I've read they're not very much popular in the USA due to low availability, but it is the only thing I've seen to beat my previous Sony Triniton in image quality.
And the screen is horizontally and vertically flat (to the point that the image seems to be convex when you look at the monitor).
I've seen these efforts to build a new rendering engine for X a long time ago (I think there was even a Slashdot stry for it). But the page hasn't changed a bit since then.
Is there a place where I can get the current status of this project? It is really interesting.
The Itanium uses some sort of preprocessor to translate x86 instructions to the EPIC instructions the chip actually uses.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the P[I-II-III-4] have 3 decoding circuits so they can translate what they call "macro instructions" (the assembly lines you/your compiler create) into micro-instructions the execution unit understands?
Intel has already been doing this kind of tranlation for quite some time now...
If a perl program can compile AND execute in a fraction of the time--why would I want to use java anywhere that I could use perl instead?
If it was that simple, then there would be no need for "workarounds" such as mod_perl to lessen the overhead of the start program/compile to bytecode/execute process.
Java back-end apps are fast as hell because of that. They do not need to be compiled time and time again, and on a server you should not have many memory constraints, so the JIT can work its guts out to optimize the code the VM is executing. The result is that you have code that yes, takes more time to load (VM startup, initialization of classes, etc, etc), but exactly because of that can be optimized over time.
I've seen benchmarks (Ace's Hardware if I am not mistaken) that show Java can even beat C/C++ in speed on number crunching algorithms. The notion that Java is slow is highly overrated.
You should try to do some server side programming with Java. All the accusations of "bloatness" generally are related to Swing being very slow, so client apps are not as snappy as they should be.
But on the server side, the JIT compilers make things really fast, and the enormous class library you get with the JVM is surely a welcome help when developing.
You know how annoying it is to type that out every time?
Maybe you should try to use an editor that helps your life... you know, you aren't stuck to notepad to write Java code.
I use jEdit, and whenever I type "sout(" on a Java file it expands the line to read "System.out.println();", and positions the caret inside the brackets. Cannot get easier than that.
I can't even do basic things like getElementById in IE...
I hate playing devil's advocate, but that is one thing you can do that works in IE... getElementById() works just fine (although I think it is a little too permitive - it also gets elements whose names are passed, which is wrong - for that you should use getElementsByName() ). At least in IE 5.x.
There are other (rather basic) things that do not work in IE, like the constants defined in the Node class (e.g., Node.TEXT_NODE raises a javascript error).
The Opera browser is 100% W3C compliant and does a very good job in retaining compatibility with bugged web pages.
Oh, c'mon, you didn't *really* mean that, did you?
As for the standards part, sorry to remind you, but Mozilla and so Netscape 6 have the crown for the most standards compliance around (and they're still not 100% conformant). Opera does a good job, but every browser still have issues.
Now, about compatibility with buggy web pages you gotta be joking... some time ago I tried to test some pages from where I work in Opera, just to see how it behaved. Most HTML there is written by lazy designers using Dreamweaver, so it is a complete mess and a total junk, unless you are willing to spend some hours to fix it. IE shows them OK (after all, Dreamweaver outputs for IE). Mozilla does just as good a job as long as you fix the Javascript issues (just add DOM compatibility to the scripts). NS4 does OK also. But Opera completely garbles the thing. I was so shocked by the horrid result that I never touched Opera again.
You may argue that "Opera is supposed to be about compliance, not buggy HTML", but in the real world we have buggy HTML in every place you go, thanks to old browsers not conforming to standards. And in that Mozilla kicks the hell out of Opera. Just check bugzilla and look for bugs with the "compat" keyword.
You may like Opera, it may be fast and all, but please, get facts a little straight before claiming things like "100% compliant".
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Details about the Brazilian booth
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
Those machines can connect to a phone line and send their results to the Election Court of the state.
Hmmm... I wasn't aware of that. I thought that the terminals had to be phisically moved to the counting locations to process the data.
One more thing that was not pointed out: I'm not sure (I read somewhere during the elections), but the data stored in the booths is encripted using common public/private key pairs, so that only the electoral authorities can decrypt them.
I really was surprised when I saw the way americans vote... and I was even more surprised by seeing the details of the ballot today.
I won't discuss the electoral college thing (which sounds very weird for me; I'm from Brazil, here the governors are elected by direct electors' votes), but it sure sounds interesting to be adopted here (of course no one would approve, but when you look at some particularities of the voting process in Brazil, you begin to wonder). But I digress...
As of the last elections here (for mayors, held last october), papers ballots have been completely subsituted by an "electronic ballot" in every city of the country.
This can't be more simple: you have a terminal at the voting booth, which have a numeric pad and three buttons (cancel, confirm, and one for voting in nobody). Each candidate's party has a designated number (and in some cases where you have many candidates from the same party, they have their own number). You type it, click confirm, and it's done.
Not only that helps a lot in making the voting process easier, but it also makes counting the votes a no brainer. I live in a city wich has roughly 5 million voters, and last election we new our new mayor within hours from the end of the voting. Two years ago, when we voted for president, we knew the results on the other day (and that was because then many smaller cities were still using paper ballots).
Maybe it's time for a change up there in the first world, isn't it?
However, lots of other web and app servers (iPlanet, BEA WebLogic, WebSphere, blah, blah) implement their own JSP/servlet engines. Their performance will definitely vary.
Not only that, but the Java Virtual Machine plays a big role in performance. We have a pretty big application running on Apache JServ here (Servlets, no JSP), and the performance gain when we tried the IBM JDK 1.3 was enormous, comparing to when we were using the 1.2.2 JDK from Sun. The same can be said when testing Sun's JDK 1.3.0 against 1.2.2.
He's measuring the MP3 encoders, and Ogg Vorbis is not an MP3 encoder
Wouldn't it be interesting to make one of these tests comparing many different encoding techniques (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, VQF...)? I saw once one that made a comparisson between MP3 and VQF (I think it was posted to Slashdot, maybe) and it was pretty interesting.
I tried the Ogg Vorbis encoder the other day for the sake of trying, encoding a small song (Black Sabbath's Paranoid) with both BladeEnc and the Ogg Vorbis enconder... and I can say that the high frquency responde for Ogg Vorbis was much, *much* better. The MP3 sounded noticeably different from the CD, while with the Ogg Vorbis file such a difference was not so trivial to hear. (Ok, I know that it is a well known fact that MP3 sucks at higher frequencies, but, it was an example.)
Anyway, a deep comparisson showing the pros and cons of each encoding technique would be very interesting. This won't change the fact that it will be very very difficult to convince people that there may be better alternatives to MP3, but...
Thanks.:-)
I'm probably going to download the ISO sometime, but in the meantime I was hoping to upgrade using FTP... I'll look for info about it. --
Marcelo Vanzin
Woooah... pretty high typo count on my last message.:-) I hate this keyboard (and the layout being configured in the wrong way doesn't help either.) --
Marcelo Vanzin
I'm new to SuSE (used to use Debian until Slink wouldn't install on my machine), but how easy is it to upgrade? Is it safe to just use the YaST updater on different distribution versions (I use 6.4)? Or is there something liker RedHats "different major numbers mean uncompatible changes"? --
Marcelo Vanzin
.NET seems like a great idea. More exactly, I think the CLR is a wider implementation of the JVM concept started with Java. But, reading the posts here, I still have many many doubts about it (or maybe I should read more about.NET).
People talk about how it is better than Java because it lets you use any language of choice. And over this statement rise most of the questions... for people reading this, most of the time here I am talking about Java the platform, not Java the language.
First, I think the power of Java is not on the language itself, the JVM or the portability. I use Java to do my everyday programming at work, and I like the language a lot (I tend to see it as a "clean" C++). But what really is great about Java is the platform around it. The Java Class Library is just plain incredible and powerful (and I use just a tiny portion about it). How do.NET compare in this context??? What kind of "standard library" does it provide? Or is it "hey, you got CLR, the rest is up to you"?
Please note that being able to access the Windows API (or any other native API) does not count on this matter (here the "cross platform" argument comes to mind).
Also, another thing that is cool in Java is the great load of applications built around the platform, applications that are available *now* for anyone to use (and many of them at no cost except your internal development and deployment). Things like servlets up to entire application frameworks (take a look at Turbine) are really interesting.
Also, about performance... from what I understand, with.NET, although you can use any language you fell like using when you stand up in the morning, every compiler generates a bytecode that is understood by the CLR (just like the Java compiler does). Being that way, writing in "Managed C++" (new Microsoft jargon?) will not give me the same performance as writing a "native" C++ application. Thus, although this will easewthe development using different languages, won't this kind of "cripple" the good sides of different languages? Java suffers from this, specially when you talk about client (GUI) applications (it's a monster on the server, provided you have enough memory).
Another thing that comes to mind is something I read on the first stories about C#, saying that every C# object would be a COM object (just like inheriting from "Object" in Java). Isn't COM a "Windows only" technology?
Now on a different matter... just exactly what makes.NET so revolutionary as some people point? Is the JVM design flexible enough to accomodate different languages (JPython comes to mind)? Or is there more about C# than just a common runtime based a bytecode interpreter, and compilers for different languages that can understand it?
The idea is quite interesting (although I think mixing many languages would be a real mess on a big project:-) ), but, just what is so new about it, aside from the fact that Microsoft seems to be making something right after all?
After releasing the creepy PR2 (man, did it suck or what), it seems Netscape got it right this time...
I usually have always the latest nightly build installed, and PR3 seems a little faster than the nightlies (both when browsing and when using mail, which used to be damn slow some time back. Now it's only slow.). It loads faster also.
And the nicest thing: I went to a page with Java, and it didnt't crash!!! Goodbye "killall -9 netscape"!!!
For those interested, I really suggest getting it. This really is looking like a road up to a "final" release, after all.
I've attended a workshop some time ago where one of the guys talking was Mr. Andrew Lippan (sp?) from the MIT Media Lab.
There he showed some pictures of one printer they were testing at the ML. The pictures showed some vegetables (a pickle, as far as I remember) and fruits (an apple) with text printed on them. The printer was capable to print things on non-flat objects...
Anyone has links to it??? It sure is interesting...:-)
OK, Kylix will be Qt based, but on which version??? v. 2.x (which I really hope so) or version 1.4x (which I greatly hope NOT)?
All this talk about KDE integration and such leaves the question in the air, as the current "stable" KDE is Qt 1.4x based, but the new 2.x version is much, much better.
I did a little search on Google to look for the system my university uses in its library, and found an interesting listing.
However, it seems to contain only commercial software (the one the guys here use, Aleph, is the first in the list), but you may find some interesting things if you browse the links (I didn't take the time for that).
Slashdot Mirror
I found one, but in Portuguese: here. The Flatron one is the 17" 795FT model. (Mine is a 795FT Plus, which is the same but has an USB Hub.)
There's some info also in LG USA web page at http://www.lgeus.com.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Have you ever seen a LG "Flatron" monitor?
I've read they're not very much popular in the USA due to low availability, but it is the only thing I've seen to beat my previous Sony Triniton in image quality.
And the screen is horizontally and vertically flat (to the point that the image seems to be convex when you look at the monitor).
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I've seen these efforts to build a new rendering engine for X a long time ago (I think there was even a Slashdot stry for it). But the page hasn't changed a bit since then.
Is there a place where I can get the current status of this project? It is really interesting.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
The Itanium uses some sort of preprocessor to translate x86 instructions to the EPIC instructions the chip actually uses.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the P[I-II-III-4] have 3 decoding circuits so they can translate what they call "macro instructions" (the assembly lines you/your compiler create) into micro-instructions the execution unit understands?
Intel has already been doing this kind of tranlation for quite some time now...
--
Marcelo Vanzin
If a perl program can compile AND execute in a fraction of the time--why would I want to use java anywhere that I could use perl instead?
If it was that simple, then there would be no need for "workarounds" such as mod_perl to lessen the overhead of the start program/compile to bytecode/execute process.
Java back-end apps are fast as hell because of that. They do not need to be compiled time and time again, and on a server you should not have many memory constraints, so the JIT can work its guts out to optimize the code the VM is executing. The result is that you have code that yes, takes more time to load (VM startup, initialization of classes, etc, etc), but exactly because of that can be optimized over time.
I've seen benchmarks (Ace's Hardware if I am not mistaken) that show Java can even beat C/C++ in speed on number crunching algorithms. The notion that Java is slow is highly overrated.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I still feel that it is bloated,
You should try to do some server side programming with Java. All the accusations of "bloatness" generally are related to Swing being very slow, so client apps are not as snappy as they should be.
But on the server side, the JIT compilers make things really fast, and the enormous class library you get with the JVM is surely a welcome help when developing.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
You know how annoying it is to type that out every time?
Maybe you should try to use an editor that helps your life... you know, you aren't stuck to notepad to write Java code.
I use jEdit, and whenever I type "sout(" on a Java file it expands the line to read "System.out.println();", and positions the caret inside the brackets. Cannot get easier than that.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I can't even do basic things like getElementById in IE...
I hate playing devil's advocate, but that is one thing you can do that works in IE... getElementById() works just fine (although I think it is a little too permitive - it also gets elements whose names are passed, which is wrong - for that you should use getElementsByName() ). At least in IE 5.x.
There are other (rather basic) things that do not work in IE, like the constants defined in the Node class (e.g., Node.TEXT_NODE raises a javascript error).
--
Marcelo Vanzin
The Opera browser is 100% W3C compliant and does a very good job in retaining compatibility with bugged web pages.
Oh, c'mon, you didn't *really* mean that, did you?
As for the standards part, sorry to remind you, but Mozilla and so Netscape 6 have the crown for the most standards compliance around (and they're still not 100% conformant). Opera does a good job, but every browser still have issues.
I have digged a little and found this for your reading pleasure:
Conformance tests results
Now, about compatibility with buggy web pages you gotta be joking... some time ago I tried to test some pages from where I work in Opera, just to see how it behaved. Most HTML there is written by lazy designers using Dreamweaver, so it is a complete mess and a total junk, unless you are willing to spend some hours to fix it. IE shows them OK (after all, Dreamweaver outputs for IE). Mozilla does just as good a job as long as you fix the Javascript issues (just add DOM compatibility to the scripts). NS4 does OK also. But Opera completely garbles the thing. I was so shocked by the horrid result that I never touched Opera again.
You may argue that "Opera is supposed to be about compliance, not buggy HTML", but in the real world we have buggy HTML in every place you go, thanks to old browsers not conforming to standards. And in that Mozilla kicks the hell out of Opera. Just check bugzilla and look for bugs with the "compat" keyword.
You may like Opera, it may be fast and all, but please, get facts a little straight before claiming things like "100% compliant".
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Those machines can connect to a phone line and send their results to the Election Court of the state.
Hmmm... I wasn't aware of that. I thought that the terminals had to be phisically moved to the counting locations to process the data.
One more thing that was not pointed out: I'm not sure (I read somewhere during the elections), but the data stored in the booths is encripted using common public/private key pairs, so that only the electoral authorities can decrypt them.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I really was surprised when I saw the way americans vote... and I was even more surprised by seeing the details of the ballot today.
I won't discuss the electoral college thing (which sounds very weird for me; I'm from Brazil, here the governors are elected by direct electors' votes), but it sure sounds interesting to be adopted here (of course no one would approve, but when you look at some particularities of the voting process in Brazil, you begin to wonder). But I digress...
As of the last elections here (for mayors, held last october), papers ballots have been completely subsituted by an "electronic ballot" in every city of the country.
This can't be more simple: you have a terminal at the voting booth, which have a numeric pad and three buttons (cancel, confirm, and one for voting in nobody). Each candidate's party has a designated number (and in some cases where you have many candidates from the same party, they have their own number). You type it, click confirm, and it's done.
Not only that helps a lot in making the voting process easier, but it also makes counting the votes a no brainer. I live in a city wich has roughly 5 million voters, and last election we new our new mayor within hours from the end of the voting. Two years ago, when we voted for president, we knew the results on the other day (and that was because then many smaller cities were still using paper ballots).
Maybe it's time for a change up there in the first world, isn't it?
--
Marcelo Vanzin
However, lots of other web and app servers (iPlanet, BEA WebLogic, WebSphere, blah, blah) implement their own JSP/servlet engines. Their performance will definitely vary.
Not only that, but the Java Virtual Machine plays a big role in performance. We have a pretty big application running on Apache JServ here (Servlets, no JSP), and the performance gain when we tried the IBM JDK 1.3 was enormous, comparing to when we were using the 1.2.2 JDK from Sun. The same can be said when testing Sun's JDK 1.3.0 against 1.2.2.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
He's measuring the MP3 encoders, and Ogg Vorbis is not an MP3 encoder
Wouldn't it be interesting to make one of these tests comparing many different encoding techniques (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, VQF...)? I saw once one that made a comparisson between MP3 and VQF (I think it was posted to Slashdot, maybe) and it was pretty interesting.
I tried the Ogg Vorbis encoder the other day for the sake of trying, encoding a small song (Black Sabbath's Paranoid) with both BladeEnc and the Ogg Vorbis enconder... and I can say that the high frquency responde for Ogg Vorbis was much, *much* better. The MP3 sounded noticeably different from the CD, while with the Ogg Vorbis file such a difference was not so trivial to hear. (Ok, I know that it is a well known fact that MP3 sucks at higher frequencies, but, it was an example.)
Anyway, a deep comparisson showing the pros and cons of each encoding technique would be very interesting. This won't change the fact that it will be very very difficult to convince people that there may be better alternatives to MP3, but...
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Thanks. :-)
I'm probably going to download the ISO sometime, but in the meantime I was hoping to upgrade using FTP... I'll look for info about it.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Woooah... pretty high typo count on my last message. :-) I hate this keyboard (and the layout being configured in the wrong way doesn't help either.)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I'm new to SuSE (used to use Debian until Slink wouldn't install on my machine), but how easy is it to upgrade? Is it safe to just use the YaST updater on different distribution versions (I use 6.4)? Or is there something liker RedHats "different major numbers mean uncompatible changes"?
--
Marcelo Vanzin
.NET seems like a great idea. More exactly, I think the CLR is a wider implementation of the JVM concept started with Java. But, reading the posts here, I still have many many doubts about it (or maybe I should read more about .NET).
People talk about how it is better than Java because it lets you use any language of choice. And over this statement rise most of the questions... for people reading this, most of the time here I am talking about Java the platform, not Java the language.
First, I think the power of Java is not on the language itself, the JVM or the portability. I use Java to do my everyday programming at work, and I like the language a lot (I tend to see it as a "clean" C++). But what really is great about Java is the platform around it. The Java Class Library is just plain incredible and powerful (and I use just a tiny portion about it). How do .NET compare in this context??? What kind of "standard library" does it provide? Or is it "hey, you got CLR, the rest is up to you"?
Please note that being able to access the Windows API (or any other native API) does not count on this matter (here the "cross platform" argument comes to mind).
Also, another thing that is cool in Java is the great load of applications built around the platform, applications that are available *now* for anyone to use (and many of them at no cost except your internal development and deployment). Things like servlets up to entire application frameworks (take a look at Turbine) are really interesting.
Also, about performance... from what I understand, with .NET, although you can use any language you fell like using when you stand up in the morning, every compiler generates a bytecode that is understood by the CLR (just like the Java compiler does). Being that way, writing in "Managed C++" (new Microsoft jargon?) will not give me the same performance as writing a "native" C++ application. Thus, although this will easewthe development using different languages, won't this kind of "cripple" the good sides of different languages? Java suffers from this, specially when you talk about client (GUI) applications (it's a monster on the server, provided you have enough memory).
Another thing that comes to mind is something I read on the first stories about C#, saying that every C# object would be a COM object (just like inheriting from "Object" in Java). Isn't COM a "Windows only" technology?
Now on a different matter... just exactly what makes .NET so revolutionary as some people point? Is the JVM design flexible enough to accomodate different languages (JPython comes to mind)? Or is there more about C# than just a common runtime based a bytecode interpreter, and compilers for different languages that can understand it?
The idea is quite interesting (although I think mixing many languages would be a real mess on a big project :-) ), but, just what is so new about it, aside from the fact that Microsoft seems to be making something right after all?
--
Marcelo Vanzin
After releasing the creepy PR2 (man, did it suck or what), it seems Netscape got it right this time...
I usually have always the latest nightly build installed, and PR3 seems a little faster than the nightlies (both when browsing and when using mail, which used to be damn slow some time back. Now it's only slow.). It loads faster also.
And the nicest thing: I went to a page with Java, and it didnt't crash!!! Goodbye "killall -9 netscape"!!!
For those interested, I really suggest getting it. This really is looking like a road up to a "final" release, after all.
(BTW, posted with PR3.)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I've attended a workshop some time ago where one of the guys talking was Mr. Andrew Lippan (sp?) from the MIT Media Lab.
There he showed some pictures of one printer they were testing at the ML. The pictures showed some vegetables (a pickle, as far as I remember) and fruits (an apple) with text printed on them. The printer was capable to print things on non-flat objects...
Anyone has links to it??? It sure is interesting... :-)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Hey, I just found a way to get a +5 (Funny) moderation on slashdot... just follow the algorithm:
I'm not really sure if the Perl syntax is right (don't have a Perl interpreter handy) but you get the idea. :0)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
OK, Kylix will be Qt based, but on which version??? v. 2.x (which I really hope so) or version 1.4x (which I greatly hope NOT)?
All this talk about KDE integration and such leaves the question in the air, as the current "stable" KDE is Qt 1.4x based, but the new 2.x version is much, much better.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
If you mod me down, you aren't reading between the lines.
I *really* tried, but all I could see was the page's white backgroud. <g>
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I downloaded the package again today from a mirror (sourceforge) and it worked. Maybe the one on the KDE ftp is broken, or maybe they fixed it...
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Yeah, I think it is broken really, now that I see that I'm not the only one having problems.<g>
Anyway, I filed a bug to bugs.kde.org about this yesterday, and got a response from the package mantainer. Hope they fix that soon...
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I did a little search on Google to look for the system my university uses in its library, and found an interesting listing.
However, it seems to contain only commercial software (the one the guys here use, Aleph, is the first in the list), but you may find some interesting things if you browse the links (I didn't take the time for that).
--
Marcelo Vanzin