OESF Portables Forum

General Forums => Off Topic forum => Topic started by: Varti on July 08, 2017, 10:03:36 pm

Title: The Night Watch by James Mickens
Post by: Varti on July 08, 2017, 10:03:36 pm

The Night Watch, a humor column by James Mickens on the horrors of system programming, well worth reading:

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/f...enightwatch.pdf (http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch.pdf)

"What is despair? I have known it—hear my song. Despair is when you’re debugging a kernel driver and you look at a memory dump and you see that a pointer has a value of 7. THERE IS NO HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE THAT IS ALIGNED ON 7. Furthermore, 7 IS TOO SMALL AND ONLY EVIL CODE WOULD TRY TO ACCESS SMALL NUMBER MEMORY. "

Varti

Title: Re: The Night Watch by James Mickens
Post by: speculatrix on July 18, 2020, 01:11:58 pm

brilliant!
even more relevant today than when first published.