alerighi

31 ms·

331.
by alerighi 5y ago
Yes, and they are just two usages of pointers. The fact is that, whatever you call it, null pointer, nullable reference, optional, you have to put in a language a concept of "reference to an object that can reference a non valid object
332.
by alerighi 5y ago
That complicates a lot of things. You are basically making a new product, with all the complications (and costs) associated with it. And where do you stop? What decides if it has impact or not? If I change the brand of a capacitor do I need
333.
by alerighi 5y ago
A thread is not the same thing of a process. There are situations where you are fine with a thread, other where you need a process.
334.
by alerighi 5y ago
It makes creating processes easy to me, when you did understand how it works: while (1) { int client_socket = accept(socket, &client_addr, &client_len); if (client_socket > 0) { pid_t pid = for
335.
by alerighi 5y ago
Why overcommit is a problem? A program is unlikely to use all the memory that it allocates, or use it only at a later time. It would be a waste to not have it, it would mean having a ton of RAM that never gets used because a lot of programs
336.
by alerighi 5y ago
It's complicated. Nowadays we have shortage of electronic components and it's difficult to know what will be not available the next month. So it's obvious that manufacturers have to make different variants of a product that c
337.
by alerighi 5y ago
What a waste of electronic devices. Single use electronics should be declared illegal. I don't get how my country (in EU) bans disposable plastics (and I'm 100% in favor of it) and permits these devices. I also wonder how many peo
338.
by alerighi 5y ago
Well, they could be doing some simplifications and assumptions that can improve performance. Also performance is not always the only factor to consider: you can optimize a program for speed, but also for RAM usage, or the size of the binary
339.
by alerighi 5y ago
My solution is, buy your own domain. It's cheap and it will cost you only 20$ a year or something like that. I'm not saying run your own email service (I do, but I recognize that it's complex and not worth for most people), b
340.
by alerighi 5y ago
Still WSL2 lacks of two fundamental things: the lack of bridge networking (being able to connect to a server running in the WSL from another host in the LAN) and the lack of sharing serial ports with the host (better would be USB devices, b
341.
by alerighi 5y ago
Some distributions disable user namespaces by default because they are considered a dangerous feature. And it probably is, in the end.
342.
by alerighi 5y ago
With we don't need that kind of security I was talking about average home computer user (the one for which the personal computer was created!) that buys a computer to use it for normal everyday tasks. There are situations where that ki
343.
by alerighi 5y ago
The only formal specification of a software is the software itself. If there would exist a way to specify exactly what a program should do formally you wouldn't need the programmer: you already have the formal specification, can't
344.
by alerighi 5y ago
> Not really, because you can usually shake or tilt the pinball machine to set the ball free. And you can restart a program that crashes or reboot a system. Or workaround the bug. > These events happen (literally) once every few years
345.
by alerighi 5y ago
You said it: it prevents you from booting a custom firmware. If the manufacturer decides to lock down the stock firmware for only booting Windows (something that is not absurd and some manufacturers already attempted in the past, and keep i
346.
by alerighi 5y ago
Would be too difficult to implement. x86 is a very big instruction that is impossible to implement with an hardware: both Intel and AMD processors in fact run inside a virtual machine that translates x86 instructions in an internal RISC ins
347.
by alerighi 5y ago
RISCV is an open architecture. If a manufacturer does that, simply don't buy the processor from that manufacturer and buy it from another. All your software will still be compatible since it's the same architecture. Otherwise with
348.
by alerighi 5y ago
Don't see what macOS gives you more than Linux if you don't need XCode. While I can understand developers that use Windows (there are a ton of compilers and development environments that unfortunately are only for Windows, especia
349.
by alerighi 5y ago
The problem is the AMD PSB functionality in itself. It should be considered malware like the Intel managament engine and thus refused by users. It's a second processor that runs a proprietary firmware signed by the vendor (that the use
350.
by alerighi 5y ago
Docker is slower because it runs a VM. The macOS kernel doesn't include any containerization API, thus a native Docker cannot be built. Of course even if it can be built the kernel would be completely different than Linux and you could
351.
by alerighi 5y ago
Yes in theory you can but it's a pain, a certificate needs to be installed in the browser, the user gets a popup every time saying that you want to use a certificate, when the user changes computer either needs to backup the certificat
352.
by alerighi 5y ago
And why also limit to that? What if I have a function that accepts values in the range [0, 100]? Make a type to express that? What if I have a function that takes only positive integers (i.e. unsigned integers minus 0)? Chances are that you
353.
by alerighi 5y ago
Depends if that is required. For most enterprise software, that nowadays is more and more web based, you don't need all of that. Accounts are created by the system administrator, the password check is fine with the default mechanism of
354.
by alerighi 5y ago
As every other login form does. In this situation basic authentication is no different from every other authentication mechanism that uses passwords...
355.
by alerighi 5y ago
Agree with everything beside the third point. The argument of passing plain password over the wire doesn't make sense: every login form when you submit it passes username and password over the wire! Nobody encrypts the passwords client
356.
by alerighi 5y ago
That is true if we are talking about high end speakers or headphones. I doubt that with AirPods or any other in ear headphones you can hear the difference. These devices are not only built to a cost (even if they are sold at absurd prices,
357.
by alerighi 5y ago
They are not reliable at all. And if you don't want to use USB... well good luck finding a modern motherboard with a floppy disk interface. These days you obviously have to use a USB floppy disk readers. The argument of not using USB d
358.
by alerighi 5y ago
In C there are ton of things that are hardware dependent. For example the size of every data type is not specified, or the fact that char is signed or unsigned, the representation of signed integers (tough I don't think there still exi
359.
by alerighi 5y ago
There are ways to call a function that cannot be caught by static analysis: basically you just need a way to jump to an arbitrary address of memory where a particular function is stored. If we exclude languages that by design sandbox the co
360.
by alerighi 5y ago
Well in a lot of new distributions /bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin are symlinks to /usr/bin. The historical difference is that in /sbin there are binaries meant to be executed by root, and thus they were not be

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