Recent versions of Chromium (Chrome's development snapshots, kind of like Minefield for Firefox) are built on a much newer WebKit branch (in fact, it is new enough to pass the Acid3 test)
At our institution, the Software Engineering program receives a lot of funds from Microsoft, so they end up learning C# in a Windows-only environment. I am glad the Computer Science department doesn't have such an affiliation (if anything, they seem to have a certain love for Macs, even though I haven't seen Apple actively support the faculty)
This website parses the serial number and displays some useful information, such as the factory and date of origin. The model number information is not always accurate from my limited testing, and I have no way of checking if the manufacturing data is correct, so use this at your own risk.
The iPhone/iPod touch actually learns your typing, but you have to make sure to hit the "x" on bad autocorrections to force it to learn.
For the first few days, I had to continually correct "PHP" because it kept wanting to correct to either "PNP" or "pup" (if lowercase). I eventually wised up to touching the "x" each time, and it has now stopped autocorrecting PHP and started to correct PJP to PHP. I find that it learns a new word in around 3 instances, i.e. if I type a new word three times in separate occasions, the word becomes part of the local dictionary and can be autocorrected to.
Long story short: if you have to correct 25% of the autocorrections after a month, you probably either write too infrequently or aren't using "the right way" to train the dictionary.
From http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ I count 39/8 blocks assigned to individual companies or organizations. That's purely wasteful, since it is highly unlikely that any of these companies actually need the 16 million or so addresses in those blocks. If those blocks were reallocated, which will likely occur if we reach "X-day" ( http://entne.jp/tool/toollist/index_en.html ) before IPv6 becomes widespread, we will have gained approximately 500 million IP addresses. That will probably be sufficient to buy us another two years, since we currently have about 566 million free and two years to go (again according to the IPv4 exhaustion counter).
So, we should have another four years if IANA pushes for reallocation of the/8 blocks by 2010.
Safari on Mac will, by default, load Preview unless Adobe Reader has decided to override it.
Preview is the Mac OS X general-purpose image/PDF viewer. It loads very quickly and displays PDFs using Apple's renderer (which also underlies a lot of their GUI -- a number of the UI elements are actually PDF files!).
On Linux, most browsers will use Xpdf or similar and are not hard to configure to use a different viewer.
It seems that the problem exists mainly on Windows, where the lack of well-known alternatives force the majority of users to use Adobe Reader.
Technically, Apple calls their hibernation mode "safe sleep". There are various firmware hacks you can do to enable it for regular Apple laptops, or even to replace the regular sleep functionality. It actually does work quite seamlessly, and the system doesn't look like it's just started up, but rather like it's taking a bit longer to resume (the grayscale screenshot is a nice touch).
I'm inclined to believe the results you posted, since there's a news post which suggests that by 2006, the computational speed was 20 TFLOPS:
http://mersenne.org/ips/stats.html
It is, though, still two orders of magnitude smaller than Folding@Home.
It crashes again, then you press "no", thus breaking the loop. Most normal people wouldn't keep hitting "yes" if it causes their browser to continually present that dialog. (an xkcd comic involving lightning bolts and buttons comes to mind)
I have used Firefox since it was called Phoenix and had a 0.x version number. Phoenix and Firebird were really great browsers, but they lacked support for a number of websites (can't blame them, it was beta). Firefox 1.5 was perhaps the best release prior to FF3, but GMail basically killed FF1.5 for me (it's funny, but GMail seems to be the app that is best at exposing JS implementation bugs!). FF2 was a train-wreck in terms of performance; it wasn't a bad browser, but it wasn't great, either. Safari and Opera thoroughly trounced FF2 for performance and stability. However, Mozilla got very serious about performance for FF3, and, for me, stability is 100% (I have had weeks of uptime with Firefox 3, with continual usage). I didn't even clear my profile for FF3; the profile I'm using was actually copied off my old computer and upgraded from 0.8 gradually up to version 3. I have to say that I am very pleased with what Mozilla has done, but again, Your Mileage May Vary.
I have 12 extensions, of which only Firebug has ever crashed on me (1.20 betas tended to cause Firefox's cycle collector to go into a hang, but the final version appears to have fixed that).
In all honesty, Firefox is a lot more stable than IE and Opera -- I have never *ever* had Firefox 3 crash outright (I've only gotten hangs, and those were due to Firebug); I have managed to cause both IE and Opera to die with "... has encountered a problem and needs to close..." errors (IE when browsing GMail, Opera when browsing GMail through a proxy).
Final thought: I visited http://crashie.com/ on IE7 yesterday (OS: XP SP2), and it managed to completely hang my dual-core processor while using only one core (as verified by Process Explorer when it finally got enough CPU time to start). With ~30% idle, and memory usage still at normal levels (i.e. no pagefile thrashing), I am at a loss to explain how my system could nearly be brought down due to IE's crash (Process Explorer was eventually successful in killing it). Maybe someone here has a clue?
The only problem is the fact that the API for embedding browsers differs wildly; for IE, you include and activate an OLE control, for Safari, you would include a WebKit frame, and I have no idea how you'd do it with Opera. While doable, it would probably require very separate approaches, and that suggests having different extensions for each browser.
Basically, it was a full Firefox install with three add-ons.
Anyway, an Idea just hit me: what about making Firefox metapackages? For example, a "privacy/paranoia" metapackage incorporating ABP, NoScript, perhaps Torbutton, etc., a "webdev" metapackage with Firebug, Web Developer, YSlow,..., and so on.
My digital camera, a Fujifilm Finepix Z10, actually happens to have this feature (called "Natural + Flash"). I've even used it a couple of times; the intention is to allow you to get a photo under different lighting to see which one is better (both are saved though). I guess this gives my camera a new use:)
Testing a single candidate Mersenne prime takes a month of straight computation on a single 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 (assuming a 10 million digit prime, which would be the minimum to win the prize). This assumes the use of only one core, but you'd need at least 100 cores to make it anything resembling "quick" (~7 hours), if you could even parallelize the procedure that much.
Never mind the fact that only about one in 150,000 exponents will yield a prime, meaning that on average, 150,000 months of computation is required for a single prime to emerge, and furthermore, finding giant Mersenne primes is easier than most other kind of primes. So, I don't think your computer will find these giant primes "pretty damn quick".
Pessimism aside, I think this is a pretty impressive achievement considering that GIMPS doesn't have nearly the power of larger efforts like Folding@Home (GIMPS has around 500 GFLOPS while F@H has around 3372 TFLOPS, or 3372000 GFLOPS).
And XP would run swimmingly in that environment. Heck, we have machines at the local university running XP with 128MB RAM and Pentium IIIs, without any trouble. The fact is -- Vista is bloatware.
All the tests conform to some part or another of some published and accepted specification. Thus, they are valid according to these specifications.
That said, they were specifically designed to fail browsers. In fact, during the last few weeks of finalizing the test, the makers specifically asked for code to fail WebKit, since it was doing quite well (and still is).
I am using Windows XP (SP2)
Firefox 3.0a5 (2008030506): 67/100 (built today, March 5th)
WebKit nightly (r30768): 88/100 (built today, March 5th)
Opera 9.5 beta (b9815): 65/100 (built February 29th)
IE7: 12/100
There you go. Information for the latest available builds, at time of writing, of the major Windows browsers.
3.0.4 is fairly old. Get the latest WebKit nightly (http://nightly.webkit.org) and you will see it do very well.
The nightly seems to be increasing its score by one each day, as far as I've observed, so by next week, it will have passed all the tests if it keeps up.
Now, if they could only get ruby text to work - properly...
Reversing the polarity on speakers can typically turn them into low-quality microphones (yes, it sounds like a science-fiction solution, but it does basically work).
It's kind of like reversing the polarity of a generator to make a motor and vice-versa.
Slashdot Mirror
Recent versions of Chromium (Chrome's development snapshots, kind of like Minefield for Firefox) are built on a much newer WebKit branch (in fact, it is new enough to pass the Acid3 test)
At our institution, the Software Engineering program receives a lot of funds from Microsoft, so they end up learning C# in a Windows-only environment. I am glad the Computer Science department doesn't have such an affiliation (if anything, they seem to have a certain love for Macs, even though I haven't seen Apple actively support the faculty)
This website parses the serial number and displays some useful information, such as the factory and date of origin. The model number information is not always accurate from my limited testing, and I have no way of checking if the manufacturing data is correct, so use this at your own risk.
The iPhone/iPod touch actually learns your typing, but you have to make sure to hit the "x" on bad autocorrections to force it to learn.
For the first few days, I had to continually correct "PHP" because it kept wanting to correct to either "PNP" or "pup" (if lowercase). I eventually wised up to touching the "x" each time, and it has now stopped autocorrecting PHP and started to correct PJP to PHP. I find that it learns a new word in around 3 instances, i.e. if I type a new word three times in separate occasions, the word becomes part of the local dictionary and can be autocorrected to.
Long story short: if you have to correct 25% of the autocorrections after a month, you probably either write too infrequently or aren't using "the right way" to train the dictionary.
It runs a browser derived from WebKit. Safari, Chrome and the iPhone's Safari are all derived from WebKit. You may draw your own conclusions.
From http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ I count 39 /8 blocks assigned to individual companies or organizations. That's purely wasteful, since it is highly unlikely that any of these companies actually need the 16 million or so addresses in those blocks. If those blocks were reallocated, which will likely occur if we reach "X-day" ( http://entne.jp/tool/toollist/index_en.html ) before IPv6 becomes widespread, we will have gained approximately 500 million IP addresses. That will probably be sufficient to buy us another two years, since we currently have about 566 million free and two years to go (again according to the IPv4 exhaustion counter).
/8 blocks by 2010.
So, we should have another four years if IANA pushes for reallocation of the
Safari on Mac will, by default, load Preview unless Adobe Reader has decided to override it.
Preview is the Mac OS X general-purpose image/PDF viewer. It loads very quickly and displays PDFs using Apple's renderer (which also underlies a lot of their GUI -- a number of the UI elements are actually PDF files!).
On Linux, most browsers will use Xpdf or similar and are not hard to configure to use a different viewer.
It seems that the problem exists mainly on Windows, where the lack of well-known alternatives force the majority of users to use Adobe Reader.
Technically, Apple calls their hibernation mode "safe sleep". There are various firmware hacks you can do to enable it for regular Apple laptops, or even to replace the regular sleep functionality. It actually does work quite seamlessly, and the system doesn't look like it's just started up, but rather like it's taking a bit longer to resume (the grayscale screenshot is a nice touch).
See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1757 for a short explanation.
I'm inclined to believe the results you posted, since there's a news post which suggests that by 2006, the computational speed was 20 TFLOPS: http://mersenne.org/ips/stats.html
It is, though, still two orders of magnitude smaller than Folding@Home.
http://v5www.mersenne.org/ is where I got my info; clearly we have a slight disconnect between that and http://mersenne.org/primenet/. Thanks for the heads-up.
It crashes again, then you press "no", thus breaking the loop. Most normal people wouldn't keep hitting "yes" if it causes their browser to continually present that dialog. (an xkcd comic involving lightning bolts and buttons comes to mind)
Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3. Between beta1 and beta2, they made a 3 point improvement.
I have used Firefox since it was called Phoenix and had a 0.x version number. Phoenix and Firebird were really great browsers, but they lacked support for a number of websites (can't blame them, it was beta). Firefox 1.5 was perhaps the best release prior to FF3, but GMail basically killed FF1.5 for me (it's funny, but GMail seems to be the app that is best at exposing JS implementation bugs!). FF2 was a train-wreck in terms of performance; it wasn't a bad browser, but it wasn't great, either. Safari and Opera thoroughly trounced FF2 for performance and stability. However, Mozilla got very serious about performance for FF3, and, for me, stability is 100% (I have had weeks of uptime with Firefox 3, with continual usage). I didn't even clear my profile for FF3; the profile I'm using was actually copied off my old computer and upgraded from 0.8 gradually up to version 3. I have to say that I am very pleased with what Mozilla has done, but again, Your Mileage May Vary.
I have 12 extensions, of which only Firebug has ever crashed on me (1.20 betas tended to cause Firefox's cycle collector to go into a hang, but the final version appears to have fixed that).
..." errors (IE when browsing GMail, Opera when browsing GMail through a proxy).
In all honesty, Firefox is a lot more stable than IE and Opera -- I have never *ever* had Firefox 3 crash outright (I've only gotten hangs, and those were due to Firebug); I have managed to cause both IE and Opera to die with "... has encountered a problem and needs to close
Final thought: I visited http://crashie.com/ on IE7 yesterday (OS: XP SP2), and it managed to completely hang my dual-core processor while using only one core (as verified by Process Explorer when it finally got enough CPU time to start). With ~30% idle, and memory usage still at normal levels (i.e. no pagefile thrashing), I am at a loss to explain how my system could nearly be brought down due to IE's crash (Process Explorer was eventually successful in killing it). Maybe someone here has a clue?
The only problem is the fact that the API for embedding browsers differs wildly; for IE, you include and activate an OLE control, for Safari, you would include a WebKit frame, and I have no idea how you'd do it with Opera. While doable, it would probably require very separate approaches, and that suggests having different extensions for each browser.
Firefox actually did this a while ago for college students, making a version they called "Firefox Campus Edition": http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/08/firefox-campus-edition-for-cool-college-students/
..., and so on.
Basically, it was a full Firefox install with three add-ons.
Anyway, an Idea just hit me: what about making Firefox metapackages? For example, a "privacy/paranoia" metapackage incorporating ABP, NoScript, perhaps Torbutton, etc., a "webdev" metapackage with Firebug, Web Developer, YSlow,
My digital camera, a Fujifilm Finepix Z10, actually happens to have this feature (called "Natural + Flash"). I've even used it a couple of times; the intention is to allow you to get a photo under different lighting to see which one is better (both are saved though). I guess this gives my camera a new use :)
Testing a single candidate Mersenne prime takes a month of straight computation on a single 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 (assuming a 10 million digit prime, which would be the minimum to win the prize). This assumes the use of only one core, but you'd need at least 100 cores to make it anything resembling "quick" (~7 hours), if you could even parallelize the procedure that much.
Never mind the fact that only about one in 150,000 exponents will yield a prime, meaning that on average, 150,000 months of computation is required for a single prime to emerge, and furthermore, finding giant Mersenne primes is easier than most other kind of primes. So, I don't think your computer will find these giant primes "pretty damn quick".
Pessimism aside, I think this is a pretty impressive achievement considering that GIMPS doesn't have nearly the power of larger efforts like Folding@Home (GIMPS has around 500 GFLOPS while F@H has around 3372 TFLOPS, or 3372000 GFLOPS).
And XP would run swimmingly in that environment. Heck, we have machines at the local university running XP with 128MB RAM and Pentium IIIs, without any trouble. The fact is -- Vista is bloatware.
Mafiaa + Scientology would be far, far worse, if you knew the tactics the Scientologists go by...
For IE7, the trick is to wait about 30 seconds to a minute. Then, it will start counting again.
Presumably, this is because it fails a ton of tests in the middle, so it *looks* like it stopped counting.
It eventually gets to 12.
All the tests conform to some part or another of some published and accepted specification. Thus, they are valid according to these specifications.
That said, they were specifically designed to fail browsers. In fact, during the last few weeks of finalizing the test, the makers specifically asked for code to fail WebKit, since it was doing quite well (and still is).
I am using Windows XP (SP2) Firefox 3.0a5 (2008030506): 67/100 (built today, March 5th) WebKit nightly (r30768): 88/100 (built today, March 5th) Opera 9.5 beta (b9815): 65/100 (built February 29th) IE7: 12/100 There you go. Information for the latest available builds, at time of writing, of the major Windows browsers.
3.0.4 is fairly old. Get the latest WebKit nightly (http://nightly.webkit.org) and you will see it do very well. The nightly seems to be increasing its score by one each day, as far as I've observed, so by next week, it will have passed all the tests if it keeps up. Now, if they could only get ruby text to work - properly...
Reversing the polarity on speakers can typically turn them into low-quality microphones (yes, it sounds like a science-fiction solution, but it does basically work).
It's kind of like reversing the polarity of a generator to make a motor and vice-versa.