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An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

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Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#121

Post by whelming_wave »

oblio wrote: post #116
maccard wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons games do this is the data is compressed, so a "patch" might be indistinguishable from a real update. Also, as a dev, you have no idea what version your users are updating _from_. You either need to generate some number of patches for every version you could be updating from, and figure out if you should just download the whole thing again in any of those cases anyway.

> One of the reasons games do this is the data is compressed, so a "patch" might be indistinguishable from a real update. Does this happen with more advanced compression algorithms? I've rsynced zip files of different versions of internal software and the diff was always much, much smaller than the entire package.

Kind of an aside from your question, but binary patches not being much smaller than the full thing might happen more with modern games?

Heresay, but from what I've heard modern games may ship multiple copies of some assets with different levels or features so they can be loaded as a sequential read off the disk. While a block-oriented compression algorithm might sync up more reliably, if you're packing 200MB of assets for a level and they're all compressed to take advantage of the fact they'll be read sequentially could mean a change 25MB in would still ship ~175MB of changes.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#122

Post by 29athrowaway »

Once, someone tried to refute my argument using a post by a ghost user from github.

That ghost user was an older account of mine. Their interpretation of the post was wrong though.

I reacted to the situation by laughing slightly but didn't even bother explaining why. Because of the poor tone, I decided to let that person enjoy being wrong.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#123

Post by mpermar »

Awesome story.

I'm not sure if this is just my personal feeling but I would say that stealing intellectual property was sort of common at that time. Open source was not widely known, knowledge was scarce, communities were just ramping up and really anyone with lack of principles could pretty much steal anything and get away with it.

It happened to me a few times with online content I wrote. Essentially tutorials, articles, etc. around Open Source. Once my own company sent me a newsletter which contained one of my articles signed by another employee from a different place. It felt pretty weird.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#124

Post by toyg »

neilv wrote: post #86

There's a long industry history of stealing code, but I'm surprised to hear this story of Sun allegedly doing it. My impression is that reason for the stealing usually makes sense. For example, a key library that's hard to write that's just copied into the source tree, ignoring licensing. Or an appliance developer didn't want to deal with licensing for Linux or BusyBox. Or an individual developer in over their head q…

You are very compassionate towards people just literally stealing code. My experience is that a lot of folks just don't care about licenses: they steal and rebrand by any mean necessary, I guess to accumulate reputation.

I wrote a few silly scripts in my lifetime, all small-time stuff (so trivial it never got me hired as a Dev anywhere). No matter whether I marked things as GPL or BSS, I often found them copied on GitHub with my copyright notices stripped. In the case of the BSD license, that's literally the only thing you can't do!

In some cases it was utterly blatant: cloning from my own GitHub repo and then replacing authorship notices in the very first commit. I mean, come on guys, at least try to be smart; you can add your name just fine... When I politely asked to, y'know, respect license terms and reinstate the notices, some people just took down their repo rather than doing that. I bet they then re-uploaded it somewhere else.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#125

Post by maccard »

oblio wrote: post #116
maccard wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons games do this is the data is compressed, so a "patch" might be indistinguishable from a real update. Also, as a dev, you have no idea what version your users are updating _from_. You either need to generate some number of patches for every version you could be updating from, and figure out if you should just download the whole thing again in any of those cases anyway.

> One of the reasons games do this is the data is compressed, so a "patch" might be indistinguishable from a real update. Does this happen with more advanced compression algorithms? I've rsynced zip files of different versions of internal software and the diff was always much, much smaller than the entire package.

I can't say, I'm not sure what compression we used on the last two games I worked on, sorry!

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#126

Post by Agentlien »

sammorrowdrums wrote: post #91
irrational wrote: post #55

> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?

I'd say most people hear divergence from their local accent, and consider theirs to be (at least subconsciously) a normal accent. This results in English people hearing my accent as a bit Irish, and Irish people hearing the English parts. Neither acknowledge fully the shared parts. In truth, I am a bit of both. So I'd say a strong American accent to an Australian is the most divergent one, not one that somebody in US…

I'm born and raised in Göteborg (Gothenburg), Sweden. My parents are originally from Karlskoga, 270km NE from here. Göteborg has a very distinct accent and I always get told by others that I have a very bland Swedish with no hint of that accent.

But one time I was at a wedding in Karlskoga and talked to someone I hadn't met before. I opened my mouth and managed to get half a sentence out before he interrupted with "Oh! You're from Göteborg!"

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#127

Post by brendangregg »

kbenson wrote: post #67
kortilla wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If someone wants more control their interests already aren’t aligned with the community. Developer resources aren’t just some faucet easily redirected. It’s worse to have people trying to jam shit into the main project if they don’t actually care about the main project. That’s how you get contributions that are huge hacks and require more work to review and iterate on than is worth it to the community. If some c…

> That’s how you get contributions that are huge hacks and require more work to review and iterate on than is worth it to the community. And yet the author here is saying please work together. Presumably he or the community is okay with picking apart those huge hacks. I'm not sure why you should care what that community is willing to accept, unless you're part of it. > If some company forks for an observability produ…

I appreciate the discussion as I want to do a follow on post about this in more detail. It doesn't do the BPF community any good to have people running old broken versions of my tools (just as back in 2005, Sun was selling DTrace by distributing my half-finished socketsnoop.d). Now, some people are going to port anyway regardless of what's good for BPF. But if I can reach developers who may be on the fence about it, I can explain the pros of just building upon the existing tools. To start with, you get updates for free by kernel engineers at Facebook, Netflix, etc. Also, by pushing fixes back you'll find people will try to help you in return for when you need it (some startups, like Cilium, have done so much for BPF that I'd happily help them with anything they need (provided there isn't a clash with my current employment)).

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#128

Post by bitwize »

irrational wrote: post #55

> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?

Really rhotic r's, relaxed prosody, tongue flaps instead of a t berween vowels, indistinct schwas on unstressed syllables, etc.

I also perceive Canadians to have "heavier" North American accents than Americans do. Some Canadians speak as if from the backs of their throats, with leaden vowels and really round r's. They also often overcorrect /a/ to /æ/ so "drama" becomes "dramma" (like the first two syllables of "Dramamine". And of course there was William Shatner's famous "sabotadge"...

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#129

Post by xmprt »

maccard wrote: post #112
throwaway3699 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implementing software updates where you don't want to ship entire binaries again (and only the diff) would be one. In some video games the assets are also packed into massive binaries, so you don't want to ship gigabytes of data because you replaced one icon. Sadly many games do this anyway nowadays.

One of the reasons games do this is the data is compressed, so a "patch" might be indistinguishable from a real update. Also, as a dev, you have no idea what version your users are updating _from_. You either need to generate some number of patches for every version you could be updating from, and figure out if you should just download the whole thing again in any of those cases anyway.

If you know a user is on version 3 and need to update to version 5, then why not just send out all the patches between 3 and 5? Why do you need to generate a new patch for each pair of versions.

It feels a bit egregious when I have to download a 100MB update just because a few characters were buffed or nerfed. More involved changes end up being over 1GB.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#130

Post by toyg »

exidy wrote: post #110
irrational wrote: post #55

> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?

For me, if the speaker uses two syllables for "and", it's a strong American accent.

To me it's when water and wider are pronounced in a very similar way. Also, Americans abuse awesome.
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