I use firefox dev edition and am on the aurora channel. I had version 54, and I checked for updates, 55 was there. I had 800 tabs open. I let it update, and restart, and yeah, it restarted quick enough that I didn't get bored waiting for it like I normally do.
When I shop on some website, I can open a dozen tabs with things I want to take a closer look at, but not right now as I'm still browsing the list (so they all open in the background).
Do you expect me to instead bookmark those things, then check them out one by one, deleting the bookmarks of products that I didn't like in the process?
No.
Tabs are great as short-lived bookmarks (but can also be used as permanent ones, especially with tab pinning). One advantage of tabs is that they'll remember the position in the page.
For the user, there should not be a difference between the resource usage of a bookmark and an unused or unloaded tab. That's a technical problem. If the browser is running short on memory, then why not just discard a few tabs until they're selected again? There's absolutely nothing stopping the browser from doing that.
Bookmarks are a relic from the time when browsers didn't have tabs.
Tabs should never have consumed as many resources as they did (and they didn't in the past, not until all the bloat was added with each new browser release).
This is the result of bad design not any inherent limitation in the hardware or lack of DMA use. The PCI bus is involved in all cases (DMA doesn't transfer things magically).
Not only is there no need to keep copied data in memory (or even swap out other processes to increase the disk cache like Windows is fond of doing), but you can even turn off caches for copy processes to avoid trashing them.
Furthermore, rules can be created to govern when something is worthy of caching and when it is not (and many systems have those, taking into account things like type of access, random, sequential, which process interactive/background, how many accesses are queued up, big or small read/writes). Limits can also be set as to how much space a disk cache can consume.
As an example of how stupid Windows is/was, I remember the days when leaving Windows running overnight while downloading some torrents would leave me with a completely unresponsive system in the morning because everything was swapped out... why? Because Windows thought it was a good idea to cache all your overnight downloads (which is a stupid thing to do when your disk can read/write 50 MB/sec+ and your internet can hardly manage 1 MB/sec).
My solution at the time was: add enough real memory, and turn off the swap file. That artificially limited the amount of memory that could be devoted to disk caching.
I think even P2 could address 64 GB of RAM, but with a maximum of 4 GB per process. It is something a lot of people don't realize because Microsoft disabled that on consumer OS versions.
I wouldn't expect too much improvement on the algorithm side of things, we've already been optimizing those as much as possible for years because current hardware can't keep up.
As for more cores, eventually power and heat requirements will become too large. Even if you can generate free power, the heat will have to go somewhere which will become a practical limit if we want to keep following Moore's law in just a few iterations. At the point where your computer is providing the heat for your entire house it will quickly become unpractical to add more cores.
I looked into HT a bit, and its performance gains.
Basically, it comes down that as soon as you have real cores available that HT barely does anything and sometimes even becomes detrimental for performance. So if you have 1 core, HT shows some real benefits. With 2 cores it was pretty marginal, and with 4 cores or more you might as well disable it.
Agreed. A developer should be able to check in properly formatted code without the use of a formatter. If they can't be precise and accurate enough to do that, then how can I trust them to do anything?
You know why I think devs that use spaces make more money?
They're more practical, they realize this debate (and many like it) are pointless wastes of time. Instead they pick a simple option that even the newbs in your team can understand and make that the standard. Then they continue with important issues.
LOL, HP Fortify, the tool that marks almost every line as a vulnerability to cover its own ass. It generates so many false positives that it is beyond useless. We'll just keep doing our own reviews....and if junk in your log manages to cause a hack, then it is not your software at fault. It is the log viewer software that is at fault. If that happens to be VIM or your shell, then yes, I boldly claim that is a bug in those pieces of software.
If Python just disallowed mixing of tabs / spaces in files, it would already be a lot better. Just flag an error as soon as indentations are detected that are not the same style.
In my setup nothing is allowed internet access unless going through my proxy. Windows is not privy to what that proxy is... this effectively kills tons of exploits, and of course, Windows own spyware.
It does limit me to software that can be configured to use a proxy, but that doesn't really bother me.
Scala is like a hammer that also can be used to saw, drill, screw and paint! But only if you're an expert and even then only very carefully or you'll cut of your foot.
To think that a civilization so advanced that it can simulate a universe would still be using concepts that we currently know from traditional computers is ludicrous at best.
In my experience, way too many programmers go for the obvious, short-cutting, direct, layer-breaking solution because it only requires writing a few lines of code. Out of an infinite set of possible solutions for the problem, they choose the one that saves them the most characters typed.
Experienced ones however will reduce the solution space and reject solutions that don't adhere to architectural criteria right from the start, and write something that looks a little more complicated but in fact results in a far more elegant, better scaling and maintainable solution.
So, I profile that code, I find, hm, odd, this loop is taking a lot of time.
It's accessing some array, wierd, array accesses are normally blazingly fast.
Oh look, it's a two dimensional array, that's something you don't see every day!
Let's play a bit with the code, hey, it's fast now that I'm looping through it differently... hm, I wonder how that thing is laid out in memory... oh, could it be that it is causing cache line misses / page faults / disk cache misses (yes, those abstractions are present at every level)?
I've been in this business for over 20 years, and I think I can honestly say that seeing my own code from one year ago, every single year, would cause me to sigh and think: "I was so naive then..."
But anyway, I wrote this book, just follow it and you'll be a professional programmer after you finished reading it...
I think in part that the processes are now so complex, you actually needed the previous generation of CPU / GPU's to design the next generation. It be hard to skip generations if your current generation can't even run CAD software, let alone validate a design before putting it on a wafer.
Slashdot Mirror
I tested it just now after I read the story.
I use firefox dev edition and am on the aurora channel. I had version 54, and I checked for updates, 55 was there. I had 800 tabs open. I let it update, and restart, and yeah, it restarted quick enough that I didn't get bored waiting for it like I normally do.
A huge improvement.
I just updated to firefox dev edition 55... and their claim is indeed accurate. It loaded quickly although I only had 800ish tabs open.
Quite happy that they finally fixed this silly problem. Now chrome.
Bookmarks are too permanent.
When I shop on some website, I can open a dozen tabs with things I want to take a closer look at, but not right now as I'm still browsing the list (so they all open in the background).
Do you expect me to instead bookmark those things, then check them out one by one, deleting the bookmarks of products that I didn't like in the process?
No.
Tabs are great as short-lived bookmarks (but can also be used as permanent ones, especially with tab pinning). One advantage of tabs is that they'll remember the position in the page.
For the user, there should not be a difference between the resource usage of a bookmark and an unused or unloaded tab. That's a technical problem. If the browser is running short on memory, then why not just discard a few tabs until they're selected again? There's absolutely nothing stopping the browser from doing that.
Bookmarks are a relic from the time when browsers didn't have tabs.
Tabs should never have consumed as many resources as they did (and they didn't in the past, not until all the bloat was added with each new browser release).
...and that is all completely avoidable.
This is the result of bad design not any inherent limitation in the hardware or lack of DMA use. The PCI bus is involved in all cases (DMA doesn't transfer things magically).
Not only is there no need to keep copied data in memory (or even swap out other processes to increase the disk cache like Windows is fond of doing), but you can even turn off caches for copy processes to avoid trashing them.
Furthermore, rules can be created to govern when something is worthy of caching and when it is not (and many systems have those, taking into account things like type of access, random, sequential, which process interactive/background, how many accesses are queued up, big or small read/writes). Limits can also be set as to how much space a disk cache can consume.
As an example of how stupid Windows is/was, I remember the days when leaving Windows running overnight while downloading some torrents would leave me with a completely unresponsive system in the morning because everything was swapped out... why? Because Windows thought it was a good idea to cache all your overnight downloads (which is a stupid thing to do when your disk can read/write 50 MB/sec+ and your internet can hardly manage 1 MB/sec).
My solution at the time was: add enough real memory, and turn off the swap file. That artificially limited the amount of memory that could be devoted to disk caching.
I think even P2 could address 64 GB of RAM, but with a maximum of 4 GB per process. It is something a lot of people don't realize because Microsoft disabled that on consumer OS versions.
I wouldn't expect too much improvement on the algorithm side of things, we've already been optimizing those as much as possible for years because current hardware can't keep up.
As for more cores, eventually power and heat requirements will become too large. Even if you can generate free power, the heat will have to go somewhere which will become a practical limit if we want to keep following Moore's law in just a few iterations. At the point where your computer is providing the heat for your entire house it will quickly become unpractical to add more cores.
...I must be too old, but leaving my phone in another room does not raise my level of anxiety.
I looked into HT a bit, and its performance gains.
Basically, it comes down that as soon as you have real cores available that HT barely does anything and sometimes even becomes detrimental for performance. So if you have 1 core, HT shows some real benefits. With 2 cores it was pretty marginal, and with 4 cores or more you might as well disable it.
Agreed. A developer should be able to check in properly formatted code without the use of a formatter. If they can't be precise and accurate enough to do that, then how can I trust them to do anything?
You know why I think devs that use spaces make more money?
They're more practical, they realize this debate (and many like it) are pointless wastes of time. Instead they pick a simple option that even the newbs in your team can understand and make that the standard. Then they continue with important issues.
The problem aren't the vulnerabilities you know about, the problem are the ones you donot know about.
LOL, HP Fortify, the tool that marks almost every line as a vulnerability to cover its own ass. It generates so many false positives that it is beyond useless. We'll just keep doing our own reviews. ...and if junk in your log manages to cause a hack, then it is not your software at fault. It is the log viewer software that is at fault. If that happens to be VIM or your shell, then yes, I boldly claim that is a bug in those pieces of software.
If Python just disallowed mixing of tabs / spaces in files, it would already be a lot better. Just flag an error as soon as indentations are detected that are not the same style.
People still use voicemail? It's the first thing I disable at any provider. Call me again if it was important.
In my setup nothing is allowed internet access unless going through my proxy. Windows is not privy to what that proxy is... this effectively kills tons of exploits, and of course, Windows own spyware.
It does limit me to software that can be configured to use a proxy, but that doesn't really bother me.
...donot set an alarm for 7 am in the morning.
Alexa: sure, setting your alarm at 7 am in the morning
Sure, happy sewing with that sword.
Scala is like a hammer that also can be used to saw, drill, screw and paint! But only if you're an expert and even then only very carefully or you'll cut of your foot.
To think that a civilization so advanced that it can simulate a universe would still be using concepts that we currently know from traditional computers is ludicrous at best.
In my experience, way too many programmers go for the obvious, short-cutting, direct, layer-breaking solution because it only requires writing a few lines of code. Out of an infinite set of possible solutions for the problem, they choose the one that saves them the most characters typed.
Experienced ones however will reduce the solution space and reject solutions that don't adhere to architectural criteria right from the start, and write something that looks a little more complicated but in fact results in a far more elegant, better scaling and maintainable solution.
So, I profile that code, I find, hm, odd, this loop is taking a lot of time.
It's accessing some array, wierd, array accesses are normally blazingly fast.
Oh look, it's a two dimensional array, that's something you don't see every day!
Let's play a bit with the code, hey, it's fast now that I'm looping through it differently... hm, I wonder how that thing is laid out in memory... oh, could it be that it is causing cache line misses / page faults / disk cache misses (yes, those abstractions are present at every level)?
I've been in this business for over 20 years, and I think I can honestly say that seeing my own code from one year ago, every single year, would cause me to sigh and think: "I was so naive then..."
But anyway, I wrote this book, just follow it and you'll be a professional programmer after you finished reading it...
Je completely mee eens damit.
...and don't forget to check if you did it right by changing the tab size setting in your IDE to several values before saving!
I think in part that the processes are now so complex, you actually needed the previous generation of CPU / GPU's to design the next generation. It be hard to skip generations if your current generation can't even run CAD software, let alone validate a design before putting it on a wafer.