Comment More of the same (Score 4, Interesting) 117
And Mars continues to give Russia a big, fat middle finger. No Russian/Soviet probe has successfully completed a mission to the Red Planet...
Comment Re:C/C++ a disaster? No! (uh, YES!) (Score 1) 79
You know, Skapare, even Kernighan and Ritchie admit that C has serious security problems. I've talked to them both about it. As for C++, it is a complete dog of a language that would be best stricken from the planet.
You may snicker, but I am a scheme programmer at heart.
gem
Comment Re:evolution of the security industry? (Score 1) 79
WSC is a good book. So is the SDL book by Lipner and Howard.
Probably the best book on security for builders to read is "Security Engineering" by Ross Anderson,
I happen to think that "Software Security" is good too. Then again, I wrote it.
gem
Comment Re:Let's not ask someone who has lots of credentia (Score 1) 79
Here, try this one on for size:
Software Security
gem
Comment EE (Score 4, Insightful) 296
If you want to learn controls, it seems Electrical Engineering would be a better fit than Computer Science. While Mechanical Engineers have to learn a fair degree of controls theory, the EE guys live and breathe controls, so it would make you more proficient in that area, at least on paper.
Comment Re:This is a real problem (Score 1) 253
Have you considered using Fortran? Matlab is much closer to Fortran than C (arrays start at 1 instead of 0, to pick a rather annoying bug), has plenty of libraries available (just like C) and the newer versions of the language standard are not the spaghetti-laden soup they used to be.
Comment Re:Late-Breaking News from the Council: Onwards! (Score 2) 86
Heh, I was wondering what K'Breel was going to say about this. You seriously should put all of these in an eBook or something similar... if nothing else to ensure that all the gelsacs that have been sacrificed during the Blue Planet's invasion are memorialized properly.
PayPal Accuses Google of Poaching Mobile Payment Trade Secrets, Personnel 103
jhernik writes with a selection from eWeek Europe's short story on a snag facing Google's new mobile payment system: "PayPal, eBay's payment service, has sued Google over its new Google Wallet service, accusing the search engine of poaching trade secrets for use in its mobile payment service. The suit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court just hours after Google unveiled its Wallet payments sheme, alleges that two key executives who created the near-field communication (NFC) service used company secrets about mobile payments to fashion its own service."
Last Available IPv4 Blocks Allocated 312
stoborrobots writes "Following on from APNIC's earlier assessment that they would need to request the last available /8 blocks, they have now been allocated 39/8 and 106/8, triggering ARIN's final distribution of blocks to the RIRs. According to the release, 'APNIC expects normal allocations to continue for a further three to six months.'"
Comment Re:So (Score 1) 709
Awesome post. Let me add one thing, though: If you like BASIC, you will love FORTRAN. It is procedural, so it is similar in concepts to BASIC; and it is extensible, so you can start with a Hello World program in Fortran with a PRINT *, "Hello World", similar to BASIC's PRINT "Hello World".
You can then gradually introduce concepts, such as loops and conditionals in the same way with BASIC; then, you can take on more complex ideas, such as variable typing and allocation (IMPLICIT NONE ftw!), pointers, modules/classes, and you can go all the way to object oriented fluff with the latest standards.
Moreover, FORTRAN is still being used in industry, and not just as a legacy language. There is extensive development of parallel code in Fortran, and the language still reigns king in High-Performance Computing. Thus, the language can grow and be anything from a crayon to a calligraphy quill as desired.
Comment This just in (Score 4, Informative) 97
Trolling people encourages replies in online fora.
News at 11
News at 11
Comment Re:Solid rockets (Score 0) 121
The big drawback is that once they're lit you have no control, you can't turn them off, or even throttle them down.
Something I've always wondered, if one of the shuttle's SRBs fails to lit and the other one starts up, what happens?
At that point, you're fucked...
Comment Re:Neat, but... (Score 1) 380
Do you really want Bush to be Reptile from Mortal Kombat?
Comment Re:GPU = supercomputer? (Score 1) 135
The major problem with adoption is probably that most of the people running jobs on SC's are scientists not computer scientists. They use large piles of ancient, well tested libraries and only tweak small parts of the code that are specific to their problem. This means that most of those libraries will need to be ported to OpenCL and CUDA before adoption really picks up.
And we have a winner!
Most people do not want to write their eigensolvers, Poisson system solvers, matrix multiplication routines, and the like. They just want to use code that already does that, and that has been tested to do its job well. Code verification is important. So, the libraries that do so need to be ported before anyone in HPC switches to GPU architectures seriously. (Remember: this is the land where FORTRAN is still king...)
Comment Re:Remember National Opt Out Day (Score 1) 712
Next Wednesday: http://www.optoutday.com/
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/779/
