By comparison, imagine having to sign an agreement with ARIN before you could use the DNS. Not get a domain name of your own... just look up names in the DNS. Crazy!

ARIN expects a service provider in backwoods Africa to sign an agreement legally binding in Virginia before they'll provide the certificates (not keys, certificates) that provider (and every other) needs to validate the origin of a BGP advertised route. It's nuts.

Ancient mainframes using 1's complement arithmetic, floating point on systems without a FPU and integers on devices that don't do integer math in hardware? Got any more wacky exceptions that prove the rule?

Don't bank on it.

They say the exception proves the rule. That you had to dig all the way to -complex numbers- to find an exception to the C-is-close-to-the-hardware rule kinda proves my point.

Turns out to be a trivial add and shift loop.

I had to look that one up. It actually is core starting in C99. Yikes. Fortunately not something more than a handful of folks use, what with C not being the language of choice for scientific computing.

Properly behaving C compilers don't automatically add code to detect buffer overflows.

What part of "every basic operation EXCEPT a function call" did you fail to understand?

C is close to machine language because every basic operation except a function call results in simple, brief, and concise machine language code. "c=a+b;" results in only a few instructions. And except when you're calling functions whose internals you haven't investigated, everything else is like that.

C is a high level language in that it masks the repetitive assembly language constructs to do those basic functions, but it still only provides basic constructs which are directly tied to what the hardware itself does.

By comparison, perl has a basic construct: "$myhash{"stuff"}=5;" This complex operation under the hood is masked by the simple language construct. It is far away from assembly language.

By comparison, C++ has a basic construct: "cout << "stuff";" While not as egregious as perl, this simple language construct masks function calls and loops under the hood.

In C, simple constructs in the language always result in comparably simple machine level code with comparably short running times. That's what is meant when folks say that C is close to machine language.

CCIE is worth it if you have a passion for routers and networking. The rest (including the other Cisco certs) are trash.

Your career is stalled because you're not interested in programming and don't have an easy knack for management. You've reached the pinnacle of general systems administration and no certifications will change that. There will be more raises as you refine your expertise but you're no longer on a fast growth curve.

If I'm wrong, go get your MBA or MSCS and your career will un-stall.

Felon = committed a felony, distinctly worse than "several prior misdemeanor convictions". Did you? If not, you probably shouldn't describe yourself as a felon.

What were the crimes? If it's something to do with dishonesty (e.g. theft) then yeah, you can pretty much kiss a career in IT goodbye. It would be incredibly irresponsible to grant someone with a record of criminal dishonestly unsupervised access to valuable, private data. And what jobs in IT don't require unsupervised access to valuable, private data?

If it's something else (temper, drugs) then you just have to persist. Try the retail end of IT (work at a computer or electronics store) and maintain a spotless record. Give it a couple years and then use the good reference to work your way back up.

"student in his twenties" is by far the most common time for schizophrenia and a number of other mental illnesses to first manifest. If you notice a rapid and unexpected change in your cognitive abilities in that time frame, visiting with a doctor is just good sense.

And by the way, you seem a little paranoid about doctors. ;)

If your attention span is suffering that dramatically, there might be something medical going on.

Here you go, this is the ticket. At 4 it's all about the fantasy play. Buy her some computer games that indulge the fantasy -- dress the character, animate the character, etc. Things that match the fantasy but also conceptually prepare the player for more technical endeavors.

She'll either be interested or she won't. If she's not interested, you can't force it. If she is, maybe the play segues into something more technical and maybe it doesn't.

You can set the stage but get used to the idea that your child will write her own script. You did when you were the child.

Hawking should stick to what he actually knows.

There's no reason to fear a smart machine. What you should fear is an autonomous but stupid machine. Something with the power to do harm but without the free will to choose not to follow its instructions.

Besides, humans are the great adapters. AI won't replace us; we'll become it.

Wear leveling is only part of the picture. Whenever the SSD erases a block (for wear leveling OR because one sector in the block has been rewritten) it empties any sectors in that block which have been trimmed. The next write to an empty sector requires no erase and copy, thus it's far faster.

Without trim, a visible sector, once used, is never again empty. This means that every write requires a block copy and erase.

I haven't heard of any SSD remapping sectors as opposed to remapping full blocks. Not saying it's impossible, just that I don't think it's generally done. In principle you could journal sectors to a non-user visible area and then do your copy/erase activity when the drive is reasonably idle. But the description of the Sandforce controllers I read suggests it doesn't have the necessary hardware for that.

Seriously? I'd love to hear how you imagine that works.

Without TRIM, the SSD eventually considers all user-visible sectors to be in use. As a result, a sector is never just empty ready to be written. Even with reserved space, it still has to copy the entire much larger erase block in order to insert one sector.