Comment 8086 vs. 68000 (Score 1) 103
Does anyone remember when Intel ran print ads touting how much faster the 8086 was than the Motorola 68000?
Comment Install is not an noun. (Score -1, Offtopic) 85
Install is not a noun.
Comment Buster (Score 1) 155
A cluster of black holes is a buster.
Submission + - Electrical Engineers Can't Be Software Developers: New H-1B Rules (wsj.com) 1
iliketrash writes: The Wall Street Journal reports on new rules on H-1B visas:
The Trump administration announced an overhaul of the H-1B visa program for high-skilled foreign workers that will require employers to pay H-1B workers significantly higher wages, narrow the types of degrees that could qualify an applicant and shorten the length of visas for certain contract workers.
The Department of Homeland Security’s rule would narrow who qualifies for H-1B visas based on their specific education. Currently, foreigners with a college degree or the equivalent amount of experience can apply to work in what is known as a specialty occupation. Under the changes, an applicant must have a college degree in the specific field in which he or she is looking to work. A software developer, for example, wouldn’t be awarded an H-1B visa if that person has a degree in electrical engineering
Is this actually the new rule or is this just bad writing? Is it even possible to get a college degree in Software Development? Aren't many developers electrical engineers? The article continues:
That requirement could make it tough for technology companies to hire in emerging fields like artificial intelligence or bioinformatics, which combines biological data, computer science and mathematics. Experts in such fields may have studied other subjects, or degrees in some subjects may not have existed until recently.
EDITOR: PLEASE FIX THE LINK BELOW THIS TEXT EDITING BOX THAT SAYS," WHAT TEXT FORMATTING CAN I USE?" IT CURRENTLY LINKS TO NOWHERE.
Comment Hydrogen engines' exaust is a greenhouse gas&mdash (Score 1) 78
Can someone please explain why hydrogen-powered transportation is such a big deal?
The exhaust from a hydrogen-oxygen reaction is water vapor. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Yes, it condenses in a few days but the supply is constantly replenished, and filling the world with hydrogen-powered vehicles will surely increase the overall level of atmospheric water.
Water vapor's most significant effect is that it doubles the effect of atmospheric CO2. That seems like a big deal, so more H20 means an increased effect of C02.
Sure, condensed H20 reflects sunlight (clouds), the negative feedback, but the of amplifying C02 is a positive feedback, because warmer air means that the air can hold more water vapor.
So—we won't solve the modeling problem here, but can we get some rational explanation rather than simply accepting that hydrogen motors will help global warming?
Submission + - SPAM: Optimal Detection With Faulty Detectors
iliketrash writes: Let’s say you have a binary detection problem which will be repeated over time and a choice of several detectors that are each faulty but to unknown degrees. False positives are bad but false negatives are worse. Is it better to (a) choose at random a single detector and reuse it for each subsequent test or (b) choose randomly a different detector for each subsequent test?
Application: An engineer who cares about detection theory and who doesn’t want to die because of less-than-perfect medical practice is about to begin a series of colonoscopies at five to 10 year intervals in which, at each test, it is hoped to find and remove any polyps, pre-cancerous growths. Physicians are known miss some polyps and some physicians are worse than others.
Application: Any coronavirus testing scenario you care to imagine.
Application: An engineer who cares about detection theory and who doesn’t want to die because of less-than-perfect medical practice is about to begin a series of colonoscopies at five to 10 year intervals in which, at each test, it is hoped to find and remove any polyps, pre-cancerous growths. Physicians are known miss some polyps and some physicians are worse than others.
Application: Any coronavirus testing scenario you care to imagine.
Comment "Compute" is a verb (Score 2) 108
"Compute" is a verb, you f*cking nitwit.
Comment ReadWHATFM (Score 2) 41
You would think that after 10 years they would get around to publishing a user's manual. Good luck trying to guess the syntax in order to get the results you want. Natural language understanding? Yeah, right.
Comment OP points need refining (Score 1) 406
OT, but a couple points in the OP need refining.
"Macs won't, but it's based on a Unix-like BSD system."
macOS is NOT Unix-like. It is Unix.
https://images.apple.com/media...
And hey, Linux is free.
So is macOS.
Comment It's bad dialog audio mixing (Score 5, Interesting) 440
There is a simple but vexing explanation for most people watching with captioning: Dialog audio is mixed nowadays in such a way to make it have a certain sound character, not for intelligibility. Why this happens is the vexing part. Mainly it is a bass boost. People blame the actors for mumbling. Maybe but I doubt it. You do realize, don't you, that most dialog is added after the scene is shot, requiring the actors to watch themselves on a video screen and repeat the lines in a recording studio. Look up "ADR" or "looping." For real. There is simply no excuse for unintelligible dialog but the art of the day apparently requires characters to have dramatic deep, impressive voices. You might also wonder why TV procedurals have office scenes that are so poorly lit; it's for dramatic effect. Nobody has office spaces lit like that. On the death of Jerry Lewis a couple years ago I watched The King of Comedy, from 1980, in a theater. Mono sound. Not even stereo music. Perfectly intelligible. Amazing. Also, another problem is that music and sound effects are frequently mixed too high; this is a problem for people with poor cocktail party ability. The situation is so bad for TV that at least one company is selling a special speaker with signal processing to try to fix the situation. Somebody should be shot for this state of affairs.
Comment Car Mode (Score 1) 137
Love the symmetry since dogs have at least one car mode.
Comment These authors are engineers, not scientists (rant) (Score 2) 116
These aren't scientists. There are 18 authors and 15 are affiliated with electrical engineering departments, one with chemical engineering, one with chemistry, and one with physics. 16 out of 18 are engineers and the author of the article classifies them all as "scientists. God I get fucking tired of this.
The Linux Kernel Is Now VLA-Free: A Win For Security, Less Overhead and Better For Clang (phoronix.com) 113
With the in-development Linux 4.20 kernel, it is now effectively VLA-free. From a report: The variable-length arrays (VLAs) that can be convenient and part of the C99 standard but can have unintended consequences. VLAs allow for array lengths to be determined at run-time rather than compile time. The Linux kernel has long relied upon VLAs in different parts of the kernel -- including within structures -- but going on for months now (and years if counting the kernel Clang'ing efforts) has been to remove the usage of variable-length arrays within the kernel. The problems with them are:
1. Using variable-length arrays can add some minor run-time overhead to the code due to needing to determine the size of the array at run-time.
2. VLAs within structures is not supported by the LLVM Clang compiler and thus an issue for those wanting to build the kernel outside of GCC, Clang only supports the C99-style VLAs.
3. Arguably most importantly is there can be security implications from VLAs around the kernel's stack usage.
1. Using variable-length arrays can add some minor run-time overhead to the code due to needing to determine the size of the array at run-time.
2. VLAs within structures is not supported by the LLVM Clang compiler and thus an issue for those wanting to build the kernel outside of GCC, Clang only supports the C99-style VLAs.
3. Arguably most importantly is there can be security implications from VLAs around the kernel's stack usage.
Comment LPs are made with less dynamic range compression (Score 1) 345
Listener preference for LP over CD-or-better digital—is not based on LP being a better medium; it is not, by any objective and any fidelity-based subjective measure. I suppose others on this thread have commented on nostalgia or faux-nostalgia—think "millennial" or "hipster"—but there is a better reason that some prefer LPs. That reason is that LPs in many cases are not created with the same signal as the corresponding CD. The LP signal is _better_! It is a documented and audible fact that many LPs use a signal that has been subjected to less dynamic range compression and less peak limiting, both of which are used extremely heavily to horrible effect on most recordings of the last 25-30 years. Look up "loudness wars." I have personally seen histograms of the same tracks taken from LP and CD by a colleague and the differences are striking. The track was "300 m.p.h. Torrential Outpour Blues" from Icky Thump by the White Stripes. And here https://www.soundonsound.com/t... is an interview with the recording folks involved, including this quote from the second sidebar:
"Jack wanted the CD to sound loud and aggressive, so it was cut as hot and exciting as possible, whereas the vinyl was cut in a more traditional way. The vinyl version has more size and dynamics and air, all the things about vinyl that we love. Was the CD version brickwalled to compete in the loudness wars? Let’s hope not!”"
Which Programming Languages Are Most Prone to Bugs? (i-programmer.info) 247
An anonymous reader writes:
The i-Programmer site revisits one of its top stories of 2017, about researchers who used data from GitHub for a large-scale empirical investigation into static typing versus dynamic typing. The team investigated 20 programming languages, using GitHub code repositories for the top 50 projects written in each language, examing 18 years of code involving 29,000 different developers, 1.57 million commits, and 564,625 bug fixes.
The results? "The languages with the strongest positive coefficients - meaning associated with a greater number of defect fixes are C++, C, and Objective-C, also PHP and Python. On the other hand, Clojure, Haskell, Ruby and Scala all have significant negative coefficients implying that these languages are less likely than average to result in defect fixing commits."
Or, in the researcher's words, "Language design does have a significant, but modest effect on software quality. Most notably, it does appear that disallowing type confusion is modestly better than allowing it, and among functional languages static typing is also somewhat better than dynamic typing."
The results? "The languages with the strongest positive coefficients - meaning associated with a greater number of defect fixes are C++, C, and Objective-C, also PHP and Python. On the other hand, Clojure, Haskell, Ruby and Scala all have significant negative coefficients implying that these languages are less likely than average to result in defect fixing commits."
Or, in the researcher's words, "Language design does have a significant, but modest effect on software quality. Most notably, it does appear that disallowing type confusion is modestly better than allowing it, and among functional languages static typing is also somewhat better than dynamic typing."
