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My nom de net is Dr. Drang, and I blog about scripting, engineering, and occasional other topics at leancrew.com. In real life, I’m an engineer (civil and mechanical) who spends most of his time figuring out why things have broken. Dr. Drang is a consulting engineer who blogs about scripting and fatigue analysis.
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30 years of research on memory safe C/C++ should be enough. It’s time to suck it up, take the best available memory safety solution, and just turn it on by default for a major open-source OS distribution such as Ubuntu.... If the safe-by-default experiment succeeded, we would have (for the first time) a substantial user base for memory-safe C/C++. There would then be an excellent secondary payoff in research aimed at reducing the cost of safety, increasing the strength of the safety guarantees, and dealing with safety exceptions in interesting ways. Would it be better to just stop using C/C++ instead of making them safe?
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Yes, I have to agree. From what I understand, properly done, C# is just about as fast as C++. Obvously still a need to have the ability to bypass automatic memory management
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You'd wish that would be true, but, especially in numerical areas and making use of all of your processor vector instructions .NET is not great. Also note the recent shift away from .NET towards native. MS needed to get better performance in order to get decent battery life on tablets and phones.
Wout
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Would it be better to just stop using C/C++ instead of making them safe?
Yeah, they should just the write the whole OS in javascript/c#/whatever. I'm sure the tiny performance hit would be worth the "safety"
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In a word no, and no they can't make them safe either. Witness C# and Java. All these years of 'safety' and nothing of any serious size or complexity stands up unless manual memory management is used and when it's not memory sizes still balloon and effective leaks still occur.
The safest systems are the most transparent systems where there is little or nothing 'under the hood', in fact there is no hood. Then and only then can the smallest problem be seen for what it is the moment it arrises and hence fixed.
To put it another way, in space there are no 'no user servicable parts inside, do not void warranty by opening' sealed units.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Would it be better to just stop using C/C++ instead of making them safe?
For most new development yes; but for performance sensitive apps GC pauses aren't acceptable and the cost of porting billions of lines of legacy code to a new language is beyond prohibitive (see COBOL[^]).
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
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As a relatively new Common Lisp user, I’ve compiled a list of notes and tips on learning it. It’s a synthesis of my own experience, as well as my observations of the Lisp world. Lisp has a reputation as a hard to learn language, and I believe this is not the case, but there are such things as bumps on the road. Some of them are false beliefs about lisp that might scare people, others are actual nuisances that need to be dealt with, yet others are simply culture shock. Since Lisp is old, it has it’s own distinct culture and jargon, and people often get confused or put off by the differences. An old post, revamped for a new generation of Lisp learners.
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One day, we may be able to check e-mail or call a friend without ever touching a screen or even speaking to a disembodied helper. Samsung is researching how to bring mind control to its mobile devices with the hope of developing ways for people with mobility impairments to connect to the world. The ultimate goal of the project, say researchers in the company’s Emerging Technology Lab, is to broaden the ways in which all people can interact with devices. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if several emails had just arrived.
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When HTML first appeared, it offered a coherent if limited vocabulary for sharing content on the newly created World Wide Web. Today, after HTML has handed off most of its actual work to other specifications, it’s time to stop worrying about this central core and let developers choose their own markup vocabularies and processing. Hooray, standards won the web! Now let's throw out all the standards...
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At Xamarin Evolve 2013, I caught up with Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza after his keynote. It's been a while since I last chatted with Miguel, so it was great to catch up. Clearly, he and team have been very busy pushing Mono forward and building Xamarin—a new technology that enables developers to target multiple platforms by writing apps in C# and .NET. During his keynote, Miguel announced that F# is now a part of the Xamarin family, too. An interview about the intersection (and future) of Mono, .NET and open source.
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Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws. The secret legal authorization from the Justice Department originally applied to a cybersecurity pilot project in which the military monitored defense contractors' Internet links. Since then, however, the program has been expanded by President Obama to cover all critical infrastructure sectors including energy, healthcare, and finance starting June 12. All your browsing are belong to us.
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Feel your privacy slowly slipping away?
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Now you know why I do not like Obama. On most issues he is a tea party republican. At least if he was an old school republican... (are they extinct?)
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LMFAO! Not even close!
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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That's your opinion, but I find Obama to be conservative. His administration was not quick to get out what has turned out to be disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, he effectively invaded Libya that effectively just reversed who was the repressed culture, his administration continues to emphasis war on marijuana despite it being legalized in several states, he did not overturn his administration on the day after pill for teens, he supported bailing out the banks just like Bush (he effectively supports big business. His health care bill is mostly good for the insurance companies and hospitals, not the people. He also does not seem to be supporting the Hispanics in the immigration issues. Outside of his policies on discrimination, he is a conservative through and through. You give me an example outside of this where his policies have been liberal. This is just another example of his conservative side. I like the fiscal conservatives, but this tea party, or reactionary group I cannot stand, and I cannot stand Obama.
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Well this is really a conversation for the soapbox.
The problem is all the things you listed are not conservative ideals. While RINOS (Republican In Name Only) support those things, they're not truly conservative ideals. Except perhaps the supporting and being tied to big business part. The funny thing is the "Tea Party", as I understand it, is against most of the things you've enumerated.
Obama certainly is not conservative on the spending side of things, nor on many of the programs he pushes for. Most conservatives were very angry with Bush (and Congress) for the bailouts and subsidies he instigated. Same with Obama. Why, because they're not conservative, but rather liberal & socialistic.
While, I get what you're saying, most of Obama's policies are really liberal policies, including the bailouts, subsidies and Obamacare. I agree with you that it's gonna benefit insurance co's, etc (not sure about hospitals), certainly not doctors and patients.
We have a bastardization of politics here in the US. Grr.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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I think Facebook was actually created by the FBI and the CIA so that they could watch what the entire world is doing!
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We’ve just received an invite from Microsoft to an event on May 21st where it will show off the next version of its Xbox console and media box. The next version of the company’s media play has been expected for a while, especially as Sony unveiled most of its PlayStation 4 at an event a few weeks ago. The next Xbox, which is code-named Durango, has been heavily rumored to include a large focus on entertainment and television content as well as games. A new, far more sensitive Kinect sensor has also been rumored for the event. That's really all anyone knows about it. Who's ready to play?
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Not much information. Would have liked to have seen more.
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A handful of myths have become common defenses of the W3C’s plan for “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME), a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) scheme for HTML5, the next version of the markup language upon which the Web is built. These arguments obscure the threat this poses to a free and open web and why we must send a strong and clear message to the W3C and its member organizations, that DRM in HTML5 is a betrayal to all Web users and undermines the W3C’s self-stated mission.... The W3C exists to bring the vision of an undivided ‘One Web’ to its full potential, and DRM is antithetical to that goal. 3 myths about DRM in HTML debunked.
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What's the future of crowdfunding? "I definitely think crowdfunding is going to be part of gaming going forward. I really like what it's doing," said Roberts. "There's this whole idea that one thing is the dominant platform. It used to be console's in, and then console's over and it's Facebook, now Facebook's over and it's mobile, now mobile is passé and it's tablet and free-to-play. I think as the industry gets bigger and it diversifies, there's room for many different things." Crowdfunding, shorter development cycles and more targeted audiences are changing the game scene.
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