jklowden
That essay believing in townsfolk was written while lynchings were still happening and schools were segregated and land deeds prohibited sale to blacks and Jews. Levittowns and the federal highway system were actively indulging and encouraging white flight. But, yeah, anyone will feed you.
Nowadays our children endure “active shooter” drills and sometimes die at the hands of active shooters. Parents are charged with neglect for letting children go to the store unaccompanied. Stand-your-ground laws defend shooting someone through a locked door, or in a parking lot. Vote canvassers have been shot at for turning onto the wrong driveway. Salt of the earth, those townsfolk.
The price of housing continues to rise mainly because those already there prevent building for those who would come. San Francisco is 1/2 the density of New York. It’s expensive because Palo Alto looks like Levittown and not, say, Queens. That was decided by those same sweet townsfolk.
Maybe Heinlein’s essay was inspirational in the McCarthy Era. In the present day, when Republicans root for deporting citizens elected to congress, it’s a transparent fantasy. Take every sentence as false, and it’s a useful guide to the world that we sadly actually live in.
That and, you know, Microsoft.
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised to see 8th-grade advice offered to adult professionals with a straight face. Nor finger-wagging about the passive. Honestly, you want the world to know “the president was elected by the voters” is improved by “the voters elected the president”?
Want to be an excellent technical writer? Start by reading everything Brian Kernighan has written. Emulate. Repeat until done. Expect it to take time. Definitely years.
Instead of worrying over Oxford commas, wonderful though they be, great technical writing starts with and keeps always the reader in mind. Not so different from all great writing, in fact. Drop the “X was designed to intended to” throat-clearing, and get to what the user can do with what X does. And thanks for taking the time.
You won’t know Apple joy until you replace the one you have with another. If you’re backed up via Time Machine — because you are, right? — then you plug in your new machine, hit “restore” or whatever it’s called, and head off to sleep. In the morning all your data, applications, and settings will be there. Your new machine will be indistinguishable from the old but for the grime.
Is terminal a world of “pure information’ or “a mess”? Both, it seems. Don’t dump “pages and pages of debug” text? Check. But do use boldface fonts “in a terminal independent way” and “try” to provide man pages. But because “some people” don’t know about them and “some platforms” don’t support them, provide help text by default.
Those “some” by the way are one: Windows. Do please enlighten us on the terminal-independent font control system that includes CMD.EXE.
How much is too much? Their showcase examples are more than 25 lines, more than the default size of a terminal window. The authors don’t give much weight to context, to the ability to look back on over the history of the interactive session. No, much better to splat the screen with 50 lines the user didn’t request, because helpful.
Oh, and don’t write a filter like cat(1). How the system is supposed to distinguish between reading from standard input and reading from standard input by mistake, they don’t say. Just quit and print a help message.
I have different advice: please don’t help. Please be quiet. Don’t suggest, don’t guess, dont offer, don’t assume. Just do. Do what the user said. If he wants something else, he’ll say so in time.
If you want —help to do something useful because you think your user is too dense to find the manual (condescension much?) then invoke it for him. Just maybe put a hint somewhere to press “q” to quit.
Virtually all the “help” I get on the command line is unasked-for and unwanted and unhelpful. If I fat-finger “ls”, I don’t need a suggestion to install lsof. The very last thing I want is 50 lines of noise obscuring what I was looking at before you so helpfully interrupted.
There’s nothing new in publishing anonymously, just ask George Elliot. What’s new is the notion that publishers have no liability. Social media companies do not claim to speak for themselves. They have no reporters, no sources to protect. They’re one giant “letters to the editor” section. They should know for whom they speak.
Whether or not a writer commits libel is for the courts to decide. Neither the writer nor publisher has the right to avoid responsibility by camouflage.
Whenever anyone complains about Trump, remind them he’s not the cause but the product. Seventy million voted for him, and Republicans in congress let him do illegally what they cannot accomplish legislatively. And all the while they’re busy selling the country for parts, whether through tax policy, or neutering the CAFE standards, or handing copyright to Disney.
To believe the valuation, Anthropic earnings need to grow 100x. For a more likely outcome, I can recommend a bridge in Brooklyn.
1NF removes repeating groups, putting for example data for each month in its own row, not an array of 12 months in 1 row.
Storage efficiency was never the point. IMS had that locked down. Succinctness of expression and accuracy of results was the point. And is: normalization prevents anomalous results.
This of course is not true. It is a defect in Microsoft’s query planner. And the proof lies in the remedy.
The recommended solution is to convert the search argument type to match that of the index. The user is forced to discover the problem and adjust manually. SQL Server could just as well have done that automatically.
No information is lost converting nvarchar to varchar if the index is varchar. If the search argument is ‘’, no conversion from varchar will match it (unless the index data is UTF8, which the server should know).
This is a longstanding bug in SQLserver, and not the only one. Instead of patting ourselves on the back for avoiding what SQL Server “has to do”, we should be insisting it not do it. Anymore.
The program you used to leave your comment, and the libraries it used, were loaded into memory via mmap(2) prior to execution. To use protobuf or whatever, you use mmap.
The only reason mmap isn’t more generally useful is the dearth of general-use binary on-disk formats such as ELF. We could build more memory-mapped applications if we had better library support for them. But we don’t, which I suppose was the point of TFA.
A better example might be Guix, depending how “operating system” is defined.
I agree it shouldn’t be hard. On the evidence, though, it is. I suspect the root problem is lack of tools. Lex and yacc tools for Unicode are relatively scarce. At least that’s what’s set me back from rolling my own.
Pass by value describes the semantics of a function call, not implementation. Passing a const reference in C++ is pass-by-value. If the user opts to pass "a copy" instead, nothing requires the compiler to actually copy the data. The compiler is required only to supply the actual parameter as if it was copied.
Many of the claims are dubious. TCP has "no notion of multiple steams"? What are two sockets, then? What is poll(2)? The onus is on QUIC to explain why it’s better for the application to multiplex the socket than for the kernel to multiplex the device. AFAICT that question is assumed away in a deluge of words.
If the author thinks it’s the "end of TCP sockets", show us the research, the published papers and meticulous detail. Then tell me again why I should eschew the services of TCP and absorb its complexity into my application.
And, yes, the assault on democracy is real. On January 20, Trump signed an order in support of free speech. Within a week he barred the AP over the Gulf of America. Within a month he illegally disbanded USAID. Within 3 months he began suing law firms and defunding university research. Today colleges are receiving letters demanding curriculum in exchange for funding. And we have four years more, at least, to endure.
Would you tell me though, please, what language and cultural differences should inflect science or math or literature or history? Are you suggesting evolution not be taught where there are parents who object, or that the civil war be taught differently in the former confederacy, so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings? Those things are happening, of course. I’m just innocent of any defense for them.
Whoever "they" are in your assertion, they are not cutting down bureaucracy or promoting local control. The federal government has not issued new regulations to cap administrative overhead, for example. It simply abandoned its civil rights enforcement and slashed funding.
Agreed, public schools in America do a poor job. Something like 1/3 of graduating seniors are ready for college work, according to the "national report card". But that’s by design: elected school boards and administration determine salaries and standards. No principal wants to explain poor grades to a disappointed parent; no teacher wants to combat a parent’s prejudice by teaching real history or biology. So, the curriculum is mediocre and grades are high.
The situation isn’t much better at private schools by the way. Grade inflation is everywhere. Harvard just has the luxury of picking its students.
No Child Left Behind and civil-rights enforcement by the department of education did narrow the achievement gap, which has now begun to widen again. So it is clear the department directly benefits student. The complaint is not that; it is that it benefits the "wrong" students, if you get my drift.
Variables were also 2-bytes, but ASCII. The user could enter a longer name, but only the first two characters were significant.
Tomshardware could do better reporting. There is no such thing as a computer that can’t fail, or a component that can’t be replaced. Does our reporter think the entire system was installed 25 years ago, and not one component has been replaced since? More likely it’s the ship of Theseus, and not one component is original.
I’ve replaced whole systems without interruption. You build in compatibility, then replace every computer one by one, and phase out use of the compatibility. It’s not rocket surgery.
Technical sites could be superior to the reporting in the general media on technical issues. It doesn’t have to be be stenography.
The point of the type system is to define types. It’s not to make the compiler’s job easier, or to give standards committees clouds to build their castles on. No amount of words will justify this misbegotten misinvention.
Anyone who knows SQL sees dozens of problems immediately. What enforces data integrity? How do we know the records are NF1? How do we perform a join, or test existential quantification, without table names? How do we know all supposed "dates" are valid dates, and not my uncles ex-wife’s maiden name? How does one reference XML attributes from SQL?
The answer produced by SQL are only as good as the data they’re drawn from. The quality and internal consistency of those data are enforced by the DBMS. No amount of pretty graphs and syntax highlighting changes that. The effective of SQL depends on the knowledge of the practitioner. No tool changes that, either.