Meh. I stopped going to the cinema when the price of two tickets became more than the price of the DVD (and that's before you add snacks / drinks). I bought a projector and a reasonable surround-sound system almost a decade ago (and have replaced the bulb once). A subscription to a DVD rental service now costs significantly less than two people going to the cinema once a month. I can have friends over to watch a film without paying any more (and they can bring food / booze), I can pause it if I need to go to the toilet (or turn on subtitles if someone is hard to understand). I can drink or eat whatever I want with the film. Oh, and unlike seemingly every cinema in the UK, I don't have the equaliser settings configured to completely destroy any sane audio balance that might have been present in the original.
But how many people actually own one? I haven't yet seen a manufacturer of clip-on Bluetooth gamepads for Android phones that's willing to divulge sales figures to the public
People aren't making game pads for Android phones. The same ones that people use on the PCs and (some) consoles work with Android phones. They're just Bluetooth HID devices, not something special and specific to Android.
You can flag down an Uber car that drives past? Don't think so. That makes Uber a private hire system.
Did you read what I wrote? The fact that you can't flag it down means that it's not a hackney carriage: you have to book it, so it's a taxi. Vehicles that can be flagged down and picked up in the street need a hackney carriage license. Vehicles that must be booked require a taxi license.
Go and look at how Apple actually does their inventory management. You can get a fairly good feel for it from the order tracking information that they hand out to customers: if you buy a built-to-order model then you'll get it shipped via a completely different route to if you buy a default one. Apple's distribution chain is heavily optimised for consumer-style goods. Move away from that, and you'll be a lot better off with a supplier who has a supply chain optimised differently.
Depends on what you're compressing. Most large static content (images, video) are already compressed. This is aimed at HTTP-level compression, so the output from whatever is generating your dynamic pages will be streamed through the compressor on the way to the socket and then through the decompressor at the far end.
That's not just the price of the memory though, it's the price of taking an off-the-shelf model and having someone customise it. That adds a lot to the supply chain costs - they probably have a few of the baseline models in a warehouse near you already, which they can ship out for very little. Having someone more central pull a stock model off the line, customise it, test it (seat the RAM badly and it will be sent straight back at Apple's expense, so you want to make sure that it's actually working well), then send it via a different delivery chain because it needs to go out right now, all adds up. If they can do the customisation in an Apple Store near you then it can be a lot cheaper, but that's often not possible.
This may be a terminology difference. In the UK (and some parts of US law), Hackney Carriage is the legal term for a vehicle that can be flagged down to pick people up on the street and take them somewhere for a fee (though taxi is in common use for them). Private limos and vehicles that turn up after a phone call / app message / whatever, but can not pick people up from the street are covered by legislation that refers to taxis. In legal terminology, Uber is providing a taxi service, they just might not be in common usage terminology.
I've not used Uber (I signed up, started installing the app, read the list of permissions that it wanted, and said 'no thanks' without getting any further), but my understanding is that it has a reputation system for their drivers. Didn't this let you tell apart the ones that knew what they were doing from the ones that didn't?
Android has supported bluetooth gamepads for a while and the nVidia app store thingy includes a lot of games that strongly recommend having one. An increasing trend for game publishers is to sell their older titles for mobile to make even more money. Modern tablets have HDMI output, can support multiple bluetooth game pads, and have a GPU that's faster than last generation's consoles. This is a great place to be able to sell your 'old' games to a completely new market. Publishers that are thinking ahead will be making sure that the port is easy for the games that they release now. For most, this doesn't actually mean using OpenGL directly: it means using in-house middleware that abstracts over the implementation details of each platform and then performance tuning for the ones where it matters.
Note that r-value references and move semantics in C++11 improved the state of this a lot. Templates still create a lot of potential bloat, but if you're writing templates well (i.e. for things that should be templates, not simply calling methods) then the specialisation means that you can do a lot of inlining and then deletion: 3-4 specialised instances of a template can often end up being smaller in binary code than one generic implementation.
OO, as defined by Alan Kay (who invented the term, so in my mind gets to decide what it means) is about decomposing your problem into isolated parts, constructing small special-purpose computers that solve individual parts and communicate by well-defined interfaces. There's a lot of cargo-cult cruft built up around the idea since he came up with it in the '60s, but the core idea is still very important (especially once security matters and you want to compartmentalise your application).
Why are you talking about an interpreted program? We're specifically talking about JIT-compiled Java. Modern JITs use trace-based optimisation, which means that they will generate straight-line binary code for hot paths that span multiple method calls and returns. This is something that an AoT-compiled implementation can't do without a lot of profiling information. A JIT compiler can also optimise based on assumptions that are true for one phase of the program, then throw away the result if it stops being true for a later phase.
There are also other trades. For example, if you're writing memory-safe C++ and sharing pointers across threads, then you're going to be using std::shared_ptr, which performs an atomic operation (MESI bus traffic) on every assignment. In a typical JVM, copying pointers doesn't require atomic operations, but the cost of this is the GC pass. Depending on your workload, the GC cost can be a lot cheaper, a lot more expensive, or about the same as doing it correctly with smart pointers.
Unfortunately, a big part of the current 'Java is slow' claim is from idiots who don't understand that different GC implementations are all on a spectrum trading throughput for latency and who then build big distributed systems where tail latency in the edge nodes is important, then run a throughput-optimised stop-the-world collector on the edges and wonder why it sucks.
Businesses seem to have very varying success converting Groupon users to regular customers. Some try it once and fail. Others keep coming back because making a small loss on a few sales (and guaranteeing that those people actually do try your product / service) is much cheaper than most forms of advertising.
I don't have much sympathy for companies that don't do well out of Groupon. Your attitude seems to sum it up:
We asked ourselves: what kind of customer is that going to attract? The answer is clear: extreme bargain seekers, who will never come back and pay our normal prices. No thanks, go away.
And if you treat people like this, no wonder they never come back. Groupon gives you potential customers who are interested in the kind of thing that you're selling, willing to try buying it from you, and on your premises where you can try to convert them into repeat customers. If you can't persuade at least some of these people to come back regularly then that says a lot more about your customer service than it does about Groupon. What other form of advertising identifies people who are interested in your product or service and gets them to try yours as cheaply?
Your problem seems to be assuming that Groupon is a substitute for marketing, not a form of marketing. Do you also complain that people don't pay to click in banner ads or to look at your leaflets / posters?
I bought my phone from the company that Google owned at the time, directly. They've apparently released an update to 'carrier partners', but not yet through their own update server (for those of us who didn't by the phone through a carrier). Their web site claims that I should be able to upgrade to 5.1, but the update doesn't appear. Meanwhile, colleagues with much older iPhones are still getting security updates (and need them less because the iOS sandboxing model isn't nearly as braindead as the Android one).
Oh, and that patch you got the next day from Google didn't fix the issue. I hope you also installed the update from a couple of weeks later that did...
This is true. I have an Android phone, and I don't even need to go to some 'app store' thingy download malware, it still (3 months after initial public disclosure) is vulnerable to the Stagefright vulnerability, which Google researchers have shown is exploitable from the browser and allows privileged arbitrary code execution. None of this crap from Apple, where you need user action to install this stuff!
Destroying infrastructure isn't always a bad thing. The destroyed / looted infrastructure in Germany after the second world war meant that they became one of the most modern industrial nations and developed the economy that they have today. The cold war produced byproducts like satellite communication, which have added far more to the economy than the cost of caring for all of the injured veterans in its myriad warm conflicts.
Wow, that's dire. It's pretty obvious by question 6 that it's not a human and the none of the rest look even vaguely convincing. It's been a couple of years since I last read Loebner transcripts, but I remember it taking a bit longer 5 or so years ago. Perhaps this just means that the questioners have become better at picking questions that make sense. Back then, they put some of the winners online. I remembered a question from the arithmetic book I had when I was 4 or 5: 'Flipper ate 10 fish, then he ate 4, how many fish did flipper eat?' None of them got it right (or even demonstrated that they had parsed that it was a question with a numerical answer).
It's fairly hard to deliver malware through images like jpeg, png, and gif compared to the ease at which you can do so via java and flash
Not really. It's only possible to deliver malware via Flash and Java because of bugs in the implementation. If there's a bug in the JPEG or PNG library that allows arbitrary code execution, then the same technique will work. Search for arbitrary code execution CVEs in libjpeg and libpng and you'll see how common this is - they both have a fairly dire security track record, yet browsers will happily pass them untrusted data.
Better than what was available previously? That's a pretty low bar (though I'll note that my pre-Android, pre-iOS Nokia N80 supported SIP out of the box for cheap calls over WiFi and integrated nicely with the system without third-party apps and could sync over Bluetooth without requiring cloudy things). All of the modern phone offerings suck. Microsoft is the only company that has a UI that feels as if they've actually done some competent user studies and their platform is going to remain a niche as long as there's no useful software for it.
They should be charged with creating a hoax police department.
Impersonating a police officer is probably the crime that you're thinking of, though Deprivation of rights under color of law is a more interesting one that should be more widely applied.
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Meh. I stopped going to the cinema when the price of two tickets became more than the price of the DVD (and that's before you add snacks / drinks). I bought a projector and a reasonable surround-sound system almost a decade ago (and have replaced the bulb once). A subscription to a DVD rental service now costs significantly less than two people going to the cinema once a month. I can have friends over to watch a film without paying any more (and they can bring food / booze), I can pause it if I need to go to the toilet (or turn on subtitles if someone is hard to understand). I can drink or eat whatever I want with the film. Oh, and unlike seemingly every cinema in the UK, I don't have the equaliser settings configured to completely destroy any sane audio balance that might have been present in the original.
Considering that Groupon is crumbling
Is it? I take it that you haven't looked at their most recent financial statement...
But how many people actually own one? I haven't yet seen a manufacturer of clip-on Bluetooth gamepads for Android phones that's willing to divulge sales figures to the public
People aren't making game pads for Android phones. The same ones that people use on the PCs and (some) consoles work with Android phones. They're just Bluetooth HID devices, not something special and specific to Android.
You can flag down an Uber car that drives past? Don't think so. That makes Uber a private hire system.
Did you read what I wrote? The fact that you can't flag it down means that it's not a hackney carriage: you have to book it, so it's a taxi. Vehicles that can be flagged down and picked up in the street need a hackney carriage license. Vehicles that must be booked require a taxi license.
Go and look at how Apple actually does their inventory management. You can get a fairly good feel for it from the order tracking information that they hand out to customers: if you buy a built-to-order model then you'll get it shipped via a completely different route to if you buy a default one. Apple's distribution chain is heavily optimised for consumer-style goods. Move away from that, and you'll be a lot better off with a supplier who has a supply chain optimised differently.
Depends on what you're compressing. Most large static content (images, video) are already compressed. This is aimed at HTTP-level compression, so the output from whatever is generating your dynamic pages will be streamed through the compressor on the way to the socket and then through the decompressor at the far end.
That's not just the price of the memory though, it's the price of taking an off-the-shelf model and having someone customise it. That adds a lot to the supply chain costs - they probably have a few of the baseline models in a warehouse near you already, which they can ship out for very little. Having someone more central pull a stock model off the line, customise it, test it (seat the RAM badly and it will be sent straight back at Apple's expense, so you want to make sure that it's actually working well), then send it via a different delivery chain because it needs to go out right now, all adds up. If they can do the customisation in an Apple Store near you then it can be a lot cheaper, but that's often not possible.
This may be a terminology difference. In the UK (and some parts of US law), Hackney Carriage is the legal term for a vehicle that can be flagged down to pick people up on the street and take them somewhere for a fee (though taxi is in common use for them). Private limos and vehicles that turn up after a phone call / app message / whatever, but can not pick people up from the street are covered by legislation that refers to taxis. In legal terminology, Uber is providing a taxi service, they just might not be in common usage terminology.
I've not used Uber (I signed up, started installing the app, read the list of permissions that it wanted, and said 'no thanks' without getting any further), but my understanding is that it has a reputation system for their drivers. Didn't this let you tell apart the ones that knew what they were doing from the ones that didn't?
Android has supported bluetooth gamepads for a while and the nVidia app store thingy includes a lot of games that strongly recommend having one. An increasing trend for game publishers is to sell their older titles for mobile to make even more money. Modern tablets have HDMI output, can support multiple bluetooth game pads, and have a GPU that's faster than last generation's consoles. This is a great place to be able to sell your 'old' games to a completely new market. Publishers that are thinking ahead will be making sure that the port is easy for the games that they release now. For most, this doesn't actually mean using OpenGL directly: it means using in-house middleware that abstracts over the implementation details of each platform and then performance tuning for the ones where it matters.
Note that r-value references and move semantics in C++11 improved the state of this a lot. Templates still create a lot of potential bloat, but if you're writing templates well (i.e. for things that should be templates, not simply calling methods) then the specialisation means that you can do a lot of inlining and then deletion: 3-4 specialised instances of a template can often end up being smaller in binary code than one generic implementation.
OO, as defined by Alan Kay (who invented the term, so in my mind gets to decide what it means) is about decomposing your problem into isolated parts, constructing small special-purpose computers that solve individual parts and communicate by well-defined interfaces. There's a lot of cargo-cult cruft built up around the idea since he came up with it in the '60s, but the core idea is still very important (especially once security matters and you want to compartmentalise your application).
Why are you talking about an interpreted program? We're specifically talking about JIT-compiled Java. Modern JITs use trace-based optimisation, which means that they will generate straight-line binary code for hot paths that span multiple method calls and returns. This is something that an AoT-compiled implementation can't do without a lot of profiling information. A JIT compiler can also optimise based on assumptions that are true for one phase of the program, then throw away the result if it stops being true for a later phase.
There are also other trades. For example, if you're writing memory-safe C++ and sharing pointers across threads, then you're going to be using std::shared_ptr, which performs an atomic operation (MESI bus traffic) on every assignment. In a typical JVM, copying pointers doesn't require atomic operations, but the cost of this is the GC pass. Depending on your workload, the GC cost can be a lot cheaper, a lot more expensive, or about the same as doing it correctly with smart pointers.
Unfortunately, a big part of the current 'Java is slow' claim is from idiots who don't understand that different GC implementations are all on a spectrum trading throughput for latency and who then build big distributed systems where tail latency in the edge nodes is important, then run a throughput-optimised stop-the-world collector on the edges and wonder why it sucks.
Businesses seem to have very varying success converting Groupon users to regular customers. Some try it once and fail. Others keep coming back because making a small loss on a few sales (and guaranteeing that those people actually do try your product / service) is much cheaper than most forms of advertising.
I don't have much sympathy for companies that don't do well out of Groupon. Your attitude seems to sum it up:
We asked ourselves: what kind of customer is that going to attract? The answer is clear: extreme bargain seekers, who will never come back and pay our normal prices. No thanks, go away.
And if you treat people like this, no wonder they never come back. Groupon gives you potential customers who are interested in the kind of thing that you're selling, willing to try buying it from you, and on your premises where you can try to convert them into repeat customers. If you can't persuade at least some of these people to come back regularly then that says a lot more about your customer service than it does about Groupon. What other form of advertising identifies people who are interested in your product or service and gets them to try yours as cheaply?
Your problem seems to be assuming that Groupon is a substitute for marketing, not a form of marketing. Do you also complain that people don't pay to click in banner ads or to look at your leaflets / posters?
Oh, and that patch you got the next day from Google didn't fix the issue. I hope you also installed the update from a couple of weeks later that did...
This is true. I have an Android phone, and I don't even need to go to some 'app store' thingy download malware, it still (3 months after initial public disclosure) is vulnerable to the Stagefright vulnerability, which Google researchers have shown is exploitable from the browser and allows privileged arbitrary code execution. None of this crap from Apple, where you need user action to install this stuff!
Maybe she grew a pair after the class?
Destroying infrastructure isn't always a bad thing. The destroyed / looted infrastructure in Germany after the second world war meant that they became one of the most modern industrial nations and developed the economy that they have today. The cold war produced byproducts like satellite communication, which have added far more to the economy than the cost of caring for all of the injured veterans in its myriad warm conflicts.
Wow, that's dire. It's pretty obvious by question 6 that it's not a human and the none of the rest look even vaguely convincing. It's been a couple of years since I last read Loebner transcripts, but I remember it taking a bit longer 5 or so years ago. Perhaps this just means that the questioners have become better at picking questions that make sense. Back then, they put some of the winners online. I remembered a question from the arithmetic book I had when I was 4 or 5: 'Flipper ate 10 fish, then he ate 4, how many fish did flipper eat?' None of them got it right (or even demonstrated that they had parsed that it was a question with a numerical answer).
It's fairly hard to deliver malware through images like jpeg, png, and gif compared to the ease at which you can do so via java and flash
Not really. It's only possible to deliver malware via Flash and Java because of bugs in the implementation. If there's a bug in the JPEG or PNG library that allows arbitrary code execution, then the same technique will work. Search for arbitrary code execution CVEs in libjpeg and libpng and you'll see how common this is - they both have a fairly dire security track record, yet browsers will happily pass them untrusted data.
Back then, there were two kinds of smartphones: Blackberries and WinMo phones
Oh, and there was that other company that had 80% of the smartphone market...
You know that Doubleclick is owned by Google, right?
Better than what was available previously? That's a pretty low bar (though I'll note that my pre-Android, pre-iOS Nokia N80 supported SIP out of the box for cheap calls over WiFi and integrated nicely with the system without third-party apps and could sync over Bluetooth without requiring cloudy things). All of the modern phone offerings suck. Microsoft is the only company that has a UI that feels as if they've actually done some competent user studies and their platform is going to remain a niche as long as there's no useful software for it.
There was a time when we used to exude bravery
Really? When was this?
They should be charged with creating a hoax police department.
Impersonating a police officer is probably the crime that you're thinking of, though Deprivation of rights under color of law is a more interesting one that should be more widely applied.