In other ways it looks like complete garbage, at both the hardware and software levels...
I have a friend who has one, and is pretty enthusiastic about it from a conceptual level, but he basically says it's currently entirely unsuitable for using as an actual phone now. Which is kind of unfortunate.
No, I actually do too. I understand why a lot of people find it a pain, but from a selfish stance none of those reasons (usually dealing with cross-timezone stuff) really apply to me. (Actually I sort of wish that DST were all year, but in the absence of that I like it with as much DST as possible.)
Windows and OS X both have this now sort of, but it's not quite "right" (at least for what I want): both Windows's Previous Versions and OS X's Time Machine do time-based snapshots, as opposed to triggering the backup from file system events (e.g. an fclose()). This means that changes made within the backup span (1 hr for Time Machine) won't be recorded.
(Time Machine also has a couple other deficiencies compared to what I want. The main one is that you have to use an external drive for the backup, as opposed to being able to use the same partition as your main data store. This means that you have to manage free space on two pools instead of one.)
Finally, Linux has some projects that do some of this stuff, both snapshot-style and true versioning file systems, but none has the clear support that Previous Versions and Time Machine have, and I doubt any have anywhere near the GUI integration of especially Time Machine.
How does the filesystem know when to create a new version? Should every byte ever written to the file be construed as a new version? If so, how does the admin figure out which precise version, out of the literally billions that would be created, is the right one?
True, you may not be able to get it perfect, but you can get way more useful than nothing.
For instance, many programs that work on small files (the kind you'd most want to version) don't keep the file open, and instead open the file, write to it, and close it each time you save. (Some will move the file to a backup name (eg file~), create a new file, and write to that. This is in part so you at least have the previous version in the ~ file, and in part to compensate for non-ACID file systems because there will always be at least one copy of either the old or new data at any given time.) So creating a version when a process calls fclose() is a reasonable thing to do.
Sure, it won't work for programs that keep the file open and update it by seeking around and writing, but it will work for the vast, vast majority of the cases that at least I personally would want.
And how do you reasonably prune that wasted space?
What you see as wasted space I see as space going to a pretty darn good use.
As for pruning, you'd have to be fairly clever. But you could create policies that specify how long to keep old versions, how many versions to keep in a certain time period, etc. You could also pay attention to how often a file is opened, how often old versions of files are opened, etc. There's a paper on a file system called Elephant written for FreeBSD where they discuss some ideas on how to do this.
There's also a hypothesis that at least I would agree with that things recently saved are much more likely to be useful. If you remember the "last lecture" guy Randy Pausch, he did another talk about time management in which I think he told a story about an experiment they did where the goal was to clean up the lab. People were too hesitant to throw things out because "I might need it later," so they set up a rotation of the trash bins. Things you throw out would stick around for a week, which meant that you could still safely retrieve it. But if you didn't need it within a week, you almost certainly wouldn't need it, so it was still basically safe to do. It it helped a lot with cleanliness since people actually threw things away. (He said the biggest problems were when the janitors emptied trash bins at the wrong time.)
Finally, you could restrict the versioning by the file size, so for instance it would only store past versions for files under a certain size, etc. If you set it to 200K or something that would cover almost all of the files that I would really like versioning on, and yet keep the extra space relatively low.
No, what you really want is version control software.
That may be what you want, but it's not what I want.
At the very least, it ensures that each commit was deliberate, and represents a valid state.
This is also a downside: it means you can't see anything but valid states.
Personally, I would like it if things like text editors and word processors saved the entire edit history of documents, persistently. You could use a scroll bar to go through the history, saves would be marked with small tick marks, and deliberate commits would be marked with larger tick marks.
Most importantly, 99% of the Mac applications don't require a reboot, while >80% of the windows apps do (strictly speaking, they don't really require one, but they ask for it as if).
My impression is that this has decreased tremendously from a while ago. Older programs often require it, some programs that make system changes (like VMWare, which installs a driver) require it, and the occasional program (like Visual Studio, I think) requires it for who-knows-what reason, but I would say it's pretty rare. I don't know if it's just the programs I install (often fairly lightweight installations of OSS stuff, often ported from Unix), but in my experience it's probably under a third of the time that they even ask for a reboot.
I think 80% is VASTLY overstating the problem. (Not that it isn't a problem and developers aren't dumb.)
If all airplanes went into production after a successful flight of a prototype...
Yes, but what's appropriate for an airplane fly-by-wire system isn't necessarily appropriate for, for instance, Word. Sure, you want some sort of verification for your plane, because it's safety critical. OTOH, if adding a substantial amount of cost to do that verification raises the price of my word processor 20% and decreases the frequency it crashes from once every month to even never, it probably wouldn't be worth it to me.
Dear kind sir, I am located in the Sudan, and a small piece of this asteroid landed in a nearby field. I have investigated, and there is unfortunately evidence of alien spores. However, I am presently unable to eradicate them. If you could wire a sum of $10,000 (ten thousand dollars) to my account then I will be able to take action. I am an official in the Sudanese government, and can guarantee that your expendature will be reimburesed plus an additional $10,000 reward, but it operates slowly and the government funds will not be available in time.
I look forward to hearing back from you if you can help. I will send detailed information in response. I fear that if you do not help, the Earth may be susceptable to the alient invaders.
For most application the quantity of memory is more important than the speed of the memory.
To an extent this is true, but not entirely. For most programs, there's a point at which it fits entirely into physical memory, and once you're there for the programs you're using, adding more memory won't really help at all. You just need enough to prevent paging.
If you're below the point where you're paging, more memory will help far more, but if you're above that point, faster memory is what you want.
I doubt most programs adjust how they use memory based on how much physical memory your machine has (though there are probably some).
My impression from the (relatively poorly written, especially on this point) article, and the fact that just about everyone has a campaign website, is just that linking from the official site is forboden. For instance, neither Obama nor McCain's site really makes it look like they are running for president. (I know both are Senators, not Representatives, but TFA says the new House rules are modeled off of the Senate ones, so I assume they have similar restrictions.)
With XP home on a machine with 4G of RAM (only 3.something recognized)
That's somewhat expected. The memory space is shared amongst everything in on the bus, in particular the video card. For instance, if your video card has 512 MB of RAM and you only have a 32-bit processor, it will see rather less than 3.5 GB.
32-bit OSes can get around this with stuff like PAE (physical address extensions) that extend the physical address space to 36 bits, but you need to explicitly enable this in Windows because I think it can cause problems with some drivers. I think it also requires a bit of extra effort in the non-server editions because MS is dumb.
The last thing I want is a phone running a proprietary OS that is impossible to program for...
My impression was that since you can program to the.net compact framework, VM would be one of the better systems to develop for. Depending on your program, it seems like it should even be possible to create a program with basically one code base that will run on either a WM device or a Windows PC, and maybe even other systems under mono. Compare that to either the iPhone or Android, both of which by my understanding don't have this provision. (Well, the iPhone might I don't know. But as far as phones for me, it's out of the question for a few reason.) My impression is that at the least, programming for WM is substantially more friendly than programming for the iPhone.
Is there some reason you think programming for WM is unfriendly?
This is my question too. If my understanding is correct, you can say even *more* favorable things about developing for Windows Mobile because you can use the same APIs as when developing for Windows. This means that not only do you not have to learn a new set of APIs (like for Android), but you should be able to more easily make a program that runs on both Windows Mobile and Windows proper, if it makes sense for that app. And with Mono, might even be able to make it run on Linux without too much trouble either. (Mono supposedly has support for Windows Forms 1.0; I don't know what Windows Mobile uses.)
Are you talking about HL2 and Episode 1? If so, that's because they did something special for those games. Portal wasn't released before the rest of the Orange Box, so people in my situation (buying the whole Orange Box when they already have Portal) is probably pretty rare. However, buying the Orange Box when you already own one or both of the earlier episodes may have been more common than not, and I guess Valve said "let's offer the chance to give it away."
(The same thing could have been done if you had gotten HL2 or Ep1 from Steam directly.)
You have been able to purchase gifts for a while now, but you can't gift something that you have already used yourself. You also can't gift just part of the Orange Box (modulo if you already had a copy of HL2 or Episode 1).
Exactly. I even own two licenses to Portal. (I bought Portal standalone, then decided I wanted HL2 Ep2 and bought the Orange Box at 50% off.)
And I can't freaking do anything with the second one. I know at least one person who I'd have liked to give a license to, and I can't. I even emailed Valve and see if they could make a one-time exception, and they refused.
I put up with Steam, and it has a lot of nice conveniences, but I still think it's inferior to physical CDs by a noticeable margin.
Except that on that show, they have people agree to it beforehand. They don't go rob someone's house and stand around until they get home and go "here's what we did".
(where do you put the apostrophe on a name that ends with "s"?)
By almost all sources, either "Steve Jobs' approach" or "Steve Jobs's approach" is acceptable. I advocate the latter simply because I don't like exceptions and it keeps things consistent ("Steve Jobs' approach" isn't, after all, referring to multiple Steve Jobs instances), but whichever you use is up to you.
(A better question is "how do you pluralize Steve Jobs so you don't have to say 'Steve jobs instances'?")
It isn't even new in the browser world. In fact it's where we started.
Though it is pretty new for a mainstream browser to choose that as an explicit choice.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a problem with Firefox that would have been solved by it being in its own process.
Either you're lucky or I'm unlucky... there was a couple years when I was restarting Firefox probably about once a day on average because the memory use would shoot up to the point where it was basically unusable, and closing tabs basically didn't decrease that use.
It's not nearly that bad now, but I still have plug-ins cause problems from time to time. And there are still times when doing something in one tab will cause the whole browser to freeze for a couple seconds, which gets a bit annoying if you're trying to listen to music or something.
Every bandwagoner, technical lightweight is now stomping their feet that Firefox needs to get on this yesterday, but really this is pretty low on the list of things that make a real improvement in people's lives.
Processes would solve the problems I alluded to first, but they are mostly gone anyway. Threads would help with the second problem. I do not feel that Firefox needs separate processes, but I really *do* feel that it would benefit from separate threads.
(And in terms of the list of things that make a real improvement in people's lives, I would say that web browser improvements have basically stopped fitting that bill anyway. A thread per tab would, I think, be an improvement on par with almost anything FF3 brought to the table. Maybe Mozilla should have not done the awesome bar because that too is low on the list of things that make a real improvement?)
Presuming that the sandbox of a browser automatically stops sites from doing stupid stuff (unlike IE that will let a site kill just by going into a perpetual loop in JavaScript)...
Unfortunately, MS has yet to solve the halting problem. Maybe they should import Mozilla's module that determines if a Javascript loop is going to be perpetual too.
(I'm being somewhat facetious here of course. I do appreciate Firefox's "this script is taking a long time to run" dialog. At the same time, I have definitely gotten that for legitimate scripts.)
Obviously, some people have trouble with the concept of people who don't like giving out their personal e-mail addresses or other personal information just to read a frickin' article.
Actually I'm not entirely comfortable with the notion of bugmenot, and I don't use it (though I understand those who do) and this doesn't apply to me. I definitely understand people who don't like giving out their personal email addresses and such to read an article, and I think sites that require it are stupid.
That said, I think it's the site's right. If the NYT wants to require me to register to read their articles, then either I can register with them or go somewhere else for my news. If reading the article is not worth it to me to register, then I won't go to that site.
Ordinarily I'd agree completely. But this is Google we're talking about, where "beta" has almost ceased to have meaning. By their typical schedule, Chrome will be out of beta circa 2017.
I don't know what it is, but Firefox memory use seems to vary dramatically between people.
This is a fun screenshot of my task manager back in the days of either Firefox 1 or 1.5, of me closing Firefox and my virtual memory use dropping about a gigabyte. (This was a time when I only had 512 MB of RAM.) At the time, I regularly had to restart Firefox (maybe once a day, maybe once every couple days, it's been a while) because its absurd memory demands would slow it to a crawl.
Things have improved dramatically, but I would still say FF uses 300 MB+ typically for me.
Slashdot Mirror
In other ways it looks like complete garbage, at both the hardware and software levels...
I have a friend who has one, and is pretty enthusiastic about it from a conceptual level, but he basically says it's currently entirely unsuitable for using as an actual phone now. Which is kind of unfortunate.
No, I actually do too. I understand why a lot of people find it a pain, but from a selfish stance none of those reasons (usually dealing with cross-timezone stuff) really apply to me. (Actually I sort of wish that DST were all year, but in the absence of that I like it with as much DST as possible.)
For Linux, KDirStat: http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/
Basically the same as WinDirStat, except actually perhaps older and not quite as pretty. I am a tremendous fan of both programs.
Windows and OS X both have this now sort of, but it's not quite "right" (at least for what I want): both Windows's Previous Versions and OS X's Time Machine do time-based snapshots, as opposed to triggering the backup from file system events (e.g. an fclose()). This means that changes made within the backup span (1 hr for Time Machine) won't be recorded.
(Time Machine also has a couple other deficiencies compared to what I want. The main one is that you have to use an external drive for the backup, as opposed to being able to use the same partition as your main data store. This means that you have to manage free space on two pools instead of one.)
Finally, Linux has some projects that do some of this stuff, both snapshot-style and true versioning file systems, but none has the clear support that Previous Versions and Time Machine have, and I doubt any have anywhere near the GUI integration of especially Time Machine.
How does the filesystem know when to create a new version? Should every byte ever written to the file be construed as a new version? If so, how does the admin figure out which precise version, out of the literally billions that would be created, is the right one?
True, you may not be able to get it perfect, but you can get way more useful than nothing.
For instance, many programs that work on small files (the kind you'd most want to version) don't keep the file open, and instead open the file, write to it, and close it each time you save. (Some will move the file to a backup name (eg file~), create a new file, and write to that. This is in part so you at least have the previous version in the ~ file, and in part to compensate for non-ACID file systems because there will always be at least one copy of either the old or new data at any given time.) So creating a version when a process calls fclose() is a reasonable thing to do.
Sure, it won't work for programs that keep the file open and update it by seeking around and writing, but it will work for the vast, vast majority of the cases that at least I personally would want.
And how do you reasonably prune that wasted space?
What you see as wasted space I see as space going to a pretty darn good use.
As for pruning, you'd have to be fairly clever. But you could create policies that specify how long to keep old versions, how many versions to keep in a certain time period, etc. You could also pay attention to how often a file is opened, how often old versions of files are opened, etc. There's a paper on a file system called Elephant written for FreeBSD where they discuss some ideas on how to do this.
There's also a hypothesis that at least I would agree with that things recently saved are much more likely to be useful. If you remember the "last lecture" guy Randy Pausch, he did another talk about time management in which I think he told a story about an experiment they did where the goal was to clean up the lab. People were too hesitant to throw things out because "I might need it later," so they set up a rotation of the trash bins. Things you throw out would stick around for a week, which meant that you could still safely retrieve it. But if you didn't need it within a week, you almost certainly wouldn't need it, so it was still basically safe to do. It it helped a lot with cleanliness since people actually threw things away. (He said the biggest problems were when the janitors emptied trash bins at the wrong time.)
Finally, you could restrict the versioning by the file size, so for instance it would only store past versions for files under a certain size, etc. If you set it to 200K or something that would cover almost all of the files that I would really like versioning on, and yet keep the extra space relatively low.
No, what you really want is version control software.
That may be what you want, but it's not what I want.
At the very least, it ensures that each commit was deliberate, and represents a valid state.
This is also a downside: it means you can't see anything but valid states.
Personally, I would like it if things like text editors and word processors saved the entire edit history of documents, persistently. You could use a scroll bar to go through the history, saves would be marked with small tick marks, and deliberate commits would be marked with larger tick marks.
Most importantly, 99% of the Mac applications don't require a reboot, while >80% of the windows apps do (strictly speaking, they don't really require one, but they ask for it as if).
My impression is that this has decreased tremendously from a while ago. Older programs often require it, some programs that make system changes (like VMWare, which installs a driver) require it, and the occasional program (like Visual Studio, I think) requires it for who-knows-what reason, but I would say it's pretty rare. I don't know if it's just the programs I install (often fairly lightweight installations of OSS stuff, often ported from Unix), but in my experience it's probably under a third of the time that they even ask for a reboot.
I think 80% is VASTLY overstating the problem. (Not that it isn't a problem and developers aren't dumb.)
If all airplanes went into production after a successful flight of a prototype...
Yes, but what's appropriate for an airplane fly-by-wire system isn't necessarily appropriate for, for instance, Word. Sure, you want some sort of verification for your plane, because it's safety critical. OTOH, if adding a substantial amount of cost to do that verification raises the price of my word processor 20% and decreases the frequency it crashes from once every month to even never, it probably wouldn't be worth it to me.
Dear kind sir, I am located in the Sudan, and a small piece of this asteroid landed in a nearby field. I have investigated, and there is unfortunately evidence of alien spores. However, I am presently unable to eradicate them. If you could wire a sum of $10,000 (ten thousand dollars) to my account then I will be able to take action. I am an official in the Sudanese government, and can guarantee that your expendature will be reimburesed plus an additional $10,000 reward, but it operates slowly and the government funds will not be available in time.
I look forward to hearing back from you if you can help. I will send detailed information in response. I fear that if you do not help, the Earth may be susceptable to the alient invaders.
For most application the quantity of memory is more important than the speed of the memory.
To an extent this is true, but not entirely. For most programs, there's a point at which it fits entirely into physical memory, and once you're there for the programs you're using, adding more memory won't really help at all. You just need enough to prevent paging.
If you're below the point where you're paging, more memory will help far more, but if you're above that point, faster memory is what you want.
I doubt most programs adjust how they use memory based on how much physical memory your machine has (though there are probably some).
My impression from the (relatively poorly written, especially on this point) article, and the fact that just about everyone has a campaign website, is just that linking from the official site is forboden. For instance, neither Obama nor McCain's site really makes it look like they are running for president. (I know both are Senators, not Representatives, but TFA says the new House rules are modeled off of the Senate ones, so I assume they have similar restrictions.)
With XP home on a machine with 4G of RAM (only 3.something recognized)
That's somewhat expected. The memory space is shared amongst everything in on the bus, in particular the video card. For instance, if your video card has 512 MB of RAM and you only have a 32-bit processor, it will see rather less than 3.5 GB.
32-bit OSes can get around this with stuff like PAE (physical address extensions) that extend the physical address space to 36 bits, but you need to explicitly enable this in Windows because I think it can cause problems with some drivers. I think it also requires a bit of extra effort in the non-server editions because MS is dumb.
The last thing I want is a phone running a proprietary OS that is impossible to program for...
My impression was that since you can program to the .net compact framework, VM would be one of the better systems to develop for. Depending on your program, it seems like it should even be possible to create a program with basically one code base that will run on either a WM device or a Windows PC, and maybe even other systems under mono. Compare that to either the iPhone or Android, both of which by my understanding don't have this provision. (Well, the iPhone might I don't know. But as far as phones for me, it's out of the question for a few reason.) My impression is that at the least, programming for WM is substantially more friendly than programming for the iPhone.
Is there some reason you think programming for WM is unfriendly?
This is my question too. If my understanding is correct, you can say even *more* favorable things about developing for Windows Mobile because you can use the same APIs as when developing for Windows. This means that not only do you not have to learn a new set of APIs (like for Android), but you should be able to more easily make a program that runs on both Windows Mobile and Windows proper, if it makes sense for that app. And with Mono, might even be able to make it run on Linux without too much trouble either. (Mono supposedly has support for Windows Forms 1.0; I don't know what Windows Mobile uses.)
Wow, it's a good thing that "average" commonly means just something indicating central tendency and not specifically the mean.
Are you talking about HL2 and Episode 1? If so, that's because they did something special for those games. Portal wasn't released before the rest of the Orange Box, so people in my situation (buying the whole Orange Box when they already have Portal) is probably pretty rare. However, buying the Orange Box when you already own one or both of the earlier episodes may have been more common than not, and I guess Valve said "let's offer the chance to give it away."
(The same thing could have been done if you had gotten HL2 or Ep1 from Steam directly.)
You have been able to purchase gifts for a while now, but you can't gift something that you have already used yourself. You also can't gift just part of the Orange Box (modulo if you already had a copy of HL2 or Episode 1).
This was about 5 or 6 months ago.
Exactly. I even own two licenses to Portal. (I bought Portal standalone, then decided I wanted HL2 Ep2 and bought the Orange Box at 50% off.)
And I can't freaking do anything with the second one. I know at least one person who I'd have liked to give a license to, and I can't. I even emailed Valve and see if they could make a one-time exception, and they refused.
I put up with Steam, and it has a lot of nice conveniences, but I still think it's inferior to physical CDs by a noticeable margin.
Except that on that show, they have people agree to it beforehand. They don't go rob someone's house and stand around until they get home and go "here's what we did".
Entirely different situation.
(where do you put the apostrophe on a name that ends with "s"?)
By almost all sources, either "Steve Jobs' approach" or "Steve Jobs's approach" is acceptable. I advocate the latter simply because I don't like exceptions and it keeps things consistent ("Steve Jobs' approach" isn't, after all, referring to multiple Steve Jobs instances), but whichever you use is up to you.
(A better question is "how do you pluralize Steve Jobs so you don't have to say 'Steve jobs instances'?")
...THIS IS NOT A "DVD Copier." This is just a ripper...
And what does a ripper do? Oh yeah... it makes a copy. Just not onto another media of the same type.
It isn't even new in the browser world. In fact it's where we started.
Though it is pretty new for a mainstream browser to choose that as an explicit choice.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a problem with Firefox that would have been solved by it being in its own process.
Either you're lucky or I'm unlucky... there was a couple years when I was restarting Firefox probably about once a day on average because the memory use would shoot up to the point where it was basically unusable, and closing tabs basically didn't decrease that use.
It's not nearly that bad now, but I still have plug-ins cause problems from time to time. And there are still times when doing something in one tab will cause the whole browser to freeze for a couple seconds, which gets a bit annoying if you're trying to listen to music or something.
Every bandwagoner, technical lightweight is now stomping their feet that Firefox needs to get on this yesterday, but really this is pretty low on the list of things that make a real improvement in people's lives.
Processes would solve the problems I alluded to first, but they are mostly gone anyway. Threads would help with the second problem. I do not feel that Firefox needs separate processes, but I really *do* feel that it would benefit from separate threads.
(And in terms of the list of things that make a real improvement in people's lives, I would say that web browser improvements have basically stopped fitting that bill anyway. A thread per tab would, I think, be an improvement on par with almost anything FF3 brought to the table. Maybe Mozilla should have not done the awesome bar because that too is low on the list of things that make a real improvement?)
Presuming that the sandbox of a browser automatically stops sites from doing stupid stuff (unlike IE that will let a site kill just by going into a perpetual loop in JavaScript)...
Unfortunately, MS has yet to solve the halting problem. Maybe they should import Mozilla's module that determines if a Javascript loop is going to be perpetual too.
(I'm being somewhat facetious here of course. I do appreciate Firefox's "this script is taking a long time to run" dialog. At the same time, I have definitely gotten that for legitimate scripts.)
You say that as a joke, but it may be more likely than you think.
Obviously, some people have trouble with the concept of people who don't like giving out their personal e-mail addresses or other personal information just to read a frickin' article.
Actually I'm not entirely comfortable with the notion of bugmenot, and I don't use it (though I understand those who do) and this doesn't apply to me. I definitely understand people who don't like giving out their personal email addresses and such to read an article, and I think sites that require it are stupid.
That said, I think it's the site's right. If the NYT wants to require me to register to read their articles, then either I can register with them or go somewhere else for my news. If reading the article is not worth it to me to register, then I won't go to that site.
Ordinarily I'd agree completely. But this is Google we're talking about, where "beta" has almost ceased to have meaning. By their typical schedule, Chrome will be out of beta circa 2017.
I don't know what it is, but Firefox memory use seems to vary dramatically between people.
This is a fun screenshot of my task manager back in the days of either Firefox 1 or 1.5, of me closing Firefox and my virtual memory use dropping about a gigabyte. (This was a time when I only had 512 MB of RAM.) At the time, I regularly had to restart Firefox (maybe once a day, maybe once every couple days, it's been a while) because its absurd memory demands would slow it to a crawl.
Things have improved dramatically, but I would still say FF uses 300 MB+ typically for me.