mo

Safe Dynamic Memory Management in Ada and SPARK

Safe Dynamic Memory Management in Ada and SPARK by Maroua Maalej, Tucker Taft, Yannick Moy:

Handling memory in a correct and efficient way is a step toward safer, less complex, and higher performing software-intensive systems. However, languages used for critical software development such as Ada, which supports formal verification with its SPARK subset, face challenges regarding any use of pointers due to potential pointer aliasing. In this work, we introduce an extension to the Ada language, and to its SPARK subset, to provide pointer types (“access types” in Ada) that provide provably safe, automatic storage management without any asynchronous garbage collection, and without explicit deallocation by the user. Because the mechanism for these safe pointers relies on strict control of aliasing, it can be used in the SPARK subset for formal verification, including both information flow analysis and proof of safety and correctness properties. In this paper, we present this proposal (which has been submitted for inclusion in the next version of Ada), and explain how we are able to incorporate these pointers into formal analyses

For the systems programmers among you, you might be interested in some new developments in Ada where they propose to add ownership types to Ada's pointer/access types, to improve the flexibility of the programs that can be written and whose safety can be automatically verified. The automated satisfiability of these safety properties is a key goal of the SPARK Ada subset.




mo

Kans op 2e golf, maar contactopsporing moet 2e lockdown vermijden: bekijk de beste fragmenten uit "Het coronadebat" - VRT NWS

  1. Kans op 2e golf, maar contactopsporing moet 2e lockdown vermijden: bekijk de beste fragmenten uit "Het coronadebat"  VRT NWS
  2. Het Corona Debat met Marc Van Ranst, Erika Vlieghe, Maggie De Block (Open Vld), Bart De Wever (N-VA) en anderen  De Morgen
  3. 'We moeten tijd winnen tot vaccin er is'  De Standaard
  4. Het grote coronadebat: “We moeten tijd winnen tot vaccin er is”  Het Belang van Limburg
  5. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws










mo

173 gestrande Belgen eindelijk thuis na quarantaine in Tenerife: “Regering liet ons aan ons lot over. We hebben twee maanden op ons terras moeten doorbrengen” - Het Laatste Nieuws

  1. 173 gestrande Belgen eindelijk thuis na quarantaine in Tenerife: “Regering liet ons aan ons lot over. We hebben twee maanden op ons terras moeten doorbrengen”  Het Laatste Nieuws
  2. 173 gestrande Belgen eindelijk thuis na quarantaine in Tenerife: “Regering heeft te weinig gedaan!”  Het Laatste Nieuws
  3. Na quarantaine in Tenerife: 173 Belgen eindelijk weer thuis  De Morgen
  4. Belgen die vastzaten op Tenerife charterden zelf vliegtuig naar huis  De Standaard
  5. West-Vlaming regelt repatriëring gestrande Belgen  Focus en WTV
  6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws







mo

Short Film: THE iMOM

Ariel Martin’s “The iMom” explores the future of A.I. and asks who is to blame when technology turns on us.




mo

The Iron Dragon's Daughter E-Book Only $1.99--MONDAY ONLY!

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More than a quarter-century ago, I was driving to Pittsburgh, with my wife, Marianne Porter, and we were talking about fantasy and about steam locomotives. I made a joke about the Baldwin Steam Dragon Works and Marianne laughed. Then, another mile or so down the road, I said, "Write that down, please."

Thus was born the Iron Dragons Trilogy, a trio of stand-alone books, the third of which, The Iron Dragon's Mother, was published just last year.

Far more recently, just an hour or so ago, I got an email from my associates at Open Road Media, telling me that The Iron Dragon's Mother, first of the three, will be on sale for $1.99 this coming Monday, March 23.

That's one day only BUT this time the sale includes Canada. Which I am very grateful for because the Canadian science fiction community has always been very warm and kind to  me.

Anyway, here's the boilerplate below, cut-and-pasted from the corporate email:


We are pleased to let you know that the following ebook(s) will be featured in price promotions soon.


ISBN13 Title Author Promo Type Country Start Date End Date Promo Price
9781504025669 The Iron Dragon's Daughter Swanwick, Michael ORM - Early Bird Books NL US 2020-03-23 2020-03-23 $1.99
9781504025669 The Iron Dragon's Daughter Swanwick, Michael ORM - Early Bird Books NL CA 2020-03-23 2020-03-23 $1.99


Open Road will promote the feature via social media. We hope you can share the deal with your network as well. You can subscribe to the newsletters at the links below so that you will get the direct link to the deal on the day that it appears.


Newsletter Link
  Early Bird Books     Subscribe Now  
The Lineup Subscribe Now
The Portalist Subscribe Now
Murder & Mayhem Subscribe Now
A Love So True Subscribe Now
The Archive Subscribe Now
The Reader Subscribe Now


So if you (1) read e-books, (2) don't own a copy of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, and (3) would like to... well, here's your opportunity to do it on the cheap.





mo

A Glorious Review of The Postmodern Adventures of Darger and Surplus

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My Subterranean Press collection, The Postmodern Adventuers of Darger and Surplus,  has received quite a splendid review for Locus by Gary K. Wolfe, which has now been posted on Locus Online. Darger and Surplus are, as you probably know, gentlemen grifters in the future civilization that rises from the ashes of our own, after a failed revolution by the Artificial Intelligences we are currently hard at work creating. Humanity mostly won that war and the demons and mad gods were banished to a subterranean infrastructure too widespread and well-defended to be rooted out. But, as a result, the mechanical sciences have languished while the biological ones thrive.

All this is spelled out in the review more entertainingly than I have put it here. I encourage you to read it.

Meanwhile, here's the pull-quote I'd grab from the review if I were the sort of person who did that sort of thing:

As those Hugo voters apparently recognized nearly 20 years ago, Darger and Surplus not only join the small company of SF’s classic rogues, but the world they occupy is as complex, detailed, and morally chaotic as we’ve come to expect from the best of Swanwick’s fiction.

You can find the review in its glorious entirety here. Or you can just go to locusmag.com and poke around. Bot Locus and Locus Online make for informative, enjoyable reading


And as long as you're there . . .

Like everything else, Locus is feeling the financial stress of the lockdown. If you can afford it, and if you, like me, value the publication, consider contributing a little toward its survival.


*




mo

E-Book Sales Sunday and Monday!

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Open Road Media, my main e-book publisher, appears to be on a tear these days. Maybe because a lot of self-isolated people need books these days and aren't willing to wait for them to be delivered through the mails? I don't know and I haven't asked. I just pass along their promotions to you.

On Sunday, April 19th for one day only, my classic Grand Tour of the Solar System novel, Vacuum Flowers, will be on sale for $1.99 in Canada and the US.

Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark has a headful of stolen wetware, enemies that want her dead, and a Solar System full of colorful human and posthuman cultures that is far too small for her to hide in. She doesn't want to change everything. But she has no choice...

(Vacuum Flowers was written at the height of the Cyberpunk/Humanist wars and was meant to belong to neither camp. But I did throw in a short nod to each camp in the novel. Widely separated, of course.)

Here's their chart:


ISBN13 Title Author Promo Type Country Start Date End Date Promo Price
9781504036504 Vacuum Flowers Swanwick, Michael ORM - Portalist NL US 2020-04-19 2020-04-19 $1.99
9781504036504 Vacuum Flowers Swanwick, Michael ORM - Portalist NL CA 2020-04-19 2020-04-19 $1.99


Immediately after, on Monday, April 20th, my short story collection, ,Tales of Old Earth, goes on sale in the US and Canada for $2.99.

Tales of Old Earth contains nineteen of my best and strangest stories, including two Hugo Award winners and I forget how many also-rans. Featuring a planet-sized grasshopper, the train to Hell, an amorous sphinx, the last elves in the world, a civilization inside an International Harvester refrigerator, and much, much more!

Here's the second chart:



ISBN13 Title Author Promo Type Country Start Date End Date Promo Price
9781504036511 Tales of Old Earth Swanwick, Michael ORM - Early Bird Books NL US 2020-04-20 2020-04-20 $2.99
9781504036511 Tales of Old Earth Swanwick, Michael ORM - Early Bird Books NL CA 2020-04-20 2020-04-20 $2.99


Enjoy!

*




mo

Zero Notebook 6: Mother Eve

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She never appears in person in The Iron Dragon's Mother, but Mother Eve is central to the entire enterprise. Unsettling, isn't she?

Judith Berman once told me that most of the First People have Trickster tales. But of the hundreds of tribes in North America, only two--and they small tribes--have a female trickster. The female trickster is, apparently, difficult for people to imagine.

So you can imagine my delight when I found one right inside my own culture.


But what, you ask, does it mean . . .?

Trickster is a strange and difficult character, neither a good guy nor an evil one. She exists somewhere in between, a creator of chaos and a provider of a special Something that it seems human beings require. It might be corn and it might be fire. Trickster gets blamed for a lot of the woes of existence, but it seems that without him/her, we're skunked.

I wonder if Pandora was originally a Trickster,  before they allegorized her to hell and back? It bears thinking on.


Above: Image Six. Four to go.


*




mo

Our addiction to driving is costing lives, and more

The solution is not to scold drivers but to make structural solutions.

  I must confess: I was tempted to write a column along the lines of “Yes, it’s a war on the car, and it’s a just war!” But we don’t need a war on the car. What we need is an intervention. We need a serious conversation about our collective, structural addiction to this substance, […]

The post Our addiction to driving is costing lives, and more appeared first on Torontoist.




mo

Jeff Hardy takes on Cesaro to highlight WWE Money In The Bank Kickoff Show

WWE Money In The Bank Kickoff begins at 6 pm ET/3 pm PT on Sunday, May 10.




mo

Top 10 Friday Night SmackDown moments: WWE Top 10, May 8, 2020

Top 10 Friday Night SmackDown moments: WWE Top 10, May 8, 2020




mo

Becky Lynch racks up most total days as Raw Women’s Champion in history

Becky Lynch has become the Superstar with the most total days as Raw Women’s Champion, surpassing Alexa Bliss.




mo

Analysis: Tennis pros' US return amid pandemic no true model

Analysis: Tennis pros' US return amid pandemic no true model




mo

Mordor Shield and Banner Designs


These were gathered from everywhere from many different references. A lot of the bottom ones I created to be designs orcs themselves could have come up with, rough and crude.



  • lord Of The Rings

mo

I’m Famous At Last! :)






mo

French (near) homonyms – "calembours pourris"

[h/t Stephan Hurtubise]  




mo

Perils of topic modeling

Today's xkcd illustrates why topic modeling can be tricky, for people as well as for machines: The mouseover title: "As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat." […]



  • Linguistics in the comics

mo

The Caffeine Traces Give the Car About 100 More Horsepower

The tail light cover used to be a plastic Folgers can. I know because the label is still on it.



  • coffe
  • car-repairs-tail-lights



mo

Valhalla Rising movie review

About a week ago I rented this movie, now if you’ve been watching any new movies over the last couple of months you’ve probably seen the trailer for this movie. If your like me you probably thought to yourself “Hey this looks pretty sweet, it looks like there’s going to be lots of hacking and slashing and all that fun stuff”




mo

How to get your youtube videos more hits

YouTube and other video sharing sites like Vimeo for example are great places to get traffic to your website or blog. But there only as effective as the traffic those video receive, makes sense right. Obviously if your vides are getting next to no hits, your website will see little to no increase in traffic, which in a word sucks. So for this post I'm going to go over some simple steps you can use if your new to YouTube to help get your videos noticed. In the next post I'll cover some ways you can take those videos and use them to get traffic back to your site.




mo

How to use youtube to get more traffic

In my last post I showed some simple ways you can use to help get your videos more views and subscribers. Now let's talk about getting some of that traffic over to your website or blog. Being that YouTube is the most used search engine in the world right now, and showing no signs of slowing down, this is something you want to tap into.




mo

How to promote your website for free

It seems there are literally thousands of sites that promise to promote your website or blog…..but for a price. The best known one is Google Adwords where you pay so many cents per click depending on the competition of the Keywords you want top rankings in. And while this will get your website to the top page in Google not everyone has the budget to fork out hundreds of dollars in advertising. But you can promote your site for free using some of these methods. Most of these are going to take time to build up before you start noticing huge amounts of traffic, but they will work if your willing to put the time in.




mo

What to consider to get listed on dmoz

When you submit a website to search engines, most search engines automatically crawl websites looking for links and popularity of the sites they crawl to determine how they list on search engine results, one site that doesn’t is DMOZ. Also known as the Open Directory Project or ODP, this directory is entirely monitored by people (volunteer editors), this means that you have to submit your site and wait for somebody to physically look at your site. This process can take weeks, months, or even in a few cases years, so why bother with this site at all?




mo

How to promote your website using twitter

Using twitter is a great way to promote your website or blog and increase traffic. If your new to twitter and never used it before it works like this. You get 140 characters to write a short statement or advertisement depending on what you’re using the site for. Most people tweet simple things like there not feeling well or changes in their social life. All that’s fine but you want to use it to promote your website, so here are some simple things to optimize your tweets to get the maximum traffic return.




mo

Why You Should Use Stumbleupon To Get More Traffic

When it comes to getting people to your site one of the ways you can do this is through social bookmaking sites. And while these all give your site excellent one way back links, there is one site that you should sign up to first to get more traffic, and that site is Stumbleupon. Why you should use Stumbleupon to get more traffic If you’re not familiar with Stumbleupon this is how it works for your site to get more traffic. Instead of using keywords like how you would for a search engine, visitors select categories that interest them such as videos, music, or computers to name a couple examples. Once they pick their categories and click on the stumble button their randomly taken to a site, article, or video that fits that category. They can then decided if the like or dislike that site by giving it thumbs up or down. The more thumbs up your site gets the more hits it will get because it will show up more frequently when people stumble that category. Visitors to your site can also write reviews and share it with other users or add a sites link to their list of favourite sites giving you even more exposure, back links, and that oh so coveted traffic..........




mo

8 Ways To Promote Your Facebook Fan Page

Just because you created a page on Facebook doesn’t mean it’s going to start magically bringing people to your site. In order for it to be effective you have to promote your page like you would your website. Here is a list of a few things you can do to get your page noticed.




mo

Black Death Movie Review

If you haven’t heard of this movie, don’t worry you’re not the only one, I only recently found out about it after going to Blockbuster and seeing it there a couple days ago.




mo

7 Ways To Get More Traffic From Stumbleupon

In my opinion Stumbleupon is one of the best ways to get more traffic to your to your site, especially if it’s brand new and your looking to get noticed quickly. If you’re not familiar with Stumbleupon it’s a web based service that allows you to discover websites, blogs, and videos without having to use traditional methods such as Google. Instead you can choose what topics you want to look for, click stumble and your randomly shown sites that meet your search criteria, if you like it you can give it a “thumbs up”. What makes this so appealing to site owners is that the more thumbs up your site gets the more times it’ll appear when that topic is searched.




mo

Battle Los Angeles Movie Review

There’s an old saying “Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one” This couldn’t be more true of all the Battle Los Angeles reviews I’ve seen online. It’s seems to be a mix of positive acclaim, comparing it to Independence day, and comments like this one made by Robert Ebert on his website “Battle Los Angeles is noisy, violent, ugly and stupid, it’s manufacture is a reflection of appalling cynicism on the part of it’s makers” Well that’s nice Mr. Ebert, but then who really cares what you have to say since you think movies like the Assaination of Richard Nixon is a great movie. So with all that out there I thought I’d throw my own review into the mix.................. Now if you haven’t seen Battle Los Angeles it’s nothing like Independence Day, which in my opinion went way over the top with American pride. Hey nothing wrong with being American but the rest of the world doesn’t need it shoved in its face. This movie closer to Saving Private Ryan, but with aliens instead of Nazi’s.




mo

10 Tips To Make Your Site SMO Friendly

Everyone who knows anything about SEO (Search engine optimization) can’t stress enough the importance of trying to increase traffic to your website by ranking well in the search engines. I mean let’s face it if your site isn’t optimized your not going to get very much traffic, and those dreams of getting all the people in the world to visit your site isn’t going to happen. But while SEO is important to your site, there’s something else you should be doing as well and that’s SMO............




mo

20 Different Ways To Make Money Online

Making money online, it seems every day more people are looking ways to make money online either to boost their income as a secondary source of income, or as a full time job. But if you’re relatively new to this how do you make money online? I put together a list of 20 different ways you can make money on the internet. I’ve broken these down into two groups, ways you can make money without a website or blog, and ways you can with a website. These ideas aren’t listed in any order of importance as some of them will work better for you then others.




mo

Squeeze More Earnings Out Of Your Adsense Account In 5 Minutes Or Less (Blog Post)

Google Adsense it’s usually the first place people go who want to monetize their websites and blogs with the hope those Adsense earnings will net them some big cash. Normally these ads will be matched to your site based on the content and browsing history of the people visiting your site. The goal is to tailor make ads that will hopefully be appealing for people to click on......................




mo

5 Of The Most Overused And Annoying Songs On YouTube (Blog Post)

I like making videos on Youtube, its fun. And while I’m far from being a pro I learn new tricks with each new video. One of the things I’ve learned from trial and error is what songs work and what doesn’t. Sure it doesn’t really matter if your videos are only for a hobby or just to show something off. However if your looking to get your name out there, get your videos popular, and not have people leave after 10 seconds then understanding what songs work and don’t is important.........




mo

In pictures: Last supermoon of 2020 rises on a world grappling to overcome pandemic - DAWN.com

  1. In pictures: Last supermoon of 2020 rises on a world grappling to overcome pandemic  DAWN.com
  2. May's flower moon lights up the sky around the globe  ABC News
  3. Hurry up: Last chance to see a supermoon this year  Euronews
  4. Last supermoon of the year, Photos News & Top Stories  The Straits Times
  5. Stunning supermoon lights up New Zealand's skies overnight  New Zealand Herald
  6. View Full coverage on Google News