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An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

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Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#131

Post by milankragujevic »

xmprt wrote: post #129
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.

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.

It can go worse - some cheap and badly designed Android phones which download updates from every month when you first buy it until the current month, so maybe 10+ updates, but they aren't deltas (diffs) but full images. Ridiculous on so many levels.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#132

Post by toyg »

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…

The single most significant factor for the popularity of American accents is Hollywood.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#133

Post by Agentlien »

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'm Swedish and to me a heavy American accent means a clear rhotic r[0], slightly slurred speech, and a lot of volume.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#134

Post by EvanAnderson »

I worked with a tech from a software vendor who had a link to one of my Server Fault answers in their setup docs. We got to that bit of the setup and I mentioned that I wrote the answer his doc was referencing. I quite enjoyed it.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#136

Post by toyg »

rodgerd wrote: post #28
galacticaactual wrote: post #21

TIL that people fly around the world demoing DTrace...

At the time, Sun were pushing it heavily as one of the two salvations for Solaris, so I'm not surprised. I have to say that my limited experience in dealing with Sun as a customer mirrors Brendan's comments around a remarkable arrogance, and it probably played no small part in their downfall.

> At the time, Sun were pushing it heavily as one of the two salvations for Solaris, so I'm not surprised.

Yeah, I remember that. I kept thinking "this tool might be nice for C wizards but it does nothing for my day-to-day experience as smalltime Linux user / admin". The other big thing was ZFS, which was interesting, but they were extremely uncooperative with the license, basically ensuring it would never make it big.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#137

Post by toyg »

BrissyCoder wrote: post #14
lukeh wrote: post #12

Good story; I do find the “Australians are just the little guys” narrative a bit frustrating and a self-fulfilling prophecy though.

Agree it's cringe. The whole "little guy punching above his weight" thing is even worse in NZ.

Have you ever been to the UK? That sort of mindset is widespread. In fact, there is basically an obligation that the country must, at all times, fight wildly above its level.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#138

Post by brendangregg »

bilalhusain wrote: post #99

> I've learned ... instead to simply say "I have a lot of experience with that technology" and leave it at that. Shows Brendan's maturity. I am not sure what should be the appropriate reaction or corrective measure in these situations. We should talk more about handling these unfair situations. Someone else can become more successful building on top of one's open source project. On a resume, a top contributor and a m…

Thanks. There was a time when many observability products were adding latency heat maps, and at one conference expo floor there were three companies with latency heat maps on their screen at the same time, pitching them as a flagship feature. If I walked near them they'd start trying to explain them to me, and I never figured out an appropriate response. If I said "hey, great to see you added them, I invented these back at Sun" I'd get funny looks.

I think it's a small world, and everything is software, so the chance you'll bump into someone who wrote software you are using I think is pretty high. I was once trying to get my head around Andi Kleen's pmu-tools, and I had the github repo open in my browser on my laptop I was carrying, when the guy sitting next to me on a bus says he's Andi Kleen. (Ok, it was a bus taking Linux conference attendees to an event, not a random bus, but I still found it remarkable timing -- I was studying pmu-tools at that exact time!)

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#139

Post by jclulow »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #103
bilalhusain wrote: post #99

> I've learned ... instead to simply say "I have a lot of experience with that technology" and leave it at that. Shows Brendan's maturity. I am not sure what should be the appropriate reaction or corrective measure in these situations. We should talk more about handling these unfair situations. Someone else can become more successful building on top of one's open source project. On a resume, a top contributor and a m…

> I am not sure what should be the appropriate reaction or corrective measure in these situations. We should talk more about handling these unfair situations. Start recording; have them, a big multinational with a massive legal department, admit to violating and stripping a license from source code. Then sue them. They should know better, and they're making billions off of other people's work. That in itself is fair…

Be extremely careful recording conversations without consent in the US.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#140

Post by sgtnoodle »

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.

Zip files have all the metadata in a footer rather than a header. As a result, compressed files can be added and overwritten by appending to the file without disturbing already compressed data. Additionally, the "deflate" compression likely does not span across files, so files that did not change from version to version would have a similar compressed byte sequence, regardless of the order they were added to the archive.

I'd argue that zip is a relatively simple compressed archive format. Its simplicity is its charm and the reason it's so popular. More space-efficient algorithms would be less likely to be "patchable" as there would be less redundancy / structure in the compressed representation to exploit (the best compression seems like it would have similar properties of random data.)

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