So "Mostly functional programming is unfeasable"? Oh, really? No shit.

There's a name for 'mostly funcitonal programming' - it's called 'I-just-started-with-programming-and-Basic imperative spagetti code'.

There is one situation were functional programming makes sense, and that is when you're not sure which segment of which procedure will come first, either because you can't wrap your head around it due to the complexity of the domain you're just programming your way into or because you really can't know. UI state and workflow procedure is one of those things. It's basically information hiding when building and tying up complex interdependant procedures, and functional programming is the intelligent hack to deal with that. Well-built Spreadsheets of course being *the* classic example of that sort of thing.

Doing functional programming outside of its domain, like, for instance, modelling a business process or a gameworld, is not only counter-productive, it's flat out stupid/bad software development.

So, yeah, doing everything functional is unfeasable. Thanks for the news pal.

That being said, every programmer should look into functional programming and know when to apply it. Switching your mind to functional mode at the right time is a skill that can save a programmer lots of headaches. Quite litteraly actually.

My 2 cents.

Right now, the big scare is that we're running into a deflation. No, really. DEflation. Not INflation. Now, considering how bad inflation is (allegedly), deflation must be good, right? Wrong! It's even more feared than inflation.

Inflation and deflation are orthogonal to each other. Inflation is a devaluation/flat tax on money while deflation is a devaluation of goods & services that can be bought with money. You can have both at the same time, they are not opposites, but two entirely seperate matrixes which are, at most and only under certain circumstances and certain moments, indirectly linked to each other. Right now we're observing a bit of a mixture of both.

That's a bit of a stretch... it doesn't even play Candy Crush.

Sidenote: While you are reading this, 6 trackers on slashdot.org are tracking you.

Just saying.

Others such as Eli Lily or the UK Gov Dept of Pensions really don't need so many addresses

Someone in the UK government pointed that out recently - it turns out that "Dept of Pensions" allocation is actually used across most of the government as some sort of VPN extranet with various external contractors. Apparently, since they all use different RFC1918 blocks internally, they can't all be VPNed into any single RFC1918 block: they needed a globally-unique block for that purpose.

British Telecom uses the 30.0.0.0/8 block for managing all their customer modems - that block is actually allocated to the US DoD, but they don't allow external access to it anyway, so there's nothing to stop you using that block internally yourself as long as you don't need to communicate with any other networks using the same trick. Better than wasting an entire /8 of global address space just for internal administrative systems - or a /9, like Comcast grabbed back in 2010.

My inner geek - who cares about efficiency - would love to see all the legacy blocks revoked. I'm sure the DoD could use 10/8 instead of 30/8 quite easily for their non-routed block; the universities could easily fit in a /16 instead of a /8, or smaller with a bit of NAT. Still, we should be moving to IPv6 instead now: give each university and ISP a /48, or /32 for big complex networks needing multiple layers. I just have a nasty feeling we're in for a long time of CGNAT spreading instead - where we currently have ISPs that don't offer static IP addresses, in a few years they'll be refusing to issue anything other than a NATted 100.64/16 address.

Then use fake rocks and make the water yourself. :)

Palates are so different, it's hard to say what affects what. I make an onion spread with caraway seed, yet a few people don't like the caraway. To me, the spread is bland without it! Much like a rye bread.

I'd also like to give my wife some recipies that don't overpower all the other flavors with spices.

Rock soup. :)

Naturally.

We're fast moving into a post-scarcity economy with practially finished software doing all the work nowadays, running on hardware that has a cost approaching near-zero as we speak. A computer that can be bought for 20 hours of work at a fast-food joint today is the size of a book, can run on solar power and has enough processing power to do all the billing and taxes for an entire city. What's left to do for suits beside sitting in parlaments and passing stupid laws or selling the customers we service bloated shit that no one can operate with the sole purpose of producing more pointless work and billable hours?

Social contacts, knowledge and information are increasing in value, simple manual work beyond a certain threshold is decreasing in value, repetetive "knowledgework" is bascially disappearing entirely, unless required due to bad human planing (hence IT experts jobs are becoming increasingly tedious and boring).

That's all basically a Good thing(TM) I'd say. The problem is getting there will be a pain and yield the one or other new great depression along the way.

I personally rather would have a cheap all-in-one computer sitting in the corner of my room doing all the work for me my clients while I cook for friends, dance tango all night, sleep late and help the occasional customer update their content on a Joomla installation for 50$ and hour because they couldn't be bothered clickling their way through that luxurious web interface than build yet another Web CMS or hassling with other stuff that can be done orders of magnitudes cheaper by computers or service providers. Point in case:I recently set up the entire IT infrastructure for a client using only Google Drive, GMail and Squarespace in roughly 7 hours, 3 of which were taking photos and talking strategy and workflow. Even with potential downtime of the Intarweb and/or Google, that environment is orders of magnitude more productive than any MS PC, with all her shit automatically backed up and available from any PC around the world hooked to the internet. I don't expect her to get back to me until she wants to update her portfolio in a year or two and needs some handholding when clicking through squarespaces gallery options. Which I will gladly provide and ask 35 Euros per hour for.

With "knowledgeworkers" being put out of business by Google, Huawei and Co., no wonder they're working longer hours than the guy at the filling-station down the street. He's actually doing something usefull - until Teslas battery replacing robots come that is.

Our job as IT and software people is to make ourselves superflous. And we're getting good at it.

My 2 cents.

I tend to agree with sticking with Moleskin(sic) - preferably 8 1/2 X 11 size --- nonruled (blank). I've tried electronic logs - I've tried electronic drawing apps (e.g. Papyrus on a Nexus 7 Android system). The main problem for me is not only do I want to write in it - but I find freeform drawing to be more helpful in conjunction with the writing. The Nexus pixel sizes for drawing where too coarse - and while you can zoom in and out -- the drawings always ended up looking odd - and took longer than just writing on paper. The only other acceptable solution I found was a $1500 Wacom electronic drawing tablet --- so I continue to buy Moleskin at a fraction of the cost.

So that does bring up the problem that is mentioned regarding indexing - and here is how I deal with that:

Each entry is dated in this manner: yyyymmdd e.g. 20140421 ; in this way each volume contains a series of entries that are uniquely numbered; if you need to add more than one entry per day - then just add hours and minutes as needed: 20140421:1405 (using the colon to visually separate the date from the time is preferred by me).

I also encode each entry as to 'type', where types are based upon single letter codes: C = computer science, A = art, etc... I put the letter code inside of a square in the upper - outer corner of each page where an entry begins.

The next step is to create an electronic index to key entries in your logs --- assuming you number your volumes sequentially - you can identify an entry like this:

Vol 2, 20140421:1400 History of FOO

With this system you can have both the flexibility of combining freehand drawing with your log entries, and also keep an index of your key entries organized however you like (perhaps by type, or project codes etc...you can expand this as you need beyond my simple method).

I use Evernote. But I don’t trust it.

I use Evernote for most of my digital notes stuff. I like the syncing feature which keeps notes on my mac, smartphone and tablet in sync.

However I don’t trust it for really important long-term stuff. Really essential stuff, such as long writing projects, articles, essays, important letters or digital journals go into textfiles that are in directories covered by redundant backup/archive mechanisms on detached portable HDDs with filesystems that can be read with widely available free open source software (Mac OS X HFS *without* journaling).

Doing anything else with anything valuable that’s supposed to stay useable longer than a decade is insane.

For instance, I still have CD copies of CD Archives of Zip Disk Archives of very old HDDs (2,5 40 MB HDDs would fit on one ZipDisk attached via parallel port - yepp, those were the days) with texts written in Ami Pro. The Ami Pro format is openable with a regular text editor, but it still is anoying to extract the useful data. No way am I installing Dos 5 and Win 3.11 on a Vbox just to run Ami Pro just to open them. Hence, only UTF-8 textfiles since round-about 2000.

You should do the same for any journal stuff that is supposed to last longer than 3 years.

My 2 cents.

It's most annoying, and couter-productive, to audit code when the lack of formatting gets in the way. The first thing I do when I get a piece of messy code is run it through a beautifer first. In one case, that one action made the bug shine like the sun on a clear day. Who audits using diffs? The audit needs to cover ALL the code.

You've looked at the "code changes"? I did, and found many of the alleged changes to be reformatting, to make the code easier to audit. Some of the changes are to pull out portability cruft on long-dead platforms. But you go ahead and view OpenSSL as dead to you -- that's your choice. As for "untested code changes", are you sure? This appears to be part of a process, not a rush to release.

Mr. Anonymous Coward:

What changes are you referring to? The changes I see are good re-factoring: clean up formatting, remove dead code, add missing bounds checks

Are you volunteering to do the code audit?

Massive rush? Evidence, please.

Security testing clearly hasn't been done before? Evidence, please. The counter-evidence is that the security testing tools were found not to work in this one particular case, and that problem has been patched. Security testing costs money; how much have you donated to the project?

Heartbleed exposes a problem, it doesn't invalidate the concept of Open Source. For one example that made world-wide news, there are hundreds of examples of open-source "wins" that never rose about the journalistic "noice" because it worked properly, and didn't make any waves. The mainstream says "who do we blame, who can we sue?"

And how do you manage projects, particularly open-source projects? Does early disclosure bother me? Yes, as the admin of a group of servers. Would I be comfortable if this were done behind a wall? No. We need all the eyes we can get looking at the problem. And you need to be more explicit: are the bugs that you are complaining about being exposed exploitable in some bad way? Examples, please.

SUMMARY: It's bad, but not as bad as you make it out to be.