Posts by E

Dial 'M' for Microsoft's new programming language

@Brent Gardner

My money is still in the Ada pot... yay large scale, high reliability, long life projects!

Boffin brews up 'Jurassic Park' beer

"...once the patents are complete..."

WTF? They're patenting a 45 million year old yeast strain they found?? God help us all against the USPTO.

Discover a new language with our programming books offer

What about a reliable language...

...like Ada? An Ada 2005 compiler is out with a free IDE (released under GPL) at https://libre.adacore.com/gps/

NASA confirms manned mission to 10 Petaflops

"...fuel the manned missions to the moon..."

How sad that we went to the moon using slide rules and computers far, far less powerful than my HP RPN calculator. Now we require monstrous super computers to repeat something done forty years ago.

On the bright side, maybe with a few petaflops and some virtualization, NASA will be able to run *two* instances of Crysis with full graphics on.

Microsoft emails its staff to reassure Yahoos

Baffling

I'm stunned how a shareholder, or group of shareholders, could sue the company for doing their jobs... unless the board went against a *majority* vote of controlling stock. Don't like what they're doing? Vote their replacement. Or sell your stock and buy M$.

Cockwads.

Google mounts Chewbacca defense in EU privacy debate

PID Aggregation

"What happens when USA decides it can help itself to Google's data?"

You mean like how they use ChoicePoint, et al., to slide around the Privacy Act?

"Well, no, it's the *government's* system of records, it's a corporate database. They're not burdened with, er, covered under 552a USC, so don't have the same notification requirements... we're just another (biggest) customer."

Kind of stomach turning how they weasel around the spirit of the law.

Yahoo! launches! flat!-!-rate! web! hosting!

US! Only!

I imagine it's because anywhere else but the U.S. they'd get bitch-slapped hard over privacy and data retention.

NetFlix sics troops on Apple TV

@John

Intel macs aren't exactly the pinnacle of consumer quality, mate. OS is on, but hardware-wise is now the computer version of Bose... shiny, trendy case, shite components.

US Army loads up on Apples for 'better security'

Military Connectivity

@Rich:

Are you kidding? Everything is done by email, with storage and configuration management being done remotely. Check out NMCI... the world's largest intranet.

You're right. The US Gov. should get onboard with their own standards, and everything should be written in Ada for robust long-life cycle support (it's not ADA... it's a proper name, not an acronym. Named for the worlds first programmer--Augusta Ada King [née Byron], Countess of Lovelace). There was a humorous thought floated in the Ada world that M$ was just waiting for the US Gov. to contract and fund conversion of all M$ Suckware to a more robust and secure codebase under current standards (now it'd be under IEEE/EIA 12207 and specifying Ada as the HOL for use [probably Ada 2005 (ISO/IEC 8652:1995/Amd 1:2007)]). Then they get stupid amounts of money to go back and do it the right way.

DoD should just absorb the AdaOS project, which has apparently been languishing in purgatory, and develop it. Maybe get a couple of software engineers to hijack the SourceForge project, make it live again.