Ah-ha! If that's the case, this slowness on Linux is a symptom of Firefox foolishly doing an fsync() every time it writes to the filesystem (see this bugzilla entry). Lots of discussion there, but I don't think it's been resolved.
The short version: If fsync() is expensive on your kernel/filesystem/etc. you're going to see terrible performance.
Adobe and Apple might just have access to Mac OS X on Intel hardware, which is supported by MS's Silverlight 2.0 plugin. In fact, both companies also produce Windows software...
Unity (a game development platform) translates JavaScript (and Python) into.NET CLR opcodes and then runs them via Mono, which ends up being quite a bit faster than just running the JavaScript in a traditional interpreter.
SquirrelFish (a bytecode interpreter in WebKit) and V8 (a native JIT compiler in Chrome) are also available to speed things up.
Looking at it from the.NET CLR bytecode perspective, Silverlight 2.0 is available on Windows platforms and OS X (Intel); once Moonlight hits 2.0, that'll make a similar system available for the UNIXy OSes...
With things like these, JavaScript probably isn't awful for computationally-expensive work.
OK parents, how about you stop being stupid and actually take responsibility for raising your kids?
My son's eight and he loves video games. He's got his own DS, and he's even been trying out an MMORPG (Fusion Fall by the Cartoon Network).
We don't let him play excessively (even though I have a tendency to want to play video games excessively), we don't let him play unsupervised (all computers are in public areas, he won't have a computer in his room until he goes off to university), and we teach him about the dangers of being online.
Ultimately, you are responsible for your kids and what they do. Grow some balls and stop trying to blame other things for your inattentiveness and ignorance.
This is exactly what happened to me about two years ago now. One too many cycle of "I need this beta video driver to play game X, but game Y won't load with it" and "I have two hours to play a game, why am I spending an hour updating my OS, my video drivers, and my game?" Not to mention the various "WTF, this plays smooth on the original XBox, why is my P4/Radeon x1600 system struggling?!" types of hardware upgrade treadmill issues.
On my consoles, I pop the game in and it goes, nothing to it.
Ironically, gaming was the only thing keeping my on XP at home, too; my wife and I are using Mac laptops now instead. So, PC gaming's target audience shrank a bit, and so did the Windows "ecosystem".
Even if you're not ready/willing to drop Windows as your "doing things" OS, there's hardly any reason to play games on it anymore. So much more comfy playing on my couch infront of the 1080p monitor than at my desk.
I've bought several games for Mac OS X, too, but nothing for the PC since BioShock was released.
If only Amazon would sell MP3s to people who don't live in the US. Are the Canadian arms of the American music companies really that different?
I buy my music online from the likes of Magnatune and the "iTunes Plus" store (DRM-free, and higher-quality files than the regular iTunes store). When I can, I buy directly from the artists online.
Sure Apple is enabling idiotic behaviour from the music companies, but I'm not sure we should blame them; would the music companies have even allowed them to sell music without the DRM? You could show your "appreciation" for the DRM'd music by buying something from the iTunes Plus store...
OS X "just works" on supported hardware. Windows/Linux sometimes "just works" on supported hardware.
Big difference.
I suppose Linux is more likely to stay working on supported hardware than Windows... still trying to figure out why my XP box keeps randomly switching to French keyboard input (note: I don't have a French keyboard, and I don't use French at all).
You do realise how tiny the DS's screens are, right? Remember how big Baldur's Gate's maps were? Now imagine them each taking up at least 4x as many screens.
BeOS used human-readable MIME types to specify file types. They were automatically assigned to new files by the system, using magic numbers and falling back to the extension if magic wouldn't do it.
That may be true (it certainly was with Firefox 2), but it's MS's fault that Vista Capable machines have enough RAM to run Vista, pretty much without any additional applications.
Throw in the shovelware crap (all of it auto-starting and installing tray icons and who knows what else) that consumer machines get "for free" and you're doomed.
The penny-pinching customers who don't trust anyone would listen to me and then after about 10minutes of me discussing their needs and stuff, they would buy the machines anyway because someone they knew said it was a good deal.
ARGH, I hate that. Relatives, friends, etc. ask me for advice and then ignore it completely to buy some crappy computer and "free" monitor that'll ensure they go blind after watching the machine spend 10 minutes booting. Or my father-in-law who signed up for $35/month dial-up with Bell after I found him a $9.95/month local dial-up place.
Why are you asking for me advice if you're going to ignore it?! You knew I wasn't going to validate your preconceptions by agreeing with your bad choices!
Compare the user experience of loading a page with a Java applet vs. one with Flash or Silverlight. With the Java page, your browser is dead to the world while the JVM hauls itself up from the disk like a brontosaurus. With Flash or Silverlight, the control pops up quickly and the app loads.
This is one thing that I've always wondered about... why do.NET apps, even running through Mono, load so much faster than Java apps?
Serious question; I'm not really a fan of Java (although I use Eclipse a lot and I've written a few Java articles for IBM's developerWorks site), but I do like using the right tool for the job, whatever that job might be...
Moonlight lags behind Silverlight significantly. They're at an almost-1.0 release, but Silverlight 1.0 was a joke that even MS wouldn't use for anything. 2.0 is what the initial release should have been, and it's what Moonlight needs to be to actually be useful.
Even on Mac OS X, PowerPC machines are left in the dark with only a Silverlight 1.0 implementation available; someone will need to port Moonlight 2.0 there if there's any demand.
XP's paging kills me at work all the time. I've somehow trained myself to minimize windows when I'm not working in an app... probably years of dealing with the usability failure that is MDI. Almost as soon as I minimize an app, XP seems to swap it out. If I switch back after a while it's paging city. According to the Yahoo! widget I've still got over a gig of RAM free (not used for caching or anything, it's just sitting there empty and useless). Drives me absolutely nuts.
At home, I've got my iTunes library stored on my FreeBSD server (ZFS for the win, even though it's experimental and hangs now and then; I need to throw more RAM in that machine). I mount it via AFS over the wireless network, and performance is OK unless I'm doing something crazy like importing the whole collection.
I tried using SMB/CIFS back when the iTunes library still lived on my old XP box, and it was just too unreliable. At the time (OS X 10.3 time frame, I think) the connection would die fairly often, and (copying one of XP's "greatest" features) the Finder would sit there for a few minutes trying to figure out what happened to the network drive.
No idea how NFS compares, it scares me.:-)
sshfs on FUSE worked pretty well, but incredibly slow. Although it was vaguely amusing to have my entire iTunes library available from my office at playable speeds (although my normal consumer DSL wouldn't handle copying things, really).
IMHO the sane conclusion is to only develop games for "closed" systems and sell them only online through another closed system (like XBox 360 + XBox online store or Wii + WiiWare).:-\ Or write Flash/Silverlight games and make money via advertising.
Or, if you don't want to do it as a career, give it away. Most people appear to prefer to work for money though.
This is often (usually?) filesystem stupidity. Specifically, that in Windows (and DOS before it for that matter), an open file is considered sacrosanct. You can't delete it until everybody closes their file handles. Everybody, no exceptions.
This is very bad when Windows helpfully caches things for you, like DLLs and EXEs, even after you've exitted the program. That's why you often have to reboot after installing something innocuous like Acrobat.
UNIX filesystem semantics are superior here; it's the DOS legacy that keeps Windows from changing its behaviour.
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Ah-ha! If that's the case, this slowness on Linux is a symptom of Firefox foolishly doing an fsync() every time it writes to the filesystem (see this bugzilla entry). Lots of discussion there, but I don't think it's been resolved.
The short version: If fsync() is expensive on your kernel/filesystem/etc. you're going to see terrible performance.
Adobe and Apple might just have access to Mac OS X on Intel hardware, which is supported by MS's Silverlight 2.0 plugin. In fact, both companies also produce Windows software...
Unity (a game development platform) translates JavaScript (and Python) into .NET CLR opcodes and then runs them via Mono, which ends up being quite a bit faster than just running the JavaScript in a traditional interpreter.
SquirrelFish (a bytecode interpreter in WebKit) and V8 (a native JIT compiler in Chrome) are also available to speed things up.
Looking at it from the .NET CLR bytecode perspective, Silverlight 2.0 is available on Windows platforms and OS X (Intel); once Moonlight hits 2.0, that'll make a similar system available for the UNIXy OSes...
With things like these, JavaScript probably isn't awful for computationally-expensive work.
See also Unity 3D, which features a cross-platform (well, Windows and OS X) 3D engine browser plug-in. Spiffy demo here.
Dunno which version of the Finder added the feature, but you can definitely copy and paste files in the version I'm using (10.5.6).
See Plutocracy. See also Oligarchy.
OK parents, how about you stop being stupid and actually take responsibility for raising your kids?
My son's eight and he loves video games. He's got his own DS, and he's even been trying out an MMORPG (Fusion Fall by the Cartoon Network).
We don't let him play excessively (even though I have a tendency to want to play video games excessively), we don't let him play unsupervised (all computers are in public areas, he won't have a computer in his room until he goes off to university), and we teach him about the dangers of being online.
Ultimately, you are responsible for your kids and what they do. Grow some balls and stop trying to blame other things for your inattentiveness and ignorance.
This is exactly what happened to me about two years ago now. One too many cycle of "I need this beta video driver to play game X, but game Y won't load with it" and "I have two hours to play a game, why am I spending an hour updating my OS, my video drivers, and my game?" Not to mention the various "WTF, this plays smooth on the original XBox, why is my P4/Radeon x1600 system struggling?!" types of hardware upgrade treadmill issues.
On my consoles, I pop the game in and it goes, nothing to it.
Ironically, gaming was the only thing keeping my on XP at home, too; my wife and I are using Mac laptops now instead. So, PC gaming's target audience shrank a bit, and so did the Windows "ecosystem".
Even if you're not ready/willing to drop Windows as your "doing things" OS, there's hardly any reason to play games on it anymore. So much more comfy playing on my couch infront of the 1080p monitor than at my desk.
I've bought several games for Mac OS X, too, but nothing for the PC since BioShock was released.
I only wrote one (not very successful, sadly), but I've tech edited a pile!
Still working on that novel though... and that video game... and...
If only Amazon would sell MP3s to people who don't live in the US. Are the Canadian arms of the American music companies really that different?
I buy my music online from the likes of Magnatune and the "iTunes Plus" store (DRM-free, and higher-quality files than the regular iTunes store). When I can, I buy directly from the artists online.
Sure Apple is enabling idiotic behaviour from the music companies, but I'm not sure we should blame them; would the music companies have even allowed them to sell music without the DRM? You could show your "appreciation" for the DRM'd music by buying something from the iTunes Plus store...
OS X "just works" on supported hardware. Windows/Linux sometimes "just works" on supported hardware.
Big difference.
I suppose Linux is more likely to stay working on supported hardware than Windows... still trying to figure out why my XP box keeps randomly switching to French keyboard input (note: I don't have a French keyboard, and I don't use French at all).
You're joking, but I swear Outlook 2007 is using more CPU than Folding@Home...
You do realise how tiny the DS's screens are, right? Remember how big Baldur's Gate's maps were? Now imagine them each taking up at least 4x as many screens.
BeOS used human-readable MIME types to specify file types. They were automatically assigned to new files by the system, using magic numbers and falling back to the extension if magic wouldn't do it.
That may be true (it certainly was with Firefox 2), but it's MS's fault that Vista Capable machines have enough RAM to run Vista, pretty much without any additional applications.
Throw in the shovelware crap (all of it auto-starting and installing tray icons and who knows what else) that consumer machines get "for free" and you're doomed.
Or worse, EA could crank out an FPS version of The Name of the Rose...
ARGH, I hate that. Relatives, friends, etc. ask me for advice and then ignore it completely to buy some crappy computer and "free" monitor that'll ensure they go blind after watching the machine spend 10 minutes booting. Or my father-in-law who signed up for $35/month dial-up with Bell after I found him a $9.95/month local dial-up place.
Why are you asking for me advice if you're going to ignore it?! You knew I wasn't going to validate your preconceptions by agreeing with your bad choices!
Apparently you use a web browser written in Java so you don't have to wait for the JVM to load and initialize?
Note how Bell Canada would be more than happy to sell you HD satellite service to overcome this unfortunate limitation of your broadband connection.
Compare the user experience of loading a page with a Java applet vs. one with Flash or Silverlight. With the Java page, your browser is dead to the world while the JVM hauls itself up from the disk like a brontosaurus. With Flash or Silverlight, the control pops up quickly and the app loads.
This is one thing that I've always wondered about... why do .NET apps, even running through Mono, load so much faster than Java apps?
Serious question; I'm not really a fan of Java (although I use Eclipse a lot and I've written a few Java articles for IBM's developerWorks site), but I do like using the right tool for the job, whatever that job might be...
s/Linux/Mac OS X/g
Moonlight lags behind Silverlight significantly. They're at an almost-1.0 release, but Silverlight 1.0 was a joke that even MS wouldn't use for anything. 2.0 is what the initial release should have been, and it's what Moonlight needs to be to actually be useful.
Even on Mac OS X, PowerPC machines are left in the dark with only a Silverlight 1.0 implementation available; someone will need to port Moonlight 2.0 there if there's any demand.
The key was "OEM"... you have to sell the OEM versions with hardware. Of course, this hardware can be a mouse or something stupid/cheap like that.
XP's paging kills me at work all the time. I've somehow trained myself to minimize windows when I'm not working in an app... probably years of dealing with the usability failure that is MDI. Almost as soon as I minimize an app, XP seems to swap it out. If I switch back after a while it's paging city. According to the Yahoo! widget I've still got over a gig of RAM free (not used for caching or anything, it's just sitting there empty and useless). Drives me absolutely nuts.
At home, I've got my iTunes library stored on my FreeBSD server (ZFS for the win, even though it's experimental and hangs now and then; I need to throw more RAM in that machine). I mount it via AFS over the wireless network, and performance is OK unless I'm doing something crazy like importing the whole collection.
I tried using SMB/CIFS back when the iTunes library still lived on my old XP box, and it was just too unreliable. At the time (OS X 10.3 time frame, I think) the connection would die fairly often, and (copying one of XP's "greatest" features) the Finder would sit there for a few minutes trying to figure out what happened to the network drive.
No idea how NFS compares, it scares me. :-)
sshfs on FUSE worked pretty well, but incredibly slow. Although it was vaguely amusing to have my entire iTunes library available from my office at playable speeds (although my normal consumer DSL wouldn't handle copying things, really).
IMHO the sane conclusion is to only develop games for "closed" systems and sell them only online through another closed system (like XBox 360 + XBox online store or Wii + WiiWare). :-\ Or write Flash/Silverlight games and make money via advertising.
Or, if you don't want to do it as a career, give it away. Most people appear to prefer to work for money though.
This is often (usually?) filesystem stupidity. Specifically, that in Windows (and DOS before it for that matter), an open file is considered sacrosanct. You can't delete it until everybody closes their file handles. Everybody, no exceptions.
This is very bad when Windows helpfully caches things for you, like DLLs and EXEs, even after you've exitted the program. That's why you often have to reboot after installing something innocuous like Acrobat.
UNIX filesystem semantics are superior here; it's the DOS legacy that keeps Windows from changing its behaviour.