The Insider News - CodeProject

The Next Web[^]:
Google’s Nexus devices began life as a proving ground for Android. It was meant to showcase what Android was capable of, and how the platform would move forward.

And I don't "need" to eat this delicious fourth pastry, but here we are.

Until Android patches are distributed via a Windows update like mechanism Nexus devices are the way to go for security updates. My current phone is an HTC M8 picked for a combination of better than most patching, an uSD slot (so I can hold all my music locally), and availability from my carrier. With Nexus devices now going to 128GB and changes in US plans meaning there's no longer any reason to buy direct from your carrier (if you can afford the full price up front anyway - and I expect vendor financing installment plans to expand beyond Apple in the near/mid-term) I'm 95% sure my next phone will be a 2016 Nexus.

As for the Android patching system improving I'm not holding my breath. The Linux kernel not having a proper HAL, officially because the kernel team didn't want the overhead or to risk tying their hands if they came up with a better way to do something (but almost always also with a smirking 'and to make it harder for companies that don't have open source drivers that the kernel team could update in sync themselves'), makes fixing anything at the lowest levels requiring access to code that various 3rd parties don't make available publicly. To fix this, the least impractical option would be for Google'd to get all of the SoC/SoC sub-component/misc other chip/etc designer companies to give them access to their code instead of providing BLOBs to only the OEM building the phone. More infeasible options would include either forking the linux kernel to build in a HAL into the android kernel (IMO political suicide in the FOSS world), or to convince Linus that the current situation has to change. There're enough kingdoms that'd need to accept major changes to their bits of the platform to make a change on the level of adding a HAL that without his support there'd be no chance of getting everyone to play along nicely.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

"A major advance reveals deep connections between the classes of problems that computers can — and can’t — possibly do." [^]

"For more than 40 years, researchers had been trying to find a better way to compare two arbitrary strings of characters, such as the long strings of chemical letters within DNA molecules. The most widely used algorithm is slow and not all that clever ...

... in a paper presented at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forth a mathematical proof that the current best algorithm was "optimal" — in other words, that finding a more efficient way to compute edit distance was mathematically impossible."

Edit: However, note:

"But researchers aren’t quite ready to record the time of death. One significant loophole remains. The impossibility result is only true if another, famously unproven statement called the strong exponential time hypothesis (SETH) is also true. Most computational complexity researchers assume that this is the case — including Piotr Indyk and Artūrs Bačkurs of MIT, who published the edit-distance finding — but SETH’s validity is still an open question. This makes the article about the edit-distance problem seem like a mathematical version of the legendary report of Mark Twain’s death: greatly exaggerated."

My reading of this fascinating Quanta article is that it describes progress towards defining Intractable, Complete and NP-complete classes of computational problem. However, I disclaimer that by asserting my profound ignorance of the higher-levels of computer-science theory. I welcome correction and instruction ... on that ... however Smile | :)

«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.

modified 2-Oct-15 23:59pm.

Sounds familiar; don't we get this every couple of years or so?

PIEBALDconsult wrote:
don't we get this every couple of years or so?

Well, Esteemed Man of Pie, I may have had it every few years, but I never got it, and still don't.

«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.

We probably get similar articles every year or so; and will until/unless one of the major computational bounds is actively proved one way or the other.

On the flip side, the article has what's probably the best mundane friendly explanation of P vs NP I've seen in a long time if ever.

Quote:
The informal version: if P equals NP, we could quickly compute the true answer to almost any question we wanted, as long as we knew how to describe what we wanted to find and could easily recognize it once we saw it, much like a finished jigsaw puzzle. The vast majority of computer scientists believe that P does not equal NP.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

Ayasin[^]:
In this article I’m going to tackle the review process by discussing what a good code review should look like.

I laughed, I cried. I thought the ending was a little too predictable though.

This is what good code-review should look like: [^], to be followed-up, of course, by the burning of the apostates.

«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.

It reminds me the fact that, my senior colleages fight together about their coding styles!

Yes we all do. One thing I hate is not putting spaces between operators. This

C++

for(rg=rmin;rg<rmax-3;rg++){medie[rg]=(double)bottProfile[rg]+bottProfile[rg+1]+bottProfile[rg+2])/6.0;}

for me is not a row of code, it is a single long word. This

C++

for(rg = rmin; rg < rmax - 3; rg++){medie[rg] = (double) bottProfile[rg] + bottProfile[rg + 1] + bottProfile[rg + 2])/6.0;}

is a line of code.

Then I have a colleague who wrote a single huge CPP of 2700 rows of code like this. Mad | :mad:

GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X

If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver

"When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." -- Mike Hankey

Never mind the spaces, I'm breaking out the napalm canisters over the lack of newlines.

Dead | X|

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

That is the second thing that drives me wild. Sometimes even I put several short lines in a single line: it may (or may not) have sense and actually improve readability. Of course this is not such a case but consider that the function is very long and not breakable.

But no spaces totally break my token recognition. Wherever I can I try to keep all the tokens in columns, unless it is stupid to do so (fully specified class names can be pretty long).

GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X

If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver

"When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." -- Mike Hankey

den2k88 wrote:
Sometimes even I put several short lines in a single line: it may (or may not) have sense and actually improve readability. Of course this is not such a case but consider that the function is very long and not breakable.

My feelings on that range from neutral/mild distaste in trivial cases, (eg int i = 0; int j = 0; ink k = 0;) mostly because anything exceptional causes me to have to slow down and take a 2nd look. I'm extremely strongly against it in the case of conditionals/loops; because without a blank line afterward to cleanly separate it from whatever follows it's too prone to confusion and a blank line is too easily lost.

den2k88 wrote:
Wherever I can I try to keep all the tokens in columns,

Many years back I used to do that a lot; but have thrown in the towel because doing so is incompatible with all the auto-formatters I've used and I find them to be more generally useful. I'll still do it occasionally, but it's very much a by exception thing now.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

Well some code like

C++

if (condition)  { flag = false;      break; }
if (condition2) { otherflag = false; break; }

is actually (in my opinion) more readable like this because it is actually one / two short operations that are extremely correlated and stay very wall on one line. But actually this is the only case I put more instructions on a single line - I especialli avoid the "int i = 0; int j; int k = 0;" case because is is less flexible to add/remove/rename variables.

I tweaked VisualAssistX so that now it doesn't autoformat as I don't like, only the VB6 IDE autoformats without possibility of turning it off.

GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X

If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver

"When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." -- Mike Hankey

WinBeta[^]:
In Redmond, Washington, Microsoft houses the most technologically advanced hardware labs on the planet in their own Area 51, dubiously titled Building 87.

In the future, we will all live in Building 87.

Kent Sharkey wrote:
In the future, we will all live in Building 87.

In the future, I will live in Theory, because in Theory everything works. Smile | :)

Patrice

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Albert Einstein

Ars Technica[^]:
Stagefright 2.0 comes as Android users were still recovering from Stagefright 1.

No one has hacked my "two cans and string" yet

Kent Sharkey wrote:
No one has hacked my "two cans and string" yet

Vulnerable to the oldest denial of service attack of all:

O O
 X
/ \

"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.

Inside Microsoft Research[^]:
Microsoft researchers have figured out a way to build software systems spanning many computers that can be proven free of bugs, a significant feat in the decades-long quest to create perfect software.

*to varying definitions of "bug-free"

Kent Sharkey wrote:
software systems ... free of bugs

And how complicated that 'software system' is? Like 1 + 1 = 2?

Kent Sharkey wrote:
perfect software

Can it make coffee?

Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.

"I can create bug-free software, if by bugs you mean things I can detect."

Best of blessing to that!

By changing the definition of bug we have managed to produce software that's 100% bug free.

Closed because it is by design.

GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X

If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver

"When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." -- Mike Hankey

Kent Sharkey wrote:
to varying definitions of "bug-free"

Agreed