Visual C++ has this handy/MP option which tells the compiler to do multi-threaded compiles. On some of our build machines (with 16 cores) this gives an almost linear increase in build speeds. It's obvious from the author's discussion of multi-core that he is not aware of this option and did not use it.
A performance benchmark which doesn't turn on the go-fast option is not going to produce meaningful results.
The author also doesn't discuss debug symbols. VC++ generates debug symbols by default, whereas the other compilers do not. Generating builds without symbols is not a reasonable scenario for most builds, so this makes the file size comparisons rather meaningless.
There are many ways that I might want to add media to or remove media from my computer. I might use explorer to copy them, SyncToy to synchronize with another machine, use the command prompt to delete files, etc. iTunes could detect all of this -- it's not hard -- but it doesn't. It forces users to manually rescan their music folders in order to find new files. Doing this scan often leads to duplicate listings of files, and it fails to detect when files have been deleted. It's lousy.
Why would I want to put my Media in that particular folder? I should be able to put my media anywhere in the music library and have my music player figure it out. Zune and Windows Media Player do this fine, and equally importantly they notice when files have gone away and they remove them from their catalog. Handy. iTunes doesn't.
Zune and Windows Media Player have other problems of course...
iTunes scans your folders for new files periodically? First of all, I have never seen it do that. It never notices when music files have been added or deleted. That is probably its biggest weakness compared to other music players. Second, if iTunes did want to stay synchronized with what was on the hard drive (crazy idea) then directory notifications are a far more efficient way of doing that.
This comparison misses the point about SSDs. Yes, SSDs may have somewhat better bandwidth, and may improve startup times slightly, but that is not their advantage. They have awesomely better seek times, which makes some operations hundreds of times faster. Putting Visual Studio's.sdf files on an SSD avoids lots of VS 2010 hangs.
This blog post I wrote discusses the random I/Os to the Windows Live Photo Gallery SQL database at startup. On my photo collection I see 5,000 random disk I/Os, which are painful on a laptop HDD but would be a non-issue on an SSD:
In situations like this an SSD is probably a *hundred* times faster than an HDD. Database accesses seem to be a common scenario where an SSD is worth its weight in gold.
In short, if an SSD is only twice as fast then it's not worthwhile. If it's ten to a hundred times faster, then hell ya.
Dumping pollution into the environment is often cheaper, at least in the short term, than trying to avoid creating waste, or trying to dump the waste responsibly. Burning coal is cheaper because of this. If you factor in the costs -- acid rain, altering the chemistry of the air, acidification of the oceans -- coal is more expensive.
And, by reducing their fossil fuel imports Portugal has now insulated themselves from the vagaries of the energy market. The next time oil prices spike the US will be force to send crates of money to unfriendly regimes because the US is addicted to their oil. Portugal will thrive while the US stumbles.
Portugal is planning ahead. The US is hoping that it can continue to be profligate forever.
Money isn't necessarily a proxy for emissions. Often it is a proxy for human labor.
I'm sorry to hear that you can't find a Windows version of Windows Live Photo Gallery. Such a shock. Luckily the OP asked to solve a problem on Windows 7, so your concerns are not relevant.
Now if you'd wanted to post some alternate suggestions that work on linux then that would have been productive. Merely mentioning that a free Microsoft program doesn't work on linux, when the OP asked about Windows, is just trolling
What documentation are you planning to carry to prove you are legal? Drivers license? Proves nothing. Birth certificate? Better, but not something I really want to carry around. Ditto with passport.
As others have said this risks being a hassle for citizens. It will also make many people less likely to trust the police and thus less likely to report crimes. There is a reason that the police don't generally enforce immigration laws.
Reality does not insist that Windows programs require root access. I have one piece of software that requires administrative privileges (Starry Night Enthusiast -- I've complained to them). Every one of the dozens of other software packages I have installed (Python, Office 2007, Perforce, Visual Studio, Family Tree Maker, Streets and Trips, Cam Studio, Fractal eXtreme, SyncToy, Total Annihilation, Xbox 360 SDK, Image Magick, WinDirStat, Airfoil, Garmin Training Center, etc.) works fine as restricted user.
The two PCs that my other family members use are both locked down -- they don't have the admin account passwords -- and they are totally fine.
Your complaint is outdated. And you haven't provided any examples of these many programs that (inappropriately) required administrative privileges. Put up (so we can evaluate the importance of these 'many' programs that require root) or shut up.
You need to update your criticisms, and give more details. Very little software on Windows requires administrative privileges -- Vista forced those necessary fixes years ago. The remaining needs for administrative privileges are, by and large, for administration and software installation. You know, the sort of thing that allows locking a machine down securely.
As for proprietary networking, my Windows box uses TCP/IP. What does yours use?
And I didn't really understand #1, #2, or #3. You need to give more details to justify your claims, and preferably to show how they are any different from Linux/OpenSource bugs.
This question got modded as insightful? I think the poster should have to read the article before having comments modded as insightful. From the article:
> The researchers determined the age of the lakes by counting crater impacts
They don't go into a lot more detail than that -- it's not a scientific paper -- but that at least answers your first question. Asking for more details is reasonable but asking those questions actually requires some effort. Questioning scientists intelligently is more than just speculating about their possible failures without reading what they've said.
Base 2 makes sense for RAM sizes and cache sizes. For HD sizes it makes no sense. The operating systems should get a clue and display HD sizes and file sizes in decimal MB/GB/TB.
It says that "per day" and "per year" are both incorrect. Shrinkage figures are given as a percentage of sales. That makes sense because giving shrinkage numbers as a percentage of inventory wouldn't be meaningful without understanding how quickly the inventory was turned over, and even then it's not very useful because it doesn't directly indicate the economic cost of the shrinkage.
What the Wikipedia link says is that shrinkage is about 1.7% of retail sales in the US in 2001. Not per year. Not per day. Also not 2% to 5%.
In the UK you can also see, side by side, signs that say something like:
Overpass clearance: 3 m
Exit for Reading: 3 m
Either the exit for Reading is really close, or the overpass is really high, or the letter 'm' is being used for two different reasons. I think that by dragging their feet the UK is going to make the conversion to metric as painful as possible. I like the way Canada did it -- all distances and speeds were changed to metric pretty much overnight.
In addition to being a massively multi-base system (base 12, base 3, based 5,280?) it is a system where the same word has many meanings:
inch: this was only standardized in 1958. Prior to that there were at least two commonly used inches which were slightly different from the 2.54 mm inch which is now the standard. Even now the survey inch (old US inch) is still used in some contexts.
gallon: the imperial and US gallons are different -- one is 128 fluid ounces and the other is 160 fluid ounces, which is why US cars get fewer miles to the gallon than UK cars:-)
fluid ounce: the imperial and US fluid ounces are different sizes -- US fluid ounce is about 4% heavier
ounce: ignoring fluid ounces there is still the avoirdupois ounce, troy ounce, and others. And oh, by the way, a troy pound has 12 troy ounces, instead of the usual 16. The troy ounce is still used for precious metals.
The metric system is much easier to work with, especially when doing calculations in your head. It also makes it easier to do conversions between types of units (a liter is approximately 1000 cubic centimeters and weighs approximately a kilogram -- or maybe it's exact). However arguably the best reason to ditch inches/gallons/ounces is because the whole inches/gallons/ounces system is actually several different systems.
They don't map the whole 2 GB in to your address space. They typically map in the video card RAM through a 256 MB window, so a video card with more memory doesn't use more of your address space. So, with a 2 GB video card and a 32-bit OS you would still have access to up to 3.0-3.5 GB of RAM.
Then again, a game that can justify a 2 GB graphics card will need a huge amount of RAM, and it is absolutely time to be running a 64-bit OS. I run 64-bit Vista on all four of my computers (home and work), and installing a 32-bit OS now when memory is so cheap seems very shortsighted.
He didn't say using current solar generators, he said using current solar technology. Obviously we'd have to build some more solar plants to generate significantly more power.
But good job knocking down the straw-man. It won't be getting up again.
Preaching to the choir with irrelevant numbers. Yes, a metric MB and a binary MB are not the same. However the article (well, the summary anyway) doesn't even *talk* about MB. It talks about GB and TB.
Thus, they missed a chance to point out that the metric/binary discrepancy is greater for GB than MB, and greater for TB than GB.
If you really want a shocking headline you need to be pointing out that a 1.0 (metric) TB drive is actually only 0.909 (binary) TB! What a rip-off!
Frankly I'm sick and tired of binary MB/GB/TB. They make sense for DRAM, and are pointless everywhere else. I wish the operating systems would switch to decimal MB/GB/TB, as the 2.4% correction factors get tiresome.
Okay, I'm sick of people saying "mouse/keyboard is so much better than controller because the mouse gives greater sensitivity/precision/whatever".
Great. Fabulous. However you've just casually ignored half of your control scheme. You've forgotten about the keyboard. A mouse may give greater control than a joypad, but a keyboard is *horrible* in comparison to a joypad.
With a joypad you can move in any direction, at any speed, in an intuitive way that takes no time to learn. With a keyboard you are dealing with a very peculiar and limited input device.
So please, if you have any comments about how fabulous a mouse is, at least remember to acknowledge that maybe the keyboard half of the equation is slightly less fabulous.
I have the opposite experience of many people. I often need to copy 600 MB files from a server in Seattle to my machine in the UK. After upgrading to Vista my transfer times improved by a factor of ten! The copy was taking a rather pathetic 100 minutes, and now it takes about ten. Clearly the speed is still not setting any records, but it is now a nuisance rather than something I'd have to plan my day around.
I've heard that the improved network transfer speed is because, among other things, Vista can use much larger packets, which makes it less likely to be latency bound.
I can't explain why I'm seeing faster copies while other people are seeing slower copies.
> I don't understand how people debug the "hard" bugs without any assembly knowledge.
Absolutely. Any professional programmer should know how to *read* assembly language. Otherwise they may find it impossible to debug optimized code, code with no symbols, code-gen bugs, and all sorts of oddball issues.
If you don't mind having to go to an expert whenever you hit a hard problem then by all means don't learn assembly language. I will happily be that expert for you, and I will make more money because of it. If you want to rise to the top of your profession and be productive, then learn how to read assembly language.
Writing assembly language, on the other hand, is 99.99% obsolete. Still needed occasionally, but rarely worth it. Most developers will only make their programs worse (larger, less portable, harder to maintain, and *slower*) by writing them in assembly language.
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Visual C++ has this handy /MP option which tells the compiler to do multi-threaded compiles. On some of our build machines (with 16 cores) this gives an almost linear increase in build speeds. It's obvious from the author's discussion of multi-core that he is not aware of this option and did not use it.
A performance benchmark which doesn't turn on the go-fast option is not going to produce meaningful results.
The author also doesn't discuss debug symbols. VC++ generates debug symbols by default, whereas the other compilers do not. Generating builds without symbols is not a reasonable scenario for most builds, so this makes the file size comparisons rather meaningless.
Oh yeah -- I forgot that I blogged about this iTunes annoyance. Luckily I found a way to delete orphaned references to moved or deleted music files, but it really shouldn't have been necessary. Here's the post: http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/itunes-itunes-why-hast-thou-forsaken-me/
There are many ways that I might want to add media to or remove media from my computer. I might use explorer to copy them, SyncToy to synchronize with another machine, use the command prompt to delete files, etc. iTunes could detect all of this -- it's not hard -- but it doesn't. It forces users to manually rescan their music folders in order to find new files. Doing this scan often leads to duplicate listings of files, and it fails to detect when files have been deleted. It's lousy.
Why would I want to put my Media in that particular folder? I should be able to put my media anywhere in the music library and have my music player figure it out. Zune and Windows Media Player do this fine, and equally importantly they notice when files have gone away and they remove them from their catalog. Handy. iTunes doesn't. Zune and Windows Media Player have other problems of course...
iTunes scans your folders for new files periodically? First of all, I have never seen it do that. It never notices when music files have been added or deleted. That is probably its biggest weakness compared to other music players. Second, if iTunes did want to stay synchronized with what was on the hard drive (crazy idea) then directory notifications are a far more efficient way of doing that.
> twice the performance
This comparison misses the point about SSDs. Yes, SSDs may have somewhat better bandwidth, and may improve startup times slightly, but that is not their advantage. They have awesomely better seek times, which makes some operations hundreds of times faster. Putting Visual Studio's .sdf files on an SSD avoids lots of VS 2010 hangs.
This blog post I wrote discusses the random I/Os to the Windows Live Photo Gallery SQL database at startup. On my photo collection I see 5,000 random disk I/Os, which are painful on a laptop HDD but would be a non-issue on an SSD:
http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/fixing-another-photo-gallery-performance-bug/
In situations like this an SSD is probably a *hundred* times faster than an HDD. Database accesses seem to be a common scenario where an SSD is worth its weight in gold.
In short, if an SSD is only twice as fast then it's not worthwhile. If it's ten to a hundred times faster, then hell ya.
Dumping pollution into the environment is often cheaper, at least in the short term, than trying to avoid creating waste, or trying to dump the waste responsibly. Burning coal is cheaper because of this. If you factor in the costs -- acid rain, altering the chemistry of the air, acidification of the oceans -- coal is more expensive.
And, by reducing their fossil fuel imports Portugal has now insulated themselves from the vagaries of the energy market. The next time oil prices spike the US will be force to send crates of money to unfriendly regimes because the US is addicted to their oil. Portugal will thrive while the US stumbles.
Portugal is planning ahead. The US is hoping that it can continue to be profligate forever.
Money isn't necessarily a proxy for emissions. Often it is a proxy for human labor.
Now if you'd wanted to post some alternate suggestions that work on linux then that would have been productive. Merely mentioning that a free Microsoft program doesn't work on linux, when the OP asked about Windows, is just trolling
It stores the information in the images, as it should, and it maintains a database for fast access. And it's free.
What documentation are you planning to carry to prove you are legal? Drivers license? Proves nothing. Birth certificate? Better, but not something I really want to carry around. Ditto with passport. As others have said this risks being a hassle for citizens. It will also make many people less likely to trust the police and thus less likely to report crimes. There is a reason that the police don't generally enforce immigration laws.
The two PCs that my other family members use are both locked down -- they don't have the admin account passwords -- and they are totally fine.
Your complaint is outdated. And you haven't provided any examples of these many programs that (inappropriately) required administrative privileges. Put up (so we can evaluate the importance of these 'many' programs that require root) or shut up.
As for proprietary networking, my Windows box uses TCP/IP. What does yours use?
And I didn't really understand #1, #2, or #3. You need to give more details to justify your claims, and preferably to show how they are any different from Linux/OpenSource bugs.
This question got modded as insightful? I think the poster should have to read the article before having comments modded as insightful. From the article: > The researchers determined the age of the lakes by counting crater impacts They don't go into a lot more detail than that -- it's not a scientific paper -- but that at least answers your first question. Asking for more details is reasonable but asking those questions actually requires some effort. Questioning scientists intelligently is more than just speculating about their possible failures without reading what they've said.
Base 2 makes sense for RAM sizes and cache sizes. For HD sizes it makes no sense. The operating systems should get a clue and display HD sizes and file sizes in decimal MB/GB/TB.
You forgot to post a link to some stats. I'll help you out. How about this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting)
It says that "per day" and "per year" are both incorrect. Shrinkage figures are given as a percentage of sales. That makes sense because giving shrinkage numbers as a percentage of inventory wouldn't be meaningful without understanding how quickly the inventory was turned over, and even then it's not very useful because it doesn't directly indicate the economic cost of the shrinkage.
What the Wikipedia link says is that shrinkage is about 1.7% of retail sales in the US in 2001. Not per year. Not per day. Also not 2% to 5%.
Avoirdupois or troy ounces?
There are four answers to your question. That's the forgotten problem with the pounds/ounces/inches/miles system.
Either the exit for Reading is really close, or the overpass is really high, or the letter 'm' is being used for two different reasons. I think that by dragging their feet the UK is going to make the conversion to metric as painful as possible. I like the way Canada did it -- all distances and speeds were changed to metric pretty much overnight.
inch: this was only standardized in 1958. Prior to that there were at least two commonly used inches which were slightly different from the 2.54 mm inch which is now the standard. Even now the survey inch (old US inch) is still used in some contexts. :-)
gallon: the imperial and US gallons are different -- one is 128 fluid ounces and the other is 160 fluid ounces, which is why US cars get fewer miles to the gallon than UK cars
fluid ounce: the imperial and US fluid ounces are different sizes -- US fluid ounce is about 4% heavier
ounce: ignoring fluid ounces there is still the avoirdupois ounce, troy ounce, and others. And oh, by the way, a troy pound has 12 troy ounces, instead of the usual 16. The troy ounce is still used for precious metals.
The metric system is much easier to work with, especially when doing calculations in your head. It also makes it easier to do conversions between types of units (a liter is approximately 1000 cubic centimeters and weighs approximately a kilogram -- or maybe it's exact). However arguably the best reason to ditch inches/gallons/ounces is because the whole inches/gallons/ounces system is actually several different systems.
They don't map the whole 2 GB in to your address space. They typically map in the video card RAM through a 256 MB window, so a video card with more memory doesn't use more of your address space. So, with a 2 GB video card and a 32-bit OS you would still have access to up to 3.0-3.5 GB of RAM.
Then again, a game that can justify a 2 GB graphics card will need a huge amount of RAM, and it is absolutely time to be running a 64-bit OS. I run 64-bit Vista on all four of my computers (home and work), and installing a 32-bit OS now when memory is so cheap seems very shortsighted.
The threats on the Internet and the responses available have changed significantly since then.
He didn't say using current solar generators, he said using current solar technology. Obviously we'd have to build some more solar plants to generate significantly more power. But good job knocking down the straw-man. It won't be getting up again.
Thus, they missed a chance to point out that the metric/binary discrepancy is greater for GB than MB, and greater for TB than GB.
If you really want a shocking headline you need to be pointing out that a 1.0 (metric) TB drive is actually only 0.909 (binary) TB! What a rip-off!
Frankly I'm sick and tired of binary MB/GB/TB. They make sense for DRAM, and are pointless everywhere else. I wish the operating systems would switch to decimal MB/GB/TB, as the 2.4% correction factors get tiresome.
Great. Fabulous. However you've just casually ignored half of your control scheme. You've forgotten about the keyboard. A mouse may give greater control than a joypad, but a keyboard is *horrible* in comparison to a joypad.
With a joypad you can move in any direction, at any speed, in an intuitive way that takes no time to learn. With a keyboard you are dealing with a very peculiar and limited input device.
So please, if you have any comments about how fabulous a mouse is, at least remember to acknowledge that maybe the keyboard half of the equation is slightly less fabulous.
I've heard that the improved network transfer speed is because, among other things, Vista can use much larger packets, which makes it less likely to be latency bound.
I can't explain why I'm seeing faster copies while other people are seeing slower copies.
Absolutely. Any professional programmer should know how to *read* assembly language. Otherwise they may find it impossible to debug optimized code, code with no symbols, code-gen bugs, and all sorts of oddball issues. If you don't mind having to go to an expert whenever you hit a hard problem then by all means don't learn assembly language. I will happily be that expert for you, and I will make more money because of it. If you want to rise to the top of your profession and be productive, then learn how to read assembly language. Writing assembly language, on the other hand, is 99.99% obsolete. Still needed occasionally, but rarely worth it. Most developers will only make their programs worse (larger, less portable, harder to maintain, and *slower*) by writing them in assembly language.