Quotes of the week

Code that assumes that ASCII is good enough for writing English properly is stupid, shortsighted, illiterate, broken, evil, and wrong. Off with their heads! If that seems too extreme, we can compromise: henceforth they may type only with their big toe from one foot (the rest still be ducktaped).

Unfortunately, there is a problem with Free Software developers, firstly - they often don't wear suits, and (get this) some have beards: which just shows you the kind of schmucks they are. But worse - they have odd, meritocratic, collaborative decision making processes, that don't come up with suitably corporate answers.

Not surprisingly, a lot of software that claims to be 64 bits-ready isn't. This touches all web navigators, most jit engines, and probably lots more of software (our ports tree version of gnu-grep, for instance).

How comes nobody in other OSes noticed ? Well, people probably did, and tweaked their allocators to "work", by using preferably the low address space, and having addresses that increase slowly, so that a lot of pointers are below 4GB, and a lot of pointer diffs are under 4GB.

This is yet another example of the patheticness that is modern software development. Instead of going headfront and fixing the actual problems, most systems cope out and just sweep the problem under the carpet, hoping no-one will notice.