Let's wait a month - and see price then. AMD drops prices for their CPUs quite soon.
Still, 140W is bit over the top. Considering that workstation market is dominated by Intel CPUs which have now lead in both performance and power consumption, the CPU have few niches left.
My problem here is that many tools in M$Office are plainly broken and now UI is also screwed...
OO.o won me some time ago - tools I need do actually work and they work the way I want them - despite OO.o being sluggish, bloated and generally ugly (lacking style, to be precise).
M$O, despite excellent kernel (document rendering is magnitudes better than that of OO.o) is now turned into some obscure tool with price tag of a pro suit, yet with UI rivaling primitiveness of Wordpad. IOW, if one pays for M$O, he overpays, as many advanced tools are now oh-so-fscking hard to access, rendering them pretty useless. So why pay more??
Look at emacs for christ's sake. Ridiculous commands that aren't standard in any other program, and they even have commands for moving the cursor up and down.
Yet, one can learn that.
And by looking at menus/buttons around the options you know already you can learn more.
he ribbon makes using references, citations, tables of contents, and formatting a hell of lot easier
References? Citations? Check out OO.o - it does it right. *WITHOUT* *RIBBONZ*.
Tables of content? And what you do with them?? I personally do once in a while "update" and that's it. Why to screw up with it at all???
Formatting? hell a lot easier?? Styles, as they have never worked properly before, they still do not work. (Check OO.o for how they should work) Rearranging standard formatting buttons around also can't magically make formatting "hell a lot easier."
But they surely made typing harder. "Normal" view mode is gone - but new "Draft" mode isn't really a replacement.
Nobody likes sifting through menus and over crowded toolbars.
And no proficient user ever does.
I learned to like it
Oxymoron. As if you had any choice.
I just hope OpenOffice.org isn't doing this to be a copy cat, but rather to make it easier for the average Joe to be productive and navigate through the program.
On the wall of the my father's office there were two printed sheets with location of often used M$Office commands.
Now it can be replaced with one sheet "Dig through ribbon, it is somewhere there".
On a more serious note, Microsoft claims to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on changes to Office 2007...
Since when waste of money started to be an indication of anything?
If nothing else, after burning all the money management/marketing/etc had to push for something radical - only to justify the expenses.
P.S. Witnessed btw once relatively big project inside a middle-sized company. They were trying to replace TCP with their own proprietary protocol. After ca. two years of R&D, countless man-years worth of money, result of research were "use TCP and UDP, our own stuff is no better." Very few managers would risk their position by coming back with such conclusions.
Why is that, as screens are getting bigger and we can see more of our documents at a glance, that they have to use up more on-screen real estate, thus giving us less view of the documents in question than we had on a 14" monitor.
The problem is that monitor resolutions are getting not "bigger" - they are getting wider.
Ribbon by default is very very think (buttons with large icons and two line labels) and it can't be moved e.g. to the side. And for day to day work with documents you have to have ribbon open all the time so it is eating into precious vertical space all the time.
KOffice 2.0 UI is still (very) rough on edges, but I like it more.
Myself, I don't want crap moving around on the main function set. If other stuff is going to be context-sensitive, give me Coreldraw-style, killable, dockable toolboxes.
+1. Haven't used Corel Draw, but it sounds sensible.
Also It's quite funny to see that Mac OS UI now has more customization capabilities compared to MS' new invention.
The simple fact that Outlook main windows doesn't have ribbon is a "writing on the wall" that ribbon sucks and engineers managed to salvage at least one application from the clutches of marketing.
Any interface which is (1) not customizable and (2) not predictable sucks by definition. Because UI has to be predictable - so people can learn it - and customizable - so people after learning it can adjust it to their needs.
The fact that ribbon behaves differently in different situations is what makes it practically impossible to learn to be proficient with. Not that ribbon itself has any features to learn anyway...
"Bloatware == slowness" is a misguided generalization.
Emacs actually is the classic example of bloatware. It doesn't matter that the bloat is fast. What matters is that when you try to change an option you discover that you have 5-10 micro-options + hooks + extra bunch of options for different modes you might happen to use. And none of their combination leads to desired result. Then you turn to lisp - hopping to tap into the programmability of Emacs - just to discover that every tiny thing has already layers of overrides, spread over dozens megabytes of preinstalled lisp code.
That what happened to me twice. Because twice I have tried to learn Emacs.
What'a day... OpenSSH has compression enabled by default. It's official commercial SSH (which we happen to have on couple of old Tru64 DEC boxes) have it disabled by default.
Re:Amusingly..
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
OK. Lied. It is disabled by default but seems to be enabled selectively on my servers.
Do not overoptimize - SSH already by default compresses its traffic with gzip. Bzip sure is better, but compression speed is not there what becomes visible on GB LAN.
Re:Amusingly..
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Nothing special: Linux to Linux over GB LAN or the internet. CPUs are C2D or AMD X2 or better.
Also note that SCP/SFTP transfer files one by one and the handshake times (especially if you have number of smaller files) dominates over actual file transfer times. That's why I have mentioned the tar trick. FTP for whatever reasons doesn't have the problem.
Re:Amusingly..
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Given the fact that most websites will be hosted on a Linux box...
That makes it easier. Most Linux systems I have installed in past years don't have ftpd preinstalled.
On security note, default configs of ftpds found in Fedora, SUSE and Debian are [censored] insecure: they allow anonymous to access anything on hard drive while rejecting (even over SSL) valid users.
Unfortunately, raw FTP still rules when you need a high bandwidth. With SCP/SFTP I get consistently 4-5 times lower transfer speeds compared to FTP. It doesn't matter much if one transfers megabytes. But SCP/SFTP becomes a pain when one needs to upload dozens/hundreds megabyte. 'tar cf - . | ssh tar xf -' trick speed things up, but not always available.
As for how you would get around this if using a Windows/IIS server I wouldn't have the first clue and my advice would probably be along the lines of "get a man's operating system and stop using asp"!
IIRC, M$ stack uses WebDAV over HTTPS for such stuff. Abomination had spared me, thus do not have any performance numbers.
Management quickly realized that crisis is coming (.Com buble) to our niche market. And their decision was questionable (and actually job threatening to me) but in the end saved the company: they pumped production of cheap offering (making it even cheaper), expecting that manageable higher-end expensive systems wouldn't sell at all (for which I was writing control software). And there was period of 13 month when no higher-end systems were sold. Yet, company managed to survive by cutting off only contractors - not a single full-time employee were fired.
Now to the point. When I spoke to management about the crisis and their handling of it, they simply told that industry wouldn't stop working - they would need equipment, but they will not have money to buy something new or expensive.
In the end that strategy played off: there were much less sales and support/maintenance something like doubled (can't buy -> but have to do work -> better maintain existing equipment).
P.S. A sort of hypocrisy in behavior of public companies also showed itself. Most were banned by shareholders from buying anything. Yet, several such clients forked us for maintenance quite a big buck - which would have allowed them otherwise to buy a completely new equipment.
And if we also look at global warming with the same critical eye, can we really say that humans are responsible for global warming when all we can really show is a strong correlation?
The point here should be - not what/who caused it - but that global warming is the fact. And without intervention, leaving things as they are, our civilization isn't going to exist for too long.
I doubt many would love option of joining dinosaurs in future civilization's history books. Though as we have dug up pretty much all dino fossils, probably they wouldn't even know about them.
Haven't we explored this one to death already? Java isn't slow, and there's nothing magic about C/C++. Badly written C/C++ gets trounced by Java any day, and algorithmic efficiency trounces both of those when it comes to complex functions like indexed searches.
Actually on synthetic benchmarks C/C++ implementation might outperform the Java implementation. Some benchmarks are crafted to essentially test memory bandwidth, where C/C++ easily wins.
And still, well written C/C++ code scales magnitudes better than Java code. Resource management is a bitch. I have seen that to win a number of deals.
C++ and C both fail to deliver the same level of performance as the Java virtual machine.
Oh wait hang on...
As was pointed above, the search engines spend >90% of their time in DB/file I/O code.
In other words, implementation language plays little role - it is I/O optimization algorithms which play bigger role.
From my experience with number of C/C++ projects, efficiency of the languages/compilers allows developers to remain ignorant. In Java that approach simply doesn't work. Thus I more often see more better algorithms often in less efficient languages.
Like I recently found in one program people used a bubble sort - as if copied verbatim from "C Programming for Dummies in 21 day." And it worked without causing any problem for more than a decade - only after a rare occasion when dimension went above 1000, it took longer than 1 second to finish. I bet Java would have immediately choked on the code.
In short, you apparently did not bother seriously trying to use any recent version of Chrome [...]
I have up-to-date Chrome on my office laptop and I'll check the ^B.
... since it seems not to work yet on Linux.
So it is alpha after all? Or is it still "Chromium is effectively identical to Chrome"??
In any event, I once more don't see this option in Opera either.
It is one of the Opera's numerous sidebars.
And regarding RSS... YOU MUST BE [CENSORED] BLIND! to not to notice RSS in Opera which is like forever part of its mail client.
You must have been using Opera even less than I did Chrome.
These all go far beyond the fact that Chrome doesn't have many good extensions yet, and all those statements are patently absurd.
AdBlock and FlashBlock are not part of FireFox precisely because they are extensions. They might have been a part or it - like Opera - but then it might have severed Mozilla's (which is non-profit) relationships with advertisers.
So of your criticisms of Chrome:
1. Two out of ten related to lack of extension support, which has nothing to do with your original claims.
2. Four out of ten Chrome actually has, and you apparently didn't bother to look hard enough to figure that out.
3. Three it might not have, but neither does Opera, so if they're reason to condemn Chrome, you're contradicting your earlier statement that Opera is featureful and useful.
4. One I couldn't even understand.
1. See above. They are extensions in FireFox for a reason. Needless to mention that Fx since 3.0 provides pretty much official interface for such extensions. Let's see how Google (which depends on ad revenue) would fare.
2. "Four out of ten" apparently work in some developer build acquired somewhere else, but not from official source: http://www.google.com/chrome. Huh?
3. "Three it might not have" and you are blind to not to have seen them in Opera. (N.B. I do not think that Opera is usable browser. Actually I hate Opera. Yet it is well tried and usable browser for modern Web. But I do not like it.)
4. One you couldn't understand v. three you failed to answer.
I have no idea why I bothered writing out such a detailed response to such patent nonsense, but here you go anyway.
I also have no idea why you bothered to write how everything is rosy in Chrome^WChromium land and at the same time mention number of times that some some stuff still doesn't work.
Which are essential tools to make about 99% of Web palatable.
Seems like we have different opinions about what is essential.
In a way you are right - considering that some people still argue that IE 4/5/6/7/8 is The Best Browser.
Comparing Chrome v. IE v. Safari is fairer: they all lack similar advanced features and customization capabilities. FireFox is closer to Opera and thus should be compared against it.
Chromium is identical to Chrome in effectively every respect except branding
RTFA. We are talking here about official piece of alpha software released by Google called Chrome.
Until I have in Chrome the same functionality I have in vanilla FireFox + Google Toolbar, for me it is in deep "alpha", least 2.0 release.
But you aren't able to name specific, exact things that you can do in Firefox but can't in Chrome?
ZOMG. Where do I start?
1. AdBlock
2. FlashBlock
3. Bookmarks toolbar
4. Bookmarks menu
5. Keyword searches
6. Preserving text zoom level per domain
7. RSS feeds as bookmark folders
8. Searchable browsing history
9. Proxy configuration
10. Page Info screen which allows to save e.g. images used on the page.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's wait a month - and see price then. AMD drops prices for their CPUs quite soon.
Still, 140W is bit over the top. Considering that workstation market is dominated by Intel CPUs which have now lead in both performance and power consumption, the CPU have few niches left.
And motherboard?
At least before, motherboards for AMD CPUs were cheaper, often nullifying short-lived Intel's CPU price advantage.
Though power consumption alone turns me off.
It was already explained above. CPU and GPU are very different at handling things, meaning that top level algorithms used are very different.
Unless of course you can point at a compiler which can rethink and rewrite the program.
My problem here is that many tools in M$Office are plainly broken and now UI is also screwed...
OO.o won me some time ago - tools I need do actually work and they work the way I want them - despite OO.o being sluggish, bloated and generally ugly (lacking style, to be precise).
M$O, despite excellent kernel (document rendering is magnitudes better than that of OO.o) is now turned into some obscure tool with price tag of a pro suit, yet with UI rivaling primitiveness of Wordpad. IOW, if one pays for M$O, he overpays, as many advanced tools are now oh-so-fscking hard to access, rendering them pretty useless. So why pay more??
Look at emacs for christ's sake. Ridiculous commands that aren't standard in any other program, and they even have commands for moving the cursor up and down.
Yet, one can learn that.
And by looking at menus/buttons around the options you know already you can learn more.
he ribbon makes using references, citations, tables of contents, and formatting a hell of lot easier
References? Citations? Check out OO.o - it does it right. *WITHOUT* *RIBBONZ*.
Tables of content? And what you do with them?? I personally do once in a while "update" and that's it. Why to screw up with it at all???
Formatting? hell a lot easier?? Styles, as they have never worked properly before, they still do not work. (Check OO.o for how they should work) Rearranging standard formatting buttons around also can't magically make formatting "hell a lot easier."
But they surely made typing harder. "Normal" view mode is gone - but new "Draft" mode isn't really a replacement.
Nobody likes sifting through menus and over crowded toolbars.
And no proficient user ever does.
I learned to like it
Oxymoron. As if you had any choice.
I just hope OpenOffice.org isn't doing this to be a copy cat, but rather to make it easier for the average Joe to be productive and navigate through the program.
On the wall of the my father's office there were two printed sheets with location of often used M$Office commands.
Now it can be replaced with one sheet "Dig through ribbon, it is somewhere there".
How much of enhancement is that???
On a more serious note, Microsoft claims to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on changes to Office 2007 ...
Since when waste of money started to be an indication of anything?
If nothing else, after burning all the money management/marketing/etc had to push for something radical - only to justify the expenses.
P.S. Witnessed btw once relatively big project inside a middle-sized company. They were trying to replace TCP with their own proprietary protocol. After ca. two years of R&D, countless man-years worth of money, result of research were "use TCP and UDP, our own stuff is no better." Very few managers would risk their position by coming back with such conclusions.
There is already one worth looking at - it is called KOffice....
Why is that, as screens are getting bigger and we can see more of our documents at a glance, that they have to use up more on-screen real estate, thus giving us less view of the documents in question than we had on a 14" monitor.
The problem is that monitor resolutions are getting not "bigger" - they are getting wider.
Ribbon by default is very very think (buttons with large icons and two line labels) and it can't be moved e.g. to the side. And for day to day work with documents you have to have ribbon open all the time so it is eating into precious vertical space all the time.
KOffice 2.0 UI is still (very) rough on edges, but I like it more.
Myself, I don't want crap moving around on the main function set. If other stuff is going to be context-sensitive, give me Coreldraw-style, killable, dockable toolboxes.
+1. Haven't used Corel Draw, but it sounds sensible.
Also It's quite funny to see that Mac OS UI now has more customization capabilities compared to MS' new invention.
Uhm... I do not get your point.
The simple fact that Outlook main windows doesn't have ribbon is a "writing on the wall" that ribbon sucks and engineers managed to salvage at least one application from the clutches of marketing.
Any interface which is (1) not customizable and (2) not predictable sucks by definition. Because UI has to be predictable - so people can learn it - and customizable - so people after learning it can adjust it to their needs.
The fact that ribbon behaves differently in different situations is what makes it practically impossible to learn to be proficient with. Not that ribbon itself has any features to learn anyway...
"Bloatware == slowness" is a misguided generalization.
Emacs actually is the classic example of bloatware. It doesn't matter that the bloat is fast. What matters is that when you try to change an option you discover that you have 5-10 micro-options + hooks + extra bunch of options for different modes you might happen to use. And none of their combination leads to desired result. Then you turn to lisp - hopping to tap into the programmability of Emacs - just to discover that every tiny thing has already layers of overrides, spread over dozens megabytes of preinstalled lisp code.
That what happened to me twice. Because twice I have tried to learn Emacs.
It could be they heard my cries... On Debian 4, anon access enabled/user login disabled was default for both proftpd and vsftpd.
What'a day... OpenSSH has compression enabled by default. It's official commercial SSH (which we happen to have on couple of old Tru64 DEC boxes) have it disabled by default.
OK. Lied. It is disabled by default but seems to be enabled selectively on my servers.
Do not overoptimize - SSH already by default compresses its traffic with gzip. Bzip sure is better, but compression speed is not there what becomes visible on GB LAN.
Nothing special: Linux to Linux over GB LAN or the internet. CPUs are C2D or AMD X2 or better.
Also note that SCP/SFTP transfer files one by one and the handshake times (especially if you have number of smaller files) dominates over actual file transfer times. That's why I have mentioned the tar trick. FTP for whatever reasons doesn't have the problem.
Given the fact that most websites will be hosted on a Linux box ...
That makes it easier. Most Linux systems I have installed in past years don't have ftpd preinstalled.
On security note, default configs of ftpds found in Fedora, SUSE and Debian are [censored] insecure: they allow anonymous to access anything on hard drive while rejecting (even over SSL) valid users.
Unfortunately, raw FTP still rules when you need a high bandwidth. With SCP/SFTP I get consistently 4-5 times lower transfer speeds compared to FTP. It doesn't matter much if one transfers megabytes. But SCP/SFTP becomes a pain when one needs to upload dozens/hundreds megabyte. 'tar cf - . | ssh tar xf -' trick speed things up, but not always available.
As for how you would get around this if using a Windows/IIS server I wouldn't have the first clue and my advice would probably be along the lines of "get a man's operating system and stop using asp"!
IIRC, M$ stack uses WebDAV over HTTPS for such stuff. Abomination had spared me, thus do not have any performance numbers.
Only if they have money to spend.
Hey! I've in the situation like that.
Management quickly realized that crisis is coming (.Com buble) to our niche market. And their decision was questionable (and actually job threatening to me) but in the end saved the company: they pumped production of cheap offering (making it even cheaper), expecting that manageable higher-end expensive systems wouldn't sell at all (for which I was writing control software). And there was period of 13 month when no higher-end systems were sold. Yet, company managed to survive by cutting off only contractors - not a single full-time employee were fired.
Now to the point. When I spoke to management about the crisis and their handling of it, they simply told that industry wouldn't stop working - they would need equipment, but they will not have money to buy something new or expensive.
In the end that strategy played off: there were much less sales and support/maintenance something like doubled (can't buy -> but have to do work -> better maintain existing equipment).
P.S. A sort of hypocrisy in behavior of public companies also showed itself. Most were banned by shareholders from buying anything. Yet, several such clients forked us for maintenance quite a big buck - which would have allowed them otherwise to buy a completely new equipment.
And if we also look at global warming with the same critical eye, can we really say that humans are responsible for global warming when all we can really show is a strong correlation?
The point here should be - not what/who caused it - but that global warming is the fact. And without intervention, leaving things as they are, our civilization isn't going to exist for too long.
I doubt many would love option of joining dinosaurs in future civilization's history books. Though as we have dug up pretty much all dino fossils, probably they wouldn't even know about them.
Haven't we explored this one to death already? Java isn't slow, and there's nothing magic about C/C++. Badly written C/C++ gets trounced by Java any day, and algorithmic efficiency trounces both of those when it comes to complex functions like indexed searches.
Actually on synthetic benchmarks C/C++ implementation might outperform the Java implementation. Some benchmarks are crafted to essentially test memory bandwidth, where C/C++ easily wins.
And still, well written C/C++ code scales magnitudes better than Java code. Resource management is a bitch. I have seen that to win a number of deals.
C++ and C both fail to deliver the same level of performance as the Java virtual machine.
Oh wait hang on...
As was pointed above, the search engines spend >90% of their time in DB/file I/O code.
In other words, implementation language plays little role - it is I/O optimization algorithms which play bigger role.
From my experience with number of C/C++ projects, efficiency of the languages/compilers allows developers to remain ignorant. In Java that approach simply doesn't work. Thus I more often see more better algorithms often in less efficient languages.
Like I recently found in one program people used a bubble sort - as if copied verbatim from "C Programming for Dummies in 21 day." And it worked without causing any problem for more than a decade - only after a rare occasion when dimension went above 1000, it took longer than 1 second to finish. I bet Java would have immediately choked on the code.
In short, you apparently did not bother seriously trying to use any recent version of Chrome [...]
I have up-to-date Chrome on my office laptop and I'll check the ^B.
So it is alpha after all? Or is it still "Chromium is effectively identical to Chrome"??
In any event, I once more don't see this option in Opera either.
It is one of the Opera's numerous sidebars.
And regarding RSS ... YOU MUST BE [CENSORED] BLIND! to not to notice RSS in Opera which is like forever part of its mail client.
You must have been using Opera even less than I did Chrome.
These all go far beyond the fact that Chrome doesn't have many good extensions yet, and all those statements are patently absurd.
AdBlock and FlashBlock are not part of FireFox precisely because they are extensions. They might have been a part or it - like Opera - but then it might have severed Mozilla's (which is non-profit) relationships with advertisers.
So of your criticisms of Chrome:
1. Two out of ten related to lack of extension support, which has nothing to do with your original claims.
2. Four out of ten Chrome actually has, and you apparently didn't bother to look hard enough to figure that out.
3. Three it might not have, but neither does Opera, so if they're reason to condemn Chrome, you're contradicting your earlier statement that Opera is featureful and useful.
4. One I couldn't even understand.
1. See above. They are extensions in FireFox for a reason. Needless to mention that Fx since 3.0 provides pretty much official interface for such extensions. Let's see how Google (which depends on ad revenue) would fare.
2. "Four out of ten" apparently work in some developer build acquired somewhere else, but not from official source: http://www.google.com/chrome. Huh?
3. "Three it might not have" and you are blind to not to have seen them in Opera. (N.B. I do not think that Opera is usable browser. Actually I hate Opera. Yet it is well tried and usable browser for modern Web. But I do not like it.)
4. One you couldn't understand v. three you failed to answer.
I have no idea why I bothered writing out such a detailed response to such patent nonsense, but here you go anyway.
I also have no idea why you bothered to write how everything is rosy in Chrome^WChromium land and at the same time mention number of times that some some stuff still doesn't work.
Which are essential tools to make about 99% of Web palatable.
Seems like we have different opinions about what is essential.
In a way you are right - considering that some people still argue that IE 4/5/6/7/8 is The Best Browser.
Comparing Chrome v. IE v. Safari is fairer: they all lack similar advanced features and customization capabilities. FireFox is closer to Opera and thus should be compared against it.
Chromium is identical to Chrome in effectively every respect except branding
RTFA. We are talking here about official piece of alpha software released by Google called Chrome.
Until I have in Chrome the same functionality I have in vanilla FireFox + Google Toolbar, for me it is in deep "alpha", least 2.0 release.
But you aren't able to name specific, exact things that you can do in Firefox but can't in Chrome?
ZOMG. Where do I start?
1. AdBlock
2. FlashBlock
3. Bookmarks toolbar
4. Bookmarks menu
5. Keyword searches
6. Preserving text zoom level per domain
7. RSS feeds as bookmark folders
8. Searchable browsing history
9. Proxy configuration
10. Page Info screen which allows to save e.g. images used on the page.