David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)‘Beware the SATAs of March’ doesn’t have quite the same ring.
- 39 Followers
- 78 Following
- 652 Posts
Programmer (C, Perl, others). Sysadmin of Unix and Linux instances. Remembers Usenet.
Mark Dominus
Resuna*He went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: “I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”*
-- Tracy Kidder, "Soul of a New Machine."
Even when I first read it I was not particularly impressed, it was well written and interesting, but I had this niggling feel all the way through that Data General was conning Tracy Kidder because it was clear early in the book that the project was doomed.
But this quote has stuck with me.
Lance FortnowTurning Awardee Sir Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Jim Miles remembers.
https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2026/03/tony-hoare-1934-2026.html
Last time I had to debug this deeply into #m4 macros, my neighbour hung a #pentagram on the #cubicle wall between us.
Matthew GarrettHello! Because I clearly hate myself I have written about some of the tradeoffs involved in allowing non-free blobs of code to be updated at runtime and published it on the internet: https://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/blog/p/to-update-blobs-or-not-to-update-blobs/
To update blobs or not to update blobs
A lot of hardware runs non-free software. Sometimes that non-free software is in ROM. Sometimes it’s in flash. Sometimes it’s not stored on the device at all, it’s pushed into it at runtime by another piece of hardware or by the operating system. We typically refer to this software as “firmware” to differentiate it from the software run on the CPU after the OS has started1, but a lot of it (and, these days, probably most of it) is software written in C or some other systems programming language and targeting Arm or RISC-V or maybe MIPS and even sometimes x862.