Posts by Ru 1818 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
The low power Xeon E3 chips that Intel announced at the beginning of the year (and that's positively ancient in CPU land) had quite reasonable power consumption figures, given that they were quite capable x64 chips. More expensive than Atom, of course, but to my mind a low end Xeon is a rather more useful bit of gear than a top end Atom...
Also, these days you can just grab yourself a 5D2 and a 7D for less money than a 1D and still have pretty good performance and a backup camera to boot. Unless you're a working photographer who uses their camera every day, the 1D whatevers aren't worth the cash anymore.
And yes, lenses are where its at. My 'how can I afford it?' thoughts are mostly directed at the 200-400 F4...
most of this sort of tracking is already done. A bit of good, old fashioned police work garnished with a few court orders should get enough information to link person A with activity B if B was done on or via the internet without the aid of something like TOR.
Times, IP addresses, DHCP leases, MAC addresses, security camera footage of net cafes and the like... presumably mobile networking logs DHCP sessions, base station IDs, and IMEI numbers or whatever the nG equivalent of MAC addresses is and so on. What does this guy expect to gain? A magical 'whodunnit' service which prints out the name and address of whoever posted or downloaded some image on the interwebs at the press of a button?
I wonder how well it'll work on non-european systems.
The control system of an insulin pump is *external*
There must be an external component of the system *so it can be refilled with insulin*
The only reason there is a radio control system is convenience. It could be done just as well with an interface on the control box (what, did you think that thing was actually stuck inside the patient? what on earth did you suppose the buttons were for?) or even a plug in control unit.
There is absolutely no reason for any of these kind of drug delivery devices to have a radio control system. None.
Well, the benefits of taking insulin outweight the risks of someone using your new killswitch functionality, that much I'll agree with. Insulin pumps are pretty good, especially if you're less than brilliant at dosing yourself with insulin effectively.
But exactly what are the benefits of using a radio control system, again? Perhaps the 900mhz radiation makes the insulin more effective, hmm?
I assume he really meant 'pseudonym', but sometimes its hard to tell.
I'd reference the other guy who was keen to let a thousand flowers bloom and what happened to the people who followed that particular plan, but I see that it was been done already.
Quite apt for a Google guy, mind you...
I hear if you write your software in COBOL, you can get your business guys to do all the useful 'business logic' bits without needing any code monkeys. Its all about the interface after all... none of these problems are intrinsically difficult, they're just poorly presented... probably by people trying to protect their own jobs. Time to cut away some deadwood, I say.
There's some legal bumf that was published on the web very shortly after this whole sorry episode came to light in which Astrolabe claimed to have tried to contact the maintainer of the tzdata and at least one other associated individual.
Hopefully, the database maintainers didn't just bin the messages and hope that they were just an idle threat, and that would be slightly unprofessional of them.
Apple don't seem to have any particular nostalgic attachment to their old software products. They always seem quite happy to bin the old and bring in something flakey to replacement it.
Your MS examples are rather curious, though. XBOX seems to be doing well enough. Zune is effectively a zombie product at this point, but in the face of WM7 or whatever the latest phone platforms will be called, we shouldn't have to wait long before it gets its head chopped off. Windows Mobile is an odd one... if they pull themselves together, they might make a reasonable product. Android is flailing around a bit at the moment, webos is dead and bada isn't exactly setting the world on fire... it'll be nice not to have to look forward to Apple with everything in the future.
That'll be sorted in about 50 years time. That still leaves a 20 year gap to fill.
Any other major development can only realistically come from fission power, which the western world seems to be trying to sideline as much as possible, hindering the sort of major developments we really need.
A fair amount of nuclear waste simply isn't very useful. Its nasty, toxic, awkward to work with and in most cases there's nothing useful to be done with it. There are various kinds of reprocessing that can be done to extract useful fuel from waste, but they're not entirely economical at present and many kinds of waste wouldn't yield anything usefully fissile. The radiation and heat you get from this useless waste is simply too low to turn into useful power... you'd be better off building wind turbines and photovoltaic panels instead.
There are various interesting things you could do with a working fusion device that produced a decent amount of neutrons that you use to irradiate radioactive waste, but a) we don't have a working fusion device, b) fusion devices that produce a high neutron flux will create their own hazardous waste products and c) no-one really wants to associate lovely shiny fusion power with nasty dirty fission waste.
But that's a definitely finite resource.
Forty years of lacklustre support for nuclear research will cost us dearly; only recently has HMG woken up to the pitiful lack of nuclear physicists and engineers and the army of highly skilled construction staff that a nuclear industry requires. The way things are going right now, its going to get increasingly difficult even to buy that expertise from abroad if the German anti-nuclear stance becomes popular elsewhere. Still, at least the French have their heads screwed on, right?
Maybe the Chinese will save us from ourselves, by keeping all their neodymium so they can build the fleets of electric cars that their power grid will be able to support and wind power will become even more grievously uneconomical than it is now. Lets hope they don't mind selling us their thorium tech, eh?
Aussies would probably die in Alaska. One of my former housemates hailed from Victoria (not exactly the toastiest part of Oz) and didn't really cope well with East Anglian weather; not exactly the frostiest place on earth. I think she spent 7 of the 8 months of her time in the UK shivering under a thick ski jacket.
Bless you and your childlike hope and naivety. The strong typing that SQL offers is an impediment to swift development, in the same way that in Yeggeland security is an impediment to releasing products. Happily, you can just define every database with 50 columns of varchar(8000) and let all the clever stuff be done in the application! Better yet, completely redefining the schema can be done without waking up the database monkeys. Win-win.
All that stuff is of absolutely no use, worth or interest to the average punter. If you happen to be the sort of power user who understands all that stuff, that's super but you're a looooooong way down the priority list of Customers Apple Cares About.
RAII implies deterministic cleanup of resources; this is often very important, at least in the fields I usually work in. IDisposable is a horrible hack that's been stuck onto the language almost as an afterthought... its semantics are totally undefined, and using (...) {...} is basically syntactic sugar for try...catch...finally { foo.dispose(); } and requires that the coder remember they are using a resource that requires cleanup and add the extra code to ensure that happens.
By contrast, knowing that a stack-allocated object will be destroyed when it goes out of scope or the stack is unwound means I can put cleanup logic in its destructor and be happy to know that it will be run regardless of whether any future coders remember to use the using syntax. Relying on them "doing it right" isn't really enough for me.
Of course, they could just create a new heap allocated object and avoid that nice feature, but there's just no helping some people. Though I suppose a private constructor and a factory method that returned a smart pointer to an instance might work... but I ramble.
You may note neither I nor the original commenter mentioned garbage collection. The original comment was talking about checked memory access; I'd expect you to get for free from any language with a greater level of abstraction (eg, no pointers) and in turn those generally imply garbage collection, but they're not essential.
I'm talking about the kind of memory management system where every memory access needs to be validated by the userland before it happens; the STL containers and smart pointers perhaps fulfil this role. Their overhead is optional, and choosing to avoid it for whatever reason is relatively painless (eg, you could just get pointer to the first element of a vector and treat it like a normal array, if you wanted).
Making a GC and an unmanaged memory model work together seems to be clunky at best... C++ CLR does indeed use extra templates such as pin_ptr and gc_root and safe_cast as well as new keywords like gcnew and the addition of object Finalizers. Its effectively two languages crudely grafted together, though I'd like to think it is possible to do better.
GCs are popular because they are a crutch... they take away some immediate hassles, and replace them with magic and nondeterministic behavour, but this is a tradeoff you may be happy to make. They are not essential for C++ by any means, even less so under C++11. If you feel that you absolutely cannot work without one, or that whatever project you are currently involved with requires one then you are probably trying to use the wrong language for the job, and you should look to Java or C# or whatever else instead.
Leaving aside your failure to understand object orientation, you're still quite incorrect. I can create block, function, class or application-scoped object instances and know exactly when they will be destroyed. I can use smart_ptr and unique_ptr to conveniently handle most other kinds of memory management. I can use (r)value references to pass around object instances without ever having to use new and delete.
Garbage collectors generally imply an absense of RAII, a very useful pattern, and nasty hacks like .net's using {} and IDisposable stuff for trying to do the same thing. They also make it very difficult to offer any kind of execution time guarantee, or memory footprint restrictions. These aren't important for many kinds of application, but when you do need them you will definitely notice their absense from your happy shiny garbage collected managed memory model.
Why should everyone else be encumbered by a fancy heaviweight memory management system just because your coding style is somewhat lacking? If you cannot be trusted to write code that does relatively low level memory access, perhaps you should stop trying to do so.
Learn to use the STL correctly (between std::vector and std::array buffer access, allocation, deallocation and size limits are pretty painless) and you'll be rather better off. Your code may make implicit object copies, incidentally, but that's because of the way you've written it. Instead of restricting the language to fit your demands, you've now been given the opportunity to use rvalue references instead. The STL classes handle those just fine, incidentally, and if you didn't want to learn about them you could make more use of normal object references instead.
And all those other wonderful languages you use instead, do they manage RAII? How about explicit memory management? Or little syntactic luxuries like const correctness? No? Didn't think so. Realistic arguments against C++ should probably revolve around things like ease of refactoring, or static analysis perhaps. These are serious concerns and major impacts on programmer productivity and bugfinding... everything else you've listed is just whining.
Wrong question: you should be asking whether it has been used on anyone outside of the German government's jurisdiction. Though that's a pretty fuzzy concept these days, following the US approach of 'our jurisdiction is wherever we find people we don't like very much'.
That aside; you may be a foreign national, but if you're in Germany you are reasonably expected to follow local laws and submit to the local enforcement and judiciary.
Its almost as if 'like' competitions are just there to get a load of free advertising. I'm all in favour of ignoring the sort of crap that the general public think they ought to want, but only if the alternative is actually something interesting or worthwhile. Choosing instead something that a bunch of tone deaf, out of touch, echo-chamber inhabiting media luvvies think that the Yoof would find cool? Oh dear.
It also doesn't sound a whole lot like any Dubstep I've ever heard. Fail on all fronts.
In the early days, MS were neither rich, nor powerful, nor a monopoly. How did they end up being such a massive force in the computer world when everyone could have bought "better" products? If Apple or IBM or whoever had a credible alternative, what stopped it selling, depite somehow being "better"?
Leaving the notion of magical monopolies bamfing into existence... Zune and Vista came out long after BG stepped down as microsoftie in chief. Hell, even Windows Mobile postdated him, though WinCE started life during his watch.
Another eminently forgettable attempt to replace a nasty yet pervasive language? I just don't see it happening. A nice new scripting language supported by all the major vendors would be great, but...
- its a whole new and exciting attack surface, because javascript just isn't enough.
- its a whole new language for everyone to learn.
- its a whole new standard for all the vendors to support, because they've already harmonised CSS and javascript.
Seems slightly more likely to take the world by storm than, say, Go... but only slightly. I for one am unconcerned about my existing language skills becoming obsolete overnight.
Given how many people fall for the most transparent of phishing scams (please to vist www.yourbank.com.suspicious.cc and enter the password) and given the less than awesome success achievements of SSL in the face of corporate (Diginotar), technical (SSLstrip, BEAST) and user (who might not even notice the difference between EV and standard certificates) failures, how on earth would .bank fix anything?
CUPS isn't an Apple gift. It was developed and open sourced some time before Apple chose to use it in OSX. Since then, Apple purchased the project from the original developers. Whether the project has remained open source for purely altrustic reasons, or because of license obligations isn't entirely clear to me ;-)
You'd be better off looking at the work Apple have contributed to LLVM and Clang. Its a little more esoteric and non-consumer oriented than CUPS, but it is pretty interesting and useful nonetheless. Seems like they've also done a better job here working with open source devs than they did with Webkit/KHTML.
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