Rapid DHCP: Or, how do Macs get on the network so fast?

Congratulations! Your laptop does the equivalent of using the exit lane to jump ahead in traffic. There's bound to be an empty spot near the end, right?

The only reason that is a useful example to you is because that act is genuinely dangerous. There is nothing dangerous about swiping someone's IP and causing them to have to reconnect.

And yet it is exactly as dickish and disrespectful of others. Just like Apple as a whole, it seems.

You're right. I guess it's more comparable to walking up to a checkout or a cash register without looking to see if anyone is waiting in line. Great UX if you don't look around you.

Meh. Treating developers and the back end gingerly results in no benefit for consumers, in fact by and large it results in in a pretty clear loss.

Characterize it however you wish, as a user I'm going to go with the platform that focuses on pleasing me rather than making the lives of other users or developers easier.

It's really not. There is no real world comparable act, frankly. It is what it is, and what it is is not a big deal.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I disagree with the idea that potentially inconveniencing other network users for a small gain of your own is not a big deal.

That's as bad as your exit lane analogy. If you want a checkout line analogy that actually somewhat fits the situation, here is one.

You pay for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, standing in line until it was your turn to pay. Then you pay and go sat down and drank some of it, while working on your laptop. You get caught up reading HN, and don't take a sip from your coffee for five minutes. You then want to take a sip.

What Apple is doing is like resuming finishing the coffee without going back to the checkout and trying to pay for it again.

I agree with Kant here: when deciding whether an action is right, one should consider what would happen if everyone started doing it.

Also, you're a dick. Congratulations.

Well, no, that's a bit inaccurate as well, if we want to have nice analogies, let's go with something like this:

You pay for a cup of coffee at a coffee shop. Nominally you get your own cup, and there isn't a limit on the amount of time you can keep it. However, the store occasionally and unpredictably runs out of cups. Also, at the start of a new day a new barista might occasionally come in, and they might not know which cups should still be considered owned. Because of this, everyone else has for years observed a simple procedure where you look to make sure it's your coffee you're about to sip. It's polite and it's just — what's the phrase — not a big deal. You get your coffee, leave for two days, come back and take a drink from the cup that looks like the one you got previously without as much as a glance inside or around.

I'm a dick for buying products that work best for me and not other users or developers? Ok... I thought the Hacker News community was supposed to have a modicum of maturity?

Except I drink hundreds and hundreds of cups of coffee a day. When it takes 10 seconds every time to determine who's coffee it is, we need to come up with a new solution.

Yeah this analogy blows as well. What it comes down to is old world technology spends a ton of time on error correction like this and it's an easy place to increase efficiency & speed for portable devices. It's going to keep happening, get used to it.

Except it doesn't take 10 seconds. The time between the Galaxy Tab's proper DHCP discover and DHCP ACK was 0.653 seconds. You might notice a difference between that and the Mac's 0.031 seconds to DHCP-free link up if you blink fast.

This conversation makes me want to block Apple devices from any and all devices I control. Because hey, such anti-social network behaviour is going to keep happening. Because it's not a big deal. Because you're worth it. Good thing the network layer doesn't support such, uh, experience-enhacing features.

> Except it doesn't take 10 seconds. The time between the Galaxy Tab's proper DHCP discover and DHCP ACK was 0.653 seconds. You might notice a difference between that and the Mac's 0.031 seconds to DHCP-free link up if you blink fast.

I unlock my phone and launch MobileSafari in less than a second, so it matters.

> This conversation makes me want to block Apple devices from any and all devices I control.

So do it then. If it actually enhances your experience, why compromise for users that don't matter to you? That's my point. You don't need to enforce network neutrality on your own AP.

> Because hey, such anti-social network behaviour is going to keep happening.

As long as router manufacturers keep being cheap and expiring DHCP leases after a reset, yes it will.

> Because it's not a big deal. Because you're worth it.

Damn straight.

> Good thing the network layer doesn't support such, uh, experience-enhacing features.

True, they should work on that. While their at it, add the ability to save DHCP tables before a reset and solve the actual problem here.

Even for new network discovery, 10 seconds is unacceptable on a portable device. Reconnects should be as quick as possible, no exceptions.

Sorry if you are offended that companies are actually working on improving this instead of insisting that it's good enough as it is.

Good for you. It's still not a big deal and you can't "outrage" that away.

It's not a small gain, for the record. And the only users you are inconveniencing are ones that are malfunctioning. If everything is working correctly and the AP hasn't been reset, this causes no inconvenience to anyone and results in a clear direct benefit for the user.

You figure a community of developers would possibly give a shit about what matters to the UX, I guess not. You do know that the "U" stands for user, right?

You're a dick for buying products that actively negatively affect other users and that would lead to chaos if everyone bought them, yes.

Thanks for your reply.

It would lead to chaos if every device retained the IP it used on that AP previously? Yeah that sounds like hell, imagine the horror.