Viewing profile — jklowden

The next time, your libertarian friend mutters “Solyndra”, tell him at the most Solyndra cost the federal government 1/2 billion dollars, not the many billions Trump is spending to…

Apple is learning from Microsoft, sometimes as counterexample. You won’t know Apple joy until you replace the one you have with another. If you’re backed up via Time Machine — beca…

Geez, what a lot of vague self-contradictory self-regarding opinionated advice. Is terminal a world of “pure information’ or “a mess”? Both, it seems. Don’t dump “pages and pages o…

Count me among those who think publishers should always know who they’re publishing. When law enforcement comes knocking, a warrant should be all they need. Meta can’t shrug and sa…

Hey, the economy is great and gas is cheap. All we had to put up with is mean tweets. Whenever anyone complains about Trump, remind them he’s not the cause but the product. Seventy…

Exactly. Anthropic has been losing three-comma money until recently. In Q2 2026 it earned a profit for the first time, about $500 million. If we imagine they will earn $2 billion i…

Nonsense. See Codd’s first paper. 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 n…

> SQL Server has to convert every single value in the column to nvarchar before it can compare. This of course is not true. It is a defect in Microsoft’s query planner. And the pro…

I’m not sure why the top-rated reply begins by presuming anything about the problem domain. Many domains have a specified language and implied if not explicit collation. Rejecting …

It’s a terribly useful idea. FTFY. 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…

Not sure how viable Mezzano is. The most recent bug report was two years ago. The “beginnings of a manual” was last updated 7 years ago. A better example might be Guix, depending h…

If only there was one good library. libxml2 is the leading one, and it has been beleaguered by problems internal and external. It has had ABI instability and been besieged by CVE r…

iRobot’s largest creditor isn’t its Chinese supplier. It’s the US government, in the form of unpaid tariffs, some $3.5 million. Arguably it was Trump’s stupid tariffs that drove th…

I believe that’s what we call a "view".

There is no pass-by-value overhead. There are only implementation decisions. Pass by value describes the semantics of a function call, not implementation. Passing a const reference…

Note well: the claims about TCP come with some evidence, in the form of a graph. The claims for QUIC do not. Many of the claims are dubious. TCP has "no notion of multiple steams"?…

There was never any danger of public education, so eliminating that danger was quite easy. What we are undermining, though, is the benefit of public education. Witness the last ele…

90% of funding for K-12 public schools comes from state and local taxes. That’s hardly a one-size-fits-all national system. Would you tell me though, please, what language and cult…

To be fair, the characterization is entirely accurate. Anyone who speaks of "government schools" advocates their demise. They want an entirely privatized system funded at taxpayer …

Brian Kernighan cannot be topped. He is easy to read, succinct, clear, and sometimes funny.

Why do I remember that every C64 BASIC keyword was a 2-byte integer? A typing shortcut was to enter the first letter, followed by a "shifted" high-bit character. Every keyword was …

Operating systems were always more reliable than Windows95 from the day it was introduced. Protected memory and process privilege were not exactly unknown when DEC was selling VMS.…

> some systems can never be shut down 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 …

What drugs were they on? Why on earth is there any distinction between variables allocated statically, on the stack, or on the heap? I allocate a struct, copy data to it, and those…

Uh huh. The No SQL zombie yet shuffles on. Anyone who knows SQL sees dozens of problems immediately. What enforces data integrity? How do we know the records are NF1? How do we per…