Posts by Rob Menke

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Re: USCD Berkeley?

Methinks the author got confused. Perhaps he mixed up Cal Berkeley with UCSD Pascal, which was an implementation of the language from the University of California, San Diego.

Microsoft ❤️ Linux? Microsoft ❤️ running its Windows' SQL Server software on Linux

Re: virtualisation again?

Um, no. LLVM is a compiler technology that abstracts away the underlying assembly language of the platform. macOS has been native x86 since the transition. Nor is it pure Mach, opting more for a hybrid approach to a kernel.

LLVM isn't even platform-independent. It simply treats function calls and φ-operations as primitives during code generation. That the bytecode can be interpreted rather than translated to the targeted assembly is a happy accident, not a goal of the project.

Hasbro kills Colonel Mustard in the corporate office with the marketing ploy

Two words, Hasbro:

New Coke.

Don't mess with a classic.

Hadoop: When grownups do open source

Not exactly a shining star, but compared to everything else...

The reason people don’t write about Hadoop is that good Hadoop programming is really old school Lisp programming. If you are capable of doing data analysis in Lisp without resorting to mutators, Hadoop will seem eerily familiar.

My biggest complaint about Hadoop is its sucky documentation. It almost *has* to be open source just so you can figure out what the damn map-join classes are supposed to do.

But what it does do right, it does so wonderfully.

As for Yahoo, they unfortunately view Hadoop as the panacea for all their computing woes: applying it to all problems even where it should not be applied, then gnashing and wailing when it fails to yield performance benefits. Case in point: the project I am working on is willing to take a 50% performance hit to achieve Hadoopification, just because it’s fucking Hadoop, bitches. Another sad tale of using a power drill for a hammer.

Maven founder proposes Eclipse marriage

A Netbeans troll speaks!

I agree with Steven Dick: a build system is a build system is a build system; it should be independent of the underlying IDE. There's no reason I'd stop using Maven if they strive for stronger integration with Eclipse, *provided* that they don't exclude other IDEs.

If they did, Maven would simply fork and the Eclipse-only version would wither away. It's just too useful to become dependent on Eclipse. One of the reasons I switched from Eclipse to Netbeans was that Eclipse's build process back then required the IDE to be locally installed (don't know if that's still true; probably not) while Netbeans used Ant as its default. In any case, this is definitely a Chicken Little story.

Now for the troll: Has anyone noticed that the quality of Eclipse is inversely proportional to the size of its governance board? Do they really want new members? Software by committee has never been a good idea.

(I'd rather have a "WTF?" icon to display my amazement at this fluff, but the thumbs-down would have to do.)

Hackintosh maker gets legal greeting from Apple

If Psystar Wins, the Homebrew Cloners Lose

If people think a Psystar win will force Apple to license MacOS X for beige boxes, think again.

Apple will simply stop selling MacOS X starting with Snow Leopard. You get a box, the OS will be preloaded. System updates will work as usual. Want a new release? Take your machine into an Apple Store (or via mail) and for a nominal service charge (around $130, natch) they'll upgrade your machine. They'll probably make you sign a contract, too; no EULA problems there since you actively agreed. Obviously, they have the right to refuse to service a competitor's machine.

That won't stop people from making and distributing images of a clean MacOS X drive, but since those will be patently illegal copies Apple won't care; they'll just sic the BSA on the distributors. Psystar will have no options open: Leopard will no longer be available via retail, and Snow Leopard won't be available period.

Expect new machines to come with the TPM fully activated to limit the cloning. Also expect the MacMacs to vigorously defend the practice even though it sucks for everyone else, and the Freetards to claim "Well, now I'm switching to Linux!" even though Apple couldn't care less about them (which causes them to hate Apple more). Finally, with the death of the EULA, expect to be forced to sign a contract for ANY software since companies won't be able to enforce their terms any other way.

Apple isn't going to slit their own throat to make the customer's life easier; nor should they. Most of their customers wouldn't upgrade anyway: the average consumer is content with the OS that comes with the machine.

Why Microhoo! is like, so, totally dead

Spoiler

Fine, you people need it spelled out? Here ya go:

http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9939129-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Note that I had to dredge through her (his? its?) collection of inanity to find the correct article. The sacrifices I make for you people...

(Dead vulture, because this parody flopped, and flopped badly.)

Boffin says Astronomical Unit should be binned

Avagadro's Number and Prototypes

Actually, there was an article in El Reg a couple of months ago where a group of (Australian?) scientists were trying to do exactly that: count the number of atoms in a given sample of ultrapure silicon. Once complete, the sample would be the new standard for the mole and Avagadro's number would be derived from that sample.

If instead Avagadro's number is fixed by convention, then that sample would also be standard for mass.

Operating systems are old and busted

Full Circle

Imagine that, an operating system whose sole purpose is to allow applications to pretend they're sitting directly on top of the bare metal. Why, a system to enable virtual machines should have a snappy name, like Virtual Memory System (VMS for short).

And people say that the only thing reinvented (badly) nowadays is UNIX...