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IE9, FF4 Beta In Real-World Use Face-Off
An anonymous reader writes "Most browser benchmarks are isolated, artificial tests that can be gamed by browser vendors optimizing those specific cases. With only those benchmarks to go on, the folks at LucidChart were skeptical that the IE9 beta would actually outperform other modern browsers in real-world applications. To separate hype from reality, they built their first browser benchmarking tool, based in LucidChart itself. This benchmark is to SunSpider what a Left4Dead 2 benchmark is to 3Dmark Vantage. Product specs don't matter, only real-world performance on a real-world application. The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last."
Browser makers design for tests, real world data shows exact opposite results to what you expect. We've got a crew working on the story overnight and will have a full update for you on the weekend edition of Wicked Early News, we start before normal people wake up.
I'd like to see Chrome 7 results in there...
Unless the test contains porn and all the accompanying popups, it's not a real world test.
t
I have been thinking about using Chrome for some time, it seems faster and already has a respectable community around it. But I also would like to avoid google stuff and I'm already used to Firefox, not sure if it is worth the trouble.... Any opinions?
I must say that I have pretty much totally switched to Chrome. FF 3 and 4 are really dragging my system down, and often fail to load sites I depend on (gmail passwords are now randomly rejected in FF, but work in any other browser).
I've had the prebeta for 7 for awhile, and it scored over twice as well as 6 did on Kraken. I would have liked to see them test that, especially since 6 did a little worse than 5 did for me.
No native Gopher support?
From my cold, dead hands!
THL phish sticks
Portable Firefox?
Dilbert RSS feed
Frames per second seems like pretty much the opposite of "real-world" for how 99% of users use their browsers.
from Linux this month after using Linux since 1993, I think this applies to all of FOSS.
Somehwere around 2000-2006 FOSS was basically head-and-head with commercial software in practical usability and maintainability, with its own distinct advantages and a relatively small learning curve.
Then there was this veer into "if you ever want all the Windows users to switch..." thinking, and in an effort to eliminate the learning curve FOSS threw away pretty much all of its advantages as well. If FOSS is just Windows/Mac OS/IE by another name, why choose FOSS?
Particularly when Windows/Mac OS/IE win on the polish, compatibility, and accessibility fronts by virtue of their being cathedral-built software?
With Firefox slow and cumbersome, Thunderbird choking on Gmail IMAP continuously while Apple's Mail.app sails along happily, and KDE4/GNOME3 being emblematic of the many ways in which FOSS has lost its way, I just decided I'd had enough of the nonsense. I'm ready to be able to walk into Best Buy, purchase any device, and expect that it will work seamlessly with the current generation of computing devices, without options, without Bugzilla (and condescendingly dismissive developer retorts), and without lots of consulting Google to find out how the gconf infrastructure has changed in the last two years or how HAL has been replaced by DeviceKit or policies moved from /etc tree A to uneditable dynamic filesystem B (but just use this easy command line management tool to set options...)
It just plain saves me a boatload of time and headache to use something else, like OS X plus Google apps plus Chrome. The pending desktopization of FOSS has fizzled thanks to the politics of the bazaar.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
...to ragequit again.
I'm not sure what is "real world" about spinning a UML box around another UML box in a giant (presumably) canvas-based javascript app.
For me, "real-world" means: is gmail fast enough? is opening a new tab fast? is image rendering fast enough? is html video fast enough? is the occasional embellished html5 animation fast enough? is typing into the address bar fast enough?
I'm sure their diagramming app is cool and everything, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone use anything like it, so I'm not sure what is "real world" about using it for a benchmark.
They even said that they altered the test in the middle to fix IE's performance problem. Come on.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Yeah, I just ran the test myself, and I went from: FF4b6: Average FPS: 14.388 JS Time: 10.667ms Frame T: 57.500ms FF4b7pre: Average FPS: 24.841 JS Time: 1.683ms Frame T: 38.568ms This is on a 5 year old HP prebuilt (Core2Duo @ 1.86 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2-533, etc.)
Netcraft has to confirm it first.
Er, correction: "it took Microsoft this long to..."
Firefox 4 beta 6 doesn't have the new JavaScript engine in it. Beta 7 will have it. But there's no particular need to wait for beta 7 as they could benchmark a nightly now. They also don't mention what kind of video card they've got in that laptop. IE9 and Firefox 4 can take better advantage of a good video card on Windows 7 than the other browsers tested and that may significantly influence a charting benchmark like this one.
I love how a difference of a few milliseconds (looks to be 5ms) means a browser "tanks" and its position, when compared to other browsers, can be described as "dead last." Oh no, we're not painting a bias picture here.
The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last.
No. Not surprising at all... but I still prefer Firefox for everyday use.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Too busy spreading anti-MS FUD to proof read? You suck an ass. LOLZ!!!!!
I'd be much more interested to see it being done with the builds of FF 4 that have jaegermonkey enabled. Though that should be merged into the main branch fairly soon with any luck.
http://www.conceivablytech.com/2673/products/first-look-firefox-4-jaegermonkey/
The way this benchmark measures "intra-frame time" is broken. In particular, it uses a setInterval with a 1ms delay. No browser actually respects that 1ms. Chrome clamps it to 5ms; others clamp it to 10ms, all to avoid the website thrashing the CPU pointlessly.
The upshot is that Chrome's interframe delay in the graph is about 5ms and Firefox 3.6's interframe delay is aboug 10ms. Which this particular benchmark can't tell apart from "no delay at all", given its methodology.
Firefox 4 beta, IE9 beta, Safari, and Opera seem to have delays greater than 10ms, so they're clearly doing some work they can't finish in 10ms.... or have slightly buggy timer implementations. Or both.
Of course in practice frame rates above 60fps or so are pointless since the screen doesn't redraw that often. ;)
On the other hand, on Mac, on modern hardware, I get 4.5fps in Chrome 7 dev on a random trial document I just tried, with JS render tiems on the order of 7ms (with a 7ms standard deviation) and "intra-frame time" of 224ms with a 900ms standard deviation (yes, those numbers are nuts). Firefox 4 beta comes in at about 11s for the JS (with 3ms stddev) and 125ms for the "intra-frame time" (with a claimed stddev of 0, which looks really suspicious).
It'd be nice if there were non-obfuscated source for this benchmark so its number-crunching could be evaluated; that 0 stddev is ... highly improbable.
This benchmark can be run by anyone in LucidChart. First, sign up for a free account here.
Nuff said
TFA (yes, I actually read it) says: "Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 came in behind all other browsers except for IE8". That's quite different from "dead last".
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Same here. I can't completely ditch FF, though, since it has all my webcomic RSS feeds set up just so, and Chrome doesn't do Live Bookmarks. And trying to recreate that list in another RSS reader would take days.
(gmail passwords are now randomly rejected in FF, but work in any other browser).
Yeah, that would be the phishing malware screwing with you.
Firstly, the only thing including more samples in a test does is give you clearer results. It doesn't cost the tester that much time or money to simply run a web browser.
Furthermore, even if someone were to accept your claims and assertions, the matter is simply that the selection of browsers in the article covers all the actively developed rendering engines currently in use. No one would argue to include Seamonkey, Flock, or Galeon, even if they had a higher usage share than Opera, since Firefox already represents Gecko.
If anything, Safari or Chrome should be dropped, since they are both based on Webkit.
FF 3 and 4 are really dragging my system down, and often fail to load sites I depend on (gmail passwords are now randomly rejected in FF, but work in any other browser).
You've fucked up your installation somehow. That ain't the default behavior, if it were even close to the default behavior it would be all over the news.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The thing with "real-life" benchmarks is that "based on Webkit" only gets you so far. Safari and Chrome use totally different JavaScript engines, for example. They use totally different drawing libraries. Heck, Chrome on Windows uses totally different drawing library than Chrome on Mac (which makes a difference in "real-life" benchmarks, since drawing is anywhere from 30% to 80% of the total benchmark time).
The less synthetic the benchmark the more silly details (exact browser, not just rendering engine, exact graphics driver version, exact Xorg version on Linux, exact graphics hardware, etc) start to matter...
Well lets talk about my country for a minute. 200 years ago group A (the English) were over here taking property from group B (the Aboriginals). I don't think that was communism. And now that some members of group C (descended from group A) want to give some property back to group B, I don't that that is communist either.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Now, will IE9 scale with a faster GPU? I'd like to see some benchmarks with different video cards.
Life is not for the lazy.
I use Firefox and IE regularly, have played with Chrome, and occasionally use Safari on the Macs at work.
I honestly can't notice any difference between any of them in rendering speed.
99.99% of the time, web browsing performance is network-limited anyway.
Surely standards support and browser stability are more important features, at least on platforms with more grunt than an iphone?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The story doesn't mention the GPU in use, but it does mention it's an i7 processor. So I assume it's using an i965-class GPU. These aren't exactly known for speed or stability on linux. I believe FF4 uses Cairo, which in turn uses XRender, and my experience with integrated Intel GPUs and XRender is that pure software ( ie X on FBDev ) is faster. I would have liked to have seen a system used which could actually accelerate the drawing operations.
The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last."
Why is this surprising? Firefox has been the slowest of the current crop of browsers (IE8 excepted) for quite a while now.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Let me assure you, the bloat is inbred, default, ingrained and well-integrated into FF. That being said, the extension support is good. Oh, and the speed does actually have a bearing in that FF doesn't flush its cache terribly often. For windows this is fine, but on linux where a system could be up for weeks, it can get annoying closing and re-opening so many tabs. Browsing the internet almost exclusively from within a virtual machine, really eccentuates the effects of a bloated browser, particularly with the limited ram issue. :D
Chrome has beautiful WebKit integration, and suffers none of the shortfalls of Midori
What features do you think needed to be added to NTFS to make it a modern file system?
I'm impressed with your ability to get an unknown error installing something that hundreds of thousands of people can install with no problem.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
And once again I see no mention of lag or latency behind everyday controls, one of the real factors which affect a user's perception of speed and responsiveness. The kind which gets them to say, "It feels faster, but I don't know how". I'm talking about switching between tabs, closing tabs, clicking the browser's back or forward button, and general UI navigation. You want hundredths of a second or less for these kind of actions.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I'm not sure how they get off calling this a "real world benchmark", as it seems to bear almost no resemblance to what people normally use web browsers for: "The benchmark works by simply dragging a part of the diagram around the page for five seconds." WTF?
It certainly doesn't seem to be any more useful than the other browser benchmark being touted these days, and arguably it's much less useful, because it measures a single very narrow aspect of browser operation, one which has little connection with typical browser usage.
Moreover, the slashdot summary seems to go to great lengths to emphasize how "badly" FF4 did on this (useless, remember) benchmark, and to pump up IE9: "The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last" -- but if you actually look at the results that emphasis is misplaced: almost all the browsers were quite close to each other, with a few outliers, but in no cases was FF4 an outlier, and indeed was pretty much identical to IE9 (on this test).
The only clear result I can see is: When doing a certain very specific type of javascript rendering, most modern browsers have pretty much identical performance, though chrome's particularly fast, and IE8 particularly slow.
Of course, that isn't very interesting to anybody except LucidChart users, of course, nor very likely to generate any controversy...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Chrome is faster because it massively favors speed over customization and features. FF is slower because it favors customization, and assumes, correctly, that no one actually actually gives a flying fark if it needs slightly more than a 1/50th of a second to render a page that Chrome can do in 1/100th of a second. This isn't a problem, nor is it news. Now of course, you may do the occasional task where those milliseconds actually matter because your browser is processing something enormous, but then just install both browsers, use Chrome in those rare instances, and use FF for a primary browser.
Frame rate isn't really an issue either. You can point out that the human eye sees at roughly 60 FPS, so going under 60 is undesired, but let's be realistic. Those Flash games are usually built at 20-25 FPS, because running at 60 would make them freaking huge. Video on the web likewise runs at 60 FPS roughly never, because it needs to stream. Downloaded video WILL run at 60, but your browser isn't playing that.
This doesn't mean there isn't a couple of very specific tasks that FF is abnormally slow at and could use a code cleanup on, but for the most part, FF's speed difference vs. Chrome is utterly negligible in actual use.
Really, fuck it. I've had it with corporate-sponsored dick-fighting contest about which browser is the fastest. I really, really couldn't care any less. Features, openness, security, standards compliance, yeah. But If I want a fast app, I'll go native, thank you. Maybe I'm too old, but I've always thought HTML sucked as a programming paradigm. As an information distribution mechanism, sure. But for interactivity? Please. It's about time somebody called bullshit on this. Hell, a goddamn Visual Basic app from fifteen years ago kicked the butt of most modern web sites in usability, performance and ease of maintenance. The only thing that makes the web so attractive is the barrier to entry : free, nothing to install, immediate access to the average brains of millions. Just like TV. No thanks for dumbing it down to this. And now you wanna make it faster? Piss off. Go write real code that does something, not just another abstraction layer.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
However, anyone who think it is okay to take property from group A and give it to group B is a communist. You can't take it from group A unless you believe property is yours to take.... held in common.
Okay, then, so you're giving up: medicare, social security, non-toll roads, all forms of insurance, public schools, libraries, the armed forces, etc? Guess what, all those things are possible ONLY by taking stuff from Group A and giving it to Group B. Throwing around words like socialism and communism is just further proof you're impossibly ignorant. But that's okay, because I'm sure it FEELS true to you.
the basis of this free nation is the limited government to secure life, liberty, and property. you take such a casual stance with respect to loss of liberty.
Name one appointee
Van Jones.
The red scare was nonsense even when it was happening.
Except that the Soviet Union actually WAS attempting to infiltrate public institutions and influence US actions thru the entire cold war. Man, even NPR talked about that.
THL phish sticks
Stability and web standards implementation is what matters most.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I guess the actual selection of versions shows how the point of the article was more about bashing FF4 compared to IE9 (in which it also failed, given the very small difference between them) rather than doing a honest comparison of all of the browsers.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
For fucks sake, you argue like a kid. Like everything's a dichotomy.
If you take money from the rich and give it to the poor, that is fundamentally wrong. If you take it from the middle class to give to the corporations, that is fundamentally wrong.
If all groups agree to contribute towards the creation of common property (roads, armed forces), then that is part of the social contract formulated among free people. But why should upper-middle class pay a greater percentage of their earnings toward roads than the lower-middle class? Do rich people wear out roads faster? Do the cops spend more or less of their budget year dealing with rich or poor people?
There are problems with the Bush tax cuts, since there are rich people paying nothing. Everyone should pay in their share to the social contract, but NO ONE should be cashing out.
Obama, et al, really do think your money belongs to them first. To be doled out as they see fit. It's YOUR money, you just agree to let them have a portion to support the social contract.
I listen to people like you, a good chunk of slashdotland....it's like the Enlightenment never happened. Like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Jefferson didn't get thru to y'all the importance of government as a social contract and consent of the governed.
THL phish sticks
Except it isn't Group C giving things back - it's a subset of group C, giving for everyone. They're taking from others in group C in order to be generous.
All said scenarios are theft. It just so happens that the current scenario happens to do so through the wealth redistribution methods outlined by Karl Marx, a man who wrote a manifesto which became the basis for modern "democratic socialism" and communism alike. The problem? Even people like Hitler and Mussolini were nice guys who came off favorably at first. Then they got power and control of the state through Marxist agendas. Oops!
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I've said this before. I think it's time that Mozilla release a stripped down, lean, mean version of Firefox without all of the bloat.
They can call it something like Firebird, or Phoenix, to distinguish it from the main branch.
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
Obvious troll is obvious...and very, very boring.
Nothing. What's funny is if you want to talk about some primitive ass shit, 90% of the real UNIX world still uses NFSv3. 16 group limits? Literally allowing the client to tell the server "Oh, I'm Joe Bob - trust me!". Seriously?
How about making the fucking filesystem _not_ fragment and piss itself regularly? That would make it atleast semi-modern.
-- Linux user #369862
But why should upper-middle class pay a greater percentage of their earnings toward roads than the lower-middle class?
Marginal income. A lower-middle-class family might have to spend, say, 85% of their post-tax income on basic necessities, whereas an upper-middle-class family might be able to meet those same needs on 60% of their income. Wealthier people have more cash left over after their basic needs are met. That's why we have progressive marginal tax rates.
Do rich people wear out roads faster?
Yes, they do. They take public transit less, and they drive more and bigger cars.
Do the cops spend more or less of their budget year dealing with rich or poor people?
Rich people have a greater expectation of service from the cops than poor people do.
Obama, et al, really do think your money belongs to them first. To be doled out as they see fit.
The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama thinks the rich should pay taxes.
If you take money from the rich and give it to the poor, that is fundamentally wrong.
You can't make a statement like that and expect it to be universally agreed with. You'd be in the far minority around here with that opinion.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Real world people use flashstop, noscript, adblock plus. I use firefox only because of those. If the other browser had the same functionality as easily accessible built in, I would maybe use them. As it stands, only firefox interrest me. As for performance... Talk to me when the majority of the people bandwidth and access time stops being *the* limiting factor.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'm surprised none of the browser vendors hired the author of this virtual machine, which beats both V8 and TraceMonkey in the shootout benchmarks by a wide margin.
I'm hoping Google or Mozilla does that eventually, it'd be a pity if he got hired by a closed source browser vendor.
I would switch if only those stupid developers didn't support the standard "thou must click three times to select everything in the urlbar" debacle with no option to change it. That and the fact that you can't switch the tabbar to the side. Yeah, that one is really very funny with 20+ tabs open.
"Die endgueltige Teilung Deutschlands - das ist unser Auftrag." - Chlodwig Poth
NFSv4 was released in December 2000, almost 10 years ago. The fact that people still use NFSv3 is that it simply works and it suits most peoples needs. And NFSv3 is not the only protocol that is vulnerable to spoofing.
3) is now obsolete in the latest Firefox 4 nightlies - http://blog.zpao.com/post/1140456188/cascaded-session-restore-a-hidden-bonus
Read up on the features of ZFS and Btrfs. Copy-on-write would be a start.
It's YOUR money, you just agree to let them have a portion to support the social contract.
Don't abuse the words "social contract" as if it were an individual contact. If so, show me where I signed it. Nor did I vote for it, and even if I boycotted the election that is hardly consent. It is important in the sense that the right to govern is given by the people, not some divine right, royal heritage, nobility, military force or something like that but the people forces their will on the individuals. That I could escape the jurisdiction of the contract by leaving the country is not the same as being able to abstain from it, nor is it certain that I could, that any other country would accept me or that it'd be better there. Being the smallest evil does not make it voluntary.
Some don't recognize the contract at all (anarchists), some only recognize negative rights, some only at the most basic level of positive rights like the right to a fair trial (which would require neutral courts, which would require taxes). On the other extreme of the scale are those who'd give up all property rights and most any other right if the social contract required it, communists and Marxist socialists, with most people somewhere in between. You're beating down an open door, regimes without consent of the governed are universally despised. The question is rather how much the governed may impose on the individual, as opposed to individual freedom.
I live in one of the more socialist countries in Europe, and there's plenty that I would call undue meddling in my life. I can't go buy a beer in the shop on 7 PM on a Saturday, because the sale closes at 6 PM by law. I can't in any way complain about the democratic process (we're a monarchy, but it's not practically relevant), we have a good selection of political parties, regular and reliable elections every four years and while I in some cases can blame the government for running their own way in this case I'm convinced it's because we have too many busybodies and nanny state proponents in the people.
I just don't think it's right even if a majority thinks so, that kind of interference just shouldn't be part of the social contract. Who will stop the people from grabbing too much power? What stops the people from taking too much taxes, from taking your property simply because they're in the majority? There is a lot of talk of the balance of power within the branches of government, but there's very little balance outside it, the government is an instrument of the people over the individual. In some ways I guess I want it too, I wouldn't want every lone nut be able to do anything. But I definitively don't want too much of it either, and it seems the slope is only slippery in one direction...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It has 1-2% market share in the English-speaking world. It has a much larger share (over 20% in some countries) in Eastern Europe and Russia.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you take money from the rich and give it to the poor, that is fundamentally wrong
The rich can't get rich without the poor to feed upon, therefore giving back to the poor is simply perpetuating the system. It's for everyone's good, including theirs. If the rich would support those they depend upon without being forced then we wouldn't have to force them.
Obama, et al, really do think your money belongs to them first. To be doled out as they see fit. It's YOUR money, you just agree to let them have a portion to support the social contract.
Yeah, where "et al" includes Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and almost every other president we've had, or political party. It's not your money, though. Money is a bullshit fiction. Indeed, it is the government's money. They issue it and without them it's ass paper.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Firefox beta does not even have the new Method JIT. So they are comparing oranges and apples, not nearly finished products. Maybe Mozilla shouldn't have called it Beta, maybe that is the problem. But rerunning the tests in a few weeks will give very different results.
New things are always on the horizon
Well, the suggestion of trying the nightly builds isn't such a bad idea, because it does include the have the improved engine (Jeagermonkey). The currenty latest beta does not have the improved engine. So the any performance test you do with Firefox 4 Beta is going to be nothing like the release version.
New things are always on the horizon
performance
This is all just my personal opinion.
Let me assure you, the bloat is inbred, default, ingrained and well-integrated into FF.
What IS the default bloat?!
Nobody ever says what it is! EVER! From the default install of Firefox what can you remove that you can consider bloat?
Amusing. The post above you requested a filesystem that didn't fragment. You request copy-on-write, which massively increases fragmentation. With ZFS, every single write adds a new fragment. If you write a file, then modify a few bytes in the middle of it, CoW means that the file will now be in 3 fragments. This cripples performance on mechanical disks, which is why ZFS needs a lot of RAM for the ARC and recommends a big blob of flash for the L2ARC.
The separation of policy and mechanism in NTFS is actually quite similar to the design of ZFS, so implementing CoW semantics would be relatively easy to do at the policy layer. Like ZFS, NTFS differentiates between the low-level on-disk storage mechanism and the high-level user-visible layout.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Config (bookmark, settings, stored password, etc.) syncing, what Mozilla used to call Mesh, is now in the 4.0 beta. That's a feature I don't need or want.
.sig withheld by request
Newsflash: all filesystems fragment. The idea that extX doesn't is a fantasy and if you believe it it's no better than people believing Linux/Mac doesn't get viruses and trojans.
Ext3 and 4 however are resistant to it though, but currently there's no way to defragment them.
How does the timer in firefox "kick off"? It's obviously not on the branch callback anymore; surely you guys aren't firing an operation callback every 10ms?
Do you know how often in the tracing JIT checks operation callback? How about JM? I'm wondering if this style of benchmark will become increasingly innaccurate as the JS JITs get tighter. Is a super-accurate 10ms timer a goal @moz?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
In the former Soviet republics, Opera is #1 in many cases.
..and this is just a short sampling of the former Soviet republics. Its #1 in more of them, and where it isn't #1 its often a close #2.
#1 in Uzbekistan
#1 in Ukraine
#1 in Georgia
#1 in Belarus
"His name was James Damore."
If you take money from the rich and give it to the poor, that is fundamentally wrong.
Says who? We've been taking things from one another since we first fell out of the trees. Granted, for 99% of human history it was the rich and powerful taking it away from those who already had far less, but that's a minor detail.
Taxation is the price for living in a civilized society. So please, if you are of the opinion that all forms of taxation are theft, why not piss off and literally sit by yourself on an island?
I listen to people like you, a good chunk of slashdotland....it's like the Enlightenment never happened. Like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Jefferson didn't get thru to y'all the importance of government as a social contract and consent of the governed.
Quite the contrary. Which is why we ridicule the exceptionally small percentage of selfish dirtbags that seem to think they can reap all the benefits of society without paying for any of it.
Obama, et al, really do think your money belongs to them first. To be doled out as they see fit.
Populist claptrap. Citation needed. And no, Glenn Beck doesn't count.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I hadn't realised it was quite so popular - for those too lazy to click the link, or who don't have Flash, it has 30-50% market share in those countries. The original poster's comment reminds me of the poster in the last iPhone story claiming he'd never seen a Nokia Smartphone in the wild. It's important to remember that the US market is often not reflective of the global market.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Chrome and Opera have had the same feature for a while. Are they also bloated?
"Has features I don't want" is a funny definition of bloated anyway. Tons of people never use tabbed browsing - does that make all modern browsers bloated because that's a feature they don't need or want? Or are your needs the gold standard of bloatedness?
The syncing feature isn't even on by default, so I'm not even sure how it bothers you. I didn't even notice it was there until you posted that.
and seeing how many of these fruits of your labor actually end up in future releases. (Hint: none, even if the bug does things like solve massive NTFS corruption or critical on-screen corruption in the ATI 2D driver, both of which are real attempts of mine.)
They say "U Want? U Fix!"
Then you do and they say it doesn't:
Fit with project goals
Adhere to project style or standards
Offer regression data about other use cases
Solve a big enough problem to justify effort to include
Or they'll just ignore the hell out of you and eventually (as you noted) mark the bug as "solved" simply because bug submitters stop responding to repeated nonsense bug labor/reply requests after 2-3 years... even if there are replies (SOMETIMES DOZENS OF THEM) in the Bugzilla threads linking to WORKING PATCHES.
God I've had it with having to rebuild half of my packages from .src.rpm each release using hacked and rehacked patches, version after version, from Bugzilla discussions that never, ever seem to make it into the code year after year and release after release because arrogant maintainers have their heads up their asses.
THIS is why I'm done with FOSS. Just done. I loved it and the community in the '90s. Now it's mostly arrogant young hotshots with no particular interest in getting actual work done apart from the work of coding for coding's sake, implementing new experimental unstable (if not useful) features at the expense of old, stable, useful ones that most users rely on.
After all, u want... u fix! (But not in my project -- build your own codebase from scratch!)
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Timers run from the event loop. They have all along; they didn't fire via the branch callback at all. So to get your timers to fire you have to stop whatever you're doing and return to the event loop.
I don't know how often the operation callback runs, sorry.
Having a 10ms timer that actually runs after 10ms (accurate to under a ms) is definitely a goal. But again, you'll have to go to the event loop to get the timer, and if something else is running when the timer is supposed to fire (e.g. if you have 1000 timers all scheduled for the same millisecond), chances are your timer will run late.
I can't make enough sense of the benchmark's obfuscated code so far to say anything useful about its accuracy past what I already said.
Have they got a modern filesystem yet
Yes they did, it is magical and called NTFS and still is the FS that outperforms most *nix FS technology and offers 10x the features, and is considered the holy grail of non-MS OS FS technology that all *nix users get excited when a FS gets close to NTFS, like when ZFS was to be the next generation for *nix, and it even fell short of NTFS on features.
Thanks for playing, "Not only a Troll, but a Dumb Troll."
I just tested the latest beta of IE 9 with our application and it beats out all the other browsers. Our web application heavily depends on image display and canvas and the difference is likely due to IE9's rendering integration with DirectX. If you are looking at writing web apps that heavily use Canvas, IE9 is going to be more than relevant.
I can't recall when my "user experience" has been limited by anything other than download speed (and the abysmal quality of most Web sites, of course). So why should I care about browser speed?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
In my tests, on the average, Ie9 was infinitely slower. Of course, I knew that if I just posted raw cross-platform results, people would object that Windows has a disproportionate market share, so I took that into account. In my final numbers, Windows counts for a generous 99% of the result, and other OSes for only 1%. Of course, 1% of infinity is still infinity, so, on the average, any given user will experience an infinite slowdown with IE9. It's all there in the numbers! :)
They are also taxed the same on the same income, thanks to marginal tax rates. Everyone pays nothing (well, no income tax anyway) on the first $10,000 (or so). Everyone pays the same on the next $20,000, then on the next $40,000 after that (just making up numbers) and so on. Everyone pays the same on the same chunks of income.
The wealthy also pay far less in social security tax, so their rates can actually come out to about the same as the middle class. The ultra wealthy likely don't pay over 20% on average, and possibly less, meaning they have a lower tax rate than most of us.
How do I make NTFS "piss itself"?
NTFS supports that - it's controlled by a switch. It defaults to case-insensitive because the entire Win32 API layer depends on this assumption (and, naturally, most third-party DOS/Windows software does, too). But e.g. when you install SUA (Unix compat layer) on Vista/2008/7, one thing that it'll ask you is whether you want to switch the target NTFS partition to be case-sensitive.
NTFS does avoid fragmentation in the same ways that ext3, HFS+ any any other modern filesystem try to do. It will naturally write files to sequential blocks when they are available. To completely avoid fragmentation the system would have to find or organize a large enough number of sequential free blocks every time it tried to do a write. If you changed a file so that it requires another free block the whole thing would have to be moved to a sequential area of free space. Imagine how things like the swap file would be impacted by that kind of thing.
As for pissing the file system I don't know what you could be doing because the design of NTFS is pretty robust. The MFT is mirrorred on completely different areas of the disk and structured in a binary tree (instead of chains like FAT). The filesystem itself is journalled and uses bitmaps, as well as supporting things like file snapshots. I've never seen NTFS "piss itself" unless there was a hardware failure somewhere.
If you stop unplugging your drives before they can flush the write cache (hint: Safely Remove Hardware) your NTFS pissing problems will probably go away.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
Bah. I'll wait until it's ported to linux.
What's the practical difference between 6.3 and 5.5 seconds to get to 100 km/h?
.GE. 6 versus Netscape Navigator I would probably want to trash Navigator all over again. The weakest link gets kicked off the island, even if the difference is measured in fractions.
Big difference. As a commuter I value the acceleration (along with other properties) of my vehicle. If everyone else takes 6.3 and I take 5.5, this difference will help me numerous times per commute to merge more easily or to be able to take advantage of the hole created in front of some grey beard, or in some cases to make the next light due to dumb configuration of light sequence. So it is not 6.3 vs 5.5 with car acceleration, it is relative acceleration that matters. In the dog-eat-dog world of commuting, acceleration matters quite a bit. For me, more acceleration equals less stress. My brother's "zero to 50 in 30" two-cylinder Toyota has no place on today's roads.
And FWIW this is at least partially true with other things -- if browser x is the slowest, whenever we run it we will notice. For me, IE v6, 7, 8 are all so slow vs Opera & Firefox that I simply never run them. Yet if I did an absolute comparison of IE
I come here for the love
You should take a look on how ext3 works. Yes, it does write files to sequential blocks when they are available, but that is not enough to avoid fragmentation.
Rethinking email
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Some idiot modded me "overrated" but, you know, you could browse a website on a netbook or a 1000-core supercomputer with a monitor and keyboard attached, and either way you'll spend most of your time waiting for things to download. Everything you've already loaded will render before the next element loads. The only difference you'll notice is how fast it takes your browser to load in the first place, and that has nothing to do with graphics acceleration.
In fact, when you modify a file, you write a whole new block, leaving the old block which contained the old data in place. This will not introduce more used blocks (as the old block is freed) and will in fact give a better write performance as the disk head does not jump around seeking blocks to edit.
Whether copy on write can be introduced in NTFS or not is completely beside the point. NTFS does not currently have this feature.
You are assuming that the workload is composed entirely of writes. Back in the real world, workloads are generally read-heavy, by a fairly large margin. Fragmentation caused by CoW degrades read performance. You hard drive can do around 100-200 seeks per second, so if you are reading heavily fragmented files the speed can drop to around 100KB/s. Since each read will displace the head away from the current insert point (with ZFS, by the way, there isn't just one place where writes can happen - it's not LFS), you still need to seek back to it to write, just as you'd have to seek to the middle of a file to write. If you are using rotational media, you can't do CoW without a very large cache or a performance hit. ZFS recommends 1GB of RAM for the kernel (around 600MB for the ARC) and a large flash drive for the L2ARC to mitigate this.
When the majority of desktops and laptops have SSDs, then CoW will make a lot of sense in a desktop filesystem. At that point, the fact that it's trivial to add it to NTFS will be important. At the moment, the fact that it is not present is not.
I really don't understand this irrational Microsoft bashing. I haven't used Windows for about 7 years, but even I can accept that they did some things right.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Hyperbole much?
ZFS concatenates many small random writes into large sequential write operations. This clearly gives better write performance. As for file defragmentation, WAFL features automatic defragmentation. Similar defragmentation is also in the works for ZFS.