For the heck of it I ran the sunspider tests for chrome 4.0 beta and three versions of firefox - 3.7a1pre, 3.6b and 3.5.5 I also tested on opera 10 and ie 8 but omit those as they were very slow. Tests are on an aging athlon mp dual cpu system.
Chrome came in at 1315 Firefox 3.7a at 1818 Firefox 3.6b at 2045 Firefox 3.5.5 at 2472
Observations - the fannkuch test ran 25% slower on 3.7a then on 3.5.5, something odd there.
When comparing Chrome to 3.7a Chrome pulls ahead primarily on the regexp and date functions and to a lesser extent on the strings. 3.7a however is significantly faster on the math tests.
I wonder if we are getting to the point where on a modern cpu the actual perceived differences in speed will be negligible.
The non-wired Sony ereaders are superior. The battery life is measured in weeks, not hours or days as with these wired devices. Any one who still reads books really doesn't need to be able to download books on the fly when they probably will load far more books on to their device than they can hope to read in many years. I can see wired if you absolutely must be able to download the daily newspaper but I find the battery life trade off vs marginal convenience (news papers are still beter read at newspaper size).
Powerful desktops and workstations always were a niche. Average prices have declined largely due to the decline in component costs. Middle of the road CPU's are cheaper, storage is significantly cheaper and display prices have dropped tremendously. So what might have been a 2K middle of the road desktop in 1998 is now 1K, give or take.
The problem with the netbooks is they are underpowered relative to the OS and basic applications. They are also too small for regular prolonged use - both in keyboard and display space. But for some people that is a trade off they are willing to take for convenience or lack of funds. My primary point was I think the craze will end with the pick up in economy as that price shopper moves up.
As to another poster who said they are in addition to people's regular laptops (or desktop as the declining case may be) - I too think that will fade as, excepting a minority, it will become *inconvenient* over time to maintain/synch up.
I'm not knocking netbooks. They have their place. I just don't think the place is anywhere near as large as pundits want you to believe.
So.. netbooks are about 10% of pc sales and carry a margin of next to zero. They are a niche product for those who want a small device for convenience and will see growth stunted as the eekonomy recovers as those who couldn't afford a desk top replacement laptop abandon the cheap netbook segment for low/mid end full sized/powered laptops.
Perhaps you would like to rebuild and exponentially expand the current electric grid while you are at it. If not, kiss your electric car dreams good bye.
You hit on a number of important reasons why books are advantageous compared to e-readers. There is also the issue of format. Real books come in a very wide variety of sizes, many times for a reason. Some things just aren't meant for a 5 or 6" screen. e-readers are also sterile when compared to a real book which offers tactile and other sensory input (smell, look, sounds).
However what e-readers do offer is convenience and an easy to read screen (unlike lcds). They have their place and I do own one. But I will still continue to buy new (real) books. I find I am using the e-reader more for older books which I would otherwise probably never spend money to buy.
To be fair, I think the pressure to be 'first' was the primary motivator, but not the only one. LHC is an incredibly large project subject to cost overruns, politics (both from physicists and member states) and any number of other things which plague these types of efforts.
And those pressures do not just effect the LHC but also shape how those funding particle physics will think of future proposals.
CERN elected to speed up their testing and skip or minimize the amount of low(er) power testing and ramp up to higher energies.
ScienceDaily (June 25, 2007) â" Speaking recently at the 142nd session of the CERN1 Council, the Organizationâ(TM)s Director General Robert Aymar announced that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will start up in May 2008, taking the first steps towards studying physics at a new high-energy frontier.
A low-energy run originally scheduled for this year has been dropped as the result of a number of minor delays accumulated over the final months of LHC installation and commissioning, coupled with the failure in March of a pressure test in one of the machineâ(TM)s components.
âoeThe low-energy run at the end of this year was extremely tight due to a number of small delays, but the inner triplet problem now makes it impossible,â said LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans. âoeWeâ(TM)ll be starting up for physics in May 2008, as always foreseen, and will commission the machine to full energy in one go.â
CERN management did not want to undertake any significant low power testing and consequently suffered a major failure. In addition, as it now seems clear, the overall oversight left something to be desired. I'm not saying people did not work very hard but it is difficult to believe corners were not cut in a race to get running before the Tevatron could start accumulating enough statistics to allow them to spot and claim the Higgs (though still not likely at the 5 sigma level.)
If this guy can't handle reading the FORTRAN code I seriously doubt he is capable of re-inventing it in a 'new' language. FORTRAN is not that hard to understand even "old" dialects.
FORTRAN baby. It has all the modern bells and whistles. if you want/need to use them. Tons of libraries which are rock solid. And its easy for somebody with no exposure to coding to understand very quickly. I would second with Pascal.
Its all about teaching concepts in programming and algorithms. You don't want to have the language get in the way and be the focus (or anchor) of the experience. Nobody is ruined for life, contrary to slashdot opinion for learning BASIC/FORTRAN/PASCAL/COBOL. If anything, it should make grasping the 'newer' languages easier and provide a basis for understanding why certain techniques or features may be useful or desirable.
"A law in the US that is due to take effect in 2012 mandates such tough efficiency standards for lightbulbs that it has been assumed, until recently, that it would kill off the incandescent bulb. Instead, the law has become a case study of the way government regulation can inspire technical innovation.
That is a total crock and just an example of an ecocommunist crusader trying to defend imposing their ideas of whats good for you.
February 23, 2007 08:03 AM Eastern Daylight Time GE Announces Advancement in Incandescent Technology; New High-Efficiency Lamps Targeted for Market by 2010
Re-inventing Edison: New Light Bulb Will Provide High-Quality Light and Deliver Efficiency Comparable to Compact Fluorescent Lamps
You are asking for what amounts to the impossible. PDF's are created for a specific page size when created. A4, A5, 8.5x11 , whatever. PDF's do not "reflow" easily or properly onto smaller devices. Yes, all the major ebook readers 'support' pdf and do attempt some degree of reflow. For all but the most simple documents (ie, something that would look just as good as a flat txt file) the results are poor. Sometimes the font is reduced to unreadable. If it is not, edges of pages may be cut off. Page breaks will be in the worng place. And good luck with any journal style pdf that is in 2 columns with tables or images.
If you have serious need for viewing pdf's then you need to get a large screen e-reader, something that has an 8.5x11 (or very close to it) physical display. The choices are currently few and expensive. It would be far better if the world either moved away from PDF and to something more like TeX such that the document does not lock you into a specific display size. A default size is fine, but in this age of iphones to 30+inch monitors, there needs to be a better way.
Gee, I'm glad you don't mind paying 200 bucks extra. Would you pay for me too? And I'm sure there are a lot of people in the plains and mountain states who drive a ton of miles every day just to do their job that would be much obliged if you'd show them you don't mind paying for them either.
Yes, its called TOLL ROADS. They exist. Once again a solution looking for a problem. Why is it so hard to simply raise the fuel tax? Or better yet, why is it so hard for the government (federal / state / local) to live within their means?
Not only that but all the repressive policies he is complaining about came under which government? Hmm... lets see.. Labor! And what is labor? Liberal left! Of course that is not to say that conservatives can do no evil too (usa circa 2002-2006) but close inspection will show that the left is as bad, if not many times worse, for personal freedoms.
And how much have you paid to iSteve in upgrades? Apple has charged significant coin for upgrades in the past and far more frequently than the span from XP being introduced to Win 7 this fall. XP was in the end a bargain (for a non-free OS) for most of us who bought it.
quoting from the link provided which is dated 3/13:
The new state is above the threshold for decay to pair of charmed hadrons. The decay of the state appears to occur to a pair of vector mesons, J/\psi \phi, in close similarity to a previous state found at 3930 MeV, the Y(3930), which also decays to two vector mesons in Y \to J/\psi \omega. Therefore, the new state can be also called a Y(4140).
The 'review' will take 'a few months'. Didn't Obama already spell out his policy on FOIA requests? USTR should now have the message and immediately unclassify the documents in question. This is just typical DC defer and delay tactics.
Whenever you want the latest on interesting stuff at Fermilab, Tommaso's blog is the place to start, he works with the CDF group. This is his post on the Y(4140).
Also, please correct the summary - there was NOT a discovery of "a new single top quark". There was a discovery of an interaction ("a production") which proceded with a single top and another quark as opposed to the more common ttbar (top+antitop) "production".
Slashdot Mirror
For the heck of it I ran the sunspider tests for chrome 4.0 beta and three versions of firefox - 3.7a1pre, 3.6b and 3.5.5 I also tested on opera 10 and ie 8 but omit those as they were very slow. Tests are on an aging athlon mp dual cpu system.
Chrome came in at 1315
Firefox 3.7a at 1818
Firefox 3.6b at 2045
Firefox 3.5.5 at 2472
Observations - the fannkuch test ran 25% slower on 3.7a then on 3.5.5, something odd there.
When comparing Chrome to 3.7a Chrome pulls ahead primarily on the regexp and date functions and to a lesser extent on the strings.
3.7a however is significantly faster on the math tests.
I wonder if we are getting to the point where on a modern cpu the actual perceived differences in speed will be negligible.
The non-wired Sony ereaders are superior. The battery life is measured in weeks, not hours or days as with these wired devices. Any one who still reads books really doesn't need to be able to download books on the fly when they probably will load far more books on to their device than they can hope to read in many years. I can see wired if you absolutely must be able to download the daily newspaper but I find the battery life trade off vs marginal convenience (news papers are still beter read at newspaper size).
So please, keep your kindles and nooks.
Powerful desktops and workstations always were a niche. Average prices have declined largely due to the decline in component costs. Middle of the road CPU's are cheaper, storage is significantly cheaper and display prices have dropped tremendously. So what might have been a 2K middle of the road desktop in 1998 is now 1K, give or take.
The problem with the netbooks is they are underpowered relative to the OS and basic applications. They are also too small for regular prolonged use - both in keyboard and display space. But for some people that is a trade off they are willing to take for convenience or lack of funds. My primary point was I think the craze will end with the pick up in economy as that price shopper moves up.
As to another poster who said they are in addition to people's regular laptops (or desktop as the declining case may be) - I too think that will fade as, excepting a minority, it will become *inconvenient* over time to maintain/synch up.
I'm not knocking netbooks. They have their place. I just don't think the place is anywhere near as large as pundits want you to believe.
So.. netbooks are about 10% of pc sales and carry a margin of next to zero. They are a niche product for those who want a small device for convenience and will see growth stunted as the eekonomy recovers as those who couldn't afford a desk top replacement laptop abandon the cheap netbook segment for low/mid end full sized/powered laptops.
Perhaps you would like to rebuild and exponentially expand the current electric grid while you are at it. If not, kiss your electric car dreams good bye.
You hit on a number of important reasons why books are advantageous compared to e-readers. There is also the issue of format. Real books come in a very wide variety of sizes, many times for a reason. Some things just aren't meant for a 5 or 6" screen. e-readers are also sterile when compared to a real book which offers tactile and other sensory input (smell, look, sounds).
However what e-readers do offer is convenience and an easy to read screen (unlike lcds). They have their place and I do own one. But I will still continue to buy new (real) books. I find I am using the e-reader more for older books which I would otherwise probably never spend money to buy.
To be fair, I think the pressure to be 'first' was the primary motivator, but not the only one. LHC is an incredibly large project subject to cost overruns, politics (both from physicists and member states) and any number of other things which plague these types of efforts.
And those pressures do not just effect the LHC but also shape how those funding particle physics will think of future proposals.
CERN elected to speed up their testing and skip or minimize the amount of low(er) power testing and ramp up to higher energies.
ScienceDaily (June 25, 2007) â" Speaking recently at the 142nd session of the CERN1 Council, the Organizationâ(TM)s Director General Robert Aymar announced that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will start up in May 2008, taking the first steps towards studying physics at a new high-energy frontier.
A low-energy run originally scheduled for this year has been dropped as the result of a number of minor delays accumulated over the final months of LHC installation and commissioning, coupled with the failure in March of a pressure test in one of the machineâ(TM)s components.
âoeThe low-energy run at the end of this year was extremely tight due to a number of small delays, but the inner triplet problem now makes it impossible,â said LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans. âoeWeâ(TM)ll be starting up for physics in May 2008, as always foreseen, and will commission the machine to full energy in one go.â
Personally I have always used Free OTFE rather than Truecrypt.
CERN management did not want to undertake any significant low power testing and consequently suffered a major failure. In addition, as it now seems clear, the overall oversight left something to be desired. I'm not saying people did not work very hard but it is difficult to believe corners were not cut in a race to get running before the Tevatron could start accumulating enough statistics to allow them to spot and claim the Higgs (though still not likely at the 5 sigma level.)
If this guy can't handle reading the FORTRAN code I seriously doubt he is capable of re-inventing it in a 'new' language. FORTRAN is not that hard to understand even "old" dialects.
FORTRAN baby. It has all the modern bells and whistles. if you want/need to use them. Tons of libraries which are rock solid. And its easy for somebody with no exposure to coding to understand very quickly. I would second with Pascal.
Its all about teaching concepts in programming and algorithms. You don't want to have the language get in the way and be the focus (or anchor) of the experience. Nobody is ruined for life, contrary to slashdot opinion for learning BASIC/FORTRAN/PASCAL/COBOL. If anything, it should make grasping the 'newer' languages easier and provide a basis for understanding why certain techniques or features may be useful or desirable.
That is a total crock and just an example of an ecocommunist crusader trying to defend imposing their ideas of whats good for you.
You are asking for what amounts to the impossible. PDF's are created for a specific page size when created. A4, A5, 8.5x11 , whatever. PDF's do not "reflow" easily or properly onto smaller devices. Yes, all the major ebook readers 'support' pdf and do attempt some degree of reflow. For all but the most simple documents (ie, something that would look just as good as a flat txt file) the results are poor. Sometimes the font is reduced to unreadable. If it is not, edges of pages may be cut off. Page breaks will be in the worng place. And good luck with any journal style pdf that is in 2 columns with tables or images.
If you have serious need for viewing pdf's then you need to get a large screen e-reader, something that has an 8.5x11 (or very close to it) physical display. The choices are currently few and expensive. It would be far better if the world either moved away from PDF and to something more like TeX such that the document does not lock you into a specific display size. A default size is fine, but in this age of iphones to 30+inch monitors, there needs to be a better way.
Gee, I'm glad you don't mind paying 200 bucks extra. Would you pay for me too? And I'm sure there are a lot of people in the plains and mountain states who drive a ton of miles every day just to do their job that would be much obliged if you'd show them you don't mind paying for them either.
Its not like electricity is not taxed by state and feds.
Yes, its called TOLL ROADS. They exist. Once again a solution looking for a problem. Why is it so hard to simply raise the fuel tax? Or better yet, why is it so hard for the government (federal / state / local) to live within their means?
Not only that but all the repressive policies he is complaining about came under which government? Hmm... lets see.. Labor! And what is labor? Liberal left! Of course that is not to say that conservatives can do no evil too (usa circa 2002-2006) but close inspection will show that the left is as bad, if not many times worse, for personal freedoms.
And how much have you paid to iSteve in upgrades? Apple has charged significant coin for upgrades in the past and far more frequently than the span from XP being introduced to Win 7 this fall. XP was in the end a bargain (for a non-free OS) for most of us who bought it.
was the original application that changed computing and led to the explosion of use by average corporations in the 60s and 70s (and beyond).
Clearly you weren't anywhere NYC or DC on 9/11 or you might think differently of a widebody flying at 1000 feet where none others are allowed.
Think before you post next time.
When you want to be sure your financial calculations are accurate and not subject to floating point shenanigans
quoting from the link provided which is dated 3/13:
The 'review' will take 'a few months'. Didn't Obama already spell out his policy on FOIA requests? USTR should now have the message and immediately unclassify the documents in question. This is just typical DC defer and delay tactics.
Whenever you want the latest on interesting stuff at Fermilab, Tommaso's blog is the place to start, he works with the CDF group. This is his post on the Y(4140).
Also, please correct the summary - there was NOT a discovery of "a new single top quark". There was a discovery of an interaction ("a production") which proceded with a single top and another quark as opposed to the more common ttbar (top+antitop) "production".