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Relational Databases Considered Harmful
My first real job, at the actual company called AIRS and the original owner of the domain airs.com, was working on what was then called a fourth generation language system. Nowadays we would simply call it a database. It was pretty powerful, and we had customers, but we only ran on a system called the…
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Archive Alignment
gold normally simply mmaps input files and reads the data directly from the mapped memory. In general this requires that all the data structures be properly aligned in the file, which is guaranteed by the ELF standard. The x86, of course, does not require proper alignment for memory loads and stores, so this was never…
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Banks
I’m happy to see that there is a nice new edition of one of my favorite books, The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. For some reason the book drags me in every time I read it. Much of it amounts to a critique of an exaggerated version of our own society, but the…
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Apocalypse Now
We’re a bit busy with a slow motion move, so my postings may be less frequent than usual. It’s fairly common for people to say that the future world will be a terrible place for one reason or another. I wonder to what extent that has already happened. The world today is radically and completely…
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Future Transportation
Barring some remarkable change in the world, we are going run out of oil in my lifetime. I don’t mean that we will literally run out of oil; I mean that it will become too expensive to use for ordinary tasks such as selling it in the form of gasoline for cars. There seem to…