jklowden

8 ms·

1.
by jklowden 8d ago
This. Any engineer or manager developing Notes at the time had to be aware of X.400 and X.500, and SMTP. They decided to ignore them. However cool and useful and clumsy Notes was, it was a proprietary walled garden. Lotus and the IBM hawk
2.
by jklowden 21d ago
Every technical writing guide I’ve found is depressing or boring. This one is both. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised to see 8th-grade advice offered to adult professionals with a straight face. Nor finger-wagging about the passive. Hones
3.
by jklowden 1mo ago
The next time, your libertarian friend mutters “Solyndra”, tell him at the most Solyndra cost the federal government 1/2 billion dollars, not the many billions Trump is spending to cancel wind projects.
4.
by jklowden 1mo ago
Apple is learning from Microsoft, sometimes as counterexample. You won’t know Apple joy until you replace the one you have with another. If you’re backed up via Time Machine — because you are, right? — then you plug in your new machine, hit
5.
by jklowden 2mo ago
Geez, what a lot of vague self-contradictory self-regarding opinionated advice. Is terminal a world of “pure information’ or “a mess”? Both, it seems. Don’t dump “pages and pages of debug” text? Check. But do use boldface fonts “in a te
6.
by jklowden 3mo ago
Count me among those who think publishers should always know who they’re publishing. When law enforcement comes knocking, a warrant should be all they need. Meta can’t shrug and say they don’t know who Batman1964 is. There’s nothing new in
7.
by jklowden 3mo ago
Hey, the economy is great and gas is cheap. All we had to put up with is mean tweets. Whenever anyone complains about Trump, remind them he’s not the cause but the product. Seventy million voted for him, and Republicans in congress let him
8.
by jklowden 4mo ago
Exactly. Anthropic has been losing three-comma money until recently. In Q2 2026 it earned a profit for the first time, about $500 million. If we imagine they will earn $2 billion in 2026, that’s a 0.2% return on the $1 trillion investment
9.
by jklowden 5mo ago
Nonsense. See Codd’s first paper. 1NF removes repeating groups, putting for example data for each month in its own row, not an array of 12 months in 1 row. Storage efficiency was never the point. IMS had that locked down. Succinctness of
10.
by jklowden 6mo ago
> SQL Server has to convert every single value in the column to nvarchar before it can compare. This of course is not true. It is a defect in Microsoft’s query planner. And the proof lies in the remedy. The recommended solution is to co
11.
by jklowden 6mo ago
I’m not sure why the top-rated reply begins by presuming anything about the problem domain. Many domains have a specified language and implied if not explicit collation. Rejecting characters outside that domain is part of the job. There a
12.
by jklowden 7mo ago
It’s a terribly useful idea. FTFY. The program you used to leave your comment, and the libraries it used, were loaded into memory via mmap(2) prior to execution. To use protobuf or whatever, you use mmap. The only reason mmap isn’t more ge
13.
by jklowden 7mo ago
Not sure how viable Mezzano is. The most recent bug report was two years ago. The “beginnings of a manual” was last updated 7 years ago. A better example might be Guix, depending how “operating system” is defined.
14.
by jklowden 8mo ago
If only there was one good library. libxml2 is the leading one, and it has been beleaguered by problems internal and external. It has had ABI instability and been besieged by CVE reports. I agree it shouldn’t be hard. On the evidence, thoug
15.
by jklowden 9mo ago
iRobot’s largest creditor isn’t its Chinese supplier. It’s the US government, in the form of unpaid tariffs, some $3.5 million. Arguably it was Trump’s stupid tariffs that drove the company out of business. Rather than bringing manufacturin
16.
by jklowden 10mo ago
I believe that’s what we call a "view".
17.
by jklowden 11mo ago
There is no pass-by-value overhead. There are only implementation decisions. Pass by value describes the semantics of a function call, not implementation. Passing a const reference in C++ is pass-by-value. If the user opts to pass "a
18.
by jklowden 11mo ago
Note well: the claims about TCP come with some evidence, in the form of a graph. The claims for QUIC do not. Many of the claims are dubious. TCP has "no notion of multiple steams"? What are two sockets, then? What is poll(2)? T
19.
by jklowden 1y ago
There was never any danger of public education, so eliminating that danger was quite easy. What we are undermining, though, is the benefit of public education. Witness the last election, where tens of millions were indifferent to democratic
20.
by jklowden 1y ago
90% of funding for K-12 public schools comes from state and local taxes. That’s hardly a one-size-fits-all national system. Would you tell me though, please, what language and cultural differences should inflect science or math or literatur
21.
by jklowden 1y ago
To be fair, the characterization is entirely accurate. Anyone who speaks of "government schools" advocates their demise. They want an entirely privatized system funded at taxpayer expense: a voucher for every child to be spent as
22.
by jklowden 1y ago
Brian Kernighan cannot be topped. He is easy to read, succinct, clear, and sometimes funny.
23.
by jklowden 1y ago
Why do I remember that every C64 BASIC keyword was a 2-byte integer? A typing shortcut was to enter the first letter, followed by a "shifted" high-bit character. Every keyword was represented that way. Variables were also 2-byte
24.
by jklowden 1y ago
Operating systems were always more reliable than Windows95 from the day it was introduced. Protected memory and process privilege were not exactly unknown when DEC was selling VMS. Or for that matter when Microsoft was selling Windows NT.
25.
by jklowden 1y ago
> some systems can never be shut down Tomshardware could do better reporting. There is no such thing as a computer that can’t fail, or a component that can’t be replaced. Does our reporter think the entire system was installed 25 years a
26.
by jklowden 1y ago
What drugs were they on? Why on earth is there any distinction between variables allocated statically, on the stack, or on the heap? I allocate a struct, copy data to it, and those data have no Effective Type? Because I started with mall
27.
by jklowden 1y ago
Uh huh. The No SQL zombie yet shuffles on. Anyone who knows SQL sees dozens of problems immediately. What enforces data integrity? How do we know the records are NF1? How do we perform a join, or test existential quantification, without ta
28.
by jklowden 1y ago
Yup, COBOL is that overnight sensation 4 years in the making. GCC COBOL is foremost an ISO COBOL compiler, with some extensions for IBM and MicroFocus syntax. We also extended gdb to recognize COBOL, so the GCC programmer has native COBOL c
29.
by jklowden 2y ago
If the economics make no sense, it’s only because the economics do not account for the cost to the environment. If the retail cost included reclamation, so that there was no waste at all, this kind of toaster would be the cheapest.
30.
by jklowden 2y ago
Perhaps TFA could explain what happened to math between 1977 and 2024. Because the meaning of "atomic" didn’t change, nor did the meaning of 1NF. The author pretends to explain 4NF, but never actually begins. He calls himself an

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