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An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

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Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#181

Post by TulliusCicero »

WA wrote: post #79
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 as a German, the people in this video speak a heavy American accent: https://youtu.be/c9kI_rAFuKA?t=72

Well, that's a specific regional American accent, in the US called a Southern accent. Probably the only strong/widespread regional accent really left in the states (you could also argue for AAVE/ebonics but it's not regional in the same way).

It's a bit like saying that someone from rural Bavaria who speaks with a strong Bavarian accent has a heavy German accent while speaking German.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#182

Post by maccard »

wruza wrote: post #163
maccard wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is very unlikely that it was a “continuous” compression anyway. Continuous archives disallow random file access property, and games require exactly that for assets. You can’t decompress few gb on average to fetch a sprite of a cat. The reason games (and software in general) do full downloads instead of binary patches is purely overdefensive and/or stupid. Store software could just check checksums after a patch and…

it's a UE4 game so the code is available on Github, I believe it was a header, with an encrypted index into a large binary blob of compressed data.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#183

Post by ivanbakel »

rorykoehler wrote: post #164
brendangregg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in shock, and a bit furious at being ripped off, but didn't feel there was a lot I could do about it. I edited this bit out (I was trimming the post): "You might wonder why I didn't talk about this first case publicly at the time. I'd already informed them of the problem privately and how to fix it, so there wasn't more to say. Also, Sun was the number one employer in town, and to be publicly critical could be…

Are there no legal recourse options for breaking the license so blatantly?

Was there a license violation if the software wasn't distributed?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#184

Post by oblio »

brazzy wrote: post #177
oblio wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-native English speaker I absolutely hate English accents where consonants absolutely disappear for no good reason. Personally I'd rather have Americans "lean heavily on the R" than act like the letter doesn't exist (rhotic vs non-rhotic). I think it's another factor why American English is more popular than British English (besides the huge economic factor, the US economy being 5x the UK one), since their pr…

That's funny. As a non-native (German) English speaker, British pronounciation seems far clearer to me than American - barring strong regional accents of course, maybe thatis what you had in mind.

Yeah, but Received Pronunciation is basically an artificial creation, only a certain percentage of Brits actually use it.

Regular Brits use their regional access, yes. And those can be much, much harder to understand than your average American accent. For precisely the same reason rhotic accents can cause issues, those regional accents tend to eat up sounds and sometimes entire syllables.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#185

Post by V-2 »

oblio wrote: post #120
naruhodo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak through your nose and and lean heavily on the R sound wherever you find it. Peter Sellers called Americans "The Herns" [1]: > Various American characters with the surname Hern or Hearn, often used for narration, outrageous announcements or parody sales pitches. The Goons referred to Americans as "herns", possibly because saying "hern hern hern...." sounded American to them, possibly because Sellers once said th…

As a non-native English speaker I absolutely hate English accents where consonants absolutely disappear for no good reason. Personally I'd rather have Americans "lean heavily on the R" than act like the letter doesn't exist (rhotic vs non-rhotic). I think it's another factor why American English is more popular than British English (besides the huge economic factor, the US economy being 5x the UK one), since their pr…

I like British accent for its aesthetics, but from pragmatic point of view it's not even a contest (from the perspective of a non-native speaker), I agree.

It's not just the r's (in fact, some British accents are rhotic - around their South West, if I'm not mistaken?), there are all these glottal stops and whatnot.

But, from my observations at least, there are also big discrepancies related to social class. When I moved to the UK, I had no problem whatsoever talking to, say, a local librarian - but a plumber would be nearly impossible to understand for me, in the first months at least. I didn't really experience it in the US, certainly not to such an extent.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#186

Post by rusk »

Twirrim wrote: post #89

Years ago, I interviewed a candidate for a role on my team. As usual, one of the ways I break the ice with candidates is to get them to talk "war stories". The team he'd worked on had produced a tool that was only ever intended to be used by the team to solve a particular problem they had. It contained proprietary code. Unknown to the team, word had spread about the tool, and others had started to use it, including s…

An app so killer they're willing to rewrite a part of it. Nice problem to have!

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#187

Post by messe »

oblio wrote: post #120
naruhodo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak through your nose and and lean heavily on the R sound wherever you find it. Peter Sellers called Americans "The Herns" [1]: > Various American characters with the surname Hern or Hearn, often used for narration, outrageous announcements or parody sales pitches. The Goons referred to Americans as "herns", possibly because saying "hern hern hern...." sounded American to them, possibly because Sellers once said th…

As a non-native English speaker I absolutely hate English accents where consonants absolutely disappear for no good reason. Personally I'd rather have Americans "lean heavily on the R" than act like the letter doesn't exist (rhotic vs non-rhotic). I think it's another factor why American English is more popular than British English (besides the huge economic factor, the US economy being 5x the UK one), since their pr…

What does that even mean? There's nothing clearer or more explicit about either. Maybe you mean that it closer matches the orthography?

> than act like the letter doesn't exist (rhotic vs non-rhotic).

Every language changes. Nobody is acting like "the letter doesn't exist", just occasionally that phoneme has changed or dropped in their dialect. Even in non-rhotic accents, an r in the orthography can indicate a change in vowel quality.

> I think it's another factor why American English is more popular than British English (besides the huge economic factor, the US economy being 5x the UK one),

I think the greater population, and the fact that the Hollywood content has embedded itself globally, has resulted in more exposure to American content (of which there is more of). Any dialect will sound clearer to you if you're exposed to it more often than others.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#188

Post by Aeolun »

Aachen wrote: post #162
Twirrim wrote: post #89

Years ago, I interviewed a candidate for a role on my team. As usual, one of the ways I break the ice with candidates is to get them to talk "war stories". The team he'd worked on had produced a tool that was only ever intended to be used by the team to solve a particular problem they had. It contained proprietary code. Unknown to the team, word had spread about the tool, and others had started to use it, including s…

> having to rapidly re-architect the tool around a non-GPLv3 licensed library ... or just go with it and have it be open source? The old version is already open and free for anyone to request the code of. No rush at that point, you can withhold updates for a little while while you rearchitect this or take the situation as it is and have the next few bugfix releases also fall under GPL until you get around to replacin…

It does hopefully prevent any of your customers from ever asking for it.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#189

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

purpleidea wrote: post #18

I was fortunate enough to happen to be live at LISA13 where AFAIK, Brendan gave his first public flamegraphs demo. I'm glad I saw it. I love learning about areas (performance engineering) where I'm weaker. Great demos! I've tried to keep my personal live demos at a high quality too. Can't wait to see what he comes up with next!

Flame graphs completely blew my mind, but most people I talk to about them just don't seem to get it.

I'm a generalist, but I've been thinking lately if performance engineering is something I should be specialising in. I'd love to hear any advice from those in the field.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#190

Post by mnw21cam »

brendangregg wrote: post #107
throwawaye3735 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not saying it's factually incorrect. My point is that it includes a lot of Gregg's personal feelings (and maybe was informed incorrectly about the situation) and I'm just not sold that the guy who was assigned to show off Dtrace was the bad guy here

In the article I included my guess about real cause for this: Sun's assumption that any good work had to be from a Sun employee. I'd guess the sequence of events was: - DTrace is the new hotness, we need it in our UI. - Everyone's using Brendan's tools, let's add them (so far, so good). - Oh, why do they say copyright Brendan? He made a mistake: Sun employees should be putting copyright Sun on them. (THIS is the mist…

As for how you were treated - I don't think the low-key introduction can be fully blamed. The VIP should have known that smart people exist in various places around the world, and sooner or later one does bump into them. When you meet someone knowing absolutely nothing about them (and an introduction doesn't count), and then they start talking intelligently about a topic, then you have one data point (that they have talked intelligently), and you should draw an appropriate conclusion from that. It sounds like the VIP had serious preconception issues.
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