I was waiting for Jordan to bring in the Wicked Witch of the East, Dumbo, Elron (the elf one), Elron (the e-meter one), a singing chorus of catamites, eighteen truckloads of laid-off house elves from the Harry Potter universe, the Tooth Fairy and Scrooge.
Now we'll never know what was supposed to happen. Wah!
_Return of the Jedi_ ended about five minutes early. After the Rebels blow up the Big Round Thing II, there are a bunch of perfectly good Star Destroyers left in orbit. While the credits are rolling, they fire up their blasters and start toasting Ewoks.
I would pay to see that.
Everything in the SW universe was crap after the first Ewok appeared on screen. That was the moment I realized George Lucas had sold out whatever integrity he had as a story-teller, and that from then on his real customers were the ones collecting cheap tie-in garbage at MacDonald's, Burger King and Toys-R-Us. (The appearance of Jar-Jar merely epoxied shut any hope that Lucas had of redeeming himself. I went to the remaining films only because they were "group morale events" that my employers paid for; I would not have spent my own money going -- and frankly, these events did not do much for anyone's morale, that I could see).
Must be great at an amusement park: You get off the roller-coaster with dozens of new friends.
Let's not contemplate what happens during an earthquake.
[I knew Bluetooth was in deep doo-doo in the late 90s, when I first saw a 900pp book on the protocols involved. Why is it that wireless-specific protocols are all garbage?]
A long-time gamer household, we have a 360 and a Wii (and a bunch of older systems). We have three Wii titles (including the one that came with the box) and it hasn't been turned on in months. The 360 gets daily use, and we have about 20 titles.
A friend of mine, also a 360 owner, just bought a Wii. I'll be interested to see how long the system remains active, and how many titles he buys.
I worked at Atari just after Bushnell left. He left a company in near complete disarray, but they were selling enough games that their mistakes didn't really start to show for another year or so. Truly bad mistakes, too; they wound up sinking the company. Atari had stopped the "we make fun" thing and traded it for something evil.
Even 80s games were great. I just finished a session of Robotron on my 360, for old times' sake, and it brought back memories of my first million-point game. Tempest. Centipede . . . I traded my college career for Centipede (you think I'm kidding? I'm not. It worked out really, really well).
I think the evil crept in when they tried to marry movies and games, that was the start. Star Wars, E.T., Superman, all just soul-killing schlock-fests of plasticky marketing-driven garbage. "Let's graft a game onto this movie. Can you have it done next week? Why NOT? What do you mean, EIGHT weeks? We'll get someone else to write it. You need more RAM? What's RAM? Oh, that costs *money*? No way. Do your stupid job, we're *marketing* and we know what we're doing."
So maybe Bushnell bailed after he got tired of fighting the real forces of darkness. I don't know. I do know he's full of it when he says that games have been downhill since Pong. That just sounds spitefully bitter.
Me, I earned my right to be bitter the *hard* way. And I'm back in the games biz after 25 years. It feels good, it really does. Fie upon Bushnell.
Bioshock provided me with some of the best game-based entertainment I've had in years. And I've spent many happy hours deathmatching in Quake, going through a number of the Zeldas, thumping bad guys in Crackdown, and even playing Solitaire.
As a relatively new dad, yes, I'm worried about the content that my son is going to encounter and want to buy.
But I don't want to make that someone else's problem. That's my problem, that problem belongs in my family, not in some politician's pocket. The government will probably do a lousy job of enforcing this. It will always be a political tool, subject to the whims of whomever needs to get a few minutes of media time.
I'm probably going to say, "Sure, it's fine to play Gears of Mayhem IV, as long as I can co-op with you, but stay the heck away from that money-sucking Disney crap."
I view any abbrogation of free speech rights as very, very problematic.
As an Old Fart, I often take half hour naps in the early afternoon. I'm lucky to have worked mostly at companies with private offices (with doors that lock), but I've done this in cube farms, too.
After thirty minutes of down-time, I grab a cup of coffee and hit the afternoon refreshed, thinking clearly and less stressed.
Other attacks include DMA into buffers already provided to the kernel (lots of fun with async disk and network I/O), GPU writes, OS callbacks (depends on the OS in question), and even plain vanilla threads.
The kernel (or whatever secure subsystem you're talking about) needs to copy and verify parameters. This stuff has been known for decades. That doesn't stop weak software from being written, but it does give old farts like me a chance to kvetch:-)
It's hard to get excited about "smarter than human intelligences exploding" when all of our cool technology, all of our whizzy supercomputer centers and so forth, are powered by coal for the most part. (Aside from enlightened bits of Europe, where they use nukes).
Anything "exploding" is going to have to deal with the fact that exponential growth is up against a hard energy shortage. Even if it enslaves us into shoveling more coal and building more power plants, it's still going to be in trouble.
So, memo to uplifted self #1: Secure a reliable, scalable power source.
That's gonna be hard. Maybe Something Smart will figure out how to make fusion actually work well, or will learn how to rub quarks together to make sub-etheric plamsa mumblegook, or just launch enough self-deploying powersats to keep it happy (reductio ad absurdum: A Dyson Sphere). But in the absence of a breakthrough like those of 1930's Campbellian SF [c.f., _The Mightiest Machine_, _The Black Star Passes_], anything behind an AI hard take-off is going go hungry after a while.
Unless it was really cute. Then we'd feed it all the energy it wanted. Cute is a survival trait...:-)
If Unix / Linux was the dominant operating system of the day, who would you be blaming? Because this is purely a matter of the number of machines in the field; it's how attractive the target is.
Let's say that Windows was magically replaced by (say) Ubuntu installs tomorrow, all over the world, with the best known default configuration in terms of being secure. Within a day you'd have exploits, and rapidly growing botnets.
Ideally, *you* would then be ranting about the morons who wrote the kernel, the idiots who did the filtering and mail clients, the jerks who designed the network protocols, and the nincompoops who can't rub two curly braces together without creating a security hole.
Or you could do some research and realize that this stuff is just bloody hard to get right. By anyone. By people who have been doing this their entire careers.
Look, the security holes are *already there* on other platforms. Why aren't you ranting about them?
"Sir, they don't want to wind up in the infirmary, like when General Havermeyer reviewed them."
"What?"
"Ah, but it was beautiful, Sir. The whole camp, passing in review, snapping their new powered arms up in perfect salutes . . . too much sun on the hardware . . . a firmware bug not caught in testing . . .."
"You mean?"
"Fifteen hundred simultaneous concussions, Sir."
"What?!"
"They dropped in well-ordered lines, north-to-south, toes straight up. A credit to the training officers, if you ask me, Sir."
I dunno. Maybe *everything* sucks. The Erlang folks make some elaborate promises about reliability of their systems (which are highly parallel and available, yadda yadda). The Erlang paper in the ACM's latest History of Programming Languages (III) is compelling.
I know I don't want to do another system where all I've got are locks and variations on locks (mutexes, semaphores, guards, monitors, whatever -- all just sugar on top of the same basic idea). STM just seems to paper over the underlying flakiness of it all, and when you look at *really* scalable systems, guess what? they're passing messages. Messages do have their pitfalls, no question about it (trying to debug truly async processes spread out over hundreds of CPUs and hundreds of milliseconds is a nightmare on roller skates).
There's no silver bullet. But there are lots of lead ones.
Locks suck. Nobody really understands efficient locking schemes. You either wind up with (a) a system with a few giant locks, and little parallelism, or (b) a system with lots of locks, but also lots of crashes and deadlocks. Very few programmers can deal with this stuff.
As for lockless algorithms, even fewer people understand how to make these work. In the papers I've read on lock-free hash tables, there are many with bugs or very bad misfeatures in the algorithms. Additionally, system-dependent things (like cache coherency protocols, and precise definitions of how instructions work in various edge conditions) can leave you with code that *looks* portable, but isn't. (Don't get me started on varying degrees of quality of compiler treatment of 'volatile' and various extensions that amount to 'noalias' . . . and compiler bugs).
STM will likely bottom-out when (a) the cost of re-do becomes a huge issue, and (b) the cache coherency traffic becomes the real bottleneck. The first you can solve with code reviews and education, the second is just going to be a wall.
Message-passing looks (to me) to be the likely successful road. I guess it's time to do something real with Erlang. No smiley.
I wrote a Perl filter that took C code as input, and applied all kinds of "unprettifications" to it (removing comments, collapsing variable declarations, introducing random curly-brace and indentation styles, removing whitespace or adding strange whitespace). The output looked like it had been written at 3am by a hung-over ex-FORTRAN engineer who had just discovered FORTH.
Then I demonstrated that a bunch of code checked into our system looked like it had *already* been run through this tool. After the public shaming, a couple of the offenders cleaned up their acts for a while, but they're back to their old tricks.
These days I'm working on a project where all the devs are really, really serious about the formatting and naming conventions. Some of the rules suck, in my opinion, but there's a lot to be said for consistency.
[In the 80s, HyperCard team at Apple used to regularly run their sources through a Pascal formatter. The code, in a friend's words, "looked ironed." Unfortunately I haven't run across any good C++ formatters.]
Those relays are powered by *steam*, and serve only to control arms in the corridor outside the control room which raise and lower colored flags. Mesopotamian runner-slaves note the configuration of the flags and carry messages to more slaves stationed near the reactor core who in turn are responsible for raising and lowering the control rods, who man the coolant pumps, and in a pinch, who sacrifice goats to the altar of O'krap, the God of Reactor Meltdowns.
Speaking tubes were tried once ("Ahoy! More coolant on the starboard pile, and hoist up control rod three!") but finding reactor operators who knew Urdu was too difficult.
The Nuclear Safety Council is considering a move to systems based on "electrics," but the committee responsible for this investigation has been unable to locate the inventors B. Franklin and T. Edison.
"Our performance traces indicate large amounts of cussing when images are resized."
---
"Wow. During that file open, three hundred users gave the finger to the camera."
"And that one guy --"
"I don't want to talk about that guy. Wahwahwahwahwah I-can't-hear-yoooo. Don't remind me of what he did."
---
"Nine hundred instances of users hitting the computer with a hammer while cropping. At least, that what we think the accelerometers were saying."
--
"The rapid rise in temperature was probably caused by the users pouring gasoline on the system and lighting a match. We'll try to address that issue in the next release."
(1) there were (say) 14 million VCS consoles sold, including the ones in closets; (2) Atari built 16-18 million ET carts
Might not be wholly true. But I certainly believe that Atari management was capable of stupidity of that order. And they did stuff a lot of them into a landfill.
Rule #1 of Systems Programming: Never check for an error you don't know how to handle.
But, if you simply MUST, then:
Rule #2: If you have to blow up, arrange it to be in someone else's code.
That way, when you're (say) deep in your file system update locking and you realize that something's gone truly plonkered, you stealthily return something that causes X Windows to blow chunks long after you've returned.
"It's the file system."
"No, it's not. It's the bloody clipping code in X. Remember when release 10.5.08A came out? It's just gotten worse from that. Did I ever tell you about the time that 9.02 was released? Let me just say, you're lucky, man . .."
Rule #3: When necessary, distract, distract, distract. Everything is on the table, and "Look, the Goodyear Blimp!" [points excitedly] is just for starters...
Good systems programmers know these tricks, and all the others you haven't learned about yet, which is why they're curmudgeons with level 70 pallies and tier-2 gear and you're shovelling Java and XML around trying to make a rent check.
C doesn't belong on the list. Period. I've been using it for (shriek!) 28 years and (as another poster said) it will probably outlast me.
As for PowerBuilder: -)spit(-. What a piece of garbage. Words fail me; I've heard that Arabic is a wonderful language in which to curse, and it might be worthwhile learning it just to express my utter contempt and disgust with that steaming pile of infected . . . (sputter).
Non-relational databases are an interesting one, because there are some amusing things you can do with tailored, high-performance databases (or likewise, embedded ones, where you don't have the horsepower or space for a relational engine).
Slashdot Mirror
End the treadmill? Noooo!
I was waiting for Jordan to bring in the Wicked Witch of the East, Dumbo, Elron (the elf one), Elron (the e-meter one), a singing chorus of catamites, eighteen truckloads of laid-off house elves from the Harry Potter universe, the Tooth Fairy and Scrooge.
Now we'll never know what was supposed to happen. Wah!
Um: Zoooom. Zoooooommmm. WHOOOOSSSSHHHHH! ZOOOM! BLAT! BANG! BadabbabadabadaWOOSHWHANGZAMKLANGZOOMWHOOOSH SPLURCH!
"Wait a minute."
"What?"
"You made a mistake. Nothing goes 'SPLURCH' in space."
"Oh. You're sure about that?"
"Look, the script says 'Zoom,' it says, 'Whoosh,' and there's even an occasional 'Ka-pow!', but nothing goes SPLURCH."
"Um . . . how 'bout DOINK?"
"Sorry."
"Not even a little one?"
Easy. Ewoks.
_Return of the Jedi_ ended about five minutes early. After the Rebels blow up the Big Round Thing II, there are a bunch of perfectly good Star Destroyers left in orbit. While the credits are rolling, they fire up their blasters and start toasting Ewoks.
I would pay to see that.
Everything in the SW universe was crap after the first Ewok appeared on screen. That was the moment I realized George Lucas had sold out whatever integrity he had as a story-teller, and that from then on his real customers were the ones collecting cheap tie-in garbage at MacDonald's, Burger King and Toys-R-Us. (The appearance of Jar-Jar merely epoxied shut any hope that Lucas had of redeeming himself. I went to the remaining films only because they were "group morale events" that my employers paid for; I would not have spent my own money going -- and frankly, these events did not do much for anyone's morale, that I could see).
Must be great at an amusement park: You get off the roller-coaster with dozens of new friends.
Let's not contemplate what happens during an earthquake.
[I knew Bluetooth was in deep doo-doo in the late 90s, when I first saw a 900pp book on the protocols involved. Why is it that wireless-specific protocols are all garbage?]
A long-time gamer household, we have a 360 and a Wii (and a bunch of older systems). We have three Wii titles (including the one that came with the box) and it hasn't been turned on in months. The 360 gets daily use, and we have about 20 titles.
A friend of mine, also a 360 owner, just bought a Wii. I'll be interested to see how long the system remains active, and how many titles he buys.
I worked at Atari just after Bushnell left. He left a company in near complete disarray, but they were selling enough games that their mistakes didn't really start to show for another year or so. Truly bad mistakes, too; they wound up sinking the company. Atari had stopped the "we make fun" thing and traded it for something evil.
Even 80s games were great. I just finished a session of Robotron on my 360, for old times' sake, and it brought back memories of my first million-point game. Tempest. Centipede . . . I traded my college career for Centipede (you think I'm kidding? I'm not. It worked out really, really well).
I think the evil crept in when they tried to marry movies and games, that was the start. Star Wars, E.T., Superman, all just soul-killing schlock-fests of plasticky marketing-driven garbage. "Let's graft a game onto this movie. Can you have it done next week? Why NOT? What do you mean, EIGHT weeks? We'll get someone else to write it. You need more RAM? What's RAM? Oh, that costs *money*? No way. Do your stupid job, we're *marketing* and we know what we're doing."
So maybe Bushnell bailed after he got tired of fighting the real forces of darkness. I don't know. I do know he's full of it when he says that games have been downhill since Pong. That just sounds spitefully bitter.
Me, I earned my right to be bitter the *hard* way. And I'm back in the games biz after 25 years. It feels good, it really does. Fie upon Bushnell.
Bioshock provided me with some of the best game-based entertainment I've had in years. And I've spent many happy hours deathmatching in Quake, going through a number of the Zeldas, thumping bad guys in Crackdown, and even playing Solitaire.
Downhill, huh?
(And yes, I enjoyed Halo 3).
As a relatively new dad, yes, I'm worried about the content that my son is going to encounter and want to buy.
But I don't want to make that someone else's problem. That's my problem, that problem belongs in my family, not in some politician's pocket. The government will probably do a lousy job of enforcing this. It will always be a political tool, subject to the whims of whomever needs to get a few minutes of media time.
I'm probably going to say, "Sure, it's fine to play Gears of Mayhem IV, as long as I can co-op with you, but stay the heck away from that money-sucking Disney crap."
I view any abbrogation of free speech rights as very, very problematic.
1) It was released too early (needed another 3-4 months shaking out before hitting the shelves).
2) Synchronizing data was a painful process involving lots of cable manipulation, app-launching, etc. (the Palm had a dock: very easy)
3) Too expensive (by about $500)
4) Too large (Palm got it right)
5) NewtonScript was nice, but too weird. A C++ dev kit would have helped a lot (but was politically impractical in the Newton group)
6) Apple management wanted royalties on applications (which was just absolute bugf*ck insanity)
[Yeah, I worked on it.]
As an Old Fart, I often take half hour naps in the early afternoon. I'm lucky to have worked mostly at companies with private offices (with doors that lock), but I've done this in cube farms, too.
After thirty minutes of down-time, I grab a cup of coffee and hit the afternoon refreshed, thinking clearly and less stressed.
Civilized societies have siestas.
The sooner the better.
The shuttle / ISS have done only harm to the space program.
(Go read _The Hubble Wars_ if you want to see how bad it was in the 80s. And it only got worse from there).
Nothing really new here.
:-)
Other attacks include DMA into buffers already provided to the kernel (lots of fun with async disk and network I/O), GPU writes, OS callbacks (depends on the OS in question), and even plain vanilla threads.
The kernel (or whatever secure subsystem you're talking about) needs to copy and verify parameters. This stuff has been known for decades. That doesn't stop weak software from being written, but it does give old farts like me a chance to kvetch
It's hard to get excited about "smarter than human intelligences exploding" when all of our cool technology, all of our whizzy supercomputer centers and so forth, are powered by coal for the most part. (Aside from enlightened bits of Europe, where they use nukes).
:-)
Anything "exploding" is going to have to deal with the fact that exponential growth is up against a hard energy shortage. Even if it enslaves us into shoveling more coal and building more power plants, it's still going to be in trouble.
So, memo to uplifted self #1: Secure a reliable, scalable power source.
That's gonna be hard. Maybe Something Smart will figure out how to make fusion actually work well, or will learn how to rub quarks together to make sub-etheric plamsa mumblegook, or just launch enough self-deploying powersats to keep it happy (reductio ad absurdum: A Dyson Sphere). But in the absence of a breakthrough like those of 1930's Campbellian SF [c.f., _The Mightiest Machine_, _The Black Star Passes_], anything behind an AI hard take-off is going go hungry after a while.
Unless it was really cute. Then we'd feed it all the energy it wanted. Cute is a survival trait...
The Morris worm was in the Fall of 1988.
Fixed for . . . well, maybe nineteen years?
The technical term for someone who puts a *nix box on the net without the latest set of updates, patches, and good planning is "0wn3ed."
If Unix / Linux was the dominant operating system of the day, who would you be blaming? Because this is purely a matter of the number of machines in the field; it's how attractive the target is.
Let's say that Windows was magically replaced by (say) Ubuntu installs tomorrow, all over the world, with the best known default configuration in terms of being secure. Within a day you'd have exploits, and rapidly growing botnets.
Ideally, *you* would then be ranting about the morons who wrote the kernel, the idiots who did the filtering and mail clients, the jerks who designed the network protocols, and the nincompoops who can't rub two curly braces together without creating a security hole.
Or you could do some research and realize that this stuff is just bloody hard to get right. By anyone. By people who have been doing this their entire careers.
Look, the security holes are *already there* on other platforms. Why aren't you ranting about them?
Meh.
"Figby, why aren't the troops saluting me?"
."
"Sir, they don't want to wind up in the infirmary, like when General Havermeyer reviewed them."
"What?"
"Ah, but it was beautiful, Sir. The whole camp, passing in review, snapping their new powered arms up in perfect salutes . . . too much sun on the hardware . . . a firmware bug not caught in testing . . .
"You mean?"
"Fifteen hundred simultaneous concussions, Sir."
"What?!"
"They dropped in well-ordered lines, north-to-south, toes straight up. A credit to the training officers, if you ask me, Sir."
I dunno. Maybe *everything* sucks. The Erlang folks make some elaborate promises about reliability of their systems (which are highly parallel and available, yadda yadda). The Erlang paper in the ACM's latest History of Programming Languages (III) is compelling.
I know I don't want to do another system where all I've got are locks and variations on locks (mutexes, semaphores, guards, monitors, whatever -- all just sugar on top of the same basic idea). STM just seems to paper over the underlying flakiness of it all, and when you look at *really* scalable systems, guess what? they're passing messages. Messages do have their pitfalls, no question about it (trying to debug truly async processes spread out over hundreds of CPUs and hundreds of milliseconds is a nightmare on roller skates).
There's no silver bullet. But there are lots of lead ones.
Locks suck. Nobody really understands efficient locking schemes. You either wind up with (a) a system with a few giant locks, and little parallelism, or (b) a system with lots of locks, but also lots of crashes and deadlocks. Very few programmers can deal with this stuff.
As for lockless algorithms, even fewer people understand how to make these work. In the papers I've read on lock-free hash tables, there are many with bugs or very bad misfeatures in the algorithms. Additionally, system-dependent things (like cache coherency protocols, and precise definitions of how instructions work in various edge conditions) can leave you with code that *looks* portable, but isn't. (Don't get me started on varying degrees of quality of compiler treatment of 'volatile' and various extensions that amount to 'noalias' . . . and compiler bugs).
STM will likely bottom-out when (a) the cost of re-do becomes a huge issue, and (b) the cache coherency traffic becomes the real bottleneck. The first you can solve with code reviews and education, the second is just going to be a wall.
Message-passing looks (to me) to be the likely successful road. I guess it's time to do something real with Erlang. No smiley.
I wrote a Perl filter that took C code as input, and applied all kinds of "unprettifications" to it (removing comments, collapsing variable declarations, introducing random curly-brace and indentation styles, removing whitespace or adding strange whitespace). The output looked like it had been written at 3am by a hung-over ex-FORTRAN engineer who had just discovered FORTH.
Then I demonstrated that a bunch of code checked into our system looked like it had *already* been run through this tool. After the public shaming, a couple of the offenders cleaned up their acts for a while, but they're back to their old tricks.
These days I'm working on a project where all the devs are really, really serious about the formatting and naming conventions. Some of the rules suck, in my opinion, but there's a lot to be said for consistency.
[In the 80s, HyperCard team at Apple used to regularly run their sources through a Pascal formatter. The code, in a friend's words, "looked ironed." Unfortunately I haven't run across any good C++ formatters.]
Low tech is better.
Those relays are powered by *steam*, and serve only to control arms in the corridor outside the control room which raise and lower colored flags. Mesopotamian runner-slaves note the configuration of the flags and carry messages to more slaves stationed near the reactor core who in turn are responsible for raising and lowering the control rods, who man the coolant pumps, and in a pinch, who sacrifice goats to the altar of O'krap, the God of Reactor Meltdowns.
Speaking tubes were tried once ("Ahoy! More coolant on the starboard pile, and hoist up control rod three!") but finding reactor operators who knew Urdu was too difficult.
The Nuclear Safety Council is considering a move to systems based on "electrics," but the committee responsible for this investigation has been unable to locate the inventors B. Franklin and T. Edison.
With cameras and microphones and other things:
----
"Our performance traces indicate large amounts of cussing when images are resized."
---
"Wow. During that file open, three hundred users gave the finger to the camera."
"And that one guy --"
"I don't want to talk about that guy. Wahwahwahwahwah I-can't-hear-yoooo. Don't remind me of what he did."
---
"Nine hundred instances of users hitting the computer with a hammer while cropping. At least, that what we think the accelerometers were saying."
--
"The rapid rise in temperature was probably caused by the users pouring gasoline on the system and lighting a match. We'll try to address that issue in the next release."
The story I heard about ET cartridges is that
(1) there were (say) 14 million VCS consoles sold, including the ones in closets;
(2) Atari built 16-18 million ET carts
Might not be wholly true. But I certainly believe that Atari management was capable of stupidity of that order. And they did stuff a lot of them into a landfill.
*mouse kicks dinosaur in the toenail*
"Oh, yours is coming! We'll have our day! Yes-sirree!"
*kick kick kick*
"We're open source and free and real agile with a moral high ground and all kinds of stuff, and you are goin' DOWN!"
*lots more petulant kicking*
The dinosaur looks down, puzzled. It tickles. It also squishes.
Rule #1 of Systems Programming: Never check for an error you don't know how to handle.
."
But, if you simply MUST, then:
Rule #2: If you have to blow up, arrange it to be in someone else's code.
That way, when you're (say) deep in your file system update locking and you realize that something's gone truly plonkered, you stealthily return something that causes X Windows to blow chunks long after you've returned.
"It's the file system."
"No, it's not. It's the bloody clipping code in X. Remember when release 10.5.08A came out? It's just gotten worse from that. Did I ever tell you about the time that 9.02 was released? Let me just say, you're lucky, man . .
Rule #3: When necessary, distract, distract, distract. Everything is on the table, and "Look, the Goodyear Blimp!" [points excitedly] is just for starters...
Good systems programmers know these tricks, and all the others you haven't learned about yet, which is why they're curmudgeons with level 70 pallies and tier-2 gear and you're shovelling Java and XML around trying to make a rent check.
Cheers!
C doesn't belong on the list. Period. I've been using it for (shriek!) 28 years and (as another poster said) it will probably outlast me.
As for PowerBuilder: -)spit(-. What a piece of garbage. Words fail me; I've heard that Arabic is a wonderful language in which to curse, and it might be worthwhile learning it just to express my utter contempt and disgust with that steaming pile of infected . . . (sputter).
Non-relational databases are an interesting one, because there are some amusing things you can do with tailored, high-performance databases (or likewise, embedded ones, where you don't have the horsepower or space for a relational engine).