It really depends on the city/quarter where you live. I live in the center of Barcelona and had no problems with two small kids at all. Supermarkets, real farmer's markets, hospitals, pharmacies, schools, etc are all within 10min walking distance. I work from home, but I could walk to the office it I wanted to. I don't have to leave the city at all.
Eventually I gave in and bought a car, not because it was necessary but rather to leave the city on weekends and get closer to nature.
Yeah, if you live in the most expensive part of the town, which is often the epicenter, it may be ok. However, not everyone can afford this, or justify the expense, especially since you are pitted against childless couples that don't have to support children financially. Also, the presence of bikes on the sidewalk makes it hostile for vulnerable pedestrians, and generally turn a pleasant experience (walking in a city) into a stressful one.
Yes, gentrification is a thing around here too, but I also lived in the outskirts of the city and you don't need a car there either. They also have all the essentials. The fancy restaurants and theaters are 30min metro/bus away, but otherwise it is fine too. A car is a luxury in those quarters too.
Completely agree that the presence of bikes and scooters on the sidewalk is annoying and dangerous. The city changed the rules a few months ago and now there is a 500€ fine if you use them on the sidewalk. That fixed the problem. They have to use the street or one of the many bike lanes.
No idea how it is in Paris, but there are places where living happily in a city without owning a car is perfectly possible, even if you have small kids.
If bikes (not cars) are making a city "hostile to vulnerable pedestrians", that seems like a very good problem to have compared to the average car-centric city.
Bikes and cars. But cars have their own space (the road) and rules (red lights, crosswalks...), whereas cyclists ride at full speed on the pedestrian's space (the sidewalk).
The argument that cyclists (implied: all cyclists) ride at full speed on pavement at all times is akin to arguing that cars (implied: all cars) go over the speed limit at all times. It’s daft at best, and utterly outlandish.
You should stop and have coffee in a street shared only by pedestrians and cyclists, and observe the behaviour of cyclists. I have observed it to be mostly slow, controlled, courteous and respectful of pedestrians.
I picked up my son today at the kindergarten, and we walked for 25 minutes back home. Here in Riga most cyclists go on the sidewalks, I'd say that 2/3 of them don't respect a minimum 1.5 meter safety distance, and about the same amount go as fast as they can. I stopped and scolded a food courrier (who is incentivized to go as fast as he can) who was slaloming between pedestrians as if it was a game.
No, I don't feel safe at all, and my son can't walk freely either. In Paris it's the same (my wife, who was pregnant then, got hit at a crosswalk by a cyclist who seemed to believe that red lights were for cars only). Even Le Monde published an piece about it!
It’s false that cyclists routinely ride on the sidewalk in Paris, let alone at full speed. They ride on the road (car and bus lanes) and in bike lanes. It’s true, however, that on some very popular bike routes (rue de Rivoli, boulevard Saint-Michel/Sébastopol), there are enough cyclists that don’t stop at lights that pedestrians can’t easily safely cross. This is a solvable issue that’s independent from the modal share or infrastructure.
Everyone is competing for space. I don't see how cities prevent building larger apartments. European cities are mostly built out anyway, and the tendency is rather more to split large apartments to cater to the childless crowd.
Cities prevent larger apartments through onerous zoning codes. It's so expensive to build because of the permits and the risk that only a narrow type of structure has a chance of profit.
> mostly built out
Look at rent in Asia. They actually build towers over there and they build large apartments for families as well as small apartments for couples. There's enough building that the housing market is diverse.
Central Paris is denser than Manhattan. At some point the bottleneck is not the amount of people you can cram into a m2 of land, but the underlying infrastructures.
I live in the 19th district of Paris—probably the cheapest district within city bounds, with the 20th, and not in the center—and I have no issue living with an under 2-year-old. Hell I even decide to go all the way to the 14th for his pediatrician appointments, on the subway. I can walk to something like 5 supermarkets and bodega-like markets, take the subway to a bunch more including specialized, I can walk to see a generalist, we walk to his daycare, etc. all < 10 minutes. I can’t imagine what you can’t do honestly.
> Eventually I gave in and bought a car, not because it was necessary but rather to leave the city on weekends and get closer to nature.
How much does parking for that cost the rest of the week? How much is your car payment + insurance + fuel? Presumably you did the math and it's cheaper to have bought one, including a nominal amount for your time to rent one on Friday and return it Sunday night. So I'm just curious.
> They are the gatekeeper to one thing: their own app store.
They also control the OS and don't allow side-loading or other app stores (without putting absurd obstacles in the way) So in the end they completely control the devices they sell.
The end user is _NOT_ forced to buy into their ecosystem though.
There are alternatives, and depending on where on this globe you ask, apple is not even the one with the biggest marketshare.
So while I'm not against the general outcry and need for change, it is not just apple. The problem is way way bigger, and it should not be put onto one of the players in my opinion.
Create regulation/platform that sets the limits, then put ALL players into the process not just one
The difference is that we can easily try to pretend that game consoles are not general purpose computers. And doing so is not going to cause issues to the fabric of the society.
Hahaha, wow, OK. Then we must acknowledge that we're talking about PHONES here, and the applications on it are optional TOYS. The phone could have no app store at all, and still be highly functional and complete. In fact... that's how the iPhone launched. There was no app store for years.
Meanwhile, a game system with no games is not functional at all.
No, they are general purpose computers that can also work as cellphones.
The first iPhone technically wasn't a smartphone (unlike its competitors at the time) because it did not have a way to install third-party programs. This situation only lasted a year though.
It did have a pre-installed Google Maps app, very much not a toy...
And don't game consoles typically come out bundled with some first party games too ?
"The first iPhone technically wasn't a smartphone (unlike its competitors at the time) because it did not have a way to install third-party programs"
What a laughably wrong assertion. The iPhone handled all kinds of PIM data and synced with computers. There was no requirement (or even expectation) that a "smart" phone had third-party applications.
I would assume that "lightweight" in this case means that they share a single Linux kernel. Or that there is an emulation layer that maps the Linux Kernel API to macOS. In any case, I don't think that they are running a Linux kernel per container.
This is not a good article and the content doesn't support the claim in the title. It talks about memory latency and how it negatively affects instruction level parallelism, but doesn't offer any solution or advice, except for offering their own (payed) service...
Memory latency only matters in chains of dependent instructions.
Otherwise the performance is limited by the memory transfer throughput, not by the latency of individual memory accesses.
The article demonstrates the difference between these 2 cases, even if its title could have been better.
Because the latency of memory loads is many times greater than the latency of any other kind of CPU instructions, both for loads from the main memory and for loads from the L3 cache memory, this effect is more visible in programs with many memory loads, like the examples from the article, than in programs using other instructions with long latencies.
A page miss in the TLB cache memory that happens for a memory load is just a memory load that happens to have a latency many times greater than its normal latency, which is already very big.
The same as for normal memory loads, the effect of a page miss will vary depending on whether the memory load is part of a long dependency chain, so the CPU will not be able to find other instructions to execute concurrently while the dependency chain is stalled by waiting for the load result, or the memory load has only few instructions depending on it, so the CPU will go ahead executing other parts of the program.
Page misses in the TLB do not cause any new behavior, but the very long latencies corresponding to them exacerbate the effects of long dependency chains. With page misses, even a relatively short dependency chain may not allow the CPU to find enough independent instructions to be executed in order to avoid an execution stall.
With certain operating systems that choose to load lazily memory pages from a SSD/HDD or which choose to implement a virtual memory capacity greater than the physical memory capacity, there is a different kind of page miss, a miss from the memory currently mapped as valid by the OS, which results in an exception handled by the operating system, while the executing program is suspended. There are also mostly obsolete CPUs where a TLB page miss causes an exception, instead of being handled by dedicated hardware. In these cases, to which I assume that you refer by mentioning mmap, it does not matter whether the exception-causing instruction was part of a long dependency chain or not, the slowing-down of the program by exception handling is the same.
Yes, in theory you can pause at any point, but in practice it is not that easy to stop. I remember not hearing the boarding call and losing a flight while reading La fiesta del chivo…
I don't have any numbers, but I think this is still pretty common. On iOS for example Alamofire which is a popular network stack, still offers this as a feature. I think the use case is a bit different for apps and web sites, especially for closed ecosystems like Apple's where reverse engineering is not as easy/straightforward.
