Sorry, forcing a download of an entire album is *not* giving you an option that "you don't have to tune into". This is not you giving the kids an album you like, this is you strapping them to a chair to listen to it à la "Clockwork Orange". If everyone got an email saying "Click for a free download of the album!" there would be no complaints. (Mockery, perhaps, but not complaints.:-) )
Except this is pretty much exactly how the system was setup.
In "releasing" the album, Apple pretty much just added a database entry for every user on iTunes to say that they had already purchased the album. It was then supposed to[0] show up in your iTunes library as "in the cloud", with an option to download it.
Nobody was forced to download the album. The only way you'd download it without needing to do so specifically is if you had previously turned on the option to automatically download all new iTunes purchases (which defaults to off). And the only way you'd have to worry about using cellular data for this is if you had the option to download iTunes Music purchases over mobile enabled as well (otherwise, it would wait until you're on WiFi). So yeah -- this is completely a tempest in a teapot from people who don't like U2 seeing a free album available for download showing up in their libraries.
Hopefully Apple have learned their lesson. It was a publicity stunt, and while it upset some people, here we are talking about it. I don't think it went off the way they were hoping it would, and hopefully they've learned some lessons in the process.
[0] - Here in Canada at least, it appears the setup for this album didn't work for a very large number of users. I know in my case, the U2 album did not show up on my iPad as it was supposed to, nor did it show up in any of my iTunes libraries. And I do have the auto-download option enabled. In order to get the album, I had to go into iTunes and find the section that shows all your existing purchases, and then select the "Not on This Device" list, and only then could I download the album. And looking at the album reviews on iTunes Canada, it seems that I was hardly the only person to experience this -- nearly every review when I last checked last night was form people trying to figure out how to get their "free" album. I haven't seen this level of complaints outside of Canada, so I'm assuming either a) something screwed up with the iTunes Canada edition of the album's launch, or b) iTunes Canada did something different in order to not run afoul of some legislation (although I can't for the life of me guess what legislation that might be). This situation seems to have been lost in the noise of everyone else complaining about getting a free album, so I haven't heard much commentary on the situation.
FWIW, I agree that it may not entirely be "real-world accurate". It does pre-suppose that whomever is attempting to crack your password already knows something about the structure of your password (such as it being a dictionary word followed by a repeating sequence, as in the original "Ten!!!!!!!!!!!" example). However, if we take this at face value, it does give us a better worst-case scenario for password strength than those which simply presume a brute-force approach.
That is, given someone looking over your shoulder (but without sufficient accuracy to see exactly what you're typing), and then applying computational tools, how quickly could your password be cracked? That's certainly an interesting question to have the answer to, and if your password is resistant to a known-pattern based cracking approach, it's certainly going to kill any attempts to purely brute-force it.
OK, I don't get it either. If somebody is using GPL code and refuses to issue source, it's cut and dried, guilty. But I can't make out whether this is what is going on.
Nit-pick here, but using GPL code doesn't require you to issue source, even if you've made modifications. It's not until you distribute said modified code that you need to release source (and even then, you only technically have to provide source to those you've distributed binaries to, and not just anyone who happens to request it).
Thus if I take some GPL code, modify it, and use it in an internal process that isn't shared with anyone, there is no requirements for me to make sources available. But as soon as I share the artifacts with anyone else, they have the right to my source modifications, and all those rights entail.
A strong password CAN be easily remembered. How about remembering 10 and 11?
"Ten!!!!!!!!!!!"
That's 10 and eleven "!" characters.
There are a number of ways to calculate password effectiveness. If you assume zero knowledge of the password characteristics, then the 290 million years the website you linked to calculated may be accurate.
Hackers, however, have typically found that certain patterns are used by humans more frequently than others, and instead of brute-forcing the password from the beginning (following UTF-8 order " ", " ", " !"... etc.), you can instead skip a significant part of the overall password space by only testing these common patterns.
I prefer this tool, which evaluates password entropy. The figures it comes up with do tend to presume that something about the structure of the password is known (i.e: in your example that it is a word followed by a repeating symbol), but IMO this is a good figure to base your password decisions off as it represents a worst-case scenario, and not the best-case scenario the tool you linked presumes.
Using that tooling instead, your passwords strength and estimated crack time is as follows:
password: Ten!!!!!!!!!!!
entropy: 18.669
crack time (seconds): 20.836
crack time (display): instant
score from 0 to 4: 0
calculation time (ms): 3
FWIW, (and purely for the sake of comparison) one of the passwords I use online has, according to this tool, an entropy of 61.819 and a crack time of 203355820622500.06s (about 6.4 million years). And yes, it's something I both change often and have memorized.
"Although there are those who think the systems debate has been decided in favour of systems, the exceedingly loud protests on message boards, forums, and the posts I wrote over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise.
"Although there are those who think bacon is tasty, a loud protests I've posted recently on message boards, forums, and here on/. over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise."
(Yeah, I've been here long enough to know that nobody at/. does any actual editing. Still, can I make fun of the submitter for making it sound like (s)he's the one who is going around and posting all the loud protests, and then trying to make it seem like some sort of movement?)
Well that sounds truthy, but I don't buy it especially since you're obviously a Mac nut (your email is mac.com). I'm hitting 40 and my big fingers and crappy eyes have a tough time navigating my 4.3" screen so the almost 6" my Note 3 has, is an outstanding upgrade. Could the possibility be that people want more phone choices than one? Nah, must be because droids are that shitty.
I have at least seven different e-mail addresses on different domains, including gmail.com. Does that also qualify me to be a Google nut?
Android phones (particularly on the high end) are big for exactly the reasons I described. They were big because of technical issues making them small. But if as a by-product that means a phone that works for the fat-fingered four-eyed brigade, well, I have no problems with that. But it's somewhat silly to be overly proud of the fact that you carry around a large phone, when the reasons why it's large are due to technical limitations for it being small. That would be akin to claiming your portable record player is way superior to an iPod because it's bigger. This is still a technology site, isn't it? (I know -- hard to tell sometimes these days).
Oh, and FWIW, I don't own or carry a phone of any kind, so I don't have a horse in the race either way. I'm glad you found the right phone for you, but I wouldn't go around bragging about your phone being generally better just because it's bigger, particularly when the truth of the matter is it's primarily bigger as it requires more hardware to overcome software issues.
Apple PR again. In light of good press from Microsoft and android simply having more apps. IOS is falling behind in both quality and quantity. Posted from a 5.5" phone
Let's try to remember for a moment why Andriod phones were bigger in the first place.
Andriod apps written against Davlik are garbage collected, however the garbage collection process on a phone with the typical quantity of phone memory requires a) frequent collection runs, and b) causes pauses. In order to alleviate this effect, Andriod device manufacturers started popping multi-core CPUs into their devices, simply to be able to handle garbage collection in the background, and make their devices appear closer to real-time performance and reduce UI "hiccoughs". Particularly early versions of these processors were more power hungry, requiring a larger battery to meet the same per-charge runtime as the iPhone. This required a larger overall package.
As such, the Andriod phones aren't larger because larger is better. They're larger because they couldn't compete with the iPhone in terms of performance or battery life if they were the same size.
Keep that in mind the next time you want to brag about your giant phone:).
For example, this week I saw a video of a beheading. Now after watching it I probably wish that somebody had filtered that for me.
If it makes you feel any better, unless you watched a completely different video than I did (something other the what has been in the news recently), you didn't see a beheading. Did you see the blood spurt/drain out as the carotid/jugular were severed? Did you see the disarticulation of the spine? Those weren't in any version of the video I saw. It moves from a guy making a sawing motion with a knife in front of a guy throat, to a picture of the disembodied head sitting atop the body.
That's not to say that the guy is any less dead, or that it was any less horrific. But there was a lot of somewhat creative editing going on in that video. Shadows seem to shift at different points relative to the background, indicating that some of the later parts may have been recorded an hour or two after the earlier parts. There is some analysis that seems to indicate the "terrorist" may have been two different people at different points in the video. There are a lot of cuts, and quite a bit you don't see.
I'm not saying the video is a complete fake. The guy obviously suffered a horrific death, and the perpetrators need the full weight of the western worlds power brought down upon them. But don't beat yourself up about watching a beheading -- what was shown was both sad and shocking, but it left out the actual beheading part (again, unless there is some special uncut version out there I haven't heard about).
Sure, you could cobble together all the assets and code together in no time...
That depends on the game, which supports my thesis.
Strong AI is difficult to do, and can be the real differentiator between a great game and a cheap copycat. Likewise for a physics engine or a rendering engine.
If your game doesn't feature any form of AI, or is easily reproduced with off-the-shelf physics and/or rendering engines, then your game is probably trivial. And if it took you years to put together your trivial game when it only takes the next guy days to replicate it -- than as I've said, you did something wrong.
Not necessarily. I don't particularly care about Flappy Bird, but let's look at Chess. Chess took centuries to develop, and almost anyone could reproduce it now.
Chess has evolved over time, and wasn't the product of a single development team, so it's not exactly an apples-to-oranges comparison. It took roughly 900 years of evolution for chess to take on its modern form, and there have been many variations of chess (Wikipedia claims more than 2000 published variations).
Early versions of chess weren't unplayable, in-development versions. They were proper, stand-alone games. You could think of modern chess as actually having been a "rip-off" of these earlier games. Indeed, several of the basic game mechanics were seen in earlier games that predated chess by centuries (pieces on an X-by-Y grid, for example, was used 600 years before the earliest variants of chess in Ludus latrunculorum). Indeed, if chess hadn't freely borrowed from games that came before it, it wouldn't exist today.
As such, chess evolved in exactly the way this article is railing against. Over the years, people who had nothing to do with the original "developers" of the earliest chess forked their own versions with slightly different rule-sets, and those with rule-sets that provided for an improved game were adopted by others, who then adapted those rules with their own improvements. Without these "copy-cats", we'd be sitting down to play Chaturanga right now instead of chess.
Well, you mean as an Indie developer if I start from scratch, do the design, generate graphics, coding, testing, then it should still takes me as much time as some one who can simply download the app, and replicate without having to 'think' (or like in case of Android apps, just download the apk, decompile and open it up, grab the resources) and put out a clone. Interesting.
You have a fair comment, so I should clarify somewhat. I'm assuming that whomever does the copy is not only generating their own code, but is also generating their own resources. If they're copying your resources you have the ability to go after them for copyright infringement. That's not really a new thing in game development, and there is legal recourse (and yes, I know it's a shitty thing to have to go through, as it has happened to me personally with someone who ripped off both code AND resources from an OSS game a friend of mine and I coded 8 years ago).
But the summary is talking about differing orders of magnitude here. If you've developed something that took years and someone is able to replicate your work (without stealing code or resources) in days, then yes -- I still submit you're doing something wrong.
Unless that "someone else" happens to be a game studio of 500 artists and 50 devs, in which case it makes sense that they can do it faster.
Personally, I've never known a team of that size to be able to ramp up development all that quickly. What that many devs, you'd probably wind up with a month of design meetings before any coding got started.
While coming up with good game mechanics is important to a successful game, if it takes you years to develop a game, and someone else can copy it in weeks or days, then you're probably doing something seriously wrong. Either your game is too trivial, or you weren't a very good developer to start with.
I should note that I am assuming that with 16GB of RAM you're running a 64-bit OS. If you're running a 32-bit OS (with PAE to access all the extra memory), you're going to be more constrained. While an OS with PAE can access quite a lot of RAM, 32-bit processes are still limited to a 32-bit virtual memory space (with a maximum addressable memory of 4GB, but functionally less on some OS's depending on whether or not they do things like mapping kernel memory into process memory space (Windows, I'm looking at you...)). On some OS's, Java also expects that the heap memory space will be completely contiguous (virtually, not physically), which may not seem like a problem until you run into a virus scanner or some such that loads some library resident into every single process ("DLL Injection") at the 2GB mark or some other fixed virtual memory location below the maximum (yeah, I'm looking at Windows again. Had this one bite a customer pretty badly a few years back who for some odd reason still insisted on running 32-bit Windows servers). 64-bit OS's can still support DLL Injection, but typically the injected memory location is so insanely high within VM (quite a large amount higher than you can physically install in your typical system), that it doesn't cause any problems.
The point being (before I go off into too long of a rant), on the off chance you're still running a 32-bit OS and 32-bit Java (I'm reasonably sure you can run 64-bit Java on OS X 1.6, even when booting with the 32-bit kernel), tuning may only take you so far for Java applications that are really memory hungry -- you'll still hit a wall well before even 1/4 of your installed RAM is used. In that case, upgrading to a 64-bit OS and 64-bit Java is highly recommended, if possible.
(As an aside, this is actually one reason why Android handset developers were quick to jump into using quad-core processors. When programming Android using Java, all of these memory and garbage collection issues arise, in a package with less RAM and less processing power than a standard PC. The best way to handle being able to create responsive applications under GC in such a model is to do as much of the GC as you can in the background on one or more independent cores to minimize whole-application pauses. Contract this to iOS which uses retain/release cycles (or better yet, Automatic Retain Counting, aka ARC) where memory management is either hand-coded by the developer, or resolved at compile time (in the case of ARC), requiring no GC at all).
I use a few Java programs on my desktop, which has 16GB of RAM. One program I use is a little editor / mini-IDE for microcontrollers which have 4k of memory. While writing these 4K programs, Java will largely lock up the machine for 30 seconds, probably while it's doing GC.
Check your settings. For better or worse, Java doesn't run like other native programs (on most platforms at least) -- the maximum heap space it will allow programs to use is fixed at runtime (i.e.: it won't grow dynamically as memory allocations are requested). On the system I'm sitting at right now, the default is set to just under 2GB (Win7, JDK 1.7.0_45 (both 64-bit), 8GB RAM). No matter how much actual memory my application wants (or needs), this is the maximum that can be allocated for objects on the heap. Attempting to allocate any new objects once this 2GB of heap space won't use any free RAM available on the system; it will instead trigger garbage collection.
Additionally, with Java 7 at least, there are seven different garbage collection algorithms. The default is the Parallel Scavenger Collector, which is a "stop the world" collector. You might find on your system you have fewer pauses if you enable the Concurrent Mark/Sweep collector, in conjunction with the Parallel Copy Collector. Concurrent Mark/Sweep runs in the background, and only stops all application threads if it can't keep up with demand.
Tuning those should help with your specific performance issues. I completely recognise that none of this should be necessary in a well-written application; unfortunately for all too many Java developers, "I don't need to worry about garbage collection" also seems to mean "I don't need to care about the lifecycle of my objects", which of course isn't true. There are a lot of badly written Java applications out there, and in some ways understanding how Java handles memory is actually harder than understanding memory allocation in a lower-level language like C (Garbage Collection makes things pretty complex), and all too often I run into Java developers who simply have no idea how the JVM manages these things. IDEs for embedded systems always seem to be particularly bad for this. That's not entirely Java's fault -- you can write memory-efficient Java applications, it's just that too many Java developers (and frequently their managers) seem to think you can ignore memory issues with Java because it has Garbage Collection, as if it's some magical solution to memory allocation/deallocation.
But.. but...but didn't mac's come with some magic magnetic connectors to safeguard them against cable strain ??
No. The MagSafe connector was never designed to eliminate cable strain. It was designed to break away from the laptop should you trip over the cable, preventing the laptop from being damaged.
Cable strain can come from many sources. The cable can simply be bent in a funny angle repeatedly over a long period of time. A MagSafe style connector isn't going to protect against that. Yanking out the cable by gripping the cable and pulling (as opposed to holding the connector directly) also causes cable strain, and again -- MagSafe won't help you here (other than by ensuring you can't also accidentally yank the laptop with the cable).
Even the very ad you linked emphasizes this -- the whole point is that the "PC" is damaged -- not the PC's power cord. Apple has never claimed you can't damage the cable by straining it inappropriately, and MagSafe was never designed nor marketed to prevent such damage.
When you pay for gas with a credit card and the pump asks you to punch in your zip code, it's not collecting marketing information. It's using the zip code as a (rather flimsy) security measure to protect against someone buying gas with a lost/stolen credit card.
I had never seen this done prior to a trip through the US earlier this year. Of course, it wouldn't accept my Canadian postal code (which is a six character mix of alternating letters and numbers). I had to cancel the transaction and go in and have the cashier run everything manually, and then go in after filling up to complete the transaction.
Not the end of the world, I suppose. I suspect we don't bother with doing that here in Canada due to a) stronger privacy laws and b) near global use of chip-and-pin for credit cards. At the time, my natural first thoughts were "why on EARTH would you need to even ask me that???". Now I know why, and will know better the next time I'm down that way.
That's all good reason for boarding them last - so they don't slow down those who can board quickly.
I promise the plane won't take off without you. What, are you in a hurry to cram yourself into an airline seat instead of enjoying the comfort of the airport lounge for another 10 minutes or so? Entitled much?
But because such penalties impact all businesses in whatever country is collecting them, it won't really change things - because all of those businesses will simply pass along the new government-mandated increase in their overhead along in the form of higher prices.
However, if you believe in capitalism this creates a space for an aggressive innovator to come in with new reduced-energy practices/processes, and pass those savings onto consumers, causing the existing players to either likewise update their practices/processes to compete, or have them diminish/die. Such changes don't happen overnight however -- it could take many years for the selective pressure to bear.
In this case, Black (born Canadian, but renounced his citizenship after becoming British in order to sit in the House of Lords), who was CEO of Hollinger International. As part of a series of criminal charges against him, he was ordered by a US court not to move or tamper with documents relating to the case. However, he and an accomplice were filmed removing boxes of paperwork from an office in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was charged and ultimately found guilty of obstruction of justice in the US for this, and served 48 months in prison.
From an iPhone on AT&T IPv6 does not work. Neither does it work on my Uverse connection.
That's the fault of the connection, however, and not the iPhone. iOS if fully IPv6 compatible; I take advantage of it all the time. I even wrote an IPv6 test utility for iOS a few years ago. You just need a WiFi router with autoconf advertising IPv6 routes, an you're all set.
The fact that all too many North American ISPs still haven't got their IPv6 implementations in play is the real story here. Computers and most smart phones are ready to connect -- they just need the ISP support to do it.
I doubt it's high on Microsoft's priority list. Your earlier example shows a saving of a few hundred megabytes out of 8 GB, and RAM is really cheap.
I should point out that in my example, the memory pressure at the time was quite low. Had I pushed the memory pressure higher, the amount of compressed memory would also have been quite a bit higher.
RAM may be cheap, but there are still physical limits that can be hit on any given board or system before you reach the theoretical limits. I'm posting this on a 2009 iMac right now, and it has a maximum RAM configuration of 8GB (which is also how much RAM is installed). No matter how cheap RAM gets, this system can't accommodate any more.
Considering Mavericks was a free upgrade, installing it was like going up to 12GB of RAM or more -- for free. I don't have any metrics in front of me of the useful theoretical maximum compressed memory storage, I can only assume that it's somewhere in the neighbourhood of about (Installed RAM - 1GB)*2 at best (or in my case, 14GB. The 1GB is to ensure space is reserved for wired memory, which can't be swapped or compressed). I suspect it will be a bit less, depending on how compressible your data is (the algorithm used is optimized for a 2:1 compression ratio, however not all pages will be compressible to this degree; my understanding is that if a pair of pages can't be compressed into a single page, the compression routine stops for that pair of pages).
Note that as memory compression sits between the point where the OS identifies that it may need to evict old pages and the point where the pages are physically swapped to disk, the pages written to disk are also compressed (unless they were incompressible in the first place). This will roughly halve the amount of data that needs to be written to swap, meaning that the slowest operations of the paging to disk procedure is roughly halved in time as well.
As Windows machines swap as well, being able to halve the time required to read data from and write data to disk would be a huge boost. Being able to get a few million extra pages without the need to swap is an even bigger performance boost. I'll point out this ArsTechnica article on Apple's Compressed Memory subsystem -- note in particular the second graphic which shows a system under much heavier memory pressure, where a machine with 16GB of RAM has over 8GB compressed, and only 26.5MB (not a typo!) of data swapped to disk. That's a lot of data that didn't need to be written to a page file.
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Sorry, forcing a download of an entire album is *not* giving you an option that "you don't have to tune into". This is not you giving the kids an album you like, this is you strapping them to a chair to listen to it à la "Clockwork Orange". If everyone got an email saying "Click for a free download of the album!" there would be no complaints. (Mockery, perhaps, but not complaints. :-) )
Except this is pretty much exactly how the system was setup.
In "releasing" the album, Apple pretty much just added a database entry for every user on iTunes to say that they had already purchased the album. It was then supposed to[0] show up in your iTunes library as "in the cloud", with an option to download it.
Nobody was forced to download the album. The only way you'd download it without needing to do so specifically is if you had previously turned on the option to automatically download all new iTunes purchases (which defaults to off). And the only way you'd have to worry about using cellular data for this is if you had the option to download iTunes Music purchases over mobile enabled as well (otherwise, it would wait until you're on WiFi). So yeah -- this is completely a tempest in a teapot from people who don't like U2 seeing a free album available for download showing up in their libraries.
Hopefully Apple have learned their lesson. It was a publicity stunt, and while it upset some people, here we are talking about it. I don't think it went off the way they were hoping it would, and hopefully they've learned some lessons in the process.
[0] - Here in Canada at least, it appears the setup for this album didn't work for a very large number of users. I know in my case, the U2 album did not show up on my iPad as it was supposed to, nor did it show up in any of my iTunes libraries. And I do have the auto-download option enabled. In order to get the album, I had to go into iTunes and find the section that shows all your existing purchases, and then select the "Not on This Device" list, and only then could I download the album. And looking at the album reviews on iTunes Canada, it seems that I was hardly the only person to experience this -- nearly every review when I last checked last night was form people trying to figure out how to get their "free" album. I haven't seen this level of complaints outside of Canada, so I'm assuming either a) something screwed up with the iTunes Canada edition of the album's launch, or b) iTunes Canada did something different in order to not run afoul of some legislation (although I can't for the life of me guess what legislation that might be). This situation seems to have been lost in the noise of everyone else complaining about getting a free album, so I haven't heard much commentary on the situation.
Yaz
FWIW, I agree that it may not entirely be "real-world accurate". It does pre-suppose that whomever is attempting to crack your password already knows something about the structure of your password (such as it being a dictionary word followed by a repeating sequence, as in the original "Ten!!!!!!!!!!!" example). However, if we take this at face value, it does give us a better worst-case scenario for password strength than those which simply presume a brute-force approach.
That is, given someone looking over your shoulder (but without sufficient accuracy to see exactly what you're typing), and then applying computational tools, how quickly could your password be cracked? That's certainly an interesting question to have the answer to, and if your password is resistant to a known-pattern based cracking approach, it's certainly going to kill any attempts to purely brute-force it.
Yaz
OK, I don't get it either. If somebody is using GPL code and refuses to issue source, it's cut and dried, guilty. But I can't make out whether this is what is going on.
Nit-pick here, but using GPL code doesn't require you to issue source, even if you've made modifications. It's not until you distribute said modified code that you need to release source (and even then, you only technically have to provide source to those you've distributed binaries to, and not just anyone who happens to request it).
Thus if I take some GPL code, modify it, and use it in an internal process that isn't shared with anyone, there is no requirements for me to make sources available. But as soon as I share the artifacts with anyone else, they have the right to my source modifications, and all those rights entail.
How that relates to this case, I have no idea.
Yaz
How do I know this tool doesn't collect passwords that people try, which could then be used to break into people's accounts?
Well, you could always read the source and verify that this is not the case.
Yaz
A strong password CAN be easily remembered. How about remembering 10 and 11?
"Ten!!!!!!!!!!!"
That's 10 and eleven "!" characters.
There are a number of ways to calculate password effectiveness. If you assume zero knowledge of the password characteristics, then the 290 million years the website you linked to calculated may be accurate.
Hackers, however, have typically found that certain patterns are used by humans more frequently than others, and instead of brute-forcing the password from the beginning (following UTF-8 order " ", " ", " !"... etc.), you can instead skip a significant part of the overall password space by only testing these common patterns.
I prefer this tool, which evaluates password entropy. The figures it comes up with do tend to presume that something about the structure of the password is known (i.e: in your example that it is a word followed by a repeating symbol), but IMO this is a good figure to base your password decisions off as it represents a worst-case scenario, and not the best-case scenario the tool you linked presumes.
Using that tooling instead, your passwords strength and estimated crack time is as follows:
FWIW, (and purely for the sake of comparison) one of the passwords I use online has, according to this tool, an entropy of 61.819 and a crack time of 203355820622500.06s (about 6.4 million years). And yes, it's something I both change often and have memorized.
Yaz
"Although there are those who think the systems debate has been decided in favour of systems, the exceedingly loud protests on message boards, forums, and the posts I wrote over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise.
"Although there are those who think bacon is tasty, a loud protests I've posted recently on message boards, forums, and here on /. over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise."
(Yeah, I've been here long enough to know that nobody at /. does any actual editing. Still, can I make fun of the submitter for making it sound like (s)he's the one who is going around and posting all the loud protests, and then trying to make it seem like some sort of movement?)
Yaz
Well that sounds truthy, but I don't buy it especially since you're obviously a Mac nut (your email is mac.com). I'm hitting 40 and my big fingers and crappy eyes have a tough time navigating my 4.3" screen so the almost 6" my Note 3 has, is an outstanding upgrade. Could the possibility be that people want more phone choices than one? Nah, must be because droids are that shitty.
I have at least seven different e-mail addresses on different domains, including gmail.com. Does that also qualify me to be a Google nut?
Android phones (particularly on the high end) are big for exactly the reasons I described. They were big because of technical issues making them small. But if as a by-product that means a phone that works for the fat-fingered four-eyed brigade, well, I have no problems with that. But it's somewhat silly to be overly proud of the fact that you carry around a large phone, when the reasons why it's large are due to technical limitations for it being small. That would be akin to claiming your portable record player is way superior to an iPod because it's bigger. This is still a technology site, isn't it? (I know -- hard to tell sometimes these days).
Oh, and FWIW, I don't own or carry a phone of any kind, so I don't have a horse in the race either way. I'm glad you found the right phone for you, but I wouldn't go around bragging about your phone being generally better just because it's bigger, particularly when the truth of the matter is it's primarily bigger as it requires more hardware to overcome software issues.
Yaz
Apple PR again. In light of good press from Microsoft and android simply having more apps. IOS is falling behind in both quality and quantity. Posted from a 5.5" phone
Let's try to remember for a moment why Andriod phones were bigger in the first place.
Andriod apps written against Davlik are garbage collected, however the garbage collection process on a phone with the typical quantity of phone memory requires a) frequent collection runs, and b) causes pauses. In order to alleviate this effect, Andriod device manufacturers started popping multi-core CPUs into their devices, simply to be able to handle garbage collection in the background, and make their devices appear closer to real-time performance and reduce UI "hiccoughs". Particularly early versions of these processors were more power hungry, requiring a larger battery to meet the same per-charge runtime as the iPhone. This required a larger overall package.
As such, the Andriod phones aren't larger because larger is better. They're larger because they couldn't compete with the iPhone in terms of performance or battery life if they were the same size.
Keep that in mind the next time you want to brag about your giant phone :).
Yaz
For example, this week I saw a video of a beheading. Now after watching it I probably wish that somebody had filtered that for me.
If it makes you feel any better, unless you watched a completely different video than I did (something other the what has been in the news recently), you didn't see a beheading. Did you see the blood spurt/drain out as the carotid/jugular were severed? Did you see the disarticulation of the spine? Those weren't in any version of the video I saw. It moves from a guy making a sawing motion with a knife in front of a guy throat, to a picture of the disembodied head sitting atop the body.
That's not to say that the guy is any less dead, or that it was any less horrific. But there was a lot of somewhat creative editing going on in that video. Shadows seem to shift at different points relative to the background, indicating that some of the later parts may have been recorded an hour or two after the earlier parts. There is some analysis that seems to indicate the "terrorist" may have been two different people at different points in the video. There are a lot of cuts, and quite a bit you don't see.
I'm not saying the video is a complete fake. The guy obviously suffered a horrific death, and the perpetrators need the full weight of the western worlds power brought down upon them. But don't beat yourself up about watching a beheading -- what was shown was both sad and shocking, but it left out the actual beheading part (again, unless there is some special uncut version out there I haven't heard about).
Yaz
Sure, you could cobble together all the assets and code together in no time...
That depends on the game, which supports my thesis.
Strong AI is difficult to do, and can be the real differentiator between a great game and a cheap copycat. Likewise for a physics engine or a rendering engine.
If your game doesn't feature any form of AI, or is easily reproduced with off-the-shelf physics and/or rendering engines, then your game is probably trivial. And if it took you years to put together your trivial game when it only takes the next guy days to replicate it -- than as I've said, you did something wrong.
Yaz
Not necessarily. I don't particularly care about Flappy Bird, but let's look at Chess. Chess took centuries to develop, and almost anyone could reproduce it now.
Chess has evolved over time, and wasn't the product of a single development team, so it's not exactly an apples-to-oranges comparison. It took roughly 900 years of evolution for chess to take on its modern form, and there have been many variations of chess (Wikipedia claims more than 2000 published variations).
Early versions of chess weren't unplayable, in-development versions. They were proper, stand-alone games. You could think of modern chess as actually having been a "rip-off" of these earlier games. Indeed, several of the basic game mechanics were seen in earlier games that predated chess by centuries (pieces on an X-by-Y grid, for example, was used 600 years before the earliest variants of chess in Ludus latrunculorum). Indeed, if chess hadn't freely borrowed from games that came before it, it wouldn't exist today.
As such, chess evolved in exactly the way this article is railing against. Over the years, people who had nothing to do with the original "developers" of the earliest chess forked their own versions with slightly different rule-sets, and those with rule-sets that provided for an improved game were adopted by others, who then adapted those rules with their own improvements. Without these "copy-cats", we'd be sitting down to play Chaturanga right now instead of chess.
Yaz
Well, you mean as an Indie developer if I start from scratch, do the design, generate graphics, coding, testing, then it should still takes me as much time as some one who can simply download the app, and replicate without having to 'think' (or like in case of Android apps, just download the apk, decompile and open it up, grab the resources) and put out a clone. Interesting.
You have a fair comment, so I should clarify somewhat. I'm assuming that whomever does the copy is not only generating their own code, but is also generating their own resources. If they're copying your resources you have the ability to go after them for copyright infringement. That's not really a new thing in game development, and there is legal recourse (and yes, I know it's a shitty thing to have to go through, as it has happened to me personally with someone who ripped off both code AND resources from an OSS game a friend of mine and I coded 8 years ago).
But the summary is talking about differing orders of magnitude here. If you've developed something that took years and someone is able to replicate your work (without stealing code or resources) in days, then yes -- I still submit you're doing something wrong.
Yaz
Unless that "someone else" happens to be a game studio of 500 artists and 50 devs, in which case it makes sense that they can do it faster.
Personally, I've never known a team of that size to be able to ramp up development all that quickly. What that many devs, you'd probably wind up with a month of design meetings before any coding got started.
Yaz
While coming up with good game mechanics is important to a successful game, if it takes you years to develop a game, and someone else can copy it in weeks or days, then you're probably doing something seriously wrong. Either your game is too trivial, or you weren't a very good developer to start with.
Yaz
You're welcome -- glad to help.
I should note that I am assuming that with 16GB of RAM you're running a 64-bit OS. If you're running a 32-bit OS (with PAE to access all the extra memory), you're going to be more constrained. While an OS with PAE can access quite a lot of RAM, 32-bit processes are still limited to a 32-bit virtual memory space (with a maximum addressable memory of 4GB, but functionally less on some OS's depending on whether or not they do things like mapping kernel memory into process memory space (Windows, I'm looking at you...)). On some OS's, Java also expects that the heap memory space will be completely contiguous (virtually, not physically), which may not seem like a problem until you run into a virus scanner or some such that loads some library resident into every single process ("DLL Injection") at the 2GB mark or some other fixed virtual memory location below the maximum (yeah, I'm looking at Windows again. Had this one bite a customer pretty badly a few years back who for some odd reason still insisted on running 32-bit Windows servers). 64-bit OS's can still support DLL Injection, but typically the injected memory location is so insanely high within VM (quite a large amount higher than you can physically install in your typical system), that it doesn't cause any problems.
The point being (before I go off into too long of a rant), on the off chance you're still running a 32-bit OS and 32-bit Java (I'm reasonably sure you can run 64-bit Java on OS X 1.6, even when booting with the 32-bit kernel), tuning may only take you so far for Java applications that are really memory hungry -- you'll still hit a wall well before even 1/4 of your installed RAM is used. In that case, upgrading to a 64-bit OS and 64-bit Java is highly recommended, if possible.
(As an aside, this is actually one reason why Android handset developers were quick to jump into using quad-core processors. When programming Android using Java, all of these memory and garbage collection issues arise, in a package with less RAM and less processing power than a standard PC. The best way to handle being able to create responsive applications under GC in such a model is to do as much of the GC as you can in the background on one or more independent cores to minimize whole-application pauses. Contract this to iOS which uses retain/release cycles (or better yet, Automatic Retain Counting, aka ARC) where memory management is either hand-coded by the developer, or resolved at compile time (in the case of ARC), requiring no GC at all).
Yaz
I use a few Java programs on my desktop, which has 16GB of RAM. One program I use is a little editor / mini-IDE for microcontrollers which have 4k of memory. While writing these 4K programs, Java will largely lock up the machine for 30 seconds, probably while it's doing GC.
Check your settings. For better or worse, Java doesn't run like other native programs (on most platforms at least) -- the maximum heap space it will allow programs to use is fixed at runtime (i.e.: it won't grow dynamically as memory allocations are requested). On the system I'm sitting at right now, the default is set to just under 2GB (Win7, JDK 1.7.0_45 (both 64-bit), 8GB RAM). No matter how much actual memory my application wants (or needs), this is the maximum that can be allocated for objects on the heap. Attempting to allocate any new objects once this 2GB of heap space won't use any free RAM available on the system; it will instead trigger garbage collection.
Additionally, with Java 7 at least, there are seven different garbage collection algorithms. The default is the Parallel Scavenger Collector, which is a "stop the world" collector. You might find on your system you have fewer pauses if you enable the Concurrent Mark/Sweep collector, in conjunction with the Parallel Copy Collector. Concurrent Mark/Sweep runs in the background, and only stops all application threads if it can't keep up with demand.
Tuning those should help with your specific performance issues. I completely recognise that none of this should be necessary in a well-written application; unfortunately for all too many Java developers, "I don't need to worry about garbage collection" also seems to mean "I don't need to care about the lifecycle of my objects", which of course isn't true. There are a lot of badly written Java applications out there, and in some ways understanding how Java handles memory is actually harder than understanding memory allocation in a lower-level language like C (Garbage Collection makes things pretty complex), and all too often I run into Java developers who simply have no idea how the JVM manages these things. IDEs for embedded systems always seem to be particularly bad for this. That's not entirely Java's fault -- you can write memory-efficient Java applications, it's just that too many Java developers (and frequently their managers) seem to think you can ignore memory issues with Java because it has Garbage Collection, as if it's some magical solution to memory allocation/deallocation.
Yaz
But.. but...but didn't mac's come with some magic magnetic connectors to safeguard them against cable strain ??
No. The MagSafe connector was never designed to eliminate cable strain. It was designed to break away from the laptop should you trip over the cable, preventing the laptop from being damaged.
Cable strain can come from many sources. The cable can simply be bent in a funny angle repeatedly over a long period of time. A MagSafe style connector isn't going to protect against that. Yanking out the cable by gripping the cable and pulling (as opposed to holding the connector directly) also causes cable strain, and again -- MagSafe won't help you here (other than by ensuring you can't also accidentally yank the laptop with the cable).
Even the very ad you linked emphasizes this -- the whole point is that the "PC" is damaged -- not the PC's power cord. Apple has never claimed you can't damage the cable by straining it inappropriately, and MagSafe was never designed nor marketed to prevent such damage.
Yaz
When you pay for gas with a credit card and the pump asks you to punch in your zip code, it's not collecting marketing information. It's using the zip code as a (rather flimsy) security measure to protect against someone buying gas with a lost/stolen credit card.
I had never seen this done prior to a trip through the US earlier this year. Of course, it wouldn't accept my Canadian postal code (which is a six character mix of alternating letters and numbers). I had to cancel the transaction and go in and have the cashier run everything manually, and then go in after filling up to complete the transaction.
Not the end of the world, I suppose. I suspect we don't bother with doing that here in Canada due to a) stronger privacy laws and b) near global use of chip-and-pin for credit cards. At the time, my natural first thoughts were "why on EARTH would you need to even ask me that???". Now I know why, and will know better the next time I'm down that way.
Yaz
What are you smoking? Have you never been late for a connecting flight?
The plane actually WILL take of without you.
In which case, having parents with children board first is the least of your problems.
Yaz
That's all good reason for boarding them last - so they don't slow down those who can board quickly.
I promise the plane won't take off without you. What, are you in a hurry to cram yourself into an airline seat instead of enjoying the comfort of the airport lounge for another 10 minutes or so? Entitled much?
Yaz
But because such penalties impact all businesses in whatever country is collecting them, it won't really change things - because all of those businesses will simply pass along the new government-mandated increase in their overhead along in the form of higher prices.
However, if you believe in capitalism this creates a space for an aggressive innovator to come in with new reduced-energy practices/processes, and pass those savings onto consumers, causing the existing players to either likewise update their practices/processes to compete, or have them diminish/die. Such changes don't happen overnight however -- it could take many years for the selective pressure to bear.
Yaz
You apparently never heard of United States vs. Conrad Black
.
In this case, Black (born Canadian, but renounced his citizenship after becoming British in order to sit in the House of Lords), who was CEO of Hollinger International. As part of a series of criminal charges against him, he was ordered by a US court not to move or tamper with documents relating to the case. However, he and an accomplice were filmed removing boxes of paperwork from an office in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was charged and ultimately found guilty of obstruction of justice in the US for this, and served 48 months in prison.
.
Yaz
From an iPhone on AT&T IPv6 does not work. Neither does it work on my Uverse connection.
That's the fault of the connection, however, and not the iPhone. iOS if fully IPv6 compatible; I take advantage of it all the time. I even wrote an IPv6 test utility for iOS a few years ago. You just need a WiFi router with autoconf advertising IPv6 routes, an you're all set.
The fact that all too many North American ISPs still haven't got their IPv6 implementations in play is the real story here. Computers and most smart phones are ready to connect -- they just need the ISP support to do it.
Yaz
I doubt it's high on Microsoft's priority list. Your earlier example shows a saving of a few hundred megabytes out of 8 GB, and RAM is really cheap.
I should point out that in my example, the memory pressure at the time was quite low. Had I pushed the memory pressure higher, the amount of compressed memory would also have been quite a bit higher.
RAM may be cheap, but there are still physical limits that can be hit on any given board or system before you reach the theoretical limits. I'm posting this on a 2009 iMac right now, and it has a maximum RAM configuration of 8GB (which is also how much RAM is installed). No matter how cheap RAM gets, this system can't accommodate any more.
Considering Mavericks was a free upgrade, installing it was like going up to 12GB of RAM or more -- for free. I don't have any metrics in front of me of the useful theoretical maximum compressed memory storage, I can only assume that it's somewhere in the neighbourhood of about (Installed RAM - 1GB)*2 at best (or in my case, 14GB. The 1GB is to ensure space is reserved for wired memory, which can't be swapped or compressed). I suspect it will be a bit less, depending on how compressible your data is (the algorithm used is optimized for a 2:1 compression ratio, however not all pages will be compressible to this degree; my understanding is that if a pair of pages can't be compressed into a single page, the compression routine stops for that pair of pages).
Note that as memory compression sits between the point where the OS identifies that it may need to evict old pages and the point where the pages are physically swapped to disk, the pages written to disk are also compressed (unless they were incompressible in the first place). This will roughly halve the amount of data that needs to be written to swap, meaning that the slowest operations of the paging to disk procedure is roughly halved in time as well.
As Windows machines swap as well, being able to halve the time required to read data from and write data to disk would be a huge boost. Being able to get a few million extra pages without the need to swap is an even bigger performance boost. I'll point out this ArsTechnica article on Apple's Compressed Memory subsystem -- note in particular the second graphic which shows a system under much heavier memory pressure, where a machine with 16GB of RAM has over 8GB compressed, and only 26.5MB (not a typo!) of data swapped to disk. That's a lot of data that didn't need to be written to a page file.
Yaz
Although studying it again now, it seemed much more interesting! Maybe my teacher wasn't very good...
Hope I wasn't your teacher the first time around!
Yaz