neilc

49 ms·

451.
by neilc 17y ago
"Successful" and "not sucking" are two very different things.
452.
by neilc 17y ago
PostgreSQL is the best large C codebase I've ever seen.
453.
by neilc 17y ago
I doubt very much that Myhrvold has a guilty conscience. There is no reason for him to have one, anyway: he's just exploiting the current nature of the patent system. That is called "acting rationally" (assuming that his venture works out,
454.
by neilc 17y ago
Right. But I don't think the facts support that he was a "lazy, lazy man" or that he only worked for "short bursts."
455.
Confessions of a Used PL Salesman: Getting the Masses Hooked on Haskell(research.microsoft.com)
1 points by neilc 17y ago|0 comments
456.
by neilc 17y ago
Winston Churchill was a lazy, lazy man who succeeded because he was capable of brilliance for the short bursts of time he worked Do you have a reference for that? My impression was that Churchill had a fairly intense work schedule. For ex
457.
by neilc 17y ago
http://devblog.streamy.com/2009/08/24/cap-theorem/ http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.20.1... CAP is absolutely not a paradox; it is just a conjecture or a theorem. As far as CAP and distributed databases, it is w
458.
by neilc 17y ago
Diversity for its own sake doesn't seem that compelling: there was previously much more diversity in CPU architectures, and presumably there were valid "evolutionary" reasons for that changing (e.g. network effects WRT software support, eco
459.
ARM Cortex-A9 SMP Announced: High-Performance ARM(perspectives.mvdirona.com)
43 points by neilc 17y ago|13 comments
460.
by neilc 17y ago
Related work is motivation. It's part of the story. It depends on the paper -- in many cases, I think that a paper can be adequately motivated in the introduction, without explicitly enumerating all the potential related work. Given that
461.
by neilc 17y ago
1GB isn't exactly "Big Data". I'd expect most truly Big Data tasks to be more I/O bound than computation bound -- at least if your "computation" consists of text parsing and hash table lookups. That said, it's interesting that mawk is so fa
462.
by neilc 17y ago
Yeah, completely unrealistic -- basically just a publicity stunt from Wired. Someone who is really trying not to be found doesn't create a Twitter account describing his actions, protected or not.
463.
by neilc 17y ago
Interesting point -- I've never written a scheduler. Is it really true that writing a scheduler for the multi-socket, multi-core case is that much more complicated than focusing on single-socket, multi-core? Seems possible to me. However, d
464.
by neilc 17y ago
Building a scheduler that doesn't scale to an 8-CPU system seems like madness to me, given the very predictable trends in desktop hardware.
465.
by neilc 17y ago
I'll take consistent data access performance characteristics, thank you very much. And if the distribution of your data changes, or you move the application to a new machine? Hard-coding a particular data access strategy into your applica
466.
by neilc 17y ago
Methinks that if this becomes reality, we'll see many more seniors die of mysterious causes... That seems a bit paranoid to me: what is being securitized are bundles of lots and lots of policies, so investors aren't speculating about whet
467.
by neilc 17y ago
How would this be "one more way to steal your money"? Seems like a perfectly legitimate investment to me.
468.
by neilc 17y ago
Understanding how all the components in a computer system work is important to being a good programmer, especially if you're doing work that is performance sensitive. Memorizing a particular instruction set probably isn't important, but a g
469.
by neilc 17y ago
"I am informed that the right thing to use [for audio] on FreeBSD is OSS" doesn't exactly inspire confidence, though.
470.
by neilc 17y ago
This boils down to: (1) Charge corporate users of Twitter on a per-user-followed basis (2) Strongly discourage "ego"-driven users of Twitter who follow lots of people #2 is fine, but will only decrease Twitter usage and won't make much mone
471.
by neilc 17y ago
I think you obviously don't read a review like this because you want to understand whether to plunk down your $29 -- you read this because you want to understand Snow Leopard.
472.
by neilc 17y ago
What is the distinction between those two situations? (i.e. those in which the article "concedes the point"?)
473.
by neilc 17y ago
There's a social difference, yes. In this case, I'm not sure the technical difference is all that large: if they were at all competent, they could have easily snooped on your VM without your knowledge.
474.
by neilc 17y ago
They ... offered to take a look at the problem if I gave them root on the box. “Over my dead body,” I thought That seems a little silly to me. If they control the hardware, they basically have root already. They shouldn't need root to i
475.
by neilc 17y ago
it's good and right to be compensated for the value you create There are ways to be compensated other than wealth, however. For example, many people would consider that a tenured position at a prestigious university, with a generally very
476.
by neilc 17y ago
Work there is published if and only if it is in Microsoft's interest to do so. Do you have any evidence for that claim? Often a bare outline is published: enough to impress people but not enough for an outsider to duplicate the work. Thi
477.
by neilc 17y ago
He starts his article with a line from Maggie Thatcher on socialism. Not a subtle way to tee off a debate Somewhat inflammatory, sure -- but hardly worthy of a boycott. The vast majority of the Mackay piece is a level-headed argument -- o
478.
by neilc 17y ago
That would actually pretty close to the MIT license, in practice. There are major benefits to not inventing yet-another-license, and using something that everyone is already familiar with.
479.
by neilc 17y ago
But by moving to a different language, you can make your app 360x faster. If your "app" is a toy microbenchmark with an under-specified benchmarking methodology, then sure. You could also make your "app" 360x faster by switching to a user
480.
by neilc 17y ago
Well, fair enough: presumably GHC is creating 5 kernel threads under the covers, whereas the C implementation creates 503 kernel threads. Therefore the C implementation incurs approximately 100x the context-switching overhead. Once again, a

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