It's a hidden blessing that Flash only uses a single core. On a single core, Flash will bring a computer to its knees, but a dual core processor will barely be affected at all. If Flash eventually supports multiple cores, then heaven help us.
Incidentally, it's actually braindead developers that are responsible for Flash being so slow. All they have to do is add a few wait states to their code and the problem disappears. I've actually seen a number of Flash games that were programmed properly, and will not use more than 3% of my CPU time, despite running at 60 FPS. True, it would be nice if Flash had a built-in way to throttle the performance of content, but... no HTML5 I'm aware of has a mechanism for doing this, either. Firefox certainly doesn't, despite having a Flash container process.
I'm always amused when people bash Flash for sucking up CPU time. If an HTML5/JS application goes into a badly-written tight loop waiting for input, it will max out the CPU, too... and will likely do so on all cores. Will a switch to HTML5 automatically fix code with tight loops? Of course not. Thus, I don't think it's reasonable to blame Flash for badly written apps, either. It's the responsibility of the client platform to manage process priority (the web browser is the OS of the future? Yeah, right. Even memory management poses a challenge to many modern web browsers!)
As for working badly, one thing I liked about Flash many years ago was that it was a paltry ~300K download that didn't require a full installer. It "just worked", when other things like Java weighed in at 15+ MB and were a PITA to install. Also, Flash content is almost always packaged into a single file, making content easy to download and archive for offline use (such as cartoons and games). Try that with HTML5 or Java. There is no official packaging format for HTML/CSS/JS, so archiving content consisting of hundreds of files with tons of cross-links is a lot more difficult today than in the HTML3 days. Even Java figured out that packaging was important with the JAR file format. With GZip compression becoming standard on most web servers these days, why can't HTML5 get an official packaging format? More complaining about it being against a free Internet or some other impractical crap?
The fact it is controlled by a single corporation is another
Yeah, in the face of Flash, all those loud-mouthed open-source guys (and other companies) did a fine job of making some good old fashioned competition.
Seriously. The alternatives to Flash were Java, millions of mal-ware infested media players, and eventually Silverlight. Everything either outright sucked, was mis-applied, or was too late to market to matter. Today, HTML5 is literally the only thing to go up against Flash, and HTML5 pretty much sucks. Just playing audio is a major challenge. just audio. That's pretty damn sad. The most revolutionary thing HTML5 has to offer is... a frame buffer? Really? It took this long?
Everyone else was wetting their pants about some mythical standards-compliant angel to come from the heavens and save us all, but they all either refused to work on it, or was too busy bitching over the proper color of the bike shed. No shit Flash took over the market.
I like Flash, despite its problems, because it actually works and works well. If it swamped the market, that was the fault of the market not responding and making something better.
Everyone tells me I'm crazy when I say that windowed games and videos play really sluggish in Windows 7 compared to XP. The reason is because the new window manager uses 3D hardware to do compositing, and for some reason, updates seems to be locked in at 30 FPS (my guess is 50% of the monitor refresh rate). XP updated at full blast and provided much, much smoother games and video. I've noticed a rather huge loss in overall performance on my new Win7 machine, despite it being massively more powerful than my old XP box.
Apparently, I'm the only one who notices or is bothered by this.
What exactly is it about TB that is not capable of handling your need?
In my case, it's buggy as hell.
Quick example: I found out the hard way that changed account defaults would take effect right away, but the GUI would not properly show the new settings until the program is restarted. If the GUI can so easily become decoupled from what's going on internally, that does not inspire confidence.
I've tried it a few times over the years, and found it to be stable, but it has a LOT of glitches and design issues that never get fixed. I think people use it because there's noting out there (among GUI-based clients) that's much better. It is certainly not a very good program in its own right, though.
I considered switching to Thunderbird a few weeks ago. I kept having problems with it not remembering configuration changes, the GUI not updating properly, and even simple tasks, like choosing a default sending address, required a lot of research and forum hunting to figure out (in the end, people kept recommending extensions to do it, even thought the program does support a default. Apparently, veteran Thunderbird users are just as confused as noobs like me).
I was NOT impressed. When I uninstalled it and the installer asked me for feedback, I specifically pointed out tons of bugs and horrible GUI design. Any e-mail program that makes it a chore to funnel mail from multiple addresses into one Inbox is not a well-designed program.
I always thought they would just stamp the metal with forging. It makes for a far sturdier part and takes a lot less time, and they would only have to machine the ports and sides. This is especially true since Macs don't have much internal bracing, and are thus susceptible to flexing and even cracking.
But then, that reduce the look of the aluminum grain, and we can't have Macs without the brushed metal look, can we?
The video hardly impresses me. I get more amazement out of half the episodes of How it's Made.
Every Windows machine since Win2K has been rock solid stable. It's the OEM crapware and buggy drivers that make Windows unbearable.
Do you really think Atari, Amiga, and Acorn would be better today had they survived? After 20 years, Linux is still just a blip on the radar because... el-cheapo OEMs and normal people love it?
Windows is popular for far more reasons than monopolization. It took a long time for non-Apple companies to realize that, and only now are systems like Android picking up steam. Yeah, Android -- that system suffering from stability issues, fragmentation, bad drivers, etc.
It's worth pointing out that Nintendo didn't have a "real" Mario game on the Gamecube. They came out with Mario Sunshine which was... not really Mario.
Much like what happened to Sega with the Saturn, it's kind of hard to sell a console without your star characters front and center.
The other possibility is that the consoles experience diminishing returns past the horsepower the modern systems are at for most of the game developer's needs.
A more realistic way of putting it, is that Nintendo designed a system that fit their own needs, and 3rd party developers will just have to work with it. Take a look at the games Nintendo has typically made for the Gamecube and Wii, and it's pretty obvious that lots of CPU power for game logic isn't a requirement.
I guess I'm not really a hardware guy but I feel like we've actually moved toward less inventive ideas for consoles
What about the PS3 Cell? Oh, well, it's so different from traditional CPUs that all developers do is whine and bitch about how different it is, and how their x86 PC code runs like crap without *gasp* extensive modification.
Trying to make interesting custom hardware would just be financial suicide, when pumping out Call of Duty sequels every year is a working, proven business model.
The question is whether the 10% of good releases will actually be worth it to bother, or even if it's easy enough to find them in the first place (given how bad the new Playstation Store is, I find it amazing that anyone buys games from there at all, let alone manages to find decent games).
I was looking for an easy way to automate character conversion from Latin-1 to UTF-8 for the forum software I use. I found out the hard way that the built-in MySQL recoder is completely broken, and will barf in different ways depending on which version number of MySQL you are using. No errors or warnings during the conversion for any version. You'll just find out later that all the field limits are wrong. You can only find out if it worked or not by inserting new rows and finding out if you get errors about data being too large to fit in the field, and whether it fails or not has nothing to do with the actual length of the data, but with whether you send 7-bit or 8-bit characters.
I gave up trying to get MySQL to do it, and wrote my own conversion tool.
And that's just for baby stuff for a web forum on a personal web site. I can only imagine what MySQL is like in an enterprise environment.
MS has always done that. Patches and support for 6+ years, at least. I was still getting patches for Win2K long after my old Mac became a doorstop.
Just because they aren't releasing service packs or rollups, does not mean they aren't releasing security updates and patches. Yes, the new packaging sucks, but the updates are still there.
I was thinking the other way around. There are far fewer CPU choices than there are motherboard configurations, so... what happens if the motherboard I want is saddled with a CPU I don't? I'd have to imagine that having a CPU welded on, or even socketed with a daughter card, will reduce the number of motherboard variations a manufacturer is willing to make. These days, I'm far more concerned about features in my workstation than I am about raw speed and getting just the right color of heat sinks.
Frankly, I'm baffled at the idea of an Intel CPU without "pins." I thought they already didn't have any?! This can't be about cutting costs, so if Intel's intent is just trying to piss off the enthusiast market, I doubt daughter cards and other hacks will be very easy, effective, or economical to make and support.
Well, I was referring to laptops released at the same time as the new consoles when they came out. I thought that would be obvious since it's pointless to talk about memory costs when comparing 2012 laptops and tablets to 2006 consoles.
Look at the CPU in those tear-down review photos. It's tiny.
No matter how many cores it has, no matter what the GHz rating, the bottom line is that you're not going to get a lot of performance out of a CPU with such a small die and so few transistors.
Honestly, "4 cores" is the new "16-bit graphics", isn't it?
People always whine about individual pennies in manufacturing, because when you multiply it by millions, it might mean the difference between paying or not paying a bonus to the CEO. Boo hoo.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a hidden blessing that Flash only uses a single core. On a single core, Flash will bring a computer to its knees, but a dual core processor will barely be affected at all. If Flash eventually supports multiple cores, then heaven help us.
Incidentally, it's actually braindead developers that are responsible for Flash being so slow. All they have to do is add a few wait states to their code and the problem disappears. I've actually seen a number of Flash games that were programmed properly, and will not use more than 3% of my CPU time, despite running at 60 FPS. True, it would be nice if Flash had a built-in way to throttle the performance of content, but... no HTML5 I'm aware of has a mechanism for doing this, either. Firefox certainly doesn't, despite having a Flash container process.
I'm always amused when people bash Flash for sucking up CPU time. If an HTML5/JS application goes into a badly-written tight loop waiting for input, it will max out the CPU, too... and will likely do so on all cores. Will a switch to HTML5 automatically fix code with tight loops? Of course not. Thus, I don't think it's reasonable to blame Flash for badly written apps, either. It's the responsibility of the client platform to manage process priority (the web browser is the OS of the future? Yeah, right. Even memory management poses a challenge to many modern web browsers!)
As for working badly, one thing I liked about Flash many years ago was that it was a paltry ~300K download that didn't require a full installer. It "just worked", when other things like Java weighed in at 15+ MB and were a PITA to install. Also, Flash content is almost always packaged into a single file, making content easy to download and archive for offline use (such as cartoons and games). Try that with HTML5 or Java. There is no official packaging format for HTML/CSS/JS, so archiving content consisting of hundreds of files with tons of cross-links is a lot more difficult today than in the HTML3 days. Even Java figured out that packaging was important with the JAR file format. With GZip compression becoming standard on most web servers these days, why can't HTML5 get an official packaging format? More complaining about it being against a free Internet or some other impractical crap?
The fact it is controlled by a single corporation is another
Yeah, in the face of Flash, all those loud-mouthed open-source guys (and other companies) did a fine job of making some good old fashioned competition.
Seriously. The alternatives to Flash were Java, millions of mal-ware infested media players, and eventually Silverlight. Everything either outright sucked, was mis-applied, or was too late to market to matter. Today, HTML5 is literally the only thing to go up against Flash, and HTML5 pretty much sucks. Just playing audio is a major challenge. just audio. That's pretty damn sad. The most revolutionary thing HTML5 has to offer is... a frame buffer? Really? It took this long?
Everyone else was wetting their pants about some mythical standards-compliant angel to come from the heavens and save us all, but they all either refused to work on it, or was too busy bitching over the proper color of the bike shed. No shit Flash took over the market.
I like Flash, despite its problems, because it actually works and works well. If it swamped the market, that was the fault of the market not responding and making something better.
Everyone tells me I'm crazy when I say that windowed games and videos play really sluggish in Windows 7 compared to XP. The reason is because the new window manager uses 3D hardware to do compositing, and for some reason, updates seems to be locked in at 30 FPS (my guess is 50% of the monitor refresh rate). XP updated at full blast and provided much, much smoother games and video. I've noticed a rather huge loss in overall performance on my new Win7 machine, despite it being massively more powerful than my old XP box.
Apparently, I'm the only one who notices or is bothered by this.
Slashdot being down doesn't cause my browser to crash.
I think the unflattering image in that Wikipedia article entirely fits the program's slogan.
What exactly is it about TB that is not capable of handling your need?
In my case, it's buggy as hell.
Quick example: I found out the hard way that changed account defaults would take effect right away, but the GUI would not properly show the new settings until the program is restarted. If the GUI can so easily become decoupled from what's going on internally, that does not inspire confidence.
I've tried it a few times over the years, and found it to be stable, but it has a LOT of glitches and design issues that never get fixed. I think people use it because there's noting out there (among GUI-based clients) that's much better. It is certainly not a very good program in its own right, though.
I considered switching to Thunderbird a few weeks ago. I kept having problems with it not remembering configuration changes, the GUI not updating properly, and even simple tasks, like choosing a default sending address, required a lot of research and forum hunting to figure out (in the end, people kept recommending extensions to do it, even thought the program does support a default. Apparently, veteran Thunderbird users are just as confused as noobs like me).
I was NOT impressed. When I uninstalled it and the installer asked me for feedback, I specifically pointed out tons of bugs and horrible GUI design. Any e-mail program that makes it a chore to funnel mail from multiple addresses into one Inbox is not a well-designed program.
I always thought they would just stamp the metal with forging. It makes for a far sturdier part and takes a lot less time, and they would only have to machine the ports and sides. This is especially true since Macs don't have much internal bracing, and are thus susceptible to flexing and even cracking.
But then, that reduce the look of the aluminum grain, and we can't have Macs without the brushed metal look, can we?
The video hardly impresses me. I get more amazement out of half the episodes of How it's Made.
Where do all the $300 PCs come from? Apple?
Every Windows machine since Win2K has been rock solid stable. It's the OEM crapware and buggy drivers that make Windows unbearable.
Do you really think Atari, Amiga, and Acorn would be better today had they survived? After 20 years, Linux is still just a blip on the radar because... el-cheapo OEMs and normal people love it?
Windows is popular for far more reasons than monopolization. It took a long time for non-Apple companies to realize that, and only now are systems like Android picking up steam. Yeah, Android -- that system suffering from stability issues, fragmentation, bad drivers, etc.
What I can't believe is that Adobe's EULAs are available only in PDF. So just to read a EULA, I have to read a EULA to read a EULA to read a...
Reminds me of those times I had to update the installer before I could install a program. What BS.
By "rest of the world", are you referring to nations like Germany and Canada, or nations like Romania and Venezuela?
Just what I always wanted. An OS with a mandatory ad browser attached.
"A touchscreen isn't a replacement for a keyboard or mouse, it's a complement."
Gee, thanks for listening to feedback from the community for the last few years.
IE is several times older than Chrome. We only use mature software around here, bro.
It's worth pointing out that Nintendo didn't have a "real" Mario game on the Gamecube. They came out with Mario Sunshine which was... not really Mario.
Much like what happened to Sega with the Saturn, it's kind of hard to sell a console without your star characters front and center.
The other possibility is that the consoles experience diminishing returns past the horsepower the modern systems are at for most of the game developer's needs.
A more realistic way of putting it, is that Nintendo designed a system that fit their own needs, and 3rd party developers will just have to work with it. Take a look at the games Nintendo has typically made for the Gamecube and Wii, and it's pretty obvious that lots of CPU power for game logic isn't a requirement.
I guess I'm not really a hardware guy but I feel like we've actually moved toward less inventive ideas for consoles
What about the PS3 Cell? Oh, well, it's so different from traditional CPUs that all developers do is whine and bitch about how different it is, and how their x86 PC code runs like crap without *gasp* extensive modification.
Trying to make interesting custom hardware would just be financial suicide, when pumping out Call of Duty sequels every year is a working, proven business model.
Or part of the holiday spirit. He knows when you've been sleeping, he knows when you're awake...
90% of releases on all platforms are crap.
The question is whether the 10% of good releases will actually be worth it to bother, or even if it's easy enough to find them in the first place (given how bad the new Playstation Store is, I find it amazing that anyone buys games from there at all, let alone manages to find decent games).
I was looking for an easy way to automate character conversion from Latin-1 to UTF-8 for the forum software I use. I found out the hard way that the built-in MySQL recoder is completely broken, and will barf in different ways depending on which version number of MySQL you are using. No errors or warnings during the conversion for any version. You'll just find out later that all the field limits are wrong. You can only find out if it worked or not by inserting new rows and finding out if you get errors about data being too large to fit in the field, and whether it fails or not has nothing to do with the actual length of the data, but with whether you send 7-bit or 8-bit characters.
I gave up trying to get MySQL to do it, and wrote my own conversion tool.
And that's just for baby stuff for a web forum on a personal web site. I can only imagine what MySQL is like in an enterprise environment.
MS has always done that. Patches and support for 6+ years, at least. I was still getting patches for Win2K long after my old Mac became a doorstop.
Just because they aren't releasing service packs or rollups, does not mean they aren't releasing security updates and patches. Yes, the new packaging sucks, but the updates are still there.
I was thinking the other way around. There are far fewer CPU choices than there are motherboard configurations, so... what happens if the motherboard I want is saddled with a CPU I don't? I'd have to imagine that having a CPU welded on, or even socketed with a daughter card, will reduce the number of motherboard variations a manufacturer is willing to make. These days, I'm far more concerned about features in my workstation than I am about raw speed and getting just the right color of heat sinks.
Frankly, I'm baffled at the idea of an Intel CPU without "pins." I thought they already didn't have any?! This can't be about cutting costs, so if Intel's intent is just trying to piss off the enthusiast market, I doubt daughter cards and other hacks will be very easy, effective, or economical to make and support.
Well, I was referring to laptops released at the same time as the new consoles when they came out. I thought that would be obvious since it's pointless to talk about memory costs when comparing 2012 laptops and tablets to 2006 consoles.
I thought selling out usually resulted in people telling you to take out what you thought was good.
Apparently (if folklore is true) there are ways to deal with this
Specs be damned.
Look at the CPU in those tear-down review photos. It's tiny.
No matter how many cores it has, no matter what the GHz rating, the bottom line is that you're not going to get a lot of performance out of a CPU with such a small die and so few transistors.
Honestly, "4 cores" is the new "16-bit graphics", isn't it?
So what about ($250 .. $400) x 70 million?
People always whine about individual pennies in manufacturing, because when you multiply it by millions, it might mean the difference between paying or not paying a bonus to the CEO. Boo hoo.