That won't do those without 120 MB of memory to spare much good.
Setting a cap on memory usage isn't a good solution, IMHO -- using well-designed memory handling that proactively frees memory seems to me to be a far better solution than a cap and garbage collection model.
(-1, Uninformed)
Firefox has no global cap on memory. It will dynamically configure it's caches (to some extent) based on the available RAM. It would be a stupid design to leave lots of RAM free, and reload stuff over the net. It also proactively frees memory, in most cases, although it sometimes delays a little, because it knows that you might turn around and reuse all of that memory you just stopped using. The GC is just for JavaScript (required by design) and for DOM nodes which end up being circularly referenced (which is unavoidable).
Finally, 120MB is not a lot of RAM. Notice that the other browsers are using similar amounts of RAM.
Is that with a Profile Guide Optimization build though? Those haven't been done yet for OS X yet AFAIK... Webkit will probably still be faster, because it's a smaller code base, with less features.
There are no pictures of the die, AFAIK, but another guess is that with the quad cores being such big chips, you could make a 'triangular' chip and sneak it into the corners of the wafer... Maybe you'll get a few extra usable chips per wafer... Besides which - they're just working out the bugs before they drop a GPU into that 4th hole. I don't bet, but I'd guess the first GPU/CPU combos from AMD/ATI are not single die (despite all of AMDs comments about 'real' multi-core being single die), but one of these with a GPU attached to the now free bus.
Probably more like people shopping on line in the Christmas period. There are a lot of extra hits from people who normally only surf one or two sites (CNN, Fox), but suddenly start looking all over the place for good deals at Christmas time. Hence the 'drop' (1.4%) in Firefox in the USA, but stable in Europe. Although it's interesting that IE usage remained constant. I wonder if there was a jump in old or wierd browsers like Netscape or WebTV.
The article is mostly trash though. Anyone who thinks that they can measure a 0.18% change in browser usage should not be in the stats business...
And, of course, engineering rounding... 0.5 = 1.0 or 0.0, with some factor of safety. Works particularly well if the glass contains beer. Which direction one needs the factor of safety depends on who's buying... But at least it means you're 0.5 of the way to the next round.
Regards, -Jeremy
Re:Disappointed by Mac Mini as entertainment cente
on
Mac mini, Apple DVR?
·
· Score: 1
Cost - Hasn't stopped the iPod...
Audio - The new PowerMacs and PowerBooks ship with 5.1, so expect it in the next mini. It's an obvious addition.
Video - No experience with a Mac Mini and HDTV, but seems like a bug/missing feature in OS X... If it can be done, then it'll be done.
Remote - Of course the new mini will support the Apple remote.
Software - I suspect that we'll find Kalidascope is really the name of the video software, not the code name for the new Mini.
My predicitons are that there won't be PVR software. Apple are only just starting to experiment with video distribution. If iTMS is the model they want to follow, then I suspect that they will sick to distributing the content themselves, or letting you import content that you 'own'.
My prediction for this release will be a Mini, very similar to the current one, but with 5.1 sound, an integrated dock and the remote. They might up the HDD size... More storage is always better. It will not have a TV tuner. But, I think that they'll also launch an Apple branded HDTV projector - Apple are getting good traction in the laptop market, and a projector will serve them well on both the mobile and home fronts. They have enough experience with displays, but no experience with TV, so I think they'll go the projector route rather than the flat screen TV.
Once upon a time when bittorent was new I'd agree with you.
I wonder how many iTunes installs there are out there, and how hard it would be to build a P2P network ala Bittorrent with them... The technology is fairly stable. Apple are happy using OSS. And with some careful application of DRM they could happily share blocks. And they always have a nice big tracker and seed site?
And Blockbuster, despite being really evil in most of their policies, are not making a big noise about P2P - why? Because they're not losing business... Common sense says that they would be the ones with the most to lose if the market for 2nd, 3rd, etc. viewings goes to downloaded shows. Maybe they've just got their heads in the sand - they missed the internet boat to Netflix - or maybe they've noticed that in the absence of compeling content on TV/in theatres, that they're still raking in the money...
Did you mean Predixis MusicMagic... It analyses your MP3s and then makes mixes based on songs you select. They claim to have 8,000,000 songs in their DB. Look for a patent war in this space soon...
This application by Moodlogic was filed a few days earlier, and seems to cover much of the same ground as the Microsoft patent...
Wish someone was clever enough to point out that three independent applications for the same invention in the space of a few months (and those are only the ones showing up), would indicate that the basic idea was obvious...
I know how it feels to have people neglect your work... But it's a pity that he's throwing in the towel at this point.
Cairo, the main consumer of Xgl/Xegl, is just nearing version 1.0, and will be used by the new releases of Gtk/Gnome. Also, once Gecko 1.8 is out the door the plan is to move the entire Gecko GFX architecture to Cairo. It already uses it for SVG rendering. So some of the big boys are coming to the party!
Hopefully things will pick up and he'll return to it soon...
Maybe it's time that the OSS community began to get 'investors' to patent obvious ideas...
The concept is simple: Start a dynamiclly driven web site (Oops...;-), which lets users add ideas for patents and vote on what they think are the most likely to actually be implemented. Then find donors to fund the EFF to write patent applications, and to submit them.
If the patent succeeds, licence it under an OSS licence, that gives unlimited use unless the site's portfolio is challenged in court. If this happens, all users must come to the rescue of the site.
But the better outcome is that the patent office rejects the patent as 'obvious'. If the average/.'er can think of it then it must be obvious;-)... And then when you get sued by someone, you can take your site and the rejected 'obvious' patent and ask the court to rule how that someone else's patent is not obvious, because you implemented based on what the patent office already declared obvious...
For something a little closer to completion than 2016, check out the Southern African Large Telescope. Scheduled to open in November, and will be the biggest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere.
That might be a joke, but if this becomes available as a treatment for autism and other conditions, it'll also become available on the black market, and we might be looking at a new "date rape" drug... Especially since the primary natural environment is sex/intimacy. Not a happy thought.
We have Xorg, and Cairo/SVG, and maybe GTK or Qt, but not a complete, end-to-end platform
Actually there has been a bunch of movement towards a better graphics architecture. Cairo is mostly driving things at the moment, because it provides a unified API for 2D graphics on X, Max OS X, Win32, and PDF/Printer output. Because of this Mozilla.org are planning on completely replacing all their graphics, not just SVG, in GFX 2.0 with Cairo (except possibly embedded stuff). I suspect that as they get going there will significant cross flow from the Mozilla side into improving Cairo and copying ideas and code from mozilla.org into Cairo.
GTK is also moving to a Cairo base, because it is also a big win for them, and there are some noises about QT...
One of the big features of Cairo is that it makes use of the Xgl/glitz pipeline, which accelerates 2D rendering in must the same way as Avalon. The final architecture still has to be worked out, but there's a good chance that Cairo will run directly on the hardware, with OpenGL/DRI support, and that much of the higher level X stuff in new Xorg releases with use Cairo for their rendering
Cairo is very much designed to be like Avalon on the API level, and to fill a similar role to Avalon and Core Image on the Mac. The only things not being addressed by Cairo are 3D (mostly OpenGL's area) and video.
Yes. But it would not prevent him from selling it to that firm. Or if it is a good idea, in a competitive market, auctioning it to the highest bidder. So the small time inventor can still get what his idea is worth.
It also doesn't stop him from getting someone to make his product under license, and then marketing it himself.
What it really stops is people developing a set of patents and cross licensing between a group of firms so that there is an effective monopoly, which is where the computer industry stands at the moment.
I think that the real solution to patent problems is to forbid licensing of patents. The reasons for the existence of patents is to allow a small company an exclusive right to develop and market a product without having to fear being out competed by a big company, or for a big company which has spent millions on R&D to be allowed to make products without fear of a small company knocking the product off.
Neither of these two requires people to license their patent to a second party, and in fact doing that negates the reason for the government granting them the patent. So I think the solution is to prevent people for licensing a patent, and place the patent into the public domain if they do so. This would not stop them selling the patent, but would prevent them licensing the idea to all their competitors.
This would mean that there would be no way to have patent portfolios which can be used as bargaining chips by big and small companies to push an entire industry around...
Don't forget the The Onion! As a foriegner living in the US, I find that their underlying opinions are often far closer to reality, and express a real insight into American culture... Sad, but at least it's also funny to read...
It worries me that these articles concern themselves so much with matching traditional US PSTN services (like 911 and call centers) and very little with celluar phone services. It's probably because of the lack of a good packet switched cellular network in the US...
Since GSM based phones are already packet switched, and can already do packet switched (IP) data via GPRS and 3G technologies, why aren't we seeing a strong push fot VoIP and cellular integration. An additional advantage is that the turnover of mobile phones is much higher than land lines, so technology adoption is much faster.
Regards,
-Jeremy
Have you tried installing a second compiler for ports... gcc 3.2.1 (which is in current) wont buy you anything with the base system, other than 15% slower compile times. But you can install the gcc32 port, and then use 'make CC=gcc32 CXX=g++32' to build ports such as KDE or Gnome which might benefit from the newer compiler. You might also want to insure that you use the correct -march setting for your machine also, because gcc 3.2.1 will generate worse code than 2.95 if you just leave it to the default arch (vanilla 386).
It's interesting that/. completely ignored the world's second space tourist, and the first African in space. South African.com millionare Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Thawte, and who lists/., Linux and Mozilla among his favourite things, spent 11 days is space, from the 25th of April to the 5th of May.
Guess the integrity of/. is so high that $20 million can't even buy you a story...
Most folks that use a BSD license intentionally use it so that businesses can have the option of using it in proprietary software. If they're comfortable with that, so be it. They're not being ripped off if they intentionally allow this.
As someone who uses a BSD license (and wouldn't use the GPL if my life depended on it), I would say that this is the crux of any licence flame war...
But I will say that most BSD programmers don't care about whether or not their code is used in proprietary software. Mostly, people who code BSD software only care about writing good software - software that they want to use.
But, on the taking over the world lark, BSD software takes a different approach to the GPL. The approach is known as 'raising the bar'. If there is BSD licenced software which is better than your commercial software, then why bother with continued development on your source (especially if your shareholders find out that some geeky schoolkids, who probably don't even speak english;-), are giving away what your highly skilled engineering department is late delivering, and over budget on nerf guns...)
As an approach, raising the bar has already been very successful:
Darwin is based on BSD code, because Apple realised it was cheaper than maintinaing NeXT OS.
Oracle dumped their web server in favour of Apache. So did several other web server developers...
Microsoft used BSD code in developing their TCP/IP stack. Let's wait and see what happens with IPv6...
There are several other places where raising the bar is working too, like OpenGL, where XFree86 is slowly becoming the de facto X/Windows standard. With the slow death of custom graphics hardware, don't be surprised if XFree86 takes over entirely from The Open Group.
I think most of your question has been answered already, but I would add the Debian is probably the closest Linux distribution to FreeBSD, in terms of the way that the Debian people think and manage their OS. There was even talk a few years ago about a Debian release using the FreeBSD kernel and libc...
My comments weren't intended as a slight of Linux, but you just have to read the two kernel hacker interviews posted today to see that patching is still a big part of running Linux. I personally have never run Linux for any significant time, mostly because when I first decided to dump Windows I couldn't figure out which Distribution was right for me. FreeBSD was easy (and had a mirror site on my LAN;-)
As already mentioned, the big difference is that FreeBSD tends towards compiling things yourself. Some people like that, others don't.
In terms of actually running a system, you'll probably not notice that many differences. As you already mentioned, the configuration/startup stuff is different. FreeBSD support's less hardware than Linux, so in a desktop/notebook setup it's sometimes not as good (depends how you choose your hardware). Empirical evidence suggests that FreeBSD is slightly more stable, and tends to have better uniprocessor performance.
But in the long run the whole point of open source software is that you can try it and mix and match to suit your needs... I see a lot of people commenting on BSD stories on/. that they should give FreeBSD a try one day. My advice would be to just do it... Install onto a old harddisk/spare parition and just play around a bit. Install all of the stuff that you'd normally have running (using ports or packages), copy across your home directory from Linux and see what works, what doesn't work and what's different. Load the system up, try crashing things, and see how it behaves...
Slashdot Mirror
(-1, Uninformed)
Firefox has no global cap on memory. It will dynamically configure it's caches (to some extent) based on the available RAM. It would be a stupid design to leave lots of RAM free, and reload stuff over the net. It also proactively frees memory, in most cases, although it sometimes delays a little, because it knows that you might turn around and reuse all of that memory you just stopped using. The GC is just for JavaScript (required by design) and for DOM nodes which end up being circularly referenced (which is unavoidable).
Finally, 120MB is not a lot of RAM. Notice that the other browsers are using similar amounts of RAM.
Regards
-Jeremy
Photosynth was acquired from the University of Washington... The original was in Java and called photo tourism. http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/
You're only using 1 bit in 8! memset(ptr,0xff,1099511627776);
Is that with a Profile Guide Optimization build though? Those haven't been done yet for OS X yet AFAIK... Webkit will probably still be faster, because it's a smaller code base, with less features.
There are no pictures of the die, AFAIK, but another guess is that with the quad cores being such big chips, you could make a 'triangular' chip and sneak it into the corners of the wafer... Maybe you'll get a few extra usable chips per wafer... Besides which - they're just working out the bugs before they drop a GPU into that 4th hole. I don't bet, but I'd guess the first GPU/CPU combos from AMD/ATI are not single die (despite all of AMDs comments about 'real' multi-core being single die), but one of these with a GPU attached to the now free bus.
-Jeremy
Probably more like people shopping on line in the Christmas period. There are a lot of extra hits from people who normally only surf one or two sites (CNN, Fox), but suddenly start looking all over the place for good deals at Christmas time. Hence the 'drop' (1.4%) in Firefox in the USA, but stable in Europe. Although it's interesting that IE usage remained constant. I wonder if there was a jump in old or wierd browsers like Netscape or WebTV.
The article is mostly trash though. Anyone who thinks that they can measure a 0.18% change in browser usage should not be in the stats business...
Regards,
-Jeremy
And, of course, engineering rounding... 0.5 = 1.0 or 0.0, with some factor of safety. Works particularly well if the glass contains beer. Which direction one needs the factor of safety depends on who's buying... But at least it means you're 0.5 of the way to the next round.
Regards,
-Jeremy
Cost - Hasn't stopped the iPod...
Audio - The new PowerMacs and PowerBooks ship with 5.1, so expect it in the next mini. It's an obvious addition.
Video - No experience with a Mac Mini and HDTV, but seems like a bug/missing feature in OS X... If it can be done, then it'll be done.
Remote - Of course the new mini will support the Apple remote.
Software - I suspect that we'll find Kalidascope is really the name of the video software, not the code name for the new Mini.
My predicitons are that there won't be PVR software. Apple are only just starting to experiment with video distribution. If iTMS is the model they want to follow, then I suspect that they will sick to distributing the content themselves, or letting you import content that you 'own'.
My prediction for this release will be a Mini, very similar to the current one, but with 5.1 sound, an integrated dock and the remote. They might up the HDD size... More storage is always better. It will not have a TV tuner. But, I think that they'll also launch an Apple branded HDTV projector - Apple are getting good traction in the laptop market, and a projector will serve them well on both the mobile and home fronts. They have enough experience with displays, but no experience with TV, so I think they'll go the projector route rather than the flat screen TV.
Regards,
-Jeremy
Once upon a time when bittorent was new I'd agree with you.
I wonder how many iTunes installs there are out there, and how hard it would be to build a P2P network ala Bittorrent with them... The technology is fairly stable. Apple are happy using OSS. And with some careful application of DRM they could happily share blocks. And they always have a nice big tracker and seed site?
Regards,
-Jeremy
And Blockbuster, despite being really evil in most of their policies, are not making a big noise about P2P - why? Because they're not losing business... Common sense says that they would be the ones with the most to lose if the market for 2nd, 3rd, etc. viewings goes to downloaded shows. Maybe they've just got their heads in the sand - they missed the internet boat to Netflix - or maybe they've noticed that in the absence of compeling content on TV/in theatres, that they're still raking in the money...
Regards,
-Jeremy
Did you mean Predixis MusicMagic... It analyses your MP3s and then makes mixes based on songs you select. They claim to have 8,000,000 songs in their DB. Look for a patent war in this space soon...
Regards
-Jeremy
This application by Moodlogic was filed a few days earlier, and seems to cover much of the same ground as the Microsoft patent...
Wish someone was clever enough to point out that three independent applications for the same invention in the space of a few months (and those are only the ones showing up), would indicate that the basic idea was obvious...
Regards,
-Jeremy
I know how it feels to have people neglect your work... But it's a pity that he's throwing in the towel at this point.
Cairo, the main consumer of Xgl/Xegl, is just nearing version 1.0, and will be used by the new releases of Gtk/Gnome. Also, once Gecko 1.8 is out the door the plan is to move the entire Gecko GFX architecture to Cairo. It already uses it for SVG rendering. So some of the big boys are coming to the party!
Hopefully things will pick up and he'll return to it soon...
Regards,
-Jeremy
Maybe it's time that the OSS community began to get 'investors' to patent obvious ideas...
The concept is simple: Start a dynamiclly driven web site (Oops... ;-), which lets users add ideas for patents and vote on what they think are the most likely to actually be implemented. Then find donors to fund the EFF to write patent applications, and to submit them.
If the patent succeeds, licence it under an OSS licence, that gives unlimited use unless the site's portfolio is challenged in court. If this happens, all users must come to the rescue of the site.
But the better outcome is that the patent office rejects the patent as 'obvious'. If the average /.'er can think of it then it must be obvious ;-)... And then when you get sued by someone, you can take your site and the rejected 'obvious' patent and ask the court to rule how that someone else's patent is not obvious, because you implemented based on what the patent office already declared obvious...
Regards,
-Jeremy
For something a little closer to completion than 2016, check out the Southern African Large Telescope. Scheduled to open in November, and will be the biggest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere.
Regards,
-Jeremy
That might be a joke, but if this becomes available as a treatment for autism and other conditions, it'll also become available on the black market, and we might be looking at a new "date rape" drug... Especially since the primary natural environment is sex/intimacy. Not a happy thought.
Regards,
-Jeremy
We have Xorg, and Cairo/SVG, and maybe GTK or Qt, but not a complete, end-to-end platform
Actually there has been a bunch of movement towards a better graphics architecture. Cairo is mostly driving things at the moment, because it provides a unified API for 2D graphics on X, Max OS X, Win32, and PDF/Printer output. Because of this Mozilla.org are planning on completely replacing all their graphics, not just SVG, in GFX 2.0 with Cairo (except possibly embedded stuff). I suspect that as they get going there will significant cross flow from the Mozilla side into improving Cairo and copying ideas and code from mozilla.org into Cairo.
GTK is also moving to a Cairo base, because it is also a big win for them, and there are some noises about QT...
One of the big features of Cairo is that it makes use of the Xgl/glitz pipeline, which accelerates 2D rendering in must the same way as Avalon. The final architecture still has to be worked out, but there's a good chance that Cairo will run directly on the hardware, with OpenGL/DRI support, and that much of the higher level X stuff in new Xorg releases with use Cairo for their rendering
Cairo is very much designed to be like Avalon on the API level, and to fill a similar role to Avalon and Core Image on the Mac. The only things not being addressed by Cairo are 3D (mostly OpenGL's area) and video.
Regards,
-Jeremy
Yes. But it would not prevent him from selling it to that firm. Or if it is a good idea, in a competitive market, auctioning it to the highest bidder. So the small time inventor can still get what his idea is worth.
It also doesn't stop him from getting someone to make his product under license, and then marketing it himself.
What it really stops is people developing a set of patents and cross licensing between a group of firms so that there is an effective monopoly, which is where the computer industry stands at the moment.
Regards,
-Jeremy
Hi,
I think that the real solution to patent problems is to forbid licensing of patents. The reasons for the existence of patents is to allow a small company an exclusive right to develop and market a product without having to fear being out competed by a big company, or for a big company which has spent millions on R&D to be allowed to make products without fear of a small company knocking the product off.
Neither of these two requires people to license their patent to a second party, and in fact doing that negates the reason for the government granting them the patent. So I think the solution is to prevent people for licensing a patent, and place the patent into the public domain if they do so. This would not stop them selling the patent, but would prevent them licensing the idea to all their competitors.
This would mean that there would be no way to have patent portfolios which can be used as bargaining chips by big and small companies to push an entire industry around...
Regards
-Jeremy
Don't forget the The Onion! As a foriegner living in the US, I find that their underlying opinions are often far closer to reality, and express a real insight into American culture... Sad, but at least it's also funny to read...
Regards,
-Jeremy
It worries me that these articles concern themselves so much with matching traditional US PSTN services (like 911 and call centers) and very little with celluar phone services. It's probably because of the lack of a good packet switched cellular network in the US... Since GSM based phones are already packet switched, and can already do packet switched (IP) data via GPRS and 3G technologies, why aren't we seeing a strong push fot VoIP and cellular integration. An additional advantage is that the turnover of mobile phones is much higher than land lines, so technology adoption is much faster. Regards, -Jeremy
Have you tried installing a second compiler for ports... gcc 3.2.1 (which is in current) wont buy you anything with the base system, other than 15% slower compile times. But you can install the gcc32 port, and then use 'make CC=gcc32 CXX=g++32' to build ports such as KDE or Gnome which might benefit from the newer compiler. You might also want to insure that you use the correct -march setting for your machine also, because gcc 3.2.1 will generate worse code than 2.95 if you just leave it to the default arch (vanilla 386).
Regards,
-Jeremy
It's interesting that /. completely ignored the world's second space tourist, and the first African in space. South African .com millionare Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Thawte, and who lists /., Linux and Mozilla among his favourite things, spent 11 days is space, from the 25th of April to the 5th of May.
Guess the integrity of /. is so high that $20 million can't even buy you a story...
Regards,
-Jeremy
Most folks that use a BSD license intentionally use it so that businesses can have the option of using it in proprietary software. If they're comfortable with that, so be it. They're not being ripped off if they intentionally allow this.
As someone who uses a BSD license (and wouldn't use the GPL if my life depended on it), I would say that this is the crux of any licence flame war...
But I will say that most BSD programmers don't care about whether or not their code is used in proprietary software. Mostly, people who code BSD software only care about writing good software - software that they want to use.
But, on the taking over the world lark, BSD software takes a different approach to the GPL. The approach is known as 'raising the bar'. If there is BSD licenced software which is better than your commercial software, then why bother with continued development on your source (especially if your shareholders find out that some geeky schoolkids, who probably don't even speak english ;-), are giving away what your highly skilled engineering department is late delivering, and over budget on nerf guns...)
As an approach, raising the bar has already been very successful:
There are several other places where raising the bar is working too, like OpenGL, where XFree86 is slowly becoming the de facto X/Windows standard. With the slow death of custom graphics hardware, don't be surprised if XFree86 takes over entirely from The Open Group.
Regards,
-Jeremy
I think most of your question has been answered already, but I would add the Debian is probably the closest Linux distribution to FreeBSD, in terms of the way that the Debian people think and manage their OS. There was even talk a few years ago about a Debian release using the FreeBSD kernel and libc...
My comments weren't intended as a slight of Linux, but you just have to read the two kernel hacker interviews posted today to see that patching is still a big part of running Linux. I personally have never run Linux for any significant time, mostly because when I first decided to dump Windows I couldn't figure out which Distribution was right for me. FreeBSD was easy (and had a mirror site on my LAN ;-)
As already mentioned, the big difference is that FreeBSD tends towards compiling things yourself. Some people like that, others don't.
In terms of actually running a system, you'll probably not notice that many differences. As you already mentioned, the configuration/startup stuff is different. FreeBSD support's less hardware than Linux, so in a desktop/notebook setup it's sometimes not as good (depends how you choose your hardware). Empirical evidence suggests that FreeBSD is slightly more stable, and tends to have better uniprocessor performance.
But in the long run the whole point of open source software is that you can try it and mix and match to suit your needs... I see a lot of people commenting on BSD stories on /. that they should give FreeBSD a try one day. My advice would be to just do it... Install onto a old harddisk/spare parition and just play around a bit. Install all of the stuff that you'd normally have running (using ports or packages), copy across your home directory from Linux and see what works, what doesn't work and what's different. Load the system up, try crashing things, and see how it behaves...
Regards
-Jeremy