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Comment Re:It's really annoying (Score 1) 303

What languages is L4 written in?

The more relevant questions are "what is the size of the codebase of L4 written in an unmanaged language" and "is that unmanaged codebase small enough to mathematically prove its correctness" .

There is a reason why we layer systems on top of each other, and not just because we like cake.

Comment Re:Yet again C bites us in the ass (Score 1) 303

What does managed code do that good C doesn't???

Managed code does one very important thing: it guarantees that elusive quality you've just named 'goodness'. (With respect to memory access, at least).

Goodness or otherwise of arbitrary unmanaged C code is a Turing-complete quality that, we've painfully discovered, cannot be reliably detected by either a compiler, a testing regime, or the entire planet's worth of expert C programmers given unlimited access to the code and up to two years time. That's how many coder-years? A lot.

Goodness of managed code? It has that quality. Period. And we can go on with our lives solving instead of creating problems.

Comment Re:Gee, that's worse than no encryption isn't it? (Score 1) 303

If only they had written OpenSSL in Java instead of C!

Arguably all the recent security holes in Java are exactly because they wrote extensions and libraries in C/C++ and not in Java.

A real language - like, say, UCSD Pascal in 1978 can compile itself to its own virtual machine just fine...

But admittedly the resource requirements to host a system like that that are pretty steep - you'd need at least 128K of RAM. Still, I like to dream that one day....

Comment Re:Um no (Score 2) 224

I don't think they're very concerned with easily-divisible numbers—4*7-day months and 13-month years!

13 months is a little annoying, yes; you have to split the months on week boundaries to make quarters. But we actually do have 13 lunar cycles in a year, so this naturally aligns the months with the real moon. And we keep 7 day weeks, which is a win both because we're used to our week, and because 7 days is a natural quarter-moon. And no more "30 days hath December..."

Thing is, a workable Earth calendar never is going to be evenly divisible by powers of 10, because it has to stay aligned with astronomical cycles which are subtly varying; even the Sun and Moon don't strictly align. So everything's going to be a bit of a juggle. Frankly, I think this is the best alternate calendar design I've seen in a long while.

Comment Re:No, the problem is DVD should not be cheaper (Score 1) 490

The question you should be asking is why is streaming video so expensive that DVD (shipping little plastic discs around) is cheaper than sending bits over a wire?

Because it's the second stupidest deliberate misuse of computational capacity to artificially create digital scarcity since Bitcoins.

The correct way to distribute large files like movies online is to copy the bits as locally to the endpoints as possible, and cache them pervasively at all levels of the network. Nothing would need to be sent more than once down any given cable. It would be fast, cheap, make use of the Internet as it was designed to function, and give us near-unlimited bandwidth.

But that would mean that those bits don't become artificially scarce and can't be tracked and audited by the media companies for copy-protection purposes. So instead of copying, we stream them over and over and over again, generating terabytes of needless, duplicated data traffic, and creating huge bandwidth storms that suck all the capacity out of the Internet.

tldr: Video streaming is expensive because it was designed to be. It wasn't designed by or for you, and it doesn't benefit you.

Comment Re:Gnome = good (Score 4, Funny) 134

They took out the the duel pain feature?!?!?! WTF.

Yeah, I hate it too when I score a counter-riposte to my opponent's flying parry and there's just a beep on the referee's scoreboard and no blood.

Comment Re:surprised!!!! (Score 1) 704

You think "governmental actors" care about $615,000? That's adorable.

$615,000 in drug, terrorist and child porn money? Or assuming some innocent parties involved in Bitcoin, at the very least $615,000 of juicy leads and contact details for the people who are dealing the hard stuff? Yes, it's conceivable that they perhaps might. You know, since tracking and catching thsi stuff is pretty much the number one job of all the West's police, intelligence and militaries at the moment.

Lie down with Bitcoins, wake up with whatever it is that Bitcoin merchants are selling. And possibly the FBI knocking on your door to ask nicely if you have any drug dealers or terrorists in your address book.

Comment Re:surprised!!!! (Score 1) 704

The concept of currencies outside of government control tends to make governments nervous.

Yes, because the advocates of those currencies are loudly crowing that the entire point is to enable criminal acts. That it's a perfect money laundering service and that this is a great thing.

But if a government responded rationally to this widely advertised lawbreaking by shutting down the people who launder money and the mechanism they're using to do it, that would somehow be immoral, and anyway they wouldn't do it. Because, um. Government bad, government inefficient, Bitcoin rules, FBI drools?

I'm shocked, shocked that Bitcoin exchanges might conceivably be running into money problems related to fund and transfer freezes from ongoing international drug investigations. That's simply not possible, because Bitcoin!

Comment Re:surprised!!!! (Score 1) 704

Is it possible this is some grand conspiracy? Sure it is.

Yeah, since deliberately thumbing your nose at multiple international anti-money-laundering treaties by associating with blatant drug dealers and then having all the governments which subscribe to those treaties respond rationally by shutting you down, is.... a conspiracy.

I don't see what's hard to understand about this. Bitcoin's primary market appears to be criminals. Bitcoin advocates advertise this fact widely and make it one of their primary selling points for cryptocurrency. Therefore, anyone trading in Bitcoin-to-national-currency is waving a huge sign saying 'I'm moving money for criminals, please arrest me now. Oh, but you can't because it's cryptocurrency and you don't know for sure that I'm a criminal myself! Just, you know, that I've made millions selling services to criminals! Double dare you to arrest me! Triple, quadruple, googolplex dare you! Phpppppttttt! Ha ha, stupid cops!'

And then mysteriously! Bitcoin exchanges start getting... unspecified "problems".... to do with not being allowed to bank any more.... which they can't talk about because of... unspecified "investigations".

Yeah, I'm going to put that down to a completely coincidental series of bizarre freak accidents with no connection whatever to international law enforcement's rational response to widely advertised international lawbreaking. That seems perfectly plausible and anyone who suspects that it's just a case of crooks getting into trouble from cops is a 'conspiracy theorist'.

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