Posts by Zzznorch

Compromise reached as Linux kernel community protests about treating compiler warnings as errors

I Agree With Linus

Almost 15 years ago I inherited a huge C project that generated about 17,000 warnings. The original team of developers never bothered to investigate them and was happy if the build completed without “errors”. I was always getting tasked with finding out why a customer would discover a weird bug that was usually a showstopper. Eventually I ran a good analyzer on the code and found that a lot of those warnings should have been errors. Perhaps 30% of the warnings were pointing out buffer overruns, invalid use of “=“ instead of “==“, potential stack issues. Took me ages to clean those up. The reward was a customer commenting several weeks after an upgrade at how stable the code suddenly was after the upgrade.

I wholeheartedly agree that warnings should be errors. Code should build clean. Especially C.

PDP-10 enthusiasts resurrect ancient MIT operating system

PDP-11 and VAX-11/780

I had a chance to use a PDP-10 back in the spring of 1977 when I was in 9th grade but that was only because a friend let me play a computer game on the ASR-33 teletype. My first programming course was in the fall of 1977, when I was in 10th grade, and we used a timeshared PDP-11 running RSTS/E through a 300 baud modem connected to an LA36 DecWriter II. That is the nostalgic system for me as well as VAX/VMS that I worked on in the 1980's at my first and second jobs. Occasionally I fire up the SiMH software to play a little with either RSTS/E or VMS. I was much more involved with VMS and even wrote several kernel mode programs having been tutored by one of the then guru's on the internals of that operating system.

Brazil's anti-NSA prez urged to SNATCH keys to the internet from America

Starting to Agree

In the past, when the United Nations and other countries were demanding that control of the Internet be turned over to an international body, my opinion was if you want control of the Internet, go invent it yourself. The United States created and funded the beginnings of the Internet and is entitled to run it.

That being said, in light of all the spying activity the United States has been performing on the Internet, I am beginning to change my mind. However, if one considers that the current Internet is totally compromised and that you will not be able to pull the back doors out of it, perhaps my original thought that the International body create a totally new Internet devoid of United States control makes sense. Forget trying to take over the existing Internet. The other advantage is that the new Internet could be based on IPV6 and other newer protocols that would solve many of the problems inherent in our IPV4 based Internet.