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Happiness
One of the drawbacks of our secular age is that it is less clear what we should strive for in our lives. In medieval Europe it seems as though life goals were pretty clear for most people: keep your nose clean, and you get to go to heaven after you die. Heaven is a good…
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GCC vs. CERT
CERT recently issued an unfortunate advisory about gcc. The advisory is about an optimization which gcc introduced in gcc 4.2: given a pointer p, then a comparison of the form p + C1 < p + C2 can be reduced to C1 < C2. This is always valid in standard C and C++, because those…
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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…