> "While technically true... I don't see how it contributes anything useful to the conversation, so I downvoted it."
If you don't see how it contributes to the conversation - why not just ignore it then? Just because you think this doesn't contribute to the conversation, doesn't make it true.
> "If you don't agree, that's fine..."
Clearly it's not "fine", otherwise you wouldn't try to silence comments you disagree with by down-voting them.
> "you commit the result if no other thread has stomped on your data"
What does "committing" mean here? If it means performing an atomic write (a-la CAS), then you're using a lock (see my next point).
> "If another thread has stomped on your data, you start over."
So you let your thread sit there in a spin-loop and CAS a condition-variable. That's a lock for all intents and purposes, and your system can still "dead-lock" (read: your thread will never get to "win the race"), if your "data gets stomped on" over and over again in-between reads (which are obviously non-atomic, otherwise you'd be locking there too).
> "Usually, there is some sort of guarantee that lock-free systems always make progress."
Getting a time-slice to continue running in a tight-loop while trying to CAS is not the same as "making progress".
"Making progress" would be - you'd get a chance to commit your changes and proceed to your next bit of business logic. But with contention, that's not guaranteed to happen at-all?
Yes, that aligns more closely with my mental model of a "lock-free algorithm", but what I see in practicality is people avoiding (or re-inventing) synchronization primitives, thinking that they don't belong in a "lock-free algorithm".
You can still use standard kernel-provided synchronization objects (mutex/events/semaphores) in your "lock-free applications", as long as you provide timeouts to blocking wait() calls, and handle abandoned objects gracefully.
> "the lock duration is strictly bounded; it is determined by the application or the thread-scheduler"
Practically speaking - wouldn't the exact duration be heavily influenced by the countless layers of abstraction beneath the application itself (kernel, scheduler, hardware, speculative execution, etc)? If so, can we ever truly make the claim that the "duration is strictly bounded"?
Lock-free algorithms will usually boil down to some combination of polling, waiting (sleep(), futex-style), or use what are essentially more fine-grained, hardware-backed locks (CAS, memory barriers, LOCK instructions, hardware-specific transactional instructions, etc). The locks are very much still there.
> "6% get 1.3% => 5x too little. I think we can cry a little."
Surely there's more to it than just percentages and genders?
First, how many companies are we actually talking about here? The Nordics are a smaller market - I don't expect it to be in the orders of thousands of companies - maybe several tens or several hundreds, at most. We shouldn't extrapolate if the sampling group is small.
Then, what about the other factors associated with investments? How are the investments spread across different sectors and industries? Locations? Growth prospects? Revenue/Operating Costs?
It's a very shallow comparison otherwise, without this data.
> "In reality very very few ISPs are giving one IPv6 address per customer"
In actual reality, global IPv6 adoption is at ~33% [0, 1], so I'd say this is, at best, a premature and naive presumption. ISPs actively engage in rent-seeking, and resource scarcity is another contributing factor. In-short, there's nothing in OPs comment that warrants the downvotes.
Content aside - I feel like this video is terribly edited, scripted and produced. It's impossible to follow - thanks to all the shallow jokes, weird cuts and messy presentation. Almost like it's intentionally made for people without an attention span...
To people using custom domains (for email, etc): what is your plan in-case you end up losing the domain name (either temporarily, or otherwise)? How do you prepare for this, reduce the risk, etc?
Losing your domain name can happen due to any number of reasons: hacked account (at the registrar), social engineering, etc. There can also be issues with registrars going bankrupt, increasing fees (see dot-org case), laws changing (especially with ccTLDs - see the dot-EU case with British citizens post-brexit) and much more...
> "What I see here is a senior manager type, maybe a VP or a bit below it, who needs numbers that go dramatically up and to the right in the short term and is thinking about their own personal success."
I mean, there are plenty of other ways to demonstrate value without forcing people to login with a Facebook account to use their Oculus devices. In-fact, I'm not sure what added value this requirement demonstrates in the first place?
People already pay for the hardware, servicing, apps/games, and upgrades.
I think some of the artifacts on the video at 0:12 (handbag thing) are very noticeable. Same thing at 0:19 (cat)and at 0:28 (cat again). Otherwise, looks nice :)
> "In my coffee analogy, the promotion of the fair-trade alternative would be based on the fair-trade mechanism for ensuring the lower levels of the production chain receive a fairer share of the income. Whether or not the author pays less or more at the store is irrelevant to the argument."
But for there to be any form of income trickling down production chains, someone has to be willing to pay something for the services they consume. Is this controversial in any way?
> "I gave you an example by quoting how expensive it is to run a "free" jitsi service."
That's an entirely meaningless argument. Here's what you're doing:
> "I run a large-ish jitsi instance: approx €50/month just for the VPS, my hours probably add another €2000/month to that."
Here's what Sussman is doing:
> "I used a Jitsi Meet server that I installed on an obsolete and otherwise useless computer that was sitting idle in my laboratory, on its way to the electronics junk heap."
The two scenarios are not comparable.
I'm not making exaggerated claims here. The University can absolutely afford to do better, the students (who pay exorbitant tuition fees) deserve better, and any "libre software" idealism here is simply people trying to cut costs, jeopardizing the quality of education and the overall experience, while touting moralistic superiority...
Distance learning, for example, could've been a much more widespread and accepted thing, had it not been for instructors cobbling up together scrapyard-bound hardware to use as a chat server. Coming up with a proper solution takes investing (time, money, expertise) - which some people will evidently avoid at all costs...
> "You seem to fail to grasp the difference between "free as in beer" (gratis) and "free as in freedom" (libre)."
Why are we going back-and-forth about this again?
I previously asked whether there were concrete examples of software used during the course that were "free as in freedom" but NOT "free as in beer", and the response to my question was that no such examples were available.
It's the actions that matter here, and the bottom line is that they weren't intending to pay for anything to begin with. And by that, they were abdicating the "it's not about the money" argument, in my honest opinion.
We're discussing an educational institution with power and authority (MIT), which promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume.
Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted for when we choose to not pay for the coffee we consume.
Is this a sustainable approach? Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")? And why does a university, which takes exorbitant tuition fees, not prioritize the best software for the course (over the one that's merely free)?
What's wrong with having to pay for software? Or learning to accept that some software is proprietary? Or even with learning to use the right tool for the job, even if that "right tool" may sometimes come at a cost?
Students are required to pay for their education at MIT. Were the costs of this course offset with the costs of the non-free software used in an otherwise "standard course"?
People put immense effort into developing software. Is asking for compensation for one's time and effort somehow wrong?
And in many cases, proprietary/commercial software really does outperform the equivalent FOSS/Libre solution. Why are we teaching people to reach out for the suboptimal tools in these situations?
I think it's because the generated text will generally follow a reasonable "structure", it's "framed" relatively well and you (as a person) will recognize those patterns quickly. There's plenty of "glue" used throughout the text. Those are all patterns which we pick up very quickly, and we're used to seeing them in "real text".
Exampels from the comment above include using things like: "A year ago", "made headlines", "Now, it's the {event}, and {name} is at it again. But this time, ...", "{name} was not impressed", "You know, I feel like, I feel like you could have ...", "I don't know if... but...".
Those are all very common in those "online celebrity magazine" type texts...
It's only when you actually read into the stuff that's in-between, you'll come to see it's pretty much a load of nonsense. But that takes a bit more time and slower reading.
If you don't see how it contributes to the conversation - why not just ignore it then? Just because you think this doesn't contribute to the conversation, doesn't make it true.
> "If you don't agree, that's fine..."
Clearly it's not "fine", otherwise you wouldn't try to silence comments you disagree with by down-voting them.
This is my last comment on HN.