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Comment Re:Correct quote (Score 1) 5

What makes that the "correct" version?

Well, for one thing it leaves out words that warp the meaning. As you point out, correlation means causation is -plausible- while a lack of correlation makes causation unlikely. If you pinch "imply" hard enough you can make it mean "infer" or "deduce," but it actually means, "strongly suggest." Correlation doesn't suggest any particular causal relationship but it does suggest that one exists.

Comment ddwrt (Score 1) 2

For what you describe, your best bet is to buy one of the generic home wifi routers that are supported by ddwrt of openwrt. It's not uncommon to find something used for $10-$20. And then install one or the other, giving a linux box with full control. Add a USB stick so you have enough space for all the utilities.

I just went through the search for mini-PCs for a project at work. The main problem is that almost all of them cool poorly, and that significantly impairs their life span.I finally found a few at the $100 price point that cooled acceptably... and they disappeared from the market shortly after I bought the test units, replaced with newer models in the $250 ballpark.

Comment Re: Leave me behind (Score 1) 320

The DNS is a better designed protocol than TCP, frankly. But I didn't explain by complaint well.

The low level programming primitives for using a TCP/IP network separate the "talk to this IP address" function from the "map this name to an IP address" function. They require the developer to implement that anew in every program or at least every higher-level library. They don't just encourage developers to think about low-level network addresses, they require it. That's a mistake that haunts both IPv4 and IPv6.

Ideally, you want the programmer to deal with the symbolic identity of the service the program wants to connect to. And they do. But the APIs make it seem like that identity is an IP address or includes an IP address. It doesn't. The IP address reflects a particular computer's current attachment to the network, not the identity of any services it happens to provide. At least, it's supposed to.

This conceptual error lies at the root of the routing system challenges, where addresses have to be messily rerouted to the current attachment when the attachment changes instead of simply taking on a new address that reflects the current attachment.

Comment Re:Leave me behind (Score 4, Insightful) 320

I can subnet an IPv4 address in my head, can't do that with IPv6.

Baloney. Figuring the subnet boundary in IPv6 is trivial. For one thing, it's almost always /64, falling exactly in the middle of the 128-bit address.

For another it's hexadecimal, base 16. That means you only have to remember 4 masks, because everything beyond those 4 moves which digit the mask applies to. Moreover, savvy IPv6 users pick subnet masks that always fall between two digits so that they never have to -change- one of the numbers when applying the netmask like they do in IPv4.

What you meant to say is that you can't memorize the IPv6 address because it's too long. That's not a bug, it's a feature. Half the problems with the TCP/IP protocols stem from developers and operators working with bare addresses when they should be working with names and letting the name service find the address.

Comment Re:Maybe Rust would be a Much Better Choice (Score 1) 139

Unless you override its protections, Rust lets you deal with multithreading and memory access in complete safety.

Unfortunately, many of the tasks folks want to use Rust for require those overrides to be successfully and efficiently built. When you start overriding Rust's protections, you'd generally be better off just doing the work in C.

Comment Re:Maybe Rust would be a Much Better Choice (Score 3, Informative) 139

1. Estimating the performance of C++ code. For example, what does a simple statement like A = B do?

What does some_func(A, B), or worse SOME_MACRO(A, B) do in C?

Tells you, the reader of the code, that what's happening may be complex. In C you can expect that a=b is a simple, computationally inexpensive operation.

Comment As if data transfer fees mattered (Score 3, Interesting) 12

Google says this as if data transfer fees were a meaningful part of anyone's move-out equation. The lock-in is the Google-specific, Amazon-specific and Microsoft-specific services you built your application to depend on which aren't available in the other cloud. If you weren't cautious about what your devs used, rewriting your application to use generic services available anywhere can be an unbounded cost.

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