As in many large projects, even more so with a large company,
the point is not to react when the problems are happening,
it is to preempt these problems, foresee them and prevent their happening.
So indeed, by 2018, even though Intel has not yet fallen, it's actually already late.
The roots of the problems seems to be earlier, and that's where the CEO, and the Board, should have reacted.
Wow, LZ4 high compression mode has become really fast, at least on my system.
I don't need to settle on some lower compression setting now. That's -9 all the way.
To begin with, it requires the distance between 2 consecutive matches to be exactly 65536. This is extremely rare. Mountains of files never generate such a situation.
Then it needs to employ a repcode match as the match following the 65536 literals. Repcode matches are more common after short literal lengths (1-3 bytes). Needless to say, 65536 is far from this territory, so it's uncommon to say the least.
Finally, the block splitter must be active (hence only high compression modes),
and it must decide to split the block exactly at the boundary between the literals and the repcode match.
So this is not 0, since Google found a sample, but all these conditions _together_ have an astronomically low chance to happen, as in competitive with winning the Powerball jackpot. I wouldn't worry so much for my own dozens of archives.
This guy has no idea what he's talking about.
Yet again another click-baity title, followed by an angry rant, the topic of which has nothing to do with C after all (but readers have to go through an impressive amount of noise to deduct that).
Quite the reverse actually, the btrfs estimator is way worse than the zstd one. By using the btrfs estimator, you leave a ton of compression ratio on the table, for no good reason.
My own experience with this group has been remarkably similar. Oversized ego, dismissive of others, overtly aggressive to competing ideas and technologies, the Rust core team is simply one of the worst I've ever had to make contacts with.
The overall feeling when dealing with them is that they are so sure that they represent the "future of programming" that they want the rest of the world to burn now, and no one else than themselves to benefit from the aftermaths.
(I used to be active on Rust in the 2014-2018 era, but then moved away, essentially disgusted by the attitude).
Well, indeed, there are limits to copyrights that are supposed to be applicable when using trivial common names.
But ever since a certain company decided to call itself "fruit", and then go on rampage attacking small players which themselves used to be called "fruit" under the petty reason that they are actually producing and selling "fruit", there is a sense in US that, as long as you got the balls and the lawyers, there is just no limit. Limits of the rules, even when written, are for "others".
Or maybe this is a classical troll scheme, like we have seen a hundred times, black money used to confiscate a public good (a common name) and ransom it to highest bidder, all this with the entire backing of Uncle Sam's own lawyers.
I think the pb is that it's so barebone that pretty much nothing works out of the box. One has to add a few more components, depending on which application needs to run (as an OS alone is, well, not an end in itself).
However, that's where it stings : adding "components", yet but which ones ? in which order ? how ?
Componentization was not a topic, so there's no tool, almost no doc, just tribal knowledge on the topic.
That makes it essentially useless for the vast majority of humanity.
Well, maybe you have to remember the capacities of these days. If my memory serves me right, a "good" computer for win98se was 64 MB of RAM. But of course, there were plenty of "less powerful" ones still running, with 32 or even 16 MB of RAM.
With such limitation, I can see how a 800x600 BMP image can become a drain on RAM. The swap engine tries to make up for it transparently by using swap space on spin-disk HDD, but then, it becomes sloooow.
Interestingly, the author manages to spend the entire blog entry without even mentioning Apple's own Ad Network. If there is a single example where you pay (the devices, the apps) and are nonetheless tracked (without even receiving a warning selection prompt, in contrast with _all others_ Ad networks), it should be this one.
The part where he is wrong is the premisses that every new computer must more or less gives up all the software of the previous one in order to reach a new trajectory.
This used to be more or less true with early 80's computers, such as Apple II or C64, but that's exactly what changed with the PC. 32-bit arrived, and kept compatibility with 16-bit alive. Windows arrived, but (initially) kept compatibility with DOS. etc. Fast forward today, and the Mac M1 arrives, and can still count of Rosetta to continue running x64 applications.
This is a key change, and a necessary one, as rewriting everything for a new system is just a killing blow.
Unfortunately for him, this mistaken analysis is exactly what lead Jobs to the NeXt, a new computer re-invented from scratch, dropping everything that existed prior to rebuild it. This costed too much time and energy, and the NeXt was late, expensive, incomplete, a commercial failure. Jobs was lucky to be bought by Apple before going under.
And arguably, that's a lesson he learned well. Immediately after, while taking command of Apple, he states basically the opposite : re-use everything that can be re-used, especially open source. Only redevelop what you think you can do better.
You obviously haven't lived a single of these "trainings".
Once they are in place, it's part of a broader culture.
People receiving these mandatory trainings are afraid. During the training, they comply, and look at each other. After the training, they are still afraid. They know it's part of a general strategy to prey on the scape goats, so if any of them "laugh" about the "training", he risks being reported or complained about by another employee, even outside of working place and working hours, because mandatory Reporting of any Deviance under penalty of job termination is also Part of the Training !
But hey, I get it, as long as "others" have to suffer it, you don't care.
That's not the reality.
Once they arrive, these kind of trainings become Compulsory for everybody. Those who refused are fired, with cause.
Well, everybody "white", of course, thus worth being "reminded" of their "privilege". And also their flaws. I mean, if they are white, they are necessarily racist. If they seem not to be, they are just hiding it. If they defend themselves, it's a proof of their privilege, and by extension their racism. If you are a man, you are also a rapist in hiding. Etc.
Just pass a few hours receiving such kind of "training", get it repeated every year just in case, and we'll see how you think about it afterwards.
but Hey,
THANKS APPLE, they CURATED the App Store !
(PS: if you got scammed and get your bank account siphoned off, or lost all your bitcoin, this is obviously Your Fault. Now that you have a problem, let's correct the previous statement : Actually, Apple Never promised anything, right ?)