Posts by Paddy 108 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Aug 2006
Have we done enough research to build safer nuclear plants? I know the lead-time is shot, but if we 're going to build nuclear, then I'd rather we used something safer.
This is your article from 2013! We should have had many more thorium reactors by now.
https://www.theregister.com/2013/09/27/someone_must_have_a_thorium_reactor/
Saving your work for later was always either a consideration of the programmer or a failure of the computer.
I learnt to code, one night a week on Trent Poly's minicomputer, saving my work between sessions on paper tape. Later it was casette tape for the first home computers.
You quiockly learnt how crucial it was to save your work between accesses to the computers. Basics ability to run without learning about files is a non-feature as soon as you leave the showroom because you need to save your work so you quickly learn about how to use the non-volatile storage provided.
There was an earlier blog post about similar pressures put on open-source maintainers. I replied in Redditt that if they, (the pushy, demanding requestor), wasn't pleased with the support then they could always fork-off!
I've never had to say that in real life as I chose to contribute to Rosettacode.org where I knew that support is limited by the nature of that web site, and I could contribute in the time I was willing to allocate.
Expend more of the computers capacity in making programming higher-level, simpler, and more correct for us.
For example I state that I need to access this data in a sorted order, and the compiler might suggest a first data structure and sort algorithm, but feedback from subsequent runs could change that, improving the performance over time. The compiler would be free to use insertion sort as the data is read in - or instead sort before this use; or sort as part of an intermediate action.
Parallisation should also be automated based on examination of un-or-part-parallised source.
Use the AI to allow us to think bigger, successfully!
The other day I caught the BBC heading a news section by calling the return of the Starliner "a success".
Only later did it fill in the less than optimal details.
I watched Carol Vorderman's critique of TV at the Edinburgh TV Festival, too. Yes you do have to find multiple TV news sources online, and cross-check; but I too have less trust in TV news now.
"In highlighting the need to understand the requirements before development begins, the research charts a path between Agile purists and Waterfall advocates."
Get that spec. but understand that it can change because of, as well as during, code development. You need to be agile enough to asses possible updates to the spec and keep everyone on track to the latest agreed spec update. Requirements may change. The design flow is not some software package or holy software tome
"Drafting software that their mechanical engineers wrote"
Software engineers know software. Given a Mechanical engineer who can program and has the problem, then he may well write a bug-free program that will get the task done. Transferring the knowledge to the software engineer is time-consuming and error prone, but likely to produce a much better GUI.
Python *is* also a scripting language. It can be embedded and can embed code written other languages, and in ways that make such code accessible in a Pythonic manner.
Data scientists and those in AI for example need very fast processing, often provided by specific hardware whose vendors go to the trouble of integrating them with Python as a way of making their hardware accessible. Coders write Python for access to the speed they need.
Doctor, doctor, it hurts if I use this core!
Then use one of your millions of others?
But I need all that I buy!
Then buy safer, ASIL D, automotive spec chips.
But they cost more!
So you're cheap? NEXT!
Chip lifetime bathtub curves are statistical in nature. When you run that many cpu's, their occasional failures might be expected; and failures don't need to be reproducible.
If a company porposefully bakes its known "1900 is a leap year" bug into its Office open XML "standard" , then shame on those who ratified the standard and shame on those who entrust their data to a company who flagrantly ignores its bugs rather than fixing them.
Spreadsheets are as attractive as sirens; but more perilous!
> "hacky scripty language’s like Python that pay no regard whatsoever to how the underlying hardware works"
Read the groups frequented by the C'Python core devolopers and you would see your error. Read up about Timsort and you would find that those core develppers also look above the hardware at how the language and its libraries are used and optimise that too.
You may suffer from a narrow view of "to optimise" not shared by all.
Those same MIT professors should progress to *wrapping* their orders of magnitude faster solution so it becomes simply callable from Python. That would then allow other scientists and engineers to benefit from superfast matrix multiplication with the ease of a Python function call. It's how peole get things done in, for example, data-science in simple "Python" without having to now the intricate details of all of the libraries they are using.
They have moved on from the problems of a couple of decades ago when C and Fortran ruled.
Why did you expect that allocated memory to be all zeros, again?
You only ever used 5 letter names, which dumbo would have tried to use more than 10?
Are you sure <insert complex pointer arithmatic> does what you think it should?
Progress, yah!
| "Basically, what we tried to show is that using Stack Overflow without reviewing it carefully can lead to potential vulnerabilities inside applications,"
It seems the rate of misuse of bad code was low. A more positive headline of something like "Most Github projects avoid using SO code with known vulnerabilities" seems to be less desirable.
I have both answered questions and got questions answered on SO.The worst problem is those thankless takers who don't even bother to aknowledge any answer, they just disappear leaving readers/helpers with no idea if any of the solutions were appropriate.
I try and write good questions - some times it's easy as in when I had a short Python function and asked if a numpy guru could make it faster for me. I got four answers from one guy and one from another, so slotted in my own data and posted timings and my thoughts on how their examples might fit my use case, as well as selecting an answer to close the SO question. I tried to give back something to those who took their time to answer me; in a way that I had found useful in the past.
Open source doesn't work when too many take.
After creating ways to measure this kind of issue in an automotive processor, as well as novel design tools to allow us to design in such a way that resultant systems can be demonstrated to be at the required safety level for ISO26262, I must say that I didn't expect to read about what I thought was a specialist area in the Register.
"two fully independent math processors on board which both receive full video from the car and make their own independent evaluations before another part of the system compares them to make sure they match. "
Are they running the same software?
How do they avoid the Boeing effect: Self-certification of safety and business pressures work against each other.
Maybe directors need to be in the chair from Marathon Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzw1_2b-I7A
MKBHD on Youtube has more details on the zoom feature here: https://youtu.be/0O4_EAGNg7k?t=141
I'll take a different view than the author of this Register article: I think that the true zoom, and how it is integrated into the phone's form-factor is *very* innovative. They have matched it with very good stabilisation to make high-zoom useable too, it seems.
I would expect github has an API for data extraction. I would hope that this second team of researchers also created a Jupyter notebook (In Python, of course), able to reproduce the statistical results they mention. (At some snapshot in time). This should help in later reproducibility issues and allow a new group of researchers to spend more time on criticising methodology, or showing later github trends.
In the 19 century the UK had laws ( http://mentalfloss.com/article/71555/ridiculous-uk-traffic-laws-yore), restricting the first motorcars: 2 miles and hour in town; Have a man walking in front waving a flag at all times...
We progressed from that. We need strict rules, for autonomous cars now, but hopefully, we will look back at them as being draconian and/or silly as we are chauffeured around autonomously as routine, with huge benefits to society.
The government might need to aso ensure that customers can make software updates when a car manufacturer decides to "play dirty". I the Car's entertainment system software is updated , but a similar car with the same entertainment software package is not updated due to the company ceasing upgrades to that particular model; would it be allowed to update that software manually?
How do customers avoid "planned" auto obsolescense by not making software updates updates available to some car models?
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