I mean, most people that go out of their way to download a browser installer probably intend to use that browser as their default, whether it's Safari, Opera or Firefox.
Picture this: Joe User downloads and installs Firefox, clicks right through the installer without reading and then starts clicking the little Firefox icon when he wants to surf the net. However, since the 'default' checkbox was blank by default, whenever his friend on MSN sends him a link, he clicks it and it opens in Internet Explorer. In my experience, a very large number of users will not notice that they're not in their usual browser for quite a while. They may navigate away from the linked site and do banking or other security sensitive stuff, but now they're in a browser that hasn't necessarily been keeping up with patches because it's rarely being run.
I don't know, but it seems to be that it's safer to default that box to be checked. Users that keep multiple browsers for testing purposes already know to look for it, will remember to uncheck it, and are in the minority anyway.
Whenever Opera fans jump into conversations like this, I'm reminded of this comic.
That said, I'm quite fond of what Opera has done for mobile devices. Opera mini is far and away the best mobile browsing solution for virtually any hand-held device (particularly Windows Mobile devices). I recommend it to almost everyone I know who uses the web on their phones, and I use it myself.
Nevertheless, I'm writing this in Firefox 3. I've downloaded Opera here and there for a lark, but always end up back on Firefox. So you raise a good point: Why is the Opera installed base so low? It is a good browser.
NOT performance. It's simply a statement about the number of transistors we can cram onto a chip.
That said, you make a very interesting observation, since performance in the desktop PC market has scaled pretty well with transistor density (and therefore Moore's Law). Given what you're saying, is the ratio of performance in supercomputers to regular PCs increasing?
You're quite right; the Commodore 64 had an 8-bit processor, but the chip had a 16-bit address bus (link)
The ability to do 64-bit processing is not a prerequisite for accessing large amounts of memory. The Intel Pentium III Xeon chips (32-bit), for example, could address up to 64GB of memory (link, 64GB = 2^36 bytes, so a 36-bit address space).
I believe that the memory controller is that component that determines how much memory can be addressed. There are, so far as I know, three "bit" numbers that are important with processors:
1) The registers; the size of the register determines the size of values that can be processed directly.
2) The addressable space; determined by the memory controller. (IIRC)
3) The data bus width; the number of bits per bus clock that can be moved into or out of the chip.
I'm hardly an expert on this stuff though. Anyone care to give a more detailed description?
The article seems to indicate that he's working on his own. I agree that overusing things like "I", "me" and "my" can sound a lot like bragging (whereas "We", "ours", etc. does not) but if he really was working solo, he wouldn't need to phrase it any other way, neh?
To be fair, one should probably not be using subjective tenses all that much in academic writing anyway.
For the sake of argument, I'm writing this on my laptop with the display set to 800x600 (I can't do 800x480, but the width is my main concern anyway). I have to admit that Slashdot, for example, seems to resize quite well. I'll hit a few more bookmarks and try it out...
*checking*
Okay, most of my links work very well. BBC News has horizontal scroll bars, but all the I'm missing is an ad; The site seems to be formatted for an 800 pixel width. A forum I regularly read fails to resize well. That's about it. I guess "Web 2.0" has resulted in sites that are a little more dynamic and make better use of the available real estate. To be honest, I haven't surfed under 1024x768 in ages.
I suppose the only other major resolution-hog in my day to day use is spreadsheets, but I can't see myself doing spreadsheet work on the Eee anyway. It wouldn't be the point of the machine, if I were to get one.
Still, for now I'll stick with the 12.1" notebook. To carry an Eee I'd still need some sort of bag, and the MEC Bag I currently use is very compact (the 12.1" fits snugly in it). Out of interest, how do you carry your Eee around?
My only major objection to the Eee is the screen resolution. 800x480 is simply too low to be able to comfortably use full-blown internet applications. I'd love to see a slightly bigger WXGA (1280x768) display in there. The current models have pretty wide bezels, so they could 'fit in in', technically, probably at the cost of making the unit a bit thicker so that the support electronics can sit behind the display instead of beside it.
Anyway, once a model comes out with higher screen res, I'm in!
"Jobs won't sell it to you until he's sure it rocks."
This is one of the most enlightening things I've read here in a while. I've never understood why people get so attached to the Mac platform. Macs have build-quality issues (for example) like any other brand, but I suppose I can see how Apple fans buy because they know that they're getting a product that, at the very least, Apple is sure is awesome. I've never really gotten the foaming-at-the-mouth fan-boy thing for ANY brand, but this at least explains some of the brand loyalty for Macs.
"So the next time you feel the need to abuse someone just because they use a Mac, ask yourself instead why you hate that they use the Mac. What difference does it make to you?"
While I don't go out of my way to abuse Mac users, I do find myself getting defensive around Mac users by default, which I suppose can lead to a sort of abuse-in-retribution. My desktop is a assembled-at-home affair, and my laptop is a Dell XPS, and both run Windows Vista Ultimate. The laptop (Dell + Vista) is like wearing a bullseye on my forehead when Mac users are around, and I'm constantly berated by "Mac-heads" over my choice of computer and operating system.
Of course, the Dell machine I use was virtually the *only* discrete graphics option in the 12.1" formfactor at the time that I bought it, and Windows affords me the opportunity to take advantage of that hardware (in the form of gaming). Now, to be fair, I could game in Linux, and I have. However in windows I can easily do things like undervolt my processor, overclock my video card and, in the end, get the maximum amount of gaming and battery performance out of my tiny, under-powered machine.
The point is that I take crap from a number of Mac users for not using a brand that doesn't have a machine in its lineup that meets my needs! The Macbook and Macbook Air, while both relatively small (although still bigger than an M1210) don't have discrete graphics. That's the end of the story for me. If they offered an option that suited me, I'd consider it.
Now, one could argue (and some of my Mac using friends have) that they abuse "PC" users because PC users abuse them. In the end this may just be a chicken/egg thing.
What I don't get it why people can't just be happy letting people choose for themselves. I absolutely approve of giving, say, a Linux Live CD to someone who has never tried it, and I've converted a number of friends to Linux even though I don't use it much myself. Exposing people to new options is admirable. Abusing them for their choices is not.
Sorry, this ended up coming off as more of a rant than an insightful comment.
Children don't develop certain reasoning and memorization skills until certain ages, not because they're stupid, but because their brains haven't physically developed to the point where it's possible for them to do it. While the age where a child abruptly develops various cognitive skills varies from child to child, an average kid below the age of 12 or so possesses almost no abstract reasoning skills whatsoever.
"School-age children are limited to thinking concretely--in tangible, definite, exact, and uni-directional terms--based on real and concrete experiences rather than on abstractions." Source (yeah, yeah, Cliff's notes, but this is Psych 101 stuff.)
You can't tell a seven year to "suck it up" and perform a task her brain simply can't yet handle. It's completely ridiculous.
This is obviously completely anecdotal, but I torrented a version of SP1 for Vista 64 and installed it just fine on my desktop machine running Ultimate on a P5N-E/Wifi-AP (the wifi bit is just a wireless card stuck on one of the USB headers). However, I installed a BIOS update that was released a week or two before SP1 RTM hit the torrent sites, so that may be related to why I'm not having trouble but many other users are.
This is exactly correct. I'm a bit of a flight game nut (I hesitate to use the word "sim" because while I do enjoy highly realistic games like Falcon 4, I still play a great deal of Ace Combat). While I've owned a number of sticks over the years, my current favourite is the Hori Flightstick II that shipped with the special editions of AC5. Before this I used a Microsoft Force Feedback 2, which had an extremely heavy base. You would use your weak hand for the throttle control at the base of the stick and your dominant hand for the stick itself. The weight of the base was sufficient.
The Hori sticks are quite light, and therefore come with suction cups on the bottom. This actually works quite well, provided whatever surface to which you intend to affix them is smooth. My coffee table and desk (both fairly standard Ikea fare) are "textured" slightly, and the sticks will not stay in place. The worst is the left hand throttle control. I prefer to adjust my throttle to have a lot of friction (there's an adjustment on the bottom of the unit), but this means that throttling up often results in me just shoving the whole stick forward instead.
My current solution is that I have both of them mounted on a pane of glass that used to be a door for an entertainment unit that I no longer use. I've stuck some rubber feet on it to protect the surface of the table or desk, and to keep it sliding around. This works perfectly while playing, but just as the parent post suggested, this hack of a base for my sticks is big, and not very mobile. They sit, always stuck to the glass, rather conspicuously beside my entertainment unit. It's an okay solution, but quite annoying.
I seriously doubt that anyone other than flight game addicts like myself would be willing to put up with it.
I'm into computers and probably could bubble sort my way out of a paper bag, but I'm a physicist, you insensitive clod! I wouldn't be able to do it in an interview.
Seriously though, let's be fair. I didn't get the joke about compression algorithms, but I can fab you a processor on which you can execute them (my work is with semiconductors.) I'm sure there are many people here who wouldn't get the joke, but who are nevertheless nerdy (and proud) in their own right.
In a lot of cases in computing, doubling the number of pipelines (read: adding a second core, for example) does not, in fact, double performance unless the problem being worked on is highly parallelizable. For example, this is why one can not accurately describe a machine with two 2.5GHz processors as a "5GHz machine". Most computation that personal computers do on a day to day basis does not scale well, and the average user will reach a point of diminishing returns very quickly if they add many cores to increase performance for these tasks.
So all he's demonstrating here with his "16-core" experiment is that ray-tracing is a highly parallel process, and that throwing lots of cores at it will work effectively to increase performance without reaching that point of diminishing returns (at least, not reaching it very quickly.) Yes, we expect 16 cores to be faster than 4 cores or 1 core, but he's saying that when we're ray-tracing we can expect 16 cores to be almost four times faster than four cores and almost sixteen times faster than one.
Tell me about it. I post some really insightful comment in slashdot and somescum cut and paste it and post it as their own insight in other fora and blogs.
Certified that this comment is not a cut and paste of another poster's comment. Well, as far as I know. And I don't know much.
Seriously, if you're going to NOT get vaccinated for something as a result of having watched a YouTube video, then it's probably better for humanity if you increase your risk of being removed from the gene pool.
To quote bash.org:
" The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?"
Yes, I am sure. That project requires patches to the original install media specifically to circumvent the TPM chip. Get your hands on an OSX install disc for one of the Intel models and try to install it on your beige box. Good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
After hitting refresh a couple of times, I get http://getfirefox.com/ to respond and it brings up the download page for... Firefox 2.
Is this no longer a valid place to download Firefox?
I mean, most people that go out of their way to download a browser installer probably intend to use that browser as their default, whether it's Safari, Opera or Firefox.
Picture this: Joe User downloads and installs Firefox, clicks right through the installer without reading and then starts clicking the little Firefox icon when he wants to surf the net. However, since the 'default' checkbox was blank by default, whenever his friend on MSN sends him a link, he clicks it and it opens in Internet Explorer. In my experience, a very large number of users will not notice that they're not in their usual browser for quite a while. They may navigate away from the linked site and do banking or other security sensitive stuff, but now they're in a browser that hasn't necessarily been keeping up with patches because it's rarely being run.
I don't know, but it seems to be that it's safer to default that box to be checked. Users that keep multiple browsers for testing purposes already know to look for it, will remember to uncheck it, and are in the minority anyway.
Whenever Opera fans jump into conversations like this, I'm reminded of this comic.
That said, I'm quite fond of what Opera has done for mobile devices. Opera mini is far and away the best mobile browsing solution for virtually any hand-held device (particularly Windows Mobile devices). I recommend it to almost everyone I know who uses the web on their phones, and I use it myself.
Nevertheless, I'm writing this in Firefox 3. I've downloaded Opera here and there for a lark, but always end up back on Firefox. So you raise a good point: Why is the Opera installed base so low? It is a good browser.
Don't Vista licenses come with downgrade rights for XP? Maybe they'll keep that up with Windows 7.
NOT performance. It's simply a statement about the number of transistors we can cram onto a chip.
That said, you make a very interesting observation, since performance in the desktop PC market has scaled pretty well with transistor density (and therefore Moore's Law). Given what you're saying, is the ratio of performance in supercomputers to regular PCs increasing?
You're quite right; the Commodore 64 had an 8-bit processor, but the chip had a 16-bit address bus (link)
The ability to do 64-bit processing is not a prerequisite for accessing large amounts of memory. The Intel Pentium III Xeon chips (32-bit), for example, could address up to 64GB of memory (link, 64GB = 2^36 bytes, so a 36-bit address space).
I believe that the memory controller is that component that determines how much memory can be addressed. There are, so far as I know, three "bit" numbers that are important with processors:
1) The registers; the size of the register determines the size of values that can be processed directly.
2) The addressable space; determined by the memory controller. (IIRC)
3) The data bus width; the number of bits per bus clock that can be moved into or out of the chip.
I'm hardly an expert on this stuff though. Anyone care to give a more detailed description?
RAmen to that!
The article seems to indicate that he's working on his own. I agree that overusing things like "I", "me" and "my" can sound a lot like bragging (whereas "We", "ours", etc. does not) but if he really was working solo, he wouldn't need to phrase it any other way, neh?
To be fair, one should probably not be using subjective tenses all that much in academic writing anyway.
Here's a flight simulator in Excel! Sort of. ;)
For the sake of argument, I'm writing this on my laptop with the display set to 800x600 (I can't do 800x480, but the width is my main concern anyway). I have to admit that Slashdot, for example, seems to resize quite well. I'll hit a few more bookmarks and try it out...
*checking*
Okay, most of my links work very well. BBC News has horizontal scroll bars, but all the I'm missing is an ad; The site seems to be formatted for an 800 pixel width. A forum I regularly read fails to resize well. That's about it. I guess "Web 2.0" has resulted in sites that are a little more dynamic and make better use of the available real estate. To be honest, I haven't surfed under 1024x768 in ages.
I suppose the only other major resolution-hog in my day to day use is spreadsheets, but I can't see myself doing spreadsheet work on the Eee anyway. It wouldn't be the point of the machine, if I were to get one.
Still, for now I'll stick with the 12.1" notebook. To carry an Eee I'd still need some sort of bag, and the MEC Bag I currently use is very compact (the 12.1" fits snugly in it). Out of interest, how do you carry your Eee around?
My only major objection to the Eee is the screen resolution. 800x480 is simply too low to be able to comfortably use full-blown internet applications. I'd love to see a slightly bigger WXGA (1280x768) display in there. The current models have pretty wide bezels, so they could 'fit in in', technically, probably at the cost of making the unit a bit thicker so that the support electronics can sit behind the display instead of beside it.
Anyway, once a model comes out with higher screen res, I'm in!
"Jobs won't sell it to you until he's sure it rocks."
This is one of the most enlightening things I've read here in a while. I've never understood why people get so attached to the Mac platform. Macs have build-quality issues (for example) like any other brand, but I suppose I can see how Apple fans buy because they know that they're getting a product that, at the very least, Apple is sure is awesome. I've never really gotten the foaming-at-the-mouth fan-boy thing for ANY brand, but this at least explains some of the brand loyalty for Macs.
"So the next time you feel the need to abuse someone just because they use a Mac, ask yourself instead why you hate that they use the Mac. What difference does it make to you?"
While I don't go out of my way to abuse Mac users, I do find myself getting defensive around Mac users by default, which I suppose can lead to a sort of abuse-in-retribution. My desktop is a assembled-at-home affair, and my laptop is a Dell XPS, and both run Windows Vista Ultimate. The laptop (Dell + Vista) is like wearing a bullseye on my forehead when Mac users are around, and I'm constantly berated by "Mac-heads" over my choice of computer and operating system.
Of course, the Dell machine I use was virtually the *only* discrete graphics option in the 12.1" formfactor at the time that I bought it, and Windows affords me the opportunity to take advantage of that hardware (in the form of gaming). Now, to be fair, I could game in Linux, and I have. However in windows I can easily do things like undervolt my processor, overclock my video card and, in the end, get the maximum amount of gaming and battery performance out of my tiny, under-powered machine.
The point is that I take crap from a number of Mac users for not using a brand that doesn't have a machine in its lineup that meets my needs! The Macbook and Macbook Air, while both relatively small (although still bigger than an M1210) don't have discrete graphics. That's the end of the story for me. If they offered an option that suited me, I'd consider it.
Now, one could argue (and some of my Mac using friends have) that they abuse "PC" users because PC users abuse them. In the end this may just be a chicken/egg thing.
What I don't get it why people can't just be happy letting people choose for themselves. I absolutely approve of giving, say, a Linux Live CD to someone who has never tried it, and I've converted a number of friends to Linux even though I don't use it much myself. Exposing people to new options is admirable. Abusing them for their choices is not.
Sorry, this ended up coming off as more of a rant than an insightful comment.
On Slashdot, you have to use car analogies to make your point.
If you say "My Corolla has a four cylinder engine" and he says "Bullshit, my BMW 3 Series has a six..." etc, etc.
Children don't develop certain reasoning and memorization skills until certain ages, not because they're stupid, but because their brains haven't physically developed to the point where it's possible for them to do it. While the age where a child abruptly develops various cognitive skills varies from child to child, an average kid below the age of 12 or so possesses almost no abstract reasoning skills whatsoever.
"School-age children are limited to thinking concretely--in tangible, definite, exact, and uni-directional terms--based on real and concrete experiences rather than on abstractions." Source (yeah, yeah, Cliff's notes, but this is Psych 101 stuff.)
You can't tell a seven year to "suck it up" and perform a task her brain simply can't yet handle. It's completely ridiculous.
Ah, that makes sense. My drives are using the Intel RAID controller, and since I don't have any eSATA devices, I have the JMicron controller disabled.
A good thing to know though, in case I ever run into trouble. Thanks for the tip.
This is obviously completely anecdotal, but I torrented a version of SP1 for Vista 64 and installed it just fine on my desktop machine running Ultimate on a P5N-E/Wifi-AP (the wifi bit is just a wireless card stuck on one of the USB headers). However, I installed a BIOS update that was released a week or two before SP1 RTM hit the torrent sites, so that may be related to why I'm not having trouble but many other users are.
"With two sticks, you'd need a base."
This is exactly correct. I'm a bit of a flight game nut (I hesitate to use the word "sim" because while I do enjoy highly realistic games like Falcon 4, I still play a great deal of Ace Combat). While I've owned a number of sticks over the years, my current favourite is the Hori Flightstick II that shipped with the special editions of AC5. Before this I used a Microsoft Force Feedback 2, which had an extremely heavy base. You would use your weak hand for the throttle control at the base of the stick and your dominant hand for the stick itself. The weight of the base was sufficient.
The Hori sticks are quite light, and therefore come with suction cups on the bottom. This actually works quite well, provided whatever surface to which you intend to affix them is smooth. My coffee table and desk (both fairly standard Ikea fare) are "textured" slightly, and the sticks will not stay in place. The worst is the left hand throttle control. I prefer to adjust my throttle to have a lot of friction (there's an adjustment on the bottom of the unit), but this means that throttling up often results in me just shoving the whole stick forward instead.
My current solution is that I have both of them mounted on a pane of glass that used to be a door for an entertainment unit that I no longer use. I've stuck some rubber feet on it to protect the surface of the table or desk, and to keep it sliding around. This works perfectly while playing, but just as the parent post suggested, this hack of a base for my sticks is big, and not very mobile. They sit, always stuck to the glass, rather conspicuously beside my entertainment unit. It's an okay solution, but quite annoying.
I seriously doubt that anyone other than flight game addicts like myself would be willing to put up with it.
I'm into computers and probably could bubble sort my way out of a paper bag, but I'm a physicist, you insensitive clod! I wouldn't be able to do it in an interview.
Seriously though, let's be fair. I didn't get the joke about compression algorithms, but I can fab you a processor on which you can execute them (my work is with semiconductors.) I'm sure there are many people here who wouldn't get the joke, but who are nevertheless nerdy (and proud) in their own right.
In a lot of cases in computing, doubling the number of pipelines (read: adding a second core, for example) does not, in fact, double performance unless the problem being worked on is highly parallelizable. For example, this is why one can not accurately describe a machine with two 2.5GHz processors as a "5GHz machine". Most computation that personal computers do on a day to day basis does not scale well, and the average user will reach a point of diminishing returns very quickly if they add many cores to increase performance for these tasks.
So all he's demonstrating here with his "16-core" experiment is that ray-tracing is a highly parallel process, and that throwing lots of cores at it will work effectively to increase performance without reaching that point of diminishing returns (at least, not reaching it very quickly.) Yes, we expect 16 cores to be faster than 4 cores or 1 core, but he's saying that when we're ray-tracing we can expect 16 cores to be almost four times faster than four cores and almost sixteen times faster than one.
Tell me about it. I post some really insightful comment in slashdot and somescum cut and paste it and post it as their own insight in other fora and blogs.
Certified that this comment is not a cut and paste of another poster's comment. Well, as far as I know. And I don't know much.
Seriously, if you're going to NOT get vaccinated for something as a result of having watched a YouTube video, then it's probably better for humanity if you increase your risk of being removed from the gene pool.
To quote bash.org:
" The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?"
Yes, I am sure. That project requires patches to the original install media specifically to circumvent the TPM chip. Get your hands on an OSX install disc for one of the Intel models and try to install it on your beige box. Good luck.
Of course, it does require a special chip on a motherboard made specifically by Apple to boot up or install. How is that not DRM?
The mobile Core 2 Duo chips (T7xxx) are 64-bit, but missing from the list as well.
He said in his post that he was relatively new. He probably did white-space the post, but not using html breaks.