Do you run the Unity thing? It uses Compiz, which uses some multimedia timers and the graphic hardware, as opposed to plain good old Metacity on Ubuntu distributions prior to 11.04 which draws stuff using simpler hardware subsystems and no fancy timers etc. Just 5W seems even too good, i'd imagine Unity+Compiz drawing a bit more of a difference.
What do you base your criticism of Phoronix on, exactly? At best you draw attention to yourself and not to how bad they are or are not. I've been reading them for a couple of years and even though perhaps they haven't won awards for their journalism or website usability, the information provided SEEMS credible enough and worth a read. Certainly not "notoriously bad" or to be taken with a "gigantic nugget of salt".
Maybe YOU could build and benchmark a couple of stock kernels on a simple-as-brick Thinkpad T60 laptop better and clue us in as to where THEY have failed?
They do. But then the reports get through to the managers, and they feed the papers to their closest office paper shredder or archive the emails, and proceed to write cryptic blog entries on how they had to scrap feature X because users wouldn't care or something like that.
After installing Ubuntu every half-a-year for the fourth time, I was getting tired of "bridging" the gap between an out-of-the-box Ubuntu state to the one I prefer, so I simply wrote a bash script that does everything:) I mean it sets all my GNOME settings (through gconf- command line tools), sets up launchers and mime type preferences, icons, installs applications, even downloads and compiles stuff that cannot be found in repositories or in case I prefer a compiled version. Basically, when the script is run and done, I don't need to do much at all - the system is as it was before reinstall, except I am running a brand new distribution. Of course, one can argue why upgrade at all, but I do notice that the devs do get a lot of things fixed for major releases, usually.
Ditto. I've been running Ubuntu on my Thinkpad T43 for 5 years already, currently Ubuntu 9.10, ditching Windows and never having to look back. Thinkpads and Linux are almost made for eachother:) This is to the person who was complaining how laptop hardware is so exotic that Linux doesn't know what to do with it. Thinkpads (mostly) ship with reference Intel Centrino implementation, or whatever Intel calls their "notebook platform" these days, and as far as Linux compatibility goes, you HARDLY can do better. No USB-connected exotic wireless chipsets, etc. Occasionally you may get an NVidia chip in a Thinkpad X or T line, which negatively impacts the Linux experience (unless you use a binary driver by NVidia of course) but I consider it somewhat offensive, seeing how NVidia doesn't provide good specs for their hardware. Anyway, working on a Thinkpad T in Linux is a very very smooth experience. There are things that Linux is of course not ready for yet, I'd say professional photo and video work is one of them. I am a developer though, and really appreciate having a sensible command line at the reach of my fingers at all times, plus multitude of small tools that help me develop stuff, as opposed to large unwieldly monolithic applications with a baggage of drawbacks each.
Intel is a commercial enterprise. They don't need to write drivers if they have no incentive to do so. If they write drivers for something like Linux, it's simply because they have a hand in it.
What they arguably DO NEED to do is provide a satisfactory specification of their hardware, so that the people who shout "open source! everyone can contribute" can put theirselves where their mouth is and start well, producing decent drivers for Intel hardware. As simple as that. And Intel did provide EXCELLENT documentation for at least two of their latest consumer graphic hardware offerings.
The thing is that there is a difference between not having any spare IPv4 networks to hand out from the top and Internet not working. Internet is kept together by way of network address translation. Correct me if I am wrong bearded network gurus, but to my understanding it is the 65536 ports that fill in for lacking addresses, correct? I mean, that's how and why NAT works, right?
Put another way, a home network usually is given a single address by its connecting entity - the ISP usually, but that doesn't restrict it to a single user. Same thing, different scale is happening on Internet. We are essentially NAT-ting everything we can. Maybe it is because of that that IPv6 won't kick in for another X years or so - I mean, why, what's the problem? NAT keeps Intertubez connected and blinking.
I have collected a host of content from YT in the form of.webm files and I don't notice any visible degradation in quality. However, even if I would, and since some apparently do, if we assume that YT encodes the WebM content targetting same file size, it will be of lower quality than the corresponding file carrying H.264 video and MPEG-1 audio.
No, the problem is that you don't know what you're talking about. Instead of stopping here, I will attempt to tell you why and what's what, if you care to read on.
Both are two different codecs in their own right. VP8 is as much H.264 as anything else that uses motion estimation, motion vectors, inter-frames, human-perception-based color space, DCT and a bunch of other clever tricks that around half of the more prominent AND standalone video codecs have been using in the course of the entire last decade or so. Meaning of course that it is not H.264. As much as some basic principles of video compression are shared pretty much by ALL modern codecs, noone with a clue calls all a single name.
Additionally, H.264 was conceived almost entirely by MPEG, while VP8 was invented by On2 Technologies, its legacy going back as far as VP3 and a codec known as Truemotion S, both also by the same company (then known as The Duck Company if I recall correctly). The latter two, originating in 1995/1996, obviously predate H.264 and/or the novelties that make H.264 what it is (bidirectional inter-frames, variable-size blocks used in motion compensation etc)
As far as I know, FF3 doesn't do HTML5. FF4 does, and does so quite adequately. You won't be ditching the dreadful Adobe Flash pluging just yet though - last time I checked (this morning), a substantial share of YT content is still not available in WebM. Also, if you use Flash for other websites as well, then obviously nothing has changed there. I am a Flash Player developer on occasion, and I also wish i'd disappear. There are some things there is no alternative (HTML5 including) for though - camera and microphone access and publishing to name one.
And of course, for the completely clueless, they won't ever know or care about/tmp, but they WILL (sooner or later) discover the context menu and choose the convenient "Save video" option. And it will spread like wildfire in dry grass:-) Before you know it, it is a fact that YouTube is essentially a video and music installment that lets customers walk out with the content they (YT) put up, without the customers paying a dime for it. Will we get the sort of witchhunts for the average consumers that the BitTorrent freaks tend to get?
Thanks for the tip, i'll check it out. Still, you got to admit - there is no "Download video" button, is there, as is the case with HTML5 video. It's the small and simple things... And yes, one can do a plugin or two, or a script or a launcher or what not, but it's already there with HTML5, from day one. That's the important difference.
Yes, I did that once too, a couple of years ago. But somehow, afterwards, I came to detest the idea that I have to unscrew the poor thing whenever it stops being able to ventilate itself. I repaired four or so Thinkpads and some other models - call me a bad nerd, but I am really tired of fiddling with computer internals, especially when it's a laptop (everything is tiny and more fragile). Yes, I know - it's the nature of having moving parts and being cooled by air and so on and so on, but if what you suggest is a common thing to do (like it is with say vacuum cleaners) - don't you wish they had some spring which you push and the entire ventilation system of your Thinkpad just pops out, which you i dunno, wash or rinse or blow clean and reinsert?:-) Basically, a reusable filter. Yeah, i am creative today;-) And if someone does it first, it must be Lenovo, they got so much in the R&D dep. going on, it's a wonder they haven't done it already.
I am not talking about the legality of downloading copyrighted content as such, but about how it is far easier doing so with HTML5+WebM than it ever was (at least for me, and I can write C/C++ software _AND_ Adobe Flash Player applications!) with Adobe Flash video player they have. Simply because nobody ever made it big with a sensible, easy-to use thing that gave you a "Download this FLV" button. I've used some Firefox plugins but first, they tended to break whenever YT made changes to their website code and second, just getting to the point when you could click the button was a pain in the ass because Flash sucked the lifeblood of my laptop. I still get nerves when I have to click on a YT link, expecting massive heat issues and fan hitting 50 dB levels.
The WebM however works pretty good. I can watch stuff and still manage to do other work, and I can download not because someone retrofitted a plugin to a browser, but because nothing is actually hidden - there is a.webm stream playing and the browser can download it as well as try to render it. Simple and straightforward.
You seem to be somewhat uninformed as well. WebM indeed is a "narrowed" Matroska container format. The video stream however is NOT a H.264 but VP8, and ONLY VP8. Google chose to narrow down the Matroska and call it WebM precisely because they wanted to avoid having a format on the loose on the Web that could include any type of video stream. And so chose to limit video to VP8 and audio to Ogg Vorbis. Basically if you have a.webm file, the video (if any) it carries MUST be a VP8 stream, and the audio (if any, again) MUST be a Vorbis stream.
Google bought On2 Technologies which developed VP8. The latter is comparable to H.264 with pretty much any kind of motion and bitrates. There are subjective perception tests on the Web dating back at least two years, when the debate on VP8 vs. H.264 and open video was heating up.
On my setup the situation is opposite - Adobe Flash heats my laptop (IBM Thinkpad T43) to the point where even with the highest fan speed the CPU temperature climbs to 70C degrees and I either have to lower the frequency ceiling or pause/stop playback. Fullscreen is infinitely worse, if there is such a thing. And an interesting thing: even with videos that don't have much motion or use a static image, it'sWebM is much less resource intensive there.
One thing I've been thinking ever since I joined YouTube HTML5 preview, is: do they know how much easier it is to download their videos when playing them back in HTML5? I know that one can also extract Flash video in one way or another, but with HTML5, at least on my setup - Firefox 4 on Ubuntu 9.10 - all it takes is choosing "Save Video" in context-menu. Voila - you can now have whatever you like on YouTube for your own private viewing.
The definite advantage to this, is that one can skip the page parsings and renderings, and instead simply use say mplayer to launch and watch or listen to your favs. Let's face it - the cloud or web 2.0 applications are too slow, at least for me there is noticeable delay. mplayer handles webm videos in much better way than even Firefox 4, not to mention the monstrocity that is Adobe Flash. I simply download anything I watch more than 5 times in a month to the local storage.
Flash is so bad that it's worth inventing a phony god and prey to him that Flash disappears from the face of the Earth.
Flash is simply not as viable and attractive thing today as it was when it was introduced into the world of Web utterly desperate for realization of more and richer possibilities. Not enough people used laptops and cared for extra hours of battery life then (mind you I didn't say there weren't any) as now, and frankly the amount of Flash ads were about zero then as well. Web didn't take advantage of all those Intel Pentium and Athlon CPU cycles rendering HTML 4 pages and all heavy web app logic was done server-side.
Today it's a whole different world. Someone like Google, they willing, can almost invent, inject and install just about anything on the Web, and tomorrow everybody will be using it, courtesy of auto-update, preinstall-on-new-PC and tech savvy bloggers. Not to mention again, how Flash is out of place for a lot of function Web needs today.
Admittedly, the idea is not bad - bytecode, layer-based animation, compact binary (well, not THAT compact anymore, but still). But it's the implementation and a lot around it that are out of place. Sometimes you have to admit you've made a hell of a lot of money, and make life easier for MILLIONS of people for once. Adobe, how much is enough? You bought out Macromedia, you've given us the monstrocity that is Creative Suite (more like Creative Wardrobe Cabinet)... I am not an anti-capitalist, but Flash directly affects life of just about anybody on Internet, sooner or later, one way or another. If money is to be made, there are many other user-friendly ways to make it for a company the size of Adobe, yet they hold on to Flash with steel claws (and pink ribbons) like there is no tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you suck at arithmetic.
George Orwell would disagree.
run lm-profiler (part of laptop mode tools if I recall correctly) and see what demands that your hard drive be awoken from sleep :)
Do you run the Unity thing? It uses Compiz, which uses some multimedia timers and the graphic hardware, as opposed to plain good old Metacity on Ubuntu distributions prior to 11.04 which draws stuff using simpler hardware subsystems and no fancy timers etc. Just 5W seems even too good, i'd imagine Unity+Compiz drawing a bit more of a difference.
What do you base your criticism of Phoronix on, exactly? At best you draw attention to yourself and not to how bad they are or are not. I've been reading them for a couple of years and even though perhaps they haven't won awards for their journalism or website usability, the information provided SEEMS credible enough and worth a read. Certainly not "notoriously bad" or to be taken with a "gigantic nugget of salt".
Maybe YOU could build and benchmark a couple of stock kernels on a simple-as-brick Thinkpad T60 laptop better and clue us in as to where THEY have failed?
They do. But then the reports get through to the managers, and they feed the papers to their closest office paper shredder or archive the emails, and proceed to write cryptic blog entries on how they had to scrap feature X because users wouldn't care or something like that.
After installing Ubuntu every half-a-year for the fourth time, I was getting tired of "bridging" the gap between an out-of-the-box Ubuntu state to the one I prefer, so I simply wrote a bash script that does everything :) I mean it sets all my GNOME settings (through gconf- command line tools), sets up launchers and mime type preferences, icons, installs applications, even downloads and compiles stuff that cannot be found in repositories or in case I prefer a compiled version. Basically, when the script is run and done, I don't need to do much at all - the system is as it was before reinstall, except I am running a brand new distribution. Of course, one can argue why upgrade at all, but I do notice that the devs do get a lot of things fixed for major releases, usually.
Ditto. I've been running Ubuntu on my Thinkpad T43 for 5 years already, currently Ubuntu 9.10, ditching Windows and never having to look back. Thinkpads and Linux are almost made for eachother :) This is to the person who was complaining how laptop hardware is so exotic that Linux doesn't know what to do with it. Thinkpads (mostly) ship with reference Intel Centrino implementation, or whatever Intel calls their "notebook platform" these days, and as far as Linux compatibility goes, you HARDLY can do better. No USB-connected exotic wireless chipsets, etc. Occasionally you may get an NVidia chip in a Thinkpad X or T line, which negatively impacts the Linux experience (unless you use a binary driver by NVidia of course) but I consider it somewhat offensive, seeing how NVidia doesn't provide good specs for their hardware. Anyway, working on a Thinkpad T in Linux is a very very smooth experience. There are things that Linux is of course not ready for yet, I'd say professional photo and video work is one of them. I am a developer though, and really appreciate having a sensible command line at the reach of my fingers at all times, plus multitude of small tools that help me develop stuff, as opposed to large unwieldly monolithic applications with a baggage of drawbacks each.
Intel is a commercial enterprise. They don't need to write drivers if they have no incentive to do so. If they write drivers for something like Linux, it's simply because they have a hand in it.
What they arguably DO NEED to do is provide a satisfactory specification of their hardware, so that the people who shout "open source! everyone can contribute" can put theirselves where their mouth is and start well, producing decent drivers for Intel hardware. As simple as that. And Intel did provide EXCELLENT documentation for at least two of their latest consumer graphic hardware offerings.
The thing is that there is a difference between not having any spare IPv4 networks to hand out from the top and Internet not working. Internet is kept together by way of network address translation. Correct me if I am wrong bearded network gurus, but to my understanding it is the 65536 ports that fill in for lacking addresses, correct? I mean, that's how and why NAT works, right?
Put another way, a home network usually is given a single address by its connecting entity - the ISP usually, but that doesn't restrict it to a single user. Same thing, different scale is happening on Internet. We are essentially NAT-ting everything we can. Maybe it is because of that that IPv6 won't kick in for another X years or so - I mean, why, what's the problem? NAT keeps Intertubez connected and blinking.
...right on time for when the Mayan calendar ends :)
I have collected a host of content from YT in the form of .webm files and I don't notice any visible degradation in quality. However, even if I would, and since some apparently do, if we assume that YT encodes the WebM content targetting same file size, it will be of lower quality than the corresponding file carrying H.264 video and MPEG-1 audio.
No, the problem is that you don't know what you're talking about. Instead of stopping here, I will attempt to tell you why and what's what, if you care to read on.
Both are two different codecs in their own right. VP8 is as much H.264 as anything else that uses motion estimation, motion vectors, inter-frames, human-perception-based color space, DCT and a bunch of other clever tricks that around half of the more prominent AND standalone video codecs have been using in the course of the entire last decade or so. Meaning of course that it is not H.264. As much as some basic principles of video compression are shared pretty much by ALL modern codecs, noone with a clue calls all a single name.
Additionally, H.264 was conceived almost entirely by MPEG, while VP8 was invented by On2 Technologies, its legacy going back as far as VP3 and a codec known as Truemotion S, both also by the same company (then known as The Duck Company if I recall correctly). The latter two, originating in 1995/1996, obviously predate H.264 and/or the novelties that make H.264 what it is (bidirectional inter-frames, variable-size blocks used in motion compensation etc)
As far as I know, FF3 doesn't do HTML5. FF4 does, and does so quite adequately. You won't be ditching the dreadful Adobe Flash pluging just yet though - last time I checked (this morning), a substantial share of YT content is still not available in WebM. Also, if you use Flash for other websites as well, then obviously nothing has changed there. I am a Flash Player developer on occasion, and I also wish i'd disappear. There are some things there is no alternative (HTML5 including) for though - camera and microphone access and publishing to name one.
And of course, for the completely clueless, they won't ever know or care about /tmp, but they WILL (sooner or later) discover the context menu and choose the convenient "Save video" option. And it will spread like wildfire in dry grass :-) Before you know it, it is a fact that YouTube is essentially a video and music installment that lets customers walk out with the content they (YT) put up, without the customers paying a dime for it. Will we get the sort of witchhunts for the average consumers that the BitTorrent freaks tend to get?
Thanks for the tip, i'll check it out. Still, you got to admit - there is no "Download video" button, is there, as is the case with HTML5 video. It's the small and simple things... And yes, one can do a plugin or two, or a script or a launcher or what not, but it's already there with HTML5, from day one. That's the important difference.
Yes, I did that once too, a couple of years ago. But somehow, afterwards, I came to detest the idea that I have to unscrew the poor thing whenever it stops being able to ventilate itself. I repaired four or so Thinkpads and some other models - call me a bad nerd, but I am really tired of fiddling with computer internals, especially when it's a laptop (everything is tiny and more fragile). Yes, I know - it's the nature of having moving parts and being cooled by air and so on and so on, but if what you suggest is a common thing to do (like it is with say vacuum cleaners) - don't you wish they had some spring which you push and the entire ventilation system of your Thinkpad just pops out, which you i dunno, wash or rinse or blow clean and reinsert? :-) Basically, a reusable filter. Yeah, i am creative today ;-) And if someone does it first, it must be Lenovo, they got so much in the R&D dep. going on, it's a wonder they haven't done it already.
I am not talking about the legality of downloading copyrighted content as such, but about how it is far easier doing so with HTML5+WebM than it ever was (at least for me, and I can write C/C++ software _AND_ Adobe Flash Player applications!) with Adobe Flash video player they have. Simply because nobody ever made it big with a sensible, easy-to use thing that gave you a "Download this FLV" button. I've used some Firefox plugins but first, they tended to break whenever YT made changes to their website code and second, just getting to the point when you could click the button was a pain in the ass because Flash sucked the lifeblood of my laptop. I still get nerves when I have to click on a YT link, expecting massive heat issues and fan hitting 50 dB levels.
The WebM however works pretty good. I can watch stuff and still manage to do other work, and I can download not because someone retrofitted a plugin to a browser, but because nothing is actually hidden - there is a .webm stream playing and the browser can download it as well as try to render it. Simple and straightforward.
You seem to be somewhat uninformed as well. WebM indeed is a "narrowed" Matroska container format. The video stream however is NOT a H.264 but VP8, and ONLY VP8. Google chose to narrow down the Matroska and call it WebM precisely because they wanted to avoid having a format on the loose on the Web that could include any type of video stream. And so chose to limit video to VP8 and audio to Ogg Vorbis. Basically if you have a .webm file, the video (if any) it carries MUST be a VP8 stream, and the audio (if any, again) MUST be a Vorbis stream.
Google bought On2 Technologies which developed VP8. The latter is comparable to H.264 with pretty much any kind of motion and bitrates. There are subjective perception tests on the Web dating back at least two years, when the debate on VP8 vs. H.264 and open video was heating up.
On my setup the situation is opposite - Adobe Flash heats my laptop (IBM Thinkpad T43) to the point where even with the highest fan speed the CPU temperature climbs to 70C degrees and I either have to lower the frequency ceiling or pause/stop playback. Fullscreen is infinitely worse, if there is such a thing. And an interesting thing: even with videos that don't have much motion or use a static image, it'sWebM is much less resource intensive there.
One thing I've been thinking ever since I joined YouTube HTML5 preview, is: do they know how much easier it is to download their videos when playing them back in HTML5? I know that one can also extract Flash video in one way or another, but with HTML5, at least on my setup - Firefox 4 on Ubuntu 9.10 - all it takes is choosing "Save Video" in context-menu. Voila - you can now have whatever you like on YouTube for your own private viewing.
The definite advantage to this, is that one can skip the page parsings and renderings, and instead simply use say mplayer to launch and watch or listen to your favs. Let's face it - the cloud or web 2.0 applications are too slow, at least for me there is noticeable delay. mplayer handles webm videos in much better way than even Firefox 4, not to mention the monstrocity that is Adobe Flash. I simply download anything I watch more than 5 times in a month to the local storage.
Flash is so bad that it's worth inventing a phony god and prey to him that Flash disappears from the face of the Earth.
Flash is simply not as viable and attractive thing today as it was when it was introduced into the world of Web utterly desperate for realization of more and richer possibilities. Not enough people used laptops and cared for extra hours of battery life then (mind you I didn't say there weren't any) as now, and frankly the amount of Flash ads were about zero then as well. Web didn't take advantage of all those Intel Pentium and Athlon CPU cycles rendering HTML 4 pages and all heavy web app logic was done server-side.
Today it's a whole different world. Someone like Google, they willing, can almost invent, inject and install just about anything on the Web, and tomorrow everybody will be using it, courtesy of auto-update, preinstall-on-new-PC and tech savvy bloggers. Not to mention again, how Flash is out of place for a lot of function Web needs today.
Admittedly, the idea is not bad - bytecode, layer-based animation, compact binary (well, not THAT compact anymore, but still). But it's the implementation and a lot around it that are out of place. Sometimes you have to admit you've made a hell of a lot of money, and make life easier for MILLIONS of people for once. Adobe, how much is enough? You bought out Macromedia, you've given us the monstrocity that is Creative Suite (more like Creative Wardrobe Cabinet)... I am not an anti-capitalist, but Flash directly affects life of just about anybody on Internet, sooner or later, one way or another. If money is to be made, there are many other user-friendly ways to make it for a company the size of Adobe, yet they hold on to Flash with steel claws (and pink ribbons) like there is no tomorrow.
you say it like it's a bad thing!
I like how easy he makes it sound :-)
Things you need to hack the Airport Express:
1. Girlfriend
2. A pinch of dissappointment
3. Wilingness to break open glued Apple casing
Coming soon to Lenovo Thinkpad near you :-)
* typing this on an IBM Thinkpad T43