The issue is not so much that 64-bit is dropped or deemed unimportant; the issue is that Mozilla as a corporation has limited resources to devote to 64-bit Windows builds.
Basically, the main blockers are:
- Plugins. 64-bit plugins on Windows are still not 100% and there currently isn't a way of loading 32-bit plugins in a 64-bit Firefox. Yes, ideally Firefox would have this, but again - resources. - Testing. It'd add another column onto the test matrix which is a non-negligible cost overhead to the release engineering guys (who are already massively overworked as it is). For a feature that Mozilla as a corporation isn't prioritising, this burden on releng is unacceptable. - Benefits. The benefits from switching to 64-bit code aren't actually as plentiful as you might think. Basically, the major one is that Firefox would be able to address more memory instead of limiting at 4GB. However, project memshrink (https://areweslimyet.com/) has been working pretty hard on reducing the memory footprint of Firefox, which is the correct fix in this case *except* in the case of those people who are using hundreds of tabs amongst several browser windows. Unfortunately, they're in a small enough niche that, again, Mozilla can't dedicate resources towards a black hole to accommodate them (yet).
The myths that building the browser in 64-bit results in somehow faster code, or more efficient execution are just that - myths. In fact, in a lot of cases, code that was written for x86 that's been recompiled in x86_64 results in slower code because your pointer sizes are twice as big and you start smashing through your CPU cache more quickly.
TL;DR - it's not a question of whether Mozilla wants to do this (they do); it's a question of whether the resource/benefit tradeoff makes sense at this time.
I would also like to remind people that software engineers aren't just assets that can be moved arbitrarily from project to project, so all those people saying "stop working on X feature and concentrate on 64-bit instead" - stop thinking like that. That's how bad managers are made.
It seems to me that he's not so much condemning the marketing term Apple has applied to it, but rather condemning the fact that PC manufacturers are so far behind Apple in terms of screen resolution that Apple is/able/ to market it as some sort of superior display (in this case, a "Retina" display). Basically he's saying that it shouldn't be marketed as a high-end option called "Retina", but that it should be the norm for all laptops.
"Low level APIs will allow the Sony NGP to perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs."
Carmack isn't saying that the hardware in the NGP is a generation ahead of smart phones. He's saying that because of the APIs available to developers they'll be able to utilise that hardware more effectively (specifically that a developer will be able to squeeze an extra generation's worth of performance out of hardware with approx. the same specifications), which makes sense once you consider that the games are pretty much running on the bare metal, and that the entire system is optimised for gaming.
My opinion is that Linux is now just as easy to use as an OS as Windows is, maybe easier. The only problem is that it's different. People are scared of change. The guy said that he doesn't want to invest that much time to learn how to use Linux, but how much time do you think that he had to invest to learn to use Windows to the level of competence he has now? My guess is a lot more than he was willing to give to Linux.
The unfortunate problem with Linux is that Microsoft got there first, and as the systems are inherently different, it's very hard for distributors to ease the learning curve between the two. People have already been trained to use Windows. A lot of them probably found it quite hard to learn the quirks of Windows and may well be scared of going through all that again. Also, as every man and his dog seems to use Windows, if someone gets caught up with something, they can always ask a friend for help - something which is not possible when you're running Linux.
Of course, Apple is in a different boat as their OS can only be run on their own hardware, which it comes pre-installed on, and I think 99% of the problems people have with Linux are installation-related.
I'm just about to start at University here in the UK this October, and I have already done programming, having started when I was 8 on Visual Basic. Most of the people I met at various interview days at the universities I had applied to were also serious coders, and some were free software dudes too. At my prep school (ages 8-13) a fair few of us (probably about 30, in a school of 200) used to code because the school seemed to have quite a tradition of encouraging people to code.
As for the calculator comment above, though, most of the mathematicians here just use the calculator (TI-83+) and download programs for whatever they want to do. As far as I know, only I and one other person have ever actually written functions for them, and to be honest, it's a bit of a pain given that there's no QWERTY keyboard on a TI-83+.
Actually, hydrocarbons, when in excess oxygen (which they will be), combust to form water and carbon dioxide - not these "poisonous disgusting toxins" to which you refer.
Note: I have not yet read the article because the server seems to be dead.
Is this subwoofer even legal? International law bans transmitters which are capable of transmitting on the frequency of approx 6 or 7Hz because that's the resonant frequency of the human ribcage. Seems like this could be used as a pretty lethal weapon from the (short) description in the posting.
I got my first laptop when I was about 9; it was probably the best thing my father did for me (it was his old one) because not only did it stop me from buggering up his computer by experimenting with Linux, but it also allowed me to learn a lot about Linux and C/C++. It also gave me an inquisitive edge which I might not have gained as I strove to learn just about EVERYTHING about computers..:)
I personally use ebuyer, komplett and scan most of the time, but the others aren't too bad either. Shipping varies from store to store but some use CityLink which isn't brilliant (ebuyer and cpucity).
Hrmm, doesn't look like a particularly good search engine to me. I searched on it for "Linux" just to see what it would churn up and the first hit was a link to microsoft.com. All the search results appear to be "Sponsored Links"...
Well done on copying that from Trollaxor's site - I've seen this before. However, I shall reply to each of these points as if they were your own, in the hope that I may enlighten you..
1) True... to an extent. Why run software on PowerPC that did not originate on PowerPC? So, let's get rid of Microsoft Office v.X, the Mach microkernel, most of OS X's userspace utilities... They originated on Intel CPUs (mainly), so what are we using them on PowerPC for? Also, please note that Apple did *not* write Mach - it was developed at Carnegie Mellon University... on ia32.
2) How is Aqua/Quartz more complicated than Mach? Mach is the core of the OS - if that goes wrong you're screwed. If Aqua goes wrong - no problem. You just fall back to a text console. If Apple *could* make Mach closed source - I bet they would. Unfortunately, because they didn't write it, but instead just borrowed Mach from a university, it must remain open source. Hence why it is open. Aqua/Quartz is closed because *they wrote it*.
And Linus Torvalds may sift through a few dozen megabytes of patches a day, but that's what his job is. He works full time on Linux. He does not have any other job at the moment. Neither does he have to "attempt to integrate it into the kernel" - the patch is simply a patch - he just okays it and it goes in. Please also note that if Linux and open source wasn't here, Apple's OS X wouldn't exist.
3) This is precisely where Linux's advantage for both power users and newbies is; power users have the option of *completely* changing the GUI - something you can not do in OS X. Newbies use the default GUI, such as KDE or GNOME, which are just as good as any other GUI. Of course, people have their preferences.
And Aqua is much slower than X11. Neither does it have any of the really useful features that X11 has, such as network transparency.
4) True - this is probably Linux's major weakness, but distribution vendors such as Mandrake are making this much less user-centric and automating the process instead.
Regarding the sendmail stuff, it's your decision to have decided to compile the stuff from source. If you were running a decent distribution, such as Debian, then just a simple apt-get command would have done it all for you, in much less time. And don't say "oh, but any normal user wouldn't know about apt-get", because no "normal user" would want to patch sendmail/ssh because of security issues.
I use Linux on two PowerBook G4s - a 667MHz rev B and a 1.25GHz 15" Aluminium - and it's much more useful, and snappy, than OS X ever was.
1) Mach-O isn't specific to Apple. It's the binary format used by the Mach microkernel, which DOES NOT belong to Apple.
2) X11 is not an emulation. It's natively compiled on and runs natively on Mac OS X. Nothing is emulated. Nothing is slow.
3) KDE and GNOME aren't as enterprise ready as Aqua. Noooooo waaaay.
4) I'm not sure why NetInfo is used, but I hazard a guess it's to try to retain source compatibility with legacy applications from Mac OS Classic whose source base assume there is something like that?
George-: mind letting him know its ok, since i've only had 30 hits so it doesnt look like its gonna be an issue
Have fun:)
btw - here's an IRC log of when he first found out:D
<DanielS> you're about to get slashdotted <wardy> no <wardy> this is bad <wardy>:) <Markey> you're famous now;) <wardy> i only get 1gb bandwidth a month on that server <bruggie> hehehe, better call your isp and disable the account for a while:P <George-> wardy: hahahaha * wardy checks how much has been used so far <George-> wardy: suckered:P <wardy> George-: grrr. this aint funny:) if it goes over 1gb then that gets carried over to the next month, and if it goes over 2gb in one month then i get charged <George-> wardy: HAHAHAHAHAA <George-> wardy: pull it! pull it!!!
Being someone that has been on the KDE development team for a while, I can say that compiling KDE takes *forever*. Having a fast processor like that would be great as 20+ hours to compile the whole of KDE from CVS is insane... I'd like to be able to compile each night. Every night.
And to the person that wrote the topic: This P4 chip may be distancing the P4 and the Athlon away from each other performance wise, but AMD have basically scrapped the Athlon in favour of developing on the x86-64 stuff, which will totally rock! I'm personally waiting until I can go out and get a dual Opteron:))
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is not so much that 64-bit is dropped or deemed unimportant; the issue is that Mozilla as a corporation has limited resources to devote to 64-bit Windows builds.
Basically, the main blockers are:
- Plugins. 64-bit plugins on Windows are still not 100% and there currently isn't a way of loading 32-bit plugins in a 64-bit Firefox. Yes, ideally Firefox would have this, but again - resources.
- Testing. It'd add another column onto the test matrix which is a non-negligible cost overhead to the release engineering guys (who are already massively overworked as it is). For a feature that Mozilla as a corporation isn't prioritising, this burden on releng is unacceptable.
- Benefits. The benefits from switching to 64-bit code aren't actually as plentiful as you might think. Basically, the major one is that Firefox would be able to address more memory instead of limiting at 4GB. However, project memshrink (https://areweslimyet.com/) has been working pretty hard on reducing the memory footprint of Firefox, which is the correct fix in this case *except* in the case of those people who are using hundreds of tabs amongst several browser windows. Unfortunately, they're in a small enough niche that, again, Mozilla can't dedicate resources towards a black hole to accommodate them (yet).
The myths that building the browser in 64-bit results in somehow faster code, or more efficient execution are just that - myths. In fact, in a lot of cases, code that was written for x86 that's been recompiled in x86_64 results in slower code because your pointer sizes are twice as big and you start smashing through your CPU cache more quickly.
For a more detailed description on the cost supporting these has incurred, Ben Hearsum wrote a very good post on dev-platform: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/UOn1iQetA5w/-DNzeCOMdrcJ
TL;DR - it's not a question of whether Mozilla wants to do this (they do); it's a question of whether the resource/benefit tradeoff makes sense at this time.
I would also like to remind people that software engineers aren't just assets that can be moved arbitrarily from project to project, so all those people saying "stop working on X feature and concentrate on 64-bit instead" - stop thinking like that. That's how bad managers are made.
It seems to me that he's not so much condemning the marketing term Apple has applied to it, but rather condemning the fact that PC manufacturers are so far behind Apple in terms of screen resolution that Apple is /able/ to market it as some sort of superior display (in this case, a "Retina" display). Basically he's saying that it shouldn't be marketed as a high-end option called "Retina", but that it should be the norm for all laptops.
Posted here in full:
"Low level APIs will allow the Sony NGP to perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs."
Carmack isn't saying that the hardware in the NGP is a generation ahead of smart phones. He's saying that because of the APIs available to developers they'll be able to utilise that hardware more effectively (specifically that a developer will be able to squeeze an extra generation's worth of performance out of hardware with approx. the same specifications), which makes sense once you consider that the games are pretty much running on the bare metal, and that the entire system is optimised for gaming.
The unfortunate problem with Linux is that Microsoft got there first, and as the systems are inherently different, it's very hard for distributors to ease the learning curve between the two. People have already been trained to use Windows. A lot of them probably found it quite hard to learn the quirks of Windows and may well be scared of going through all that again. Also, as every man and his dog seems to use Windows, if someone gets caught up with something, they can always ask a friend for help - something which is not possible when you're running Linux.
Of course, Apple is in a different boat as their OS can only be run on their own hardware, which it comes pre-installed on, and I think 99% of the problems people have with Linux are installation-related.
I'm just about to start at University here in the UK this October, and I have already done programming, having started when I was 8 on Visual Basic. Most of the people I met at various interview days at the universities I had applied to were also serious coders, and some were free software dudes too. At my prep school (ages 8-13) a fair few of us (probably about 30, in a school of 200) used to code because the school seemed to have quite a tradition of encouraging people to code.
As for the calculator comment above, though, most of the mathematicians here just use the calculator (TI-83+) and download programs for whatever they want to do. As far as I know, only I and one other person have ever actually written functions for them, and to be honest, it's a bit of a pain given that there's no QWERTY keyboard on a TI-83+.
Doesn't the XBox 360 use a triple-core powerpc 970 processor or am I thoroughly mistaken?
Actually, hydrocarbons, when in excess oxygen (which they will be), combust to form water and carbon dioxide - not these "poisonous disgusting toxins" to which you refer.
Note: I have not yet read the article because the server seems to be dead.
Is this subwoofer even legal? International law bans transmitters which are capable of transmitting on the frequency of approx 6 or 7Hz because that's the resonant frequency of the human ribcage. Seems like this could be used as a pretty lethal weapon from the (short) description in the posting.
I got my first laptop when I was about 9; it was probably the best thing my father did for me (it was his old one) because not only did it stop me from buggering up his computer by experimenting with Linux, but it also allowed me to learn a lot about Linux and C/C++. It also gave me an inquisitive edge which I might not have gained as I strove to learn just about EVERYTHING about computers.. :)
For those of you in the UK there are a few cheap online resellers:
. ukt tp://www.overclock.co.uk. co.ukt ore.com
http://www.ebuyer.co.uk
http://www.komplett.co
http://www.scan.co.uk
http://www.dabs.com
h
http://www.overclockers
http://www.cpucity.co.uk
http://www.savas
I personally use ebuyer, komplett and scan most of the time, but the others aren't too bad either. Shipping varies from store to store but some use CityLink which isn't brilliant (ebuyer and cpucity).
Hrmm, doesn't look like a particularly good search engine to me. I searched on it for "Linux" just to see what it would churn up and the first hit was a link to microsoft.com. All the search results appear to be "Sponsored Links"...
Well done on copying that from Trollaxor's site - I've seen this before. However, I shall reply to each of these points as if they were your own, in the hope that I may enlighten you..
1) True... to an extent. Why run software on PowerPC that did not originate on PowerPC? So, let's get rid of Microsoft Office v.X, the Mach microkernel, most of OS X's userspace utilities... They originated on Intel CPUs (mainly), so what are we using them on PowerPC for? Also, please note that Apple did *not* write Mach - it was developed at Carnegie Mellon University... on ia32.
2) How is Aqua/Quartz more complicated than Mach? Mach is the core of the OS - if that goes wrong you're screwed. If Aqua goes wrong - no problem. You just fall back to a text console. If Apple *could* make Mach closed source - I bet they would. Unfortunately, because they didn't write it, but instead just borrowed Mach from a university, it must remain open source. Hence why it is open. Aqua/Quartz is closed because *they wrote it*.
And Linus Torvalds may sift through a few dozen megabytes of patches a day, but that's what his job is. He works full time on Linux. He does not have any other job at the moment. Neither does he have to "attempt to integrate it into the kernel" - the patch is simply a patch - he just okays it and it goes in. Please also note that if Linux and open source wasn't here, Apple's OS X wouldn't exist.
3) This is precisely where Linux's advantage for both power users and newbies is; power users have the option of *completely* changing the GUI - something you can not do in OS X. Newbies use the default GUI, such as KDE or GNOME, which are just as good as any other GUI. Of course, people have their preferences.
And Aqua is much slower than X11. Neither does it have any of the really useful features that X11 has, such as network transparency.
4) True - this is probably Linux's major weakness, but distribution vendors such as Mandrake are making this much less user-centric and automating the process instead.
Regarding the sendmail stuff, it's your decision to have decided to compile the stuff from source. If you were running a decent distribution, such as Debian, then just a simple apt-get command would have done it all for you, in much less time. And don't say "oh, but any normal user wouldn't know about apt-get", because no "normal user" would want to patch sendmail/ssh because of security issues.
I use Linux on two PowerBook G4s - a 667MHz rev B and a 1.25GHz 15" Aluminium - and it's much more useful, and snappy, than OS X ever was.
George
1) Mach-O isn't specific to Apple. It's the binary format used by the Mach microkernel, which DOES NOT belong to Apple.
2) X11 is not an emulation. It's natively compiled on and runs natively on Mac OS X. Nothing is emulated. Nothing is slow.
3) KDE and GNOME aren't as enterprise ready as Aqua. Noooooo waaaay.
4) I'm not sure why NetInfo is used, but I hazard a guess it's to try to retain source compatibility with legacy applications from Mac OS Classic whose source base assume there is something like that?
woops, thanks a lot
George-: mind letting him know its ok, since i've only had 30 hits so it doesnt look like its gonna be an issue
:)
:D
:) ;) :P :P :) if it goes over 1gb then that gets carried over to the next month, and if it goes over 2gb in one month then i get charged
Have fun
btw - here's an IRC log of when he first found out
<DanielS> you're about to get slashdotted
<wardy> no
<wardy> this is bad
<wardy>
<Markey> you're famous now
<wardy> i only get 1gb bandwidth a month on that server
<bruggie> hehehe, better call your isp and disable the account for a while
<George-> wardy: hahahaha
* wardy checks how much has been used so far
<George-> wardy: suckered
<wardy> George-: grrr. this aint funny
<George-> wardy: HAHAHAHAHAA
<George-> wardy: pull it! pull it!!!
Just for your information, wardy just found out that you posted this link and pointed out he has a 1GB/month limit.
:)
You can imagine the hilarity on IRC with him at the moment...
http://www.slashdot.org.
:)
'nuff said
Being someone that has been on the KDE development team for a while, I can say that compiling KDE takes *forever*. Having a fast processor like that would be great as 20+ hours to compile the whole of KDE from CVS is insane... I'd like to be able to compile each night. Every night.
:))
And to the person that wrote the topic: This P4 chip may be distancing the P4 and the Athlon away from each other performance wise, but AMD have basically scrapped the Athlon in favour of developing on the x86-64 stuff, which will totally rock! I'm personally waiting until I can go out and get a dual Opteron