I'm guessing there's some reason that you bring this up? I went through that comparison during the last H264 vs Theora story, and came to the same conclusion that the guy you're replying to did: the H264 version is way better. Right down to the compression artifacts around the text. (I also pointed out some time marks where artifacts were visible in other cases too, and I didn't really notice anything that bad during the H264 video.)
However, I did my comparison with VLC. Is there something about VLC that makes it an unfair vehicle for comparison? What would you suggest as software for Windows for viewing Theora at ideal quality?
But their purpose is to hold the contents of computer memory, which is innately based around the power of two.
Personally, I would say that the contents of computer memory is much more innately based around "multiples of 4" than "powers of 2." After all, what's in memory is dependent on what data the programs needs to store, which has nearly nothing to do with how that memory is actually addressed.
Frankly, I really don't know why some people are fighting so hard for base-10 units on hard drive storage.
Because using prefixes which have referred to powers of 10 for hundreds of years for something else is stupid, and as time goes by it gets stupider (as we get to larger magnitudes where the difference gets larger).
Memory is still sold in base-2 units, and I believe that flash based storage in thumb drives and digital cameras is still measured and marketed in base-2
Those things should also change. (By "change" I mean "either use GB to refer to base-10 units or GiB to refer to base-2 units.")
The correct solution to this problem is for the whole industry to take a step back and universally agree to use the base-2 unit/prefix combos.
That is fine. I would be all for that. Personally, I don't think either base-10 or base-2 units make natively more sense; each is convenient for different kinds of tasks, so I don't have a strong opinion on whether we should use the kilo-/mega-/giga- prefixes and base-10, or kibi-/mibi-/gibi- prefixes and base-2. The only strong opinion I have is that we should not be using the kilo-/mega-/giga- prefixes with base-2.
Deciding in 2000 that everything published over the last few decades now contains the wrong definition is not the answer.
I'd argue that fixing a problem late is better than not fixing it at all or pretending it's not a problem.
Presuming we stick with computers that naturally work in binary during this time, if we continue using kilo- etc. for base-2 prefixes now then this argument will still be continuing in 100 years. If we fix things now and start using the SI prefixes for base-10 and use the kibi- etc. prefixes for base-2, we'll have a few years of dispute now, a couple decades of people looking at older materials that use different units, and then agreement for the most part for the rest of that 100 years.
Not to mention the switch in subject from "if one" to "you."
But your reply isn't nearly inflammatory enough. Let me suggest an alternate wording: If you are too stupid to know the difference between "your" and "you're" then you should not be touching English.
Other posters have pointed out that bits and bytes are not SI units, but they've not pointed out that we use 1024 because it's more useful.
Sort of. And that's fine: but then invent your own prefixes instead of warping the meaning of existing ones. (Oh wait, some people did that, except most people refuse to use them for some stupid reason.)
Storage is always indexed by some binary quantity, so you need to do base-2 logarithms
Always? Is my 250 or 500 GB hard drives a power of 2? Would it be a power of 2 for either definition of "giga"? How 'bout a 1.44 "MB" floppy. There's a fun one.
Oh, I did try, and was (slightly) disappointed to see that. I thought that might be a big reason to do that.
However, Arker didn't make any statement regarding SoftMaker Office's compatibility with MS Office formats, just that "I have yet to notice any problems importing MS files to OO so that's hard to see." I was merely pointing out an area where there is tons of room for another piece of software to step up where OO.org fails.
Clearly you haven't tried to open a PPTX file in Impress; that import filter is barely alpha quality at best.
And if you want to see justification for this statement, I just put together a small page to annotate some screenshots I've been collecting over the last couple OpenOffice releases that compare what a couple slides should look like vs what they actually do look like in Impress.
It's the exact same thing Microsoft did on Windows.
No it's not... it's not even close, really. You give one of the reasons yourself -- the monopoly thing. But beyond that, MS never prevented 3rd party browsers from running on the system. Even at the height of IE dominance (both in terms of market share and even, IMO for a short time, quality), it was never hard to run other browsers on Windows.
This is entirely different from the iPhone situation, where Apple doesn't just get to decide what you see by default, but can entirely prevent you (without jailbreaking) from running a particular program for no technical reason whatsoever.
Sorry to burst your joke, but in 2000, CPUs had only just hit 1 GHz.
It's not so inaccurate... according to Wikipedia, November 2000 saw the release of 1.5 GHz CPUs, and 2 GHz P4s were out in August 2001. Even 3 GHz was out in Aug
How much for a hard drive that's as fast as that $125 SSD?... Storage capacity is irrelevant in many situations.
I don't think that the parent would dispute that SSDs have a lot of benefits over a magnetic HDD, including speed. But like capacity, speed is also irrelevant in many situations.
However, how fast of a hard drive do I need to watch a movie or listen to music? Less dramatically, how 'bout playing a video game? (HDDs would speed up loading times, but likely not the rest of the game.)
There's a lot of stuff that you don't need speed for, and space is more important. If someone has 500 GB of data, it doesn't matter how fast SSDs are if 500 GB of SSDs isn't affordable -- they'll have to decide either to lose data (unlikely) or have a magnetic HDDs.
What does all this mean? I think a lot of computers (at least many desktops) in a couple years will have both an SSD and magnetic HDD to play to their respective strengths. But it'll be a few years (I'd guess at least 5) before most desktops have only SSDs.
Ah, but when 200 GB of storage is $20, no hard drive will ever be able to be that cheap. There is a fixed minimum cost for building a hard drive. Spindle, motor, etc. It's about $70.
This page would like a word with you. (Hopefully that link works; if not, it's a page of seven drives from WD, Seagate, and Hitachi for 160 GB drives for $50. The cheapest is $37.99.)
SSDs could double in price/GB ratios every year for those 5 years and today's magnetic drives would still be about the same as what you'd got. 32-40 GB for $100ish now would mean 1-1.2TB for $100ish in 5 years with that doubling: but that's about what you can get magnetic drives for now. (Newegg has three or four 1 TB drives for $90, more than 1/4 less than the 40 GB SSD drive mentioned in this article.)
If hard drives double even once in that time, they'll still have a substantial price/size ratio lead.
Now, there's some point where drives become "big enough"; my disk space growth has slowed a bit from what it was a few years ago; I've basically only roughly doubled my use over the last 5 years. Combine that with the speed benefits of SSD and they'll definitely be much more mainstream in that time. 90% chance I'll have basically all my non-music, non-video, non-photo data stored on SSD in 5 years. 99% chance I'll have all my non-music, non-video, non-photo, non-large-video-game data stored on an SSD at that point.
But will I still have magnetic drives in my system in 5 years? 90% says yes to that too.
Chrome being "broken" in the sense it doesn't agree with the other apps should be obvious the first time you see it and see it feels that the titlebar is useless.
Being right-handed has nothing to do with it. There is no handedness in a mouse-driven GUI; you operate everything with your only hand, the mouse pointer. Regardless of whether you're right- or left-handed. Your mouse pointer does not stay on the right side of the screen, nor is it easier to leave it there.
Just be careful if you carry this too far; keep at least in the back of your mind that you may not be able to predict the contexts in which your program will be used. It might be used on a touch screen. I use a convertible tablet for taking notes in class; having the scroll bar on the right means that my hand (I'm a leftie) covers the screen when I'm trying to scroll, and I very much appreciate programs that let you flip the scroll bars to the left side. (All the Office 2007 programs do I think; OneNote definitely does. Firefox definitely does.)
thats mostly a firefox/IE(/safari?) issue no? chrome separates each tab, and plugin, as its own task, iirc.
It's entirely possible that it would work better in Chome (I refuse to/don't use Chrome for a couple reasons), but that's sorta the point... it is possible to write an efficient web browser, but that doesn't mean most of them are.
(BTW, there exist APIs that behave similarly on other platforms, including Windows; MS just doesn't provide any.)
And I might even be wrong on that point; a number of other posts mention Microsoft APIs (both in the Windows API and.Net) that are in the same general area. I'm not familiar with any of them, so can't compare to/contrast with GCD or other seemingly similar frameworks like Cilk.
using a mmorpg as an example vs a browser may be a bad example, as a browser have to download all data from the web, while the mmorpg have all data stored locally, and only changes in the scene is transmitted.
Data transfer is one thing; loading a page in one tab causing Pandora (in another tab) to stop playing for a few seconds while that page loads is another.
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Let me guess, you're viewing the videos with VLC?
I'm guessing there's some reason that you bring this up? I went through that comparison during the last H264 vs Theora story, and came to the same conclusion that the guy you're replying to did: the H264 version is way better. Right down to the compression artifacts around the text. (I also pointed out some time marks where artifacts were visible in other cases too, and I didn't really notice anything that bad during the H264 video.)
However, I did my comparison with VLC. Is there something about VLC that makes it an unfair vehicle for comparison? What would you suggest as software for Windows for viewing Theora at ideal quality?
But their purpose is to hold the contents of computer memory, which is innately based around the power of two.
Personally, I would say that the contents of computer memory is much more innately based around "multiples of 4" than "powers of 2." After all, what's in memory is dependent on what data the programs needs to store, which has nearly nothing to do with how that memory is actually addressed.
Frankly, I really don't know why some people are fighting so hard for base-10 units on hard drive storage.
Because using prefixes which have referred to powers of 10 for hundreds of years for something else is stupid, and as time goes by it gets stupider (as we get to larger magnitudes where the difference gets larger).
Memory is still sold in base-2 units, and I believe that flash based storage in thumb drives and digital cameras is still measured and marketed in base-2
Those things should also change. (By "change" I mean "either use GB to refer to base-10 units or GiB to refer to base-2 units.")
The correct solution to this problem is for the whole industry to take a step back and universally agree to use the base-2 unit/prefix combos.
That is fine. I would be all for that. Personally, I don't think either base-10 or base-2 units make natively more sense; each is convenient for different kinds of tasks, so I don't have a strong opinion on whether we should use the kilo-/mega-/giga- prefixes and base-10, or kibi-/mibi-/gibi- prefixes and base-2. The only strong opinion I have is that we should not be using the kilo-/mega-/giga- prefixes with base-2.
Deciding in 2000 that everything published over the last few decades now contains the wrong definition is not the answer.
I'd argue that fixing a problem late is better than not fixing it at all or pretending it's not a problem.
Presuming we stick with computers that naturally work in binary during this time, if we continue using kilo- etc. for base-2 prefixes now then this argument will still be continuing in 100 years. If we fix things now and start using the SI prefixes for base-10 and use the kibi- etc. prefixes for base-2, we'll have a few years of dispute now, a couple decades of people looking at older materials that use different units, and then agreement for the most part for the rest of that 100 years.
Not to mention the switch in subject from "if one" to "you."
But your reply isn't nearly inflammatory enough. Let me suggest an alternate wording: If you are too stupid to know the difference between "your" and "you're" then you should not be touching English.
Other posters have pointed out that bits and bytes are not SI units, but they've not pointed out that we use 1024 because it's more useful.
Sort of. And that's fine: but then invent your own prefixes instead of warping the meaning of existing ones. (Oh wait, some people did that, except most people refuse to use them for some stupid reason.)
Storage is always indexed by some binary quantity, so you need to do base-2 logarithms
Always? Is my 250 or 500 GB hard drives a power of 2? Would it be a power of 2 for either definition of "giga"? How 'bout a 1.44 "MB" floppy. There's a fun one.
Oh, I did try, and was (slightly) disappointed to see that. I thought that might be a big reason to do that.
However, Arker didn't make any statement regarding SoftMaker Office's compatibility with MS Office formats, just that "I have yet to notice any problems importing MS files to OO so that's hard to see." I was merely pointing out an area where there is tons of room for another piece of software to step up where OO.org fails.
This is completely off-topic (and definitely feel free to mod me such; it's not like I lack kharma), but your user name is incredibly awesome.
Clearly you haven't tried to open a PPTX file in Impress; that import filter is barely alpha quality at best.
And if you want to see justification for this statement, I just put together a small page to annotate some screenshots I've been collecting over the last couple OpenOffice releases that compare what a couple slides should look like vs what they actually do look like in Impress.
Noticeable? Really? I have yet to notice any problems importing MS files to OO so that's hard to see.
Clearly you haven't tried to open a PPTX file in Impress; that import filter is barely alpha quality at best.
Well, this is more than just a reskinned and repackaged OpenOffice; it seems to be an entirely different piece of software. Keep that in mind.
Is it worth it? That's a completely different question, and I have no idea.
No, it's not. Move to a city where there's Whole Foods markets nearby...
No, it's not hard to control for HFCS, you just have to move.
(I live in a city with Whole Foods now, but after spending over a decade and a half in Central Pennsylvania, 3 hours away from the closest one.)
They can call it Adobe Homeopathy.
It's the exact same thing Microsoft did on Windows.
No it's not... it's not even close, really. You give one of the reasons yourself -- the monopoly thing. But beyond that, MS never prevented 3rd party browsers from running on the system. Even at the height of IE dominance (both in terms of market share and even, IMO for a short time, quality), it was never hard to run other browsers on Windows.
This is entirely different from the iPhone situation, where Apple doesn't just get to decide what you see by default, but can entirely prevent you (without jailbreaking) from running a particular program for no technical reason whatsoever.
The app store not carrying things isn't evil. That's fine.
Apple making it so that the only way you can load programs onto your iPhone is, however, somewhat evil. (At least in combination with the above fact.)
Wal-Mart doesn't make you sign a contract saying you'll never shop at Target before they let you into the store.
Sorry to burst your joke, but in 2000, CPUs had only just hit 1 GHz.
It's not so inaccurate... according to Wikipedia, November 2000 saw the release of 1.5 GHz CPUs, and 2 GHz P4s were out in August 2001. Even 3 GHz was out in Aug
How much for a hard drive that's as fast as that $125 SSD? ... Storage capacity is irrelevant in many situations.
I don't think that the parent would dispute that SSDs have a lot of benefits over a magnetic HDD, including speed. But like capacity, speed is also irrelevant in many situations.
However, how fast of a hard drive do I need to watch a movie or listen to music? Less dramatically, how 'bout playing a video game? (HDDs would speed up loading times, but likely not the rest of the game.)
There's a lot of stuff that you don't need speed for, and space is more important. If someone has 500 GB of data, it doesn't matter how fast SSDs are if 500 GB of SSDs isn't affordable -- they'll have to decide either to lose data (unlikely) or have a magnetic HDDs.
What does all this mean? I think a lot of computers (at least many desktops) in a couple years will have both an SSD and magnetic HDD to play to their respective strengths. But it'll be a few years (I'd guess at least 5) before most desktops have only SSDs.
Ah, but when 200 GB of storage is $20, no hard drive will ever be able to be that cheap. There is a fixed minimum cost for building a hard drive. Spindle, motor, etc. It's about $70.
This page would like a word with you. (Hopefully that link works; if not, it's a page of seven drives from WD, Seagate, and Hitachi for 160 GB drives for $50. The cheapest is $37.99.)
SSDs could double in price/GB ratios every year for those 5 years and today's magnetic drives would still be about the same as what you'd got. 32-40 GB for $100ish now would mean 1-1.2TB for $100ish in 5 years with that doubling: but that's about what you can get magnetic drives for now. (Newegg has three or four 1 TB drives for $90, more than 1/4 less than the 40 GB SSD drive mentioned in this article.)
If hard drives double even once in that time, they'll still have a substantial price/size ratio lead.
Now, there's some point where drives become "big enough"; my disk space growth has slowed a bit from what it was a few years ago; I've basically only roughly doubled my use over the last 5 years. Combine that with the speed benefits of SSD and they'll definitely be much more mainstream in that time. 90% chance I'll have basically all my non-music, non-video, non-photo data stored on SSD in 5 years. 99% chance I'll have all my non-music, non-video, non-photo, non-large-video-game data stored on an SSD at that point.
But will I still have magnetic drives in my system in 5 years? 90% says yes to that too.
That seems extremely unlikely... I've only seen a couple computers with RCA ports ever.
Chrome being "broken" in the sense it doesn't agree with the other apps should be obvious the first time you see it and see it feels that the titlebar is useless.
Being right-handed has nothing to do with it. There is no handedness in a mouse-driven GUI; you operate everything with your only hand, the mouse pointer. Regardless of whether you're right- or left-handed. Your mouse pointer does not stay on the right side of the screen, nor is it easier to leave it there.
Just be careful if you carry this too far; keep at least in the back of your mind that you may not be able to predict the contexts in which your program will be used. It might be used on a touch screen. I use a convertible tablet for taking notes in class; having the scroll bar on the right means that my hand (I'm a leftie) covers the screen when I'm trying to scroll, and I very much appreciate programs that let you flip the scroll bars to the left side. (All the Office 2007 programs do I think; OneNote definitely does. Firefox definitely does.)
thats mostly a firefox/IE(/safari?) issue no? chrome separates each tab, and plugin, as its own task, iirc.
It's entirely possible that it would work better in Chome (I refuse to/don't use Chrome for a couple reasons), but that's sorta the point... it is possible to write an efficient web browser, but that doesn't mean most of them are.
(BTW, there exist APIs that behave similarly on other platforms, including Windows; MS just doesn't provide any.)
And I might even be wrong on that point; a number of other posts mention Microsoft APIs (both in the Windows API and .Net) that are in the same general area. I'm not familiar with any of them, so can't compare to/contrast with GCD or other seemingly similar frameworks like Cilk.
using a mmorpg as an example vs a browser may be a bad example, as a browser have to download all data from the web, while the mmorpg have all data stored locally, and only changes in the scene is transmitted.
Data transfer is one thing; loading a page in one tab causing Pandora (in another tab) to stop playing for a few seconds while that page loads is another.