Decompression time is always real time? So it doesn't matter what computer, what processor, the size of the file, the complexity of the file, or even what kind of file it is? Or do you mean that it needs to be able to be done in real-time (or faster) for some particular use a a particular kind of file on a particular platform that you have in mind?
I find it surprising and almost funny how much ire this has drawn from people with some kind of weird "purist" attitude about the whole thing.
It doesn't seem "generally useless" to me, but it would be more appropriate to say that it's "useful only in general cases". I would say that in most circumstances, I'd want compression algorithms that balance speed and compression. I often don't zip my files to maximum compression, for example, because I don't want to sit around waiting for a long time in order to save a very small amount of space. I also don't zip without compression, because speed is not that *that* important. I look for compression that's balanced. "Compress it as much as you can without making me sit around and wait for it."
Similarly, if I were ripping CDs to MP3, and you offered me a different format that would save me 1MB per song, I'd jump on board. If you told me that it would save me that space by requiring 1 hour to compress, and then another hour to decompress before I could play it, I'd tell you to fuck off. If you told me it would drain my battery life on my phone to play it, I'd say it's not worth the trouble.
So I don't know if this is the right metric or the most useful metric, but certainly there could be a metric for compression that deals with "total space savings" vs. "time and complexity in compressing and decompressing". Such a metric could actually be a solid indicator of which compression is useful in a vague general sense.
How much time it takes to compress is irrelevant, even if you get diminishing returns the longer you take. What's important is to save space when broadcasting the content.
Well, and also that it can be decompressed quickly and with little processing power, or else with enough hardware support that it doesn't matter. Otherwise, it'd take a long time to access and drain power on mobile devices.
Hence a single score is completely unsuitable to address the "quality" of the algorithm, because there is no single benchmark scenario.
So you're saying that no benchmark is meaningful because no single benchmark can be relied upon to be the final word under all circumstances? By that logic, measuring speed is not meaningful, because it's not the final word in all circumstances. Measuring the compression ratio is meaningless because it's not the final word in all circumstances. The footprint of the code is meaningless because it's not the final word in all circumstances.
Isn't it possible that a benchmark could be useful for some purposes other than being the final word in all circumstances?
Depending on what you're talking about, providing a huge table of every possible test doesn't make for easy comparisons. In the case of graphics cards, I suppose you could provide a list of every single game, including framerates on every single setting on every single game. It would be hard to gather all that data, and the result would be information overload, and it still wouldn't allow you to make a good comparison between cards. Even assuming you ad such a table, it would probably be more helpful to add or average the results somehow, providing a cumulative score. Of course, then you might want to weight the scores, possibly based on how popular the game is, or how representative it is of the actual capabilities of the card. But if that's the result that's actually helpful, why not design a single benchmark that's representative of what games do, rather than having to test so many games?
there's not a meaningful way to pick the "best" in that group that everyone will agree on
Metrics often don't provide a definitive answer about what the best thing is, with universal agreement. If I tell you Apple scores highest in customer satisfaction for smartphones last year, does that mean everyone will agree that the iPhone is the best phone? If a bunch of people are working at a helpdesk, and one closes the most tickets per hour, does that necessarily mean that he's the best helpdesk tech?
It's true that a lot of people misuse metrics, thinking that they always provide an easy answer, without understanding what they actually mean. That doesn't mean that metrics are useless.
If you're comparing a bunch of cars that get 32-35 mpg and go 130-140 mph, there's not a meaningful way to pick the "best" in that group that everyone will agree on
Yeah, but that's a really dumb metric since most people don't actually care what the top speed of a car is. Or to be more truthful, only morons care about top speed unless it's below 80mph, since you basically shouldn't be driving your car that fast. So really, in a metric like this, the "top speed" isn't a metric of "faster is better". It's a metric of "fast enough is good enough".
But if you were in the habit of doing car reviews, it might make sense to take a bunch of assessments, qualitative and quantitative, like acceleration and handling, MPG, physical attractiveness, additional features, and price (lower is better), and then weigh and average each score. That would enable you to come up with a final score which, while subjective, makes some attempt to enable an overall ranking of the cars. In fact, this is the sort of thing that reviewers sometimes do.
Since the "correct" weighting is a matter of opinion and everybody's use-case is different, a single-dimension metric isn't very useful...[snip] User A is trying to stream stuff that has to have latency less than 15 seconds, so for him the first algorithm is the best.
And these are very good arguments why such a metric should not be taken as an end-all be-all. Isn't that generally the case with metrics and benchmarks?
For example, you might use a benchmark to gauge the relative performance between two video cards. I test Card A and it gets 700. I test Card B and it gets a 680. However, in running a specific game that I like, Card B gets slightly faster framerates. Meanwhile, some other guy wants to use the video cards to mine Bitcoin, and maybe these specific benchmarks test entirely the wrong thing, and Card C, which scores 300 on the benchmark, is the best choice. Is the benchmark therefore useless?
No, not necessarily. if the benchmark is supposed to test general game performance, and generally faster benchmark tests correlate with faster game performance, then it helps shoppers figure out what to buy. If you want to shop based on a specific game or a specific use, then you use a different benchmark.
I'm not an expert here, but I think the idea is to come up with a single quantifying number that represents the idea that very fast compression has limited utility if it doesn't save much space, and very high compression has limited utility if it takes an extremely long time.
Like, if you're trying to compress a given file, and one algorithm compressed the file by 0.00001% in 14 seconds, another compressed the file 15% in 20 seconds, and the third compressed it 15.1% in 29 hours, then the middle algorithm is probably going to be the most useful one. So why can't you create some kind of rating system to give you at least a vague quantifiable score of that concept? I understand that it might not be perfect-- different algorithms might score differently on different sized files, different types of files, etc. But then again, computer benchmarks generally don't give you a perfect assessment of performance. It just provides a method for estimating performance.
But maybe you have something in mind that I'm not seeing.
Does it really qualify as a currency yet? I don't know. How do we define what makes a currency?
And don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to claim that bitcoins aren't worth anything. But Garbage Pail Kids trading cards are probably still worth something. There may be someone in the world who would accept them as payment for goods and services. Does that make them a currency?
Does a currency need to be backed by some kind of country? Is there an expectation of stability of price? Do you need an area of economic activity where the currency is ubiquitously accepted as a form of payment? Maybe you know the answers to these questions. I don't. There are probably a lot of people in Congress who don't.
Though I don't remember Apple being explicit about it, it seems that their OS updates support the past 3 models. iOS7 was released when the iPhone 5s had not yet been released, and supported the iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, and iPhone 5. You can still buy an iPhone 4s, so I would expect that iOS8 will support it, but will not support the iPhone 4 anymore.
So you will probably be able to upgrade your current phone, though it'll probably be a bit slow and will lack some features. That's just an educated guess, though.
And please note, in case you don't understand how comparisons work, that you don't compare things that are identically the same. They're the same, so it doesn't make sense to compare them. You also don't compare things that are so similar that people have a hard time understanding the differences. In those cases, it's much more meaningful to contrast them.
The only time it really makes sense to compare things is if they're significantly different and yet have similarities. Coffee and amphetamine are very different, and yet both are addictive stimulants that lots of people use in order to be productive. That makes for an interesting comparison.
But you haven't seen Windows Phone 9! They're going to overhaul the interface to make it work like a traditional desktop UI, requiring a full-size keyboard and mouse to operate it!
Yup, they're constantly warned by old people and movies alike, that only dumb, cool, sexy people with exciting lives do drugs. It's much safer to live like your boring suburban parents, who incidentally probably also do drugs-- at least alcohol, coffee, and antidepressants, if not marijuana and cocaine.
I actually don't do any illegal drugs or prescription drugs. I'm just pointing out that our society sends some seriously mixed messages.
I am suspecting your are putting your own biases into the words that I spoke.
And I'm quite sure that you're being disingenuous. Or maybe not disingenuous, but dumb. Possibly just in denial? Regardless, I could continue pointing out where your arguments don't make sense, and you'd continue to shift your argument around and pretend to be saying different things. Why would I spend time on that kind of thing?
You're searching for technical solutions to business problems.
Sometimes there are technical solutions to business problems. But my point from the beginning is that it wasn't simply a technical issue of whether we can encrypt things. It's whether we, the users and developers on the Internet, can agree on a set of standards that make encryption easy for people who don't understand encryption and can't be trusted to figure it out.
You keep pointing out that we theoretically could do all the things that needed to be done. I'm trying to point out that still, we keep not doing it. Sure, there are libraries for encrypting things, but what I'm trying to drive home is that encryption isn't the problem. The problem isn't "I need to encrypt a file," but "I need to be able to store my files so that they're secure, accessible, easy to find, easy to share, and nearly impossible to lose. If it's properly implemented, encryption can help with the "secure" part, but it can also easily hinder the rest. Until you can develop a complete solution that solves the entire problem while transparently encrypting files without causing other problems, encryption doesn't help to solve the problem.
Just adding features should not slow an OS down, as features are mostly only loaded when needed and memory management should be able to handle background stuff.
It depends on the features. Some features do in fact require more memory or processing power. You seem to be a fan of Windows 8, and yes, it performs pretty well. Still, let's look at some system requirements.
Windows XP system requirements:
* Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)
* At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)
* At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk.
* CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive.
Windows 8 system requirements:
* Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2 (more info)
* RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)
* Hard disk space: 16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
* Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver.
Those specs are significantly higher. I don't fault MS for that, it's been 10 years. They moved to 64-bit code, which enables greater memory use and better performance for big data sets, but also requires a higher minimum RAM. Part of the reason for this is that they're maintaining backwards compatibility, which is a feature.
We do have standards and off-the-shelf libraries for everything required to implement this
Yes, exactly. There are libraries available so that you can create your own solution for encrypting files and managing the keys. You can do it, and I can do it, and some other guy can do it, and if anyone is unlucky enough to want to use all of the services we create, then he can have several implementations of what is essentially the same encryption scheme with multiple different methods of managing the many associated keys. Some of the key management will be made transparent by having it automatically managed by software, or maybe it won't. Who knows, because we're all rolling our own solution.
And maybe, just maybe, if we all do things the right way, he can use the same private/public keys for all of the solutions. Except that we don't know what the "right way" is because while there are libraries for the encryption algorithms themselves, there's no cross-platform standard for actually implementing the entire system. Much more likely, he'll be able to use the same keys for 6 out of 10 services if he's a programmer or expert sysadmin, and can recompile of some the open source libraries with the appropriate switches to store data in a specific location... or whatever. It depends. Who knows.
This stuff just isn't going to work until someone actually works out an entire system, and there's a consensus within the community (users and developers on the internet) on the proper implementation. Until then, there will be a hodge-podge of silly solutions that users will be hesitant to use, with good reason.
Yes, I understand that you won't even be able to see the problem I'm indicating.
If you check the research literature then you'll find more interesting schemes.
That's part of the thing, I don't want more "interesting" schemes. I want the internet to agree on one very dull scheme. How to I enable a user, a user who is essentially a moron when it comes to computers, to encrypt all of their data and all of their traffic without any risk of losing data when they lose their private keys. Come up with a single scheme, get Google and Dropbox and Microsoft and everyone else to agree to an implementation that will work the same way across all services. Make it as common as SSL, but make it free. Give me a complete software solution that lets me encrypt my files on Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, let's me verify my identity on SSH connections, as well as sign/encrypt my email. Let me store that key once per machine, securely manage it across machines, be able to revoke it, be able to handle a complete loss of that key. Make this simple enough that I can do it even though I can't configure an IMAP/SMTP mail account. Make the whole thing virtually free.
When you've figured that out, that is when we can have ubiquitous encryption on services like Dropbox. Until then, you're just adding complexity and nightmares to whoever has to manage these things.
You forget option (d) Offer security updates for "older" (a year is older) iOS devices without the new features and tell them to buy a new phone if they want the new features.
When they introduced Siri, they didn't include that feature for updates of old phones. People complained that Apple was just trying to force people to upgrade. Eventually, people got Siri running on the old phones, and found that it didn't work very well because the new phones had special sound-processing hardware to allow better voice recognition.
There is really no way to win.
Why would you assume that was a complaint?
Because it was obviously phrased as a complaint. Maybe English is your second language, and you misunderstand the nuances, but it was a sarcastic and bitter complaint about not being offered the newest versions of the software.
as a lame effort to derail my argument?
Well yes, I suppose I am derailing your argument. That's the terminology we're using for when you show that someone's argument is full of shit? "derailing"? Ok, then yeah, that's what I'm doing.
The only exception seems to be OSX, which tends to have at least a moderate speed increase for older hardware with each major release.
And it's worth noting that OSX is getting faster because of the maturity of the platform. Windows 8 also runs faster than Vista. Mobile platforms are much less mature (and less stagnant) than OSX/Windows on Intel hardware.
So in other words, what you are saying is that Apple released a new version of iOS and intentionally did not test it against older models because, well, fuck you, that's why.
They tested against it. It works. It's slower than it used to be. It leaves you with the options of (a) upgrade the OS to get new features, deal with the fact that it's slow; (b) keep the old OS to keep it fast, deal with the fact that you lack the new features; or (c) upgrade the hardware to be fast on the new OS.
The problem is, they're stuck with a similar conundrum. The hardware for iOS becomes substantially faster with each generation. Therefore, they could (a) drop support for old phones with each iOS version, and face complaints, "You're forcing us to upgrade by not supporting old models!"; (b) support old phones, knowing they'll run slower and generate complaints, "You're forcing us to upgrade by slowing the old models!"; or (c) Refuse to create new features in iOS that will require more computing power, leading to the complaint, "Your OS is stagnant! And why aren't you making use of the power of the hardware in the new models!"
It's no win. In support of my point, you go complain, "You certainly do not have to worry about updates rendering your phones useless in America. The carriers actively block all updates whatsoever because they refuse to update their own "control" software that they built into the original Android software that they shipped in your phone." So you're complaining that Apple is providing updates for old phones, and complaining that Android is not providing updates for old phones. And then you're linking this to a whole capitalism/communism debate that feels out of place.
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Decompression time is always real time? So it doesn't matter what computer, what processor, the size of the file, the complexity of the file, or even what kind of file it is? Or do you mean that it needs to be able to be done in real-time (or faster) for some particular use a a particular kind of file on a particular platform that you have in mind?
Ok, so let's start from where you're wrong that "What's important is to save space when broadcasting the content." There are other important things.
Next, what would you like to do then? Change this benchmark to measure decompression speed rather than compression speed? Sure, fine. Let's do that.
I find it surprising and almost funny how much ire this has drawn from people with some kind of weird "purist" attitude about the whole thing.
It doesn't seem "generally useless" to me, but it would be more appropriate to say that it's "useful only in general cases". I would say that in most circumstances, I'd want compression algorithms that balance speed and compression. I often don't zip my files to maximum compression, for example, because I don't want to sit around waiting for a long time in order to save a very small amount of space. I also don't zip without compression, because speed is not that *that* important. I look for compression that's balanced. "Compress it as much as you can without making me sit around and wait for it."
Similarly, if I were ripping CDs to MP3, and you offered me a different format that would save me 1MB per song, I'd jump on board. If you told me that it would save me that space by requiring 1 hour to compress, and then another hour to decompress before I could play it, I'd tell you to fuck off. If you told me it would drain my battery life on my phone to play it, I'd say it's not worth the trouble.
So I don't know if this is the right metric or the most useful metric, but certainly there could be a metric for compression that deals with "total space savings" vs. "time and complexity in compressing and decompressing". Such a metric could actually be a solid indicator of which compression is useful in a vague general sense.
How much time it takes to compress is irrelevant, even if you get diminishing returns the longer you take. What's important is to save space when broadcasting the content.
Well, and also that it can be decompressed quickly and with little processing power, or else with enough hardware support that it doesn't matter. Otherwise, it'd take a long time to access and drain power on mobile devices.
Hence a single score is completely unsuitable to address the "quality" of the algorithm, because there is no single benchmark scenario.
So you're saying that no benchmark is meaningful because no single benchmark can be relied upon to be the final word under all circumstances? By that logic, measuring speed is not meaningful, because it's not the final word in all circumstances. Measuring the compression ratio is meaningless because it's not the final word in all circumstances. The footprint of the code is meaningless because it's not the final word in all circumstances.
Isn't it possible that a benchmark could be useful for some purposes other than being the final word in all circumstances?
Depending on what you're talking about, providing a huge table of every possible test doesn't make for easy comparisons. In the case of graphics cards, I suppose you could provide a list of every single game, including framerates on every single setting on every single game. It would be hard to gather all that data, and the result would be information overload, and it still wouldn't allow you to make a good comparison between cards. Even assuming you ad such a table, it would probably be more helpful to add or average the results somehow, providing a cumulative score. Of course, then you might want to weight the scores, possibly based on how popular the game is, or how representative it is of the actual capabilities of the card. But if that's the result that's actually helpful, why not design a single benchmark that's representative of what games do, rather than having to test so many games?
there's not a meaningful way to pick the "best" in that group that everyone will agree on
Metrics often don't provide a definitive answer about what the best thing is, with universal agreement. If I tell you Apple scores highest in customer satisfaction for smartphones last year, does that mean everyone will agree that the iPhone is the best phone? If a bunch of people are working at a helpdesk, and one closes the most tickets per hour, does that necessarily mean that he's the best helpdesk tech?
It's true that a lot of people misuse metrics, thinking that they always provide an easy answer, without understanding what they actually mean. That doesn't mean that metrics are useless.
If you're comparing a bunch of cars that get 32-35 mpg and go 130-140 mph, there's not a meaningful way to pick the "best" in that group that everyone will agree on
Yeah, but that's a really dumb metric since most people don't actually care what the top speed of a car is. Or to be more truthful, only morons care about top speed unless it's below 80mph, since you basically shouldn't be driving your car that fast. So really, in a metric like this, the "top speed" isn't a metric of "faster is better". It's a metric of "fast enough is good enough".
But if you were in the habit of doing car reviews, it might make sense to take a bunch of assessments, qualitative and quantitative, like acceleration and handling, MPG, physical attractiveness, additional features, and price (lower is better), and then weigh and average each score. That would enable you to come up with a final score which, while subjective, makes some attempt to enable an overall ranking of the cars. In fact, this is the sort of thing that reviewers sometimes do.
Since the "correct" weighting is a matter of opinion and everybody's use-case is different, a single-dimension metric isn't very useful...[snip] User A is trying to stream stuff that has to have latency less than 15 seconds, so for him the first algorithm is the best.
And these are very good arguments why such a metric should not be taken as an end-all be-all. Isn't that generally the case with metrics and benchmarks?
For example, you might use a benchmark to gauge the relative performance between two video cards. I test Card A and it gets 700. I test Card B and it gets a 680. However, in running a specific game that I like, Card B gets slightly faster framerates. Meanwhile, some other guy wants to use the video cards to mine Bitcoin, and maybe these specific benchmarks test entirely the wrong thing, and Card C, which scores 300 on the benchmark, is the best choice. Is the benchmark therefore useless?
No, not necessarily. if the benchmark is supposed to test general game performance, and generally faster benchmark tests correlate with faster game performance, then it helps shoppers figure out what to buy. If you want to shop based on a specific game or a specific use, then you use a different benchmark.
Maybe these fliers were honest, and Comcast just believes the investing in an ISP is a money-losing venture. It would explain some things.
I guess the only sensible response is to sell your stock in Comcast. They view their own business as a money-pit and a disaster waiting to happen.
Can you explain in more detail?
I'm not an expert here, but I think the idea is to come up with a single quantifying number that represents the idea that very fast compression has limited utility if it doesn't save much space, and very high compression has limited utility if it takes an extremely long time.
Like, if you're trying to compress a given file, and one algorithm compressed the file by 0.00001% in 14 seconds, another compressed the file 15% in 20 seconds, and the third compressed it 15.1% in 29 hours, then the middle algorithm is probably going to be the most useful one. So why can't you create some kind of rating system to give you at least a vague quantifiable score of that concept? I understand that it might not be perfect-- different algorithms might score differently on different sized files, different types of files, etc. But then again, computer benchmarks generally don't give you a perfect assessment of performance. It just provides a method for estimating performance.
But maybe you have something in mind that I'm not seeing.
Does it really qualify as a currency yet? I don't know. How do we define what makes a currency?
And don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to claim that bitcoins aren't worth anything. But Garbage Pail Kids trading cards are probably still worth something. There may be someone in the world who would accept them as payment for goods and services. Does that make them a currency?
Does a currency need to be backed by some kind of country? Is there an expectation of stability of price? Do you need an area of economic activity where the currency is ubiquitously accepted as a form of payment? Maybe you know the answers to these questions. I don't. There are probably a lot of people in Congress who don't.
Though I don't remember Apple being explicit about it, it seems that their OS updates support the past 3 models. iOS7 was released when the iPhone 5s had not yet been released, and supported the iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, and iPhone 5. You can still buy an iPhone 4s, so I would expect that iOS8 will support it, but will not support the iPhone 4 anymore.
So you will probably be able to upgrade your current phone, though it'll probably be a bit slow and will lack some features. That's just an educated guess, though.
I think maybe you meant to respond to someone else?
Yes.
And please note, in case you don't understand how comparisons work, that you don't compare things that are identically the same. They're the same, so it doesn't make sense to compare them. You also don't compare things that are so similar that people have a hard time understanding the differences. In those cases, it's much more meaningful to contrast them.
The only time it really makes sense to compare things is if they're significantly different and yet have similarities. Coffee and amphetamine are very different, and yet both are addictive stimulants that lots of people use in order to be productive. That makes for an interesting comparison.
So in the future most businesses will opt for blackberry in the field
Wait... people are still buying Blackberry devices?
But you haven't seen Windows Phone 9! They're going to overhaul the interface to make it work like a traditional desktop UI, requiring a full-size keyboard and mouse to operate it!
Microsoft! What'll they think of next?!
Yup, they're constantly warned by old people and movies alike, that only dumb, cool, sexy people with exciting lives do drugs. It's much safer to live like your boring suburban parents, who incidentally probably also do drugs-- at least alcohol, coffee, and antidepressants, if not marijuana and cocaine.
I actually don't do any illegal drugs or prescription drugs. I'm just pointing out that our society sends some seriously mixed messages.
People will complain that the sun is too yellow.
Exactly my point.
I am suspecting your are putting your own biases into the words that I spoke.
And I'm quite sure that you're being disingenuous. Or maybe not disingenuous, but dumb. Possibly just in denial? Regardless, I could continue pointing out where your arguments don't make sense, and you'd continue to shift your argument around and pretend to be saying different things. Why would I spend time on that kind of thing?
You're searching for technical solutions to business problems.
Sometimes there are technical solutions to business problems. But my point from the beginning is that it wasn't simply a technical issue of whether we can encrypt things. It's whether we, the users and developers on the Internet, can agree on a set of standards that make encryption easy for people who don't understand encryption and can't be trusted to figure it out.
You keep pointing out that we theoretically could do all the things that needed to be done. I'm trying to point out that still, we keep not doing it. Sure, there are libraries for encrypting things, but what I'm trying to drive home is that encryption isn't the problem. The problem isn't "I need to encrypt a file," but "I need to be able to store my files so that they're secure, accessible, easy to find, easy to share, and nearly impossible to lose. If it's properly implemented, encryption can help with the "secure" part, but it can also easily hinder the rest. Until you can develop a complete solution that solves the entire problem while transparently encrypting files without causing other problems, encryption doesn't help to solve the problem.
A half server rack should be enough space to install a mini-fridge and stock it with beer.
Just adding features should not slow an OS down, as features are mostly only loaded when needed and memory management should be able to handle background stuff.
It depends on the features. Some features do in fact require more memory or processing power. You seem to be a fan of Windows 8, and yes, it performs pretty well. Still, let's look at some system requirements.
Windows XP system requirements:
* Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)
* At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)
* At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk.
* CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive.
Windows 8 system requirements:
* Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2 (more info)
* RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)
* Hard disk space: 16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
* Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver.
Those specs are significantly higher. I don't fault MS for that, it's been 10 years. They moved to 64-bit code, which enables greater memory use and better performance for big data sets, but also requires a higher minimum RAM. Part of the reason for this is that they're maintaining backwards compatibility, which is a feature.
We do have standards and off-the-shelf libraries for everything required to implement this
Yes, exactly. There are libraries available so that you can create your own solution for encrypting files and managing the keys. You can do it, and I can do it, and some other guy can do it, and if anyone is unlucky enough to want to use all of the services we create, then he can have several implementations of what is essentially the same encryption scheme with multiple different methods of managing the many associated keys. Some of the key management will be made transparent by having it automatically managed by software, or maybe it won't. Who knows, because we're all rolling our own solution.
And maybe, just maybe, if we all do things the right way, he can use the same private/public keys for all of the solutions. Except that we don't know what the "right way" is because while there are libraries for the encryption algorithms themselves, there's no cross-platform standard for actually implementing the entire system. Much more likely, he'll be able to use the same keys for 6 out of 10 services if he's a programmer or expert sysadmin, and can recompile of some the open source libraries with the appropriate switches to store data in a specific location... or whatever. It depends. Who knows.
This stuff just isn't going to work until someone actually works out an entire system, and there's a consensus within the community (users and developers on the internet) on the proper implementation. Until then, there will be a hodge-podge of silly solutions that users will be hesitant to use, with good reason.
Yes, I understand that you won't even be able to see the problem I'm indicating.
If you check the research literature then you'll find more interesting schemes.
That's part of the thing, I don't want more "interesting" schemes. I want the internet to agree on one very dull scheme. How to I enable a user, a user who is essentially a moron when it comes to computers, to encrypt all of their data and all of their traffic without any risk of losing data when they lose their private keys. Come up with a single scheme, get Google and Dropbox and Microsoft and everyone else to agree to an implementation that will work the same way across all services. Make it as common as SSL, but make it free. Give me a complete software solution that lets me encrypt my files on Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, let's me verify my identity on SSH connections, as well as sign/encrypt my email. Let me store that key once per machine, securely manage it across machines, be able to revoke it, be able to handle a complete loss of that key. Make this simple enough that I can do it even though I can't configure an IMAP/SMTP mail account. Make the whole thing virtually free.
When you've figured that out, that is when we can have ubiquitous encryption on services like Dropbox. Until then, you're just adding complexity and nightmares to whoever has to manage these things.
You forget option (d) Offer security updates for "older" (a year is older) iOS devices without the new features and tell them to buy a new phone if they want the new features.
When they introduced Siri, they didn't include that feature for updates of old phones. People complained that Apple was just trying to force people to upgrade. Eventually, people got Siri running on the old phones, and found that it didn't work very well because the new phones had special sound-processing hardware to allow better voice recognition.
There is really no way to win.
Why would you assume that was a complaint?
Because it was obviously phrased as a complaint. Maybe English is your second language, and you misunderstand the nuances, but it was a sarcastic and bitter complaint about not being offered the newest versions of the software.
as a lame effort to derail my argument?
Well yes, I suppose I am derailing your argument. That's the terminology we're using for when you show that someone's argument is full of shit? "derailing"? Ok, then yeah, that's what I'm doing.
The only exception seems to be OSX, which tends to have at least a moderate speed increase for older hardware with each major release.
And it's worth noting that OSX is getting faster because of the maturity of the platform. Windows 8 also runs faster than Vista. Mobile platforms are much less mature (and less stagnant) than OSX/Windows on Intel hardware.
So in other words, what you are saying is that Apple released a new version of iOS and intentionally did not test it against older models because, well, fuck you, that's why.
They tested against it. It works. It's slower than it used to be. It leaves you with the options of (a) upgrade the OS to get new features, deal with the fact that it's slow; (b) keep the old OS to keep it fast, deal with the fact that you lack the new features; or (c) upgrade the hardware to be fast on the new OS.
The problem is, they're stuck with a similar conundrum. The hardware for iOS becomes substantially faster with each generation. Therefore, they could (a) drop support for old phones with each iOS version, and face complaints, "You're forcing us to upgrade by not supporting old models!"; (b) support old phones, knowing they'll run slower and generate complaints, "You're forcing us to upgrade by slowing the old models!"; or (c) Refuse to create new features in iOS that will require more computing power, leading to the complaint, "Your OS is stagnant! And why aren't you making use of the power of the hardware in the new models!"
It's no win. In support of my point, you go complain, "You certainly do not have to worry about updates rendering your phones useless in America. The carriers actively block all updates whatsoever because they refuse to update their own "control" software that they built into the original Android software that they shipped in your phone." So you're complaining that Apple is providing updates for old phones, and complaining that Android is not providing updates for old phones. And then you're linking this to a whole capitalism/communism debate that feels out of place.