dded

One significant user-visible feature of 3.13 is nftables: https://lwn.net/Articles/564095/

Thanks. I might have to check out Bredin

(Proust, at 4k pages, is perhaps too long! :-) But I appreciate the recommendation. That split in society was emphasized by Tuchman, as I recall.)

Any recommendations on a good book-length account of the Dreyfus Affair? I've read the chapter in Tuchman's Proud Tower. I've always loved her books, but this is just a short chapter in a longer book. (I also read Shirer's Third Republic, but that was so long ago I don't remember. It was just a chapter also.)

> In North America, one does not hear the word “jest” that often

That's not my experience. But certainly I'll admit that North America is a big place, and your experience could be different. I grew up in a blue collar town in the midwest of the US.

I hear "jest" all the time, and hear it in all kinds of company. But usually I only hear it in one of two idioms: "I jest", usually said after a joke if it's apparent that the listener is taking offense to something just said; and "only half in jest", indicating that the speaker wants you to take what s/he just said seriously.

It's that second idiom that he uses.

For a beginner's introduction to C++, I really liked Koenig and Moo's Accelerated C++. It's from 2000, I don't know if there's a newer edition.

Speaking of Koenig, I also like his C Traps and Pitfalls (1989).

Sedgewick's Algorithms is excellent. My copy is 30 years old, but I know there are newer editions. I believe it's multi-volume now.

I liked two by Richard Stevens: Unix Network Programming and Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment.

And I like Bentley's Programming Pearls.

These are all old, but I'm old. :-)

Addenda: I've really liked everything I've read by Brian Kernighan. K&R is my favorite programming book bar none.

Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences by Bevington and Robinson. Very approachable introduction.

div grad curl and all that by Schey. Read it before taking Fields, instead of after like I did.

Hennessy and Patterson is in its 5th edition. That makes me feel old. I can only vouch for earlier editions, but this is a good book.

(I'm only familiar with the 1st and 2nd editions of this book, and of the two, I greatly prefer the 1st. The 2nd has a lot more information (and of course is somewhat more up-to-date), but that only seems to hide the more significant information. More complete is not always better.)

Have you any experience with VNC clients on ChromeOS? If so, what's the performance like?

I found the following, which mentions Chrome Web Browser, is that equivalent for the sake of applications? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vnc-viewer-for-goo...

> But is it really so bad?

I don't know. It's not like "Gimp", which is viewed by some as insulting to handicapped people. But it wasn't clear to me that the Nimrod developers were even aware of the US connotations, so I brought it up.

Perhaps the "Git" comparison is apt; as far as the US is concerned, that's the sort of name that's been picked.

I'm not sure why this is down-voted. Connotations differ in different cultures; I merely point out that "Nimrod" does not have a universally positive connotation.

If this is connotation is intentional, perhaps as humor, please just tell me I'm not getting the joke.

Near the top of Nimrod's homepage (http://nimrod-lang.org/) is the following quotation, which leads me to believe that the language creators think they have picked a good name:

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language. -- D. E. Knuth

But "Nimrod" might not be as good of a name as they hope. The biblical Nimrod was a "mighty hunter", and the name may have that connotation in Europe: the British seem to have always had a warship or a warplane (or both) named Nimrod, for instance. But in the US, due to the ironic use of the name by Bugs Bunny to address Elmer Fudd, we tend to associate "Nimrod" with incompetence and gullibility.

I know a Cobol programmer who did (is doing) something similar.

> If everything is a command, then "#" must also be a command

In my mind, that's an argument that at least something shouldn't be a command. But perhaps it simplifies implementation enough to be worth it.

> To say that tcl does not allow one to know what a complicated line of code means is absurd.

Fully agree with you there. And for what it's worth, in the Tcl I encounter, there's rarely a line of code that complicated. Perl is often accused of being a write-only language. I think Tcl, if anything, is the opposite. It always seems readable.

> Comments in Tcl work perfectly fine

I agree with what you're saying, but allow me to go meta.

Comments in Tcl are a bit strange. This works:

  # say howdy
  puts hello

But this does not:

  puts hello   # say howdy

For the later, you have to insert a semicolon:

  puts hello;  # say howdy

I get bitten by this time and time again.

Since today seems to be Tcl Day, I thought I'd submit this: the beginning of the famous Tcl War.

Here is a direct link to John Ousterhout's reply: http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html

Yeah, but I'm glad we don't still use corduroyed roads.

Tcl is a wheel worth reinventing.

Surely you mean "fame" and not "infamy".

> One of my fondest memories working with Tcl was in the EDA industry. Thanks to its legacy, Tcl/Tk enjoys widespread usage in the entire workflow - from logic design to sign-off

Those of us actually using EDA tools are not necessarily so fond of Tcl. Not me anyhow. Tcl is awkward to debug, and its everything-is-string semantics make programming an exercise in quoting. Just when I think I understand the scoping, I screw it up.

> Despite its odd syntax

Tcl's syntax is one thing that I actually do like about the language. It's odd, yes, but it's simple and clean.

> Tcl is one of the rare examples of a functional programming language actively used in the industry (I'm looking at you Lisp).

Cadence actually uses a real Lisp in some of their tools; they call it Skill. Skill is, in fact, a joy to code in; and I greatly prefer it to Tcl. They also have a lexically scoped version called Skill+, which I've never got to use.

> wishing that something like Python would replace [Tcl]

Python, yes! Or Scheme. Or even Perl. I don't know Lua, but have always imagined it to be better than Tcl and it seems to occupy a similar niche. But no one even talks about Tcl getting replaced.

It definitely matters. I've always struggled with NX. VNC is easier, but slower.

It should be resistant to the firewire DMA attack even if it had firewire. Modern processors protect against this. AMD calls their mechanism the device exclusion vector, I forget what Intel calls theirs.

While we're on the topic of X displayers, is there something like this or VNC for ChromeOS?

> raising camera phones in unison to capture the slides he presented...

ISSCC solved this a long time ago (when cameras weren't yet phones) by giving everyone a CD of every presenters' slides.

Yes, X11 itself can display over a network. But it's quite painful over an even somewhat slow link.

Is anyone familiar with this? How does it compare with VNC or NX?

> Using the term "scripting language" to describe things like Python and Ruby fell out of favour quite a few years ago.

Which is unfortunate, because now we dance through phrases like "things like Python and Ruby". There is a hard-to-precisely-define category here, and it's useful to have a name for it--even if the name is flawed.

And, in my opinion, it's usually better to hang on to an old name as it becomes less and less literally true than to continually fish about for a new name. ("Dynamic language" is popular now, but what happens when someone popularizes such a language with static typing?) As an analogy, consider "touchdown" in American football. You haven't had to touch the ball down to score in my lifetime, or even in my parents lifetimes, but we still call it a "touchdown" and not a "planebreaker".

I see that the title has been changed to something that's neither the original title nor the current title of the article itself, but to something more straightforward and unbiased. That's all well and good, but I do wish that the word "Newegg" had been preserved in the title, as I think of this as the "Newegg case"; and I think a lot of others do too. Preserving it would be better for people searching for the discussion in the future.

In HS geometry, our teacher started showing us basic constructions with compass and ruler: bisecting a line segment, drawing a line perpendicular to another line, and bisecting an angle. Then, at the end of class, he mentioned that no one had ever succeeded in figuring out a method to trisect angles. He did not mention that it had been proven that you couldn't (in the general case).

I spent the entire evening trying to trisect the angle.

I cut-and-pasted the original title, which now appears to have changed.

Sure. But I doubt that said law firm would agree to cover GiantCorp's legal costs should we lose.

Sorry, I suppose "secret browsing window" is my default, and I did not notice any access restrictions.

I'm with you on the undesirability of sw patents.

But nowadays, even hw patents are a problem. There doesn't seem to be any meaningful requirement of a patentable idea being non-obvious to "one skilled in the arts." What we have is a race to occupy the available implementation space.

But I don't see the courts addressing either of these concerns. What they are addressing is the troll's ability to misuse patents against companies that make things (good), but they crank up the financial cost and risk so that only big players can play (bad).