Glad you like it! And, a more productive thing to do might be to actually (gasp!) tell your friendly free software coder (that'd be me) what it is you're missing. Preferably through private e-mail, with the magic word ("gentoo", although "please" is always welcome too) in the subject.;^) No guarantees of course, but it can't hurt to ask, either.
Re:Excellent! But...
on
GTK+ 2.0
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, now I've downloaded all the four libs and actually stresed my machine through building and installing it. The classic testgtk application that serves as a rather comprehensive demo of the various capabilities program is still around. And it's not anti-aliased on my machine (no xft, as far as I know), so even if turning that off helps, I'm still not happy. It's really annoying, since there's not that much visible improvement, although I'm sure everything is nice and new under the hood.
While typing this up, I had this brilliant idea: there are these things known as "benchmarks" which replace vague bitching with hard numbers... Aha!
I dove into the testgtk.c source, for both this new 2.0.0 release, and the last stable release, 1.2.10. In the "clist" demo (which is very interesting to me, since my app (mentioned in the thread root) uses GtkCList heavily), I added simple instrumentation to measure the time to add 1,000 rows with pixmaps. The results, based on running the code 10 times, dropping the min and max, and averaging the remaining 8 values:
GTK+ 1.2.10: 0.081 s
GTK+ 2.0.0: 0.787 s
Difference: a factor of 9.6 slower. Ouch. Oh, and please note that these times are for the "core" loop of the test case, which is enclosed in calls to gtk_clist_freeze() and gtk_clist_thaw(), meaning (afaik) that this does not include the time it takes for GTK+ to actually render the list. It's the internal bookkeeping only. Can you say "dramatically slower"? I know I can.
The annoying thing with this 10X performance loss is that my next machine isn't all that likely to be 10X faster than my current one; it's simply too large a step. Bummer.
There, I think I've ranted enough on the topic for this moment. Thanks for listening.:^)
Excellent! But...
on
GTK+ 2.0
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As the developer and maintainer of a little GTK+-based application (plug, plug), I see this is very good news, of course. But whoa, it's going to be a lot of work porting over... Using the deprecated widgets is an impossibility for any self-respecting maintainer, imo.;^) Also, I sure do hope they managed to get the speed up a bit from the 1.3.x series... That was really underwhelming. Which was sad, since 1.2.x is very snappy.
Well, for my own little pet project, a full rebuild takes ~5 minutes. On my nearly vintage K6-233, that is. One main reason I'm looking forward so much to a new computer system (besides the gaming, that is) is the chance to shrink that time by a significant amount. If I was a kernel developer, the ability to do a full rebuild in 23 seconds wouldn't hurt a bit, I'm fairly sure.
If you want more responsiveness, fix your toolkits. This is happening in GTK+ v2.
It is? Great. I've been developing a GTK+ app for three and a half years, using GTK+ 1.0 and lately 1.2. Since I'm looking forward to GTK+ 2.0, I recently downloaded a snapshot of the development series (1.3.10) and built it, to try it out. Geeez, was it slow! Now, I don't have any numbers or anything, but based on my experience, the simple list test program I wrote feels 3-5x less responsive than it would be under GTK+ 1.2. Clicking a list item has a noticeable delay before it gets rendered in the selected state. Now, my machine (a K6-233/128) is obviously not a modern day monster, but still. If there are initiatives to make GTK+ 2.0 faster than its predecessors, they sure seem to start by going quite a bit in the opposite direction.
This amazing trick is also performed by the venerable old Navigator, at least version 4.76 that I'm still stubbornly running. I like Mozilla too, I guess, but it's just so goddamn slow (on my vintage K6-233 box, heh).
Hm, not an exact match for what you want, but still: try "The Collapsium" by Wil McCarthy if you haven't read it. It's a bit silly, too, in places, but not when it comes to the core ideas (programmable matter, matter made out of tiny black holes, and stuff). I enjoyed it.
Well, multiple keyboards work, but I'm not sure if they can be assigned to different displays. If I just plug in a USB keyboard in my USB hub, it works alongside my "main" PS/2 keyboard, without me having done any special X configuration magic. Of course, it could be that working like that is simply the default, I don't know...
who is/are lik-sang? Lik-Sang is a video game/console import/export company, operating out of (as far as I know) Hong Kong. They often sell weird Asian-only devices to the rest of the world. They have fairly nice prices, but in my experience the shipping that's added generally makes it hurt to buy from them. Still, they're the guys I have to thank for my Neo Geo Pocket Color, which is cool.;^)
Probably not. Being a USB host (like a PC) is not at all the same as being a USB device. You can't connect a keyboard to your mouse, and type coordinates.;^) They're both devices, not hosts. The GP32, from the looks of it (which might be deceiving, but I really don't think so), is a USB device. You connect it to a PC to transfer games and stuff, play multiplayer games, and so on, but it can't drive a USB bus of its own. Too bad.
One thing that immediately struck me when browsing the tech specs, was that the only mention of audio was this: Digital Audio Through USB ports
Now, I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with this, but SGI workstations are known for their great audio capabilities. Even the humble O2 has 8-channel 24-bit ADAT optical audio I/O; that's quite something! It seems SGI has decided that this level of audio support is no longer desired, though... Too bad. I'm not sure if USB can be pushed to support this; at 48kHz sampling rate, 8 channels of 24-bit audio requires a minimum of 9 Mbps of bandwidth, which is less than the 12 Mbps theoretical maximum. *Shrug*. Of course, there's PCI slots, but having it integrated was very convenient. And cool, too.
Hello? I know I sometimes have problems doing math with small integers, I'm glad to see I'm not alone. Please consider again how you arrive at "12bit per RGBA = 32 bit color ". Last time I checked, 12 * 4 = 48. Your typical garden variety "32-bit" color PC graphics system will in fact be using 8 bits for each of the four components. Clear?;^)
Um, I really think you're stretching the meaning of the word "open" here, especially in the end. I can probably dig up the specs for PCI or USB without too much trouble, but show me the register-level specs for any recent ATI or nVIDIA GPU, and I'll show you a broken NDA. Those devices are not "open", in my world. But hey, I'd just love to be proven wrong, and really like links!;^)
Hah, intersting keyboard lore! You UK folks are lucky, us poor Swedes have the almost completely useless and ½ (without and with shift, respectively) symbols on that key. Oh, and with AltGr it does . I never knew. Anyway, paragraph and "one-half" symbols are not exactly commonly used... Both the apostrophe and the tilde are far better. I wonder who came up with these stupid choices, anyway.
Really? It doesn't say so on the page you linked to, not that I could see anyway. It did list the XP as being supported for the board, but also said "Single only!" right next to it. Too bad, I almost got my hopes up there.;^)
Um, either they draw 300 W, or they don't. They most certainly won't draw 300 W/h, since that just doesn't make sense. 1 W = 1 J/s, dividing by time again is simply crazy. This has been a heads-up from your friendly elementary physics and units consistency police, now please go back to the regular programming. Thank you.;^)
Re:time to sell volkswaggon golf
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 2, Funny
It's Volkswagen, d0rk. One 'g', and an 'e', not an 'o'. Jazz up your desk with a German dictionary, or something. Mumble.
It jives very well, the way I read it. They get more chips per wafer, at a factor of 9-10X since the chips' areas are smaller. They claim to be able to grow the volume (i.e., the height) by adding any number of layers. Thus, the overall capacity can scale without limit, assuming, probably, loads of things. Personally, I'm not sure this is an overall good thing--it just seems like a way for Kodak et al to continue the gotta-buy-consumable-storage way of photography running. And I dislike that. Of course, Sony's MemorySticks aren't exactly cheap...;^)
and Galeon is the lightest Gecko based browser that I can find.
Well, seems like you need to find SkipStone, then. It's the Gecko engine packaged up using onlyGTK+ widgets, no GNOME. It's pretty nice.
I can't seem to make sense of the answers to questions #4 and #18, about putting the kernel in CVS or similar system. Marcelo wrote, in response to Q#4: However, I could export my local CVS, yes. I might do that in the future.
And then, to Q18: No, I'm not going to put the kernel in any kind of version control system because I have to know what goes into the kernel.
Last time I used it, CVS was a version control system. So, am I the only one to think this question can't be answered with "yes" and "no" at the same time and still make sense? To me, this is just plain weird, and if this was a "real" interview, I'd think bad thinks about the interviewer. Now I guess I'll have to settle for the editors, as a few others in the thread already have. Heh.;^)
Right, there's no such thing as a "dual Athlon XP board", because there is no need. The XP seems to work just fine in a dual configuration using a board designed for the MP, although it is (as the article at Ace's pointed out) not certified or recommended by AMD in any way. They think you should use the MP for duals, since it's actually guaranteed to work. I'm not sure if running an XP on a dual board requires modifications to the CPU (like the "unlocking" needed before it can be overclocked), though. Anyone?
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Glad you like it! And, a more productive thing to do might be to actually (gasp!) tell your friendly free software coder (that'd be me) what it is you're missing. Preferably through private e-mail, with the magic word ("gentoo", although "please" is always welcome too) in the subject. ;^) No guarantees of course, but it can't hurt to ask, either.
Well, now I've downloaded all the four libs and actually stresed my machine through building and installing it. The classic testgtk application that serves as a rather comprehensive demo of the various capabilities program is still around. And it's not anti-aliased on my machine (no xft, as far as I know), so even if turning that off helps, I'm still not happy. It's really annoying, since there's not that much visible improvement, although I'm sure everything is nice and new under the hood.
While typing this up, I had this brilliant idea: there are these things known as "benchmarks" which replace vague bitching with hard numbers... Aha!
I dove into the testgtk.c source, for both this new 2.0.0 release, and the last stable release, 1.2.10. In the "clist" demo (which is very interesting to me, since my app (mentioned in the thread root) uses GtkCList heavily), I added simple instrumentation to measure the time to add 1,000 rows with pixmaps. The results, based on running the code 10 times, dropping the min and max, and averaging the remaining 8 values:
- GTK+ 1.2.10: 0.081 s
- GTK+ 2.0.0: 0.787 s
Difference: a factor of 9.6 slower. Ouch. Oh, and please note that these times are for the "core" loop of the test case, which is enclosed in calls to gtk_clist_freeze() and gtk_clist_thaw(), meaning (afaik) that this does not include the time it takes for GTK+ to actually render the list. It's the internal bookkeeping only. Can you say "dramatically slower"? I know I can.The annoying thing with this 10X performance loss is that my next machine isn't all that likely to be 10X faster than my current one; it's simply too large a step. Bummer.
There, I think I've ranted enough on the topic for this moment. Thanks for listening. :^)
As the developer and maintainer of a little GTK+-based application (plug, plug), I see this is very good news, of course. But whoa, it's going to be a lot of work porting over... Using the deprecated widgets is an impossibility for any self-respecting maintainer, imo. ;^) Also, I sure do hope they managed to get the speed up a bit from the 1.3.x series... That was really underwhelming. Which was sad, since 1.2.x is very snappy.
Well, for my own little pet project, a full rebuild takes ~5 minutes. On my nearly vintage K6-233, that is. One main reason I'm looking forward so much to a new computer system (besides the gaming, that is) is the chance to shrink that time by a significant amount. If I was a kernel developer, the ability to do a full rebuild in 23 seconds wouldn't hurt a bit, I'm fairly sure.
If you want more responsiveness, fix your toolkits. This is happening in GTK+ v2.
It is? Great. I've been developing a GTK+ app for three and a half years, using GTK+ 1.0 and lately 1.2. Since I'm looking forward to GTK+ 2.0, I recently downloaded a snapshot of the development series (1.3.10) and built it, to try it out. Geeez, was it slow! Now, I don't have any numbers or anything, but based on my experience, the simple list test program I wrote feels 3-5x less responsive than it would be under GTK+ 1.2. Clicking a list item has a noticeable delay before it gets rendered in the selected state. Now, my machine (a K6-233/128) is obviously not a modern day monster, but still. If there are initiatives to make GTK+ 2.0 faster than its predecessors, they sure seem to start by going quite a bit in the opposite direction.
This amazing trick is also performed by the venerable old Navigator, at least version 4.76 that I'm still stubbornly running. I like Mozilla too, I guess, but it's just so goddamn slow (on my vintage K6-233 box, heh).
It is our density!
There's probably a joke to be made somewhere around here, but I just can't seem to come up with it. Darn.
Imagine the fundraising potential of that hand-written manuscript on eBay... ;^)
Hm, not an exact match for what you want, but still: try "The Collapsium" by Wil McCarthy if you haven't read it. It's a bit silly, too, in places, but not when it comes to the core ideas (programmable matter, matter made out of tiny black holes, and stuff). I enjoyed it.
Well, multiple keyboards work, but I'm not sure if they can be assigned to different displays. If I just plug in a USB keyboard in my USB hub, it works alongside my "main" PS/2 keyboard, without me having done any special X configuration magic. Of course, it could be that working like that is simply the default, I don't know...
who is/are lik-sang? ;^)
Lik-Sang is a video game/console import/export company, operating out of (as far as I know) Hong Kong. They often sell weird Asian-only devices to the rest of the world. They have fairly nice prices, but in my experience the shipping that's added generally makes it hurt to buy from them. Still, they're the guys I have to thank for my Neo Geo Pocket Color, which is cool.
Probably not. Being a USB host (like a PC) is not at all the same as being a USB device. You can't connect a keyboard to your mouse, and type coordinates. ;^) They're both devices, not hosts. The GP32, from the looks of it (which might be deceiving, but I really don't think so), is a USB device. You connect it to a PC to transfer games and stuff, play multiplayer games, and so on, but it can't drive a USB bus of its own. Too bad.
One thing that immediately struck me when browsing the tech specs, was that the only mention of audio was this:
Digital Audio Through USB ports
Now, I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with this, but SGI workstations are known for their great audio capabilities. Even the humble O2 has 8-channel 24-bit ADAT optical audio I/O; that's quite something! It seems SGI has decided that this level of audio support is no longer desired, though... Too bad. I'm not sure if USB can be pushed to support this; at 48kHz sampling rate, 8 channels of 24-bit audio requires a minimum of 9 Mbps of bandwidth, which is less than the 12 Mbps theoretical maximum. *Shrug*. Of course, there's PCI slots, but having it integrated was very convenient. And cool, too.
Hello? I know I sometimes have problems doing math with small integers, I'm glad to see I'm not alone. Please consider again how you arrive at "12bit per RGBA = 32 bit color ". Last time I checked, 12 * 4 = 48. Your typical garden variety "32-bit" color PC graphics system will in fact be using 8 bits for each of the four components. Clear? ;^)
Um, I really think you're stretching the meaning of the word "open" here, especially in the end. I can probably dig up the specs for PCI or USB without too much trouble, but show me the register-level specs for any recent ATI or nVIDIA GPU, and I'll show you a broken NDA. Those devices are not "open", in my world. But hey, I'd just love to be proven wrong, and really like links! ;^)
Hah, intersting keyboard lore! You UK folks are lucky, us poor Swedes have the almost completely useless and ½ (without and with shift, respectively) symbols on that key. Oh, and with AltGr it does . I never knew. Anyway, paragraph and "one-half" symbols are not exactly commonly used... Both the apostrophe and the tilde are far better. I wonder who came up with these stupid choices, anyway.
The next time you're in the presence of one, take the time to read the label. It's Athlon. You might want to count the 'a's in there. Mumble.
Really? It doesn't say so on the page you linked to, not that I could see anyway. It did list the XP as being supported for the board, but also said "Single only!" right next to it. Too bad, I almost got my hopes up there. ;^)
Um, either they draw 300 W, or they don't. They most certainly won't draw 300 W/h, since that just doesn't make sense. 1 W = 1 J/s, dividing by time again is simply crazy. This has been a heads-up from your friendly elementary physics and units consistency police, now please go back to the regular programming. Thank you. ;^)
It's Volkswagen, d0rk. One 'g', and an 'e', not an 'o'. Jazz up your desk with a German dictionary, or something. Mumble.
It jives very well, the way I read it. They get more chips per wafer, at a factor of 9-10X since the chips' areas are smaller. They claim to be able to grow the volume (i.e., the height) by adding any number of layers. Thus, the overall capacity can scale without limit, assuming, probably, loads of things. Personally, I'm not sure this is an overall good thing--it just seems like a way for Kodak et al to continue the gotta-buy-consumable-storage way of photography running. And I dislike that. Of course, Sony's MemorySticks aren't exactly cheap... ;^)
and Galeon is the lightest Gecko based browser that I can find.
Well, seems like you need to find SkipStone, then. It's the Gecko engine packaged up using only GTK+ widgets, no GNOME. It's pretty nice.
Thanks, that's very interesting. I read most reviews of SMP boards I've seen, but noone has mentioned these deep details. Again, thanks a lot.
I can't seem to make sense of the answers to questions #4 and #18, about putting the kernel in CVS or similar system. Marcelo wrote, in response to Q#4: ;^)
However, I could export my local CVS, yes. I might do that in the future.
And then, to Q18:
No, I'm not going to put the kernel in any kind of version control system because I have to know what goes into the kernel.
Last time I used it, CVS was a version control system. So, am I the only one to think this question can't be answered with "yes" and "no" at the same time and still make sense? To me, this is just plain weird, and if this was a "real" interview, I'd think bad thinks about the interviewer. Now I guess I'll have to settle for the editors, as a few others in the thread already have. Heh.
Right, there's no such thing as a "dual Athlon XP board", because there is no need. The XP seems to work just fine in a dual configuration using a board designed for the MP, although it is (as the article at Ace's pointed out) not certified or recommended by AMD in any way. They think you should use the MP for duals, since it's actually guaranteed to work. I'm not sure if running an XP on a dual board requires modifications to the CPU (like the "unlocking" needed before it can be overclocked), though. Anyone?