Yes. The pages loaded by the tool (mostly different language versions of a number of mediawiki-based sites' home pages) are not representative of a broad enough cross section of people's browsing habits.
I think that's key though. If you start adding Flash heavy sites or whatever, you have to worry about things like plugins mismanaging memory. While that's a bad thing, it's not the fault of the browser, so it's pointless to let that influence the tests.
You could try browsing YouTube without the Flash plugin installed, but that would be an even less representative test.
The sex wasn't the problem with Spitzer. If there was no money involved it would've been news for a while but after that the only people who cared would be Republicans looking for an excuse to hate him.
Oh, I understand the cost of living differences completely. I just got a kick out of how the poster made it sound like it was an amazing amount of money that would impress everyone.
I personally will NOT touch a IT job for less than $20.00 an hour here in the midwest, my happy target is $26.00. Yes, I am that good and that experienced.
Here in Jersey, we call that range of wages entry level.
But I lost that argument because it sucked, didn't support much css or work correctly with most websites in existence.
It certainly worked with most websites. The few it didn't were either detecting it as Netscape 4 and sending it the wrong HTML, or were coded to use IE only features instead of the standards. People just do less of those things today.
Take a look at Joel's assessment of mozilla in 2003 when he first switched to firefox.
He's ranting about Firefox having a ton of features that had been in Mozilla for years at that point. The only new things Joel listed was that FireFox copied IE's Alt-D keyboard shortcut, and they changed the default setting for the Ctrl-Enter option to match his preference.
I think the NT authentication was relatively new then, but (a) it was in Mozilla first and (b) that's a really damn obscure feature, and one that I wouldn't expect non-MS products to support, so there's a limit to the validity of him complaining there.
I don't think it's fair to count pre-beta software. I remember the quality of Mozilla 0.9 and I distinctly remember choosing Netscape 4 over it.
Mozilla 0.9 was far better than pre-beta. That's when it became a pleasure to use. The UI had just about worked the kinks out by then, and that's around when tabs came in.
Mozilla 0.6 was the release Netscape 6 was based off of. Even then, it was a tossup whether it was better or worse than Netscape 4. It crashed less than Netscape and usually rendered a lot better (except for sites that sent it NS4 web pages), but the UI was very rough.
Cablevision is 15 mbps down. No idea on the up, fast enough that I haven't cared to check.
And for $10-$15 more a month (depending on what other services you get from them) they'll bump it up to 30 mbps and unblock the server ports.
Oddly, FIOS's starting package around here is 10 mbps down for the same price Cablevision has always charged for 15. And the FIOS price goes up fast as you go to the higher tiers.
I think you have IM and SMS the wrong way round in that list, I (and many people I know) write out and even punctuate SMS messages, but will resort to acronyms in IM.
I think you're the odd ones there. Do you and your friends happen to have phones with qwerty keyboards? Abbrievations on IM are due to lazy. But using them over SMS is due to typing text on a number pad sucking majorly.
If they actually implemented the standards well, they wouldn't have to worry about specific tests, they would just do well on them by default.
Have you ever tried reading the HTML/CSS specs? They're huge and often vaguely worded. There were often sections that just weren't intuitive, and the only real approach to implementing them was to just figure out what other browser did and copy it. The specs were created by people who have no intention of implementing them themselves, and it really shows.
The first is not a problem unless coercion is involed (monopolies that don't represent a win for the customers don't stay monopolies).
That sort of thing takes decades to work out on its own. If it takes most of your working career for your industry to get back into decent shape, you've been hurt rather badly.
As for the second, we have a civil court system. If these pollutants clearly demonstrate harm, why shouldn't the affected seek relief?
Because "You caused me to develop cancer, now give me money" or "You caused my newborn to become retarded, give me money" aren't trades very many people are happy with. Not to mention the huge struggle and legal bills required to get to that point. Someone shouldn't have to spend their life savings and years of time fighting a company just so that they don't get cancer - or more likely, to get money to treat the cancer they developed in the process.
The sort that don't like having their machine rooted by their binary blob video driver
Is that supposed to mean its ok if your machine get rooted due to an open source video driver?
or maybe the sort that don't run Linux
If they're complaining about Nvidia's Linux drivers not working on their system, then they're rather stupid, don't you think?
There was once a time when people complained about lack of hardware documentation, please don't lose sight of Freedom Zero.
Publicly available hardware documentation is a good thing to have, however, it has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the drivers provided by Nvidia.
NPR is on FM by me (NYC area), so I wasn't counting them.
And Bill O'Reilly is on TV and AM radio, and I think it's fair to say he's equally biased on both mediums.
I'm sure he is equally biased on both. But Fox News as a whole almost does look fair and balanced compared to the stations O'Reilly's radio shows are aired on.
AM Radio as a whole has devolved into extreme right wing talk broken up Traffic & Weather updates and sports broadcasts. TV is dominated by entertainment oriented programming with the more politically influenced stuff pretty far down the list.
Wait, I thought it was nVidia that has the weak drivers for graphics cards, not ATI. Or is that just for Linux?
Nvidia's primary advantage is their drivers. They've always been leaps and bounds above ATI's. They go back and forth on who has the better hardware. When ATI has the advantage in raw power, it's often canceled by the lower quality of the drivers.
Nvidia's Linux drivers are generally excellent, usually offering performance similar to the Windows drivers. There's a little variance from model to model and release to release, but its close and the advantage can swing either way. However, there's a very small but rather vocal minority of users that have conflicts between Nvidia's drivers and something else in their system who like to complain a lot about them.
Um, what? AMD's processors are terrible these days. There's a reason they're absolutely bleeding money: they're being killed in all segments of the processor market by Intel.
They're not terrible, they're just not quite as good as Intel's at the moment.
Terrible is things like Via processors or Transmeta or the other junk you normally wouldn't even consider.
People tend to get at least 10 years out of their TVs, so 5 years from now is when you can expect the majority of primary TVs to be HD. Probably closer to 10 years for the trickle down to secondary TVs.
Have you ever tried implementing something described in an RFC ?
When you get to the should / should not stuff, it comes down to in most cases you really want to listen to it, but there tend to be specific cases (say, embedded devices) where it really doesn't make sense to follow the normal behavior. Generally, if you run into one of those cases, it tends to be obvious that deviating from the spec is the right thing to do.
The optional and recommended stuff tends to be things that really depend on the specific product and shouldn't be forced.
Making things more strict would be a bad thing and make people break the standards more. The current setup acknowledges that different implementations have different needs and does a good job of accommodating.
How are they going to stop it? It's a exploting a buffer overrun in the Zelda save game loading code. What are they going to do, issue a firmware update that prevents the Wii from storing Zelda saves?
We're talking about the internal design of the chip here, not the externally visible part.
Over the past 15 years or so CISC & RISC have come to refer more to design principles than to instruction sets. Modern processors don't look much like they did when people started using the terms RISC and CISC, making the original meanings not very useful today.
Modern x86 is a hybrid of CISC and RISC - the more complex instructions are translated into RISC like microcode. Sometimes there are bugs in this microcode. On powerup, the microcode is copied out of ROM and into a small amount of onboard RAM, which can be replaced by software. Obviously your load, jump, add type instructions don't go through the microcode, but instructions like divide, square root, or load page table most likely do.
The other big thing that CPU drivers do is handle advanced power management features. Modern processors are capable of scaling down the processor speed to save power and reduce heat when the processor is mostly idle. The CPU drivers handle this.
So, anyway, the drivers are completely optional. They're just a means of fixing bugs and providing support for advanced functionality.
It was that last part that made Sun kill it. They couldn't stand Java running better on Windows than it did on Solaris. (Never mind the fact that Sun's Java to this day runs better on Windows than any other platform.)
I'm going to disagree on Java running better on Windows than Solaris. Did you ever try the Java port of WordPerfect? Using then modern Macs and PCs, calling it unusably slow would be a compliment. You were watching the GUI components redraw individually.
If you ran it on a several year old low end Sun workstation it was a pleasure to use, indistinguishable performance wise from a native app.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. The pages loaded by the tool (mostly different language versions of a number of mediawiki-based sites' home pages) are not representative of a broad enough cross section of people's browsing habits.
I think that's key though. If you start adding Flash heavy sites or whatever, you have to worry about things like plugins mismanaging memory. While that's a bad thing, it's not the fault of the browser, so it's pointless to let that influence the tests.
You could try browsing YouTube without the Flash plugin installed, but that would be an even less representative test.
The sex wasn't the problem with Spitzer. If there was no money involved it would've been news for a while but after that the only people who cared would be Republicans looking for an excuse to hate him.
In the last 30 years of PC/Console/Arcade gaming, we've invented more than one genre of game.
Yes, but the vast majority of them don't work well with a keyboard and mouse setup, so Slashdot users don't like to admit they exist.
Metroid Prime was the only FPS I've EVER played on console which had that lame auto-lock mechanic. Terrible move IMO, and it make the game a joke.
That's because Metroid Prime is an adventure game, not an FPS. It's more like a Zelda game with a gun instead of a sword than it is to an FPS.
If they had done FPS controls on the GameCube, it would've been a really shitty Metroid game.
Oh, I understand the cost of living differences completely. I just got a kick out of how the poster made it sound like it was an amazing amount of money that would impress everyone.
Probably because your post gave the impression that you were surprised that the current versions scored terribly.
I personally will NOT touch a IT job for less than $20.00 an hour here in the midwest, my happy target is $26.00. Yes, I am that good and that experienced.
Here in Jersey, we call that range of wages entry level.
But I lost that argument because it sucked, didn't support much css or work correctly with most websites in existence.
It certainly worked with most websites. The few it didn't were either detecting it as Netscape 4 and sending it the wrong HTML, or were coded to use IE only features instead of the standards. People just do less of those things today.
Take a look at Joel's assessment of mozilla in 2003 when he first switched to firefox.
He's ranting about Firefox having a ton of features that had been in Mozilla for years at that point. The only new things Joel listed was that FireFox copied IE's Alt-D keyboard shortcut, and they changed the default setting for the Ctrl-Enter option to match his preference.
I think the NT authentication was relatively new then, but (a) it was in Mozilla first and (b) that's a really damn obscure feature, and one that I wouldn't expect non-MS products to support, so there's a limit to the validity of him complaining there.
I don't think it's fair to count pre-beta software. I remember the quality of Mozilla 0.9 and I distinctly remember choosing Netscape 4 over it.
Mozilla 0.9 was far better than pre-beta. That's when it became a pleasure to use. The UI had just about worked the kinks out by then, and that's around when tabs came in.
Mozilla 0.6 was the release Netscape 6 was based off of. Even then, it was a tossup whether it was better or worse than Netscape 4. It crashed less than Netscape and usually rendered a lot better (except for sites that sent it NS4 web pages), but the UI was very rough.
Any browsers that came out before the Acid3 test was released are doing absolutely dismally.
That's exactly the point of the Acid tests. They're designed to motivate browser developers by pointing out a lot of flaws in current implementations.
Cablevision is 15 mbps down. No idea on the up, fast enough that I haven't cared to check.
And for $10-$15 more a month (depending on what other services you get from them) they'll bump it up to 30 mbps and unblock the server ports.
Oddly, FIOS's starting package around here is 10 mbps down for the same price Cablevision has always charged for 15. And the FIOS price goes up fast as you go to the higher tiers.
I think you have IM and SMS the wrong way round in that list, I (and many people I know) write out and even punctuate SMS messages, but will resort to acronyms in IM.
I think you're the odd ones there. Do you and your friends happen to have phones with qwerty keyboards? Abbrievations on IM are due to lazy. But using them over SMS is due to typing text on a number pad sucking majorly.
If they actually implemented the standards well, they wouldn't have to worry about specific tests, they would just do well on them by default.
Have you ever tried reading the HTML/CSS specs? They're huge and often vaguely worded. There were often sections that just weren't intuitive, and the only real approach to implementing them was to just figure out what other browser did and copy it. The specs were created by people who have no intention of implementing them themselves, and it really shows.
The first is not a problem unless coercion is involed (monopolies that don't represent a win for the customers don't stay monopolies).
That sort of thing takes decades to work out on its own. If it takes most of your working career for your industry to get back into decent shape, you've been hurt rather badly.
As for the second, we have a civil court system. If these pollutants clearly demonstrate harm, why shouldn't the affected seek relief?
Because "You caused me to develop cancer, now give me money" or "You caused my newborn to become retarded, give me money" aren't trades very many people are happy with. Not to mention the huge struggle and legal bills required to get to that point. Someone shouldn't have to spend their life savings and years of time fighting a company just so that they don't get cancer - or more likely, to get money to treat the cancer they developed in the process.
The sort that don't like having their machine rooted by their binary blob video driver
Is that supposed to mean its ok if your machine get rooted due to an open source video driver?
or maybe the sort that don't run Linux
If they're complaining about Nvidia's Linux drivers not working on their system, then they're rather stupid, don't you think?
There was once a time when people complained about lack of hardware documentation, please don't lose sight of Freedom Zero.
Publicly available hardware documentation is a good thing to have, however, it has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the drivers provided by Nvidia.
NPR is on AM radio do you think that is biased?
NPR is on FM by me (NYC area), so I wasn't counting them.
And Bill O'Reilly is on TV and AM radio, and I think it's fair to say he's equally biased on both mediums.
I'm sure he is equally biased on both. But Fox News as a whole almost does look fair and balanced compared to the stations O'Reilly's radio shows are aired on.
AM Radio as a whole has devolved into extreme right wing talk broken up Traffic & Weather updates and sports broadcasts. TV is dominated by entertainment oriented programming with the more politically influenced stuff pretty far down the list.
Wait, I thought it was nVidia that has the weak drivers for graphics cards, not ATI. Or is that just for Linux?
Nvidia's primary advantage is their drivers. They've always been leaps and bounds above ATI's. They go back and forth on who has the better hardware. When ATI has the advantage in raw power, it's often canceled by the lower quality of the drivers.
Nvidia's Linux drivers are generally excellent, usually offering performance similar to the Windows drivers. There's a little variance from model to model and release to release, but its close and the advantage can swing either way. However, there's a very small but rather vocal minority of users that have conflicts between Nvidia's drivers and something else in their system who like to complain a lot about them.
Um, what? AMD's processors are terrible these days. There's a reason they're absolutely bleeding money: they're being killed in all segments of the processor market by Intel.
They're not terrible, they're just not quite as good as Intel's at the moment.
Terrible is things like Via processors or Transmeta or the other junk you normally wouldn't even consider.
People tend to get at least 10 years out of their TVs, so 5 years from now is when you can expect the majority of primary TVs to be HD. Probably closer to 10 years for the trickle down to secondary TVs.
TV is more biased than any other source
Try listening to AM radio some time.
Have you ever tried implementing something described in an RFC ?
When you get to the should / should not stuff, it comes down to in most cases you really want to listen to it, but there tend to be specific cases (say, embedded devices) where it really doesn't make sense to follow the normal behavior. Generally, if you run into one of those cases, it tends to be obvious that deviating from the spec is the right thing to do.
The optional and recommended stuff tends to be things that really depend on the specific product and shouldn't be forced.
Making things more strict would be a bad thing and make people break the standards more. The current setup acknowledges that different implementations have different needs and does a good job of accommodating.
How are they going to stop it? It's a exploting a buffer overrun in the Zelda save game loading code. What are they going to do, issue a firmware update that prevents the Wii from storing Zelda saves?
We're talking about the internal design of the chip here, not the externally visible part.
Over the past 15 years or so CISC & RISC have come to refer more to design principles than to instruction sets. Modern processors don't look much like they did when people started using the terms RISC and CISC, making the original meanings not very useful today.
Modern x86 is a hybrid of CISC and RISC - the more complex instructions are translated into RISC like microcode. Sometimes there are bugs in this microcode. On powerup, the microcode is copied out of ROM and into a small amount of onboard RAM, which can be replaced by software. Obviously your load, jump, add type instructions don't go through the microcode, but instructions like divide, square root, or load page table most likely do.
The other big thing that CPU drivers do is handle advanced power management features. Modern processors are capable of scaling down the processor speed to save power and reduce heat when the processor is mostly idle. The CPU drivers handle this.
So, anyway, the drivers are completely optional. They're just a means of fixing bugs and providing support for advanced functionality.
It was that last part that made Sun kill it. They couldn't stand Java running better on Windows than it did on Solaris. (Never mind the fact that Sun's Java to this day runs better on Windows than any other platform.)
I'm going to disagree on Java running better on Windows than Solaris. Did you ever try the Java port of WordPerfect? Using then modern Macs and PCs, calling it unusably slow would be a compliment. You were watching the GUI components redraw individually.
If you ran it on a several year old low end Sun workstation it was a pleasure to use, indistinguishable performance wise from a native app.