5a04fcd55b8
I understand this will sound grumpy and humorless.
The new passport design seems to be very popular in my home country. Mostly - I can only suppose - to the immense majority of my compatriots who do not travel outside of the occasional guided-tour charter flight to an all-inclusive beach resort.
A few counterpoints:
- Border agents, like me you could say, are not exactly famous for their sense of humor. I foresee a few unfunny hiccups at the beginning of the transition period. A particular 50-state country immediately comes to mind.
- While admittedly most pages' designs are thankfully subdued, the first one features a bright-red-and-white rocket that looks like a childish toy.
- The childish toy interpretation is the charitable comparison. In reality, its design was inspired by Werner Von Braun's "V2" rocket. This is the weapon that devastated London during WW2 and would have erased it completely save for some cunning British intelligence.
- The rocket drawing comes from the Tintin comic books. The beloved hero, Tintin, is mostly harmless. Except for his extremely racist adventures in Congo (a Belgian colony at the time), his rather racist adventures in China, and his very racist depictions of Jews. The author has been very appreciated in Belgium, to such an extent that he had no issue continuing his work and publishing it, even when the country was not exactly autonomous between 1940 and 1945.
- While most of the comic books honored in the passport are respectable, let me just state the following. Other countries put national heroes on their passports. Think Beethoven, Shakespeare, Marie Curie, Gandhi. Or national treasures. Pyramids, parilament houses, symbols of democracy, of peace, or of greatness. In Belgium, besides the Smurfs, we also put Natasha the air hostess, and Largo Winch. Look them up if you don't know them. Their appeal is not only the quality of the scenario. I think there was confusion here, between "humility" and sheer lack of gravitas.
Yeah, it's not a big deal. I love my home country. But I can't bring myself to endorse this.
1. It really does not matter. For any measurable skill, there will be millions of people stronger than you, and millions more who are weaker. Unless you are aiming for the very top (think Usain Bolt) and being the best will be recognized somehow (as opposed to being, say, the world's best cherry kernel spitter), try not to worry too much about it.
2. Rather than take the infamously arbitrary job interview dance as a reference point, you can look at how good you are at your actual job. Are you helping forward progress in any way? Do your colleagues appreciate you? Are you bringing something positive to your community? If so, you can be more than satisfied.
You would need two distinct, long-lived dynamically-linked executables, both being hot at the same time, and both having libc (or another common library) in the hotpath at the same time.
To elaborate,
- If two hot processes are the same executable, static linking would yield the same results: They will be mmap()ed to the same physical addresses (and I'm assuming physical indexing or equivalent here, otherwise ASLR really negates any dynamic linking advantage wrt caches).
- If the processes are not hot or not long-lived, everything will be dominated (by orders of magnitude) by media access, context switches, and virtual page allocation.
- Sure, we could imagine a non-hot process trashing the cache for a hot one, and doing it less so with dynamic linking. But again, context switch is the bigger concern. A complete cache flush would make little difference here.
- And I'm not even going to touch on the various cache-timing vuln mitigations out there.
That being said, I am a staunch proponent of dynamic linking being the general case, for the memory and storage savings. Security is a common argument too, and although I'm not expert enough to have an opinion on this one, I do love the traditional distro approach to packages.