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Comment Re:This assumes... (Score 1) 930

by jspayne (#32903188) Attached to: Toyota Sudden Acceleration Is Driver Error

Right, the mechanical brake linkage regularly failed at the same time as the brake sensor failed to no pedal and the accelerator sensor failed to full pedal.

You don't do much safety analysis, do you?

Let's see, assume a bad pointer goes in an corrupts the lookup table which identifies what input corresponds to which function. Now your pedals have reversed function. All the logging in the world isn't going to change the fact that the box is now looking at the wrong pin for its input.

Yes, there are certainly things that can be done to mitigate this risk, and some of them may have been implemented. However, the unfortunate truth is that there is no recognized/legislated functional safety standard for the development of automobile software in the US. Some international companies are trying to apply IEC61508 (developed for industrial automation), but compliance is strictly voluntary.

They may be right, but they don't provide sufficient data in TFA to say either way, in fact Toyota has come right out and said that their logger is a debugging tool, and to me that says it is not safety relevant software, and therefore not subject to additional quality controls.
Math

Submission + - Surfer stuns physicists with theory of everything (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by j823777
j823777 writes: GARRETT LISI is an unlikely individual to be staking a claim for a theory of everything. He has no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii. In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, California, to teach snowboarding. Until recently, physics was not much more than a hobby.

That hasn't stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print archive this week (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770). By analysing the most elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered a relationship underlying all the universe's particles and forces, including gravity — or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
Security

Submission + - One-third of employees violate company IT policies (net-security.org)

Submitted by BaCa
BaCa writes: A national survey of U.S. white-collar workers commissioned by the nonprofit, independent organization ISACA has found that more than one-third (35%) of employees have violated their company's IT policies at least once and that nearly one-sixth (15%) of employees have used peer-to-peer file sharing at least once at their place of business, opening the door to security breaches and placing sensitive business and personal information at risk.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Is Video RAM a good swap device?

Submitted by sean4u
sean4u writes: I use a 'lucky' (inexplicably still working) headless desktop PC to serve pages for a low-volume e-commerce site. I came across a gentoo-wiki.com page and this linuxnews.pl page that suggested the interesting possibility of using the Video RAM of the built-in video adapter as a swap device or RAM disk. The instructions worked a treat, but I'm curious as to how good a substitute this can be for swap space on disk. In my (amateurish) test, hdparm -t tells me the Video RAM block device is 3 times slower than the aging disk I currently use.
What performance do other slashdotters get? Is the poor performance report from hdparm a feature of the hardware, or the Memory Technology Device driver? What do slashdotters use to measure swap performance?
Announcements

Submission + - CmdrTaco Interviewed on Wired

Submitted by lbmouse
lbmouse writes: He whose moniker is a bad business lunch restaurant name has an interview on wired concerning Slashdot's Decennial anniversary.
Security

Submission + - New scam or just a really bad work policy? 4

Submitted by greymond
greymond writes: I recently received an email from a recruiting company for a Graphic Design / Desktop Publishing position. While I have my resume available online as well as pieces of my portfolio I didn't find it at all strange to receive this initial email. I hadn't responded by the afternoon when I received a call from a lady named Pyra who asked me to send her my latest resume because they were very interested in hiring me. I asked about the positions pay since the job title and position seemed like it would be a lot lower pay grade than my current Art Director position I now hold. She said she would inquire about it, but to please send my resume.

Now here is where it gets strange...I sent my resume off (note: my resume has only my name, number and email listed in it — no address) I then received this email asking for my Social Security Number. I found this to be VERY odd as no one ever has asked me for that, save the human resource manager of a company who has already hired me. When I told her I would wait until the interview to give it to them, I was then sent this email which had this letter attached to it. I responded with the same response and needless to say I haven't heard back from them.

Oh and in case my bandwidth gets blown up, the recruiting company was Agneto and the company they were hiring for was supposedly AT&T. So, is this really just a new elaborate scam or just a really bad new business policy?
Biotech

Submission + - Human trial of experimental cancer drug approved (thestar.com)

Submitted by Colonel Angus
Colonel Angus writes: Health Canada approved the first human trial of cancer drug, DCA (dichloroacetate), in people with an advanced form of brain cancer called glioblastoma. Research into DCA as a cancer treatment is solely funded through grants and donations. According to one of the researchers, it is cheap and not patentable and, as such, pharmaceutical companies are not interested in helping to develop it as a cancer therapy.
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Is Apple going rotten? (ilounge.com)

Submitted by
Technical Writing Geek
Technical Writing Geek writes: "Karma. Doing the "right thing." Thinking different. Apple's enlightened approach to building customer loyalty is now famous, generating big headlines every time CEO Steve Jobs takes on Hollywood or the music industry. Attempts to raise iTunes prices? "Greedy." A fight with NBC over revenues? "Give peace a chance." That's Apple, your socially-conscious corporate friend, who does right by you while standing up to big bullies — sort of like a character from a Pixar movie.

But over the past two weeks, Apple's fans have been grumbling that the company they knew and loved is transforming into another Microsoft, making short-sighted, anti-consumer decisions and carelessly releasing products with user experience-diminishing problems. In response, an increasingly angry erosion of Apple's brand loyalty is beginning, with complaints mounting all over the Internet, including on the company's own discussion forums. This time, it's not just a cadre of Microsoft fans trying to anonymously stir up trouble for the Cupertino-based company, but rather legitimately upset Apple customers who are threatening boycotts of current and future iPod, iTunes, and Mac offerings.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/customers-ask-is-apple-going-rotten/"
Businesses

Submission + - $1 US == $1 CAD (canoe.ca)

Submitted by
boxlight
boxlight writes: "US dollar and Canadian dollar are now equal; on par for the first time since 1976.

This is actually bad for the profits of Canadian corporations that sell their products to the US for US dollars (Canada sells far more to the US that the US sells to Canada); but it's pretty cool from a perception level.

It also means us Canucks will get cheaper Macs as the Canadian prices get closer to US prices with every new release. ;)"
Books

Fantasy Author Robert Jordan Passes Away 571

Posted by Zonk from the doff-our-helms dept.
willith writes "James Oliver Rigney Jr, author of the long-running fantasy series The Wheel of Time and better known to millions of fans by the pen name Robert Jordan, died on 16 Sept 2007 from cardiac amyloidosis. Jordan announced he had been diagnosed with the disease in March 2006 and vowed to beat the odds, but determination and gumption sometimes just aren't enough in the face of a disease with a median survival time of just over two years. Jordan was in the process of writing the twelfth and final book in the Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light, but the book was not slated for release until 2009 and is still incomplete. While there is hope that the book will still be finished from Jordan's notes, this is devastating news to all of us who have been reading the series since 1990."
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Madeleine L'Engle, 1918 - 2007

Submitted by mosel-saar-ruwer
mosel-saar-ruwer writes: Madeleine L'Engle Camp Franklin passed away, on Sept. 6, aged 88, at Rose Haven nursing home, in Litchfield, Connecticut. Even before we discovered Tolkien, CS Lewis, or Robert Heinlein, many /.-ers' first exposure to Science Fiction & Fantasy was surely L'Engle's 1962 novel, A Wrinkle in Time. The Washington Post has an obituary, the New York Post's John Podhoretz relates his childhood memories of life at 924 West End Avenue with Mr. & Mrs. Franklin, and the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby recalls the horror of IT. Finally, the Wall Street Journal's Meghan Cox Gurdon describes a cynic's encounter with Wrinkle.
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Submission + - Is our Universe Somebody Else's Hobby? (hughpickens.com)

Submitted by
Pcol
Pcol writes: "The New York Times is running a story on Philosopher Nick Bostrum, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, who has a web site on "The Simulation Argument" that contends that there is a pretty good chance that we are living in someone else's computer simulation.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or "posthumans," could run "ancestor simulations" of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors. There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they'd experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, says that if you desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation."

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