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Demon-Haunted World

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Re: Demon-Haunted World

#281

Post by dragonsky67 »

cpeterso wrote: post #42
zaroth wrote: post #17

Why do our phones, which certainly felt damn snappy the day we bought them, inevitablely seem to slow down to the point of unusability after a couple dozen months? Even after a factory reset and installing no apps at all... I know it didn't take that long to open/close the built in apps when I bought that iPhone 4, 5, 5s... The only thing I can think of is the flash drive is slowing down as it wears. Or, the CPU cloc…

My iPhone 6 used to be snappy, but now takes almost 10 seconds to just open an app. Perhaps new OS updates are not as well-optimized for older iPhones as they are for the latest version. Ars Technica's Android 8.0 deep-dive has some interesting charts showing Android device performance deteriorating over time: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-8-0-oreo-tho...

I'm not sure that the new updates are doing much to harm older phones. My iPhone 5 is still running as quickly as it was when I got it. In fact, the latest updates seem to have made things somewhat faster.

Unfortunately I'm now at end of life as far as iOS updates go. I don't think I will bother with updating the hardware for some time yet.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#282

Post by Bartweiss »

hutzlibu wrote: post #263
Bartweiss wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The company acted shitty and you took the consequences Historically, "the consequences" have often included "you die horribly". Sure, we can all avoid Hooker Chemical Company. (Well no, we can't, because it doesn't sell to consumers and we can't find out who consumer companies are supplied by.) But if we could , it wouldn't have saved anyone living in Love Canal. They got leukemia no matter what the market did afte…

Erm, I think there is a major difference between those two examples. If a digital company and me don't come along I quit contract and it is not really anybody else business nor harm, only mine if I feel treated unfair. And the companies reputation, as I will share my bad experience. But if a company is poisoning the real world, than this is clearly a crime. And I did not say, no more police is needed.

Ah - I thought you were addressing the "bad bread" part, not just the ToS change for Hearthstone. Fair enough.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#283

Post by loup-vaillant »

eridius wrote: post #272
loup-vaillant wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May have been the one that "helpfully" deleted your music, and replaced it by compressed version, even if you didn't bought it via iTunes . Or deleted your files period , if it detected a not so "equivalent" version you could download. Supposedly to save local disk space. I recall an accounting of a composer losing his work file that way —they got compressed behind his back. Thank goodness he had a backup.

That was never an iTunes feature. That was a bug, that affected a relatively low number of people, and was fixed IIRC within a week.

I stand corrected, sorry.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#284

Post by mahyarm »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #278
mahyarm wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MP3 hasn't changed as a standard or probably as a codebase for decades. Your apps are changing every week, and apps tend to grow in size as more and more code & features are added to them. It's a natural consequence of most software projects. The binary size of swift projects doesn't catch most people, only large projects with > 400k lines of code as they go over the cellular download limit. It's the new hotness, so…

That's an interesting problem. Do you find it's that bad for a new project as well? I've otherwise heard nothing but good things about working with Swift, and it's the only macOS/iOS-specific language I've actually worked with a little bit for its rather quick learning curve. So I guess the problem is pretty simple, if not immediately obvious for the details of it. I sigh and guess that means I just have to upgrade s…

The swift scalability problems start coming up around 70k lines of code, so for the typical case of 1 or 2 developers it doesn't come up. But if you start getting a large codebase:

* indexing will take forever

* xcode will beachball continuously

* the debugger will crash because the codebase is too much to handle

* build times will be 4-5x more than the equivalent obj-c codebase

* startup times will balloon significantly if you have many separate libraries, since using swift forces you to use dylibs. 60-100 libraries will mean 3-5 seconds being added to your app startup time

They are all solvable problems, but it will take several years before they are fixed. But I don't think swift will be better than C++ development, since they are both similar languages as far as compiler tradeoffs go.

I notice some lag even in small swift projects compared to objective-c, but it isn't major enough to worry about.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#285

Post by mcguire »

hutzlibu wrote: post #260
mcguire wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an exercise, list everything you have bought in the last month or so; food, gas, electronics, whatever. Now list all the ways those products could be adulterated, fraudulently modified, or faked. Now list the specialized knowledge and skills you would need to detect the fraud. Now try to get some work done while you are caveat emptoring.

why should I know everything? There are many other experts, hackers, organizations, newspapers, etc. I can google before making a purchase. Just like it allready is, only with more responsibility for everyone, but therefore hopefully better marketpositions for nice companys.

And of course, no one lies on the internet.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#286

Post by Nomentatus »

astrange wrote: post #198
Nomentatus wrote: post #147

This isn't a new demon-haunted world, this is the old, demon-haunted world before nineteenth-century progressive politics, back when "milk" that wasn't half chalk still might have a fish in it (see famous Thoreau quote on evidence.) We aren't enforcing the laws we have and our grandfathers and mothers had. (Three guesses why.) Not on monopolies, contracts, patent misuse... nothing. Just this week I and Hearthstone ca…

> Blizzard's new policy insists on a credit card and that I owe them for purchases made if they leak the card no! This can’t hurt you if you use a credit and not a debit card. Any false charge on a credit card is not your fault, and it’s not your money. The CC company will pay for it.

Blizzard will claim the charge is in no way fraudulent, my proving it is in court would take years.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#287

Post by SolarNet »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #264
walterbell wrote: post #2

See efforts to pass Right-to-Repair laws in several U.S. states: https://repair.org & https://ifixit.org/right From http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a2... "... farmers have worked on their own equipment "for decades, generations even." Brasch also pointed to the emerging DIY sources of information in the world as a way that farmers and others who want to make repairs can learn about their equ…

The sad part of the "right to repair" laws is that they're going to force Apple to stop doing the "Activation Lock" feature that has been a real boon to everyone who doesn't steal consumer electronic devices.

Why? Being able to repair a device doesn't mean being able to circumvent anti-theft features; mechanics would be morally obligated to report a device brought in for repairs with such a lock activated.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#288

Post by copperx »

cpeterso wrote: post #42
zaroth wrote: post #17

Why do our phones, which certainly felt damn snappy the day we bought them, inevitablely seem to slow down to the point of unusability after a couple dozen months? Even after a factory reset and installing no apps at all... I know it didn't take that long to open/close the built in apps when I bought that iPhone 4, 5, 5s... The only thing I can think of is the flash drive is slowing down as it wears. Or, the CPU cloc…

My iPhone 6 used to be snappy, but now takes almost 10 seconds to just open an app. Perhaps new OS updates are not as well-optimized for older iPhones as they are for the latest version. Ars Technica's Android 8.0 deep-dive has some interesting charts showing Android device performance deteriorating over time: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-8-0-oreo-tho...

How can a piece code be optimized for one phone but not for another? Are we dealing with a bunch of #ifdefs here?

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#289

Post by muddi900 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #257
astrange wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blizzard's new policy insists on a credit card and that I owe them for purchases made if they leak the card no! This can’t hurt you if you use a credit and not a debit card. Any false charge on a credit card is not your fault, and it’s not your money. The CC company will pay for it.

It depends on how you define "hurt"; while the CC company will take care of it, it's not instant - and it's no fun dealing with someone going over your credit limit on a cross-state shopping spree. By all means, please - don't use debit cards online - but it's still not a panacea.

Also, sometimes charges are reversed via chargeback requests, and I have beaten chargeback requests because the customer claimed the CC was stolen, but I had the correct billing info.
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