andybalholm

Nope. If you did, I'm pretty sure the EPA would shut you down. Emissions regulations aren't quite as strict for tractors as for cars and trucks, but they are headed in the same direction. I don't think it's possible to meet emissions without computerized controls. And once you've put hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of electronics on the tractor, it's hard to resist the temptation to add DRM.

But it probably used : to separate the volume name from the file name.

Actually, agua is feminine. But it takes el instead of la because it starts with an accented a. The common language-learning advice is "Don't learn the genders of nouns; learn the articles that go with them." But it doesn't quite work in Spanish.

I assume that some site has hostgator-related links with two slashes instead of one. Due to the two slashes, the GoogleBot doesn't realize that it's indexing their own results pages.

If the sender has an ASCII Wingdings, and the receiver has a Unicode Wingdings, the receiver gets a J (at least if the receiver is using Apple Mail).

Go provides straight-ahead, blocking-is-OK concurrency. GCD provides callback-based concurrency, like node.js, but with several worker threads instead of just one.

Yes, websockets should be fine. Making my proxy support websockets was a little difficult, but I think it works now.

If the traffic is compliant with the protocols that ports 80 and 443 are supposed to use, it's not a problem. The one that really gets me is a thermostat using a proprietary protocol over port 443. This protocol is one where the server sends the first data over the connection; in TLS the client always sends first. So my proxy was just waiting for the TLS client hello while the thermostat was waiting for its server's message. If the thermostat had sent something first, the proxy could have seen that it was invalid TLS and passed it through; instead it deadlocked.

On the other hand, there are firewall administrators who do extensive filtering on ports 80 and 443 and allow other outgoing traffic by default. We get pretty ticked off when some thermostat, credit card machine, or postage meter decides to send its bizarre and undocumented data stream over port 80 or 443 in the name of firewall compatibility and therefore becomes incompatible with our firewall. (Yes, we can put in exceptions for those machines' IP addresses, but if they didn't try to use HTTP ports, they would Just Work.)

That is the OP's main point, except turned around. He was measuring progress by results, not by effort expended, and saying that it takes exponential effort to reach linear results.

I finally managed to track down the definition of memoryword from texlive-20130530-source/texk/web2c/texmfmem.h. Here it is:

        typedef union
	{
	#ifdef TeX
	  glueratio gr;
	  twohalves hh;
	#else
	  twohalves hhfield;
	#endif
	#ifdef XeTeX
	  voidpointer ptr;
	#endif
	#ifdef WORDS_BIGENDIAN
	  integer cint;
	  fourquarters qqqq;
	#else /* not WORDS_BIGENDIAN */
	  struct
	  {
	#if defined (TeX) && !defined (SMALLTeX) || defined (MF) && !defined (SMALLMF) || defined (MP) && !defined (SMALLMP)
		halfword junk;
	#endif /* big {TeX,MF,MP} */
		integer CINT;
	  } u;

	  struct
	  {
	#ifndef XeTeX
	#if defined (TeX) && !defined (SMALLTeX) || defined (MF) && !defined (SMALLMF) || defined (MP) && !defined (SMALLMP)
		halfword junk;
	#endif /* big {TeX,MF,MP} */
	#endif
		fourquarters QQQQ;
	  } v;
	#endif /* not WORDS_BIGENDIAN */
	} memoryword;

Once you sort through all the ifdefs and typedefs, it boils down to a union of a float (glueratio), an int32 (integer), a pair of int16s (twohalves), and a struct of 4 bytes (fourquarters). When TeX creates its memory dump file, it does it all in terms of the bytes in the fourquarters struct. (And I think there are other times that it does similar things.)

This may very well be undefined behavior, but it seems to work when compiled with GCC anyway. Thankfully gc isn't such crazy code as this.

It works when unions are used correctly. If they are used to deliberately subvert the type system (e.g., put in an int, get an array of char out) it doesn't work. But C has so many other ways to subvert the type system that there's no need to do that.

Probably about the only place you'll see them used like that is in the code produced by web2c in compiling TeX. Knuth used variant records a lot to get around Pascal's type safety, and they get translated to unions.

Probably because a lot of Go users _are_ generics-hating curmudgeons :-) (even though the team aren't)