Who the hell runs benchmarks with FireFox and iTunes.
Someone who wants to see how they handle the types of apps most people actually use?
Nothing sucks more then opening a 400dpi photoshop document and not having InDesign respond since your single core CPU is being bogarted.
Or your music drops out because you just clicked the link to a web page full of Flash animations and tables.
Or a 'high priority task" like inserting a disk blocks the CPU.
Even for home use, I prefer what on paper would be a slower dual-processor system to a slightly faster single processor. But then I tend to have a lot of stuff going on all the time and usually have one or more "real time" tasks going on (from listening to music to capturing video)..
wonder how long - realistically - it'll be before multi-core is "the norm"... less than a year?
Interesting question. A big factor is one of the questions I have. Does dual-core have a price/performance advantage over dual-processor? Some factors:
How do the yields compare? I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that the clock rate on dual-cores is lower because you just can't get a good yield at a higher clock rate. You have to go with the clock rate of the lowest performer in the dual-core.
How does performance compare? I can see some performance advantage to the two cores being "closer", but if they're so close they have to share the FSB, what does that do to performance?
I think you hit on one of the biggest problems with that. What if the foreground app doesn't need any real horsepower, but others do? Espceially if you have real-time processes (video/audio capture...) going that might get CPU starved.
I think a much better way to handle making the foreground app more responsive would simply be to raise its priority level. That way it only hogs the CPU if it really has something to do.
IMO what's missing is actually testing single vs. dual cores -all else being equal.
I'm more familiar with the tools available on Macs, but given that there are simple utilities that allow you to turn one CPU off on a dual-CPU system, I assume the same is true on the Intel side and that they would also allow one to turn off one core on a dual -core system.
Which always makes me wonder why benchmarks that are supposedly testing one vs. two processors (or cores) don't use these tools so they can actually test single vs. dual without a dozen confounding variables.
Except that Congress works much like a college student.
Keep putting off the hard stuff until the last minute, then try to cram in a full semester's studying for 4 subjects in on a long weekend. If that fails, ask for an extension.
Then go home and tell everyone how hard you've been working.
Having tried to watch a couple of those "prereleases" and seen the quality, I have to say a fitting punishment would be to force the perpetrator to watch their own handiwork.
"Wooohooo.. nekked breast!...... or was that just a dwarf walking into frame?"
Maybe I'm way off, but isn't the calibration information in essense a "key" to unlock the imgae?
So now Nikon has encrypted the "key" (calibration information). So am I not allowed to decrypt the "key" to access my own IP, or is Nikon saying the "key" itself is some form of IP?
To be fair, I don't think Nikon has "said" anything. This is all just Adobe hinting at possibilities.
The DMCA is having very far-reaching effects, all of which I'm sure were not contemplated or foreseen by the people who drafted the DMCA.
I wouldn't let them off the hook that easily. Our legislators were told by consumer rights advocates that this was the type of thing that would happen. Of course supporters of the DMCA told the legislators that nobody would ever stoop that low.
Sad, but still one step up from their usual "unnamed" sources IMO. Now at least they're quoting that Anonymous Coward guy on/. He must be an expert given how often he posts.
Hubble won't help -it can't see it. Its too close and moving too fast.
It would be like standing on the pitcher's mound and trying to watch a baseball being thrown from home to 1st base through a telescope with a minimal focal length of 100 meter. You can't move it fast enough to track the ball, and even if you could it would be so out of focus you'd be lucky to see a blur.
There are many land-based scopes much better fit for the job. Hubble is focused on things galaxies away, not within our own galaxy.
But that sounds like it could be a real PITA. From your explanation if sounds like only one chunk needs to come from a spoofed source.
I don't know how this works, but say a given piece is broken into 10 chunks. You download all 10 chunks, put them together and the hash check fails (you don't know it but one of the chunks came from a spoofed source). There's no way (I'm assuming) to know which chunk is "bad" so you have to download all 10 again. And again the hash check fails because one or more chunks came from the spoofed source.
So how many times do you have to download the "same" ten chunks to successfully get a given piece if even 10% of the sources are spoofed? What a way to congest the network and make successful downloads drop to a crawl.
IMO it effectively turns BitTorrent's strength (downloading from several sources to increase download speed) against it. Am I not understanding something there?
I'm thinking things like the Cell processors IBM unveiled.
Video coming in via Firewire being encoded and burned to DVD in real time while I'm playing the latest/greatest game with frame rates that would make the PC weenies cry!
And they can run Jaguar and not have the worries of businesses that have to make the choice between upgrading to SP2 and breaking apps, or not upgrading and gambling on security.
to add to the insult that is finder is that you can't terminate it like a regular program
I don't understand what you mean by that. I can "Force Quit" Finder without any trouble. Did you mean something more specific?
I agree that the Finder does sometimes become "modal" when it really shouldn't (displaying previews), but overall I think its a great piece of software. Sure, app A does X better, B does Y better, C does Z better, but I haven't seen a general purpose file browser that does half what Finder does half as well.
OTOH, I'm all for making it better. As for your question, its all better and faster, or so I've heard...
Its the same at many universities that have a licensing agreement in place with Apple. I have no idea how much it costs (if anyting) for the university.
The whole point is that if you have hardware available to speed up a given process, it will use it. If not, nothing will be slower than it would have been anyway.
What people seem to miss is that Apple is providing frameworks that developers have been spending gads of resources on for every single application. Buy a game, the developer spent a ton of time writing code to optimize the graphics display. Buy another game, and that developer had to do the same thing. The kicker is that both of those games will probably require the same graphics cards that CoreImage requires if you want the same performance.
Tiger doesn't, but having built-in Firewire is the easiest way to define the specs of the motherboard and supporting "chip set". Its easier than specifying a revision number or RAM type. Firewire ports are something you can see (or not) from the outside of the machine.
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Who the hell runs benchmarks with FireFox and iTunes.
Someone who wants to see how they handle the types of apps most people actually use?
Nothing sucks more then opening a 400dpi photoshop document and not having InDesign respond since your single core CPU is being bogarted.
Or your music drops out because you just clicked the link to a web page full of Flash animations and tables.
Or a 'high priority task" like inserting a disk blocks the CPU.
Even for home use, I prefer what on paper would be a slower dual-processor system to a slightly faster single processor. But then I tend to have a lot of stuff going on all the time and usually have one or more "real time" tasks going on (from listening to music to capturing video)..
wonder how long - realistically - it'll be before multi-core is "the norm"... less than a year?
Interesting question. A big factor is one of the questions I have. Does dual-core have a price/performance advantage over dual-processor? Some factors:
How do the yields compare? I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that the clock rate on dual-cores is lower because you just can't get a good yield at a higher clock rate. You have to go with the clock rate of the lowest performer in the dual-core.
How does performance compare? I can see some performance advantage to the two cores being "closer", but if they're so close they have to share the FSB, what does that do to performance?
Other factors?
I think you hit on one of the biggest problems with that. What if the foreground app doesn't need any real horsepower, but others do? Espceially if you have real-time processes (video/audio capture...) going that might get CPU starved.
I think a much better way to handle making the foreground app more responsive would simply be to raise its priority level. That way it only hogs the CPU if it really has something to do.
IMO what's missing is actually testing single vs. dual cores -all else being equal.
I'm more familiar with the tools available on Macs, but given that there are simple utilities that allow you to turn one CPU off on a dual-CPU system, I assume the same is true on the Intel side and that they would also allow one to turn off one core on a dual -core system.
Which always makes me wonder why benchmarks that are supposedly testing one vs. two processors (or cores) don't use these tools so they can actually test single vs. dual without a dozen confounding variables.
I think one big difference is that its pretty hard to accidently obtain a copy of a movie before its been released.
Except that Congress works much like a college student.
Keep putting off the hard stuff until the last minute, then try to cram in a full semester's studying for 4 subjects in on a long weekend. If that fails, ask for an extension.
Then go home and tell everyone how hard you've been working.
Don't forget to add in the cost of lost popcorn sales. That means only 4 or 5 people need to download the filem and not go see it.
Having tried to watch a couple of those "prereleases" and seen the quality, I have to say a fitting punishment would be to force the perpetrator to watch their own handiwork.
... ... or was that just a dwarf walking into frame?"
"Wooohooo.. nekked breast!
Maybe I'm way off, but isn't the calibration information in essense a "key" to unlock the imgae?
So now Nikon has encrypted the "key" (calibration information). So am I not allowed to decrypt the "key" to access my own IP, or is Nikon saying the "key" itself is some form of IP?
To be fair, I don't think Nikon has "said" anything. This is all just Adobe hinting at possibilities.
The DMCA is having very far-reaching effects, all of which I'm sure were not contemplated or foreseen by the people who drafted the DMCA.
I wouldn't let them off the hook that easily. Our legislators were told by consumer rights advocates that this was the type of thing that would happen. Of course supporters of the DMCA told the legislators that nobody would ever stoop that low.
Guess who they beleived?
Sad, but still one step up from their usual "unnamed" sources IMO. Now at least they're quoting that Anonymous Coward guy on /. He must be an expert given how often he posts.
Hubble won't help -it can't see it. Its too close and moving too fast.
It would be like standing on the pitcher's mound and trying to watch a baseball being thrown from home to 1st base through a telescope with a minimal focal length of 100 meter. You can't move it fast enough to track the ball, and even if you could it would be so out of focus you'd be lucky to see a blur.
There are many land-based scopes much better fit for the job. Hubble is focused on things galaxies away, not within our own galaxy.
I'll just make my own P2P hash algorithm.
Actually that might be kind of fun (OK, not as fun as the blackjack and hookers...)
Create your own P2P hash algorithm then use the DMCA to sue anyone who tries to mess with it.
But that sounds like it could be a real PITA. From your explanation if sounds like only one chunk needs to come from a spoofed source.
I don't know how this works, but say a given piece is broken into 10 chunks. You download all 10 chunks, put them together and the hash check fails (you don't know it but one of the chunks came from a spoofed source). There's no way (I'm assuming) to know which chunk is "bad" so you have to download all 10 again. And again the hash check fails because one or more chunks came from the spoofed source.
So how many times do you have to download the "same" ten chunks to successfully get a given piece if even 10% of the sources are spoofed? What a way to congest the network and make successful downloads drop to a crawl.
IMO it effectively turns BitTorrent's strength (downloading from several sources to increase download speed) against it. Am I not understanding something there?
The Image Analysis Facility where I work (big university) has an art contest every year featuring scientific images as art.
There's some pretty cool stuff there.
Yep. That will do it. Nothing like bringing a girl home and spending the next hour showing off your new computer to get her in the mood (to leave).
What would they be used for?
I'm thinking things like the Cell processors IBM unveiled.
Video coming in via Firewire being encoded and burned to DVD in real time while I'm playing the latest/greatest game with frame rates that would make the PC weenies cry!
OK, I can dream, cant' I?
And they can run Jaguar and not have the worries of businesses that have to make the choice between upgrading to SP2 and breaking apps, or not upgrading and gambling on security.
As MacOS X has matured, the upgrades have gotten rarer.
And IIRC, that's what Jobs said would happen. When Panther was released, he said that the major OS updates would slow down.
to add to the insult that is finder is that you can't terminate it like a regular program
I don't understand what you mean by that. I can "Force Quit" Finder without any trouble. Did you mean something more specific?
I agree that the Finder does sometimes become "modal" when it really shouldn't (displaying previews), but overall I think its a great piece of software. Sure, app A does X better, B does Y better, C does Z better, but I haven't seen a general purpose file browser that does half what Finder does half as well.
OTOH, I'm all for making it better. As for your question, its all better and faster, or so I've heard...
Its the same at many universities that have a licensing agreement in place with Apple. I have no idea how much it costs (if anyting) for the university.
Don't forget to subtract out the savings in shipping/handling, packaging as well as many other "little" things like support.
No it probably doesn't add up to $450, but it adds to the win column in customer satisfaction.
Would have been better to emulate an ad company.
"Buy Tiger! Save up to $500 instantly?"
I look at it from the other angle.
The whole point is that if you have hardware available to speed up a given process, it will use it. If not, nothing will be slower than it would have been anyway.
What people seem to miss is that Apple is providing frameworks that developers have been spending gads of resources on for every single application. Buy a game, the developer spent a ton of time writing code to optimize the graphics display. Buy another game, and that developer had to do the same thing. The kicker is that both of those games will probably require the same graphics cards that CoreImage requires if you want the same performance.
Tiger doesn't, but having built-in Firewire is the easiest way to define the specs of the motherboard and supporting "chip set". Its easier than specifying a revision number or RAM type. Firewire ports are something you can see (or not) from the outside of the machine.