Your blanket statement was to the effect that Gecko is always the slowest of the bunch, comparable to only Trident (what specific area of performance you never mention, implying performance of everything). Such are the ingredients of a troll.
Anyway, I've done a stupid thing and compared Opera 10.60 with the FF4 beta (not 3.6.6 as per above poster), just for you.
On my PC, Opera and FF4 are approximately neck-to-neck on the above benchmark, with FF4 having a small but consistent lead of about 10-15%. On zooming in to render in detail, FF's margin increases.
Try it in the Firefox 4 beta, and compare it to the latest Chrome release.
The reason you got modded down is probably because you made a dramatic, blanket claim without backing it up with facts.
Incidentally, browser performance isn't a simple yes/no issue -- it depends on a number of different pieces of technology. E.g. there's DOM and CSS, graphics, and Javascript. Chrome, for instance, does Javascript overall faster than FF (barring some instances, as above), hence Mozilla's work on JaegerMonkey.
It's clear that graphics alone do not make a good game. But graphics do remain very important in games, especially in 3D oriented titles.
For one, better graphics capabilities give game artists more flexibility in creating the right look and feel in a game. Think for instance how Team Fortress 2's unique visual style has been made possible by the advanced capabilities of modern 3D hardware and the Source engine. While graphics are getting closer and closer to photo-real, many game developers in the future will likely favour a more pseudo-real, stylised look. Why? In order to avoid falling into the uncanny valley.
While there is an obvious trend towards photorealism (this trend is nothing new), many of the best games of this generation aren't quite photorealistic. For example, in GTA IV, while the cityscapes are rendered in a more realistic style, the characters are rendered differently. Even in Crysis, while the environment looks amazingly real, the human characters are ever so slightly cartoony.
But ultimately, your question, pitting the world of Pokemon against Crysis is a bit pointless. It's like asking why people shoot live action film when animations can be just as entertaining. I'm not sure if titles like GTA IV or Crysis or CoD4 would have the same impact if they looked like Pokemon.
Heed my word, my brothers, for I have RTFA! It says that there's no way it has confirmed the presence of life right now or in the past on Mars. So what can be the big story they want to tell the President first?
Or if it's no bigger than "we found something that may or may not indicate the possibility that Mars may or may not have probably potentially hosted a form a life, maybe eventually?" then why the secrecy?
Exactly my thoughts too.
One optimistic possibility: they have photographic evidence of apparent fossilised life forms.
Perhaps more likely they have found something else interesting in the soil that would justify a mission to bring a sample back to earth. I believe there is already such a mission in the works, but maybe they are seeking funding to make it high priority.
I love the way the article uses the complete rewrite of Netscape as an example of why you shouldn't rewrite from scratch. Cause we all know how big a failure Firefox is Have to disagree with you.
While the Mozilla story did have a happy ending, the rewrite resulted in IE getting a near monopoly of the browser market. The "new" Netscape was massively delayed, and was finally released as a rebranded version of the bloated Mozilla suite. It was in the period between about 1999 and 2004 that IE expanded it's market share. In other words, Netscape lost as a result of throwing away the old code base.
It was only from around 2004 onwards, with Firefox, was Mozilla able to present a viable alternative to IE.
I agree with you totally. I've been toying around with the Firefox 3 Betas for a couple of weeks and I think the awesomebar is the best new feature. It's not broken -- it's different. Once you get used to it, finding pages you frequently visit becomes much easier.
Say you visited the Wikipedia page on the Tunguska event a couple of weeks. If you want to revisit the page, all you do is start typing the first few letters of "Tunguska" and the page comes to the top of the list. With the old type of address bar, you'll have to type the whole Wikipedia URL or search your browser history separately. This speedup is well worth the relatively shallow learning curve.
I find it pretty stupid to compare this feature with Windows' "adaptive menu" feature. There's only a superficial resemblance. Remember, the traditional address bar still "learns" in the way you hate by ordering URLs by the frequency with which you visit them. What is it with the Slashdot crowd and being insanely conservative about their software?
With 3D desktop effects and NTFS write support enabled by default, and fast user switching and improved X configuration, this is one of the most significant Ubuntu releases in a while.
"Efforts to control the net could stifle its revolutionary bent"
I believe that the stock images on the BBC are placed by the editors, and not by the writers. The editor probably simply stuck in the first stock image that the keyword "revolutionary" brought up.
It's not the first time I've seen an inappropriate or irrelevant picture accompanying an article on the BBC. This one seems to have been chosen to (poorly) emphasize some point about the Internet being revolutionary.
IIRC, "Revolution" was supposed to be the code name all along (the summary doesn't make this clear). What I'm less sure about is how good a name "Wii" is.
What I'm not able to figure out is what kind of advertising is going to be there on user pages. Yahoo Geocities has a huge advertising pane on the right side of every page. I wonder how google will deal with inserting ads. If anyone here has got Google Pages access, what kind of advertising is present on the pages?
Another thing that's not clear: how much bandwidth they offer. Geocities has a daily bandwidth limit per user. If the limit is exceeded, the user's page isn't accesible for the rest of the day. It would be interesting to see how Google deals with this.
I agree, and what the article says is actually pretty obvious if you examine it.
If you look back a bit in history, there tend to be brief periods when there this an explosion of new ideas and concepts, and these periods are always associated with particular geniuses. For physics, you could argue that we've been in one long "genius period" since Newton or perhaps Galileo. For other sciences, there have been different periods.
This is not unique to sciences, but happens with all fields. Why, for instance did so many musical geniuses emerge in Europe during the second half of the 19th century? Was it the water supply? No, it was because at that point there were a whole bunch of new ideas in music emerging. But by some time in the early 20th century, most of these musical ideas had been explored by composers, which is why there were much fewer classical music geniuses in the later 20th century. Same goes with the other arts.
Essential for genius to emerge is correct circumstances. A potential genius has to be born at a time when there is great scope in a particular field. Geniuses of the past usually had no shortage of living role models while growing up. So while biology plays a factor, it is important to be born at the right place at the right time, and have the right exposure. That's also why we don't see geniuses emerge from far away, cut-off parts of the world. No genius can develop in an intellectual vacuum.
This feature is a welcome addition, since I now no longer have to visit different sections to view the "sectional content".
Here's one suggestion for an improvement: How about automatically "promoting" abbreviated stories to full stories if a certain number of comments are posted on it. In other words if, say 200 comments are posted on one of these abbreviated stories, it becomes one of the main page stories and it's full summary is displayed.
The reason behind this is that if a "sectional" story is particularly popular, it probably deserves the same treatment as the major stories. I am more likely to take interest in a story if a large number of comments have been posted to it. Assuming that a good default is chosen for number of comments before an article is upgraded, this shouldn't affect your 15 stories a day rule much. Of course, registered users should be allowed to select their own minimum comment count.
In effect this would probably be a type of crude article moderation. The sectional stories are moderated up by way of user comments.
Of course, if you have more ambitious changes to story selection in mind, this wouldn't be of much relevance.
It looks like something CmdrTaco has introduced over the weekend. Basically it seems that "minor" stories that earlier used to appear only in subsections such as science.slashdot.org now appear as little stubs on the main page. For registered users, this can be customised -- see your Preferences page, under Homepage. You can use that to turn this feature off, or make full summaries for all stories appear on the main page.
CmdrTaco has been hinting that he will be making some major changes to Slashdot over the coming weeks/months. Check out some of his comments in this recent story. See this, this, this, and this. These indicate that major changes to the moderation system are also to be expected.
This particular feature is probably the first of these changes he's experimenting with. When it first made an appearence on friday/saturday, the stubs would appear on a plain white background. They added the grey styling a bit later. The prefs for this still have to be fleshed out a bit it seems.
(Sorry, I'm reposting this under my user name. For some reason my earlier attempt got posted as AC.)
While these above points are important, there is one issue I feel Slashdot must address properly: the context and background provided along with the story summaries.
Too often I see stories that mention a particular person or a particular piece of software without actually giving any context. For example, there was a recent story about Blender which didn't mention what Blender actually is. Now, in my case I knew perfectly well that Blender is an open source 3D modeller and renderer, but there were too many people posting comments in the thread saying "Err.. what's Blender?".
I feel that it is important for a story summary on Slashdot to provide the basic information a user would be looking for. In the Blender example, a user shouldn't have to click on the link simply to figure out what the software does. If the fact that Blender is a 3D modeller is briefly mentioned in the summary, the user is in a much better situation to decide whether or not to click on the link. This is important, as users usually skim through the headlines and summaries on the front page to decide what interests them.
Now, in many cases the summary doesn't need to provide any background. Your typical Slashdot reader would know that GNOME is a desktop environment, or who Richard Stallman is. But in other cases, I think it would be very good if the Slashdot editors can add a few words of background if the original submission didn't have any. They can use their own discretion to decide what needs background and what doesn't.
It's a comparatively small point, but it's one that's been irking me a bit. I feel a lot of users will agree with me on this, and there should be no reason for anyone to post "BTW, What on earth is (X)" type comments.
Another interesting question is, will existing x86 Linux distros run on the new Intel Macs? Perhaps there will be some trouble with the hardware, but once drivers are included, will the same old x86 distros run on these Macs? Is there anyone who can verify this?
It will be interesting to see if in the future, regular x86 distros also run on the x86 Macs. If that happens, we would be able to regard Macs as simply a special kind of PC:).
It's worth mentioning in the summary that these new Macs are Intel based. The linked articles state this. The first Intel Macs are here, ahead of when they were expected.
No, crocodile != lizard. Comparing crocodiles and lizards would be something like comparing dogs and monkeys. They belong to an entirely different order.
Crocodiles are from the order Crocodilia, lizards are from the order Squamata (which includes snakes).
Slashdot Mirror
Your blanket statement was to the effect that Gecko is always the slowest of the bunch, comparable to only Trident (what specific area of performance you never mention, implying performance of everything). Such are the ingredients of a troll.
Anyway, I've done a stupid thing and compared Opera 10.60 with the FF4 beta (not 3.6.6 as per above poster), just for you.
On my PC, Opera and FF4 are approximately neck-to-neck on the above benchmark, with FF4 having a small but consistent lead of about 10-15%. On zooming in to render in detail, FF's margin increases.
So how about another counterexample:
http://www.galbraiths.org/benchmarks/pixastic.html
FF4B1: 476ms
Opera 10.60: 827ms
Still standing by your claim that Opera is "faster" at everything?
Ok, here's a single counterexample to prove you wrong:
http://web.mit.edu/bzbarsky/www/mandelbrot-clean.html
Try it in the Firefox 4 beta, and compare it to the latest Chrome release.
The reason you got modded down is probably because you made a dramatic, blanket claim without backing it up with facts.
Incidentally, browser performance isn't a simple yes/no issue -- it depends on a number of different pieces of technology. E.g. there's DOM and CSS, graphics, and Javascript. Chrome, for instance, does Javascript overall faster than FF (barring some instances, as above), hence Mozilla's work on JaegerMonkey.
It's clear that graphics alone do not make a good game. But graphics do remain very important in games, especially in 3D oriented titles.
For one, better graphics capabilities give game artists more flexibility in creating the right look and feel in a game. Think for instance how Team Fortress 2's unique visual style has been made possible by the advanced capabilities of modern 3D hardware and the Source engine. While graphics are getting closer and closer to photo-real, many game developers in the future will likely favour a more pseudo-real, stylised look. Why? In order to avoid falling into the uncanny valley.
While there is an obvious trend towards photorealism (this trend is nothing new), many of the best games of this generation aren't quite photorealistic. For example, in GTA IV, while the cityscapes are rendered in a more realistic style, the characters are rendered differently. Even in Crysis, while the environment looks amazingly real, the human characters are ever so slightly cartoony.
But ultimately, your question, pitting the world of Pokemon against Crysis is a bit pointless. It's like asking why people shoot live action film when animations can be just as entertaining. I'm not sure if titles like GTA IV or Crysis or CoD4 would have the same impact if they looked like Pokemon.
No sharks, but this article has a nice picture. Cool that it looks like something from low budget TV sci-fi (except that it's real)
Heed my word, my brothers, for I have RTFA! It says that there's no way it has confirmed the presence of life right now or in the past on Mars. So what can be the big story they want to tell the President first?
Or if it's no bigger than "we found something that may or may not indicate the possibility that Mars may or may not have probably potentially hosted a form a life, maybe eventually?" then why the secrecy?
Exactly my thoughts too.
One optimistic possibility: they have photographic evidence of apparent fossilised life forms.
Perhaps more likely they have found something else interesting in the soil that would justify a mission to bring a sample back to earth. I believe there is already such a mission in the works, but maybe they are seeking funding to make it high priority.
All this is pure speculation though.
While the Mozilla story did have a happy ending, the rewrite resulted in IE getting a near monopoly of the browser market. The "new" Netscape was massively delayed, and was finally released as a rebranded version of the bloated Mozilla suite. It was in the period between about 1999 and 2004 that IE expanded it's market share. In other words, Netscape lost as a result of throwing away the old code base.
It was only from around 2004 onwards, with Firefox, was Mozilla able to present a viable alternative to IE.
I agree with you totally. I've been toying around with the Firefox 3 Betas for a couple of weeks and I think the awesomebar is the best new feature. It's not broken -- it's different. Once you get used to it, finding pages you frequently visit becomes much easier.
Say you visited the Wikipedia page on the Tunguska event a couple of weeks. If you want to revisit the page, all you do is start typing the first few letters of "Tunguska" and the page comes to the top of the list. With the old type of address bar, you'll have to type the whole Wikipedia URL or search your browser history separately. This speedup is well worth the relatively shallow learning curve.
I find it pretty stupid to compare this feature with Windows' "adaptive menu" feature. There's only a superficial resemblance. Remember, the traditional address bar still "learns" in the way you hate by ordering URLs by the frequency with which you visit them. What is it with the Slashdot crowd and being insanely conservative about their software?
Just to clarify, the submitter is not the real Miguel de Icaza. The real one uses the Slashdot ID miguel.
Unfortunately the summary doesn't link to a good list of features.
The release notes for the beta version give a good overview of what you can expect:
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/gutsybeta
With 3D desktop effects and NTFS write support enabled by default, and fast user switching and improved X configuration, this is one of the most significant Ubuntu releases in a while.
Already slashdotted. Editors, a better link to the text would have been this one on the Ubuntu mailing list.
If I had any say, it would be called the Indignant Ichthyosaur.
Or maybe the Ignominious Ibis.
The release was officially announced on the mailing list moments ago. Here is the link:
/ 2007-April/000102.html
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce
The caption for that picture is your answer:
"Efforts to control the net could stifle its revolutionary bent"
I believe that the stock images on the BBC are placed by the editors, and not by the writers. The editor probably simply stuck in the first stock image that the keyword "revolutionary" brought up.
It's not the first time I've seen an inappropriate or irrelevant picture accompanying an article on the BBC. This one seems to have been chosen to (poorly) emphasize some point about the Internet being revolutionary.
IIRC, "Revolution" was supposed to be the code name all along (the summary doesn't make this clear). What I'm less sure about is how good a name "Wii" is.
No FIRST POST! YOU are too late i am first!!
HAHAHA OMG I fooled you lol!!!! APril Fools!! lol
What I'm not able to figure out is what kind of advertising is going to be there on user pages. Yahoo Geocities has a huge advertising pane on the right side of every page. I wonder how google will deal with inserting ads. If anyone here has got Google Pages access, what kind of advertising is present on the pages?
Another thing that's not clear: how much bandwidth they offer. Geocities has a daily bandwidth limit per user. If the limit is exceeded, the user's page isn't accesible for the rest of the day. It would be interesting to see how Google deals with this.
I agree, and what the article says is actually pretty obvious if you examine it.
If you look back a bit in history, there tend to be brief periods when there this an explosion of new ideas and concepts, and these periods are always associated with particular geniuses. For physics, you could argue that we've been in one long "genius period" since Newton or perhaps Galileo. For other sciences, there have been different periods.
This is not unique to sciences, but happens with all fields. Why, for instance did so many musical geniuses emerge in Europe during the second half of the 19th century? Was it the water supply? No, it was because at that point there were a whole bunch of new ideas in music emerging. But by some time in the early 20th century, most of these musical ideas had been explored by composers, which is why there were much fewer classical music geniuses in the later 20th century. Same goes with the other arts.
Essential for genius to emerge is correct circumstances. A potential genius has to be born at a time when there is great scope in a particular field. Geniuses of the past usually had no shortage of living role models while growing up. So while biology plays a factor, it is important to be born at the right place at the right time, and have the right exposure. That's also why we don't see geniuses emerge from far away, cut-off parts of the world. No genius can develop in an intellectual vacuum.
This feature is a welcome addition, since I now no longer have to visit different sections to view the "sectional content".
Here's one suggestion for an improvement: How about automatically "promoting" abbreviated stories to full stories if a certain number of comments are posted on it. In other words if, say 200 comments are posted on one of these abbreviated stories, it becomes one of the main page stories and it's full summary is displayed.
The reason behind this is that if a "sectional" story is particularly popular, it probably deserves the same treatment as the major stories. I am more likely to take interest in a story if a large number of comments have been posted to it. Assuming that a good default is chosen for number of comments before an article is upgraded, this shouldn't affect your 15 stories a day rule much. Of course, registered users should be allowed to select their own minimum comment count.
In effect this would probably be a type of crude article moderation. The sectional stories are moderated up by way of user comments.
Of course, if you have more ambitious changes to story selection in mind, this wouldn't be of much relevance.
It looks like something CmdrTaco has introduced over the weekend. Basically it seems that "minor" stories that earlier used to appear only in subsections such as science.slashdot.org now appear as little stubs on the main page. For registered users, this can be customised -- see your Preferences page, under Homepage. You can use that to turn this feature off, or make full summaries for all stories appear on the main page.
CmdrTaco has been hinting that he will be making some major changes to Slashdot over the coming weeks/months. Check out some of his comments in this recent story. See this, this, this, and this. These indicate that major changes to the moderation system are also to be expected.
This particular feature is probably the first of these changes he's experimenting with. When it first made an appearence on friday/saturday, the stubs would appear on a plain white background. They added the grey styling a bit later. The prefs for this still have to be fleshed out a bit it seems.
Expect CmdrTaco to make a post about this soon.
It appears that this would apply to any free software, not just Linux. It would apply to at least all GPL'd software, including gcc, etc.
(Sorry, I'm reposting this under my user name. For some reason my earlier attempt got posted as AC.)
While these above points are important, there is one issue I feel Slashdot must address properly: the context and background provided along with the story summaries.
Too often I see stories that mention a particular person or a particular piece of software without actually giving any context. For example, there was a recent story about Blender which didn't mention what Blender actually is. Now, in my case I knew perfectly well that Blender is an open source 3D modeller and renderer, but there were too many people posting comments in the thread saying "Err.. what's Blender?".
I feel that it is important for a story summary on Slashdot to provide the basic information a user would be looking for. In the Blender example, a user shouldn't have to click on the link simply to figure out what the software does. If the fact that Blender is a 3D modeller is briefly mentioned in the summary, the user is in a much better situation to decide whether or not to click on the link. This is important, as users usually skim through the headlines and summaries on the front page to decide what interests them.
Now, in many cases the summary doesn't need to provide any background. Your typical Slashdot reader would know that GNOME is a desktop environment, or who Richard Stallman is. But in other cases, I think it would be very good if the Slashdot editors can add a few words of background if the original submission didn't have any. They can use their own discretion to decide what needs background and what doesn't.
It's a comparatively small point, but it's one that's been irking me a bit. I feel a lot of users will agree with me on this, and there should be no reason for anyone to post "BTW, What on earth is (X)" type comments.
Another interesting question is, will existing x86 Linux distros run on the new Intel Macs? Perhaps there will be some trouble with the hardware, but once drivers are included, will the same old x86 distros run on these Macs? Is there anyone who can verify this?
:).
It will be interesting to see if in the future, regular x86 distros also run on the x86 Macs. If that happens, we would be able to regard Macs as simply a special kind of PC
It seems that Zonk added the "x86" part a bit later. The very first version of the summary didn't mention Intel or x86 anywhere.
It's worth mentioning in the summary that these new Macs are Intel based. The linked articles state this. The first Intel Macs are here, ahead of when they were expected.
Isn't the crocodile the world's largest lizard?
No, crocodile != lizard. Comparing crocodiles and lizards would be something like comparing dogs and monkeys. They belong to an entirely different order.
Crocodiles are from the order Crocodilia, lizards are from the order Squamata (which includes snakes).