Why are you measuring web speed in computer time instead of human time? It doesn't matter if it takes 200ms or 170ms to render the page. What matters is how long it takes the person visiting the page to complete the task or obtain the information. Going to gmail, clicking on a subject line and having Ajax load the content is much faster for me the reader, even if the browser could have loaded a plain HTML page faster.
It doesn't make any sense at all to boast about speed while the software is still in Beta. If you don't need to be correct, you could complete the javascript benchmark in 1ms by just executing a no-op for each action. Once Firefox 4 has demonstrated the ability to execute all the javascript correctly, then I'll be interested in the benchmark scores.
"The more devices there are out in the population, the more enticing it is for developers to develop for them."
Wrong wrong wrong.
I don't want to develop my software and have to test it on 30 different phones. I want to develop for a single phone that has gigantic market share.
It's a phone remember. Getting good performance from a device that necessarily has quite limited CPU and GPU power means that you will need a lot of optimizations to ensure quality. I don't want to have test on a big pile of devices, and I don't want bad reviews because my software performed poorly on one particular device.
As a consumer, yes I want choice. As a developer, it's much easier to make good software for a single OS + hardware combination.
I'm sure the GP is referring to the Spanish Job Study, which has been debunked by everyone who has read it. This article is particularly good at pointing out the massive methodological flaws in the study. http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/credit_for_trying_spanish_stud.html
How do anecdotes keep getting modded up on Slashdot?
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
Back pain comes and goes. Bodies heal on their own. Chronic pain feels better some days and worse others. Humans respond very well to placebos. None of this is evidence in the slightest that chiropractic is effective. Randomized double blind trials show a treatment is effective.
The linked article defines pollution as sulfur emissions, but ignores the other byproducts of combustion including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and benzene. Should ships reduce sulfur exhaust? Absolutely. Does that eliminate the need for sensible personal transportation choices. Not at all.
Don't we use quotation marks to denote quotations any more? Perhaps they've been reserved for "emphasis". But to be fair, your not-as-funny paraphrasing of Demitri Martin doesn't require quotes.
Whisky ages by evaporating bad alcohols while retaining tasty ones. Flavours from the barrel wood and the sea air are a secondary effect. This cannot happen through a glass bottle, so bottling indeed stops the aging process. This explains why all whisky isn't 25 years old. Slashdot readers have surely wondered why we can't fill the pipeline and always have 25 year old whisky. The answer is that about 2% of the alcohols evaporate each year. Waiting 25 years means you lose about half the alcohol.
We all know and love Microsoft's practices of stealing other companies technologies and incorporating it into the great MS empire. Yet for some reason the Slashdot community seems to rejoice in the fact that memory companies stole Rambus' designs.
Consider the following docket from the trial which indicates a fairly serious conspiracy to take Rambus' designs and modify them only enough to avoid paying patents.
Do I believe Rambus should spend more time inovating and less time litigating? Of course. But they didn't have the 20 billion dollars to startup a manufacturing plant so they licensed the technology to a company that did. Shouldn't they be able to claim the 00.75% royalty that they are asking for?
The notion of a "safer outlet" seems to be based on the popular notion of catharsis. That is, that by letting out your anger, or satisfying or sexual urges by viewing porn, will lead to a release of your built up tensions and you will feel satisfied.
Unfortunately, catharsis is a myth. Look through any psychology text, or read any study on catharsis, and you will find the results are exactly the opposite. Rather than letting the violence out, subjects realise that expressing violence is ok, and the act of catharsis leads to an increase in violent tendancies.
I don't believe we should censor pornography and just pretend it doesn't exist. But to suggest that looking at child porn is healthy, does not agree with studies that show the opposite.
All right, so we have a bunch of benchmarks that test some games that we're all playing right now to prove that the Athalon is better than Intel. That may be true, but if I want to use my computer one year from now, I'd place my money on the Pentium 4.
I think we all know that a benchmark that simply focuses on one strength of a processor and doesn't reflect how fast your system will run in actual applications is useless. And yet, everyone seems to ignore where PCs are heading, and what sort of applications we will be using in the future.
What use are all of the Pentium IV's fancy multimedia extensions? Better multimedia. Many of you have probably downloaded a Simpsons episode off of Scour and watched it on your PC. I bet you're hoping that that 1 1/2" window will get bigger and bigger as the years go by. I bet we'll be streaming DVD's and watching HDTV off of the net very soon now. And with these high memory bandwidth requirements, the PIV will really shine.
For years, the slow memory system of a machine didn't matter. So long as you had a lightening fast cache you were fine. Most programs in use today obey the laws of locality of reference. But that's going to change in the future. We won't have tiled video game worlds, we'll have a single huge non-repeating world. We'll be streaming videos where the contents of the cache are used in a single frame, and then discarded in the next frame as the movie advances. I believe Intel saw this future, and so decided upon RDRAM with it's high latency but superior bandwidth.
Sure, if you want to crack RC-5, then a quad Athalon system is your best choice. But I think that the bulk of users will find a single CPU'd high bandwidth memory PIV to be their choice for the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you measuring web speed in computer time instead of human time? It doesn't matter if it takes 200ms or 170ms to render the page. What matters is how long it takes the person visiting the page to complete the task or obtain the information. Going to gmail, clicking on a subject line and having Ajax load the content is much faster for me the reader, even if the browser could have loaded a plain HTML page faster.
It doesn't make any sense at all to boast about speed while the software is still in Beta. If you don't need to be correct, you could complete the javascript benchmark in 1ms by just executing a no-op for each action. Once Firefox 4 has demonstrated the ability to execute all the javascript correctly, then I'll be interested in the benchmark scores.
"The more devices there are out in the population, the more enticing it is for developers to develop for them."
Wrong wrong wrong.
I don't want to develop my software and have to test it on 30 different phones. I want to develop for a single phone that has gigantic market share.
It's a phone remember. Getting good performance from a device that necessarily has quite limited CPU and GPU power means that you will need a lot of optimizations to ensure quality. I don't want to have test on a big pile of devices, and I don't want bad reviews because my software performed poorly on one particular device.
As a consumer, yes I want choice. As a developer, it's much easier to make good software for a single OS + hardware combination.
I'm sure the GP is referring to the Spanish Job Study, which has been debunked by everyone who has read it. This article is particularly good at pointing out the massive methodological flaws in the study.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/credit_for_trying_spanish_stud.html
How do anecdotes keep getting modded up on Slashdot?
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
Back pain comes and goes. Bodies heal on their own. Chronic pain feels better some days and worse others. Humans respond very well to placebos. None of this is evidence in the slightest that chiropractic is effective. Randomized double blind trials show a treatment is effective.
Stop modding anecdotes up!
The linked article defines pollution as sulfur emissions, but ignores the other byproducts of combustion including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and benzene. Should ships reduce sulfur exhaust? Absolutely. Does that eliminate the need for sensible personal transportation choices. Not at all.
Don't we use quotation marks to denote quotations any more? Perhaps they've been reserved for "emphasis". But to be fair, your not-as-funny paraphrasing of Demitri Martin doesn't require quotes.
Whisky ages by evaporating bad alcohols while retaining tasty ones. Flavours from the barrel wood and the sea air are a secondary effect. This cannot happen through a glass bottle, so bottling indeed stops the aging process. This explains why all whisky isn't 25 years old. Slashdot readers have surely wondered why we can't fill the pipeline and always have 25 year old whisky. The answer is that about 2% of the alcohols evaporate each year. Waiting 25 years means you lose about half the alcohol.
We all know and love Microsoft's practices of stealing other companies technologies and incorporating it into the great MS empire. Yet for some reason the Slashdot community seems to rejoice in the fact that memory companies stole Rambus' designs.
Consider the following docket from the trial which indicates a fairly serious conspiracy to take Rambus' designs and modify them only enough to avoid paying patents.
Do I believe Rambus should spend more time inovating and less time litigating? Of course. But they didn't have the 20 billion dollars to startup a manufacturing plant so they licensed the technology to a company that did. Shouldn't they be able to claim the 00.75% royalty that they are asking for?
The notion of a "safer outlet" seems to be based on the popular notion of catharsis. That is, that by letting out your anger, or satisfying or sexual urges by viewing porn, will lead to a release of your built up tensions and you will feel satisfied. Unfortunately, catharsis is a myth. Look through any psychology text, or read any study on catharsis, and you will find the results are exactly the opposite. Rather than letting the violence out, subjects realise that expressing violence is ok, and the act of catharsis leads to an increase in violent tendancies. I don't believe we should censor pornography and just pretend it doesn't exist. But to suggest that looking at child porn is healthy, does not agree with studies that show the opposite.
All right, so we have a bunch of benchmarks that test some games that we're all playing right now to prove that the Athalon is better than Intel. That may be true, but if I want to use my computer one year from now, I'd place my money on the Pentium 4.
I think we all know that a benchmark that simply focuses on one strength of a processor and doesn't reflect how fast your system will run in actual applications is useless. And yet, everyone seems to ignore where PCs are heading, and what sort of applications we will be using in the future.
What use are all of the Pentium IV's fancy multimedia extensions? Better multimedia. Many of you have probably downloaded a Simpsons episode off of Scour and watched it on your PC. I bet you're hoping that that 1 1/2" window will get bigger and bigger as the years go by. I bet we'll be streaming DVD's and watching HDTV off of the net very soon now. And with these high memory bandwidth requirements, the PIV will really shine.
For years, the slow memory system of a machine didn't matter. So long as you had a lightening fast cache you were fine. Most programs in use today obey the laws of locality of reference. But that's going to change in the future. We won't have tiled video game worlds, we'll have a single huge non-repeating world. We'll be streaming videos where the contents of the cache are used in a single frame, and then discarded in the next frame as the movie advances. I believe Intel saw this future, and so decided upon RDRAM with it's high latency but superior bandwidth.
Sure, if you want to crack RC-5, then a quad Athalon system is your best choice. But I think that the bulk of users will find a single CPU'd high bandwidth memory PIV to be their choice for the future.