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Preliminary Benchmarks: Unity vs. Gnome-Shell
fatalGlory writes "Despite some initial reservations about Gnome-shell, it appears to be coming out very nicely. In some preliminary benchmarking tests I've been conducting, Ubuntu's Unity desktop on 11.04 Natty uses roughly double the memory that Gnome-shell uses."
It's really not that big a deal these days, you want to use memory, because memory is FAST, and in comparison to the old days, dirt cheap. Loading things into memory is not an automatic sign of bloat, sometimes it is a sign of doing what you should, putting memory into use.
Absolutely worthless comparison, as it compares vastly different distributions. He isnt even comparing 2 debian based distros, or trying to control for different running services; why is there not even an attempt to isolate the memory usage of the DE / WM?
Perhaps this could have been useful as a comparison of distro memory usage, but even in that it fails-- its comparing an installed Debian distro to live-CD based Fedora; why wasnt fedora installed and compared (perhaps using VMs?), or Ubuntu run from LiveCD?
It's as if someone designed that "benchmark" to be criticisable in every possible way!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
everyone knows that! it's built on a solid, stable unix foundation, with a 'keep it simple' philosophy that guarantees performance and stability! with 12 overhead cams and a dual plated stainless steel cooking surface, your family will be sure to love the new Unity.
He says Gnome-Shell uses software rendering.. It's not true, fedora ships free 3D drivers for Intel, AMD/ATI and NVidia now.
Also, why use VLC when he could use Totem on all 3.And Why does he use apt-get in his test ?
Even though I like the result, it seems like a pretty lame test.
Others have correctly pointed out that comparing memory usage on two different distros is pointless. On top of that, comparing total memory usage is stupid.
Look, you have memory in your system to be used. If you dug into it and found out that most of that memory consisted of massive, unused libraries, duplicate code, empty datastructures, or garbage that wasn't getting cleaned up, then sure, you could give it a hard time. But if it's full of cached images and icons so that the interface can be quicker and more responsive, well, isn't that why you have all that RAM?
A perfect program/OS would very quickly gobble up all available memory by storing and caching useful stuff...and then free it up the instant it was needed elsewhere. That turns out to be harder than it sounds, since procs generally don't know or care about totally memory usage, but still, the ideal should not be the opposite extreme.
And hey, big surprise, comments disabled on that article. "You must log in to post a comment." And even if I did want yet another account just for commenting on a single blog, I don't see anywhere to register.
Just for fun, I'll respond here. I might even try to email it to him, if that works.
There are three fundamental entities that make up our universe, matter, energy and information.
I'm not sure information is an "entity" in any relevant sense. It's a phenomenon. More in a moment...
Now, creating and communicating information is demonstrably a mental process, requiring an intelligent mind to create and to receive the information.
Actually, it's demonstrably a physical process, one which can be performed entirely by machines, unless you are willing to describe my laptop as an "intelligent mind." But it depends what you mean by "information", in this case, as you point out:
In this way, information is distinct from data, which Shannon unfortunately referred to as "information" in his work on statistical-level information-theory, leading to the present ambiguity.
If that is the way in which information is distinct from data, then I work with a hell of a lot more data than information. My computer creates, interprets, communicates, and manipulates all sorts of data that no "intelligent mind" will ever touch, unless, again, you're willing to allow that my cell phone is an "intelligent mind."
This reality has been demonstrated amply in the book by Gitt and is expressed in a streamlined form in this lecture by Wilder-Smith.
I'm not willing to buy and read a book, but maybe I'll listen to the lecture.
Yet, so many software engineers remain evolutionists.
...what? Unless you're referring to the arguments you referenced via an amazon link and an mp3 file, I see nothing in your argument which requires intelligent design or negates evolution. Even if I accepted your premise that information must have an intelligent designer -- sorry, a god -- as its originator, as a "software engineer," I'd hope you understand that humans can and have written programs which simulate the genetic process at various levels -- why, then, could this god not design evolution as part of the "program" of the universe, fire it off and let it run, exactly as human beings do all the time?
Despite interpreting and often designing language conventions every day, very few software engineers seem to have considered the implications of language and information-theory for genetics, biology and metaphysics.
Again, out of the blue, you're introducing a new topic -- languages -- along with committing a stupidly trivial fallacy. Just guessing here, because you didn't actually deliver an argument, but if you did, I imagine it would look like this:
1. Humans can create languages.
2. Humans have intelligent minds.
3. Given 1 and 2, intelligent minds can create languages.
4. DNA is a language.
5. Given 3 and 4, an intelligent mind can create DNA (the language).
Therefore, only an intelligent mind could have created DNA.
Both 5 and the conclusion are absurd on their face, and I hope you can see that. 5 is fallacious because 3 asserts only that intelligent minds can create languages, not that they can create all languages. Even if 5 were sound, the conclusion is fallacious because 5 asserts only that an intelligent mind can create DNA, and not that only an intelligent mind can create (or could have created) DNA.
And again, what about this falsifies evolution? If it worked, it would falsify abiogenesis. Evolution can happen without intervention once we have DNA, just as a program can run without human intervention once we start it running.
Why is this? Well that's a discussion for another post.
If you're going to m
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
but since when has memory footprint been a "benchmark?" Really, we're talking roughly half a gig here, and who's running these on a system without at least 2?
Most netbooks are 1GB. half a gig is a lot just to run the desktop on a machine like that.