saljam

15 ms·

121.
by saljam 14y ago
A bit off topic, but is it just me or is the quality of comments on public G+ posts is absolutely terrible? Within a few hours there has been more than 100 replies. Most are inane, rude, of the useless “great post!” type, or just plain old
122.
by saljam 14y ago
I agree, it is challenging but there are already techniques which solve most of the problem. Namely IP multicast. Maybe this would finally push ISPs to properly support it?
123.
by saljam 14y ago
It was only Jack Copeland today. I had to miss that one as well. The other public (free) lecture is the Penrose lecture on Monday at 20:00. You still have to register online I think.
124.
by saljam 14y ago
There's a conference in his honour this weekend in Manchester, where he did much of his work. On the list of speakers are Hoare, Knuth, Penrose, Cerf, Kasparov, Fred Brooks, Rodny Brooks, Shamir, and many others. It's quite exciting to get
125.
by saljam 15y ago
I don't see why CS can't “take a problem and produce a suitable solution.” Understanding the essential underlying theory (complexity theory, etc.) is essential to solve these problems. Furthermore, not all Computer Science degrees are pure
126.
by saljam 15y ago
I find it odd they call themselves “Wahhabis.” For starters, that term isn't something a “Wahhabi” would call himself. I've never been able to trace when it was first used. However, it's often used by western scholars to refer to “the Sa
127.
by saljam 15y ago
Plan 9 has an extra permission for files; "append." When set, this means programs are only allowed to append text to the end of the file. Both simplifying logging (just open the file and write) and making it more secure (no arbitrary writes
128.
by saljam 15y ago
For what it's worth, that presentation was by William Kahan. “The Father of Floating Point” and the guy behind the IEEE 754 standard. He also has a Turing award.
129.
by saljam 15y ago
How timely! Just this morning I learnt a few anecdotal factoids about Turing's stay in Manchester, and his quarrels with the "old engineering guard" (Williams and Kilburn.) This comes from one of the professors who just retired from the Un
130.
by saljam 15y ago
Simplicity was my main point. The fact that it was faster just followed. As a matter of fact I haven't rebooted this machine in about 3 weeks.
131.
by saljam 15y ago
/run has been in Debian unstable for quite a while now actually, at least 3-4 months. /var/run is just a symlink. I think this is related to the systemd stuff. Personally, the first thing I do when I install a Linux is write a simple /etc/r
132.
by saljam 15y ago
That's not what I was proposing. The whole point is that you select who you trust and how much you trust them for any given subject. A random reviewer like the one on Amazon wouldn't have much influence on my rating unless I "trust" them pe
133.
by saljam 15y ago
Or, this could lead to the birth of a decentralised web-of-trust review and recommendation system. Imagine if something like this works: When a person reads a book, he rates it according to his taste. He would also rate how much he "trusts"
134.
by saljam 15y ago
Even though it's one of my favourites, modern high performance hardware with branch prediction, out-of-order execution, and multiple issue generally makes this trick rather unnecessary. Combine that with the cleverer compilers we have these
135.
by saljam 15y ago
C is full of surprises, and generally my favourite trick is trick du jour. While it's not strictly for C, Hacker's Delight[1] is my favourite collection of bit twiddling tricks. A highly recommended read if only for the intellectual value
136.
by saljam 15y ago
I've tried vbox when I used a mac and couldn't get past the user interface. The gui severely limits what I can easily do with it, and it's just plain irritating sometimes. Now I'm back on linux and kvm/qemu, and I'm much happier. Why are
137.
by saljam 15y ago
Probably, c.f. bind and union mounts .
138.
by saljam 15y ago
Symlinks are bad. They break the natural semantics of a hierarchical tree-like filesystem, and turn it into a messy half-assed graph. What happens if you move a symlink? Will it still point to the same object? That depends on whether i
139.
by saljam 15y ago
South Africa never got past its apartheid stage until a global boycotting movement forced it to. This isn't just a matter of "politics". This is everyone's responsibility, including scientists.
140.
by saljam 15y ago
Start a war?! I think you've got your history mixed up. Palestine was colonized by the British Empire and then given away to the Zionists. Since then Palestinians have had their homes and land brutally confiscated for the incoming Israeli
141.
by saljam 15y ago
This disappoints me. CERN is one of the most important representatives of the European scientific community. Instead of boycotting the apartheid state which openly practices racial cleansing on a daily basis, CERN embraces it. A truly sad
142.
by saljam 15y ago
1) It's also the first part of some of the most popular given names. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_(name) The word for slave simply doesn't have the same meaning as in English. 2) "Slave" (عبد) means black just as much as "nigger"
143.
by saljam 15y ago
I'm a native Arabic speaker, and I agree with you on point 10. If you've learned formal Arabic properly - i.e. attended school - then even texts from the pre-islamic era should be accessible. (Mostly poems, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
144.
by saljam 15y ago
This is pretty amazing. Very well done! It would be fantastic if it had a Gmaps-style zoom feature. A ZUI of a sort. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface (I added this comment to the HN corkboard above but it got removed
145.
by saljam 16y ago
I use the plan9 from userspace[1] version a lot on both Linux and OS X, almost exclusively actually. Read the man page[2] or even the paper[3]. I recommend giving it some time to get used to, it pays off. Acme-SAC is built on top of Inferno