Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?

Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: SUPREME'S THROW OUT BILSKI PATENT. Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand- lettered small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.
                -- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"

I'm guessing that one of the goals of this debugger is to allow embedding it in higher-level tools or scripts, meaning an IDE like KDevelop could load the debugger as a shard library and communicate with it through an API, instead of spawning a process and interacting with it via stdin/stdout. Similarly it could load the compiler and get access to the parsed symbol tree for a source file or library, so it could do more interesting things like tooltips, autocompletion, etc.

So, the 'visual overlays' for LLDB could theoretically be faster and more feature-rich than those for GDB.

I despise that, and yes it's still there. But you can disable it via the preference panel (somewhere).

As I recall, the book had three sections:

1. Original hackers in the 60s on early mainframes and minicomputers like PDPs
2. Homebrew hardware hackers in the 70s putting together their own microcomputers
3. Sierra game programmers in the 80s writing King's Quest

When I read it, my reaction to the third section was: wha? Sierra programmers were pretty cool and the stories are neat (especially the stuff about the partying and the (unsuccessful) effort by Ken Williams to try to get one of his programmers laid) but didn't rank anywhere near the top of the "cool hackers of the world" list. It was obvious in retrospect that he should have waited until the open source hacking community really took off; GNU and Linux are the obvious third generation of hackers. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and the book is nonetheless excellent.

You're right, most people have a hard time saturating the CPUs on their new computers. But they have a very easy time saturating a physical hard disk. I think that 90% of the time a person is waiting on a computer to do something, it's because the processor is waiting on IO (either reading from the filesystem or from the page file). Making IO faster is by far the best way to make a PC feel faster and more responsive.

And Windows did preemptive multitasking (you know, the real kind) before MacOS! ;-)

Heh... see, this is why we need SI units. I meant to say 2e22, or better yet, 4 x 2e20.

I know a lot of people hate the binary prefixes kibi-, mibi-, etc., but really, do you ever need to SAY them or write them out? When I tell someone verbally that a file I'm sending them is 4 megabytes, they probably don't care whether I mean 4 x 10e6 or 2e12. If they do, I can tell them the exact number of bytes. When it's written down it often needs to be more precise, but it's always abbreviated, and KiB isn't any harder to read or write than KB.

So just use the SI standard names when it doesn't matter, and use the SI standard abbreviations when you need to be precise. Of course, people who conveniently use KB to mean 1,000 bytes in order to make something appear larger need have some not-too-fine print clarifying the meaning they're using.

Of course it does, but that's different from having RAID or VFS layers which are designed to work with filesystems other than ZFS. The advantage Sun has was that they could basically make those layers interdependent, while Linux needs to worry about keeping the layers independent since other filesystems will need to use them.

It's fantastic that bandwidth in densely-populated areas (or in countries which have invested more in network infrastructure) have cheaper network plans, but that's orthogonal to this discussion.

Another way of looking at that is that if your provider currently guarantees you 6Mb, for the same price they might be able to give you anywhere from 3Mb to 12Mb, with caps which kick in after 15 minutes of 9Mb usage.

It sounds reasonable to me. If it doesn't, you may need to accept the fact that you're not at all guaranteed that you can get your full 6Mb download bandwidth 24/7. If you thought you did, sorry; you misunderstood, possibly because of shady (but probably not illegal) advertising, in which case I don't blame you for being angry. But a reliably 6Mb connection is vastly more expensive than the $50/month you're paying, so your anger is akin to being disappointed that the 120 MPH car you bought isn't guaranteed to make your 10 mile commute in 5 minutes during rush hour.