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Here's the not-shit version.

That always was a shit comic and for good reasons.

And other bollocks. Throwing in a bunch of quotes randomly combined with a complete misunderstanding of British history is not a rebuttal. The XKCD was not against free speech, it was pointing out that just because it's not illegal to say does not entitle you to a platform, let alone any platform you like. Also freedom without responsibility is anarchy, the same is true with free speech, free speech has never protected you from criticism.

People trying to defend racism (yes, white supremacists are racists, placing one race as superior to another... let alone all others is the dictionary definition of racism) are the ones who are destroying free speech. They are using this as a thought terminating cliche to silence criticism. White Supremacists are not some hard done by minority group fighting for equal rights or recognition, they are fighting to suppress equal rights for other groups they don't like. Using free speech to defend them from critics is devaluing free speech. Free speech does not mean what you say is right, it just means it is not illegal to say it. Using the free speech excuse to silence critics, especially valid critics, reduces freedom.

I'm a firm believer in playing the devils advocate, but one must always consider the nature of the devil for which one advocates for. Knowing who you are defending is key in defending it successfully. Often using the wrong defence harms you more than not defending them in the first place. Finally, using free speech as a defence is the worst possible argument, falling back on free speech means that the most compelling defence you have for what you said is that it is literally not illegal to say it.

That always was a shit comic and for good reasons.

Not sure what can be done about it except to use the Internet as little as possible.

What can be done along with running your own secure mail servers, it to set up and run your own DNSSEC service.
Set Up a DNS Name Server
Domain Name System Security Extensions

For the last few years, my home network has had a small subnet that can only reach the Internet via the Tor Network. As a Comcast subscriber with no other options in ISP's, I'm seriously considering putting all the family devices into this subnet and setting up private VPN access into it for the mobile devices while on the road.

Yeah, if speed isn't important to you. See link as to why mobile web apps are slow. You need to mobile native apps to get good performance.

Which is, quite frankly, bullshit. What that article sites is: “light word processing, light photo editing, local storage, and animations between screens” as a web app. All of which can frankly fuck right off for 99% of the stuff that companies try to shove down users, and HTML5 can often handle better than JS anyways.

I expect my bank to give me a page of info, not text editing, photo manipulation, or pointless annoying animations. I do NOT need an app for the bank that has my home loan, another app for the one with my car loan, ANOTHER for my primary bank, and 4th for my wife's bank. I don't then need an app to access AT&T's crap, not do I need also want a separate app for each utility I have to pay. There is nothing that an app can offer me that a web page doesn't more than cover.

Look at AT&T. I have the following app from the iTunes store: myAT&T, AT&T Mobile Transfer - Free, AT&T Mobile Connect, Mobile TV from AT&T, U-verse, AT&T Protect Plus, AT&T Voicemail Viewer (Home), AT&T Digital Life, AT&T Passport, and it goes ON AND ON AND ON. Wanna talk sizes? 43.7 mb, 22.7mb, 24.2 mb, 10.4 mb, 88 mb, 52.7 mb....

So if I want the mobile app for AT&T, it's 43.7 mb on my phone and you know what it does different than the web page? NOTHING. It's just a scaled down version of the web page!

Web apps shit all over common sense and the whole point of interoperability of the internet.

You know what? I don't want a god damned app for everything I do on my smartphone. I don't want to have to download and take up gigs of space on my phone when you can just deliver a HTML5 web page that's going to effectively do everything some annoying app would have done.

Yeah, if speed isn't important to you. See link as to why mobile web apps are slow. You need to mobile native apps to get good performance.

Except it isn't. Go ahead a read: http://sealedabstract.com/rant...

Jump to the graph: "If you remember nothing else from this blog post, remember this chart."

Here is what you are missing:

LLVM is enabling new languages that blur the lines between JIT and compiled. LLVM can do either. Right now Xcode JIT compiles code as you type in C/C++/objC. It is also used in openCL as a runtime JIT to compile C code to the target runtime platform (CPU or GPU). Now with Swift they have leveraged that ability further to JIT in a hot-coding environment... which is really the main advantage of interpreted and JITed languages: coding efficiency.

If you don't understand why GC is a bad idea better left in the 90s, read this: http://sealedabstract.com/rant...

There is reason Apple depreciated GC in objC for reference counting! The main jist is this: to get reasonable performance out of a GC system (meaning still 25-50% slower than manual memory management, you will need 6-to-10 times the RAM of say a C program. While this isn't a big deal on a desktop running a trivial application, this is a very expensive tradeoff in a mobile application. Lattner anticipated this problem many years ago when Apple was getting into mobile devices, and developed ARC for the compiler front end to provide a better solution, that is much more light weight.

Don't piss on Javascript.

There's nothing wrong with pissing on Javascript, but it's unfair to mention it in the same breath as PHP. PHP sucks across the board, but Javascript has very specific and identifiable flaws. You can think of Javascript as the living embodiment of Sturgeon's Revelation.

So, for example, Javascript has quite clean variable semantics (borrowed from Scheme, no less!), making it almost a functional language, but then drapes it in an unwieldy function syntax which discourages you from using it as such. Somewhere inside Javascript you can tell that there's a pretty nice scripting language trying desperately to get out. (Hell, membranes are almost elegant.)

I wish that PHP had redeeming features like that. The only thing it ever had going for it was that 15 years ago it had a better Apache binding than any other language, making it the superior choice to CGI.

I'm not asking rhetorically btw. You seem to be a couple steps ahead of me.

I don't know about that, but......IMO:
I would call Stroustrup misguided for a lot of reasons. :)

More seriously though, the design philosophy of C++ has always been, "if there is a language feature people want, make it available." I don't claim to read Stroustrup's mind, but adding garbage collection fits that design philosophy.

The other design philosophy of C++ is to try to make it fast. So most likely garbage collection in C++ will be an optional feature, that can be turned on or off. There is already a garbage collector like that available with GCC. Or possibly they will learn from Apple's experience, and make something like ARC, which is not exactly garbage collection, but still takes care of 99.99% of your memory issues. This article goes in depth on some of these issues, although it's looking at it from a mobile standpoint, not a server standpoint. I believe that story was covered on Slashdot, too.

Incidentally, I can't find any reference to where Stroustrup says garbage collection is inevitable. This seems to be his official position.

As you can see the analysis here in the garbage collection, as well as a nice research paper linked,

Time cost of garbage collection is minimal if you have physical memory 4 times as much as java heap size. I guess satisfying this requirement shouldn't be much for Google. Another limitation of java, the startup cost, shouldn't be much for Google either, as I guess most "servers" keep running for a long time.

Branch prediction and all is nice, but it is difficult to swallow the 2x estimation of performance over java. Could you give some more details? Too much floating point computation?

thanks

You can... But you'll find that you're almost instantly blacklisted by spam filters, unless you relay through a smart host and have your ISP setup a PTR record for your mail server. Here, have a handy link.

This is probably the single best explanation about why mobile web doesn't work:

http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/

Crawford brought in lots of data on real-world performance. (e.g. http://sealedabstract.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Screen-Shot-2013-05-14-at-10.15.29-PM.png)

Almog's rebuttal has a lot of claims with no actual evidence. Nothing is measured; everything he says is based on how he thinks things should in theory work. But the "sufficiently smart GC" is as big a joke as the "sufficiently smart compiler", and he even says "while some of these allocation patterns were discussed by teams when I was at Sun I don't know if these were actually implemented".

Also:

(in fact game programmers NEVER allocate during game level execution)....This isn't really hard, you just make sure that while you are performing an animation or within a game level you don't make any allocations.

I'm a professional game programmer, and I'm laughing at this. If you're making Space Invaders, and there's a fixed board and a fixed number of invaders, that statement is true. If you're making a game for this decade, with meaningful AI, an open world that's continuously streamed in and out of memory, and dynamic, emergent, or player-driven events, that's just silly. For Mr. Almog to even say that shows how much he doesn't know about the subject.

The paper is at the following link: http://www-cs.canisius.edu/~hertzm/gcmalloc-oopsla-2005.pdf

I ran into it while reading the discussion at http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/