Paolo Redaelli personal blog

Author: Paolo Redaelli

C isn’t a programming language anymore • The Register

C is often praised for being “close to the metal,” for being a “portable assembly language.”It was, once, but it hasn’t been since the 1970s; the underlying computational models of modern computers are nothing like the one that C represents, which was designed for a 1970s 16-bit minicomputer.

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C is not just a programming language, it’s also an Interface Definition Language or IDL. IDLs are very important – as we quoted back in 1999, “the CORBA Interface Definition Language IDL is… ‘one of the most significant contributions in the history of computer science’.”

 

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Hardware

Epson EcoTank, Driverless and Linux

A few days ago I bought inks for my HP Color LaserJet Pro M377dw. They were quite costly, so I looked around other manufacturers that in the past were Linux-friendly. I ended up on an Epson multifunction printer that seems as good as mine but with inks that cost by far a lot less: EcoTank…

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Ethics

Why I dislike Medium

There are several reasons why I dislike Medium. I think I will never use it as it is yet another golden prison, luring you to enter and never leave their walled garden. Aniket recently wrote What Happened When My Rich Friend Told Me to Stop Programming. His rich friend comes from an already rich family…

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Documentations

Data rotting on magnetic hard drives

According to https://mastodon.uno/@octo/108051239339031165 …it would be good practice to rewrite the data on HDDs every few years because magnetism tends to weaken over time… Flash memories (SSD, microSD…), on the other hand, simply need to be powered up from time to time, because they store bits as electrical charges in cells that act more or…

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Fun

Passano le generazioni, ma certi pezzi sono immortali. Mi piace così tanto che la cantavo a mia figlia appena nata…