Smaller ad networks might not be able to, but Google probably could. Imagine if Google ran their ads, with encoded scripts and links, through their other domains at random. Your only choice then would be to completely block Google, which would break many sites that use their hosted scripts and content, or put up with some ads. Google hasn't done this yet because an anti-adblock arms race would be both costly and a public relations disaster. It's not yet worth it for Google to push the nuclear button on ad blockers, but that day may yet come if things keep going the way that they are.
Except that, unless you only use a HOSTS file (which is the easiest thing to work around in terms of ad blocking), modern ad blockers don't solely block based on host. You can also block based on HTML tags, IDs, and classes. Sure, you can always randomize these on page loads, but you risk breaking a lot of things, and it would add extra server computation to serve out a page (to the point where for someone like Google, it might become more expensive to serve ad pages than you make in revenue).
When it comes to the Internet, the biggest problem they're going to encounter is that there is nothing in this world that advertising improves.
I've sat and tried to think of anything that advertising actually improves (in my mind at least). About the closest I can seem to get is movie trailers before a movie. And that's it. And I don't see how that would apply to websites.
There is no advertising anywhere that improves the web experience, thus users will always have an incentive to block it. It uses end-user and ISP bandwidth, so it actually costs the consumer (and everything in-between) for its delivery.
Anything that costs me money which detracts from the overall experience, even by a tiny bit, is going to get blocked when there is an easy technological means to do so. There is absolutely no way Google or anyone else can change that -- being less annoying is still infinitely worse than not being present in the first place.
LED's, arrows on the floor. smartphone, arudino, flip book, GPS...all fail
My grandfather suffered from Alzheimers in his final years. Even though he had been a military court reporter throughout WWII, and had worked in an office of a chemical plant for his entire career after the war, in his later years anytime the phone rang, he would pick it up and toss it in the garbage. Anytime my grandmother needed to use the phone, she had to go fish it out of the trash.
Years later, when I was working on my MSc., my research supervisor came to us with an idea for a device just like the OP wants to create. He had no experience with people with dementia. I related my grandfathers story. He was never able to secure funding, and the project eventually fell through. Unfortunately, I think he felt that with sufficient funding and enough research, his idea for a handheld device to help the elderly with dementia would have eventually worked, and our relationship was never quite the same again. But I had experience behind me -- my grandfather was an educated man who had used telephones his entire career, but couldn't operate one in his final years (and I am talking about a landline, and not a cell phone), and out of frustration and confusion would just dump it in the nearest waste bin. If you had given him some fancy and expensive electronic device that made unexpected sounds and flashed meaningless text and colours and such at him, it would have very quickly wound up in the exact same place.
The parent is correct. A time may come when we are of that age and our memories start failing that our long experiences with touchscreen smartphones will make such a concept tenable, but we're at least 20 - 30 years out from being at that stage yet. And I suspect that it will be some form of more invisible technology that will rule the day in the end, such as technology built into the environment. Until that time, you need a flesh and blood person to provide aid and guidance. Parent poster is right. There really is no substitute here.
Not only are you flushing your money down the toilet, but getting all those empty bottles out of our waste stream would be a great benefit for all of us.
I'm rich enough that I only fill my toilet tanks with the finest imported bottled water. It's only the best for my effluence!
Amazon doesn't offer their Instant Video streaming service in Canada at all, so their reasoning doesn't stand up here in Canada. Will they also be preventing sales of Apple TVs and Chromecast units to Canadians?
Maybe someone just needs to point them to the Chromecast and (new) tvOS SDKs so they can whip up their own Amazon Instant Video apps instead?
I hate technicalities, but the RIR for Latam is LACNIC. Oh, poorly chosen demonyms.
LACNIC ran out on June 10th, 2014.
That, and if we're going to be technical ARIN covers more than Canada and the US, also covering man island nations in the Caribbean and North Atlantic.
We have three major political parties in Canada and I wonder if the volunteers represent each of the parties to ensure no cheating. I'll ask at our next election in October.
No. The volunteers are actually temporary paid employees of Elections Canada. The positions are described here, along with the criteria for application. During the count after the polls close, each candidate or a designated representative can act as a scrutineer (officially Candidates Representative), who watches the counting process (actually, they are usually expected to be at the polling station all day to verify that the polling is being run fairly).
Elections Canada has a guide for Candidate Representatives here. If you think you want to become a Candidate Representative, get in contact with one of your local candidates committees, volunteer to do some simple tasks during the campaign, and when the time comes close, offer to be a Candidates Representative. I'm not aware of a riding that has only one polling station, and scrutineers are needed for all of them. You can even be a scrutineer for the advanced polls, and even for polling in long term care facilities where you follow a polling clerk from bed to bed to verify that the process is being followed correctly.
Amazing. You do realise you don't need more than 128Kbits/sec for that, don't you?
You do realize I listed of at least five OTHER things that I use on top of that?
VoIP can be sensitive to jitter, and it's not that hard to add transmission latency when you're also piling a whole lot of other, higher bandwidth streams through the pipe, like video, or putting large VMs into the cloud, the quality can easily suffer.
But please, go ahead and try to watch Netflix while a family member is on a VoIP call on your ISDN line. I look forward to hearing how well that works out for you.
Which means that the US is not a developed area. But 100Mbps is too high I think, that's standard ethernet speed and if you need more than that at home then you're probably running a pr0n server.
Spoken like someone who has never used a 100Mbps internet connection.
I'm fortunate to live somewhere where I do have 100Mbps (down)[0], and it is invaluable. I run two VoIP phone lines, digital video streaming from a variety of services, we play online games, and as I work from home, I can checkout large code trees from SCM in reasonable amounts of time, and sling around multi-gigabyte VMs between home and work (I tend to prefer to generate and validate the VMs locally, and then upload them to their destination server when the need arises). And best of all, I can do all of these at the same time -- I'd have to push things really hard to see any degradation when my wife is watching Netflix or someone is talking on the phone.
The only bad thing is how asymmetrical the upload speed is -- it's only 6Mbps. That I conceivably can saturate pretty easily. Fortunately, in our typical use cases our upload needs tend to be fairly asymmetric as well -- the only two major areas where our network gets impacted is when I'm moving those VMs around between home and internal deployment servers, or when we're watching video via Slingbox from outside the network. It impacts work much more than pleasure. Not much I can do about it unfortunately, without going for some crazy priced business class connection that my employer won't pay for.
Then again, I have over 20 devices on our network (via GigE and 802.11ac). We're pretty heavy users, but with nary a pr0n server in sight.
Yaz
---
[0] - A strange thing seems to have happened recently. Earlier this year, my ISP cancelled offering 100Mbps service, but grandfathered in anyone who was already a customer. Their new highest tier offering at the time was only 60Mbps (for the same price as 100Mbps used to be, at that). Since then, however, they've introduced a new 120Mbps service. I've run multiple speed tests through a few different services, and I seem to be maxing out downloading at 120Mbps as of late. Still only 6Mbps up unfortunately.
Except... we don't use a "French" (Azerty) keyboard either. We use a french Canada keyboard, and Apple doesn't sell that layout at all. It's the only PC maker with the stupid canadian multilingual keyboard.
Does anyone anywhere use the Canadian Multilingual keyboard layout on any OS, anywhere?
I've worked in industry and in government, in both English and French Canada, and I can't recall ever seeing anyone anywhere using the Canadian Multilingual layout. Ever. I've seen more Dvorak users than Canadian Multilingual.
Why does it even exist in the first place? (and FWIW, it's a terrible layout for coding IMO).
Actually, that clarifies that the zram feature did not make it to the Linux kernel until 2014, meaning that OSX had it prior to Linux. Yes, I understand some had a feature like it earlier, but full-blown reliable enough implementation to make it to the RTM release of an OS was OSX 10.9 (2013), Linux kernel 3.18 (2014) and finally Windows 10 in what appears to be late 2015, or maybe 2016 given their track record. Guess better late than never.
One further note: in OS X 10.9, the memory compression subsystem was on by default (and can only be turned off from the command line). I know of no Linux distort which ships with zram or zswap enabled by default (although if there is one, hopefully someone will jump in and let me know!). I doubt that either is particularly highly used on Linux, even though the facility is extremely useful and can enhance performance by quite a bit
zram tries to compress pages in RAM, without swapping them to disk. I've only recently enabled this on one of my Debian Jessie boxes (an Intel Core 4 Duo with a motherboard that has a weird memory configuration that in practical terms limits it to 4GB of RAM), however my experience with the equivalent subsystem on OS X has been fantastic. Pages may still later be swapped to disk, but on OS X at least the system aims for a 2:1 compression ratio, holding successfully compressed pairs of pages in a single page without swapping them to disk. Think of it as an intermediary state for swapped pages between having them sit in RAM as-is and paging out to disk.
zswap is about compressing the swap file. This can have benefits as well (especially if you have low CPU load. The Jessie box I mentioned in the previous paragraph fits into this category of use, and I'd probably use swap too if the system didn't have a large and quite fast RAID array in it), as the stuff getting paged will hopefully take up less space requiring less IO time. It is, however, different than what the article is talking about, which is the territory of the zram module in Linux.
Am I really getting so old that people find this to be a legitimate question?
Have I really been doing this for so long that there are now people who don't remember a time when disconnected machines was the norm?
Am I the only one left here who remembers (for example) dialling for hours to get into the local IBM-run BBS to download the 21 diskette images needed to update OS/2 2.1 to the latest patch level, digging into the cabinet for several boxes of diskettes, de-imaging each and every one of those diskettes (my machine had two 3.5" floppies -- I could manage two at once!), rebooting off the first disk, and then feeding diskettes into the machine one at a time as prompted to update it?
Honestly -- this is a long solved problem. Some of the technologies have changed (you probably don't need 21 USB thumb drives to contain your patch), but the basic idea remains: provide a downloadable patch image suitable for your application, have customers download it to a USB drive of sufficient size, and then have them boot from the drive or run a script or application from the drive to apply the patches.
And if you're in some industry where you worry about your patches getting out into the wild or need to ensure patch security/validity (where hashes aren't good enough) or something odd like that, put your images onto USB thumb drives yourself and ship them to your customers physically (encrypted, if you have some reason to be uber-paranoid).
I don't know how it works on a Mac, but entering alternate characters is still easy with Windows, even 8.1. (I haven't tried it on 10.) Rather, I consider it pretty easy.:-) Just hold down the ALT key, type in the four-digit code for the character you want, then release the ALT key and your character will show up. A Euro sign is ALT+0128, for example.
On OS X, you hit Shift-Option-2. Option-3 gives a pound symbol, Option-4 cents.
You still have to get to know some of the shift-option combinations, but that's WAY easier than having to know all of the character codes for whatever you want to type. Less keystrokes too. Accented characters are somewhat easier, in that you can type the accent, and then the character you want to accent (so if you want a circumflex over a character you type Option-i, followed by the character to accent). Again, it's easier to remember one two-key stroke to get the accent you want, followed by typing the letter you need accented than remembering half a dozen four-digit numeric codes. OS X does this way better than Windows.
This cannot stand. Two people with the same major marrying each other is completely against my just-now-made-up religion. It says that Frank (my just-made-up religions version of god) specifically wrote that "Thou shalt not lie with a fellow computer science major as you would with a psychology major".
The government needs to make a constitutional amendment to prevent people of the same major from marrying each other. After all, if we let two people with the same major marry, we're on a slippery slope to marrying dolphins with snack cakes. And then where will it end?
However, the summary also mentions iOS, and I was under the impression that GPL apps on the Apple AppStore are a no go?
FWIW, the situation is a bit more nuanced than that.
If the GPL licensed code is entirely your own work, you can relicense it any way you want, including to Apple for distribution on the App Store.
Where you can get into trouble with the App Store is if you take someone else GPL'd code and release it on the App Store. This could be by including third-party GPL routines, or by publishing code that was developed by multiple parties, without their permission, where copyright has not been reassigned. This was the case for the VLC player: as the article you linked alludes, Apple took that old VLC player app out of their app store due to a copyright complaint from one of the VLC developers. That was back in 2011 -- the VideoLAN Oragniaztaion has since released their own VLC for iOS, while still retaining the GPL license (albeit in part by dual-licensing it as MPL/GPL).
I'm not a PS4 (or any other console) fanboy, but I read this and can't help wonder: It there anything that stops a user from replacing the hard drive in a PS4 with a larger drive themselves (wonky interfaces? self destruct when opened cases? magic formatting of the drive that can't readily be duplicated?)? Is it a typical 3.5 inch drive or a smaller drive?
Sony pretty actively advertises that the PS4 HDD is completely user-upgradable. IIRC the PS4 manual contains instructions, and they also have them online here.
I've read articles that have tested magnetic, SSD, and Hybrid(SSHD) drives, and they all work just fine. The main limitations appear to be in terms of physical size (2.5" drive, 9.5mm or less in height). Word has it you can use up to a 6TB drive, although the people doing so are using 3.5" drives in external enclosures (and I've read some reports of some weird issues with powering such systems up).
If you write code, part of the documentation before you start should be a "risks" statement, where you state that a dependency on X external, third party library, exists, and that any vulnerability could cause issues in your application. Also, that substantial upgrades to the library interface will affect maintainability if any interfaces are changed, or are deprecated.
When someone throws a pile of libraries at a problem, that risk statement gets lengthy.
Which is all well and good if you're doing greenfield development. It's not so good when you're inherited a codebase where none of this was done in the first place, and you're tasked to keep it going. As I said, the real world can be a messy place. In my case, the previous lead architect just threw immature libraries at every problem willy-nilly, at a time before I worked for the company. I get to inherit the problems this lack of foresight caused, and don't have the benefit of going backwards to fix it.
Your problem isn't with using external libraries, it's using ones without service contracts, or immature ones. And you're reacting by throwing out the baby, bathwater, bathtub, house, plumbing infrastructure, and electrical grid.
I don't disagree -- I'm hardly anti-library (you won't get too far in development without them, unless you're doing low-level embedded work). I like a good, stable, well-designed library that has been around for a long time, and where breaking changes are rare. Unfortunately, when the previous architect would throw a library at every problem that may have required eight lines of code, without care for anything other than ensuring the library license permits us to ship it.
And FWIW, I have brought these issues up with management. Their stance is they don't want to see any backend changes of any sort (where the bulk of our library woes lie) -- their focus is on the front end only. They're more than happy to defer the risks to some unspecified future.
As I said, the real world of development can be messy. I'm stuck with a codebase that is full of immature libraries, libraries that are no longer maintained, and libraries with bugs where getting new libraries introduces major changes requiring major refactors. If I were permitted to start fresh, I'd be doing things the way you described, and we wouldn't rely so much on "randomLibrary.jar" that was someones pet project seven years ago with 'LGPL' attached to it, but which has since been rewritten or abandoned. It's a willy-nilly application of such libraries to every problem that crops up without any analysis that I'm against, and not the use of libraries in any and all situations.
What should be happening : when you're planning a new release, raise the component versions to the latest and run your test suite. If it passes, good job, release it.
What is actually happening : the version numbers never get edited, because that version worked, and if you change it, OMG, it might stop working.
Part of the problem I run into with this is that sometimes projects stick with old dependencies because at some point, some major version came along that significantly changed the organization of the API in such a way that the latest component version an't just be dropped in, but requires significant resources refactoring your code to use it. Getting management buy-in for that when there aren't any big customers breathing down their neck to get a flaw fixed can be neigh on impossible.
I ran into this recently myself. During internal testing, I discovered a flaw in our product when accessing any of our web resources using an IPv6 destination IP in the URL (i.e.: http://18080./ A quick bit of debugging showed that an external library we had been using for several years was doing some brain-dead parsing of the URL to pull out the port number; it was just doing a string split after the first colon it found, and presumed the rest was the port number.
Modifying the Maven POM to use a newer version of the API in question was initially difficult because the project had since reorganized their own library structure, breaking things into multiple smaller JARs. Except that some of the functionality was actually _removed_, and isn't available at the latest API revision (functionality we had been using, naturally). Classes had moved around to different packages than where they were previously, and various interfaces appear to have been completely rewritten.
Upgrading to a version of the library that actually fixed the flaw was going to be akin to opening Pandora's Box. Unfortunately, our former architect (from whom I inherited this code) was the type of guy who just liked to throw external libraries at every problem. In the end we had to document the fault for all current versions of the product, and now I'm trying to get management buy-in to do the work necessary to upgrade the library in question for the next version of our product. And this is for just one library out of over 100 that need similar attention.
Suffice to say, I'm not happy about this state of affairs. Unlike the previous architect, I push against using third-party libraries as our solution to everything. If I were allowed to rewrite everything from scratch, we could avoid these problems. Things are unfortunately messy out here in the real world, and when libraries decide to significantly change their interfaces your program uses to access their functionality, no amount of unit tests is going to make upgrading those libraries any easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Smaller ad networks might not be able to, but Google probably could. Imagine if Google ran their ads, with encoded scripts and links, through their other domains at random. Your only choice then would be to completely block Google, which would break many sites that use their hosted scripts and content, or put up with some ads. Google hasn't done this yet because an anti-adblock arms race would be both costly and a public relations disaster. It's not yet worth it for Google to push the nuclear button on ad blockers, but that day may yet come if things keep going the way that they are.
Except that, unless you only use a HOSTS file (which is the easiest thing to work around in terms of ad blocking), modern ad blockers don't solely block based on host. You can also block based on HTML tags, IDs, and classes. Sure, you can always randomize these on page loads, but you risk breaking a lot of things, and it would add extra server computation to serve out a page (to the point where for someone like Google, it might become more expensive to serve ad pages than you make in revenue).
Yaz
Something that's made better by ads? ... The Superbowl.
We don't get the American Superbowl ads here in Canada, so I really wouldn't know.
Besides which, if the Superbowl isn't good enough without the ads, why watch in the first place?
Yaz
When it comes to the Internet, the biggest problem they're going to encounter is that there is nothing in this world that advertising improves .
I've sat and tried to think of anything that advertising actually improves (in my mind at least). About the closest I can seem to get is movie trailers before a movie. And that's it. And I don't see how that would apply to websites.
There is no advertising anywhere that improves the web experience, thus users will always have an incentive to block it. It uses end-user and ISP bandwidth, so it actually costs the consumer (and everything in-between) for its delivery.
Anything that costs me money which detracts from the overall experience, even by a tiny bit, is going to get blocked when there is an easy technological means to do so. There is absolutely no way Google or anyone else can change that -- being less annoying is still infinitely worse than not being present in the first place.
Yaz
LED's, arrows on the floor. smartphone, arudino, flip book, GPS...all fail
My grandfather suffered from Alzheimers in his final years. Even though he had been a military court reporter throughout WWII, and had worked in an office of a chemical plant for his entire career after the war, in his later years anytime the phone rang, he would pick it up and toss it in the garbage. Anytime my grandmother needed to use the phone, she had to go fish it out of the trash.
Years later, when I was working on my MSc., my research supervisor came to us with an idea for a device just like the OP wants to create. He had no experience with people with dementia. I related my grandfathers story. He was never able to secure funding, and the project eventually fell through. Unfortunately, I think he felt that with sufficient funding and enough research, his idea for a handheld device to help the elderly with dementia would have eventually worked, and our relationship was never quite the same again. But I had experience behind me -- my grandfather was an educated man who had used telephones his entire career, but couldn't operate one in his final years (and I am talking about a landline, and not a cell phone), and out of frustration and confusion would just dump it in the nearest waste bin. If you had given him some fancy and expensive electronic device that made unexpected sounds and flashed meaningless text and colours and such at him, it would have very quickly wound up in the exact same place.
The parent is correct. A time may come when we are of that age and our memories start failing that our long experiences with touchscreen smartphones will make such a concept tenable, but we're at least 20 - 30 years out from being at that stage yet. And I suspect that it will be some form of more invisible technology that will rule the day in the end, such as technology built into the environment. Until that time, you need a flesh and blood person to provide aid and guidance. Parent poster is right. There really is no substitute here.
Yaz
Not only are you flushing your money down the toilet, but getting all those empty bottles out of our waste stream would be a great benefit for all of us.
I'm rich enough that I only fill my toilet tanks with the finest imported bottled water. It's only the best for my effluence!
Yaz
Amazon doesn't offer their Instant Video streaming service in Canada at all, so their reasoning doesn't stand up here in Canada. Will they also be preventing sales of Apple TVs and Chromecast units to Canadians?
Maybe someone just needs to point them to the Chromecast and (new) tvOS SDKs so they can whip up their own Amazon Instant Video apps instead?
Yaz
I hate technicalities, but the RIR for Latam is LACNIC. Oh, poorly chosen demonyms.
LACNIC ran out on June 10th, 2014.
That, and if we're going to be technical ARIN covers more than Canada and the US, also covering man island nations in the Caribbean and North Atlantic.
Yaz
We have three major political parties in Canada and I wonder if the volunteers represent each of the parties to ensure no cheating. I'll ask at our next election in October.
No. The volunteers are actually temporary paid employees of Elections Canada. The positions are described here, along with the criteria for application. During the count after the polls close, each candidate or a designated representative can act as a scrutineer (officially Candidates Representative), who watches the counting process (actually, they are usually expected to be at the polling station all day to verify that the polling is being run fairly).
Elections Canada has a guide for Candidate Representatives here. If you think you want to become a Candidate Representative, get in contact with one of your local candidates committees, volunteer to do some simple tasks during the campaign, and when the time comes close, offer to be a Candidates Representative. I'm not aware of a riding that has only one polling station, and scrutineers are needed for all of them. You can even be a scrutineer for the advanced polls, and even for polling in long term care facilities where you follow a polling clerk from bed to bed to verify that the process is being followed correctly.
Yaz
Amazing. You do realise you don't need more than 128Kbits/sec for that, don't you?
You do realize I listed of at least five OTHER things that I use on top of that?
VoIP can be sensitive to jitter, and it's not that hard to add transmission latency when you're also piling a whole lot of other, higher bandwidth streams through the pipe, like video, or putting large VMs into the cloud, the quality can easily suffer.
But please, go ahead and try to watch Netflix while a family member is on a VoIP call on your ISDN line. I look forward to hearing how well that works out for you.
Yaz
Which means that the US is not a developed area. But 100Mbps is too high I think, that's standard ethernet speed and if you need more than that at home then you're probably running a pr0n server.
Spoken like someone who has never used a 100Mbps internet connection.
I'm fortunate to live somewhere where I do have 100Mbps (down)[0], and it is invaluable. I run two VoIP phone lines, digital video streaming from a variety of services, we play online games, and as I work from home, I can checkout large code trees from SCM in reasonable amounts of time, and sling around multi-gigabyte VMs between home and work (I tend to prefer to generate and validate the VMs locally, and then upload them to their destination server when the need arises). And best of all, I can do all of these at the same time -- I'd have to push things really hard to see any degradation when my wife is watching Netflix or someone is talking on the phone.
The only bad thing is how asymmetrical the upload speed is -- it's only 6Mbps. That I conceivably can saturate pretty easily. Fortunately, in our typical use cases our upload needs tend to be fairly asymmetric as well -- the only two major areas where our network gets impacted is when I'm moving those VMs around between home and internal deployment servers, or when we're watching video via Slingbox from outside the network. It impacts work much more than pleasure. Not much I can do about it unfortunately, without going for some crazy priced business class connection that my employer won't pay for.
Then again, I have over 20 devices on our network (via GigE and 802.11ac). We're pretty heavy users, but with nary a pr0n server in sight.
Yaz
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[0] - A strange thing seems to have happened recently. Earlier this year, my ISP cancelled offering 100Mbps service, but grandfathered in anyone who was already a customer. Their new highest tier offering at the time was only 60Mbps (for the same price as 100Mbps used to be, at that). Since then, however, they've introduced a new 120Mbps service. I've run multiple speed tests through a few different services, and I seem to be maxing out downloading at 120Mbps as of late. Still only 6Mbps up unfortunately.
I lost an arrow once, and you still spelled 'lose' incorrectly.
As an archer myself, the grandparent poster used the correct spelling of the word they were going for.
To loose an arrow means to release the string to fire an arrow. It was not intended to mean that an arrow went missing and was lost.
Yaz
Except... we don't use a "French" (Azerty) keyboard either. We use a french Canada keyboard, and Apple doesn't sell that layout at all. It's the only PC maker with the stupid canadian multilingual keyboard.
Does anyone anywhere use the Canadian Multilingual keyboard layout on any OS, anywhere?
I've worked in industry and in government, in both English and French Canada, and I can't recall ever seeing anyone anywhere using the Canadian Multilingual layout. Ever. I've seen more Dvorak users than Canadian Multilingual.
Why does it even exist in the first place? (and FWIW, it's a terrible layout for coding IMO).
Yaz
You're getting grumpy, old man. :-)
I'd reply, but I'm too busy shaking my fist and venting my anger at a passing small, fluffy white cloud.
Yaz
I have been duly corrected!
Yaz
Actually, that clarifies that the zram feature did not make it to the Linux kernel until 2014, meaning that OSX had it prior to Linux. Yes, I understand some had a feature like it earlier, but full-blown reliable enough implementation to make it to the RTM release of an OS was OSX 10.9 (2013), Linux kernel 3.18 (2014) and finally Windows 10 in what appears to be late 2015, or maybe 2016 given their track record. Guess better late than never.
One further note: in OS X 10.9, the memory compression subsystem was on by default (and can only be turned off from the command line). I know of no Linux distort which ships with zram or zswap enabled by default (although if there is one, hopefully someone will jump in and let me know!). I doubt that either is particularly highly used on Linux, even though the facility is extremely useful and can enhance performance by quite a bit
Yaz
No. What you want is zram, not zswap.
zram tries to compress pages in RAM, without swapping them to disk. I've only recently enabled this on one of my Debian Jessie boxes (an Intel Core 4 Duo with a motherboard that has a weird memory configuration that in practical terms limits it to 4GB of RAM), however my experience with the equivalent subsystem on OS X has been fantastic. Pages may still later be swapped to disk, but on OS X at least the system aims for a 2:1 compression ratio, holding successfully compressed pairs of pages in a single page without swapping them to disk. Think of it as an intermediary state for swapped pages between having them sit in RAM as-is and paging out to disk.
zswap is about compressing the swap file. This can have benefits as well (especially if you have low CPU load. The Jessie box I mentioned in the previous paragraph fits into this category of use, and I'd probably use swap too if the system didn't have a large and quite fast RAID array in it), as the stuff getting paged will hopefully take up less space requiring less IO time. It is, however, different than what the article is talking about, which is the territory of the zram module in Linux.
Yaz
"Nobody expects heavy metals in their meals," said Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow.
Unless you like to eat Megadeth-O's, part of a nutritious breakfast!
Yaz
Am I really getting so old that people find this to be a legitimate question?
Have I really been doing this for so long that there are now people who don't remember a time when disconnected machines was the norm?
Am I the only one left here who remembers (for example) dialling for hours to get into the local IBM-run BBS to download the 21 diskette images needed to update OS/2 2.1 to the latest patch level, digging into the cabinet for several boxes of diskettes, de-imaging each and every one of those diskettes (my machine had two 3.5" floppies -- I could manage two at once!), rebooting off the first disk, and then feeding diskettes into the machine one at a time as prompted to update it?
Honestly -- this is a long solved problem. Some of the technologies have changed (you probably don't need 21 USB thumb drives to contain your patch), but the basic idea remains: provide a downloadable patch image suitable for your application, have customers download it to a USB drive of sufficient size, and then have them boot from the drive or run a script or application from the drive to apply the patches.
And if you're in some industry where you worry about your patches getting out into the wild or need to ensure patch security/validity (where hashes aren't good enough) or something odd like that, put your images onto USB thumb drives yourself and ship them to your customers physically (encrypted, if you have some reason to be uber-paranoid).
Now get off my lawn!
Yaz
I don't know how it works on a Mac, but entering alternate characters is still easy with Windows, even 8.1. (I haven't tried it on 10.) Rather, I consider it pretty easy. :-) Just hold down the ALT key, type in the four-digit code for the character you want, then release the ALT key and your character will show up. A Euro sign is ALT+0128, for example.
On OS X, you hit Shift-Option-2. Option-3 gives a pound symbol, Option-4 cents.
You still have to get to know some of the shift-option combinations, but that's WAY easier than having to know all of the character codes for whatever you want to type. Less keystrokes too. Accented characters are somewhat easier, in that you can type the accent, and then the character you want to accent (so if you want a circumflex over a character you type Option-i, followed by the character to accent). Again, it's easier to remember one two-key stroke to get the accent you want, followed by typing the letter you need accented than remembering half a dozen four-digit numeric codes. OS X does this way better than Windows.
Yaz
This cannot stand. Two people with the same major marrying each other is completely against my just-now-made-up religion. It says that Frank (my just-made-up religions version of god) specifically wrote that "Thou shalt not lie with a fellow computer science major as you would with a psychology major".
The government needs to make a constitutional amendment to prevent people of the same major from marrying each other. After all, if we let two people with the same major marry, we're on a slippery slope to marrying dolphins with snack cakes. And then where will it end?
Yaz
...that Shia LeBeouf is going to play young Han Solo!
However, the summary also mentions iOS, and I was under the impression that GPL apps on the Apple AppStore are a no go?
FWIW, the situation is a bit more nuanced than that.
If the GPL licensed code is entirely your own work, you can relicense it any way you want, including to Apple for distribution on the App Store.
Where you can get into trouble with the App Store is if you take someone else GPL'd code and release it on the App Store. This could be by including third-party GPL routines, or by publishing code that was developed by multiple parties, without their permission, where copyright has not been reassigned. This was the case for the VLC player: as the article you linked alludes, Apple took that old VLC player app out of their app store due to a copyright complaint from one of the VLC developers. That was back in 2011 -- the VideoLAN Oragniaztaion has since released their own VLC for iOS, while still retaining the GPL license (albeit in part by dual-licensing it as MPL/GPL).
Yaz (IANAL)
I'm not a PS4 (or any other console) fanboy, but I read this and can't help wonder: It there anything that stops a user from replacing the hard drive in a PS4 with a larger drive themselves (wonky interfaces? self destruct when opened cases? magic formatting of the drive that can't readily be duplicated?)? Is it a typical 3.5 inch drive or a smaller drive?
Sony pretty actively advertises that the PS4 HDD is completely user-upgradable. IIRC the PS4 manual contains instructions, and they also have them online here.
I've read articles that have tested magnetic, SSD, and Hybrid(SSHD) drives, and they all work just fine. The main limitations appear to be in terms of physical size (2.5" drive, 9.5mm or less in height). Word has it you can use up to a 6TB drive, although the people doing so are using 3.5" drives in external enclosures (and I've read some reports of some weird issues with powering such systems up).
Yaz
Wait, what?
If you write code, part of the documentation before you start should be a "risks" statement, where you state that a dependency on X external, third party library, exists, and that any vulnerability could cause issues in your application. Also, that substantial upgrades to the library interface will affect maintainability if any interfaces are changed, or are deprecated.
When someone throws a pile of libraries at a problem, that risk statement gets lengthy.
Which is all well and good if you're doing greenfield development. It's not so good when you're inherited a codebase where none of this was done in the first place, and you're tasked to keep it going. As I said, the real world can be a messy place. In my case, the previous lead architect just threw immature libraries at every problem willy-nilly, at a time before I worked for the company. I get to inherit the problems this lack of foresight caused, and don't have the benefit of going backwards to fix it.
Your problem isn't with using external libraries, it's using ones without service contracts, or immature ones. And you're reacting by throwing out the baby, bathwater, bathtub, house, plumbing infrastructure, and electrical grid.
I don't disagree -- I'm hardly anti-library (you won't get too far in development without them, unless you're doing low-level embedded work). I like a good, stable, well-designed library that has been around for a long time, and where breaking changes are rare. Unfortunately, when the previous architect would throw a library at every problem that may have required eight lines of code, without care for anything other than ensuring the library license permits us to ship it.
And FWIW, I have brought these issues up with management. Their stance is they don't want to see any backend changes of any sort (where the bulk of our library woes lie) -- their focus is on the front end only. They're more than happy to defer the risks to some unspecified future.
As I said, the real world of development can be messy. I'm stuck with a codebase that is full of immature libraries, libraries that are no longer maintained, and libraries with bugs where getting new libraries introduces major changes requiring major refactors. If I were permitted to start fresh, I'd be doing things the way you described, and we wouldn't rely so much on "randomLibrary.jar" that was someones pet project seven years ago with 'LGPL' attached to it, but which has since been rewritten or abandoned. It's a willy-nilly application of such libraries to every problem that crops up without any analysis that I'm against, and not the use of libraries in any and all situations.
Yaz
What should be happening : when you're planning a new release, raise the component versions to the latest and run your test suite. If it passes, good job, release it.
What is actually happening : the version numbers never get edited, because that version worked, and if you change it, OMG, it might stop working.
Part of the problem I run into with this is that sometimes projects stick with old dependencies because at some point, some major version came along that significantly changed the organization of the API in such a way that the latest component version an't just be dropped in, but requires significant resources refactoring your code to use it. Getting management buy-in for that when there aren't any big customers breathing down their neck to get a flaw fixed can be neigh on impossible.
I ran into this recently myself. During internal testing, I discovered a flaw in our product when accessing any of our web resources using an IPv6 destination IP in the URL (i.e.: http://18080./ A quick bit of debugging showed that an external library we had been using for several years was doing some brain-dead parsing of the URL to pull out the port number; it was just doing a string split after the first colon it found, and presumed the rest was the port number.
Modifying the Maven POM to use a newer version of the API in question was initially difficult because the project had since reorganized their own library structure, breaking things into multiple smaller JARs. Except that some of the functionality was actually _removed_, and isn't available at the latest API revision (functionality we had been using, naturally). Classes had moved around to different packages than where they were previously, and various interfaces appear to have been completely rewritten.
Upgrading to a version of the library that actually fixed the flaw was going to be akin to opening Pandora's Box. Unfortunately, our former architect (from whom I inherited this code) was the type of guy who just liked to throw external libraries at every problem. In the end we had to document the fault for all current versions of the product, and now I'm trying to get management buy-in to do the work necessary to upgrade the library in question for the next version of our product. And this is for just one library out of over 100 that need similar attention.
Suffice to say, I'm not happy about this state of affairs. Unlike the previous architect, I push against using third-party libraries as our solution to everything. If I were allowed to rewrite everything from scratch, we could avoid these problems. Things are unfortunately messy out here in the real world, and when libraries decide to significantly change their interfaces your program uses to access their functionality, no amount of unit tests is going to make upgrading those libraries any easier.
Yaz