pwaring

Depends how long it takes to write a book - I could create one today but not finish writing it for 12 months.

Specifically about British computing is Electronic Dreams (Tom Lean) (disclosure: I went to university with the author).

The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (Doron Swade) is also an interesting read, especially as Babbage's ideas were eventually vindicated when the Science Museum built it in the 1990s and it worked.

The -S flag also works in clang, although the output may differ. For example, last time I checked a comparison check of i < 10 in a for loop would become:

  cmpl    $9, -4(%rbp)
  jle .L3

under GCC ('if i <= 9, loop') and:

  cmpl    $10, -8(%rbp)
  jge .LBB0_4

under clang ('if i >= 10, end the loop'). Neither GCC or clang does an exact conversion, and they both produce different assembly instructions (optimisations disabled in both cases).

If you build a cross-compiler, you can also output assembly for architectures other than your local machine, though this can be quite fiddly (see crosstool-ng for a project which has done most of the work for you).

When I worked at a university, we had several pieces of legacy 32-bit software, mostly written in C, which were essential to some courses. It became more and more difficult to run them as Linux distributions stopped shipping 32-bit libraries by default (I think Scientific Linux 7.1 caused a lot of problems because of this).

I'm not aware of a good free introduction to ARM assembly, but you could check out the reading lists from these courses:

http://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/COMP15111/syllabus... http://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/COMP22712/syllabus...

Despite its age, ARM System-on-Chip Architecture (Steve Furber) is still a good introduction to the processor and assembly (I'm re-reading it at the moment). ARM Assembly Language - an Introduction (J.R. Gibson) is worth reading if you want to learn ARM assembly.

The materials page for COMP22712 also has some interesting resources, including the lab manuals and a small ARM assembler written in C (source is also on GitHub: https://github.com/uomcs/aasm). Unfortunately COMP15111 is now hosted on Blackboard so you can only get at the materials if you're a current student enrolled on the course.

(I've been an undergrad, postgrad and staff in CS at Manchester, so I'm familiar with the courses - other universities may have similar resources with fewer access restrictions).

The three applications I use every single day without fail are an editor, an email client and a web browser (I'm a developer/sysadmin). If you provide one of those, I'm going to see your brand all the time, even if I'm not directly aware of it. That's quite a powerful position to be in.

I don't think this is the same thing. If you want to hire the vast majority of people, it may well be easier to acquire the company. What happens if the other company is much bigger than you though? Stripe would never be able to buy Google, Microsoft, Apple etc., but they could potentially hire a small internal team from them.

I wonder how much litigation risk is involved with this. If you poach one key employee, the original company is likely to be a bit grumpy but probably won't do anything. If you poach an entire team, litigation may be worthwhile - especially if that team is their entire development staff (I've seen this happen in the UK insurance industry, cases go on for months and potentially involve millions of pounds).

I'm a freelance consultant, and I charge for my time rather than per-project (except for very small well-defined projects), so I end up doing planning and execution for some clients. If someone is paying me by the hour/day, I'm happy to jump in wherever they want in the process -- I'll even make tea all day if required. :)

I don't think there's anything wrong with an individual choosing only to do strategy though, in the same way that I only choose to work with certain programming languages. I do think it's wrong to say that consultants should never do execution, unless you have a very narrow view of 'consultant'.

The advantage of -v is that you can see what is being extracted as it happens. This is useful if you have a tarball with thousands of small files, as otherwise it's hard to tell whether tar has got stuck or there are just a lot of files.

I've read the manual and I'm currently reviewing the book - the book is a lot more in-depth than the user manual and starts further in (chapter 1 drops you right in with environment variables, there's no introduction to make, what it does, GNU Make vs other build systems etc.).

What does Hurd do to solve that problem? It has the same licence as Linux, so Microsoft could release 'Microsoft Hurd' in the same way.

The need for the GNU project and philosophy is still great, I'm not sure there's a need for the Hurd though. We already have a popular, well-supported (by companies and individuals) kernel which is available under the GPL (and another which is available under the BSD licence, which provides useful competition). I think it would be better if the GNU project put their full weight behind Linux rather than trying to work on their own kernel which isn't getting any traction.

They are completely different use cases though, so it shouldn't be too surprising that the results are different.

Gmail: Lots of small requests which each last a short time.

Netflix: Small number of large requests with connections that stay open a long time (possibly hours).

They're used heavily in Linux device drivers, amongst other things - here's just one example:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/video/...

There's a newer edition available which has been published recently:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033677.do

I listen to:

bsdtalk: http://bsdtalk.blogspot.co.uk/

FLOSS Weekly: http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly

Tech Weekly: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/series/techweekly

Linux Voice: http://www.linuxvoice.com/category/podcasts/

Ubuntu UK: http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/

There's 21st Century C from O'Reilly:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025108.do

It has mixed reviews - my impression from reading it was that if you agree with the author's choice of tools, it's a good read. There's supposedly a new edition coming out in September.

There's also Learn C the Hard Way:

http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/

I've struggled to find any other modern books on C programming.

Not necessarily. Generally, firms become insolvent if they can't meet their liabilities as they fall due (things get a bit more complicated for regulated firms such as insurers, which also have to worry about solvency ratios). If a firm's current liabilities exceed its current assets (where 'current' is defined as 'to be received/fall due in the next 12 months') then it's likely to be in trouble. Examples of current assets are cash, stock and trade debtors (i.e. other firms you have supplied to on credit), and current liabilities include trade creditors (firms who have supplied you on credit). These contrast with fixed assets and long-term liabilities, which aren't expected to arise for over 12 months (e.g. a 5 year bank loan).

If firms automatically became insolvent when liabilities exceeded assets, then no one would ever be able to start a firm with a bank loan, because from day one the liabilities (loan + interest) would outstrip the assets (cash).

It's also possible for a firm to have assets which exceed liabilities but still be insolvent, for example a property company with large fixed assets but little cash in the bank to meet its running costs.

"Subversion uses copy-on-write when creating a branch, so it is not expensive"

Agreed - it's a constant-time operation according to the documentation, and took about 5 seconds for me to branch a copy of thousands of small files.

Git does have some useful features (e.g. committing part of a file), but a change of VCS will not magically solve all your problems if the flaw is with your workflow, code or internal communications.

I've done it, though not to such a big extent. I work four days a week instead of five, due to a combination of less technical work available and wanting to explore other opportunities. Having a day off mid-week is also incredibly useful if you want to get things done like visiting the bank, which is always packed at the weekend.

Even on five days a week though, I was working less than 40 hours. Most people I know work 37.5 hours (if you exclude lunch), and the Working Time Directive places restrictions on the number of hours you can be asked to work if you're in the EU.

Isn't Bovet & Cesati a bit out of date now? I used to have a copy, but it was published in 2005, which means it was probably written in 2004.

Also, it's not kernel-specific, but this book covers a lot of system programming concepts (expensive though):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linux-Programming-Interface-System-H...

Not just science, it would be good to see open-access across all fields.

TM still doesn't mean anything in a legal sense - if you're relying on the common law protection then it doesn't matter if you put the two letters next to your logo/brand. Putting TM on doesn't mean you have any protection, and leaving it off doesn't mean you have none.

It suggests that the company has some rights to the brand and might act as a deterrent to others using the brand without permission (especially as most people probably don't understand the difference between registered and unregistered marks).

TM doesn't mean anything - a trademark is either registered (and therefore enforceable) or it isn't. You can slap it on pretty much anything you want, it doesn't mean that whatever it is attached to will become a registered trademark, or even that the owner has filed for registration.

Or you can use this library:

http://www.openwall.com/phpass/

It does all the work for you, and will even fall back to other algorithms if you don't have bcrypt available.

The problem with shorting is that you can make the right call broadly, but time it wrong. I think AAPL is overvalued, but I don't know when (or even if) the market will come to the same conclusion.

It costs money to keep short positions open - there are several examples of people who exited short positions in the subprime-mortgage bond market just before the credit crunch. They were convinced that the market was going to crash, but they didn't know exactly when.

No it wouldn't. 2011 profit/net income figures (from the 10-K filings) are:

Apple - $26bn Microsoft - $23bn Google - $9.7bn

So Apple edged past Microsoft in 2011. It is still some way from overtaking all of the companies combined.

Market cap means nothing though. Facebook's size measured this way was bigger than all the publicly listed supermarkets in the UK combined, yet Facebook makes less profit than each of them individually.