Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

I clearly need to be more aware of Andrew's racing schedule.

— Linus Torvalds plans the next merge window

A pox on whoever thought up huge pages. Words cannot express how much of a godawful mess they have made of Linux MM. And it hasn't ended yet.

— Andrew Morton

John scoured the research literature for ideas that might save his dreams of infinite scaling. He discovered several papers that described software-assisted hardware recovery. The basic idea was simple: if hardware suffers more transient failures as it gets smaller, why not allow software to detect erroneous computations and re-execute them? This idea seemed promising until John realized THAT IT WAS THE WORST IDEA EVER. Modern software barely works when the hardware is correct, so relying on software to correct hardware errors is like asking Godzilla to prevent Mega-Godzilla from terrorizing Japan. THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO RISING PROPERTY VALUES IN TOKYO.

— James Mickens [PDF]

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Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 26, 2013 1:26 UTC (Thu) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]

I don't know what software did the typesetting for Mickens PDF, but ... Ouch. Whatever it was, IT WAS THE WORST IDEA EVER.

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 26, 2013 6:30 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Is it the typesetting, or the rendering? Evince displays the article just fine; the Firefox built-in PDF renderer, instead, mangles it.

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 26, 2013 11:19 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

It's just plain ugly, anyway, Jon. It offends (at least mine, LaTeX-trained) sensibilities as how an article should look like. :-D

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 26, 2013 17:36 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

Concretely, using capital letters for emphasis is bad typographical form.

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 28, 2013 10:50 UTC (Sat) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]

I thought the caps were part of the joke.

This was a very nice read. The guy has a future as a Dave Barry replacement or something like that!

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 30, 2013 12:03 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]

I found it amusing as well, especially since he touches on several topics I have to deal with regularly as an SoC architect. The quote above is particularly amusing, since we're dealing with rising FIT rates in our chips. A later quote was even more amusing to me:

All of these techniques could be implemented. However, John slowly realized that these solutions were just things that he could do, and inventing “a thing that you could do” is a low bar for human achievement.

Sometimes it feels that way, when you're looking at techniques to detect errors in silicon and prevent them from causing a safety issue, for example. "Yep, that's definitely 'a thing that you could do.'"

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 26, 2013 17:51 UTC (Thu) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]

That was my first guess, and indeed it does look somewhat worse in pdf.js, but even in evince it looks pretty bad to me.

Sorry for the tangent though. I found it to be a hilarious and enjoyable read, and well worth enduring the typesetting. I'm very glad it was posted.

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 26, 2013 6:34 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Adobe InDesign.

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 30, 2013 21:50 UTC (Mon) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]

My favorite from the pdf: "and otherwise multiply vast, unfathomably dimensioned matrices in a desperate attempt to unlock eigenvectors whose desolate grandeur could only be imagined by Edgar Allen Poe"