Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:The problem is hipsterism, not engineer culture (Score 1) 262

by Zeio (#47651973) Attached to: Silicon Valley Doesn't Have an Attitude Problem, OK?

Ive noticed this. Bad. It shows up with the flocks of NJ, NY license plates. But true computer science genius is a rare commodity now days. Part of the reason it doesnt pay. The secretary at Microsoft made a buttload of money. Nowdays, with scamming, outsourcing, part timing and contracting along with strategic dilution and Steve Jobs Pixar stunts, most regular nerds are not setup to make it big. Its a few elite non-engineers that get together and fleece the talent for every cent its worth. I am lucky to work at a startup where everyone in engineering is way above average, and there are some serious heavy hitters with no attitudes there.

But this in the last 8 years in SillyCON valley has become an exception. The wolves are here to fleece until this bubble pops. They also collude with oligarchical collectivists and governments to analyze every piece of information about you.

Comment Re:San Francisco mentality... (Score 0, Troll) 262

by Zeio (#47651937) Attached to: Silicon Valley Doesn't Have an Attitude Problem, OK?

Yep. Exactly what I've seen here. I've made a lot of money here but never enough to even carve out a simple middle class life. We are planning to move out of the area soon. For all the talk about being the masters of the universe here in SillyCON valley, the Native Americans had better and more accessible housing in the form of leather hide teepees than we get here in SillyCON valley. Its all open and flowers and wonders and apple logos and googlers - yeah, until you suggest they build more places for regular middle class folks to live. Not going to happen. Sad really as all these NJ, NY and other stock market grifters showed up and made SillyCON valley no longer about innovation but more about get rich quick schemes and oligarchical collectivism which colludes with the police states worldwide.

Comment A real-world aimbot (Score 4, Insightful) 219

by Animats (#47645009) Attached to: Point-and-Shoot: TrackingPoint's New Linux-Controlled AR-15s

It's an aimbot for real rifles. Now, any rifleman can be a sniper.

Yes, it's too big, too complicated, and too expensive. That's a temporary problem. Ever see the first laser sight, from the 1980s? It used a helium-neon laser tube and required a power cord. There's been some progress since then. This aimbot technology should be down to smartphone size, if not cost, soon enough.

Comment No, it doesn't "roll all languages into one" (Score 5, Informative) 306

by Animats (#47644121) Attached to: New NSA-Funded Code Rolls All Programming Languages Into One

No, it doesn't "roll all languages into one". It just allows embedding of the text of another language, such as HTML, into a Wyvern program. Variables can be substituted. Like this:

let webpage : HTML = <html><body><h1>Results for {keyword}</h1
<ul id="results">{to_list_items(query(db,
SELECT title, snippet FROM products WHERE {keyword} in title))}
</ul></body></html>

(except that the last 3 lines above should be indented, because this language uses Python-style block notation.)

Of course, everybody does that now, but the way they do it, especially in PHP, tends to lead to problems such as SQL injection attacks. The idea here is that Wyvern has modules for the inserted text which understand what kinds of quoting or escaping are required for the embedded language text.

I just glanced at the paper, but that seems to be the big new feature.

Comment It doesn't matter. Solar will win in sunny areas (Score 1) 306

Utilities can only delay solar a little. PV solar, without subsidies, is just now becoming cheaper than fuel-powered electricity in sunny locations. Bloomberg reports the first non-subsidized solar plant to be built in Spain.

In the next decade, we'll see the end of subsidies and continued growth in PV solar. Anywhere the biggest daytime power load is from air conditioning, solar will win out.

Comment Not actually sending much info, just the IMEI (Score 4, Insightful) 164

by Animats (#47640635) Attached to: F-Secure: Xiaomi Smartphones Do Secretly Steal Your Data

So far, all they've found it doing is reporting the IMEI by sending an HTTP GET http://api.account.xiaomi.com/pass/v3/user@id?type=MXPH&externalId=01, The data is transmitted as a cookie of the form deviceId=IMEI . (The API returns a brief reply in JSON.) That tells them the phone has connected to the phone network, and its IP address. That's not particularly interesting information. The carrier knows the IMEI number, too, of course. Perhaps this is to check up on whether carrier-reported sales data matches actual phones coming on the air.

Carriers, app vendors, Microsoft, Google, and Apple collect far more data than that. There are way too many things phoning home with the user's contact list and other personal info.

Comment Re:C is replaced (Score 1) 371

by Vellmont (#47633185) Attached to: Oracle Hasn't Killed Java -- But There's Still Time

C has been replaced with C++, C# and Java.

In some cases, yes. But that doesn't mean C is dead or dying. It's just not as dominant as it once was. Languages are like living things, they compete with other languages for space. There's still a TON of applications written in C. The linux kernel is a major example. C isn't as dominant as it once was, but that's a natural development of diversity. Greater diversity doesn't mean the death of what was once dominant, only that what was once dominant fills a smaller niche.

Comment Re:Oh noes! (Score 4, Insightful) 371

by Vellmont (#47630881) Attached to: Oracle Hasn't Killed Java -- But There's Still Time


Java is becoming the new COBOL.

I'd like to be the first to say... huh? I'm sure Java will become a legacy language some day, but hipsters don't really define much of anything. Hipsters are against anything that's popular (because popularity by definition isn't hip), and go for the obscure things. That's why PBR became popular. It's not good, but among the younger set microbrews are very popular, so a hipster has to go for something unpopular to distinguish themselves from what's popular.

20 years ago people used to say that about C. C is dying, C is going to be replaced, etc, etc. Didn't happen. By popularity C has a lot more competition, but it's alive and well and not going away. People hate COBOL because it was a badly designed language. If anything is the new COBOL, it's PHP. I've known several PHP programmers, and many of them have switched to another language not because of a lack of jobs, but because they hate the language. I'm not old enough to have been around for the COBOL era, but I'd guess it was the same then.

The death of a language starts when developers leave it in droves for something else. I don't see that happeneing for Java. Do you?

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 132

by Animats (#47625727) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best PDF Handling Library?

Probably because if there is no community following it there is not going to be much in the way of development going on.

Right. With mid-tier open source projects, there's a good chance they're either unfinished or abandonware. (Lower-tier open source projects are both.) There's only so much attention available.

Comment Re:what? (Score 2) 143

by Animats (#47620707) Attached to: Transatomic Power Receives Seed Funding From Founders Fund Science

a flying car* is not possible.

It's quite possible to build a flying car. It won't be cost-effective to build or operate, because it will need bizjet-sized jet engines for VTOL. Elon Musk once remarked that he'd like to build one "just for fun". I wish someone would, just to shut everybody up. Quadrotors work just fine, after all. Scaled Composites could probably have something flying in a year. Probably not much range, but flying.

Just because Moller has been failing at this for 40 years doesn't mean it's impossible. That's a problem with Moller.

Comment Right. This is the "deadly valley" (Score 4, Insightful) 406

by Animats (#47618997) Attached to: Idiot Leaves Driver's Seat In Self-Driving Infiniti, On the Highway

No, it's clear why we should be worried about almost-but-not-really autonomous vehicles, in the real deal this would be fine.

That's right. Automatic lane keeping plus radar-based cruise control is right in the middle of the "deadly valley" - good enough to allow hands-off driving 98% of the time, not good enough to handle trouble. This is why that Cruise startup building a budget self-driving system worries me. Thos guys are from "social" apps. They're thinking they can ship something that sort of works, and that's good enough. It isn't.

Auto manufacturers are held to a much higher standard than the computer industry is used to. GM is being sued because their ignition switches could turn off if people hung too much crap on their keychain. (Something unlikely to be caught in testing, because, at the test track, each key hangs on a separate key tag.) "Speeding, cellphone texting, intoxication... irrelevant. We are not looking at the driver, or the circumstances of the driver's negligence. We are looking at the automobile, and only the automobile." - terms of the GM settlement.

The minimum safe level of performance for a self-driving car is that the vehicle must be able to bring itself to a safe stop, preferably at the side of the road, in any emerging bad situation. Even after any single-point failure.

Few computer based consumer products meet that standard, but a some do. The Segway is a good example. There's enough redundancy in a Segway to keep single failures from face-planting the user. Five rate gyros instead of three, two batteries, two processors, and a safety shutdown mode that brings the vehicle to a stop and sounds alarms to tell you to get off before it fails.

Comment Re:Terrible coding standards (Score 1) 430

by Vellmont (#47616397) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What To Do About the Sorry State of FOSS Documentation?

Sure, you're probbably right that documenting skills and coding skills are mostly orthogonal to one another. But my point is more that the documenting at the very end is the wrong approach. Producing documentation should be integral into the process, not an afterthought. That doesn't mean it has to be done by the same person, only that it's not the last thing you do, and has to be overcome with people feeling like they're asking "dumb questions"

Comment Much less should be written in C (Score 1) 637

by Animats (#47616381) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: "Real" Computer Scientists vs. Modern Curriculum?

Low-level programming is a specialist issue. Maybe it's time to turn C programming over to people with real EE degrees, or who can at least use an oscilloscope and wire up an Arduino. At the application level, who has time to manage memory by hand any more? EEs and mechatronics people, and OS and compiler developers, need to learn C, but most application programmers today do not.

The emphasis on Java isn't unreasonable. The pure-interpreter languages (Python, Perl) are too slow for large server-side operations. (If it's 3x as slow, you may need 3x as many server racks. That costs.) Java is memory-safe and goes reasonably fast. Go may become an alternative, but it's a little too weird to go mainstream yet. C++ has turned out to be a mess. It adds hiding to C without adding memory safety, an unfortunate feature combination unique to C++.

Realistically, a CS degree today needs to cover machine learning, which is all about calculus and matrix math. There's less need for discrite math and bit-pushing.

I have classic CS training - all that stuff in vol. 1 of Knuth, automata theory, optimization of logic gates, formal methods, proof of correctness, etc. It's just not that useful any more. Mostly I write Python and Javascript.

Slashdot Top Deals

Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

Close