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Programming

+ - Brendan Eichs advice to the next generation->

Submitted by Pivot
Pivot writes "[...] at the time, mostly we felt the need to move very quickly, not to make money but because we knew Microsoft was coming after us. Microsoft low-balled Netscape in late '94, and the Jims (Clark and Barksdale) told them to pound sand. After that, we felt the monster truck riding up on our little Yugo's rear bumper, month by month.[...]

As far as us not selling out: live and learn. I'm not sure I'll ever have the opportunity to apply this knowledge, but here it is for you kids who may end up in a rocket-like startup.

Either get your unfair share, or get your technical goods, or both (in your dreams) — but don't just work hard to try to invent something new in a hurry, to improve the nascent Web. You might not have the good grace I've had with Mozilla and Firefox to make up for it."
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Comment: Re:Why are we so worried about RAM (Score 1, Informative) 505

by cbrocious (#28408649) Attached to: Memory Usage of Chrome, Firefox 3.5, et al.

This is a false dichotomy. Most software that uses less RAM is actually also faster.

Nowadays, it's usually faster to recompute than read it all back from RAM, and if an interactive program uses a lot of RAM, then it's likely keeping a lot of junk in memory that it doesn't need.

Wow, this is a perfect example of completely misunderstanding memory-CPU tradeoffs. No. For a non-trivial amount of data, it is never cheaper to recompute the data, at access-time. It may be faster overall, as you might be able to use the freed RAM in a better way elsewhere, but it will never speed the accessing task up.

If you recompute the data constantly, it has to hit RAM and then read it back, unless you're dealing with a dataset small enough to be stored completely in cache, in which case this is a nonissue anyway. More caching is never a bad thing, so long as you set smart defaults for how the caching is done, and you allow the users to configure it. More RAM, in the hands of a smart developer, is a Good Thing (TM).

Comment: Re:It may be illegal.. (Score 3, Informative) 181

by cbrocious (#28044853) Attached to: Investigators Replicate Nokia 1100 Banking Hack
You don't even need to go the FPGA route. The baseband firmware on the iPhone has been patched for an unlocking, there's nothing stopping someone from patching it to change the IMEI built into the phone or the IMSI it "reads" from the SIM. Change these and the phone can become any other.
The Courts

Mininova Starts Filtering Torrents 267

Posted by timothy
from the afterthought-beforetrial dept.
Dreen writes with this snippet from TorrentFreak: "Just a few days before their court appearance, Mininova, the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, has started to filter content. The site is using a third-party content recognition system that will detect and remove torrent files that link to copyright-infringing files."

Advancement in position.

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