bmastenbrook

I believe that's 400 people who told Peter that they would be possibly interested in contributing something back when he first floated the idea. I was one of those 400, but when the time came I didn't have a subject lined up that I felt was suitable for the format. I think that's why starting something like this is much harder than sustaining it. In the next year I might come up with two or three things suitable for the journal and put them aside until I have time to develop them into an article, but coming up with something to fit a deadline is much more difficult. Coming up with a topic for an inaugural issue that will presumably set the tone for the publication is even more daunting.

Which distribution of Linux? Do you use compositing? If so, what compositing window manager are you using? What's your typical uptime? Do you use multi-monitor? Have you used an 802.11n AP, particularly a 5GHz AP supporting WLAN power save (such as an AirPort Extreme)?

Under a different set of circumstances, Natty could have been said to be flawless on my T420, and indeed I thought it was for the first few days. When I started using the system more intensively for the tasks I bought it for, I began to notice the problems.

Oh! It's so easy. I can't believe I didn't think to do that before.

... but every time I do find a bug, I am surprised to find it. Thus it stands to reason there are bugs I have not yet found. How do I find all of them?

Hail, god amongst men. Once upon a time I thought I was a very good C programmer. Today I know myself to be a terrible programmer. I surround myself with safety mechanisms such as -Wall -Wextra -Werror and the clang analyzer, but even these tools cannot stop me from shooting myself in the foot time and time again. Please enlighten me, such that I may learn to write safe code in an unsafe language infallibly.

To say that wingo has forgotten that systems software needs to be written is both insulting and flat-out wrong. He is a language implementor (Guile). Of course he knows that it is still needed and what it is needed for.

Oh, and I forgot that I had to disable powersave for the iwlagn driver in order to get any kind of performance out of it. I'm using the Intel 6300AGN; I tried to buy a 6200AGN from Amazon to try it out but Lenovo locks their BIOS to specific PCI product IDs.

If by any chance anyone else needs this, I just put a small shell script that runs "iwconfig wlan0 power off" in /etc/pm/power.d/wireless . The name is important because it overrides another script elsewhere with the same name.

There are probably other things I configured or changed that I can't recall right now. I need Linux to get my job done, but I'd be using VMware under Windows if I could get away with it. (For various hardware-development reasons I can't.) It really wasn't worth my time to figure all this out.

tl;dr: don't believe it, at least not for any recent Intel ThinkPads.

I have the ThinkPad T420 with Sandy Bridge graphics that they list as "Certified" under 11.04. This is at best highly misleading. I bought this laptop under the delusion that choosing components that were supported by open source in-tree drivers written by the actual hardware vendor was the right decision to make. Alas, Natty out of the box hangs quite frequently, and X is very unstable. The DisplayPort output is unusable, and even non-DisplayPort output via an adapter didn't quite work.

After quite a lot of fiddling, I've found that the latest upstream kernels (I'm using 3.1-RC9 at the moment) from the Kernel PPA mostly fix the hanging, and using KDE with the XRender compositing backend addresses the rest of the issues I have. OpenGL stability is still a disaster, but I don't really have any need it for anything. I'm not sure if native DisplayPort actually works yet; I got a small HDMI adapter to use instead. Using XFCE would probably work just as well, but don't expect stability from Compiz.

Oh, and if you use dm-crypt (which you should on a laptop) you'll get a stupid error from Grub on every boot unless you uncomment GRUB_TERMINAL=console in /etc/default/grub (&& run update-grub). For reference: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/699802

Intel fabs chips here. They assemble electronics in China.

Edit: And that's assuming that they assemble electronics at all, which I wouldn't bet on.

"Also, I think the parent post was referring to the fact that Steve Jobs is now CEO of Apple which IIRC does most of their manufacturing overseas (SE Asia)."

Does Apple have any manufacturing operations currently? I would be surprised if they did.

"And the US can still complete as both a low-cost and a world-class manufacturer."

Assuming that you're referring to the type of electronics manufacturing that NeXT was doing at its plant, can you provide any evidence to support this assertion?

I'm assuming that you have relatively recent experience in order to make this kind of statement. If you are happy with the cost, quality, capability and flexibility of your US-based contract manufacturing solution, please name names as there are many people who would be interested.

Hidden features in a programming language? Granted, most of these aren't "hidden", but they're nonobvious because the language is incredibly complex and it's difficult to predict from first principles that any of these things would actually work.

Long ago, a rule of programming language design was handed down by the great old hackers, but it has been forgotten and much needless effort has been spent as a result. It's time to remind language designers of the rule again:

"Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary."

Isn't this the whole problem? 90% of the web is crap. If Google can't deliver the non-crap, I'll be looking elsewhere.

Beyond the flood of SEO spam and Demand Media-style content mills, there's another search quality problem I have with Google: torrent sites. I will frequently search on the exact name of a song or album on Google in order to find out more information about that song or album, but lately most of the results have been links to torrents, including results on the first page. This applies even if I add "review" to the search query. I will even see links to torrents ranking above links to iTunes.

These songs and albums are not available legitimately through torrents. What value is there in providing links to pirated content? I understand that Google is not under any legal obligation to remove these results, but as a non-pirate these results are significantly lowering my perception of the quality of Google's search results.

This is HN, so I'll give an example related to my startup. We make a wireless (802.11g) flash drive called the AirStash, which works like an ordinary USB SD card reader on a PC and uses HTML5 for the interface on wireless devices. Here's an example of spam content from eHow that talks about our product:

http://www.ehow.com/how_6861903_install-wireless-flash-drive...

"Wireless flash drives communicate with wireless devices using wireless protocols."

You don't say?

"Advanced wireless flash drives stream data to more than one device at a time."

Well, we're the only one out there, so I guess they're all advanced!

"Insert the USB portion of your wireless flash drive into an available USB port on your computer. Your computer should automatically recognize the device. If not, click the "Start" button and then click "My Computer." Double click the flash drive in the removable media section. This opens the drive and displays the files. Double click the executable file (start.exe, for example) to start the installation process."

Uh, no. No software installation is ever required, a point we make abundantly clear on our web site.

Basically, it's all wrong.

Not that I've seen, but I might have a different view of what constitutes an organized crime syndicate than you do.

Ah, but we did live through it in the '80s with the satanic abuse hoax, and we didn't learn anything. In fact, the people involved in pushing the hoax were rewarded with higher office. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870428120457500... for a good writeup of the case.

"since Colin presumably doesn't want to raise his prices to pay for actual review"

Speaking as a Tarsnap user, he ought to. The service is seriously underpriced right now.

As I said, 0x lambdas can do that...

... but you probably shouldn't: don't use a macro where a function will suffice, and if you need to use a macro, write a macro that syntactically wraps around a function if possible. C++, especially 0x, provides a lot of metaprogramming functionality you can use to avoid writing macros in many cases. Using this functionality will give the compiler more information about your program for analysis purposes, which means the compiler can help ensure correctness and better efficiency.

Yes, it'd work with 0x lambdas; however, the situations where this occurs in C are much less common in C++. Consider the "max" example given, as written in C++:

template <typename T> T max(T a, T b) { return (a > b) ? a : b; }

int max_ints(int a, int b) { return max(a, b); }

Of course this only works if "a" and "b" have the same type. 0x provides a solution for the situation where they don't:

template <typename Ta, typename Tb> auto max(Ta a, Tb b) -> decltype((a > b) ? a : b) { return (a > b) ? a : b; }

int max_int_char(int a, char b) { return max(a, b); }

``I would presume it saying "the power brick is defective" is a really, really good specification about what the exact problem is with regard to a "safety issue."''

I'm suspicious of this explanation. The brick might be defective, but it's the responsibility of the charger to shut down the charge cycle if there's something wrong with the input. Most lithium-ion chargers include an on-die thermistor for this reason. I wonder if the WakeMate folks found one that didn't and also didn't populate an external thermistor to save space or cost.

It wouldn't be self-regulated; there are already laws about declaration of origin on products. The "Made in China" stickers on devices aren't there because the manufacturer is giving the vendor a discount for advertising the Chinese origin. They're there because customs can seize and destroy mislabeled products.

"I am willing to pay more money if you build your products in the US / Europe / Japan"

No, you aren't. Well, you might be; I don't know what your means are, but you probably aren't.

Here's the problem: it's not just the extra 20% in cost of the product. Once you raise the product's price, fewer people will buy it. Hardware is a game of economies of scale. When you fall off the volume curve, the price goes up exponentially. Soon enough your 20% additional cost starts looking like 200% additional cost.

Furthermore, there are precious few companies doing high volume electronics manufacturing in the US. There's no guarantee that the quality you get is going to be any better than what you can find for less in China. That's not to say that you can't find something unbelievably crappy in China, but even good services in China cost much less than they do here in the US. It's not like you can buy better capacitors in here than you can in China. The ones you can get in China have the advantage of actually being available too, whereas buying even passives in the US can result in ridiculous lead times of 6 months or more.

Yes, you bought a Soekris router and you're very happy with it. I'm glad for you. It's also a completely different class of product. There's no lesson that can be drawn from the comparison between a Soekris board and a WRT54GL.

Maybe it'd be a one time fee for somebody like Cisco that can afford the intermediate CA process, but I've looked into this for my own company and there's no way we can afford this. Nor is there any affordable option to prepurchase device certificates that I can find. If anybody actually has an idea on how to ship devices with unique certificates signed by a CA accepted by the majority of browsers, I'd love to hear it.

Perry doesn't work for VMware. He has his own business that offers training on VMware products.

The weekly diesel discount might also be a good way of attracting loyal customers from local businesses who operate diesel vehicles.

Once again, I'm not convinced the specialists are actually filtering usefully instead of juat defining the boundaries of their niche.

You've assumed that the non-reviewed content I'm reading is in the form of papers. It isn't; it's blog posts and code.

I honestly don't remember. It's somewhere between 25 and 50, though not all of those were read in detail.

Given the huge number of niche conferences and journals out there, is the filtering that takes place actually useful? I'm not convinced of it. I've engaged in venue shopping myself. Meanwhile useful, novel work is published in the open every day and my brain hasn't collapsed from the inrush of poorly filtered information. I run across junk, but I find published junk too. At least the former usually has the decency to not waste my time with a bunch of academic boilerplate language and a page of barely relevant citations.

Not really. I was not shocked. Were you shocked? If so, have you gotten all the sand out of your ears yet?