Up to that last sentence, I argued why a single CPU cannot execute programs in parallel. A dual-CPU system can, but only in a multithreaded environment where each thread does exactly equal work and no thread depends on the other. Because this never happens except in certain major scientific or mathematical programs, a dual-CPU system does not get double the speed of a single-CPU system, as any benchmark can tell you.
I don't think you understand the way processors work. A 2GHz CPU has two billion clock cycles per second. A 3GHz CPU has three billion. Therefore a 2GHz CPU has 50% longer (slower) clock cycles than a 3GHz CPU.
Yet a 2GHz Athlon64 is about equivalent to a 3GHz Pentium4 because they do more per clock than the Pentium 4.
I am well aware of instruction pairing and pipelining, having written optimized assembly code for Pentiums. And that is not the same thing as parallelism -- only two CPUs, or a single dual-core CPU, is truly parallel. A single CPU can only execute a single instruction at a time.
Of course many instructions take more than one clock cycle to execute, so traditionally some clocks would be wasted, reading no instructions, while the old one gets processed. Pipelining allows the proceeding instructions to be read and executed while computations are done on the previous one. But only one instruction can still be read and 'consumed' per clock. A program with 50k instructions cannot possibly be finished in less than 50k clocks.
If you don't believe me, read benchmarks on various systems and see for yourself that doubling the number of CPUs does not double the speed of the system.
Clock cycles don't matter. Computations matter. Since programs are far more sequential than parallel, even two CPUs won't give nearly the benefit a single twice-as-fast CPU would, and four CPUs would see no advantage over two, even if they're equal speed. Of course I'm referring to everuday computer usage, not mathematical or scientific programs designed to be run over large networks.
It's akin to having four people each running 10 miles per hour. They cannot reach 40 mph that way; they can only each run 10 mph at the same time. A 6.8 GHz [non-fictional] processor would be at least as fast as four 1.7 GHz CPUs in all cases, but usually will be four times as fast, assuming each CPU did equal work per clock cycle (unlike Pentium 4 vs Pentium M vs Athlon).
ATI writes really horrible device drivers, and this is likely the reason your Mac performance is lower than your Windows performance. Their drivers for Windows, while not perfect, are much better and much faster than their Linux drivers, so I assume the same is true for MacOSX, a Unix derivative.
The way to test this is to see if other graphics-intensive 3D games run as fast on Mac as on Windows. If not, blame ATI. Blizzard has nothing to do with it.
It supports a maximum of 128MB of RAM (really!) and a maximum 40GB of disk drive space. So they're designing and pricing the OS to be for extremely cheap low-end computers for total computer newbies, and they're inducing the limitations to ensure it's useless for anyone else. They actually are purposely making it inferior to any other OS to try to keep it used only for its intended purpose and audience.
I feel it's necessary to clarify this. Starter Edition is not a cheap alternative to XP Home; it's supposed to be for people who have never used a computer before. Ever. In fact, look here -- it's maximum resolution is 800x600 (that's XP Home/Pro's minimum supported resolution!) and it only allows three programs to run at once. But it has other features geared to people who are basically afraid of computers.
Of course, people who can't even use XP Home or OSX are probably not eager to use computers at all, so the market for this is understandably minimal.
Re:Internet Explorer already supports crazy graphi
on
IE7 Details Emerge
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· Score: 1
Um, no it can't... did you actually view the link in IE?
Internet Explorer already supports crazy graphics
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IE7 Details Emerge
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· Score: 1
While there is no current way to emulate all capabilities of a 32-bit PNG in IE, it does support a non-standard CSS property "filter" which allows for some cool and slightly useful graphical effects done client-side. This page demonstrates them... compare it in IE vs Firefox. It might seem useless but it could be used for interesting mouse-overs, and all of the effects (AFAIK) apply to text as well as images.
It's idiotic that Slashdot's comment system doesn't automatically convert newlines to tags... I keep forgetting I need to manually place them. Below is how the post was meant to look:
There are many ways advertisers can construct irritating advertisements, and the more of them you disable, the more you're taking away from legitimate websites.
Some people disable JavaScript entirely, thus making it hard for most websites to rely on it (though GMail does, which helps the rest of us).
Some people disable Flash. This is less bad, but there are some websites that use it innocuously, like for their menus.
Many people, including myself, disable pop-ups. Fortunately they're usually allowed in response to click events, which is how most of the legitimate ones are used, but some ad pop-ups are now being coded to spawn in response to click events, so people will disable pop-ups entirely soon.
Now there are floaters. Of course these are the most irritating form of advertising. What do you do in this situation? Stop going to the websites that employ them! E-mail the administrator and let him know how much you hate those goddamn ads!
My website uses a floating pop-up for a legitimate purpose. When you try creating a post, an iframe is quickly and invisibly loaded to check if your password is correct. If it is, the comment is submitted. If it is not, a pop-up spawns telling you that and letting you change your password if you want... but this happens without redirecting the main page, which would be annoying. Anyway since this pop-up loads from the iframe's onLoad handler, pop-up blockers block it, so I used a floating fake pop-up to get around it.
You can see my floater by going to a sample post (like http://devimg.net/?Post=194) and posting a comment using someone's name, such as "CGameProgrammer", without a password (or with the wrong one).
Incidentally, I also employ one other floater to get around another limitation -- there is no "_opener" target for anchor links. Since I wanted links in a pop-up to open in the main window, but to open in the same window if it's not in a pop-up, the solution I decided worked the best was to use a fake pop-up instead of a real one. This floater is spawned when you click the "referrers" button on the top-right of a post.
There are many ways advertisers can construct irritating advertisements, and the more of them you disable, the more you're taking away from legitimate websites.
Some people disable JavaScript entirely, thus making it hard for most websites to rely on it (though GMail does, which helps the rest of us).
Some people disable Flash. This is less bad, but there are some websites that use it innocuously, like for their menus.
Many people, including myself, disable pop-ups. Fortunately they're usually allowed in response to click events, which is how most of the legitimate ones are used, but some ad pop-ups are now being coded to spawn in response to click events, so people will disable pop-ups entirely soon.
Now there are floaters. Of course these are the most irritating form of advertising. What do you do in this situation? Stop going to the websites that employ them! E-mail the administrator and let him know how much you hate those goddamn ads!
My website uses a floating pop-up for a legitimate purpose. When you try creating a post, an iframe is quickly and invisibly loaded to check if your password is correct. If it is, the comment is submitted. If it is not, a pop-up spawns telling you that and letting you change your password if you want... but this happens without redirecting the main page, which would be annoying. Anyway since this pop-up loads from the iframe's onLoad handler, pop-up blockers block it, so I used a floating fake pop-up to get around it.
You can see my floater by going to a sample post (like http://devimg.net/?Post=194) and posting a comment using someone's name, such as "CGameProgrammer", without a password (or with the wrong one).
Incidentally, I also employ one other floater to get around another limitation -- there is no "_opener" target for anchor links. Since I wanted links in a pop-up to open in the main window, but to open in the same window if it's not in a pop-up, the solution I decided worked the best was to use a fake pop-up instead of a real one. This floater is spawned when you click the "referrers" button on the top-right of a post.
Thanks for the replies guys, but they're all biased in favor of Firefox. Most of my website's visitors use Internet Explorer. That means no tabs, and the only way to open something in a new window is right-click and click New Window (and that window grabs the focus too). One needs to keep that in mind when evaluating a website's design.
However, the prev/next feature for images is a pretty nice idea. I'll add that in, along with a list of the other thumbnails below each image.
By the way, my site also takes advantage of fake pop-ups, because if you try posting using the wrong password (or a name someone else already took) a pop-up appears without the page redirecting anywhere, which I think is a nice convenience. But the pop-up isn't loaded directly in response to a user click, so I had to use a fake pop-up to make it work. Try posting a comment on my site with the name "CGameProgrammer" to see the pop-up in action. It even resizes itself to fit its contents... image if advertisers started doing that sort of thing alot.:)
If you're in 640x480 and open a large image, that works fine -- the window will be is no larger than 640x480, and has scrollbars. JavaScript is used to check the screen size or the browser's inner dimensions when it can.
Your point about expected behavior makes sense to an extent... but you assume the user would ever want to completely replace the current page with the new one. In my case, he'd usually want to open each of the images, and then read the post or its comments... it's not like he's loading an entire new webpage, exactly.
Originally, I allowed the images to respond normally to middle- or right-clicks, so you could middle-click to open in a new tab or right-click to do whatever... and only left-clicking would show the pop-up. But I had to abandon that due to the way I'm handling Google ads... it's complicated.
I assume you're trying to be smarmy or something, but while the internet (or the world wide web) isn't the most important creation of the 20th century, obviously, it is arguably the most revolutionary.
Transportation? OK, now we can get places quicker, encouraging growth outwards instead of concentrating in cities. Quite revolutionary.
Better medicine? OK, people die less, or at least they cease dying of certain causes and instead die of different ones. Important, but not exactly revolutionary.
Television? Mostly just for entertainment... even the news is for entertainment. Newspapers remain the best source of news, excluding the internet. Not revolutionary.
My website uses pop-ups for viewing images (here's an example post; left-click the images to view them). I used to have regular links directly to the images, but felt it was actually more annoying that way. I, for one, prefer having a pop-up sized to exactly fit the image; when I'm in 1600x1200 resolution, viewing a 640x480 image, I appreciate it not taking up the entire screen, as a new tab or window would do.
Anyway, do you agree I've used them legitimately, or do you think even this sort of thing should be done without pop-ups?
Calling the 64-bit chip the VIIV would be fantastically idiotic marketing. They called their 586 the Pentium -- it sounds cool and has some logical basis ("pent" as in "5"). They liked it so much, they kept it even for the 686, 786, and 886 (which by all rights should be the hexium, septium, and octium). They instead called it the Pentium 2/3/4 because it's obvious which is best. VIIV is either unpronounceable or, if pronounced "veev", merely sounds ridiculous. Keep in mind this company likes names like Itanium, Centrino, Celeron, etc. No, they will not be releasing any "Veev" anytime soon.
They likely will just call it the [something] 64, and 64 will be written in arabic numerals because people won't know what the hell VIIV is supposed to be -- we certainly don't, and it's not even a valid roman numeral. LXIV is 64, IIRC.
As for VIIV being some sort of graphic representation of a new CPU structure, that can't be true either, again due to the reasons mentioned above.
They mentioned JPEGs because they're one of the two most popular image formats, with GIF being the other. BMPs are Windows-specific, PNGs are not very common and few mainstream people know of them, etc.
MP3 are by far the most popular music format. WAVs are huge in size and Windows-specific and no one knows of Ogg Vorbis.
So the two examples chosen were perfectly fine. Plus, can you name a popular lossless sound format? No. They're so large in size that they're not popular.
Anyway, this is a really good idea; I'm excited to see what happens. Since filesize is never an issue with models, the format should be designed for simple reading and writing. Perhaps it can even be slightly redundant, with a list of unique vertex positions and another list of vertices, where multiple vertices can be at the same position if their texture data differs.
Is the problem due to the OS or due to the sound card drivers? I assume the card makers simply didn't bother writing Linux drivers, but please correct me if I'm wrong, or clarify otherwise.
So many people don't understand there's more to a computer than the operating system. I used to have frequent crashes with Windows XP but that was due to faulty video-card drivers (it was a laptop, the drivers had to come from Dell). Anyway after a few driver updates, the crashes stopped.
I knew what was causing the crash because Windows XP prints a neat error dialog after you reboot (but only if it crashes, not necessarily from a freeze). Anyway everything before and including WinME is crap, but WinXP at least works fine, and I'm sure Windows 2000 does too, all things being equal, since I know a number of websites hosted on it that are never down.
Since everyone seems so giddy about the perceived ability to exploit GMail for hosting files, I'll try to introduce reality by uploading my 88x31 banner right here on SlashDot. Enjoy. It's base-64 encoded; just decode to get the image.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you read the rest of my post.
Up to that last sentence, I argued why a single CPU cannot execute programs in parallel. A dual-CPU system can, but only in a multithreaded environment where each thread does exactly equal work and no thread depends on the other. Because this never happens except in certain major scientific or mathematical programs, a dual-CPU system does not get double the speed of a single-CPU system, as any benchmark can tell you.
I don't think you understand the way processors work. A 2GHz CPU has two billion clock cycles per second. A 3GHz CPU has three billion. Therefore a 2GHz CPU has 50% longer (slower) clock cycles than a 3GHz CPU. Yet a 2GHz Athlon64 is about equivalent to a 3GHz Pentium4 because they do more per clock than the Pentium 4. I am well aware of instruction pairing and pipelining, having written optimized assembly code for Pentiums. And that is not the same thing as parallelism -- only two CPUs, or a single dual-core CPU, is truly parallel. A single CPU can only execute a single instruction at a time. Of course many instructions take more than one clock cycle to execute, so traditionally some clocks would be wasted, reading no instructions, while the old one gets processed. Pipelining allows the proceeding instructions to be read and executed while computations are done on the previous one. But only one instruction can still be read and 'consumed' per clock. A program with 50k instructions cannot possibly be finished in less than 50k clocks. If you don't believe me, read benchmarks on various systems and see for yourself that doubling the number of CPUs does not double the speed of the system.
Clock cycles don't matter. Computations matter. Since programs are far more sequential than parallel, even two CPUs won't give nearly the benefit a single twice-as-fast CPU would, and four CPUs would see no advantage over two, even if they're equal speed. Of course I'm referring to everuday computer usage, not mathematical or scientific programs designed to be run over large networks.
It's akin to having four people each running 10 miles per hour. They cannot reach 40 mph that way; they can only each run 10 mph at the same time. A 6.8 GHz [non-fictional] processor would be at least as fast as four 1.7 GHz CPUs in all cases, but usually will be four times as fast, assuming each CPU did equal work per clock cycle (unlike Pentium 4 vs Pentium M vs Athlon).
ATI writes really horrible device drivers, and this is likely the reason your Mac performance is lower than your Windows performance. Their drivers for Windows, while not perfect, are much better and much faster than their Linux drivers, so I assume the same is true for MacOSX, a Unix derivative.
The way to test this is to see if other graphics-intensive 3D games run as fast on Mac as on Windows. If not, blame ATI. Blizzard has nothing to do with it.
Much of Google's images are at least twice as high-res as MultiMap's. You must have been looking at one of the low-res areas.
It supports a maximum of 128MB of RAM (really!) and a maximum 40GB of disk drive space. So they're designing and pricing the OS to be for extremely cheap low-end computers for total computer newbies, and they're inducing the limitations to ensure it's useless for anyone else. They actually are purposely making it inferior to any other OS to try to keep it used only for its intended purpose and audience.
I feel it's necessary to clarify this. Starter Edition is not a cheap alternative to XP Home; it's supposed to be for people who have never used a computer before. Ever. In fact, look here -- it's maximum resolution is 800x600 (that's XP Home/Pro's minimum supported resolution!) and it only allows three programs to run at once. But it has other features geared to people who are basically afraid of computers.
Of course, people who can't even use XP Home or OSX are probably not eager to use computers at all, so the market for this is understandably minimal.
Um, no it can't... did you actually view the link in IE?
While there is no current way to emulate all capabilities of a 32-bit PNG in IE, it does support a non-standard CSS property "filter" which allows for some cool and slightly useful graphical effects done client-side. This page demonstrates them... compare it in IE vs Firefox. It might seem useless but it could be used for interesting mouse-overs, and all of the effects (AFAIK) apply to text as well as images.
Just imagine having the robot being hijacked.
It's idiotic that Slashdot's comment system doesn't automatically convert newlines to
tags... I keep forgetting I need to manually place them. Below is how the post was meant to look:
There are many ways advertisers can construct irritating advertisements, and the more of them you disable, the more you're taking away from legitimate websites.
Some people disable JavaScript entirely, thus making it hard for most websites to rely on it (though GMail does, which helps the rest of us).
Some people disable Flash. This is less bad, but there are some websites that use it innocuously, like for their menus.
Many people, including myself, disable pop-ups. Fortunately they're usually allowed in response to click events, which is how most of the legitimate ones are used, but some ad pop-ups are now being coded to spawn in response to click events, so people will disable pop-ups entirely soon.
Now there are floaters. Of course these are the most irritating form of advertising. What do you do in this situation? Stop going to the websites that employ them! E-mail the administrator and let him know how much you hate those goddamn ads!
My website uses a floating pop-up for a legitimate purpose. When you try creating a post, an iframe is quickly and invisibly loaded to check if your password is correct. If it is, the comment is submitted. If it is not, a pop-up spawns telling you that and letting you change your password if you want... but this happens without redirecting the main page, which would be annoying. Anyway since this pop-up loads from the iframe's onLoad handler, pop-up blockers block it, so I used a floating fake pop-up to get around it.
You can see my floater by going to a sample post (like http://devimg.net/?Post=194) and posting a comment using someone's name, such as "CGameProgrammer", without a password (or with the wrong one).
Incidentally, I also employ one other floater to get around another limitation -- there is no "_opener" target for anchor links. Since I wanted links in a pop-up to open in the main window, but to open in the same window if it's not in a pop-up, the solution I decided worked the best was to use a fake pop-up instead of a real one. This floater is spawned when you click the "referrers" button on the top-right of a post.
There are many ways advertisers can construct irritating advertisements, and the more of them you disable, the more you're taking away from legitimate websites. Some people disable JavaScript entirely, thus making it hard for most websites to rely on it (though GMail does, which helps the rest of us). Some people disable Flash. This is less bad, but there are some websites that use it innocuously, like for their menus. Many people, including myself, disable pop-ups. Fortunately they're usually allowed in response to click events, which is how most of the legitimate ones are used, but some ad pop-ups are now being coded to spawn in response to click events, so people will disable pop-ups entirely soon. Now there are floaters. Of course these are the most irritating form of advertising. What do you do in this situation? Stop going to the websites that employ them! E-mail the administrator and let him know how much you hate those goddamn ads! My website uses a floating pop-up for a legitimate purpose. When you try creating a post, an iframe is quickly and invisibly loaded to check if your password is correct. If it is, the comment is submitted. If it is not, a pop-up spawns telling you that and letting you change your password if you want... but this happens without redirecting the main page, which would be annoying. Anyway since this pop-up loads from the iframe's onLoad handler, pop-up blockers block it, so I used a floating fake pop-up to get around it. You can see my floater by going to a sample post (like http://devimg.net/?Post=194) and posting a comment using someone's name, such as "CGameProgrammer", without a password (or with the wrong one). Incidentally, I also employ one other floater to get around another limitation -- there is no "_opener" target for anchor links. Since I wanted links in a pop-up to open in the main window, but to open in the same window if it's not in a pop-up, the solution I decided worked the best was to use a fake pop-up instead of a real one. This floater is spawned when you click the "referrers" button on the top-right of a post.
The yikes.com site is up, but all the images are hotlinked from www.soe.ucsc.edu and it's been slashdotted now.
Thanks for the replies guys, but they're all biased in favor of Firefox. Most of my website's visitors use Internet Explorer. That means no tabs, and the only way to open something in a new window is right-click and click New Window (and that window grabs the focus too). One needs to keep that in mind when evaluating a website's design. However, the prev/next feature for images is a pretty nice idea. I'll add that in, along with a list of the other thumbnails below each image. By the way, my site also takes advantage of fake pop-ups, because if you try posting using the wrong password (or a name someone else already took) a pop-up appears without the page redirecting anywhere, which I think is a nice convenience. But the pop-up isn't loaded directly in response to a user click, so I had to use a fake pop-up to make it work. Try posting a comment on my site with the name "CGameProgrammer" to see the pop-up in action. It even resizes itself to fit its contents... image if advertisers started doing that sort of thing alot. :)
If you're in 640x480 and open a large image, that works fine -- the window will be is no larger than 640x480, and has scrollbars. JavaScript is used to check the screen size or the browser's inner dimensions when it can. Your point about expected behavior makes sense to an extent... but you assume the user would ever want to completely replace the current page with the new one. In my case, he'd usually want to open each of the images, and then read the post or its comments... it's not like he's loading an entire new webpage, exactly. Originally, I allowed the images to respond normally to middle- or right-clicks, so you could middle-click to open in a new tab or right-click to do whatever... and only left-clicking would show the pop-up. But I had to abandon that due to the way I'm handling Google ads... it's complicated.
I assume you're trying to be smarmy or something, but while the internet (or the world wide web) isn't the most important creation of the 20th century, obviously, it is arguably the most revolutionary. Transportation? OK, now we can get places quicker, encouraging growth outwards instead of concentrating in cities. Quite revolutionary. Better medicine? OK, people die less, or at least they cease dying of certain causes and instead die of different ones. Important, but not exactly revolutionary. Television? Mostly just for entertainment... even the news is for entertainment. Newspapers remain the best source of news, excluding the internet. Not revolutionary.
My website uses pop-ups for viewing images (here's an example post; left-click the images to view them). I used to have regular links directly to the images, but felt it was actually more annoying that way. I, for one, prefer having a pop-up sized to exactly fit the image; when I'm in 1600x1200 resolution, viewing a 640x480 image, I appreciate it not taking up the entire screen, as a new tab or window would do. Anyway, do you agree I've used them legitimately, or do you think even this sort of thing should be done without pop-ups?
Calling the 64-bit chip the VIIV would be fantastically idiotic marketing. They called their 586 the Pentium -- it sounds cool and has some logical basis ("pent" as in "5"). They liked it so much, they kept it even for the 686, 786, and 886 (which by all rights should be the hexium, septium, and octium). They instead called it the Pentium 2/3/4 because it's obvious which is best. VIIV is either unpronounceable or, if pronounced "veev", merely sounds ridiculous. Keep in mind this company likes names like Itanium, Centrino, Celeron, etc. No, they will not be releasing any "Veev" anytime soon. They likely will just call it the [something] 64, and 64 will be written in arabic numerals because people won't know what the hell VIIV is supposed to be -- we certainly don't, and it's not even a valid roman numeral. LXIV is 64, IIRC. As for VIIV being some sort of graphic representation of a new CPU structure, that can't be true either, again due to the reasons mentioned above.
Below the search results, it says:
Your query linux did not return any result because all the selected sources timed out.
Note: Slashdot.org servers are currently not serving all requests from Clusty.com.
They mentioned JPEGs because they're one of the two most popular image formats, with GIF being the other. BMPs are Windows-specific, PNGs are not very common and few mainstream people know of them, etc. MP3 are by far the most popular music format. WAVs are huge in size and Windows-specific and no one knows of Ogg Vorbis. So the two examples chosen were perfectly fine. Plus, can you name a popular lossless sound format? No. They're so large in size that they're not popular. Anyway, this is a really good idea; I'm excited to see what happens. Since filesize is never an issue with models, the format should be designed for simple reading and writing. Perhaps it can even be slightly redundant, with a list of unique vertex positions and another list of vertices, where multiple vertices can be at the same position if their texture data differs.
Is the problem due to the OS or due to the sound card drivers? I assume the card makers simply didn't bother writing Linux drivers, but please correct me if I'm wrong, or clarify otherwise.
So many people don't understand there's more to a computer than the operating system. I used to have frequent crashes with Windows XP but that was due to faulty video-card drivers (it was a laptop, the drivers had to come from Dell). Anyway after a few driver updates, the crashes stopped. I knew what was causing the crash because Windows XP prints a neat error dialog after you reboot (but only if it crashes, not necessarily from a freeze). Anyway everything before and including WinME is crap, but WinXP at least works fine, and I'm sure Windows 2000 does too, all things being equal, since I know a number of websites hosted on it that are never down.