Real Life and What's Happening...

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Rather than the long story I was going to post, I’ll just say I hope none of you ever become long-term caregivers to elderly family, and if you do I hope they appreciate the sacrifices you make for them.

Sorry to hear that. Been there and if I never experience it again it will be too soon.
 
After that it sort of just stuck as a habit and I've been keeping my head shaved since. All the years in the military helped make it a no big deal situation plus I was starting to thin out as well towards the top rear section of my head. So much easier to shave once every week or two if I'm being lazy.
Around junior high I was aware that I was highly likely to go bald from how my father's hair is and how my older brother hair (he was 7 years older) was turning out. What sealed my plan to deal with it was when I started to play high school football. The defensive line coach was this short energetic guy. He was a decent coach but for whatever reason did the comb over to try to hide his baldness.

So throughout all the time I practiced high school whenever this coach got angry or excited about something that combover would just start flapping like a maddog. I thought to myself I will be damned if I let that happened to me. It took a few year until late college but I looked in the mirror and thought. Yup that top is coming off. I kept the hair in the back of my head until a decade later when my wife told me that I would look better with it buzzed off. She actually used Patrick Stewart as an example of the look she liked. So I did it and still doing it a couple of decade later. Sure made my pandemic haircuts a lot easier.

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My phone is dying - it keeps losing contact with its SIM card and insisting on a restart. I ordered a new-old-stock Samsung Note 10 off Ebay so we'll see if the stylus works better for the UI than my fat fingers on a touch screen. This one takes two SIM cards so I should be able to install an Indonesian SIM card on it as well.

I'm kinda disappointed with the short lifespan of even upmarket smartphones.
 
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That sucks. Is it a newish phone?
 
That sucks. Is it a newish phone?
New old stock Samsung S4 bought about 3 years ago. It may be the SIM card, as I transferred that across from its predecessor. I got it to replace an S3 that had died as it took the same size SIM card so I could just transfer it over. However the S3 only lasted about 4 years or so before it died completely and refused to boot one day.

S series Samsung phones are quite pricey when they're current. I don't think I would be amused to have a £700 phone crap out after 3-4 years, although I knew someone that had a S2 that lasted for much longer, so YMMV I guess. I've been buying new-old-stock phones that are just out of date so the edge comes off the price but in theory they're in effectively new condition. However, they've not had a track record of lasting so far, so I'm not sure it's been that effective. OTOH the sample size is really too small to draw inference from so maybe I'll get lucky with this one.
 
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New old stock Samsung S4 bought about 3 years ago. It may be the SIM card, as I transferred that across from its predecessor. I got it to replace an S3 that had died as it took the same size SIM card so I could just transfer it over. However the S3 only lasted about 4 years or so before it died completely and refused to boot one day.

S series Samsung phones are quite pricey when they're current. I don't think I would be amused to have a £700 phone crap out after 3-4 years, although I knew someone that had a S2 that lasted for much longer, so YMMV I guess.
Well I bought a Pixel 2 in early 2018. Close to release. It's still working but stopped being supported in late 2020. Some buttons work intermittently. Getting a pixel 6 in November.

I think we're in the equivalent of the late 386-pentium stage for phones. Yeah the old ones mostly work but things are still changing rapidly enough it isn't worth spending all day getting your 386sx to do what the new pentium can do in 1/4 the time.
 
Well I bought a Pixel 2 in early 2018. Close to release. It's still working but stopped being supported in late 2020. Some buttons work intermittently. Getting a pixel 6 in November.

I think we're in the equivalent of the late 386-pentium stage for phones. Yeah the old ones mostly work but things are still changing rapidly enough it isn't worth spending all day getting your 386sx to do what the new pentium can do in 1/4 the time.

The S3 definitely felt like that. It was a two-core CPU moving into an age of big-little 8 core CPUs and was quite short on memory. The S4 was a bit short on storage but wasn't the biggest configuration of that model by any means and still ran OK. I'm hoping the Note 10 will remain current for a while as it's not all that far behind the curve.

I did think of just getting a cheap one and assuming it will only last a couple of years.
In unrelated news, I'm rather enjoying the electro-swing compilations on Youtube, but what's with all the waifus? Clickbait, I guess, but they look well out of place.
 
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My phone is dying - it keeps losing contact with its SIM card and insisting on a restart. I ordered a new-old-stock Samsung Note 10 off Ebay so we'll see if the stylus works better for the UI than my fat fingers on a touch screen. This one takes two SIM cards so I should be able to install an Indonesian SIM card on it as well.

I'm kinda disappointed with the short lifespan of even upmarket smartphones.
I'm not a big Apple fan and never was for various reasons. That said once Microsoft screwed up with their smartphones which I actually really loved, UI etc wise. I bit the bullet and snagged an iPhone when the Windows phone started causing errors after doing research into Android based phones. If you gave me an Android phone free I'd give it away. The lack of proper software support, the expectancy to buy a new one every 18 to 24 months, the shit show that is the software store etc etc just made it a no brainer that it would be more worthwhile and cost effective for me to go with an iPhone.

I tend to keep up on tech even if I no longer work in the field, just so I'm aware and educated on what's going on out there. So anyhow long story, I'm still using the same iPhone SE that I bought in 2016, it works fine, still gets software updates and has given me not one single problem. My password manager works perfectly on it, the small amount of apps I use never give me an issue etc. While the UI like the Android UI bores me and Windows Phone's UI was much better it has more than paid for itself.

Works so well that we replaced all the kids phones while they were at university with new iPhones since the support for their Windows phones were going to become an issue sooner than later. Had them shipped to us, set em up over the holidays and got them all set up and going. We had to do that because our kids are tech idiots except for the lawyer. Even he makes me wince at times though. lol.My wife snagged a iPhone 6s I think it is and still has it. Two of the kids did break their phones since then and we replaced them.

The kids are still on our plan since it saves everyone money but now they now they have to buy their own. Told them that all four are over a quarter century plus of age these days, about damn time they paid for their own damn phones. lol. Anyhow my wife and I will be replacing our phones next spring/summer most likely once we get the notice that Apple won't be supporting the software for the phones anymore. Figure we'll have had perfectly fine working smart phones for almost seven years when we trade them in. That is why I went with an iPhone, it's a piece of hardware I need but I don't want to have to replace the damn thing every two years, that's crap. Plus the shitty Android OS support needs to die in a fire.
 
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E E-Rocker I relate my iPhone to a 1990 movie "Crazy People" and the part about truth in advertising. The part about volvos, "Boxy but safe/good". heh. Also the part about Jaguars makes me laugh every damn time. My iPhone does exactly what I need it to do, doesn't give me shit and lasts and damn long time with solid software support. Here is the scene with Dudley Moore and Paul Reiser.

 
I'm not a big Apple fan and never was for various reasons. That said once Microsoft screwed up with their smartphones which I actually really loved, UI etc wise. I bit the bullet and snagged an iPhone when the Windows phone started causing errors after doing research into Android based phones. If you gave me an Android phone free I'd give it away. The lack of proper software support, the expectancy to buy a new one every 18 to 24 months, the shit show that is the software store etc etc just made it a no brainer that it would be more worthwhile and cost effective for me to go with an iPhone.

I tend to keep up on tech even if I no longer work in the field, just so I'm aware and educated on what's going on out there. So anyhow long story, I'm still using the same iPhone SE that I bought in 2016, it works fine, still gets software updates and has given me not one single problem. My password manager works perfectly on it, the small amount of apps I use never give me an issue etc. While the UI like the Android UI bores me and Windows Phone's UI was much better it has more than paid for itself.

Works so well that we replaced all the kids phones while they were at university with new iPhones since the support for their Windows phones were going to become an issue sooner than later. Had them shipped to us, set em up over the holidays and got them all set up and going. We had to do that because our kids are tech idiots except for the lawyer. Even he makes me wince at times though. lol.My wife snagged a iPhone 6s I think it is and still has it. Two of the kids did break their phones since then and we replaced them.

The kids are still on our plan since it saves everyone money but now they now they have to buy their own. Told them that all four are over a quarter century plus of age these days, about damn time they paid for their own damn phones. lol. Anyhow my wife and I will be replacing our phones next spring/summer most likely once we get the notice that Apple won't be supporting the software for the phones anymore. Figure we'll have had perfectly fine working smart phones for almost seven years when we trade them in. That is why I went with an iPhone, it's a piece of hardware I need but I don't want to have to replace the damn thing every two years, that's crap. Plus the shitty Android OS support needs to die in a fire.

I'm yet to be convinced that there's anything special about Apple hardware - the phones at the top end of the Android space are not significantly cheaper. Apple's gimmick is their software and iOS apps and support might have a longer life span than Android, though. Around the era of the iPhone 4s it was considered to be a particularly high point for its day and my other half had a 4s.

UI has never been a big deal, but I suppose I used to run some pretty terrible window managers (twm anyone?) and never really cared much about the UX unless some aspect of it gets underfoot. My biggest gripe with today's gesture based smartphone UIs is that there are a lot of side effects and the ergonomics are designed for Asian teenagers. My fat fingers really lack the precision and manual dexterity to operate a smartphone without turning it into a game of minesweeper.

I suspect Android apps might be more memory hungry than iOS. Objective-C isn't wildly different from C++ behind the scenes, so the run-times are fairly efficient and significantly more frugal with memory than Java. Java has a decent memory overhead in its object model, even though just-in-time compilation can still result in fairly efficient binaries.
 
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We just got new iPhones this summer, as much because our iPhone 6s were full, partly because my wife was having so many problems with hers (probably because it was so full - mine was limping along OK), so we got the biggest iPhone 12 Pro Max so hopefully "full" will never be a problem... I'm sure our old phones would work just fine if we cleaned off all the videos to get them out of the 99% full range... We were forced to upgrade to the 6s from the 4 because we couldn't keep upgrading the software and apps.
 
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 my wife got me in 2018 is still working like a charm.
 
We just got new iPhones this summer, as much because our iPhone 6s were full, partly because my wife was having so many problems with hers (probably because it was so full - mine was limping along OK), so we got the biggest iPhone 12 Pro Max so hopefully "full" will never be a problem... I'm sure our old phones would work just fine if we cleaned off all the videos to get them out of the 99% full range... We were forced to upgrade to the 6s from the 4 because we couldn't keep upgrading the software and apps.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 my wife got me in 2018 is still working like a charm.

Mrs Nobby-W Nobby-W has had a series of midrange smartphones bought new over the past decade or so but they don't seem to last more than a few years - I make 4 that she's had since I've known her. I think the compact and portable nature makes it difficult to build ones strong enough to last long without being unacceptably heavy. Having said that, folks used to lug Nokia bricks around.

Also, we have a Samsung Tab S2 that has done a sterling job of surviving the tender ministrations of two pre-school spawn. It's actually bent if you look at it from side-on, but the glass hasn't shattered and it's still running like a trooper.

In related news, the SIM card for my new phone just arrived. No phone yet, though. I also have three M.2 heatsinks for some reason.
 
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We just got new iPhones this summer, as much because our iPhone 6s were full, partly because my wife was having so many problems with hers (probably because it was so full - mine was limping along OK), so we got the biggest iPhone 12 Pro Max so hopefully "full" will never be a problem... I'm sure our old phones would work just fine if we cleaned off all the videos to get them out of the 99% full range... We were forced to upgrade to the 6s from the 4 because we couldn't keep upgrading the software and apps.
I find the camera megapixels and storage size go up in tandem meaning it takes the same time for photo heavy users to fill a phone. I've had a Gmail account since they started. It's just now warning me I'm getting low on space. My wife who's a photo hog filled hers in 2 years
 
I find the camera megapixels and storage size go up in tandem meaning it takes the same time for photo heavy users to fill a phone. I've had a Gmail account since they started. It's just now warning me I'm getting low on space. My wife who's a photo hog filled hers in 2 years
Yea, that could bite us. If we fill these phones up, I'm going to have to upgrade my laptop to fit all the pictures... (phone is 512 GB, my laptop has 1 TB SSD [with only 104 GB free], 1 TB spinning disk [about 1/2 full]).
 
Yea, that could bite us. If we fill these phones up, I'm going to have to upgrade my laptop to fit all the pictures... (phone is 512 GB, my laptop has 1 TB SSD [with only 104 GB free], 1 TB spinning disk [about 1/2 full]).
My old NAS had 1.3TB which even with my pdf habits was not getting filled until 1) I married and photos started pouring in and 2) I got a 3d printer. Those STL files seem big.

Now I have a 5TB USB drive as a backup.
 
So it's Halloween Friday so naturally there are festivities at the College here, including a costume contest, which is one entry per class, either a student or the instructor. Somehow I've been convinced to allow them to costume me. There have been whispers of pig tails. Wish me well folks.
 
My old NAS had 1.3TB which even with my pdf habits was not getting filled until 1) I married and photos started pouring in and 2) I got a 3d printer. Those STL files seem big.

Now I have a 5TB USB drive as a backup.
For my laptop, a lot of what fills it is my ripped CD collection (some 500 CDs). A third of the SSD is also full with disk images for the VMs I use for work with another 275 GB of saved VM images on the spinning disk.

I think I have some 3 TB external drives but so far the 2 TB of space on my laptop is plenty.

My next laptop will assuredly have multiple TB of SSD...
 
Gabb-gabba blurt flimini-jib
This may or may not help but...
At a high level programming languages take the stuff the programmer writes(C, Java, JavaScript) and translates it to instructions the CPU can understand. I believe it's translate into assembly language which is specific to each CPU architecture. Think of it like a parent talking to a three year old. One has a large vocabulary to quickly express ideas but if you tell it to a three year old you have to use a lot of simple words to express the same idea. The run time is the child.


Probably not a great analogy but it's not so far off if you want to explain broad concepts.
 
What exactly does that phrase mean?

The runtime is the program, whatever platform it's running on (e.g. a JVM) and the environment it's executing in.

Objective-C compiles to native code and from my (passingly familiar) understanding, it's not radically different behind the scenes than C++. This means that:
  • An object that doesn't support polymorphism has essentially no overhead over a C struct, which is essentially a packed bundle of data.
  • An object that does support polymorphism has a pointer to an array of pointers to the methods, and calls to methods are executed by looking up the address on the way through. If you wanted to implement similar functionality in C (GTK is an example of something that does this) a reasonable way to do this would be to include the pointer explicitly in the struct.
Subclassing works by tacking extra fields onto the end of the struct, and you can coerce it to treat a sublcass as the parent by the compiler interpreting the cast by just picking out the parent's actual method. That is, rather than going through the VTable (C++ speak for the table of method pointers that the pointer at the beginning of the struct pointers) the compiler will interpret the cast at compile time and just implement the appropriate call to the parent's method, or go through the parent's VTable.

Objective-C also supports something analagous to Java's interfaces. An interface is essentially a list of method definitions that are expected to be present, so you can treat it as a type and cast to the interface, calling any object implementing that interface through the cast. In order to implement an interface, the implementing class must present physical implementations of methods with the same type signature defined in the interface. C++ doesn't (or at least didn't - not sure about today) have an analagous feature, but it does really go to town with support for multiple inheritance.

The net effect is that the only overhead in Objective-C or C++ is the pointer to the VTable (normally 4 bytes on an 32 bit system or 8 bytes on a 64 bit system) on classes where subclassing is implemented (called Virtual classes in C++ speak). Objective-C has a default class member called isA, which points to an instance of Class. In this way it works a bit more like Smalltalk (in which it's basically objects all the way down) but the compiler can still optimise an efficient method lookup from this.

Objective-C or C++ implementations can also do pretty much what they like with the internal structure of the object, and can use primitive types or in-lined structures with no overhead, meaning that they can optimise memory usage and access by micromanaging stuff. This is important because a cache miss on a modern CPU can result in 500 lost cycles or more.

IIRC Java has a 16 byte overhead for each object, although it can store primitive types such as ints with no additional overhead. It's also a bit less free and easy about inlining stuff into the struct - it's not so easy to get strings or suchlike into the structure without having to chase a pointer to reach them. Heap allocated objects (i.e. objects that must live past a method returning to its caller) have more memory overhead and are more likely to be scattered about. I think later versions of the JVM address this to some extent, but it's been a while since I was involved in working with Java so it's all a bit hazy.

Android uses a hacked about version of the JVM, which means apps can be distributed as compiled bytecode and the system uses just-in-time compilation to generate executable code. This is commonly used on Java VMs and other similar architectures such as .Net. The Android implementation of Java has some efficiencies over stock Java, but I don't really know much about the specifics as I've never done any development for that platform.

Java also forces you to use garbage collection whereas Objective-C gives you the option of managing it manually, which can be more effiecient as it allows you to optimise the process for your case.

This means that I would expect by and large that native iOS apps would be more memory efficient and likely perform a bit better than their Android counterparts. Memory, in particular would have been a big deal on older smart phones - for example my Samsung S3 had 512MB of RAM. It's a lot easier than one might think to make Java apps with big memory footprints (the mapping builder for OWB would routinely run to 400MB or more in 2003-5), whereas making a native app in a C descended language take up that much memory would likely require a positive effort unless your underlying data set was big to begin with.
 
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For my laptop, a lot of what fills it is my ripped CD collection (some 500 CDs). A third of the SSD is also full with disk images for the VMs I use for work with another 275 GB of saved VM images on the spinning disk.

I think I have some 3 TB external drives but so far the 2 TB of space on my laptop is plenty.

My next laptop will assuredly have multiple TB of SSD...

I had an interesting conundrum with my laptop this year. NVMe drives in M.2 format top out at about 2TB, but the carrier to put a M.2 drive into the 2.5" bay doesn't have the same connector as a U.2 2.5" NVMe drive. I hade to get another cable and get hold of a 4TB SATA drive instead. Now the machine has a 512MB system disk in the auxiliary WWAN slot and a 3.84TB SATA disk in the 2.5" bay.

I'm not sure if there is an off-the-shelf solution to put 2.5" NVMe drives into laptops; I've never seen clear evidence that any of the manufacturers support this type of configuration. I'm not sure why, but it may be that big NVMe drives seem to run quite hot. Most of the NVMe drives I'm using on the desktop are 15mm form factor with big heatsinks built into the casing.
 
This may or may not help but...
At a high level programming languages take the stuff the programmer writes(C, Java, JavaScript) and translates it to instructions the CPU can understand. I believe it's translate into assembly language which is specific to each CPU architecture. Think of it like a parent talking to a three year old. One has a large vocabulary to quickly express ideas but if you tell it to a three year old you have to use a lot of simple words to express the same idea. The run time is the child.

Probably not a great analogy but it's not so far off if you want to explain broad concepts.
Snarf-blaggi wingo? Didi-mao wazingi! Bargabarga-dulon. Blarf. :sad:
 
Hm. Here I am on a role playing forum describing the differences between physical data structures involved object implementation on C++, Objective-C and Java and their implications on memory usage and performance on mobile devices. Maybe I really am the nerdiest poster here.
 
The runtime is the program, whatever platform it's running on (e.g. a JVM) and the environment it's executing in
Thanks, I got confused by the way people would refer to the JVM as the Java runtime, but also use the phrase to refer to the basic start up code appended to a C program to get it running with the same phrase as the C runtime, even though they're two different things fundamentally.
 
So it's Halloween Friday so naturally there are festivities at the College here, including a costume contest, which is one entry per class, either a student or the instructor. Somehow I've been convinced to allow them to costume me. There have been whispers of pig tails. Wish me well folks.

The kids at my sons elementary school were allowed to dress in costume today. My wife is the costumer in the house so I was passing along the rules, no weapons, no masks... my wife started cracking up at the masks part, since they all have to wear covid masks everyday.
Worked out pretty well actually, she has a cat (covid) mask so she dug into her bag of tricks and came up with a set of cat ears and a tail (yes these are things she just has... like I said I married weird) so he was a cat for Halloween.
 
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