He is 14 years old. There's no school in world that teaches advanced programming and problem solving at that age. Hell, even the math at that age is quite standard and easy. It's obvious he learned it by motivation, not from schools.
This just shows more about the fact that those who are great programmers are so not because of school, but because they have interest on it on their own. My own school was kind of a joke - everyone just played flash games during hours and did the least amount needed, while it was quite standard stuff too. I started programming at 8 years old, pretty much after I had learned to read (quick basic stuff obviously, but still). However atleast I had a nice teacher that understood my side aswell and let me do my own stuff like 3D game programming during the hours as long as I did the final test. Truth is most of people are quite non-intelligent about that stuff on schools, unless they do programming as a hobby.
And I can bet I was better at programming at 14 too then they were at 18 (as self conscious as that sounds). Fact is, if you're really interested on things and do it as hobby and just for fun, you will be even better than most adults are . You may lack some experience, but thats 50/50 good and bad. It's what enables you to do new things.
That being said, as this is international programming and problem analysis competition the others we're probably quite good aswell, so lots of kudos for Henadzi for winning it. You will have a good future.
The only way you are definitely going to avoid greedy software developers exploiting you is to stick with open source, make sure to donate to your favorite open source projects, and stop installing software with bundled crapware.
There has been countless numbers of open source projects that also do this. Just because it's open source it doesn't mean you're safe from such tactics - it just means the source is open. You can check the source and remove those parts, but not many of us do so.
This is actually more the nuisance of free software. If you've paid for your software, you can usually except that they wont fuck you over with that crap. It's more like the price you pay for using free ad supported software, because if they develop it professionally they also have to get the money somewhere.
And also from the article Digsby's response:
Update: Disgsby responds, saying they're pushing out a new build today with more transparency about the research module.
It turns out people play the game for very different reasons and focus on different parts of the game, but almost everyone falls into one of these categories.
Yep, I've noticed this too. I dont get why, but some people tend to stare the ass more, while personally I like to enjoy the boobs.
Did this research notice if there were any deaths caused by getting discracted when you jumped and the camera got into such position that you tried to get a nippleslip or see the panties?
It would be interesting to know how much coverage all of Finland gets. Sure, the plan is great when you're in a city... but how good is it when you go to a random part of the country? What's the cell coverage like?
Coverage is almost same everywhere, 99.6% for whole country. And like you said, the northern parts dont have a lot people living nearly, but they still cover those areas.
This argument doesn't work because all of the providers work per country. Europe is not a single country, and even the largest companies that work in multiple countries have greatly separated their companies per country.
Well, let's imagine that coverage of the country directly affects cost. This might not be so outlandish as cell phone towers need to be erected to cover area. I would venture to say that Americans & Canadians suffer from sprawl much more than Finland and total area of dense population is probably more than five times that of Finland's. So let's assume that those cell phone tower maintenance (more harsh weather conditions across the US than Finland also) and building costs are passed on to the consumer.
Eh, you obviously dont know much how nordic countries are. Most of the area is forest and not urban cities. Theres no tornadoes or such, but the weather changes a lot between summer and winter. Finland also only has 3 cities that passes 200k people living and the land area is large and many people live in smaller cities/towns. I would even argua that the cost of having cell phone network covered is more than on USA's area.
This is what I've always wondered, but learned from Slashdot comments. Why the hell mobile plans are so costly in US? I have the largest plan available from my phone company, 2500 minutes / 2500 sms per month and unlimited 3G internet. And that's still only 29 euro per month. And I did actually use that 3G internet connection for a month while waiting for adsl connection to be set up for my new apartment (hell, even running a server from it). No transfer limits or anything like that.
Yeah, mobile companies have extra costs from providing their infrastructure, but it just seems a lot what they ask in US. Sweden is mostly woods and non-urban areas too, so why is it done better here?
Maybe voice your opinion to the companies so they stop charging so much?
Like everything else, both self-enforcing 'protocols' and someone in between, say paypal, rely on trust from people. It also relies on the fact that businesses will take a major hit when someone says something bad about them or if they fraud. This is exactly the same with laws. You cant enforce it, but you can make consequences for breaking laws bad enough so people dont want to break them.
In high school I was teached that every happy customer tells about their good experience to 3-4 people, but every unhappy customer tells about it to 20 people. It's a great advice. Once the bad word gets out, your sales are going to suck and you lose customers. This is also why you need the trust and good name with self-enforcing protocols if not using middle man like paypal.
This can also be seen on webmasters forums and the like. People have certain amount of trust points according to their past and who they've done business with. You can instantly see who is reliable and who you can do business with.
Problem without using third party is that you cannot get to that trust level as newcomer and that it takes time to work it. When there's someone trusted in the middle of the transaction, you have some guarantee that you wont be cheated (or lose your personal details etc to whatever kind of fraud). In this case the trustful middlehand is good.
So it only works if the other party is big enough. When voting, you rely on trusting the goverment (now this sentence is so gonna get some paranoid persons replying:). If not, you need a middle party that is big enough that you can trust them instead.
As a side note, this is why we still rely on banks and even on our cash - We trust that our money on our bank accounts will still be available to us, and that our $10 bills wont just suddenly become worthless.
This doesn't hold truth as much as TFA says. The reason for changing your game genre from strategy and "smarter" games for something simpler isn't really that you have to 'think' so much elsewhere. The main reason is time. You can just quickly play around in simpler games.
I loved Civilization and Settlers series and other kinds of strategy games as a kid. But I had lots of time after school. Now that I think of it, I also got a lot coding done just for fun. I coded games for fun, and this was before I had stable internet, so almost noone even saw them. I just liked doing it and I had time. It wasn't that much for challenge or so, I just liked it. I however also did like games where you had some thinking.
However after you got used to games, you saw how AI reacted and what was the best tactic, even in games you had to use lots of strategy. For example in Civ2 I always went for science and tried to stay away from wars until I had discovered everything. It was so obvious and I knew when is the best time to start fighting, that the challenge went away. But I also liked that aspect most, even while hating it.
I do still play Civ4 and other such games, but as you grow up you have great amount of other stuff to take care of. Specially in mid-20's, when work and spending time with your gf takes lots of time. This seems to change again 30+ when things get more settled.
I also have a lawyer friend that likes to play tennis and golf (yeah, so guessable!). Not really lots of thinking needed. But he also likes to play chess and some other games where you need to think. You can have it both ways - peace your mind with something you just *do* that doesn't requre thinking. Then on other times play some game that does.
Another great aspect to this for myself is physics games. I still think Civilization series etc are my favourite games, but sometimes it's just fun to mess around. Physics games are great for this. You just build something, destroy something, experience around and see what happens. Physics games also is a genre where both of these world combine; you need to think some, but you get fast fun and experience around.
Actually if you want to bash, health care is bad way to go. Unlike US, we take care of people. But that goes with burden of tax, so bash that. And yes, it sucks.
It's just obvious. The reason for IT's growth during late 90's and early 2000's was because it was new, great technology. Now its getting common.
In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy.
This doesn't really make sense. IT has lots of opportunities too. Its true that "sure ways to get rich" times might be over, but its not like the other indrustries have those anymore.
Here in Sweden most of our internet infrastructure is actually fiber, not copper. Thats why we have 100mbits (1gbit in largest cities) to home. But the latency is still 25-50ms and thats in your home city. Going further from that and it grows.
I said the latency issue will not be fixed soon, not never. But it's gonna take some good time before we get there. Currently the only possible way this could work even some is to have datacenter in every city you want customers from. And you need lots of servers just sitting around idle just in case more players want to play. That is gonna be huge amount of datacenters. Hell, even Google doesn't have a datacenter in *even* every country, so theres no way they're gonna build datacenter in every larger city on the planet.
No, this is not going to make any kind of gaming revolution anytime soon, and publishers have little to nothing to worry about.
Neither OnLive and Gaikai wont make any gaming revolution. Yes, they might have the power and bandwidth to run the game as streaming video off their servers, but the major issue is still latency with controller. Even 50-100ms lag will be *really* noticiable when you're just moving mouse to look around. And in some fast games when you see the enemy you'll be already dead on the server.
OnLive shows Burnout Paradise in games catalog too, and racing games are another genre where you need fast input from the controller or you will be rolling your car down the hill pretty soon. These days latency is not gonna make it. Unlike bandwidth and power, latency is a lot harder issue to overcome in future too. Sure, it works from keyboard to pc really fast. But not when its gonna move hundreds of kilometers back and worth. It's already pushed to nice 50-100ms if theres nothing interfering with your local network or something along the way. You can talk in phones in real time too (well, with the same latency, but its not noticable in that use). But for controllers, specially for mouse, its not going to work. And more so you need to stream huge video all the time that can't be prebuffered like YouTube or other video content because its generated in real time.
Games like Counter-Strike and other multiplayer games work because the amount of work and data is split between client and server. You're only sending small amount of information to the server, like current position, shots etc. and the server is sending the client back other players information. Not a huge streaming video, but small packet with coordinates and so on. And even then we all know how crappy it goes if latency grows and the game lags.
What comes to removing piracy via online delivered content, the answer isn't streaming the game as video. Answer is delivering content when needed in game. Yes, that still needs lots of bandwidth and an active internet connection, and you pretty much fuck the customers over with it. But it makes piracy a lot harder if you need to authenticate to server and you only get some, but still significant amount of content during game, dynamically. However technically that way is A LOT closer possible than streaming the game as video and sending controller movements back to the game server.
Bandwidth can grow, but latency issues aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Only things this might work with is something like chess games, but I dont know if Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are going to be so worried about that.
Opera actually has major marketshare in Russia and CIS countries. They're the major player there, and IE and FF strugling behind. The usual marketshare statistics almost always just count US or major EU countries, ignoring everything else and it gives false statistics because they ignore almost half of the world's people.
What I find quite interesting is that those CIS countries have found the best alternative browser, even in general population. Maybe theres some intelligence to catch up in usa?:)
This is something Opera could actually push quite much via other countries. Opera has 40-60% marketshare in CIS countries, better than both FF and IE. They push the support for HTML5 and its new tags there and CIS websites adopt it (cyrillic language differences make it so that most people use local websites instead of US ones). IE and FF also has to start supporting the same to get marketshare there, and bam: you have the support elsewhere too. And they can also start supporting it on Wii, Mobile Phones and other accessories they make web browsers too. People usually underestimate the power of Opera because of their smaller marketshare (in US home PC's).
Iran's national ISPs seem to have recently gained the ability to filter large quantities of web traffic more effectively.
Quite good tactic. Instead of fighting, now every country and RIAA/MPAA wants to do business with Iran to implement these high-performing filters everywhere.
Its fun to be a dick. In games its easier and theres no consequences in it and in single player games you wont be ruining anyone elses game either.
This is partly why I love physics games too. Its fun to build, destroy, smash and do something unexceptable to see the results. Physics games probably fit this category the best because they're made to play around with.
Sometimes I also dont want to get into some epic story but just have a bit of fun. Good physics engine + Good and responsive AI and the fun begins.
This is not actually far away from how Firefox generates its revenue too - from ad clicks in Google search and by direct sponsoring from Google.
The two main ways to monetarize and support OSS projects is giving support and ads. In the later case you always lose some of your privacy. Developing Linux and its distro's need money aswell. You could choose a distro that is financed in other way (maybe by you), use commercial software that doesn't do this or be fine with generating some ad income to support the development. "Perfect" package is usually impossible to obtain because of financial limitations.
Google is build completely around this model too and it seems to work good for them - even if people lose some of their privacy. Hell, slashdot is maintained by ad revenue too. Another distro that also does same kind of stuff is Linux Mint.
Its nothing new, but it might surprise those who believe in pure, not-revenue-generating OSS. It's how the free for user projects are financed.
I wonder how this obviously one-sided summary even got posted -- it just sounds like a calling for bashing from people who dont read the article. Here's another snippet from Steven's response:
We had one beta report on the memory usage, but that was resolved by design since we actually did design it to use more memory. But the design was to use more memory on purpose to speed things up, but never unbounded â" we requset the available memory and operate within that leaving at least 50M of physical memory. Our assumption was that using/r means your disk is such that you would prefer to get the repair done and over with rather than keep working.
And it does make sense for two reasons: 1) Windows has to lock the drive anyways, so its better to get it done fast. 2) You CAN spend RAM. If the whole RAM isn't used, you're just wasting it. In this case chkdsk.exe will use dynamically what there is left, making the process faster. How is this a bad thing?
Rather than a bug or memory leak, this seems like an optimization.
The issue isn't all about how easy it is, but because they dont know of other. If they happen to run across something else, there will be list of things you need to do before you can use their store (which usually means connecting phone to computer and doing something non-standard -- we're talking about average joe here). Its great there's other app stores for iphone than apples too, but because of this I dont see how it would be such a major enemy for Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
that's why you fire up notepad when writing long comments. :|
He is 14 years old. There's no school in world that teaches advanced programming and problem solving at that age. Hell, even the math at that age is quite standard and easy. It's obvious he learned it by motivation, not from schools.
This just shows more about the fact that those who are great programmers are so not because of school, but because they have interest on it on their own. My own school was kind of a joke - everyone just played flash games during hours and did the least amount needed, while it was quite standard stuff too. I started programming at 8 years old, pretty much after I had learned to read (quick basic stuff obviously, but still). However atleast I had a nice teacher that understood my side aswell and let me do my own stuff like 3D game programming during the hours as long as I did the final test. Truth is most of people are quite non-intelligent about that stuff on schools, unless they do programming as a hobby.
And I can bet I was better at programming at 14 too then they were at 18 (as self conscious as that sounds). Fact is, if you're really interested on things and do it as hobby and just for fun, you will be even better than most adults are . You may lack some experience, but thats 50/50 good and bad. It's what enables you to do new things.
That being said, as this is international programming and problem analysis competition the others we're probably quite good aswell, so lots of kudos for Henadzi for winning it. You will have a good future.
From the article:
Summary: Stick with Open Source
The only way you are definitely going to avoid greedy software developers exploiting you is to stick with open source, make sure to donate to your favorite open source projects, and stop installing software with bundled crapware.
Did we already forget that Ubuntu also installed such and without consent (and Linux Mint) - here you atleast have the change to disallow installing it.
There has been countless numbers of open source projects that also do this. Just because it's open source it doesn't mean you're safe from such tactics - it just means the source is open. You can check the source and remove those parts, but not many of us do so.
This is actually more the nuisance of free software. If you've paid for your software, you can usually except that they wont fuck you over with that crap. It's more like the price you pay for using free ad supported software, because if they develop it professionally they also have to get the money somewhere.
And also from the article Digsby's response:
Update: Disgsby responds, saying they're pushing out a new build today with more transparency about the research module.
It turns out people play the game for very different reasons and focus on different parts of the game, but almost everyone falls into one of these categories.
Yep, I've noticed this too. I dont get why, but some people tend to stare the ass more, while personally I like to enjoy the boobs.
Did this research notice if there were any deaths caused by getting discracted when you jumped and the camera got into such position that you tried to get a nippleslip or see the panties?
Ok, they're pulling landlines, so no DSL? What do they have in nordic countries, government paid for fiber to the home?
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a joke, but yes - sweden gov supported isp's to bring fiber to every home :p
It would be interesting to know how much coverage all of Finland gets. Sure, the plan is great when you're in a city... but how good is it when you go to a random part of the country? What's the cell coverage like?
Coverage is almost same everywhere, 99.6% for whole country. And like you said, the northern parts dont have a lot people living nearly, but they still cover those areas.
By looking at comments from US people, apparently bears roaming on streets and huge snowstorms so that you cant even walk outside :)
This argument doesn't work because all of the providers work per country. Europe is not a single country, and even the largest companies that work in multiple countries have greatly separated their companies per country.
Well, let's imagine that coverage of the country directly affects cost. This might not be so outlandish as cell phone towers need to be erected to cover area. I would venture to say that Americans & Canadians suffer from sprawl much more than Finland and total area of dense population is probably more than five times that of Finland's. So let's assume that those cell phone tower maintenance (more harsh weather conditions across the US than Finland also) and building costs are passed on to the consumer.
Eh, you obviously dont know much how nordic countries are. Most of the area is forest and not urban cities. Theres no tornadoes or such, but the weather changes a lot between summer and winter. Finland also only has 3 cities that passes 200k people living and the land area is large and many people live in smaller cities/towns. I would even argua that the cost of having cell phone network covered is more than on USA's area.
This is what I've always wondered, but learned from Slashdot comments. Why the hell mobile plans are so costly in US? I have the largest plan available from my phone company, 2500 minutes / 2500 sms per month and unlimited 3G internet. And that's still only 29 euro per month. And I did actually use that 3G internet connection for a month while waiting for adsl connection to be set up for my new apartment (hell, even running a server from it). No transfer limits or anything like that.
Yeah, mobile companies have extra costs from providing their infrastructure, but it just seems a lot what they ask in US. Sweden is mostly woods and non-urban areas too, so why is it done better here?
Maybe voice your opinion to the companies so they stop charging so much?
Like everything else, both self-enforcing 'protocols' and someone in between, say paypal, rely on trust from people. It also relies on the fact that businesses will take a major hit when someone says something bad about them or if they fraud. This is exactly the same with laws. You cant enforce it, but you can make consequences for breaking laws bad enough so people dont want to break them.
In high school I was teached that every happy customer tells about their good experience to 3-4 people, but every unhappy customer tells about it to 20 people. It's a great advice. Once the bad word gets out, your sales are going to suck and you lose customers. This is also why you need the trust and good name with self-enforcing protocols if not using middle man like paypal.
This can also be seen on webmasters forums and the like. People have certain amount of trust points according to their past and who they've done business with. You can instantly see who is reliable and who you can do business with.
Problem without using third party is that you cannot get to that trust level as newcomer and that it takes time to work it. When there's someone trusted in the middle of the transaction, you have some guarantee that you wont be cheated (or lose your personal details etc to whatever kind of fraud). In this case the trustful middlehand is good.
So it only works if the other party is big enough. When voting, you rely on trusting the goverment (now this sentence is so gonna get some paranoid persons replying :). If not, you need a middle party that is big enough that you can trust them instead.
As a side note, this is why we still rely on banks and even on our cash - We trust that our money on our bank accounts will still be available to us, and that our $10 bills wont just suddenly become worthless.
This doesn't hold truth as much as TFA says. The reason for changing your game genre from strategy and "smarter" games for something simpler isn't really that you have to 'think' so much elsewhere. The main reason is time. You can just quickly play around in simpler games.
I loved Civilization and Settlers series and other kinds of strategy games as a kid. But I had lots of time after school. Now that I think of it, I also got a lot coding done just for fun. I coded games for fun, and this was before I had stable internet, so almost noone even saw them. I just liked doing it and I had time. It wasn't that much for challenge or so, I just liked it. I however also did like games where you had some thinking.
However after you got used to games, you saw how AI reacted and what was the best tactic, even in games you had to use lots of strategy. For example in Civ2 I always went for science and tried to stay away from wars until I had discovered everything. It was so obvious and I knew when is the best time to start fighting, that the challenge went away. But I also liked that aspect most, even while hating it.
I do still play Civ4 and other such games, but as you grow up you have great amount of other stuff to take care of. Specially in mid-20's, when work and spending time with your gf takes lots of time. This seems to change again 30+ when things get more settled.
I also have a lawyer friend that likes to play tennis and golf (yeah, so guessable!). Not really lots of thinking needed. But he also likes to play chess and some other games where you need to think. You can have it both ways - peace your mind with something you just *do* that doesn't requre thinking. Then on other times play some game that does.
Another great aspect to this for myself is physics games. I still think Civilization series etc are my favourite games, but sometimes it's just fun to mess around. Physics games are great for this. You just build something, destroy something, experience around and see what happens. Physics games also is a genre where both of these world combine; you need to think some, but you get fast fun and experience around.
Actually if you want to bash, health care is bad way to go. Unlike US, we take care of people. But that goes with burden of tax, so bash that. And yes, it sucks.
It's just obvious. The reason for IT's growth during late 90's and early 2000's was because it was new, great technology. Now its getting common.
In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy.
This doesn't really make sense. IT has lots of opportunities too. Its true that "sure ways to get rich" times might be over, but its not like the other indrustries have those anymore.
Here in Sweden most of our internet infrastructure is actually fiber, not copper. Thats why we have 100mbits (1gbit in largest cities) to home. But the latency is still 25-50ms and thats in your home city. Going further from that and it grows.
I said the latency issue will not be fixed soon, not never. But it's gonna take some good time before we get there. Currently the only possible way this could work even some is to have datacenter in every city you want customers from. And you need lots of servers just sitting around idle just in case more players want to play. That is gonna be huge amount of datacenters. Hell, even Google doesn't have a datacenter in *even* every country, so theres no way they're gonna build datacenter in every larger city on the planet.
No, this is not going to make any kind of gaming revolution anytime soon, and publishers have little to nothing to worry about.
Neither OnLive and Gaikai wont make any gaming revolution. Yes, they might have the power and bandwidth to run the game as streaming video off their servers, but the major issue is still latency with controller. Even 50-100ms lag will be *really* noticiable when you're just moving mouse to look around. And in some fast games when you see the enemy you'll be already dead on the server.
OnLive shows Burnout Paradise in games catalog too, and racing games are another genre where you need fast input from the controller or you will be rolling your car down the hill pretty soon. These days latency is not gonna make it. Unlike bandwidth and power, latency is a lot harder issue to overcome in future too. Sure, it works from keyboard to pc really fast. But not when its gonna move hundreds of kilometers back and worth. It's already pushed to nice 50-100ms if theres nothing interfering with your local network or something along the way. You can talk in phones in real time too (well, with the same latency, but its not noticable in that use). But for controllers, specially for mouse, its not going to work. And more so you need to stream huge video all the time that can't be prebuffered like YouTube or other video content because its generated in real time.
Games like Counter-Strike and other multiplayer games work because the amount of work and data is split between client and server. You're only sending small amount of information to the server, like current position, shots etc. and the server is sending the client back other players information. Not a huge streaming video, but small packet with coordinates and so on. And even then we all know how crappy it goes if latency grows and the game lags.
What comes to removing piracy via online delivered content, the answer isn't streaming the game as video. Answer is delivering content when needed in game. Yes, that still needs lots of bandwidth and an active internet connection, and you pretty much fuck the customers over with it. But it makes piracy a lot harder if you need to authenticate to server and you only get some, but still significant amount of content during game, dynamically. However technically that way is A LOT closer possible than streaming the game as video and sending controller movements back to the game server.
Bandwidth can grow, but latency issues aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Only things this might work with is something like chess games, but I dont know if Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are going to be so worried about that.
Opera actually has major marketshare in Russia and CIS countries. They're the major player there, and IE and FF strugling behind. The usual marketshare statistics almost always just count US or major EU countries, ignoring everything else and it gives false statistics because they ignore almost half of the world's people.
What I find quite interesting is that those CIS countries have found the best alternative browser, even in general population. Maybe theres some intelligence to catch up in usa? :)
This is something Opera could actually push quite much via other countries. Opera has 40-60% marketshare in CIS countries, better than both FF and IE. They push the support for HTML5 and its new tags there and CIS websites adopt it (cyrillic language differences make it so that most people use local websites instead of US ones). IE and FF also has to start supporting the same to get marketshare there, and bam: you have the support elsewhere too. And they can also start supporting it on Wii, Mobile Phones and other accessories they make web browsers too. People usually underestimate the power of Opera because of their smaller marketshare (in US home PC's).
I think everyone does the "go backwards in a race" from time to time.
I'd really like to see this happen in Formula1.
Iran's national ISPs seem to have recently gained the ability to filter large quantities of web traffic more effectively.
Quite good tactic. Instead of fighting, now every country and RIAA/MPAA wants to do business with Iran to implement these high-performing filters everywhere.
Its fun to be a dick. In games its easier and theres no consequences in it and in single player games you wont be ruining anyone elses game either.
This is partly why I love physics games too. Its fun to build, destroy, smash and do something unexceptable to see the results. Physics games probably fit this category the best because they're made to play around with.
Sometimes I also dont want to get into some epic story but just have a bit of fun. Good physics engine + Good and responsive AI and the fun begins.
This is not actually far away from how Firefox generates its revenue too - from ad clicks in Google search and by direct sponsoring from Google.
The two main ways to monetarize and support OSS projects is giving support and ads. In the later case you always lose some of your privacy. Developing Linux and its distro's need money aswell. You could choose a distro that is financed in other way (maybe by you), use commercial software that doesn't do this or be fine with generating some ad income to support the development. "Perfect" package is usually impossible to obtain because of financial limitations.
Google is build completely around this model too and it seems to work good for them - even if people lose some of their privacy. Hell, slashdot is maintained by ad revenue too. Another distro that also does same kind of stuff is Linux Mint.
Its nothing new, but it might surprise those who believe in pure, not-revenue-generating OSS. It's how the free for user projects are financed.
I wonder how this obviously one-sided summary even got posted -- it just sounds like a calling for bashing from people who dont read the article. Here's another snippet from Steven's response:
We had one beta report on the memory usage, but that was resolved by design since we actually did design it to use more memory. But the design was to use more memory on purpose to speed things up, but never unbounded â" we requset the available memory and operate within that leaving at least 50M of physical memory. Our assumption was that using /r means your disk is such that you would prefer to get the repair done and over with rather than keep working.
And it does make sense for two reasons:
1) Windows has to lock the drive anyways, so its better to get it done fast.
2) You CAN spend RAM. If the whole RAM isn't used, you're just wasting it. In this case chkdsk.exe will use dynamically what there is left, making the process faster. How is this a bad thing?
Rather than a bug or memory leak, this seems like an optimization.
The issue isn't all about how easy it is, but because they dont know of other. If they happen to run across something else, there will be list of things you need to do before you can use their store (which usually means connecting phone to computer and doing something non-standard -- we're talking about average joe here). Its great there's other app stores for iphone than apples too, but because of this I dont see how it would be such a major enemy for Apple.