If Firefox is using 7500MB of RAM I agree, obviously that is a memory leak problem and that needs to be fixed. Personally I've never seen it, but since I have a fast computer I don't mind closing Firefox when I'm done with it, so it doesn't stay running for weeks at a time either.
First off, for better or for worse there's no way for an OS to actually free an allocation used by an application in either Linux or Windows. There is no mechanism in either the page or heap allocation APIs in either operating system to declare an allocation in such a way as to let the OS know that instead of paging this memory to disk when low on memory, it should instead just free it and let the application know it has done so. It's a good idea, but it doesn't exist. Secondly, the OS really doesn't have any intelligent insight into the usefulness of a particular allocation to an application. An application will always be more aware of what cached data is more useful than others.
For both of these reasons, when speaking specifically of CACHED data that can be freed with impunity, the OS both cannot and should not assume that role. I'm not saying every application should implement this kind of logic, but for certain applications it is certainly worth it.
Programmer time is more expensive than hardware time. If a less efficient language is easier to use, it makes business sense to use it to save money.
This does not explain the slow languages that are difficult to use, but it does explain why assembly has fallen from favor, and why C is in decline.
I honestly hate this idea. You write have to write a program once. Most programs run thousands of times, some programs will run millions or billions of times. If you actually calculated the global collective waste due to slow heavily abstracted languages running across the globe that cost is significantly than it would've been to write it properly to begin with.
Yes, that's basically what I said. The problem isn't that Firefox can use a lot of RAM, but rather it isn't paying attention to the amount of RAM available to the system and acting accordingly. On all platforms you're going to have the ability to check the amount of memory actually available to the entire system, as this amount decreases Firefox can begin to proactively free memory used for the oldest cached data.
I think at least part of the problem is perception. Most people seem to have this mindset that using RAM is bad, and the more memory you have free and unused the faster your computer will be. These are the same people who think they're increasing their computer's performance by turning off superfetch, etc.The problem with this perception is that it's completely stupid.
Programs load data into memory because memory is fast and your disk and the network are significantly slower; hundreds or thousands of times slower, and pointlessly unloading the data from memory increases the risk of having to go back to the slower disk or network to retrieve it later. If you still have RAM available, it is actually detrimental to your system performance to free this data.
Now, when you're running out of RAM there is a problem, the operating system and applications should begin to free data that is the least likely to be useful in the near future to make room for whatever is needed at the moment. If Firefox has a problem it isn't RAM usage, it's that it isn't paying attention to global system memory levels and caching less aggressively when there is RAM pressure, and honestly I wouldn't know if that IS a problem because I have way more RAM than I've ever seen my computer manage to use.
Kind of. I agree memory bandwidth is important and especially for parallel computing problems which can be very memory bandwidth demanding, but for modern processors consisting of 4 or even 8 cores you'll see very little gains in performance when increasing DRAM frequency. The reason for this is modern processors have a lot of (ostensibly wasted) die space that allows it to make intelligent decisions in prefetching, register renaming, and yes, caching.
The real answer to this problem is we should add a third verdict.
Currently we have guilty and not guilty, and not guilty encompasses the all verdicts ranging from "I guess we couldn't PROVE he shot her, even though he probably did" all the way down to "this was absurd and a waste of time, based on the evidence presented you can not only say not guilty, but that it is obvious it should have never came to trial".
What we need is a new third verdict for the last type of outcome in which the judgement rendered is actually against the prosecuting party, mirroring the severity of the judgement the guilty verdict.
I'm going to go ahead and pass judgement right fucking now. Whether or not it's heavy, it's:
1. Pretty damn large
2. Probably expensive, at least significantly moreso than any other console controllers
3. Fragile, as in, fragile enough that you don't want to wave it around like a moron and send it flying into a wall to shatter the delicate expensive screen
If you're comparing CPU mining to a cluster of ATI GPUs it's more like having 1 ticket in versus 20,000. Sure you still have a chance, it's just extremely extremely small.
The original doom used software rendering which makes this a fair comparison actually, things like OpenGL and hardware accelerated 3D graphics certainly didn't exist (in the consumer realm) in 1993. Doom ran at full frames on 66 mhz Pentium processor. Loosely extrapolating, this means the Javascript version is about 200 to 300 times slower than the original.
The primary bitcoin miner proper IS actually optimized for ATI GPUs. In fact, it's to the point where if you're not using quite a large number of ATI GPUs in some kind of cluster, you're SOL for ever successfully mining a block.
And it almost gets 30 FPS too completely pegging one of my two cores on a 2.4 ghz proccessor! I understand (hope?) that this isn't supposed to be a serious tech demo, but honestly, if Javascript is (at least one of the parts of) the platform of the future we are seriously fucked. State of the art dynamic recompiling VMs and this is the best we can do for performance? It's time people started realizing that Javascript as a language is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced.
The production version will simply switch the program to a 24 hour Rick Astley marathon and turns your volume to maximum when it detects interference with the Viewer Monitoring Interface, for troubleshooting.
Sigh. It's a generic PPC processor, it doesn't matter if Sony likes to call it something else and considers it a part of the Cell; it isn't. Go away troll.
The proceeds from the auction are being donated to the families of the victims of the bombs to help pay the court ordered restitution that was initially handed down as part of Kaczynski's sentence. That's a pretty good cause I think, many of his victims had permanent damage that probably required a lot of time, pain, and money to undo, and even then only partially.
Lousy? On a technical level JPEG2000 is currently the state of the art in both lossy and lossless photo compression. What makes JPEG2000 lousy are the patents encumbering it (and following from that) it's lousy penetration and support in modern products.
Meh. First of all, I can boot Windows 7 from POST to desktop in less than 10 seconds, and for most people it's probably only marginally higher than that. Second of all, who powers down their computer these days anyway? I guess I should expect Linux users to be less familiar with common ACPI power management features like S3 or S4, given the support for them in even modern distros is still shoddy at best.
You have a problem with those error messages? If those exceptions look "worthless" to you then I would argue you don't really have any business automating anything remotely serious, and as such you probably have only the most basic programming experience.
Powershell is completely self discoverable, meaning if you had taken about 5 minutes to read any introduction to the language you would have become acquainted with commandlets like Get-Help, Get-Command, and Get-Member. If the output of THOSE commandlets is "worthless" to you then you really are beyond hope.
If you want to criticize Powershell be my guest, but try to do it for it's actual shortcomings instead of made up nonsense, like performance, or it's clunky remoting.
Uh, Powershell commandlets don't actually return text responses at all, they return.NET objects which can be represented as serialized XML. They turn into "worthless 6 line responses" when you pass those objects / XML to the default text formatting output, which is implicit when you are using Powershell shell. This is one of the reasons Powershell is great, no serialization and reparsing occurs when passing and piping data between commandlets and the object structure and it's associated methods are maintained.
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If Firefox is using 7500MB of RAM I agree, obviously that is a memory leak problem and that needs to be fixed. Personally I've never seen it, but since I have a fast computer I don't mind closing Firefox when I'm done with it, so it doesn't stay running for weeks at a time either.
First off, for better or for worse there's no way for an OS to actually free an allocation used by an application in either Linux or Windows. There is no mechanism in either the page or heap allocation APIs in either operating system to declare an allocation in such a way as to let the OS know that instead of paging this memory to disk when low on memory, it should instead just free it and let the application know it has done so. It's a good idea, but it doesn't exist. Secondly, the OS really doesn't have any intelligent insight into the usefulness of a particular allocation to an application. An application will always be more aware of what cached data is more useful than others.
For both of these reasons, when speaking specifically of CACHED data that can be freed with impunity, the OS both cannot and should not assume that role. I'm not saying every application should implement this kind of logic, but for certain applications it is certainly worth it.
Programmer time is more expensive than hardware time. If a less efficient language is easier to use, it makes business sense to use it to save money. This does not explain the slow languages that are difficult to use, but it does explain why assembly has fallen from favor, and why C is in decline.
I honestly hate this idea. You write have to write a program once. Most programs run thousands of times, some programs will run millions or billions of times. If you actually calculated the global collective waste due to slow heavily abstracted languages running across the globe that cost is significantly than it would've been to write it properly to begin with.
Yes, that's basically what I said. The problem isn't that Firefox can use a lot of RAM, but rather it isn't paying attention to the amount of RAM available to the system and acting accordingly. On all platforms you're going to have the ability to check the amount of memory actually available to the entire system, as this amount decreases Firefox can begin to proactively free memory used for the oldest cached data.
I think at least part of the problem is perception. Most people seem to have this mindset that using RAM is bad, and the more memory you have free and unused the faster your computer will be. These are the same people who think they're increasing their computer's performance by turning off superfetch, etc.The problem with this perception is that it's completely stupid.
Programs load data into memory because memory is fast and your disk and the network are significantly slower; hundreds or thousands of times slower, and pointlessly unloading the data from memory increases the risk of having to go back to the slower disk or network to retrieve it later. If you still have RAM available, it is actually detrimental to your system performance to free this data.
Now, when you're running out of RAM there is a problem, the operating system and applications should begin to free data that is the least likely to be useful in the near future to make room for whatever is needed at the moment. If Firefox has a problem it isn't RAM usage, it's that it isn't paying attention to global system memory levels and caching less aggressively when there is RAM pressure, and honestly I wouldn't know if that IS a problem because I have way more RAM than I've ever seen my computer manage to use.
Kind of. I agree memory bandwidth is important and especially for parallel computing problems which can be very memory bandwidth demanding, but for modern processors consisting of 4 or even 8 cores you'll see very little gains in performance when increasing DRAM frequency. The reason for this is modern processors have a lot of (ostensibly wasted) die space that allows it to make intelligent decisions in prefetching, register renaming, and yes, caching.
The real answer to this problem is we should add a third verdict.
Currently we have guilty and not guilty, and not guilty encompasses the all verdicts ranging from "I guess we couldn't PROVE he shot her, even though he probably did" all the way down to "this was absurd and a waste of time, based on the evidence presented you can not only say not guilty, but that it is obvious it should have never came to trial".
What we need is a new third verdict for the last type of outcome in which the judgement rendered is actually against the prosecuting party, mirroring the severity of the judgement the guilty verdict.
Please mod up to +10 billion insightful.
Oh, I forgot.
4. Probably has a battery life of less than 10 hours when the screen is in use.
I guess they probably don't see that as a problem because their target demographic doesn't play games for longer than half an hour anyway.
I'm going to go ahead and pass judgement right fucking now. Whether or not it's heavy, it's:
1. Pretty damn large
2. Probably expensive, at least significantly moreso than any other console controllers
3. Fragile, as in, fragile enough that you don't want to wave it around like a moron and send it flying into a wall to shatter the delicate expensive screen
Fair enough, but they could start selling hard drives with capacities and prices from this decade then.
If you're comparing CPU mining to a cluster of ATI GPUs it's more like having 1 ticket in versus 20,000. Sure you still have a chance, it's just extremely extremely small.
The original doom used software rendering which makes this a fair comparison actually, things like OpenGL and hardware accelerated 3D graphics certainly didn't exist (in the consumer realm) in 1993. Doom ran at full frames on 66 mhz Pentium processor. Loosely extrapolating, this means the Javascript version is about 200 to 300 times slower than the original.
The primary bitcoin miner proper IS actually optimized for ATI GPUs. In fact, it's to the point where if you're not using quite a large number of ATI GPUs in some kind of cluster, you're SOL for ever successfully mining a block.
And it almost gets 30 FPS too completely pegging one of my two cores on a 2.4 ghz proccessor! I understand (hope?) that this isn't supposed to be a serious tech demo, but honestly, if Javascript is (at least one of the parts of) the platform of the future we are seriously fucked. State of the art dynamic recompiling VMs and this is the best we can do for performance? It's time people started realizing that Javascript as a language is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced.
The production version will simply switch the program to a 24 hour Rick Astley marathon and turns your volume to maximum when it detects interference with the Viewer Monitoring Interface, for troubleshooting.
Sigh. It's a generic PPC processor, it doesn't matter if Sony likes to call it something else and considers it a part of the Cell; it isn't. Go away troll.
The proceeds from the auction are being donated to the families of the victims of the bombs to help pay the court ordered restitution that was initially handed down as part of Kaczynski's sentence. That's a pretty good cause I think, many of his victims had permanent damage that probably required a lot of time, pain, and money to undo, and even then only partially.
Okay, I read TFA, and I read your page on the Mozilla Wiki. Now please please please please please stop talking and go away.
Thank you,
-The Internet
So your argument is basically if you can't protect the illiterate / dyslexics, you shouldn't protect anyone at all?
Lousy? On a technical level JPEG2000 is currently the state of the art in both lossy and lossless photo compression. What makes JPEG2000 lousy are the patents encumbering it (and following from that) it's lousy penetration and support in modern products.
Meh. First of all, I can boot Windows 7 from POST to desktop in less than 10 seconds, and for most people it's probably only marginally higher than that. Second of all, who powers down their computer these days anyway? I guess I should expect Linux users to be less familiar with common ACPI power management features like S3 or S4, given the support for them in even modern distros is still shoddy at best.
You have a problem with those error messages? If those exceptions look "worthless" to you then I would argue you don't really have any business automating anything remotely serious, and as such you probably have only the most basic programming experience. Powershell is completely self discoverable, meaning if you had taken about 5 minutes to read any introduction to the language you would have become acquainted with commandlets like Get-Help, Get-Command, and Get-Member. If the output of THOSE commandlets is "worthless" to you then you really are beyond hope. If you want to criticize Powershell be my guest, but try to do it for it's actual shortcomings instead of made up nonsense, like performance, or it's clunky remoting.
Yeah, XML is really proprietary, impossible to decipher without reverse engineering; the worst format for interoperability.
Uh, Powershell commandlets don't actually return text responses at all, they return .NET objects which can be represented as serialized XML. They turn into "worthless 6 line responses" when you pass those objects / XML to the default text formatting output, which is implicit when you are using Powershell shell. This is one of the reasons Powershell is great, no serialization and reparsing occurs when passing and piping data between commandlets and the object structure and it's associated methods are maintained.