I teach a postgraduate compilers course, so I definitely wouldn't downplay the importance of understanding how compilers work. The problem is that a lot of people know how compilers worked in the '70s and '80s and the techniques that made sense for optimising for a PDP-11 or VAX (or even i386) and these techniques can often hurt performance today.
Back when I was actually doing programming, I spent several years working with Dan Alderson, [wikipedia.org] at JPL. His data structure of choice was always the linked list, either one way or two, depending on what was needed at the time. Yes, it's an abstraction layer, but it's a very useful one when you don't know how many items you're going to be working with from one run to another and it's not exactly hard to add to your toolkit.
A linked list is not an abstraction layer, it's an implementation detail. And today I would say that situations were a linked list is optimal are quite rare. Intrusive linked lists (linked lists where the link is part of the object) are something that I would avoid if at all possible.
Just looking at Objective-C: There is no "linked list" container class. There's array, dictionary, set, multi-set, indexed set, but no linked list. How come?
I would also _proper_ naming of variables, not everything abbreviated without any vowels that won't make any sense in 6 months.
That's where the importance of typing comes in. Every programmer should take a typewriting course. Makes them a ten times better programmer if you don't have to use abbreviations and avoid commenting because typing takes you too long.
The most useful concept I've ever come across is the notion of a closure in Lisp. The entire operating state of a function is contained within that function.
You mean like blocks in Objective-C, which everybody writing non-trivial code for MacOS X and iOS would know? Yes, absolutely important.
Actually, in the CNN article about this that I read, she says exactly that. She says she sat in her home recording booth for 4 hours at a time for a whole year reading nonsensical phrases given to her so that they could later be pulled apart and analyzed.
Except I think Apple uses bigger units than phonemes as building blocks. I think there will be even quite a few complete words that are recorded. I don't know about the size of the Siri recording, but high quality voices on the Mac are several hundred megabytes each.
An arrest doesn't mean you're guilty. It doesn't mean you even had anything to do with what happened.
A while ago there were photos published of a woman arrested for a robbery in a store, identified by the store detectives, and almost convicted - side by side with a photo of the woman who actually did the robbery. I wouldn't have been able to keep them apart. She was totally innocent and lucky to not be convicted.
They're putting up *ALL* booking photos. Even those who are innocent. Your solution would work if nobody was ever wrongly arrested.
I remember there were sites in the USA putting up pictures and addresses of doctors performing abortions. _Probably_ not so that people would send them flowers for doing a good job. When there was some public outrage about it, a Dutch website published all the info in the name of free speech. However, they also added info about many anti-abortionists. Without telling who was who, so that the risk of receiving a letter bomb would be fairly shared.
At least 95% of people do buy garbage quality plastic watches which they regularly lose or find eaten by the dog. Luxury watches are very popular with a small number of wealthy people, mainly as status symbols, but if you're trying to make a mass market product out of expensive watches you have to convince masses who are skeptical of that.
My reasonably expensive wrist watch has gone down in price all the time, and now it's about £30 per year. Has been looking good for 13 years. Looks as good as new. First battery lasted 12 years. And I laugh about stupid kids spending £200 on "Beats" headphones, or on their latest trainers.
That generation's utter miscomprehension of the concept of responsibility causes some of them to mistakenly think that holding somebody (like Swartz) responsible for objectionable behavior is "mental torture" or "bullying".
We could try to hold the prosecutor responsible for her objectionable behaviour, but she doesn't give a shit. Decent people would feel that being responsible for a person killing themselves is like mental torture; she obviously doesn't.
I always find it amazing how Americans apply the concept of responsibility so selectively.
Apple can't make value judgements on Chinese internet laws because that would lead to fewer sales. Corporations do not have morals. The only motivation of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value, and a CEO is required to act in this interest by law. A corporation can thus not make moral judgements that act against maximizing shareholder value, any CEO who allowed that is opening themselves up to a huge class action lawsuit.
A corporation can do anything, with the right justification. They can do lots of things by pointing out that these things might make money in the short term, but lose money long term - for example immoral behaviour will lose you customers; treating employees badly will lose you good employees, and so on. If the shareholders want to increase profits in the next quarter, the company can just point out that they prefer good profits for the next two decades.
Of course if Apple didn't prevent users from loading whatever they like this would be a complete non-issue. This is only possible because Apple control what their users are allowed to do with their device, unless you're willing to invalidate your warranty or pay them an annual fee for the privilege.
Who says it would be a non-issue?
Chinese government: People are using this app on the iPhone, which is illegal.
Apple: Sorry, nothing we can do about it.
Chinese government: No sales of iPhones until that is fixed.
On the contrary, the testers should just be bigger dicks. "We detected benchmark-specific optimizations in products #1, #2 and #3, so they all got zero points."
That seems quite arbitrary. What about "To test the battery, we tested how many minutes the battery lasts while running benchmark X". The cheaters will get shorter battery life.
I'm going to voice the opinion that software-independent caching system is definitely NOT the way to go: the firmware has no way of knowing how often the files are going to be accessed in the future and if they should be kept in cache for a longer time, the firmware doesn't know what type of a file it is, the firmware doesn't know the size of it and so on and so forth -- basically, it knows none of the important details and will end up caching stuff it doesn't need to cache, will end up not caching things that should be kept in cache and since it doesn't know actual filesystem details it can't even optimize its own structures to match those of the filesystem in use. It's just a really basic block cache.
Apple's Fusion drive works quite well that way. They don't care about files - everything is based on 128 KByte blocks; probably the write page size of the SSD drive. In a typical configuration (128 + 1000 GB) you have about 9 million blocks of which the one million that is used most often is located on the SSD drive. It even works if you use a VM to run Windows.
If you have a large music library, typically only the metadata from each music file will be on the SSD drive. If you have apps that are large because of 20 localisation, plus megabytes of help files, videos for introduction etc. only the part of the app that you actually use is on the SSD drive. Directories are accessed a lot, so they go on the SSD drive. All automatically.
And there's a 4 GB write cache, which allows gazillions of small writes to the SSD drive to be streamed at maximum speed, and then the real write happens when the drive isn't busy.
So... They didn't redact information, and distributed it. And now Samsung's on the hook?
They were lawyers employed by and paid for by Samsung. If Apple's lawyers or Nokia's lawyers had stupidly sent this information to Samsung, Samsung wouldn't be in trouble. It was Samsung's lawyers.
So ONLY the lawyers can see the agreement between the two companies? Not the executives? So in other words, an agreement occurred but it is completely impossible to comply with them because nobody at the company knows what the terms are. Genius!
Both Apple's and Nokia's executives have seen this agreement between Apple and Nokia. Plus Samsung's lawyers. There was no need for Samsung's executives to see it; Samsung didn't have to comply with that agreement because it was between Apple and Nokia.
If it were possible for the an open system to implement the standard, then it could save the decrypted data to disk instead of displaying it. More likely it will be impossible for an open browser to implement it even if it wanted to.
Your logic is wrong. As long as the decryption method doesn't require a patent license, an open system can implement it and you can use it perfectly legally. The open system _could_ add code that allows saving the file on a disk, but that would be circumvention and illegal. Or you could take the source code and add that code yourself, but that would also be illegal. But that's an entirely different matter.
How does this affect open source browsers like Firefox? If something is open source you surely can't enforce any sort of DRM restrictions; someone can just build a hacked version of the browser.
Of course you can enforce it. You just sue anyone who circumvents DRM by using a modified browser. DRM nowadays is mostly about legal threats.
Way back when John Grisham's first book had hit it big Clancy was being interviewed on one of the morning shows. They asked him with the popularity of Grisham's book would he ever write a book with a lawyer as a hero. His answer was, "I think I'm a pretty good fiction writer, but I'm not that good." (Paraphrase from a 20 year old memory.)
Michael Connelly, "The Fifth Witness". Quite good until just before the end. On the last pages it suddenly gets a lot better.
There is no free speech in America for non-Americans. Never has been.
In that case, surely you will concede that the country whose citizens love to call it "land of the free" would more correctly be called "land of the assholes".
What is the point of a 64-bit phone? Do you really need more than 4gb of RAM allocated to a single process on a phone?
Do a bit of googling about it. 64 bit = 28 general purpose 64 bit registers instead of 13 general purpose 32 bit registers. Significant advantages in Objective-C. Significant advantages in C++, like any std::string up to 22 chars using just three words of storage.
I'm not sure about that. There was an article in a local paper about someone who did £1,000 worth of damage breaking into a soft-top sports car to steal a pack of biscuits on the seat. The general consensus was that he was a loser and a moron but he got a lower fine than someone stealing £1,000 worth of goods woula have done.
Personally I think he should be punished ten times harder.
There's a rumor that Apple is going to show its appreciation to all of the Chinese sweatshop workers who made this possible by giving them a free iPhone with service. Is that true?
No. But Apple has shown its appreciation by doing more to improve working conditions and salaries in China than any other Western company.
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I teach a postgraduate compilers course, so I definitely wouldn't downplay the importance of understanding how compilers work. The problem is that a lot of people know how compilers worked in the '70s and '80s and the techniques that made sense for optimising for a PDP-11 or VAX (or even i386) and these techniques can often hurt performance today.
Please explain. I'm curious.
Back when I was actually doing programming, I spent several years working with Dan Alderson, [wikipedia.org] at JPL. His data structure of choice was always the linked list, either one way or two, depending on what was needed at the time. Yes, it's an abstraction layer, but it's a very useful one when you don't know how many items you're going to be working with from one run to another and it's not exactly hard to add to your toolkit.
A linked list is not an abstraction layer, it's an implementation detail. And today I would say that situations were a linked list is optimal are quite rare. Intrusive linked lists (linked lists where the link is part of the object) are something that I would avoid if at all possible.
Just looking at Objective-C: There is no "linked list" container class. There's array, dictionary, set, multi-set, indexed set, but no linked list. How come?
I would also _proper_ naming of variables, not everything abbreviated without any vowels that won't make any sense in 6 months.
That's where the importance of typing comes in. Every programmer should take a typewriting course. Makes them a ten times better programmer if you don't have to use abbreviations and avoid commenting because typing takes you too long.
The most useful concept I've ever come across is the notion of a closure in Lisp. The entire operating state of a function is contained within that function.
You mean like blocks in Objective-C, which everybody writing non-trivial code for MacOS X and iOS would know? Yes, absolutely important.
Actually, in the CNN article about this that I read, she says exactly that. She says she sat in her home recording booth for 4 hours at a time for a whole year reading nonsensical phrases given to her so that they could later be pulled apart and analyzed.
Except I think Apple uses bigger units than phonemes as building blocks. I think there will be even quite a few complete words that are recorded. I don't know about the size of the Siri recording, but high quality voices on the Mac are several hundred megabytes each.
An arrest doesn't mean you're guilty. It doesn't mean you even had anything to do with what happened.
A while ago there were photos published of a woman arrested for a robbery in a store, identified by the store detectives, and almost convicted - side by side with a photo of the woman who actually did the robbery. I wouldn't have been able to keep them apart. She was totally innocent and lucky to not be convicted.
They're putting up *ALL* booking photos. Even those who are innocent. Your solution would work if nobody was ever wrongly arrested.
I remember there were sites in the USA putting up pictures and addresses of doctors performing abortions. _Probably_ not so that people would send them flowers for doing a good job. When there was some public outrage about it, a Dutch website published all the info in the name of free speech. However, they also added info about many anti-abortionists. Without telling who was who, so that the risk of receiving a letter bomb would be fairly shared.
TV product? You mean the already existing (and nobody much buying) AppleTV?
In the last quarters, more people bought Apple TV than Xbox 360. It's a tiny part of Apple, but many companies have less annual revenue than Apple TV.
At least 95% of people do buy garbage quality plastic watches which they regularly lose or find eaten by the dog. Luxury watches are very popular with a small number of wealthy people, mainly as status symbols, but if you're trying to make a mass market product out of expensive watches you have to convince masses who are skeptical of that.
My reasonably expensive wrist watch has gone down in price all the time, and now it's about £30 per year. Has been looking good for 13 years. Looks as good as new. First battery lasted 12 years. And I laugh about stupid kids spending £200 on "Beats" headphones, or on their latest trainers.
That generation's utter miscomprehension of the concept of responsibility causes some of them to mistakenly think that holding somebody (like Swartz) responsible for objectionable behavior is "mental torture" or "bullying".
We could try to hold the prosecutor responsible for her objectionable behaviour, but she doesn't give a shit. Decent people would feel that being responsible for a person killing themselves is like mental torture; she obviously doesn't.
I always find it amazing how Americans apply the concept of responsibility so selectively.
Apple can't make value judgements on Chinese internet laws because that would lead to fewer sales. Corporations do not have morals. The only motivation of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value, and a CEO is required to act in this interest by law. A corporation can thus not make moral judgements that act against maximizing shareholder value, any CEO who allowed that is opening themselves up to a huge class action lawsuit.
A corporation can do anything, with the right justification. They can do lots of things by pointing out that these things might make money in the short term, but lose money long term - for example immoral behaviour will lose you customers; treating employees badly will lose you good employees, and so on. If the shareholders want to increase profits in the next quarter, the company can just point out that they prefer good profits for the next two decades.
Of course if Apple didn't prevent users from loading whatever they like this would be a complete non-issue. This is only possible because Apple control what their users are allowed to do with their device, unless you're willing to invalidate your warranty or pay them an annual fee for the privilege.
Who says it would be a non-issue?
Chinese government: People are using this app on the iPhone, which is illegal.
Apple: Sorry, nothing we can do about it.
Chinese government: No sales of iPhones until that is fixed.
On the contrary, the testers should just be bigger dicks. "We detected benchmark-specific optimizations in products #1, #2 and #3, so they all got zero points."
That seems quite arbitrary. What about "To test the battery, we tested how many minutes the battery lasts while running benchmark X". The cheaters will get shorter battery life.
I'm going to voice the opinion that software-independent caching system is definitely NOT the way to go: the firmware has no way of knowing how often the files are going to be accessed in the future and if they should be kept in cache for a longer time, the firmware doesn't know what type of a file it is, the firmware doesn't know the size of it and so on and so forth -- basically, it knows none of the important details and will end up caching stuff it doesn't need to cache, will end up not caching things that should be kept in cache and since it doesn't know actual filesystem details it can't even optimize its own structures to match those of the filesystem in use. It's just a really basic block cache.
Apple's Fusion drive works quite well that way. They don't care about files - everything is based on 128 KByte blocks; probably the write page size of the SSD drive. In a typical configuration (128 + 1000 GB) you have about 9 million blocks of which the one million that is used most often is located on the SSD drive. It even works if you use a VM to run Windows.
If you have a large music library, typically only the metadata from each music file will be on the SSD drive. If you have apps that are large because of 20 localisation, plus megabytes of help files, videos for introduction etc. only the part of the app that you actually use is on the SSD drive. Directories are accessed a lot, so they go on the SSD drive. All automatically.
And there's a 4 GB write cache, which allows gazillions of small writes to the SSD drive to be streamed at maximum speed, and then the real write happens when the drive isn't busy.
Sorry but no. If it reached the courts it should not be private anymore.
That seems like a rather ridiculous and idiotic opinion to me. But I'm sure you'll be able to give some argument to support your opinion.
So... They didn't redact information, and distributed it. And now Samsung's on the hook?
They were lawyers employed by and paid for by Samsung. If Apple's lawyers or Nokia's lawyers had stupidly sent this information to Samsung, Samsung wouldn't be in trouble. It was Samsung's lawyers.
So ONLY the lawyers can see the agreement between the two companies? Not the executives? So in other words, an agreement occurred but it is completely impossible to comply with them because nobody at the company knows what the terms are. Genius!
Both Apple's and Nokia's executives have seen this agreement between Apple and Nokia. Plus Samsung's lawyers. There was no need for Samsung's executives to see it; Samsung didn't have to comply with that agreement because it was between Apple and Nokia.
If it were possible for the an open system to implement the standard, then it could save the decrypted data to disk instead of displaying it. More likely it will be impossible for an open browser to implement it even if it wanted to.
Your logic is wrong. As long as the decryption method doesn't require a patent license, an open system can implement it and you can use it perfectly legally. The open system _could_ add code that allows saving the file on a disk, but that would be circumvention and illegal. Or you could take the source code and add that code yourself, but that would also be illegal. But that's an entirely different matter.
How does this affect open source browsers like Firefox? If something is open source you surely can't enforce any sort of DRM restrictions; someone can just build a hacked version of the browser.
Of course you can enforce it. You just sue anyone who circumvents DRM by using a modified browser. DRM nowadays is mostly about legal threats.
Way back when John Grisham's first book had hit it big Clancy was being interviewed on one of the morning shows. They asked him with the popularity of Grisham's book would he ever write a book with a lawyer as a hero. His answer was, "I think I'm a pretty good fiction writer, but I'm not that good." (Paraphrase from a 20 year old memory.)
Michael Connelly, "The Fifth Witness". Quite good until just before the end. On the last pages it suddenly gets a lot better.
There is no free speech in America for non-Americans. Never has been.
In that case, surely you will concede that the country whose citizens love to call it "land of the free" would more correctly be called "land of the assholes".
What is the point of a 64-bit phone? Do you really need more than 4gb of RAM allocated to a single process on a phone?
Do a bit of googling about it. 64 bit = 28 general purpose 64 bit registers instead of 13 general purpose 32 bit registers. Significant advantages in Objective-C. Significant advantages in C++, like any std::string up to 22 chars using just three words of storage.
I'm not sure about that. There was an article in a local paper about someone who did £1,000 worth of damage breaking into a soft-top sports car to steal a pack of biscuits on the seat. The general consensus was that he was a loser and a moron but he got a lower fine than someone stealing £1,000 worth of goods woula have done.
Personally I think he should be punished ten times harder.
There's a rumor that Apple is going to show its appreciation to all of the Chinese sweatshop workers who made this possible by giving them a free iPhone with service. Is that true?
No. But Apple has shown its appreciation by doing more to improve working conditions and salaries in China than any other Western company.
What.. It's a legitimate question.. When I hear secure and iPhone (or any other phone) in the same sentence I have to laugh..
Why would that be? Use an eight letter passcode, and nobody can unlock it and access the data on it. I mean _nobody_.