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The government would prefer it if you stopped programming tools in C or C++. In a new report, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) has called on developers to use "memory-safe programming languages," a category which excludes the popular languages. The advice is part of U.S. President Biden's Cybersecurity strategy and is a move to "secure the building blocks of cyberspace." Memory safety refers to protection from bugs and vulnerabilities which deal with memory access. Buffer overflows and dangling pointers are examples of this. Java is considered a memory-safe language due to its runtime error detection...

‘Leave the World Behind’ is a reminder to fortify your family and not surrender to the fear porn. Warning: Spoilers ahead. Netflix’s Michelle and Barack Obama-produced movie “Leave the World Behind,” which is currently the most-watched film on the platform, is fomenting a lot of fear on the internet. The dystopian movie chronicles the Sanford family’s fight for survival in the wake of a cyberattack. The middle-aged mother, Amanda, father, Clay, and their 16-year-old son, Archie, and 13-year-old daughter, Rose, live in New York City but happen to be on a spontaneous holiday in Long Island for most of the...

Who would you trust more in a high-stress, high-stakes military excursion? A trained human soldier with the limitations of hunger, thirst, lack of sleep, and emotion—or a soulless, autonomous artificial intelligence system acting according to its programming? That’s a question militaries around the world—including the US military—are already facing as AI quickly advances into every industry. But the big question is this: who gets to do the programming? So what exactly is autonomous AI when it comes to the military? Well, according to a Christian Post article, the Congressional Research Service states these are: a special class of weapon systems...

During the period when social media was increasingly putting pressure on legacy media outlets, driving down their profits, a phrase crept into the national lexicon. “Learn to code.” While it was no doubt said in a derisive or at least humorous fashion by most, it carried an underlying assumption that most people accepted. Perhaps you should learn to code. That’s where the jobs of the future would be. But the period when that will be true may turn out to have a much shorter lifespan than anticipated. The rise of Artificial Intelligence and chatbot apps is already automating the work...

Can you predict the fate of following 8 programming languages: Java, Javascript, Python, C++, C#, Kotlin, Go, PHP?1. Java is the de facto enterprise standard. Having worked in some large enterprises, I know they are absolutely resistant to quick change and will keep Java for decades, like they did with COBOL. Java comes with enterprise and team features that other languages envy. 2. Javascript: depends on Web Assembly and transpilers. Even today, you can write in PHP and transpile in Javascript. It could become “the new JVM”, that is something that gets less used over time but everything use it...

NBC is considering reducing the number of hours it programs in prime time, people familiar with the matter said, a cost-cutting move that would reflect broadcast television’s diminishing popularity. Under the scenario being discussed, NBC would stop programming the 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. hour and give those seven hours per week to local TV stations to program, the people said. The talks are preliminary and it is possible that NBC will decide to continue to program the 10 p.m. hour, one of the people said. NBC hasn’t officially discussed the matter with its affiliate board, a group that represents...

The basic need is not that of changing all file names (multi commander has that in the menu) but that of changing the case of all the characters within a text that begin with http and end with html. The situational context (take deep breath) is of html files which used to work on a Windows server, but being now on a Linux server which are case sensitive - and with a unresolvable glitch (read on), then it seems that unless one can edit a server's httpd.conf then clicking on a link that begins with a upper case letter can...

It’s the programming equivalent of the circle of life: programming languages are created, gain popularity, hit their peak, and slowly degrade until nobody uses them anymore. With some languages, this process is fairly rapid, especially if the language in question never sees much adoption; others are decades old and still going strong.For developers, knowing which languages will fade is a crucial issue: It’s hard to earn money off programming in a language that nobody really uses anymore. Here are five languages that won’t disappear tomorrow, but the long-term trends definitely don’t look good.R In the TIOBE Index, R has tumbled...

At Code Platoon, we track national demand for programming languages so that our Veterans and military spouses are trained with the best tools for a career in software development. When you’re deciding which programming language to learn, the following demand-based insights complement a much broader strategy.We first wrote a version of this article in 2018, which can be found here.This article attempts to answer which programming languages command the highest salaries and are most frequently targeted in job postings.We updated the statistics for 2020, and here are our primary findings:Python and Javascript developers continue to be in demand, commanding the...

CNN was slammed for allowing airtime to an “anti-racism” activist who declared that white children “don’t deserve innocence.” Activist and author Tim Wise gave a bigoted lesson to CNN viewers this week on the guilt of “white privilege” and how white parents can properly be an ally of “anti-racists.” ... “One of my children’s teachers sent all parents a letter yesterday. And it was a link to this article,” co-host Poppy Harlow said on “CNN Newsroom,” referring to an article about discussing white privilege with the young. “When should parents do this with their kids and how?” “Well you know,...

Early in the Wuhan virus’s trajectory, the British government announced that it was going to go for a herd immunity approach (that is, the approach Sweden eventually used). Because the government is Tory, the left-leaning media insisted this would kill every Briton.These arguments gained weight when epidemiologist Neil Ferguson introduced his model showing that anything other than a total lockdown would kill over 500,000 Britons and 2.2 million Americans. Britain and America instantly stopped in their tracks. Only now, months later, are we learning that Ferguson’s model was a buggy mess. The British Telegraph reports that the disgraced epidemiologist,...

BBC- Larry Tesler, an icon of early computing, has died at the age of 74. Mr Tesler started working in Silicon Valley in the early 1960s, at a time when computers were inaccessible to the vast majority of people. It was thanks to his innovations - which included the "cut", "copy" and "paste" commands - that the personal computer became simple to learn and use. =================================================================== RIP Larry Tesler: The Man That Invented Cut, Copy, And Paste On The Computer. Ernie Banks once said "The measure of a man is in the lives he's touched". Which means Larry Tesler is...

Your brain is not just produced by your genes; it’s sculpted by a lifetime of experiences. Experience alters brain activity, which changes gene expression. Any behavioural changes you see reflect alterations in the brain. The opposite is also true: behaviour can change the brain. When we first learn a new motor skill, it seems impossible until practice – repetition – changes the brain. The brain remains ‘plastic’ throughout life, but trajectories are set during the prenatal period and early childhood. Brain development is very rapid in the womb and continues at an accelerated rate in the first two to three...

COBOL is celebrating 60 years since its specifications were signed off. Darling of Y2K consultants, the language is rapidly approaching pensionable age, but many a greybeard owes their career to it. It arose from a desire to create a language that could straddle the computers of the era. Each manufacturer had its own way of working, which, while OK if a company always stuck with one maker, made portability of programs or skills a tad tricky. If only there was, say, a COmmon Business-Oriented Language? Wouldn't that be splendid? Mary Hawes, a programmer of Burroughs machines, put forward a proposal...

On 27 April, before he burst into a San Diego synagogue and opened fire, killing one worshipper and injuring three more, the gunman said goodbye to the community that radicalised him. “It’s been real dudes,” he posted on the far-right politics board, /pol/, on the image-posting site 8chan. “I’ve only been lurking for a year and a half, yet what I’ve learned here is priceless.” The story was familiar. Six weeks earlier, a 28-year-old had killed 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Before starting his attack, he, too, had posted on 8chan’s /pol/ board. “It’s been a...

Enough with "learn to code."  As this article points out, that's terrible advice.  Coding isn't beanbag, and if you don't have a problem-solving mindset, you won't be good at it.  It's like telling people to buy power tools and become home-renovators.  Having a tool doesn't inform you about when and how to apply it. What's the problem we are trying to solve here?  Is it to meet a need for more coders or to provide a way for unemployed people to earn a good wage?  I expect that it is the latter, so let's ask: do we need more software developers and software engineers?  We already have many...

Three 15-year-old girls in Idaho have penned an open letter supporting Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when the two were teenagers. The letter, created Wednesday by teenagers who identify themselves as Layla, Charlotte and Jessica, is being driven by Change.org, a website that allows people to start and sign petitions that “call for social change.” The petition, which has a goal of 1,000 signatures, had reached 723 signatures by Thursday afternoon. In their letter, the three teens commend Ford for going public this week with her allegations. Ford...

The way Microsoft patched a recent security bug has made several security and software experts believe the company might have lost the source code to one of its Office components.Experts reached this conclusion this week after Microsoft patched a security vulnerability tracked as CVE-2017-11882 that affected EQNEDT32.EXE — the equation editor that was included with the Microsoft Office suite until 2007.While Microsoft has replaced the old EQNEDT32.EXE component with a new one in 2007, the older file is still included with all Office installations to allow users to load and edit equations created with the old component.The way Microsoft patched...

FR NOTE: This is a factual but humorous article about a not-terribly-serious GitHub software programming project. If you fancy whipping up a bondage loop under a BSDM licence this is the language you've been gagging for. Developers: bored with bracketing? Got a dose of “escaping ennui”? Why not write bad erotica instead?That's the brilliant/sick objective of a project called "Fetlang" that recently emerged on GitHub thanks to a chap called Dagan, aka “Property404”.As the repo's readme explains:“Fetlang is a statically typed, procedural, esoteric programming language and reference implementation. It is designed such that source code looks like poorly written fetish...

It is often said that in the future, jobs that were once done by humans could eventually be taken over by robots who are admittedly more efficient due to their lack of the need to rest, take breaks, and sleep. While there are some jobs that are obvious in terms of robots being better at it, there are some that are less obvious, such as the job of a programmer. However a Danish startup by the name of Ulzard Technologies IVS could change that, thanks to their development of AI dubbed pix2code that can help to program applications based on...