Posts by DrXym

Re: And.... "He's Fired"

Also the world's biggest hypocrite. Free speech is fine when he's the one saying something inane and stupid. Free speech is not fine for anyone else pointing out what he said was inane and stupid.

Re: Maybe I'm missing something

Your question makes no sense. Safe languages are intended to stop exploits and instability caused by C/C++ like buffer over/underflows, race conditions etc. No language to my knowledge can stop code from making general application logic errors but neither the NSA or the safe languages themselves are even claiming they can.

Re: Crap unsafe software can be written in any language...

Rust is safe by default. You'd have to be determinedly bad at programming to want to wrap everything in unsafe for no reason. The purpose of unsafe in the language is for interface boundaries with the operating system or other languages. e.g. to call a function in C, or to be called by C.

Re: Crap unsafe software can be written in any language...

The difference is a crap programmers and crap software get a lot further in C or C++ than they should. If you write crap in Rust the compiler will kick your ass and then helpfully explain why it's not going to compile your code. In C/C++ the compiler won't care and that bug might go all the way to production which not only degrades the quality of the code, puts security at risk and makes it harder to identify and fix after the fact.

This is why the NSA and others are pushing hard on using a safe languages.

Re: Really ?

I maintain a very large piece of code and I have a total of THREE unsafe blocks. All three of them are small blocks of code to do with a padding function I am in OpenSSL where it does stuff to memory buffers.

That means if I suffer an NPE I know exactly where it is. The rest of the code which is tens of thousands of lines has no unsafe code at all although some of the crates undoubtedly do, mostly to wrap and call C and native OS APIs.

Re: Better compilers?

It's quite easy to enforce assuming all your code was C++ 20 in the first place and *only* using the safe constructs. Back in the real world C++ source code isn't like that and never will be.

Re: Well

The CVE database is an excellent place to highlight the stupidity of people defending C (or C++). Look at the Linux kernel CVEs and the majority are for things like double free, call after free, buffer overflow, data race etc. I think we can all agree that the kernel devs are at the top of their game, probably knowing more about C than anyone else and yet the majority of their bugs are caused by the language it is written in.

Re: Wrong

I've used boost for years and it's a really useful addition but neither boost nor the compiler will care if you remember to lock access to shared data. The usual way is to create a mutex and lock it from the block where the data is accessed, but nothing will complain if you don't.

By contrast in Rust you *can't* share data between threads unless you either send it to the other thread, or use reference counting and a mutex / rwlock. You can't even access the data without acquiring the lock first.

Re: Better compilers?

C++ went some way to help with safety. Smart pointers for example. But it's still incredibly easy to screw up in C++ and the compiler won't care. It's all very well to blame "rubbish programmers" but the world is filled with mediocre and crap programmers and the programming language isn't doing all it could to beat some sense into the code they write. This is why *everyone* is looking at safer alternatives these days. Rust would be a prime example but NVidia has SPARK, Google has Carbon plus there are other modern programming languages that will unwind in a graceful way rather than crash or be exploited by C++.

Re: Better compilers?

The simple reason it can't be enforced by C/C++ compilers is because not a single C/C++ file would ever compile if they did. Nor do the languages give the compiler the contextual information necessary to enforce safety. Compilers could certainly get stricter by default, or do some lite static analysis but it's not going to hold a candle to what the Rust compiler would do by way of example.

Re: So reassuring

If I was employed by Twitter, and forced to work in the office I would work the exact amount of hours under my contract and I would leave exactly on the minute. And I would also be looking for another job.

Re: Power steering

Not all cars have direct mechanical linkage for the wheel, throttle or even brakes. You might be stepping on the pedal and a hydraulic action is just feeding a value to a sensor which controls the action. Steer-by-wire has happened too but it's rare, mostly in racing vehicles.

Re: Maybe the roads will last longer

Perhaps the average is skewed by all those stupidly large trucks that are so popular over.

Re: Maybe the roads will last longer

Well it definitely screws tyres up if you use it when your car is stationary. When you're rolling it shouldn't unless you went full lock at 1kmh or something.

Re: Autononmous cars

Get an uber/taxi then if you're too good for the bus.

Re: Autononmous cars

Autonomous vehicles that can haul your ass home without any intervention are still a long way off. As demonstrated by "full self drive" which can barely drive properly in normal road conditions under human supervision without doing something alarming.

The average person on the street would imagine Tesla's "autopilot" to be an autonomous car of some sort. They aren't going to understand the nuances or limitations of such a system.

Tesla were lying by omission by using the term and not educating people on the limitations. Even worse, they didn't even force the driver's attention to mitigate against consequences. So of *course* people started doing stopped paying attention to the roads to look at their phones, the pretty clouds and them BAM.

They're probably trying to pitch these garbage phones at crypto bros and Nigerian scammers who like to be pictured flashing cash and posing in front of fast cars.

Re: Most of those red flags are complete nonsense

Even if you use LinkedIn it doesn't mean you want to everyone to know your business, or enjoy the flow of unsolicited contacts. I get multiple InMails a week from recruiters spamming me about some job or another. I haven't gone private simply because I enjoy wasting their InMail points, but I can see how someone else could.

Re: Scout is obsolete

Flying drones are even more problematic. They'd to subject to aviation law, unable to land / hover in a lot of places, useless without a convenient delivery spot, a danger to the public, can't carry much payload, risk hit pylons, unable to fly in weather, a noise nuisance and would probably drop out of the skies from time to time. And if they ever deliver food you'd better believe the seagulls would figure how to knock them out of the skies.

They probably have a niche role, but I doubt to the extent that they could operate in the mainstream.

Re: This may come back to bite Google eventually

Google Graveyard (https://killedbygoogle.com/) is filled with dead Google products.

Some of them got killed because Google launched something else that superceded them. But all too often Google just shat out some half-assed product and rather than perform the remedial steps they just kill it off.

Stadia falls in that camp. It was a bad idea from its inception and they never did anything substantive to fix it.

Re: Failed because failure was expected?

Aside from brief lifespan it didn't really have any of those problems. It was just a really boring, barebones, gaming platform which didn't have much to recommend it.

Re: Countries need to start taxing TDP or some other metric

"Or some other metric". Find some way of quantifying a computer electronic's energy efficiency within its class and then punitively start hitting the worst offenders.

It is absolutely plain to see that the likes of Intel, AMD, Nvidia et al are greedily going after the crypto miners with their most recent products and it is not something that should be allowed to slip by unchallenged by governments during an energy crisis.

Re: Third party "displays causing artificial issues, disabled features, and warning messages"

I normally just buy industry standard kit. I upgraded my main machine recently by swapping out the board, memory & CPU for something new while saving the case, PSU and graphics card.

I did buy a Dell once for home use. I was blissfully unaware that they'd deliberately hobble the thing by using non-standard form factors & PSU. It wasn't like it was lacking for space either, being a midi but it wasn't ATX, mini ATX or ITX so when it died, that was the end of the whole lot.