With the amount of abstraction in software development these days, very few people seem to really know what they're doing anymore. This should concern you -- if it doesn't, you haven't thought about it enough yet.

We regularly see new exploits that affect systems that have been live for years, oft-times spanning multiple major versions and platforms. In retrospect these flaws are often usually painfully obvious, but because they have been buried in the layers of sediment of "best practices", "boilerplate" code and underlying platforms, they aren't seen. At least, not until a curious or malicious mind starts poking around.

While this is in part a problem with QA, the deception of abstraction is that it provides a Black Box that is very easy to trust. This affects developers as much as QA.

Are we really wise to keep building on these layers of abstraction? Toolkits on top of frameworks on top of virtual machines on top of operating systems on top of hardware -- even device manufacturers can't keep their locked-down devices from being rooted in a matter of days, sometimes even before release. While many of the Slashdot crowd laugh because there is a sense of social justice in seeing DRM broken, the same exploits may some day be used against systems we rely on. I don't consider myself a fearmonger, but I wouldn't be surprised to see significant digital infrastructure fail at some point, either due to malicious intent or simply instability, at some point in my lifetime. Poor software quality hurts us all.

I realize that I sound like an old man yearning for the better days, but I learned to program in assembly on 8088s, and I knew exactly what my programs were doing. I'm not saying I want to go back to that, but the idea that most developers these days don't even understand memory management or garbage collection blows my mind. Asking for a new language because getters and setters are too much of a hassle? Somebody get this kid a lollipop, please.

I read the article (no, I'm not new here) and the author's main point, emphasis original, is this:

If your team is spending any time at all writing code to produce listing, filtering, and sorting behavior, not to mention creating CRUD screens and the back end logic for these operations, they are probably working at the wrong level of abstraction.

Where does he draw the line at "wasting time writing code"? This is exactly the mindset that leads us to buffer overruns, SQL injections, and many other problems which should not make it into production software. He wants his developers to abstract as much as possible, but code reuse all too easily leads to blind acceptance and a failure to understand what is being imported. If he trusts that all those acronyms on the blog post he wrote are bug-free, then I would hate to be one of his customers. Not that there seems to be many categorically better options available.

In the end, I think we need to abandon the cycle of "software bloat to more powerful hardware to software bloat..." and figure out what we can do with what we have. Good grief -- look at CUDA! We have orders of magnitude more processing power in a single video game console than all the world's computers before World War II, and available memory is simply insane. Take a look at what Farbrausch has done, and you will see what dedicated focus on efficiency can do.

Stop being lazy, understand what you are doing, understand what you have available, and use it well.

The autonomy of these rovers is already quite impressive, as they can choose parts of their paths based on a braveness variable provided by the engineers.

This latest enhancement is really interesting, essentially giving them something of a sense of curiosity. I'm not trying to anthropomorphize; the rovers are now allowed to use some sort of Bayesian-like algorithms for determining objects of interest, and examining them without direct input from us. This gives them the potential for returning more scientifically interesting information for the communication cycle.

Way to go, NASA! You guys rock!

Your idea has merit, but you need to extend the idea a little further. Make your error dialogs look like this, and you will get more user participation than you can handle:

--------
INSERT CUTESY PICTURE HERE
A little lost $Animal_Name has wandered onto your farm. It needs help! You can add it to your farm, but you need to tame it first.

To tame it, the magic words are $Magic_Word_1, $Magic_Word_2, and $Magic_Word_3.

When you are ready, click HERE to tame it and add it to your farm!
--------

You just have a simple lookup table for the $Animal_Name and $Magic_Word variables, and you've got all the info you need. Of course, then you need to make some sort of ridiculous farm app, but that could be a further source of monetization! :-)

Somebody mod dtolman up, and Wrath0fb0b down. Please.

Putting wrong information out there about how to make a split-second decision in a rare, left-threatening emergency is very irresponsible.

dtolman is correct. To reiterate:

Put the car in NEUTRAL. The engine will disengage.
Hit the brake HARD. Do not pump.
Steer the car off the road, and once its stopped, you can PARK it and turn off the engine.

The problem is that we will always see ourselves as the pinnacle of intelligence. It is a combination of hubris and misunderstanding.

See, our brains aren't large enough to recognize the intelligence of species that are significantly smarter than us, so because they are unintelligible to us, we see them as unintelligent.

Although the above point is mildly tongue-in-cheek, it certainly applies to species that are less intelligent than us. If we don't "see" the intelligence, we assume that it is not there.

Intelligence is difficult enough to define to everyone's satisfaction, let alone measure, but we have made some surprising discoveries over the last century about various species' methods of communication, tool use, and social structures.

I am presently going back to school to get a Master's in Libary and Information Sciences. After having worked 15 years in various IT fields, I am looking forward to getting into a career with books.

Innovation is great, and appreciated in libraries when it serves a useful purpose. But as has been mentioned by others, technology changes quickly, and becomes obsolete just as quickly.

This prep-school library is trying something new, and I'm all for them trying. But getting rid of tried-and-proven technology in favor for the next buzz-word seems very foolish. Why not store the stacks in locking, rolling-shelf systems? This would save a great deal of space and still provide a reliable backup.

What they've done is like discarding bicycles in favor of Segways. If they want to show they have money and like new technology, fine. But when their new toys break, unexpected problems arise, or their needs change, I will be reading my books and chuckling at them.

You have higher cognitive ability, you realize how the world runs, you get depressed. Not the other way 'round.

or try http://springrts.com/

Open source RTS engine which formed around the idea of being a '3d TA' . There's a bunch of variations of TA for it and some nice other games.

A lot of old TA and SupCom players come to spring.

less polish more game.

I've found that the combination of a PC and a Wii serves my gaming needs excellently. The Wii has an excellent set of casual games (Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros, etc) that I can pick up and play with my gf whenever we have a few minutes to kill. The PC is great for serious gaming. A keyboard and mouse are, IMO, the best input controllers ever and the graphics on a mid-range gaming PC beat those on a 360 or PS3. I also like the fact that my games are all $50 (and not $60) new at retail.

Of course, everyone is different and I do miss out on a few 360 and PS3 exclusives, but nothing has come out for either system that has been that compelling for me.

I think when people say the Wii has "no good games", they mean it doesn't have good games like GTA, CoD, WoW, and other TLAs. But it has a ton of quick and fun, easy to learn, easy to play games that are great to play with friends, coworkers, kids, gf's, non-gamers etc.

Firewalls are capable of providing all of the positive benefits of NAT (transient traffic flow approval instead of mapping for example, blocking traffic not originated from the LAN, etc) save obfuscating the source address. Obfuscating the source address isn't particularly relevant from an attack perspective given that the entire LAN is still protected by the same Firewall process, NAT or not.

For example: you could NAT your LAN in 192.168.10.x space behind IP 1.2.3.4 .. you connect to shady.com port 80 sport 192.168.10.101:2000, NAT/firewall allocates 1.2.3.4:3000 for you. Shady sees all the traffic coming from 1.2.3.4:3000, but has no way (short of client-side malware) to know that maps to 192.168.10.101; nor can Shady care since all access to 192.168.10.101 is mediated by 1.2.3.4. Shady.com might try to port scan 1.2.3.4, and see any port forwards your entire LAN uses in one swoop, try to exploit them if possible. Moral: make sure you know what you are doing when you port forward.

Or, if you use IPv6 for your LAN, let's say you are allocated 1:2:3::/112. No need to NAT it, so you just firewall behind your gateway, let's say 1:2:3::4. You connect to shady.com port 80, sport [1:2:3::101]:2000. Firewall doesn't have to allocate a damned thing for you, but instead records the flow for [1:2:3::101]:2000 shady.com:80 as established from within the LAN and thus authorized. Shady sees all the traffic coming from [1:2:3::101]:2000, but it's not relevant since all access to 1:2:3::101 is still mediated by the firewall at gateway 1:2:3::4. Shady.com can port scan 1:2:3::101 if it likes, but won't see any open ports if you only allow LAN established traffic, or else sees your whitelisted ports for that IP only (instead of your entire LAN). Just like the IPv4/NAT scenario, keep your open ports secure.

As you can see, source IP obfuscation provides no meaningful advantage to the end user in this scenario. If anything, IPv6 users who feel like they want to use NAT could have the firewall choose random source addresses as well as random source ports out of their /112, and hide their 3 LAN devices within a pool of 65 thousand addresses. Would that not confuse a would-be attacker?

Still, the major drawback to be avoided with NAT is in breaking the globally unique address space and complicating inbound connection access, which will become a growing part of popular network policy over the next few decades. One thing Bit Torrent teaches us is that "the server" will less and less frequently have resources comparable to the "client swarm", so crowdsourcing the heavy lifting (from distribution to content creation to editing to caching) becomes vital to any scaling strategy worth it's salt. The hub/spoke communication model is slowly eroding in the presence of more sophisticated, decentralized many-to-many connection models.

NAT reduces a peer to a "consumer" which can only fetch data, but never re-offer it without convoluted port forwarding messes. Entire LAN's are limited to one named service per outbound IP, unless one wishes to screw with what port they offer services on, further complicating the job for other firewalls and participants of the content network.

You'll know what I mean if you've ever tried to configure mobile SIP access. Half the time you are behind a NAT, and you'll never know in advance if it's full cone, symmetric, or just somehow pathological. Sometimes you are nested within multiple NATs which each behave differently!

Some legacy UDP protocols I've worked with need to make connections to thousands of remote IP addresses at multiple, highly transient port mappings which bring NAT mapping tables to their knees. In a firewall-only environment, it's easy to whitelist access to swaths of ports for clients and then the gateway need not maintain tables for related traffic, but can continue to protect unrelated ports unlike with SOHO DMZ.

To sum up, NAT is not only a bandaid, but it's already pulling at our short-hairs.

Ohh, so the same way my parents created me.

And then they wonder why noone is taking the FSF seriously. Thankfully, they are not representative of the open source movement.

Mod parent up! This is basic physics folks; I would have hoped more people on Slashdot new this. Wind resistance is the single most limiting factor in land speed records.

To illustrate, this high-powered modern steam vehicle hit 225 km/h, or 140 mph. Bruce Bursford beat this by nearly 50% on a bicycle , setting the world record of 334.6 km/h or 207.9 mph. He biked on a treadmill, with no wind resistance.

Members of parliament need to be reminded that they work for us, not Big Media Corp. They need to be reminded that their job security depends heavily on our support, not the support of a corporate lobby group - especially a FOREIGN lobby group. Members of parliament need to become aware that serving the interests of the people whom they represent is their number one priority and serving the interests of lobby groups can come somewhere much further down on that list. They need to be reminded in the simplest and best way possible - they need to be informed that, if they fail to represent the best interests of the people, the people will replace them with someone who understands their role better. They need to be reminded that Big Media Corp might be represented by a large and powerful lobby group but "the population at large" is a much large, much more powerful lobby group and we, as the population at large", are willing to flex our muscles if we aren't being represented properly.

Write to your member of parliament. Vote smart.