std_throwaway

Could someone please explain for the uninitiated what lock-free actually means and why it matters.

After reading http://www.drdobbs.com/lock-free-data-structures/184401865 i got this:

* Normal locking means that the process which holds the lock can hold it arbitrarily long thereby locking out all other processes. Also a live-lock and dead-lock can occur if there is a conflict between processes which try to acquire the same set of resources but cannot acquire all of them at once.

* Wait-free means that no algorithm working with the data structure will be delayed arbitrarily. This is pretty strong. A simple example would be a ring-buffer with a single reader and writer.

* Lock-free means that no process can block the resource for longer than it takes to read/write it. There will always be at least one process that can make progress while the others may have to wait (weaker than wait-free, but stronger than ordinary locked).

Normal processes on most operating systems can be interrupted at any instruction. This would make it impossible to carry out a multiple-instruction sequence to lock-modify-unlock the data structure because it could leave the data structure locked. Does this in turn mean that there must be a "commit" instruction that is uninterruptible?

Unless you also need to free, it's pretty simple.

Thank you for your honest and enlightening response. I'm glad that we still have programmers who show the courage to take risks and go beyond what they deem possible and find true knowledge that cannot be understood by the commoners mind. You are an inspiration to me.

I'm glad the author joined us for a Q&A sesh.

Where exactly in the landscape of postmodernism do you locate your data structures? Are you happy with the outcome and what was the original inspiration to write that outstanding piece of code?

Don't get me wrong, but professionals are those who deploy Win3.11 machines running on embedded i386 cores for big money today. It's more about meeting some specs, getting certifications and providing reliability than it is about technical details.

Your definition is more bleeding-edge-users who are constantly limited by technology and could justify to pay a couple thousand for a 10% increase in performance. This group overlaps but is not equal to the professional users.

Many real professionals will love the new MBP lineup while many more will hate it.

Reddit used to be a place where intelligent users had a quality discussion. It used to happen. At least in my imagination. What I see now is a machine which produces memes (still going strong there) and propaganda (growing stronger) but the discussion is on a much lower intellectual level.

In my eyes reddit quality, especially the frontpage, is declining year over year and it's not really getting better. It might be my age but I'm less and less interested in the content which gets all the upvotes. Also, the bigger subreddits seem to show this decline where quality discussion doesn't happen anymore.

Is there actually a long-term analysis about how reddit content and discussion changed over the years?

Given, that the body still functions,

> "go for a walk" or "work out" or "sleep more"

is actually sound advice to bring back normality. "Fake it until you make it" is part of recovering and becoming a "normal person" again. Those "normal people" giving you the advice catch depression like one catches a cold. They suffer for three days and then it vanishes again and the sun begins to rise in the moring. They don't understand the concept of eternal darkness and slow but steady decay while being still technically alive.

In order to recover the source of the illness needs to be cut out from ones body and life, whatever the source is. Sometimes (often) it's not even obvious.

Yes, you are in pain, yes, you are broken, yes, you cannot go back to your old life. But there might be a new life you can evolve into. You probably have to let go of things you hold dearly. Habits, people, substances, part of your senses, part of your body, your goals, your beliefs, etc. whatever it is that makes you sick.

One thing for a some perspective.

Many people struggle to even achieve 100% most of the time. Work consumes such great amounts of energy that not much fun can be had on evenings or weekends. Going out with friends? Forget it. Laying down is most that can be done. Even though that work is only 8-10 hours each day (not much considering how much many people work) there is nothing left at the end of the day. All energy is spent on just keeping oneself alive and getting by. Sometimes even that is too much and after years of a seemingly good job, everything is gone. Quitting is not an option since there is not much money saved. Working less won't provide the money needed to keep on going. Changing jobs won't cut it since all other jobs would be worse. With friends forgotten and family dead, there is no point to keep on going.

In order to be acceptable to the general public you need to represent a wide array of contradicting opinions. If your propaganda is too bland it will be rejected in increasing numbers and turning up the volume then will only make people close their ears. I don't think it is easy to run such a system but I do think it works pretty well most of the time.

I do object. They may be a private entity but they control a humongous amount of information flow which puts them in a very public position. We may argue where to draw the line but this extreme consolidation of user attention to a few gatekeepers is a problem for the public and needs to be dealt with by the public.

They could pay a third party to do this and provide them with the necessary documentation of the internals (which probably don't stray very far from standard hardware).

A simple announcement as in "We're working on it. Expect Linux drivers in 6-12 months." would suffice to calm the waves.

Dear IT overlords please alleviate the burden of critical thinking of my fellow people as thinking is too hard for them and they might stray from the golden path.

Misinformation is any information that does not follow the official guidelines laid out by the ministry of truth.

Neither is any of the other manufacturers and yet, there is a public outcry if a notebook runs only the latest version of Windows.

The real question is if Apple missed providing drivers or if it is deliberate.

Could someone enlighten me what the problem is with automated documentation systems?

Have they stopped to "just work" in creating an overview of all global variables, functions, classes and their inheritance?

I found it very convenient to just drop a few documentation strings at the function/class definition for looking it up later in the autogenerated documentation. Of course you can overcomplicate these things and waste time. But in my opinion autogenerated documentation is better than no documentation at all.

Yet, we all know what happens to companies who lose their developers. It just takes a few years to materialize.

It's still possible to release the thick "real MBP" with the old ports, big battery and up to 32/64 GB RAM.

I'm not surprised by these numbers. I believe they targeted their market pretty well and hit that 90% of customers who would usually buy a MacBook or a MacBook Air and now pay a premium for the Pro.

Only maybe 50% of actual professionals were left without a proper option which may account for maybe 5% of their sales or even less.

Meetings also serve the purpose of team building. Just seeing everybody casually in a room for a few minutes lowers the barriers of communication.

You are right but if you are in a meeting where only 5 minutes are relevant for you, you can either spend the rest sleeping or at least doing some work.

Yes, the problem is one of poor management where the system starts working against itself.

After reading the presentation, I'm imagining the presenter has an obnoxious loudmouth voice and totally misses the point.

He goes on and on to put down C++ and the four book authors as if he holds a personal grudge against both. He makes it seem as if C++ programs were written by code monkeys pasting examples from books in order to make it work while other programming languages are god's word. It does not occur to me why he thinks that in C++ there should be a general solution for an iterator over any kind of collection^1. Yet C++ allows to implement data structures on the lowest level and only the programmer may know how to iterate over a certain multiply linked structure (if possible at all). The Perl counterexample looks like a straw-man to me.

I agree with you, the core of the talk comes after the talk and is not presented properly.

1: For standard collections in C++ there are iterators predefined and you can iterate over the collection easily.

While Americans ponder about how rail is and can not be the solutions, the Chinese build train connections between megacities competing with aeroplanes in ground speed.

This guy sounds like someone who feels the new MBP satisfies his needs well. Good for him.

There are other people with differing needs. Really. No need to put them down with straw-man rhetoric.

Apple should have called these new MBPs Macbook without the Pro. Instead introduce the FatBookPro with the size, battery and all the ports of the last generation MBPs but add 2-4 USB-C ports.

Then make an option for up to 64GB of RAM and customers would only complain about the price - but pay it because it's the best you can get.

Compared to the older models I'm effectively getting less at a higher price point.

The Magsafe is missing - it saved me quite a few times and is very convenient.

Work with a DSLR (SD-Card) and USB-Sticks now requires adapters.

Yes, Apple is moving forward and these incompatibilities are others peoples fault who live in the past and didn't yet move on to an all-Apple ecosystem. But the sad truth is that - while I don't dislike MacOS - I don't need it. I can live with Windows or Linux just as well. I might just go back again.

Is this just a guess or did you investigate?

I'd be happy if they'd kept the Magsafe and two USB3 ports and the SD-Card reader. Add 2-4 USB-C ports on top of that and I'd be happy.

Using a USB-C adapter for Video output seems acceptable to me since VGA ain't coming back and there are quite a range of replacement connectors which are all semi-incompatible to each other. An adapter for wired Ethernet is also acceptable since you're connecting to other wires anyways. Not optimal but acceptable.

Not acceptable, though, is having to carry an adapter to connect a common USB-Stick or SD-Card. These things won't go away in the next 4 years.

> Some people seem to think that the MacBook is only for developers and Apple is obliged to listen to only their feedback. News flash: world doesn't revolve around hacker news.

The problem is not that Apple makes hardware for non-developers (for which it may actually be a great fit and value).

The problem is that Apple stopped making hardware for developers. A group of users which were quite happy with the previous offerings of Apple. There even was a time when the MacBooks were the best value a developer could get for reasonable money. Quite a few key users will make the switch to Windows&Linux based Laptops because Apple does not deliver anymore (not even at a high price point).