smarks

10 ms·

61.
by smarks 4y ago
At least they didn’t blame the intern.
62.
by smarks 4y ago
> base64 encoding and application level decoding is also an accepted practice I feel seen. I remember suggesting this during a design discussion where the issue was how to embed an arbitrary document in another, where the embedded docume
63.
by smarks 4y ago
At Sun Microsystems this notion was so common that there was a TLA for it: CLM = "career limiting move"
64.
by smarks 4y ago
Agreed that LinkedList memory footprint and locality are serious issues. Fundamentally though the problem is that the LinkedList implementation is at odds with the abstraction provided by List -- access by index. Certainly, straight iterati
65.
by smarks 4y ago
Right. The main problem is that Java's List interface affords access by int index, making it seem array-like. Unfortunately get(i) on a LinkedList is O(n). This turns apparently innocuous things quadratic, like looping over a list by i
66.
by smarks 4y ago
Good list. I’d add the following: * Requires virtually no system administration. It seems like every other piece of technology needs some setup, backups, periodic updates, or fiddling when something inevitably goes wrong. If I’m not mistak
67.
by smarks 4y ago
I know, right? When Oracle bought Sun they forced all the engineers to choose between legal and proctology; I chose the latter. After ten years I’m starting to regret my decision. At least Sun wasn’t bought by IBM. (That was actually in pla
68.
by smarks 4y ago
Cliff Stoll is a real character. I remember attending an author event for him at Computer Literacy in Sunnyvale, for his subsequent book “Silicon Snake Oil”. This would have been 1995 or so. The place was packed. He talked about the book a
69.
by smarks 4y ago
I’d recommend against using spray oils such as Pam because they include lecithin, I think so that the oil coats surfaces more easily. Eventually lecithin will build up and make the cooking surface less effective. You can scrub it off with d
70.
by smarks 4y ago
It’s no good unless it’s organic.
71.
by smarks 4y ago
+1 for Kenji’s book “The Wok”. I use an inexpensive carbon steel, flat-bottomed wok on my regular old electric stove. Sure, a round-bottomed wok on a gas burner might work better but I can get good results on my setup.
72.
by smarks 4y ago
Oh yes, totally undefined. But consider the time frame, early 1980s K&R C on 4bsd Unix on a VAX. This predates ANSI/ISO C and Posix. It even predates “nasal demons.” There was no specification; or perhaps the implementation was t
73.
by smarks 4y ago
Definitely not GC. This was K&R C on BSD Unix around 1984.
74.
by smarks 4y ago
Yes, grad students at Berkeley in the early 1980s. For some reason I associate this technique with Bill Joy (who obviously was a major influence on a lot of what went into the 4bsd releases). However I have no evidence of this, nor whether
75.
by smarks 4y ago
"Multidreaded programs" :-) This was at least a decade before multithreading in C and Unix. But yes this "technique" would have failed miserably in a multithreaded environment.
76.
by smarks 4y ago
It was definitely malloc'd memory, as I remember removing free() calls from the callee and adding them to the caller.
77.
by smarks 4y ago
I'm convinced there was another style of C API where the callee would malloc a struct, populate it, and free it immediately before returning a pointer to it. Of course, the only way the caller can use the result is after it has been fr
78.
by smarks 4y ago
Heh, there's a mention here to Andy and Bill's Law, "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away," which is a reference to Andy Grove (Intel) and Bill Gates (Microsoft). Since I have a long history with Sun Microsystems, upon see
79.
by smarks 4y ago
This is a really cool site! Thanks for maintaining it. My father worked for Wang through the 1970s so I'm familiar with all of these and also with several other Wang products. I see you have a lot of documentation hosted here too. Brin
80.
by smarks 4y ago
One of my earliest programming jobs as a college student was programming BASIC for Wang 2200MVP systems. A couple business school graduates had formed a partnership to develop semi-custom computer applications to support agribusiness corpor
81.
by smarks 4y ago
Yes, this. My father worked for Wang through the 1970s and he thought it was a huge mistake that An Wang handed over the company to his son Fred, instead of to a company veteran like J.F. Cunningham, who left around the time it became clear
82.
by smarks 4y ago
The VS was more of a successor to the 2200 than a competitor. The 2200 was mostly a single-user system with a ROM-based (later, firmware-based) OS that simply ran a BASIC interpreter. Later versions (e.g., 2200 MVP) supported limited multi-
83.
by smarks 4y ago
Huh, I might try this. The previous time I bought drip grind and used an automatic drip maker. They don’t seem to specify the grind anymore. I suppose I could buy whole beans and grind them myself, but that would seem to be a bit contrary t
84.
by smarks 4y ago
Of course the article is less about good coffee or bad coffee but about how coffee is intertwined with our lives and our culture (at least, American culture). For example, the author mentioned Perkins and I knew exactly what he was talkin
85.
by smarks 4y ago
Diaconis is a real character. He gave a guest lecture to my statistics class at university ... um, several decades ago. His then-current research was around the effects of unfair dice. He was going to get his grad students to roll unfair di
86.
by smarks 4y ago
The "native HashTable" referred to here is the string hash table that's inside the JVM. The JVM has to intern strings from class files' string literals here, so it's all implemented in native code. The comment about
87.
by smarks 4y ago
Unlikely, as Java’s string interning behavior was specified in the first edition of the JLS (1996). This predates C# as far as I know. https://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/jcp/jls1-spec/jls1.pdf?A... See secti
88.
by smarks 4y ago
(Note: the article is from 2019, but it is still relevant and interesting.) If all you're doing is deduplicating string objects in order to save memory, the article makes a good case to use `HashMap` or `ConcurrentHashMap` instead of `
89.
by smarks 4y ago
Right. At least at Sun through the 1990s, when everybody had their own workstations, many network nodes had local filesystems, so they were both NFS clients and NFS servers. For this to work well it pretty much required that UIDs/GIDs
90.
by smarks 4y ago
This is too bad. The sweet spot was "hard,intr" at least when I was last using NFS on a daily basis (mid 1990s). Hard mounts make sense for programs, which will happily wait indefinitely while blocked in I/O. This worked well

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