Month: April 2008
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The Walking Dead
One of the best comic books being produced these days is, of all things, a zombie story. The Walking Dead is written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Charlie Adlard. The background is the basic zombie story as reimagined by George Romero: most of the people in the world have turned into zombies, and our…
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Spectrum Auction
The FCC spectrum auction is over and the anti-collusion restrictions have been lifted. I’m not going to say anything about what my employer did–I of course was not involved in the auction at all and I don’t know anything about it beyond the public announcements. But I wonder about the whole auction concept in the…
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Relational Databases Considered Harmful
My first real job, at the actual company called AIRS and the original owner of the domain airs.com, was working on what was then called a fourth generation language system. Nowadays we would simply call it a database. It was pretty powerful, and we had customers, but we only ran on a system called the…
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Archive Alignment
gold normally simply mmaps input files and reads the data directly from the mapped memory. In general this requires that all the data structures be properly aligned in the file, which is guaranteed by the ELF standard. The x86, of course, does not require proper alignment for memory loads and stores, so this was never…
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Banks
I’m happy to see that there is a nice new edition of one of my favorite books, The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. For some reason the book drags me in every time I read it. Much of it amounts to a critique of an exaggerated version of our own society, but the…