Ubiquitous... Great, let me just open up my iPhone here. Oh wait. Guess ubiquitous = runs on linux/windows only?
Open-standard... Great, where can I find the standard specs? Oh wait. Here I thought "Open-standard" had to mean it was like...Open and a standard. It's neither Open, nor standard. So it's a proprietary closed system at the whim of a single vendor. At least silverlight is open.
The author of the article spent the time to make pretty graphs, and even identified a oddity, but spent no time actually investigating it before publishing his article. I can easily say that it took me less than 15 seconds to spot the problem, and when I can figure it out with such little effort, I have to disqualify the entire rest of the article as garbage.
I understand that the code is supposed to represent "real world" code, but it's apparent that a lot of it wasn't tested very well, let alone be taken from something actually running somewhere, which is misleading. In any case, I've only taken a quick look at the string-base64 test, and string-validate-input. Base64 was producing errors in IE, and validate-input is extremely poorly written. In your test results of catching improper zip codes, it will repeat the error message for each letter within in the zip code. For example "12345xyz" will produce 4 error messages, 3 messages that say "12345xyz contains letters", and one that says it's too long. A good routine would first check the length to make sure you aren't getting 2GB worth of data in the field before trying to loop through. When it does loop through, it would exit the loop after the first error rather than generating multiple error messages that are exactly the same. That said, the test does stress strings, and someone might actually use code similiar in production, but I'd have any of my programmers shot for writing it. Is it a valid test? Perhaps. Just because it's code that shouldn't be running anywhere doesn't invalidate the fact that the functions it does perform better or worse than anothers.
I realize that it's too much to ask to have people read the whole article on slashdot, but it's unexcusable that the author of the article didn't take the 30 seconds to investigate a problem he's having before posting his drivel.
It could be that some of the test scripts were actually written by Mozilla, and uses some non-standard javascript functions that are causing errors in IE. By non-standard, I mean uses proprietary extensions to the ECMA-262 specification, which is *EXACTLY* what these benchmark scripts are doing.
In particular, they are referencing characters within a string object by using array syntax, which isn't valid according to the specification. The correct way to retrieve the character at a particular location within a string is by calling the charCodeAt function. Once these non-standard calls are corrected, IE vastly out performs FF. Of course these errors are causing IE to generate a huge string "undefinedundefinedundefinedundefined..." (Not to mention all the error processing overhead), which is apparent if you actually look at the output of the functions. On my machine, IE runs the corrected code just under 30 times faster.
Or it could be that some of the test scripts were actually written by Mozilla, and uses some non-standard javascript functions that are causing errors in IE. By non-standard, I mean uses proprietary extensions to the ECMA-262 specification, which is *EXACTLY* what these benchmark scripts are doing.
In particular, they are referencing characters within a string object by using array syntax, which isn't valid according to the specification. The correct way to retrieve the character at a particular location within a string is by calling the charCodeAt function. Once these non-standard calls are corrected, IE vastly out performs FF.
IE is performing badly because it's generating a huge string "undefinedundefinedundefinedundefined...", which is apparent if you actually look at the output of the functions. On my machine, IE runs the corrected code just under 30 times faster.
You may think that completely separating Language from Locale is the "correct" way, but it really isn't. Locale is used as a sub-category of language so that the differences in language from different locales can be accounted for. For example English (UK) - colour and English (USA) color.
As for the "third" problem, it has nothing to do with the Operating system. The operating system exposes everything an application would need for multi-lingual support. I would venture to say that 99.999%+ of people don't want the behavior that you say you want. It would be very easy to have your installation application detect the default language of the OS and use that, but that's counter-intuitive. You've just told the OS you prefer French, so why would an application that is installing that can support French want to install with the language set to English?
What you are looking for is English (France), but it doesn't exist because there isn't enough demand for it.
Pick English (something), and click the "Customize" button and choose the date/time format, and number format that you want. Every well written application on the system will then use English with your custom formats. I believe there is a way to even add English (France) to the list, but you'll have to look that up on your own.
Because there is no "French" in the dropdown. You can pick:
French (Belgium)
French (Canada)
French (France)
French (Luxembourgh)
French (Monoco)
Frech (Switzerland)
The thing in the parenthesis is a locale.
You don't select a locale in windows. You select the langauge and then optionally, a locale. You are free to pick any language you want and click the customize button to change the number formats, currency, date formats, etc as you want.
What benefit does it offer besides as 3D accelerated desktop (and I have a better version of that in Linux)? Let's see: DirectX 10. This allows the system to offload some of the things that were making games CPU bound off to the GPU. Completely reengineered I/O stack. Background I/O intensive tasks (Defrag, Index, Backup, Virus Scan) will no longer cause huge slowdowns to foreground tasks. Native IPv6 support. Not all that important today, but it will someday, eventually. Redesigned sound. After 6 years of ultra crappy sound drivers from creative, making it so the sound drivers can no longer crash the system is a very good thing. Ready Boost. Reduce CPU stalls while waiting for data to load. Improved Disk Caching. Actually use the memory you have instead of letting it go to waste doing nothing. Decreased boot times. Smart reordering of loading processes on boot to better balance CPU and I/O limited start ups. Better hybernate, throttling. Again, faster "boots", less heat and power consumption. Per-process network I/O monitoring. Per-process disk I/O monitoring. IE7 in a sandbox. Randomized starting locations (Less susceptable to buffer overrun attacks). Prevents running code on the stack (Less susceptable to stack overflow/buffer overrun attacks). Media Center AND domain support (Ultimate Edition). IIS7. File-based configuration in web.config. Plugable authentication for FTP.
And that's just off the top of my head, not including the many UI improvements. (Task switcher, sidebar, start menu, resizable thumbnail views, etc.)
That depends on waht you consider "better". If you consider getting 104 FPS rather than 102 FPS as OMG this is so much better, well I'm happy for you.
Myself, I prefer hitting alt-tab and seeing the desktop instantly rather than watching a black screen, while the hard disk grinds reloading stuff.
"You can put a swap drive on a USB stick in Linux or XP if you really wanted, but I don't see why you would. Most thumb drives are pretty slow, and it is even slower than paging to your HDD. The only real advantage is if you can't afford more RAM."
That is because you have only an extremely rudimentary understanding of how memory management really works. First, USB sticks have an order of magnitude faster access time than the fastest HDD. Paged virtual memory can stall a processor, and being able to load the few actual pages you need (in a random order -- USB drives have 0ms seek times again) improves *response*. Again, something current benchmarks don't measure.
"1 - My XP looks just like Vista, runs Vista apps, but runs faster. AIOP project and the Vista Transformation Project. Except I don't have all the bugs, instability or driver issues of Vista."
1 - I can take an old pontiac fiero, toss on $12k worth of body panels and a couple weeks worth of work, and it will look just like a lamborghini. It will also get better gas milage to boot, but I have yet to have a real lamborghini owner want to trade me. You can be happy all you want about your accomplishment, but it's not the same thing.
Vista uses RAM a lot better than XP ever did. That allows the system to cache more of the disk in memory. Vista also supports using a USB drive (some of them) to help speed up the system. As I had one anyhow, I notice the system is MUCH more responsive even during heavy game usage, and the background tasks that run on my machine doesn't affect my gameplay (Thanks to the priority based I/O stack).
You will most likely only be able to use 3.0-3.2GB of the 4GB if you upgrade. That's just normal. Toss on a decent USB drive, and your framerates may not go up much in benchmarks (if any), but I don't know about you, but I don't game the same way the benchmarks are run. I normally have skype, messenger, outlook and probably a half dozen other applications (Hamachi, possibly a web browser, etc.) running in the background. My framerates don't plummet when I get an email, skype doesn't get all garbled when the action gets heavy and I'm trying to coordinate an attack or someone sends me an IM, and I can alt-tab to it and back in a fraction of the time I ever could on XP.
Vista has been disk caching, and better (meaning actually using) RAM management, and the ability to page to a USB device. None of that usually shows up on a benchmark because benchmarks only show what the system can do in the best of circumstances if you are just running the game alone, but who does that?
Gamers who want the best possible performance, are also the same ones who have 4GB of RAM, a high end video card, and a decent dual core CPU. That type of system runs much better on vista than it ever did on XP.
Mono isn't the only non-windows implementation of the.NET framework and C#. Microsoft itself has 2 different projects that support both. A portable.NET CLR, and Silverlight which currently runs cross-browser and cross-platform.
What router are you using?
Just curious because I too have both comcast and DSL from AT&T. However, in my area, AT&T is the one that is blocking port 25, while comcast does not. I currently have each of them running to a different nic in my machine, and a turn one of them off when I want to switch (Bad connection/latency).
Hmm....NET runs on more than just windows. C# runs on more than just windows. Excel runs on more than just windows. So half of what you've listed is portable to a non-windows environment.
Unisys has had 16-way and 32-way processor boxes for a very very long time (8+ years?). They currently have atleast one box I've seen the ES7000, which can house up to 32 processors I believe each of which can be single or dual core.
You should pick better examples. That particular problem was caused by Microsoft using a very well known OPEN SOURCE library for handling image functions. It affected many applications (including ones in linux). Now that you know that, are you still advocating that Microsoft should stop having anything to do with open source software? Didn't think so.
Monopolies are not illegal. Taken from your own sources
any company that "got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could" would not be in violation of the act
I'm 37, and let me tell you if you know guys 35-40 who can't find a job in the industry, there is a reason. I used to do consulting, and the longest I went between contracts was 36 hours. That's means if my last day on a contract is over, that night I would normally get a call. Fax over anything they needed for paperwork, interview the next day, and start either right then or the following day.
If they can't find work, that tells me that their skills are bad, and they are probably looking for a job in the wrong salary bracket. If you can't keep up with technology, then don't get a career in IT.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize the same thing is true of PHP, PERL, and any language that allows any kind of interface to native libraries?
Flash is a ubiquitous open-standard
Ubiquitous... Great, let me just open up my iPhone here. Oh wait. Guess ubiquitous = runs on linux/windows only?
Open-standard... Great, where can I find the standard specs? Oh wait. Here I thought "Open-standard" had to mean it was like...Open and a standard. It's neither Open, nor standard. So it's a proprietary closed system at the whim of a single vendor. At least silverlight is open.
Taken from the source in question:
* The Original Code is Mozilla XML-RPC Client component.
also you can find the exact same code here:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/extensions/xml-rpc/src/nsXmlRpcClient.js#956
The author of the article spent the time to make pretty graphs, and even identified a oddity, but spent no time actually investigating it before publishing his article. I can easily say that it took me less than 15 seconds to spot the problem, and when I can figure it out with such little effort, I have to disqualify the entire rest of the article as garbage.
I understand that the code is supposed to represent "real world" code, but it's apparent that a lot of it wasn't tested very well, let alone be taken from something actually running somewhere, which is misleading. In any case, I've only taken a quick look at the string-base64 test, and string-validate-input. Base64 was producing errors in IE, and validate-input is extremely poorly written. In your test results of catching improper zip codes, it will repeat the error message for each letter within in the zip code. For example "12345xyz" will produce 4 error messages, 3 messages that say "12345xyz contains letters", and one that says it's too long. A good routine would first check the length to make sure you aren't getting 2GB worth of data in the field before trying to loop through. When it does loop through, it would exit the loop after the first error rather than generating multiple error messages that are exactly the same. That said, the test does stress strings, and someone might actually use code similiar in production, but I'd have any of my programmers shot for writing it. Is it a valid test? Perhaps. Just because it's code that shouldn't be running anywhere doesn't invalidate the fact that the functions it does perform better or worse than anothers.
I realize that it's too much to ask to have people read the whole article on slashdot, but it's unexcusable that the author of the article didn't take the 30 seconds to investigate a problem he's having before posting his drivel.
It could be that some of the test scripts were actually written by Mozilla, and uses some non-standard javascript functions that are causing errors in IE. By non-standard, I mean uses proprietary extensions to the ECMA-262 specification, which is *EXACTLY* what these benchmark scripts are doing.
In particular, they are referencing characters within a string object by using array syntax, which isn't valid according to the specification. The correct way to retrieve the character at a particular location within a string is by calling the charCodeAt function. Once these non-standard calls are corrected, IE vastly out performs FF. Of course these errors are causing IE to generate a huge string "undefinedundefinedundefinedundefined..." (Not to mention all the error processing overhead), which is apparent if you actually look at the output of the functions. On my machine, IE runs the corrected code just under 30 times faster.
Or it could be that some of the test scripts were actually written by Mozilla, and uses some non-standard javascript functions that are causing errors in IE. By non-standard, I mean uses proprietary extensions to the ECMA-262 specification, which is *EXACTLY* what these benchmark scripts are doing.
In particular, they are referencing characters within a string object by using array syntax, which isn't valid according to the specification. The correct way to retrieve the character at a particular location within a string is by calling the charCodeAt function. Once these non-standard calls are corrected, IE vastly out performs FF.
IE is performing badly because it's generating a huge string "undefinedundefinedundefinedundefined...", which is apparent if you actually look at the output of the functions. On my machine, IE runs the corrected code just under 30 times faster.
You may think that completely separating Language from Locale is the "correct" way, but it really isn't. Locale is used as a sub-category of language so that the differences in language from different locales can be accounted for. For example English (UK) - colour and English (USA) color. As for the "third" problem, it has nothing to do with the Operating system. The operating system exposes everything an application would need for multi-lingual support. I would venture to say that 99.999%+ of people don't want the behavior that you say you want. It would be very easy to have your installation application detect the default language of the OS and use that, but that's counter-intuitive. You've just told the OS you prefer French, so why would an application that is installing that can support French want to install with the language set to English?
What you are looking for is English (France), but it doesn't exist because there isn't enough demand for it. Pick English (something), and click the "Customize" button and choose the date/time format, and number format that you want. Every well written application on the system will then use English with your custom formats. I believe there is a way to even add English (France) to the list, but you'll have to look that up on your own.
Because there is no "French" in the dropdown. You can pick: French (Belgium) French (Canada) French (France) French (Luxembourgh) French (Monoco) Frech (Switzerland) The thing in the parenthesis is a locale.
French is not a locale, it's a language.
You don't select a locale in windows. You select the langauge and then optionally, a locale. You are free to pick any language you want and click the customize button to change the number formats, currency, date formats, etc as you want.
Is that 80W when the computer is in it S3 sleep state, or just idle at the desktop?
DirectX 10. This allows the system to offload some of the things that were making games CPU bound off to the GPU.
Completely reengineered I/O stack. Background I/O intensive tasks (Defrag, Index, Backup, Virus Scan) will no longer cause huge slowdowns to foreground tasks.
Native IPv6 support. Not all that important today, but it will someday, eventually.
Redesigned sound. After 6 years of ultra crappy sound drivers from creative, making it so the sound drivers can no longer crash the system is a very good thing.
Ready Boost. Reduce CPU stalls while waiting for data to load.
Improved Disk Caching. Actually use the memory you have instead of letting it go to waste doing nothing.
Decreased boot times. Smart reordering of loading processes on boot to better balance CPU and I/O limited start ups.
Better hybernate, throttling. Again, faster "boots", less heat and power consumption.
Per-process network I/O monitoring.
Per-process disk I/O monitoring.
IE7 in a sandbox.
Randomized starting locations (Less susceptable to buffer overrun attacks).
Prevents running code on the stack (Less susceptable to stack overflow/buffer overrun attacks).
Media Center AND domain support (Ultimate Edition).
IIS7. File-based configuration in web.config. Plugable authentication for FTP.
And that's just off the top of my head, not including the many UI improvements. (Task switcher, sidebar, start menu, resizable thumbnail views, etc.)
That depends on waht you consider "better". If you consider getting 104 FPS rather than 102 FPS as OMG this is so much better, well I'm happy for you.
Myself, I prefer hitting alt-tab and seeing the desktop instantly rather than watching a black screen, while the hard disk grinds reloading stuff.
"You can put a swap drive on a USB stick in Linux or XP if you really wanted, but I don't see why you would. Most thumb drives are pretty slow, and it is even slower than paging to your HDD. The only real advantage is if you can't afford more RAM."
That is because you have only an extremely rudimentary understanding of how memory management really works. First, USB sticks have an order of magnitude faster access time than the fastest HDD. Paged virtual memory can stall a processor, and being able to load the few actual pages you need (in a random order -- USB drives have 0ms seek times again) improves *response*. Again, something current benchmarks don't measure.
"1 - My XP looks just like Vista, runs Vista apps, but runs faster. AIOP project and the Vista Transformation Project. Except I don't have all the bugs, instability or driver issues of Vista."
1 - I can take an old pontiac fiero, toss on $12k worth of body panels and a couple weeks worth of work, and it will look just like a lamborghini. It will also get better gas milage to boot, but I have yet to have a real lamborghini owner want to trade me. You can be happy all you want about your accomplishment, but it's not the same thing.
Vista uses RAM a lot better than XP ever did. That allows the system to cache more of the disk in memory. Vista also supports using a USB drive (some of them) to help speed up the system. As I had one anyhow, I notice the system is MUCH more responsive even during heavy game usage, and the background tasks that run on my machine doesn't affect my gameplay (Thanks to the priority based I/O stack). You will most likely only be able to use 3.0-3.2GB of the 4GB if you upgrade. That's just normal. Toss on a decent USB drive, and your framerates may not go up much in benchmarks (if any), but I don't know about you, but I don't game the same way the benchmarks are run. I normally have skype, messenger, outlook and probably a half dozen other applications (Hamachi, possibly a web browser, etc.) running in the background. My framerates don't plummet when I get an email, skype doesn't get all garbled when the action gets heavy and I'm trying to coordinate an attack or someone sends me an IM, and I can alt-tab to it and back in a fraction of the time I ever could on XP. Vista has been disk caching, and better (meaning actually using) RAM management, and the ability to page to a USB device. None of that usually shows up on a benchmark because benchmarks only show what the system can do in the best of circumstances if you are just running the game alone, but who does that?
Gamers who want the best possible performance, are also the same ones who have 4GB of RAM, a high end video card, and a decent dual core CPU. That type of system runs much better on vista than it ever did on XP.
Mono isn't the only non-windows implementation of the .NET framework and C#. Microsoft itself has 2 different projects that support both. A portable .NET CLR, and Silverlight which currently runs cross-browser and cross-platform.
What router are you using? Just curious because I too have both comcast and DSL from AT&T. However, in my area, AT&T is the one that is blocking port 25, while comcast does not. I currently have each of them running to a different nic in my machine, and a turn one of them off when I want to switch (Bad connection/latency).
Hmm... .NET runs on more than just windows. C# runs on more than just windows. Excel runs on more than just windows. So half of what you've listed is portable to a non-windows environment.
Unisys has had 16-way and 32-way processor boxes for a very very long time (8+ years?). They currently have atleast one box I've seen the ES7000, which can house up to 32 processors I believe each of which can be single or dual core.
Although, it's probably not cheap.
You should pick better examples. That particular problem was caused by Microsoft using a very well known OPEN SOURCE library for handling image functions. It affected many applications (including ones in linux). Now that you know that, are you still advocating that Microsoft should stop having anything to do with open source software? Didn't think so.
I'm 37, and let me tell you if you know guys 35-40 who can't find a job in the industry, there is a reason. I used to do consulting, and the longest I went between contracts was 36 hours. That's means if my last day on a contract is over, that night I would normally get a call. Fax over anything they needed for paperwork, interview the next day, and start either right then or the following day.
If they can't find work, that tells me that their skills are bad, and they are probably looking for a job in the wrong salary bracket. If you can't keep up with technology, then don't get a career in IT.
No, because most of us know that HTTP uses TCP, and would benefit from the device.
Heh. Living in a fantasy world are you?