My first real job was at Prime. There were some interesting features in the kernel - such as how dynamic libraries worked, but quite a bit was inefficient.

My biggest peeve with Primos was how the filesystem was laid out. Each block was 540 bytes (an odd sector size), with pointers to the next and previous block in the file. This made filesystem corruption fairly easy to recover from, but file deletion was slow for large files - as every block in the file would need to be read and written back to disk.

The 50 series platform demonstrates that many people make faulty assumptions about the size of data types. For example is sizeof(char *) always equal to sizeof(int *)?

Many of the Unix/Linux features were first created in Multix.

The tabs are related... they are all web pages. I have about 25 tabs open in each of 2 Firefox windows. I also have numerous other windows on each of 7 virtual screens on each of 2 physical screens. Before the days of tabs, it was challenging to find the correct window. Now, for a web page I merely look in my browser tab list.

Hmm... maybe I should create a new SELinux sandbox for Firefox for each web page I visit, and avoid tabs.

I bought this book about a month ago. I had my doubts about a book this size, and my doubts were realized.

I learned C from K&R first edition. K&R is about 150 pages (from memory). It covers all of the language succinctly and completely. Actually, it covers most of the language twice - first in tutorial form then in specification form. It is a fine resource.

Why should a book on Python be over 1000 pages? I started reading this book the same way I read K&R - from the beginning. Unlike K&R, after 50 pages I barely got to coding. Within each section the language is quite verbose. I suspect that the authors were paid by the word or the page.

On a positive note, I was able to use this book as a reference book as the index is quite reasonable.

I would recommend this book to those insomniacs who are interested in learning Python.

I search the post an linked articles for concrete examples of sexism. I found some - about 4 indirections away from slashdot. http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO.html links to some eight year old posts that are sexist.

All of the high-tech companies that I've worked for have many more men than women. Most of the applications for positions are from men.

In over 20 years in the industry, I only remember observing one sexist incident.

Where I work, we define remote as working from home. It is sometimes hard to keep track of who is remote - working from home - vs. working at a different company office.

We conduct many of our meetings via IRC - and have second meeting 12 hours after the first so it shouldn't be too painful for everyone to make at least one of the meetings. I am constantly surprised as to which meeting certain people show up for.

OK, the article doesn't list Facebook and MySpace as cloud applications, but it does list Twitter and Google apps. I just generalized it a bit.

According to wikipedia, Facebook and MySpace are cloud applications. On the other hand, I usually just consider them web applications.

I usually think of Cloud Computing in terms of places to run virtual machines - Like Amazon's EC2, or a private cloud. There should be no problem getting data off of a cloud infrastructure.