Posts by kirk_augustin@yahoo.com 157 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Mar 2016
You totally miss the whole point if you do not realize that ALL presidents really ARE specifically "above the law" when it comes to classified docs. That is because unlike all other laws, classified doc laws are based on an arbitrary dictatorship, and are not just the extended defense of individual rights. So all classified doc laws always have to be void when it comes to presidents. And while president, they can give themselves all the permanent copies they want, that they can keep forever.
That is ridiculous because obviously C and be memory safe because Rust is written in C and has to be.
Whether or not any code in any language is safe or not depends on if calls are being made to initialize and check pointers.
Which obviously can also be done in C or C++.
That only trick is to automate it so that people do not have to be taught how to manually do it.
C and C++ do not have to be memory unsafe since language that are memory safe are still written in C and C++.
You just have to use the memory safe checks and can do so in C or C++.
But since bad programmers are part of the problem, all you have to do is have the compiler do it for you.
All you have to invent are some new names for initializing and checking pointers.
No, C can never have a "demise" because an OS has to do things only C can do.
And it is trivial to fix C++.
All you have to do is provide an OS function that everyone uses to range check pointers before dereferencing.
I have been doing that for over 50 years and never had a problem.
The OS knows the location and size of the heap and stack, so there should be no problem.
If buffer overruns are the concern, it seems to me sizeof() works to tell you the length of the buffer, so a validation call should be easy to make?
If you can turn off the safety, then why bother ever having it on? You have to develop your own safety for an operating system, so you are better off never bothering with some poor imitation by the compiler, that you will have to turn off sometimes anyway. C is perfectly safe as long as you know what you are doing. There are some tricks to learn about how to use it safely, but there is no way to do all the things that have to be done and still have a compiler run the safety. Safety has to be hardware dependent.
There is no way to make any operating system safe by imposing strict compile time limitations. And I think it is impossible for Rust to do what any operating system needs to be able to do.
There are times you need to do things like execute hardware jump tables. Anyone who thinks you can make things like that safe, has never written an operating system.
As far as the risks C presents, it is easily fixed by setting all pointers to null ahead of time, checking for null pointers before de-referencing, and tracking all dynamic allocations.
It is trivial to make C the perfect operating system language. And there is no way to make it better.
Nor it is trivial to mix languages. It is bad enough ensuring you get the right compiler version for 1 language, much less more than one.
The people who would be alternative fab customers would not be competitors but instead would be GPU, cellphone cpu, and others that have totally different requirements.
So spinning off the fab is a great idea. Lithography is the one thing Intel is really good at. CPU design, not so much. In fact, if Intel had kept up on their CPU design, GPUs would not ever have existed.
They would be redundant.
The crash was not caused by a software glitch, but broken teeth in a gearbox.
On a normal helicopter that would not cause a crash and you would just freewheel until you auto gyro to the ground. But when you have 2 engines and one is thrusting while the other is freewheeling, then a crash is inevitable.
Ospreys are totally unreliable. Two engines ensures they will all crash eventually since all engines eventually will fail, and a mismatch of one running while one is not running will cause an Osprey to immediately spin and crash. The only way to prevent that is by synching the 2 propellers on the same engine with drive shafts and bevel gears. But then you have a whole different vehicle.
There is nothing wrong with a tilting rotor design, but you have to run them from the same engine, with drive shafts and right-angle bevel gears. If each rotor has its own engine, you not only double the source of failure, but cause a failure to immediately be so asymmetric as to not be survivable. An Osprey will immediately crash if one engine does out.
.NET can't be written in C# since .NET requires hooks into the OS. C# is interpreted at run time, so can't have anything to do with the OS.
Delphi cannot be written in Delphi and Go cannot be written in Go.
You cannot make memory safe language with a memory safe compiler.
It's not possible. A compiler has to have the lowest level, direct address access.
The idea Rust is more memory safe than C or C++ is foolish. Rust itself has to be written in C. In fact, all drivers and operating systems have to be written in C.
All you have to do is store information about the memory allocations, check for null pointers and length of allocated space, and there is no problem.
But there is no way Rust could be used to do things like access hardware registers. Only C can do that, and it will always be that way.
Economic sanctions violate the 1906 Geneva Conventions and are totally illegal. Being Finnish, Linus should know that Kyiv used to be the capital of Russia, and that Kyiv was illegally invaded by the evil Polish empire around 1700. The fact Kyiv is now mostly ethnic Polish does not mean the Ukraine is. Does anyone expect Russia to allow NATO nukes to be installed along its border?
Wrong. Fuel cells are expensive, but less than lithium batteries, and much lighter as well. And also much quicker to refill.
EV efficiency is only about 12% because you failed to include the fact generating electricity is only 50% efficient, power grids lose at least 10%, charging batteries and discharging batteries each drop 10%, and carrying a ton of batteries loses 50%, and converting electricity back to kinetic energy is only about 50% efficient.
There are catalysts that make hydrogen production much more efficient than generating electricity.
And storage of compressed hydrogen is far more efficient than lugging around a ton of heavy batteries.
Retrieving electricity from batteries and converting it to kinetic energy is less than 50% efficient, while burning hydrogen is more than 50% efficient.
Burning hydrogen only produces water and it far better for the environment that burning fossil fuels to create electricity.
Totally wrong. Fuel cells do not need charging at all. And charging lithium batteries is less than 90% efficient. Discharging lithium batteries is less than 90% efficient. Carrying around a ton of batteries is less the 50% efficient. Converting electricity to kinetic energy is only about 50% efficient.
Storage in compressed hydrogen tanks is almost 100% efficient.
That makes no sense at all. Hydrogen is the cleanest to produce and is least wasteful. With EVs you have the inefficiencies of carrying, charging, and discharging batteries, which waste more than half the energy. Not to mention battery fires. Burning hydrogen uses almost half the electricity of batteries.
Totally wrong. EVs are the most inherently inefficient. Generating electricity is only 50% efficient. Transmitting electricity loses 10%. Charging batteries loses 10%. Discharging batteries loses 10%. And carrying half a ton of batteries loses another 30%. Converting electricity back to kinetic energy loses another 50%.
And you clearly are totally wrong to claim ethanol or hydrogen will never be used successfully because they have been for decades.
Brazil has been running ethanol for over 50 years, and Iceland has been running hydrogen for 30 years.
They are far more efficient than electricity.
Ethanon or methanol is burned not used on fuel cells. Since it is a biofuel, it absorbs more carbon while growing, than later released when burned. So there is zero emissions from burning biofuels like ethanol or methanol.
And no, EV sales are not just "leveling off". They are decreasing after all the fires, dead batteries, slow charges, long recharge waits, etc.
Fuel cells are not at all "picky", and while they run only on hydrogen, that is easily installed since hydrogen stations are self contained and only require electricity. In contrast, the existing electric grid is totally insufficient for any amount of EVs. You have to spend $20k on solar in order to make batteries work. It is much easier to run heavy wires to a few hydrogen stations than it is to run heavy wires to every home that has an EV.
ISIS did not exist until Obama let go the Sunni Iraqi that Bush had illegally imprisoned. But these angry young Iraqis had no money, weapons, or jobs anymore. Suddenly they had new Toyota trucks, and lots of new weapons. So where did they get all this stuff from? When we look at what Ambassador Stevens was doing in Benghazi, apparently it was to have a CIA annex full of cash and weapons, for absolutely no reason. The coincidence is very suspicious.
Wrong. The local dealers are who provide the profits to the parent company, so then the state can easily force the car makers to change.
But all the car makers have to do is admit they are logging private messages with a disclaimer sticker warning sticker.
There would no longer be any harm to sue over if the users had been appropriately warned.
It is fine for phones, cars, networks, sites, etc., to save copies of things you enter, but they should warn you if they are going to be controlled by someone else.
The expectation people have is privacy of communications to another individual, so keeping and using those messages to others is a violation of the privacy the owner assumed.
The fact they assumed incorrectly is not their fault.
The perception is phone calls and messages expected to be private.
So the problem is the car companies did not provide the appropriate warnings that privacy is not maintained.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
