Yeah, it doesn't really offer much besides tabs in separate processes and fast JS, neither of which is as important to me as features such as live bookmarks in firefox, and of course extensions. I've gotten to the point where I can't browse without certain extensions such as LiveClick and TabMixPlus. I don't think any browser will be able to match Firefox in its extensibility unless they adopt something similar to XUL, despite what people seem to think Chrome will offer eventually.
Ok, so then you have low-res graphics magnified at 2x or 3x or whatever. Which is the same as what LCDs do.
No, it's not the same because when the 3D engine is doing the scaling it outputs at the native resolution. LCD scaling is crap, except for the very few (for example, Gateway has a 30" I think called XHD3000) that have dedicated scaling chips.
Again, the difference between War3 and SC is that War3 was built from the ground up to support multiple resolutions, and to use OpenGL to be able to scale 3D. SC is all low res bitmaps. The only thing they could do that would make SC work at higher resolutions is to create new graphics!
Well, first of all it's DirectX, not OpenGL, and of course it supports multiple resolutions, it's using 3D graphics which can be rendered at any resolution. I never argued against that. My point is that allowing multiple resolutions doesn't mean that the viewport size has to change.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
Well, first of all, why is that in the Apple section, and second of all, that's not what I was talking about. I was talking about the 4.1 release being "released" for Windows, but it's still in a pre-production state, since I tried installing KDE4.1 apps and Amarok and none of them worked besides KWrite. In any case, having Chrome for Windows is nice in that now there's finally a decent KHTML/WebKit browser on Windows for people to test their sites with.
Well, the thing is, you can do that, but you can also not, and just scale the rendering code by a constant to keep the viewport the same. Blizzard does this for Warcraft III, and so they would have done it for Starcraft too had it been using a 3D engine. And for the widescreen thing, there is a difference between having the monitor do the stretching and the graphics engine doing the scaling - it looks remarkably less crappy when the engine does it. It's still stretched, but at the native resolution of your monitor so it's not ugly.
That doesn't make sense though, because in Warcraft III when you change resolution the viewport stays the same. If you edit the registry to use a nonstandard (widescreen most likely) resolution, you get a stretched picture but no increased viewport. I think it's more that recoding the graphics engine would have been a pain and maybe some of the people who did it originally had left by the time 640x480 became woefully small.
Actually, you're mostly wrong. The RAM being lost is from addressing for things like graphics cards and the like. Also, the reason 32 bit computers might show 4GB is because Microsoft got annoyed at people wondering where their RAM was going and made Vista SP1 show the full installed amount, even if it couldn't be addressed. PAE exists but it's not in use in most desktop OSes because it causes hell with drivers and such. There is a boot time switch or something for Windows but Microsoft actually made that not do anything in one of the service packs for XP because of the headaches it causes.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 4, Informative
Link for the google-handicapped: http://windows.kde.org/ actually lists KDE 4.1 as a release for Windows. I'm surprised there wasn't more news about it though. It seems to still be alpha/true beta quality software though but interesting nevertheless. Nice for people like me who like KDE apps but also like Windows (gasp).
Kind of what I was thinking. That's not actually being done though, except for the Singularity research project in the MS research division that will probably never see production status. Then again, I don't know what the future holds. http://www.codeplex.com/singularity seems to be the site for anyone interested.
Thanks, that's pretty informative. I think this is why they're trying to move to XULRunner eventually for Firefox and Thunderbird, then there will be less hard drive space wasted on identical software and possibly less RAM used as well. I hadn't really thought of that when I made my comment.
I don't know, it's just that coming from Java first Javascript really bugs me. I guess the lack of standard OOP stuff, and function declarations seem weird to me. I guess I've never really given it a serious look, and most of the times I used it a lot of my annoyances were related to the DOM.
My post was really more about generating discussion though, because I'm genuinely curious about this. I don't have enough JS experience to really say more than it feels awkward to me. I kind of expect things to work like they do in Java and get annoyed when they don't.
The main problem I see with this (and again, I'm an amateur right now so take this with a grain of salt) is that these frameworks aren't as standardized as say, Java. I'm fairly certain that there are far more Java or C++ programmers than JS programmers who use ExtJS. I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to learn a framework but it just seems like a waste of time when you could be writing faster native code, or even Java code which at least you might already know.
Also, I was actually wondering about this topic earlier today (/. is becoming sentient, run!) and I was wondering, do colleges actually teach Javascript as part of their CS curriculum? It doesn't seem that likely to me, but I'm actually going to start college next week, majoring in EECS so I'll find out soon enough I guess. I'd guess that the people who would learn JS would be more likely to learn it from web development classes and not CS, so (I'm stereotyping here) the code might not be as optimized as it could be. Then again, I'm sure the guys writing the interpreters have a CS background so I guess maybe they do teach some JS in CS courses?
Interestingly, one of the linked blogs talks about how this could lead to more of Firefox being written in Javascript. I haven't done much non-web related Javascript programming, and I haven't really used those new frameworks, but it seems to me like application programming in Javascript is like trying to hammer a nail with the handle of a screwdriver. Sure, it might work, but there are much better tools for the job. What do you guys think?
Yeah, I also ran Minefield nightlies since the later alphas and I have to say it was pretty stable for the most part. I'd guess he's having extension, plugin, or site-specific problems. I got off the nightly train for 3.1 though because one of the checkins broke my favorite extension, Liveclick.
I knew that. The whole iLine of products is really annoying to me. Same goes for eMachines, and I have to admit the whole K thing with KDE apps is kind of annoying too. But KDE is still better than GNOME, flamewar go! *ducks*
Just curious, what optional features. I also have to admit, I love the breadcrumb bar and the search isn't just slightly better, but actually usable compared to previous OSes. The only thing that really annoys me about Vista's Explorer is that there's no up button, but backspace or the breadcrumb thing function the same way.
Perhaps, but the alternative, where companies would fail to make money because someone else could copy their ideas and manufacture them cheaper, would be equally ugly. The patent system is definitely effed, but I don't know how we could fix it without getting rid of it altogether, which would also be bad. Think of it this way: if you start a small company and discover something amazing, you bet you'd want to patent the hell out of it so that some big company couldn't just copy your design and squash you. It would be nicer if licenses were required to be sold to anyone who could prove they could use it, but that's kind of a lot of interference by the government which some might not like.
They didn't announce that, it was a rumor by this same site (The Inquirer) which nVidia vehemently denied and demanded a retraction of the original story.
The C7 successor is Nano (code name Isaiah), and I think it's been shown to be faster than Intel's (kind of sucky) Atom. It seems to be a much better chip than Atom. Hmm, I wonder what the whole licensing thing is about then. Too lazy to look it up...
I don't think Via, and definitely not Transmeta, actually had native x86 processors. Transmeta had some translation thing going, and I think Via does too, although I'm not positive.
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Yeah, it doesn't really offer much besides tabs in separate processes and fast JS, neither of which is as important to me as features such as live bookmarks in firefox, and of course extensions. I've gotten to the point where I can't browse without certain extensions such as LiveClick and TabMixPlus. I don't think any browser will be able to match Firefox in its extensibility unless they adopt something similar to XUL, despite what people seem to think Chrome will offer eventually.
No, it's not the same because when the 3D engine is doing the scaling it outputs at the native resolution. LCD scaling is crap, except for the very few (for example, Gateway has a 30" I think called XHD3000) that have dedicated scaling chips.
Well, first of all it's DirectX, not OpenGL, and of course it supports multiple resolutions, it's using 3D graphics which can be rendered at any resolution. I never argued against that. My point is that allowing multiple resolutions doesn't mean that the viewport size has to change.
Well, first of all, why is that in the Apple section, and second of all, that's not what I was talking about. I was talking about the 4.1 release being "released" for Windows, but it's still in a pre-production state, since I tried installing KDE4.1 apps and Amarok and none of them worked besides KWrite. In any case, having Chrome for Windows is nice in that now there's finally a decent KHTML/WebKit browser on Windows for people to test their sites with.
Well, the thing is, you can do that, but you can also not, and just scale the rendering code by a constant to keep the viewport the same. Blizzard does this for Warcraft III, and so they would have done it for Starcraft too had it been using a 3D engine. And for the widescreen thing, there is a difference between having the monitor do the stretching and the graphics engine doing the scaling - it looks remarkably less crappy when the engine does it. It's still stretched, but at the native resolution of your monitor so it's not ugly.
That doesn't make sense though, because in Warcraft III when you change resolution the viewport stays the same. If you edit the registry to use a nonstandard (widescreen most likely) resolution, you get a stretched picture but no increased viewport. I think it's more that recoding the graphics engine would have been a pain and maybe some of the people who did it originally had left by the time 640x480 became woefully small.
Actually, you're mostly wrong. The RAM being lost is from addressing for things like graphics cards and the like. Also, the reason 32 bit computers might show 4GB is because Microsoft got annoyed at people wondering where their RAM was going and made Vista SP1 show the full installed amount, even if it couldn't be addressed. PAE exists but it's not in use in most desktop OSes because it causes hell with drivers and such. There is a boot time switch or something for Windows but Microsoft actually made that not do anything in one of the service packs for XP because of the headaches it causes.
Link for the google-handicapped: http://windows.kde.org/ actually lists KDE 4.1 as a release for Windows. I'm surprised there wasn't more news about it though. It seems to still be alpha/true beta quality software though but interesting nevertheless. Nice for people like me who like KDE apps but also like Windows (gasp).
Well no, I don't, but I'm reading up on it now. I'm more curious than critical of JS really. It's just that my first impression was "Ick, Javascript."
Kind of what I was thinking. That's not actually being done though, except for the Singularity research project in the MS research division that will probably never see production status. Then again, I don't know what the future holds. http://www.codeplex.com/singularity seems to be the site for anyone interested.
Thanks, that's pretty informative. I think this is why they're trying to move to XULRunner eventually for Firefox and Thunderbird, then there will be less hard drive space wasted on identical software and possibly less RAM used as well. I hadn't really thought of that when I made my comment.
I don't know, it's just that coming from Java first Javascript really bugs me. I guess the lack of standard OOP stuff, and function declarations seem weird to me. I guess I've never really given it a serious look, and most of the times I used it a lot of my annoyances were related to the DOM.
My post was really more about generating discussion though, because I'm genuinely curious about this. I don't have enough JS experience to really say more than it feels awkward to me. I kind of expect things to work like they do in Java and get annoyed when they don't.
The main problem I see with this (and again, I'm an amateur right now so take this with a grain of salt) is that these frameworks aren't as standardized as say, Java. I'm fairly certain that there are far more Java or C++ programmers than JS programmers who use ExtJS. I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to learn a framework but it just seems like a waste of time when you could be writing faster native code, or even Java code which at least you might already know.
Also, I was actually wondering about this topic earlier today (/. is becoming sentient, run!) and I was wondering, do colleges actually teach Javascript as part of their CS curriculum? It doesn't seem that likely to me, but I'm actually going to start college next week, majoring in EECS so I'll find out soon enough I guess. I'd guess that the people who would learn JS would be more likely to learn it from web development classes and not CS, so (I'm stereotyping here) the code might not be as optimized as it could be. Then again, I'm sure the guys writing the interpreters have a CS background so I guess maybe they do teach some JS in CS courses?
Well, XUL is just an XML language used for the UI. As far as I know the main codebase is C++/JS right now, but probably more C++ than JS.
Interestingly, one of the linked blogs talks about how this could lead to more of Firefox being written in Javascript. I haven't done much non-web related Javascript programming, and I haven't really used those new frameworks, but it seems to me like application programming in Javascript is like trying to hammer a nail with the handle of a screwdriver. Sure, it might work, but there are much better tools for the job. What do you guys think?
Yeah, I also ran Minefield nightlies since the later alphas and I have to say it was pretty stable for the most part. I'd guess he's having extension, plugin, or site-specific problems. I got off the nightly train for 3.1 though because one of the checkins broke my favorite extension, Liveclick.
I knew that. The whole iLine of products is really annoying to me. Same goes for eMachines, and I have to admit the whole K thing with KDE apps is kind of annoying too. But KDE is still better than GNOME, flamewar go! *ducks*
Haha, I guess it's kind of become reflex now to capitalize anything coming after an i.
Just curious, what optional features. I also have to admit, I love the breadcrumb bar and the search isn't just slightly better, but actually usable compared to previous OSes. The only thing that really annoys me about Vista's Explorer is that there's no up button, but backspace or the breadcrumb thing function the same way.
A comment further down got me to reading old Penny Arcade comics, and then I hit this one. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/5/31/
Indeed. How that got modded insightful, I have no idea. I would mod that redundant.
Perhaps, but the alternative, where companies would fail to make money because someone else could copy their ideas and manufacture them cheaper, would be equally ugly. The patent system is definitely effed, but I don't know how we could fix it without getting rid of it altogether, which would also be bad. Think of it this way: if you start a small company and discover something amazing, you bet you'd want to patent the hell out of it so that some big company couldn't just copy your design and squash you. It would be nicer if licenses were required to be sold to anyone who could prove they could use it, but that's kind of a lot of interference by the government which some might not like.
We've heard about this before I think, look up nVidia's Tegra project. Although the 1Ghz is off, I think it might be the same thing overall.
They didn't announce that, it was a rumor by this same site (The Inquirer) which nVidia vehemently denied and demanded a retraction of the original story.
The C7 successor is Nano (code name Isaiah), and I think it's been shown to be faster than Intel's (kind of sucky) Atom. It seems to be a much better chip than Atom. Hmm, I wonder what the whole licensing thing is about then. Too lazy to look it up...
I don't think Via, and definitely not Transmeta, actually had native x86 processors. Transmeta had some translation thing going, and I think Via does too, although I'm not positive.