Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Crying out for open source (Score 1) 240

No. The software isn't the hard part. The hard part is the requirements gathering for the data schemata (aka archetypes). For example, suppose you want to create an archetype for blood samples. At a minimum you need to talk to phlebologists and GPs, but you probably also need input from other specialists who might refer someone for a blood sample to see what they need from the data. Then you work out the indivisible chunks of data, run them past your domain experts, fix any bugs they spot, repeat. And even with a lot of input from experts, unless the standards for blood sampling are universal you risk creating an archetype which doesn't quite fit the way the hospitals in the neighbouring province do things.

Comment Re:Or so they say... (Score 2) 142

the situation is analogous to the poor dudes in gitmo. Everybody knows they're not terrorists, yet because they were seized illegally there's no way for the justice system to process them.

I'm puzzled by this one. Surely all the justice system needs to do is say "The U.S. Constitution binds the actions of the U.S. government even outside U.S. territory" and then admit a writ of habeas corpus?

Comment Re:C Needs Bounds Checking (Score 1) 98

The compiler doesn't always know how big that free space is, because there's no type or size associated with it. It's possible in some cases to do bounds-checking, but not in many others. It's a fundamental difficulty with the language, and it's impossible for the compiler to check all those bounds without help from the language or the programmer.

That's not quite true: the compiler could arrange to pass around more than just the raw pointer (or in extremis could maintain a duplicate of the malloc table and work out the bounds given the pointer), but the performance hit would be considerably more than for direct checking.

Comment Re:Desensationalised (Score 1) 97

"This is /. after all" was intended to refer to "I admit not having read", but now that you point it out I suppose it is fair to say that most of the stuff posted is clickbait. I couldn't say in general whether that's because it's submitted by the authors of the links or because submitters can't be bothered to track back to the less sensational source.

Comment Desensationalised (Score 4, Interesting) 97

I admit not having read the clickbait (this is /. after all), but I presume that the real story behind it is that an experiment to measure the muon magnetic moment has recently moved from Brookhaven to Fermilab to get access to more energetic muons. They're hoping to start measuring data in 2.5 years.

Comment Re:And we're surprised why? (Score 5, Interesting) 58

Well, if we use the same kind of accounting principles that were used to try to extradite Gary McKinnon, this is an article about an intelligence agency causing potentially billions of pounds/dollars/euros of damage to computers, 99%+ of which were not "legitimate targets" for a black bag job. It may not be a surprise, but it's still rather embarrassing.

Slashdot Top Deals

Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker

Working...