colin_mccabe

13 ms·

91.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
No big surprises here... knowing the distribution of prizes helps a lot, like you might expect. I was a bit surprised that being the first player was better than being the second in their modeled game (I figured later was always better).
92.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
By definition, an engineer is someone who works on an engine. Unless we go back to steam powered computers, we're going to need a new name.
93.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Parallelism is but a small part of the complicated topic of boot time optimization. And yes, sequential strategies can still be really fast. Much of the speed increase in modern systems is not from parallelism, but forfeiting the overhead
94.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Thanks. As a developer, that is useful to know.
95.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
At the end of the day, this is an issue of terminology. You can say "service X requires service Y to start" or you can say "once service Y has started, start service X." In both cases you can draw a dependency graph wi
96.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Then the question becomes whether an architecture obscures or exacerbates them, and also how it deals with them. The systemd object model does not fare well, as discussed. What specific aspects of the systemd dependency model do you feel
97.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Regarding file ownership, not necessarily. If you run it as a session-based init, they'd be owned by the user it serves as an agent to. Interesting. I didn't realize systemd had a "user mode" where it doesn't run
98.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
tl;dr: the author argues that: * systemd is more similar to a traditional job scheduler than a traditional init system. * systemd should not parse text files in pid1 because it might be a security risk. * Because systemd handles order depen
99.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Yes, I was suggesting storing a pointer to the entire structure.
100.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
This article is highly misleading. Sure, certain kinds of data (like credit card data or medical data) can be a liability if not properly managed. If you are working in one of those industries you already know that (although arguably many
101.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
You can use nil to represent "no expiration."
102.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
If you read the article, they explictly rule out the "poisson sequence of life-ending events" model of mortality. If this model was true, a 120-year-old living in the age of vaccines, antibiotics, and organ transplants should hav
103.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Go already gives better tools than Java for managing native memory through cgo, which is a far less painful interface than JNI (believe me, I've written a lot of JNI for Hadoop). Go also has value types which is a huge win for managin
104.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
I'm sorry, but that conclusion is not supported by the article (or by other data). No human being has a "great shot at 130" no matter how modern the medical care is. The longest documented human lifespan is 122 years. Livi
105.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
I think you are misunderstanding how natural selection works. You seem to be implying that there is some guiding hand behind the evolution of each species. In fact, if longer life were an advantage for an individual member of any species,
106.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Adding log messages to code is a good thing. Every complex system needs a way to get visibility into it, and logs are a great way to do that. I currently work on Hadoop, and pretty much every project in the Hadoop ecosystem has a huge numb
107.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
I disagree that the article is "misquoting via omission." The article claims that "this engineer hates the Unsafe class for no real reason at all." The full quote which you reproduced doesn't offer any reasons for
108.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
JNI has a very high per-call overhead. It is not an effective alternative to many things in Unsafe. For example, in Hadoop when using short-circuit local reads, the client determines if the file descriptor it has cached is still valid by
109.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
I think if you are "ripping code in/out of your app everytime you need to do something" for debugging you need to create a logging system with multiple log levels. In log4j you can turn on TRACE logging for a particular subs
110.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
It's funny how you can take an obvious antipattern (global variables) and turn it into a pattern by giving it a cool new name like "Singleton". In this spirit, I propose "the ProgramCounterAmbulator" as a cool new
111.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
One man's "meaningful information" is another mans "privacy leak." If I visit foobar.com and they can find out from my ipv6 address what make and model of motherboard I am running, is that really a good thing? The
112.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
It's good that the author realizes that there is a tradeoff between the complexity of the language and the time and energy needed to bring new programmers up to speed on a project. This is something that gets missed really often. Howe
113.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
kvm doesn't have dom0. More generally, you can run kvm on an unmodified SuSE (or other Linux distribution) kernel.
114.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
I agree that there are already many ways to DoS the system-- for example, the age-old fork bomb. But that is not a good reason to add more flaws. People are working on ways to fix the old flaws, such as cgroups. I don't think a ulimi
115.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
I think the main argument in favor of Xen was that it would have a smaller attack surface for hackers than KVM. After all, Xen is a hypervisor-based solution, whereas with KVM you are running the full Linux kernel plus qemu as your host. W
116.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
But once you've opened the file descriptor, the kernel would guarantee that its corresponding process ID would remain unused until you closed the file descriptor. (For example, it could keep the process a zombie if it exits.) That se
117.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't opening a file descriptor to a process via /proc have the same race condition issues with process id wraparound? After all, processes in /proc are opened by process ID (the only
118.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
In the 1950s, nobody would have believed that "genetic drift" happened at all. The reason was because back then, the thinking was that any genetic change must be adaptive and caused by natural selection. The accumulation of &quo
119.
by colin_mccabe 11y ago
The problem is, even if you don't like git, subversion is a "better CVS than CVS." Just to give one example, the OpenBSD guys have to periodically manually delete old versions of various files because CVS has a limit on how
120.
by colin_mccabe 12y ago
There are really only three sane choices for C/C++ build systems right now, in my opinion: 1. Traditional Make files. Keep it simple, don't feel compelled to use all the dark corners of the language, and accept that it will be a

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