I realize that's a realistic problem. How you deal with people like that really depends on your environment.
For open source software: too bad. The AS IS part of the license should cover expectations well.
For commercial software: depends on the contract, really. If the contract hasn't specified anything, an upgrade document will work fine in many cases.
For enterprise software: your customers won't update your software anyway. I'd go with warnings just to be safe. Maybe do it in three stages, first warnings, then severe warnings, then errors.
If you really want to grab attention for your warnings, prefix them with <<COMPLIANCY RISK ALERT>> and you'll be sure to get them to read the upgrade guide!
> Our measurement based on the micro benchmarks shows that Rust is in general slower than C, but the extent of the slowdown varies across different programs. On average, Rust brings a 1.77x “performance overhead” compared to C. [1]
Of course, for the sake of completeness it should be noted that:
> With the run-time checks disabled and the restrictions loosened, Rust presents a performance indistinguishable from C. [1]
Though I believe my original statement to hold none the less, as disabling these restrictions disables (amongst other things) bound and overflow checking, which is one of if not the major selling point of rust.
As for C++ depends on the features that one uses. If one writes "just what one could do in C" then the machine code produced by the compiler will be exactly (almost) the same. This is due to the fact that many c++ features are only compiler relevant but compile to (almost) the same instructions as code.
However, I would once again raise the question I did above with rust: If we use little to no c++ features then can we distinguish that codebasse from a c codebase in any meaningful way? But assuming we write idomatic code we will have the c++ code behaving somewhat slower due to factors such as:
- automatic collections/object allocation. Datastructures growing "on demand" do in general perform slower than a comparable "none automatic" datastructure increased in larger chunks by hand (using malloc/etc. in C). While this is an implementation detail admittedly, I believe the libstdc++ does not use chunking, though I would not swear on that.
- strings. While no doubt a big upgrade from \0 terminated char sequences idomatic strings in C are less efficient. Especially when it comes to concatenating or manipulation of said strings. In addition it may lead to memory fragmentation, though this should be an afterthought most of the time.
In general the performance difference of C++/C comes down to "hidden" code. While by no means large, assuming software such as the dns root servers which are running essentially 24/7 and will most likely continue doing so for quite a while even small differences in performance will add up.
Admittedly however my original statement of
> Well written C code can easily blow a C++/Rust application out of the water.
May not have been well formulated. It would have been better to split the statement and be more specific about the individual performance differences in regards to rust/c++ instead of bunching them together.
If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure.
If you "just give" me something without any conditions then no, you could definitely not claim that story. But if you make that pen, your property, available to me explicitly only for work and nothing else?
It's your property, not mine. I only have whatever rights you grant me to it.
> If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure.
Let's leave aside whether the law (in whatever country) permits such a one-sided contract, and ask - should it permit it? There are plenty of contract terms that are illegal (i.e. not backed by law), such as usury [1] or various anti-competitive practices, because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society, regardless of whether they were entered freely. Contracts are not and should not be above the law.
> because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society
I mean, I do agree with you in general, its just that I do not see this issue as a detriment to society. If someone demands massive interest rates on loans that you need to survive thats definitely unethical.
A company demanding that you do not use their laptop so that you can work on your side projects at home ... well, that doesn't quite sound as bad. There is nothing stopping you from just buying your own device.
Thats like saying "only use the company car for work stuff" ... it just doesn't seem that unfair or unethical to me to be honest.
If you actually care about this then you can go and write a polite but firm letter/mail to Facebook's legal department.
Contacting support/appealing is unlikely to do much since their metric is tickets closed, whereas the legal metric is "number of things prevented from blowing up"
That said, there's a chance legal won't care, but it's the best option I think.
Different scale of seriousness. If the whole world goes into a recession there is a big difference between food shortages that you can buy your way out of with cash and food shortages that come as a result of societal collapse and money being worthless.
Being rich only matters as long as your investments/assets hold any value. If truly serious problems around your investments go to 0, your assets are only worth something as long as you can maintain control of them (police won't be around, nor will judges be) and even then your car will be worthless without gas.
It all depends on what meaning a person assigns to "serious" in this context. Personally as long as being rich solves my Problems I wouldn't describe any situation as serious.
> Being rich only matters as long as your investments/assets hold any value.
Also, as long as poorer people are not after you and your properties (and your life, even) through a revolution, which revolution could be caused by world-wide economical and societal crisis (if not a revolution then maybe a civil-war where the rich are of the wrong ethnicity etc)
If you could cure it, you could charge more than treatment - because it's more valuable to the person getting cured. If you had cancer with a 5 year expected survival rate, would you pick (arbitrary round numbers)
$10,000 per year in treatment to manage it but you've still got cancer.
$55,000 paid over 5 years, $5000 more than you would pay to just manage it, but you also don't have cancer any more.
Assuming that you can charge whatever number you want. Realistically however you will have to negotiate with insurances and sometimes governments about the price of things. The second group is particularly tricky, since government make the rules.
Imagine you invent a way to cure cancer and it costs you 10000$ a treatment. How much do you charge the customer? Two times that? Ten? Twenty? At what point is someone going to stop in and force you to sell at a lower price? How long till public opinion turns against you? What if competition forces the price down? There are lot of variables that might lead to you ending up at 10000$ + a few percent profit margin.
Now imagine you have a medication that's 100$ a dosage. You sell it for 120$. That's 84 doses to cover the cost of a cancer treatment. Assuming the same markup on treatment that's 100 doses.
At this point it's the simple question what the company is more likely to get away with: Many small doses with a profit margin that add up? Or one large treatment with a big profit margin?
Right now reality shows that the small doses seem to work better. An example would be insulin. In the US it costs 30$ a dose upwards. Production costs are at less than 10$. [0] That's a 200% markup.
With numbers like these, why would you ever cure something?
Then let's think through that with other considerations than the patient would have.
The lower bound is surely the same as long term treatment, right? No player here would choose more expensive treatment that doesn't cure the patient. Insurers get premiums for longer if you live, and governments rely on having a workforce.
If governments act beyond the bounds of negotiating as a large buyer and legislate, have they not already done that for the treatment already? Is there as much to lose as you think?
> With numbers like these, why would you ever cure something?
Because you can charge more. Being cured is better than not being cured. If being ill and getting partially treated cost $100/month, would you honestly not pay $100.01/month forever but be cured?
Your arguments about public opinion and pressure rely people stepping in because your business practices are immoral, but this is what you're already accusing them of without any actual repercussions.
> What if competition forces the price down
If someone has a cure cheaper than your non-cure, frankly you're already fucked as a business. This also means that anyone who isn't the current main supplier has a very obvious reason to release an actual cure because then they'll get all of the business.
For comparison, the last five years money I have paid for a rent are nowhere near the cost of an apartment I’m living in. Both cancer and a lack of room to live in destroys your life.
Assuming free market, the cost of total cure will probably settle on at least 2-5x of an average life expectation times a treatment cost per year, minus some minor operational expenses.
Are you assuming multiple suppliers for that cure or a single supplier?
Very different. In the case of a single supplier - wouldn't it make sense to pay everything you own ( minus what else you need to live ) to survive?
In the case where there were multiple suppliers ( with no collusion between them ) - then the price could be driven down to the cost of production, rather than the value that it brings.
So for example food is essential to live - yet it's cheap.
> Very different. In the case of a single supplier - wouldn't it make sense to pay everything you own ( minus what else you need to live ) to survive?
That's assuming you get to negotiate with every customer. If it's one price for everyone then while what you say is true for each person's max (ignoring the complexity of people looking after others, the same logic applies of "everything you can afford") that's different for everyone so the optimal price can vary.
> Treating an illness is even more profitable than curing it
You have to actually treat it though - if the patient dies, it isn't profitable either. I suppose (all morality aside), the optimal profitability would be in a cure that required an annual installment fee.
(1) I wasn't aware of it, but I am not surprised that something like this was written into the standard (presumably. I doubt carriers rolled their own thing)
(2) All the ways I can think off are significantly harder than rooting, so essentially no.
(3) I don't really mind that much, I have Google services running on my phone and I am certain those can do far more than my carrier could ever dream off. I have begrudgingly accepted those, so it would be a bit hypocritical to complain about my carrier turning cell broadcast back on. Especially since "turning cell broadcast back on" is a use case that I can see the argument behind.
It you care about this then I suggest you look up the relevant standard documents, probably you will find this behavior documented there.
Parts of it are in the GSM, CDMA, CDMA2000, '3g', LTE, 4g/5g standards. They are thousands of pages long. They do quite a bit. Usually baked into the firmware from whoever makes the chipset.
