I recently read The network's the thing ( via ,itself probably via ).One of the things this article is about is how for many companies,the network created by your users is the important piece, not theproduct itself; you can change the product but retain the networkand win, despite the yelling of aggravated users. My impression isthat this is a popular view of companies, especially companies withsocial networks.

(Purely social networks are not the only sort of networks thereare. Consider Github

Once upon a time, the Unix memory map of a process was a very simplething. You had text , which was the code of the program (and laterread-only data), the stack , which generally started at the topof memory and grew down, initialized data right after the text,and then bss (for variablesand so on that started out as zero). At the very top of the bss,ie the highest address in the process's data segment, was what wascalled

I was recently reading this entry by Ben Boyter , part of which is hisdiscussion of some attempts to optimize file IO. In these attemptshe varied his buffer sizes, from reading the entire file more orless at once to reading in smaller buffers. As I thought about this,I had a belated realization about file buffer sizes when you'reprocessing the result as a stream.

My normal inclination when picking read buffer sizes for file IOis to pick a large number. Classically this has two good effects;

In light of recent events (or at least rumours) of Microsoft buyingGithub, I've been driven to think about my view of Github and howI'd feel about it changing or disappearing. This really comes intwo sides, those of someone who has repos on Github and those ofsomeone who uses other people's repos on Github, and today I feellike writing about the first (because it's simpler).

Some people probably use Github as the center of their own work,and

Red Hat recently announced Stratis (for a suitable value of 'recently'). In their articles introducingit, Red Hat says explicitly that they looked at ZFS, among othersimilar things, and implies that they did their best to take theappealing bits from ZFS. So what are Stratis's priorities? Let'squote:

Stratis aims to make three things easier: initial configuration ofstorage; making later changes; and using advanced storage featureslike snapshots, thin provisioning, and even tiering.

If you look

One of the things going on with browsers today is that they'removing to making more JavaScript APIs (especially new APIs) beavailable only for pages and resources loaded over HTTPS. One oftenbelieved reason for browsers to do this is that this helps driveadoption of HTTPS in general by providing both an incentive and agoad to site operators to move to HTTPS. If you want access to thelatest attractive browser APIs for your JavaScript, you have to eatyour vegetables and move to HTTPS. While I expect that

I don't particularly like Intel for all sorts of reasons ( eg ), and as a result I want to like AMD (who I thinkhave been very good for x86 in general when they've been competitive).I'm now in the unusual position (for me) of having essentiallycomparable machines built with a top end CPU from each; my workmachine with a Ryzen 1800X, and myhome machine with an i7-8700K.

One of the things I wonder about with Extended Validation TLScertificates iswhat things will look like for them in the long term, say five toten years. I don't think things will look like today, because asfar as I can see EV certificates are in an unstable situation todaysince in practice they're invisible andso don't provide any real benefits. Commercial Certificate Authoritiescertainly very much want EV certificates to catch on and becomemore important, but so far it hasn't happened and

Extended Validation TLS certificates arein theory special TLS certificates that are supposed to give usershigher assurances about the website that they're visiting; CertificateAuthorities certainly charge more for them (and generally do moreverification). There are some fundamental problems with this idea , but there's also a very concrete practicalproblem, namely that EV certificates are effectively invisible.

Today, the only thing the presence or absence of an EV certificatedoes is that it changes the UI of the browser URL bar a little bit.Quick