise children, even though there are plenty of schools with developmental psychology PhD programs...

You don't have to be a chef to cook great food, not an ASE certified mechanic to change your own transmission. Been there, done that.

In my view, there couldn't be any worse qualification to teach children than a degree, of all things. If you think a wall of diplomas or a long list of publications qualifies you to teach, you're out of your mind and clearly do not understand what this and similar efforts are really about.

I think the title should be "Why You Shouldn't Use Spreadsheets for *Complicated* Work". Just because a job is important doesn't mean the calculation is complex and something that needs to be coded in, for example, matlab.

If my job is to make a pie chart, I can't see why using Excel is a bad idea. On the other hand, if I am examining the variance of several thousand data points and then plotting the residuals from a gaussian fit, then yes, I can see why using something else would be a lot better. It has nothing to do with importance. Only complexity.

So what happens to the decommissioned horses, should this beast be put into production?

This is a great post, mod parent up.

With regards to QT, I love it too. Great IDE, and excellent tools and libraries. First-class debugger and UI designer. But it makes you wish, doesn't it, that there was a successor to C++ that implemented some QT things a little better? Especially the signals and slots, I feel that could be a awesome thing to have without needing qmake to re-write my functions... Still love it though!

I have not found this to be the case.

MATLAB is just fine for simple algorithms that analyze data in a sort of "use once" case. It's great for throwing something together, such as plotting data from a sensor, simulating a design, making nice figures for a publication, that sort of thing.

But MATLAB is not, and should not be thought of, as a general-purpose programming language, like C. Because of some early decisions made by the matlab folks, there are many limitations. Obviously, matlab is not an ideal language for a device driver. And not ideal for any type of network service. So let's ignore those cases. For a GUI app, matlab makes what would be a few lines in QT a nightmare of get_this() and handles_that() calls. It's infuriating. It's also slow and uses a ton of memory. For analyzing any data set over 100 MB, forget it, you'll be using several gigs just to load the set in.

There is a place for matlab, and there are many places for not matlab.

While I'm at it, here are some other things that I despise about matlab:
1) matlab is loosely typed. Ever get this error: "Cannot determine if foo is a variable or a file"
2) function interface operators are the same as matrix operators. You would think that a language that supposedly caters to linear (matrix) math wouldn't have screwed this up. If I do foo(1), this could be a function call or asking for matrix element 1 of matrix foo.
3) no pointers. Enough said.
4) matrix elements start at n=1 rather than n=0. EVEN BASIC doesn't do that. For a mathematical language, this is heresy. They are denying the value of zero. Something as simple as a Maclaurin or Fibonacci series becomes a constant battle of "if n=0 then..." exceptions. Or you offset everything. It's just pure annoyance.
5) doesn't have a good debugger
6) parallel-loop programming takes longer to "spool" the job than it does to just run the darn thing on a single CPU. Oh, and their standard multiprocessor license only covers 8 cores. I have machines with over 40 cores that will never see a matlab parfor statement.... which, I'm obviously ok with...
7) Stupid capital variables in documentation,
8) 1990s-erra save dialog boxes on unix platforms that don't even allow for "favorites". Every time I save or open, I start in the current directory and have to navigate folder-by-folder to where I want to go. I feel like this is something from my CDE days.
9) unix print and pdf export is horribly broken. These functions NEVER format anything correctly. Every time I am presented with cropped cut-off plots. The EPS export works fine, why not PDF and printing?
10) default pathdef depends on what directory you launch matlab from. Just another annoyance.

Anyway, rest in peace matlab, I have moved on.

This "natural typing position" thing has always bothered me.

I tend to shift over to HJKL while editing code, and then shift back to JKL; when writing an email... I think I'd be faster if I could stick with just one.

thoughts?

There is another aspect to this that many here are forgetting.

pico/nano have more stringent terminal support required for their fancy controls. Specifically, arrow keys. If you have ever had to jump down to the world of serial terminals, you know that such keys are not always mapped out properly the first time. I have been in this situation (recovering an SGI box on a serial line using an IBM dumb terminal), and it is indeed what prompted me to learn vi in the first place. All I need is an escape key. Navigation is handled with the standard alpha keys. So for an embedded device where there is likely not a traditional screen, and perhaps not always network support, having a good simple editor that doesn't require arrow keys has an advantage.

Yes, I know termcap files can be fixed to correct these things, but that's not always the quickest option.

I appreciate vim for the same reasons. It's easy to delete entire lines, and I can assign quick keys to short-cut common text (ie, typing class names over and over again).

However, don't forget that many other more-GUI-like editors support drag and drop text and simple clipboard action. You can work pretty fast if you take full advantage of those tools. One of my favorite editors (besides vim/gvim) is part of qt creator. In addition to processing my .vimrc and having a vim mode, it almost always auto-completes code as I am typing it. It has a nice class/member navigation tool, intelligent find and replace, and code refactoring. Yes, vim can do all this too, but this is about as good as it gets for a GUI tool, and it is often faster. Also works different muscles, so it's good for variety on your hands.

With the exception of some "write-once, read-only" backup schemes, this will fail at the $300/disk level.

Meanwhile, go google "1TB USB Flash" and see the $1200 USB flash drives. These will cost a lot less ($100 each in two years I bet) in a few years, just in time for the first of these already-failed optical disks. Plus you don't need anything special to use a USB flash drive...

I call BS. All they are doing is generating noise from a laser. Anyone can do this with a laser and a detector diode. Splitting the beam and subtracting is nothing novel. I did this back in junor high in science class. (Back then a laser was a much bigger deal, but still.)

His discussion of the ADC is nice, but again, that's standard stuff. Same goes for his TLS talking points.

These guys are pumping out buzz words faster than their FPGA.

I think you have to go with both. As others have pointed out, humans can be awfully wrong too.

Having said this, there is no way, at all, that, if we had understood the gravity of the situation we would have done nothing. That's not the American or NASA spirit. Take John Glenn's first flight, where there was an indication that the heat shield and landing bag had been released in-orbit. Can you imagine being in that small capsule knowing that you might be about to burn up on re-entry? The incredible engineers, technicians, and flight directors considered every option and decided not to ignore the instrumentation reading (which was later proven to be false). They came up with a plan, and although it was untested and of course not analyzed by a computer, they put it into action, and sure enough, John Glenn made it back safely.

You're absolutely right that this level of complexity (and creativity) cannot be programmed into a computer model. It comes from ingenuity. Creativity. Outside-the-box thinking. We'll never know if the crew of Columbia could have repaired the damage, mitigated the risk, or been rescued because NOBODY TRIED. And they did deserve that fighting chance.

I'm not saying they would have made it, but they did deserve a chance.

A good list of usernames is sometimes all you need.

I purchased a server from Goodwill once, and it just so happened that it had an intact hard disk. The server was running some version of Solaris, and was part of a database for a large fortune 500 company that you have probably heard of. As an interesting "exercise", I decided to put it on my network and hack into it.

The box had a very bad telnet daemon, and using the simplest of exploits imaginable, I was able to return the contents of arbitrary files and run commands on the box. This is pretty good, but of course, you gotta always try for more. I returned /etc/passwd and tried all the accounts with the standard top-500 lists you can find online. I got into the system admin's account. He had dumped the contents of his personal windows computer as well as his palm pilot (google that on your iPhone, kids, and then get off my lawn). These included him and his wife's passports (scanned for some reason), blueprints for their house, and of course, his resume where he lists all sorts of bogus security certifications.

Word of advice to admins: protect the entire computer. Don't accept that certain files are not that big of a deal, they ALL matter. Every file should be considered a potential threat and permissions and updates applied accordingly. Never enable remote root anything. Always use alternative accounts. Audit user passwords for weaknesses. Deactivate old accounts ASAP. Be aware of repeated invalid login attempts. This isn't even scratching the surface...

Let them eat Obamacare

http://www.investors.com/image/RAMclr-101713_CLR.jpg.cms

(Michael Ramirez is the most awesome cartoonist ever)

His other stuff:
http://www.investors.com/editorial-cartoons/michael-ramirez/

I agree with you though, I think what the president called the attack isn't a scandal at all. It was funny how it was argued about, but it wasn't important or meaningful.

What is meaningful is what he has done about it and what he did on that night. Same goes for his advisors and commanders.