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Kent Sharkey wrote: debating is still a thing?
Shall we...oh, never mind! 
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Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Harish Natarajan
feh.
I'd eat 'im for breakfast.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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A recent blog article discussed the fact that 70% of all security bugs in Microsoft products are due to memory safety vulnerabilities. A lot of the comments I’ve seen on social media boil down to “The problem isn’t the use of a memory unsafe language, but that the programmers who wrote this code are bad.” How about, "both bad coders and unsafe languages"?
To some definition of "unsafe languages"
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Kent Sharkey wrote: How about, "both bad coders and unsafe languages"?
I look at the world differently. I see "unsafe coders and bad languages." 
Latest Article - Slack-Chatting with you rPi
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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The language may be "memory unsafe" but that does not mean the software you write has to be. In a domain that is sensitive to security issues you should code defensively.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Sean Griffin wrote: A lot of the comments I’ve seen on social media boil down to “The problem isn’t the use of a memory unsafe language, but that the programmers who wrote this code are bad.”
The problem in that comment is one of "I don't know what I'm doing", as previously stated.
Inventing terms to cover one's inadequacies is reprehensible behaviour: There is no such thing as a "memory unsafe" language.
There are, however, programmers who don't know how to handle memory efficiently and effectively.
Programmers who do know how to work with memory do so better than automated memory-clean-up routines.
Mr. Griffin can whine and wail as much as he likes, but defending -- and even promoting -- incompetence will never sit well, with me.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Respectfully, I completely disagree.
Many languages make it impossible to have the sort of memory errors that proliferate in C/C++ code bases. Either through use of Garbage Collection (Java,C#,etc.) or through other techniques (such as Rust's protections against memory errors).
It is common for developers to blame memory errors on bad programmers, but very few developers evaluate themselves as one of those programmers. This is evidently untrue - O/S are typically developed by some of the best developers around, and yet they frequently have these kind of issues. To blame it on incompetence is, itself, a sign of incompetency in my eyes.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Rob Grainger wrote: I completely disagree.
Fair enough; I won't try to change the educated opinion of an experienced person.
But I grew up with languages that are off-handedly called "memory unsafe" by the article, so I had to learn how to use, allocate, and clean out registers as a part of the task of coding.
It is detailed, finicky work, true, but almost all coding is detailed, finicky work.
IMO, therefore, anyone who works with such a language should learn to do the same, just as one should learn everything that is required knowledge for using any language.
My biggest reason by far for being hostile toward the article is that the writer is calling languages "memory unsafe", a very insulting and inaccurate term, because he has not learned how to handle memory.
It's like saying "Computers are useless because I don't know how to use a computer!"
The problem lies within him, not within the languages.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I agree. There's a difference between incompetence and being fallible.
Also, in my experience, I've found that the best programmers around me (i.e., who are much better than myself) are delighted at having either libraries or languages that free them from this bookkeeping. The ones who think it's easy tend to write buggy code!
We have a similar issue with concurrency and distributed computing, which are also being abstracted away via languages such as Rust, Go, Pony and Actor Model frameworks. You still have to think but at a level that's closer to the relevant business problem you're trying to solve.
Kevin
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Kevin McFarlane wrote: Also, in my experience, I've found that the best programmers around me (i.e., who are much better than myself) are delighted at having either libraries or languages that free them from this bookkeeping. The ones who think it's easy tend to write buggy code!
I am not that good and agree with this comment. But I agree with @Mark-Wallace too.
Just a consideration...
Only because really good programmers (I trust your criteria) are delighted to have that tools, it doesn't mean the previous language is "unsafe". If you or the article would have called it "not comfortable" or even an "elephanting PITA" I would totally agree and probably @Mark-Wallace too.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Email provider VFEmail said it has suffered a catastrophic destruction of all of its servers by an unknown assailant who wiped out almost two decades' worth of data and backups in a matter of hours. Something something something backups
Yeah, they got the backup server, but I could have sworn "multiple backups, including off-site" *might* have been pretty likely for this business scenario?
Which brings a question - "Hey @chris-maunder, how are your backups tonight?"
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If you rely on GPS then make a note of 6 April 2019 in your calendar because it's the date that the GPS Week Rollover occurs, and it could cause some GPS receivers to malfunction. "So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999"
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I hear that all police leave has been cancelled, and that entire police forces will be out on the streets -- for people to ask them for directions.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Why even count weeks? Why not count the day of the year or something like that? Weeks seem to be a very arbitrary unit of measure that don't even fit evenly into a year, leap or not.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Probably to expedite communication (satellites are and especially were farking slow) and computation, since positioning data won't change much daily but will have an effect weekly. In fact my old GPS had a QuickGPSFix release each week.
GCS d--(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--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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All units of measurement are arbitrary (I've done mind-boggling presentations on this), so it doesn't really matter which one you choose.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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stackify said: Customers love Amazon Web Services (AWS). There is no doubt about that. The segment earned a profit of more than $3 billion on revenues of more than $12 billion for the full year of 2016.
Revenues are a poor indicator of customer satisfaction, in tech services, especially "new" tech, like cloud services.
Their revenues are going up for three reasons:
0. More companies are being conned into using cloud services
1. Their psychopathic boss was hailed as being the world's richest man, and lots of the people who impose choices on IT matters aspire to that
2. Related to 2: the choice of external IT services and products is rarely made by the people who have to maintain and use the services/products, especially in larger companies -- and aws has shinier ads, to attract the non-technically-minded
If you think that revenues mean customer satisfaction, think oracle. That will put paid to such silly notions.
One thing that the article misses is amazon's recent decision to build its own database solution, based on an old version of the open-source database they used previously.
I would suggest that security problems are more likely to arise from using an older version, which has not had a few years' worth of updates.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Love the zero-indexed list! C coders of the world unite and take over!
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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PeejayAdams wrote: and take cover
FTFY 
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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PeejayAdams wrote: Love the zero-indexed list!
That's pretty much become the rule, in CP, unless you use the ol and li tags.
I picked up on it because @JSOP always used zero-based, and it felt like the right thing to do*.
* And because I can't type and dodge bullets at the same time
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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In my limited experience (home use) Azure is far easier to use, as in I could actually do something! With AWS I failed miserably.
Kevin
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None the less, revenue is a better tool for comparison than the garbage fire of an article.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing 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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I can't argue with that.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The reality is that it's more about perception than, um, reality. And my perception is that AWS is far superior. One of the primary reasons for that perception is that AWS offered a one year free tier which perfectly suited my needs. At the time (and I think this is still true) Microsoft didn't/doesn't. Initially, Azure seemed like a "me too!!!!" knee-jerk reaction to AWS's success. I don't like "me too!!!!" companies.
Conversely (another thing that post didn't mention) is documentation. In my experience, the documentation for AWS truly sucks. Finding an answer ends up being a circular maze of page after page where nothing actually answers my question. I found this to be particularly true when trying to figure out why I was still being charged for a closed account (turned out I had another open account that I'd forgotten about.) But the same goes for technical questions -- I often find pages that are obsolete and nobody has removed.
And what about customer service? When I contacted Amazon, I never got the issue resolved because the account in question, which they could see, couldn't be cancelled because it required "verification" from me. Which meant that at a minimum, they had to verify the callback number I had listed on the account. The problem is, I'd moved, gotten a new home number, and obviously had never updated my account information. So while they could see it, there was no way I could convince them that I was I because the callback number didn't work.
So, back to perception. My perception now is that AWS, holistically, pretty much sucks and my perception of cloud computing in general has soured. Which is why I cancelled all my accounts and host my web sites at home, myself. In the end, that's cheaper and just as fast. I'm not concerned about the very rare downtime due to power outages (the server is a laptop, the router and cable boxes are on battery backup) and if the site goes down for a couple hours, nobody is going to care.
Obviously, if I were a company where I needed the services that cloud computing offered, that would be a different story, and again perception kicks in -- I would still go with AWS.
Latest Article - Slack-Chatting with you rPi
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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