pmjordan

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241.
by pmjordan 14y ago
Yes, drastically , I'm sure. OSX heavily uses swap, even when a lot of memory is available (the dynamic pager). On iOS, the dynamic pager is disabled. This is particularly an issue with a language whose default memory allocation behaviou
242.
by pmjordan 14y ago
While I'm as annoyed at Apple as you are (environmentally friendly my arse), Android devices don't exactly have a history of frequent and timely software updates. The saving grace is that new apps often still support ancient OS releases.
243.
by pmjordan 14y ago
The RAM thing is a nice theory until you consider the 4th gen iPod touch has a similar number of pixels as iPad 1, also has 256MB of RAM and also gets iOS6 support. They're still selling it now (just about), so that's probably why. I'm sure
244.
by pmjordan 14y ago
...something Apple has never (arguably) done before. Well, pretty much every 10.x.0 OSX release has had some nasty regressions in it, but they're generally not quite as easy to spot as the maps fiasco. What's worse is that this isn't a ne
245.
by pmjordan 14y ago
All good points. I tried to find some useful data online, but I was surprised how hard it is to find a graph of revenue of a publicly traded company. All sorts of other metrics are available, just not revenue and profit. (let alone inflatio
246.
by pmjordan 14y ago
I get the impression that America's public sector is anything but small. Sure, the spending is distributed differently, but it's still colossal. And I certainly don't believe America is equipped with [...] with a more risk encouraging ment
247.
by pmjordan 14y ago
One immediate issue I see with slow-growth companies is that if all companies grow slowly, that puts a cap on the maximum growth of the overall economy. The other thing we in the software world mustn't forget is that we have marginal cost
248.
by pmjordan 14y ago
I think part of the problem is that job security is still drilled into everyone's heads: older, educated European parents are quasi-unfireable at this point (having been hired on old-style contracts with ridiculously favourable terms), and
249.
by pmjordan 14y ago
Maybe it's different in the US, but in Europe, the Xbox is basically just a gamer thing. Many people who play games on their iDevices and maybe even a Wii wouldn't even consider buying an Xbox - the branding/marketing/positioning tells them
250.
by pmjordan 14y ago
I have no idea if Amazon actually pay their tax or if they're the type of company using vigorous avoidance schemes. My understanding is that for eBooks and other digital downloads, they do. They get around VAT for DVDs and similar items b
251.
by pmjordan 14y ago
[citation needed] I dislike paying taxes as much as the next person, but where exactly are you getting these supposed facts from? Particularly in retail, the fact that VAT is an indirect tax doesn't really matter much as late payment basica
252.
by pmjordan 14y ago
I'm not saying it's easy. In fact, they seem to handle the complexity admirably: you can buy most items from anywhere in Europe from any of the sites and they charge all the appropriate fees. Which makes it all the more odd that the individ
253.
by pmjordan 14y ago
Agreed, Amazon's regional stuff is really, really weird. Base item prices seem to vary wildly between sites, and there are some real head-scratchers related to postage: amazon.es does not have free "supersaver" delivery, but amazon.co.uk wi
254.
by pmjordan 14y ago
Anyone who uses these glorified WebView wrappers is doing themselves a disservice. I've never used it, but my understanding is that Titanium does not run in a web view. It compiles the JS down to C/ObjC, then that gets compiled to nativ
255.
by pmjordan 14y ago
I'm certain I've seen clocks which pause on the minute like the stop-to-go ones sold in rail enthusiast magazines, railway museum gift shops etc. many years ago. Obviously, they don't include an actual stop-to-go master/slave system, they j
256.
by pmjordan 14y ago
I am aware that I am free to use UIWebView based browsers, which are slower than Safari and just as crashy. Freedom!
257.
by pmjordan 14y ago
In case you're not aware: Chrome on iOS uses UIWebView, which is Safari without the fast JavaScript engine. The web interface for Google Maps certainly works on Safari, but it's certainly not as slick or as fast as the app. Maybe this is du
258.
by pmjordan 14y ago
Mobile Safari is slow and crashy, good thing I can replace it with… waitaminute. As far as I know there's no decent replacement for Maps either; it remains to be seen if Apple will permit a direct replacement. If Google doesn't release one
259.
by pmjordan 14y ago
Has anyone installed the relevant firmware update https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1590 for 2010 MacBook Airs? I'd like to know if that introduces the same bug.
260.
by pmjordan 14y ago
As 'finnw has mentioned, almost 50% of 4-digit numbers have at least one repeated digit, so there is high chance of ending up with such a number. FWIW I have 2 UK cards from different banks where the PIN has no repeated digits. I suspect yo
261.
by pmjordan 14y ago
Yeah, fuzzing stream inputs is relatively straightforward. It's everything else that affects program outcome that's the issue. Trying to implement something like this via LD_PRELOAD manually is going to be a pretty enormous task. Realistica
262.
by pmjordan 14y ago
Even without a true sandbox, and with JITed/compiled code, you should be able to run it on a stack of its own, either a distinct kernel thread or a user space thread. If the code doesn't call out to event-handling code frequently enough, a
263.
by pmjordan 14y ago
I would not be surprised if compilers were the most complex examples of that kind of program in the wild. Still, I would be surprised if automated testing of a compiler was as difficult as, say, test cases kernel-space driver that simulat
264.
by pmjordan 14y ago
I write a bad bit of JavaScript and the browser just freezes This one always gets me. The browser people are (rightly) obsessed with security, but a simple DoS attack like this has worked for years.
265.
by pmjordan 14y ago
As a user of software, I get similarly frustrated as the author. ("user" here includes use of third-party libraries to build on) However, developing system-level software, I've come to realise that even if you really, really care about th
266.
by pmjordan 14y ago
If I remember correctly, each file system has its own mount.fsname command, the mount command itself just routes to those individual commands (based on the -t argument). You could surely add tools for a filesystem without modifying the gene
267.
by pmjordan 14y ago
My understanding is that the civil/copyright matter has been settled, and he's now still facing criminal prosecution for (mis)using MIT's network infrastructure. So it's not actually the downloading itself he's in trouble for at the momen
268.
by pmjordan 14y ago
The binary ?: operator is great for providing a fallback for NULL pointers, especially in Objective-C where nil is everywhere. Kind of like || in JavaScript.
269.
by pmjordan 14y ago
Much like the Medfield SoC it derives from, I suspect Clover Trail doesn't use a BIOS or various basic I/O lines and conventions that have been standard in the PC world for decades. So yeah, I wouldn't expect a stock Win7 to run at all.
270.
by pmjordan 14y ago
It's interesting how spinlocks are making a comeback in user space code. They are widely used in kernel code, but their use has previously been discouraged in application code. As this example illustrates, it's pretty easy to get them wrong

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