Posts by Daft Quant 5 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2017
The Home office is asking for a back-door to data which has been secured by Apple's encryption. Does this mean that all data on Apple's cloud will be insecure and that big brother could look at anything he wants to? No, of course not. Data will only be insecure if users only rely on Apple's encryption. If users are willing to think outside the Apple ecosystem there is no security issue. If they have data they need to secure on the Apple cloud all they need to do is encrypt it with an alternative encryption scheme that Apple does not control.
I would imagine most serious criminal would know this. So the government's proposed action is not going to be particularly effective. It will only catch dumb criminals who can't imagine using a product that Apple does not control.
The claims of greater productivity with Rust (compared to C++) may be due to the large number of modules which can be downloaded and used seamlessly. But there are plenty of class libraries for C++ too.
However, I think one the reasons why Rust appears to shine is because It is harder to code. It deters weaker programmers. Better programmers are more productive both in terms of what they produce and in terms of what they can share with others to improve the productivity of others.
When interviewing job applicants for C++ roles I quickly realised there were two sorts of programmers who claimed to be C++ coders. The better category of these programmers were those who fully understood the language and the underlying memory model on which it depended on.
The other category were those that were happy developing within a C++ framework that other better programmers had set up. These C++ frameworks can hide many more complicated aspects of design from these types of developers. For example, the use of smart pointers to save these developers from worrying about memory issues. If these coders were ever to write new classes, they would be 'boiler-plate' code from a standard prototype for the framework.
Within organisations these types of coders can write mediocre code protected by C++'s "smoke and mirrors". This code is potentially dangerous if they fall foul of one of C++'s many subtleties. In interviews I would try and separate these types of candidates by asking them to write a simple string class. This would give an insight as to whether they thought about memory management or thread safety.
Rust will give you a really bad experience if you do not understand the basics. Discouraging bad programmers is a good thing. However, I would be surprised if Rust ever becomes close to being the most widely-used language. There are too many bad coders out there ....
These scenarios crop up all the time in football. A manager spends many millions of pounds on a foreign player that he believes will be the key to the team's success (and the fans think "Why are they spending so much money on that guy?"). Sometimes it works. But all too frequently you see that player failing to live up to expectations and spending a large part of his time sitting on the bench.
Normally, however you would expect the team buying the player to bother to look at the medical report before buying. Sometimes it turns out that overpriced players are bought because the manager buying the player somehow gets a bung.
I went into my local (St Albans) Virgin shop last year and was offered a connection speed of 200 megabytes per second. I said that was unfeasibly large, and that they probably meant 200 megabits per second. The member of staff (who I later found was the manager that day) assured me I was incorrect and it was really 200 megabytes/s. I asked to see the literature and that said 200 Mb/s rather than 200 MB/s. When I explained that that confirmed it was 200 megabits/s, she said it was a printing mistake and it really was 200 megabytes/s. At this time several other colleagues of hers came round and confirmed it as 200 megabytes/s (though one did ask what the difference was between a bit and a byte).
I complained to Virgin, and they said they would train their staff better. However, this year I was stopped in the street by a Virgin salesperson and asked if I changed to Virgin I would get 200 megabytes/s.
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