Viewing profile — pwaring

Depends how long it takes to write a book - I could create one today but not finish writing it for 12 months.

Specifically about British computing is Electronic Dreams (Tom Lean) (disclosure: I went to university with the author). The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build …

The -S flag also works in clang, although the output may differ. For example, last time I checked a comparison check of i cmpl $9, -4(%rbp) jle .L3 under GCC ('if i cmpl $10, -8(%r…

When I worked at a university, we had several pieces of legacy 32-bit software, mostly written in C, which were essential to some courses. It became more and more difficult to run …

I'm not aware of a good free introduction to ARM assembly, but you could check out the reading lists from these courses: http://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/COMP15111/syllabu…

The three applications I use every single day without fail are an editor, an email client and a web browser (I'm a developer/sysadmin). If you provide one of those, I'm going to se…

I don't think this is the same thing. If you want to hire the vast majority of people, it may well be easier to acquire the company. What happens if the other company is much bigge…

I wonder how much litigation risk is involved with this. If you poach one key employee, the original company is likely to be a bit grumpy but probably won't do anything. If you poa…

I'm a freelance consultant, and I charge for my time rather than per-project (except for very small well-defined projects), so I end up doing planning and execution for some client…

The advantage of -v is that you can see what is being extracted as it happens. This is useful if you have a tarball with thousands of small files, as otherwise it's hard to tell wh…

I've read the manual and I'm currently reviewing the book - the book is a lot more in-depth than the user manual and starts further in (chapter 1 drops you right in with environmen…

What does Hurd do to solve that problem? It has the same licence as Linux, so Microsoft could release 'Microsoft Hurd' in the same way.

The need for the GNU project and philosophy is still great, I'm not sure there's a need for the Hurd though. We already have a popular, well-supported (by companies and individuals…

They are completely different use cases though, so it shouldn't be too surprising that the results are different. Gmail: Lots of small requests which each last a short time. Netfli…

They're used heavily in Linux device drivers, amongst other things - here's just one example: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/video/...

There's a newer edition available which has been published recently: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033677.do

I listen to: bsdtalk: http://bsdtalk.blogspot.co.uk/ FLOSS Weekly: http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly Tech Weekly: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/series/techweekly Linux Voice…

There's 21st Century C from O'Reilly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025108.do It has mixed reviews - my impression from reading it was that if you agree with the author's …

Not necessarily. Generally, firms become insolvent if they can't meet their liabilities as they fall due (things get a bit more complicated for regulated firms such as insurers, wh…

"Subversion uses copy-on-write when creating a branch, so it is not expensive" Agreed - it's a constant-time operation according to the documentation, and took about 5 seconds for …

I've done it, though not to such a big extent. I work four days a week instead of five, due to a combination of less technical work available and wanting to explore other opportuni…

Isn't Bovet & Cesati a bit out of date now? I used to have a copy, but it was published in 2005, which means it was probably written in 2004. Also, it's not kernel-specific, but th…

Not just science, it would be good to see open-access across all fields.

TM still doesn't mean anything in a legal sense - if you're relying on the common law protection then it doesn't matter if you put the two letters next to your logo/brand. Putting …