Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

If I have to explain this I'm going to be very sad. [...]

-#define HV_LINUX_GUEST_ID_HI		0xB16B00B5
+#define HV_LINUX_GUEST_ID_HI		0x0DEFACED

— Signed-off-by: Matthew Garrett

And to make it worse, "x" itself was the result of doing "*&y". Which was probably written by the insane monkey's older brother, Max, who has been chewing Quaaludes for a few years, and as a result _his_ brain really isn't doing too well either. Even for a monkey. And now you're letting *him* at your keyboard too?

— Linus Torvalds

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Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 19, 2012 14:48 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (2 responses)

"If I have to explain this I'm going to be very sad."

He might explain why he didn't use e.g. the decimal form of that offensive (?) hex code, to preserve numerical equivalence and thus compatibility.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 20, 2012 22:48 UTC (Fri) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link] (1 responses)

who cares about the decimal equivalence of a magic number constant?

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 21, 2012 21:32 UTC (Sat) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link]

> who cares about the decimal equivalence of a magic number constant?

You usually can't just change magic numbers without breaking backwards compatibility with existing systems or data. Fuhchee's suggestion is to keep the same constant, but refer to it using the decimal representation of 2976579765 rather than the controversial hexadecimal representation.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 19, 2012 18:22 UTC (Thu) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link] (7 responses)

I'm sorry if he is going to be sad, but what the heck is wrong with 0xB16B00B5?

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 19, 2012 18:29 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (6 responses)

B16 == Big

You probably can figure out the rest.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 19, 2012 18:47 UTC (Thu) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link] (4 responses)

This borders on ridiculousness. Now we have to recode all numbers for 1337-speak prudes? What's with 1 or 0? The glyphs of those numbers resemble outward sexual organs. Please recode 1 as (2/2) and 0 as (2-2) ;-)

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 19, 2012 18:55 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (3 responses)

The problem is that this is code from Microsoft, and this was no coincidence that B16B00B5 resembles something perverted. It really looks to be a slap in the face to Linux by Microsoft.

As I stated in the thread, what else would you expect within a file called hyPERV_vmbus.c.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 19, 2012 19:18 UTC (Thu) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

Oh, I thought this number had technical origin. Something named *perv* from this company is adequate, but how it comes Microsoft associates with linux something which many people find desirable? ;-)

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 19, 2012 23:14 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (1 responses)

I personally thought it was rather juvenile, as opposed to perverted. Stuff like this only contributes to the low participation rate of women in open source.

While it came from Microsoft, I doubt it was intended specifically to make Linux look bad. I rather suspect it was the result of a programmer with some awful habits. I wonder how many other "funny" hex constants are floating around in that programmer's code.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 20, 2012 12:27 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well, it meant that Paolo Bonzini and Matthew Garrett made national news: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18922629>.

(Given the number of worthwhile things both have done that have received no publicity outside the free software community at all, it's depressing yet typical that they get it for *this* of all things.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 21, 2012 3:26 UTC (Sat) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

He could have used B16BA115, for the AC/DC reference. That would have been C001.