Other big players like Microsoft are doing it too. And that dialog can be worse:
Do you like our app?
<Yes, rate it> <Later>
It's also freaking annoying because it interrupts your workflow, the thing for which you ended up installing that stupid app in the first place. It's basically disrespectful of their users' time and needs.
See also: the Windows 10 "upgrade" fiasco. It's as if they took their ethics lessons from the bully in _Calvin and Hobbes_: "Yes means no and no means yes. Do you want me to hit you?"
I feel you... I do it in my app and I hate doing it, but it's a necessary evil. Way too many people see the comments/ratings as either a support board or a way of punishing bad apps but very rarely they give a good or even just decent review, without being asked.
> I feel you... I do it in my app and I hate doing it, but it's a necessary evil.
This is what makes the IT part of my heart die a little inside even more: when even the "good folks" in this industry feel like they have to do obnoxious things just to get ahead or keep up.
Folks, this is why the bigger arguments about competition or arbitration and so on always come back to the same point ("there's no meaningful choice"): Eventually, everyone winds up doing the same thing because it's the only way to simply not lose ground to the others who are doing the obnoxious-overall-but-good-for-just-me-in-the-short-term tricks. If I uninstalled every app that demanded this...well, I'd have very few apps. And that's even worse because it's just obnoxious enough to help the individual app developer but not so obnoxious as to spur people onto meaningful action, yet the annoyance is still present...always grating on nerves...disrupting just a little bit of productivity or happiness...needlessly.
You may want to reconsider. I've had much better success with providing "Rate Now", "Rate Later", and "Leave Me Alone!" options. Even great apps are prone to bad reviews if the user is being prompted for the 5th time.
Like many users, I as well have fallen victim for having a temporary fit of rage and leaving a 1 star review with a 1 liner of nonconstructive feedback for an otherwise useful app.
As if to say "Fine, you want it? Here's your god damn review!"
> energy is always the only constraint that matters
Simply making a statement like this doesn't really say much. You really need to back it up with evidence, justification and/or reasoning, or at least elaborate on it a little.
On the other hand AlphaGo proves that computers can scale, even if they are inefficient, whereas the only way to grow that 20 Watts brain would be to use multiple brains and that's not going to be any good in Go matches.
On the contrary, I think there is a real question over whether AlphaGo would be able to beat a group of 3-5 tier-1 Go players (e.g. ~top 10 rankings players) who were allowed to write things down on paper, discuss, use whiteboards, use separate game boards to play variations, etc, even with same time controls.
For me FastMail's customers service has been better than Google Apps.
And had fewer issues in general with FastMail. Google Apps has some crazy limits, like on the number of IMAP connections or email aliases, you can't normally change the primary domain, you can't setup an abuse@ alias, etc, etc. and contacting Google Apps support doesn't do more than for them to tell what's already written in the docs.
And I mentioned in another mail, but FastMail's IMAP import and POP3 links work, whereas this functionality is broken for Gmail and Google's support won't help you ;-)
Truth be told, with Google Apps you get phone support and email support usually answers withing 24 hours in my experience.
Problem is they couldn't help me much when I had problems. Google Apps has serious limits and contacting support won't help you get around those limits. Most of the time support just tells you what you can already find in their online docs.
They only solved two issues for me: (1) when I wanted to change my primary domain, after 2-3 months of asking them repeatedly, they finally enrolled me into this beta programming and finally changed my primary domain. And (2) when I upgraded to the annual subscription and then changed my mind, they reverted me to the flexible pricing. On the other hand they couldn't even help with with an import gone wrong.
With FastMail I have had a good experience thus far.
> They only solved two issues for me: (1) when I wanted to change my primary domain, after 2-3 months of asking them repeatedly, they finally enrolled me into this beta programming and finally changed my primary domain.
Were you on the grandfathered free tier? It seems to be quite trivial to change the primary domain if you're on a paid tier.
No, I was on the paid tier. If you're talking about September 2016, maybe. I was talking about 2015, being just an example of how Google's support was unhelpful.
People that end up in a position to care about performance are using profilers and bechmarks. This is actually the first rule: don't guess, measure.
Of course it helps when the platform has the proper tools for it. I end up using JMH and YourKit Profiler weekly, because a memory or CPU leak can crash our process and we have pretty strict reliability requirements with a single server processing about 5000 events per second - not extremely demanding, but when it crashes, we can lose money, with the redundancy infrastructure being pretty new.
I think you're confusing concurrency with parallelism. Indeed, when these two are combined in the same process with multiple threads sharing memory or other resources, you're effectively juggling with knives.
But in fact concurrency is inevitable in absence of OS threads that can be blocked (another potential clusterfuck) or of some form of continuations support, because it is a direct consequence of asynchrony.
And asynchrony isn't avoidable, all you can do is to find abstractions that make it more deterministic.
