1. I should be more careful to cite my sources when quoting The Big Lebowski.
2. That's horseshit. While "ownership" of "property" in general is a pretty damaged concept, with much to be reconsidered, the implication of your comment is that displacement of people from that which they derive their basic subsistence has no ethical bearing... well, maybe not in your conception of ethics, but it's a hard sell to the victims and a convenient position for the victors.
Uh. And? All of what I said is still entirely true. And for the record, while I have a design background, I am primarily a developer (primarily web application UI, but also backend system).
Serious web site design can require or utilize a substantial programming background, if not programming per se. Especially as design extends into web vector graphics, but also as "design" can include things like animation.
Addendum to my last post: by "IE" I refer only to Trident (the Windows engine); Tasman (the Mac engine, also used by some Office products, I believe) was on par, in a lot of ways, with Mozilla at the time (better in some ways, worse in others).
I can't say for sure, but I seem to remember it having been "good" in the 0.7s. That is, it did what I told it to do with CSS a lot more consistently than IE did.
"It is surprising how different the versions of webkit are."
This is untrue, and mostly a product of misunderstanding but partly a product of FUD as well. More on this below...
"the current release of Chrome is almost 4 times faster than the current release of Safari"
This really has almost nothing to do with Webkit, and does not demonstrate a difference in the rendering engines at all. Ultimately what we're looking at here is a comparison of JavaScriptCore (Safari's current* ECMAScript interpreter)â"released 19 June 2008, with only minor changes from the major version from more than a year earlierâ"and V8 (Google's ECMAScript-bytecode translator engine)â"released 5 September 2008 against a codebase that was nearly brand new; while it's true that JSC is a [legacy] part of Webkit, V8 is not a part of Webkit at all. Comparing the two isn't really meaningful.
Moreover, Chrome is not released, it's a very, very early, unpolished beta.
A more apt comparison would be...
"It would be interesting to see if the Safari nightly builds have closed this gap."... the nightly builds, which use a similar engine (SFX is somewhat different in its approach, but ultimately in the same class as V8). And in fact, performance is roughly the same. It's not like this information isn't widely available, either.
I can't speak to the particular benchmark in question or whether it even has merit as a general browser benchmark (note, Google's benchmark has little merit here, as it strictly tests JS language speed, rather than DOM performance [which is extremely important for nearly all browser performance experiences]), and I don't have an environment which would be suited to finding out for myself, but I encourage you if you're that curious to try a nightly build on the test yourself.
With that said, there are existing browser benchmarks (eg Dromaeo 2) that tell a story much more interesting story.
But I want to reiterate, this is hardly a good example of differences in Webkit releases. These are differences in browser releases and over a very wide stretch of time (in the current JS engine war, especially).
* By "current", I mean "released"; it is current in that sense, but actually two generations old in the Webkit project. The Webkit team has since produced SquirrelFish and SquirrelFish Extreme, the latter being much closer to (and often faster than) Chrome's performance on every task except (if I recall correctly) recursion.
As [name any petty tech squabble] grows longer the probability of co-opting language used in historical social movements that faced abuse, torture, and often death against almost insurmountable oppressive inertia approaches one.
Presto certainly is not as fast as Gecko or Webkit. And unless Opera gets on the bandwagon and rethinks their JS engine, that gap isn't going to narrow.
KDE's Webkit which trails behind Apple's, but is "stable" in that it's not a moving target, it's simply not as up to date.
Apple's Webkit which trails its internal builds by anywhere from months to years.
Google's Webkit which could be anywhere from two months newer to two months older than Apple's, and demonstrates that no such proprietary hacking is necessary to get ActiveX to work.
MS's Webkit which would probably be a direct copy of Google's, with a hack to require all sorts of extraneous metadata to turn it on. MS won't do any other hacking because they believe it is not possible to do.
ActiveX can't be done by another plugin - the browser has to parse it and host the AX objects. Doing that kind of scale changes to Webkit would fork the code, and I'm not convinced the web would benefit. - Chris Wilson, Platform Architect of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft (and ex-Group Program Manager)
The harmonic series is a mathematical definition, generally used when talking about frequencies. The harmonic series is important in musical applications because most instruments (including guitar) produce sounds that contain harmonic frequencies. The natural frequencies of the string mentioned above form a harmonic series. A frequency is harmonic if it is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency. The fundamental is the first harmonic (although it's generally referred to as the fundamental). The second harmonic is two times the frequency of the fundamental, the third harmonics is three times the fundamental, and so on. So with a fundamental of 100 Hz, the second harmonic is 200 Hz, the third is 300 Hz, the fourth is 400 Hz, etc. Rather than working with numbers, you can think of the harmonic series in terms of musical intervals. The first harmonic is the fundamental. The second harmonic is an octave above. The third harmonic is an octave and a fifth above the fundamental. The fourth harmonic is two octaves above the fundamental. The fifth harmonic is a another major third higher, the sixth is another minor third higher, and the series continues.
A note played on the lower strings of a 12 string may simply not register as two simultaneous notes, particularly on an old 4 track recording with lots of bounced tracks.
"You can play at most six notes at once on a guitar"
This simply isn't true. It's trivial to play two notes on the same string at the same time by lightly resting a finger at certain points along the string, isolating two or more harmonics.
Slashdot Mirror
1. I should be more careful to cite my sources when quoting The Big Lebowski.
2. That's horseshit. While "ownership" of "property" in general is a pretty damaged concept, with much to be reconsidered, the implication of your comment is that displacement of people from that which they derive their basic subsistence has no ethical bearing... well, maybe not in your conception of ethics, but it's a hard sell to the victims and a convenient position for the victors.
That's just, like, your opinion man.
Uh. And? All of what I said is still entirely true. And for the record, while I have a design background, I am primarily a developer (primarily web application UI, but also backend system).
That's what she said.
Serious web site design can require or utilize a substantial programming background, if not programming per se. Especially as design extends into web vector graphics, but also as "design" can include things like animation.
What are you on and where can I get some?
By killing IE, Google can do more with their web applications.
Definitely needs to be destroyed... even if that means killing Trident and calling a Webkit GUI that looks like IE "IE".
I'm not. I'm the revenue generator for Slashdot.
Addendum to my last post: by "IE" I refer only to Trident (the Windows engine); Tasman (the Mac engine, also used by some Office products, I believe) was on par, in a lot of ways, with Mozilla at the time (better in some ways, worse in others).
I can't say for sure, but I seem to remember it having been "good" in the 0.7s. That is, it did what I told it to do with CSS a lot more consistently than IE did.
I wonder where 299.299.299.299 goes.
For the same reason the rocks in your backyard may not be found in Africa?
"It is surprising how different the versions of webkit are."
This is untrue, and mostly a product of misunderstanding but partly a product of FUD as well. More on this below...
"the current release of Chrome is almost 4 times faster than the current release of Safari"
This really has almost nothing to do with Webkit, and does not demonstrate a difference in the rendering engines at all. Ultimately what we're looking at here is a comparison of JavaScriptCore (Safari's current* ECMAScript interpreter)â"released 19 June 2008, with only minor changes from the major version from more than a year earlierâ"and V8 (Google's ECMAScript-bytecode translator engine)â"released 5 September 2008 against a codebase that was nearly brand new; while it's true that JSC is a [legacy] part of Webkit, V8 is not a part of Webkit at all. Comparing the two isn't really meaningful.
Moreover, Chrome is not released, it's a very, very early, unpolished beta.
A more apt comparison would be...
"It would be interesting to see if the Safari nightly builds have closed this gap." ... the nightly builds, which use a similar engine (SFX is somewhat different in its approach, but ultimately in the same class as V8). And in fact, performance is roughly the same. It's not like this information isn't widely available, either.
I can't speak to the particular benchmark in question or whether it even has merit as a general browser benchmark (note, Google's benchmark has little merit here, as it strictly tests JS language speed, rather than DOM performance [which is extremely important for nearly all browser performance experiences]), and I don't have an environment which would be suited to finding out for myself, but I encourage you if you're that curious to try a nightly build on the test yourself.
With that said, there are existing browser benchmarks (eg Dromaeo 2) that tell a story much more interesting story.
John Resig on JS engine performance
This shows JSC (not SF or SFX) beating V8 on a bunch of DOM tests
But I want to reiterate, this is hardly a good example of differences in Webkit releases. These are differences in browser releases and over a very wide stretch of time (in the current JS engine war, especially).
* By "current", I mean "released"; it is current in that sense, but actually two generations old in the Webkit project. The Webkit team has since produced SquirrelFish and SquirrelFish Extreme, the latter being much closer to (and often faster than) Chrome's performance on every task except (if I recall correctly) recursion.
As [name any petty tech squabble] grows longer the probability of co-opting language used in historical social movements that faced abuse, torture, and often death against almost insurmountable oppressive inertia approaches one.
Presto certainly is not as fast as Gecko or Webkit. And unless Opera gets on the bandwagon and rethinks their JS engine, that gap isn't going to narrow.
Someone buy the above poster a beer.
Er. More like...
KDE's Webkit which trails behind Apple's, but is "stable" in that it's not a moving target, it's simply not as up to date.
Apple's Webkit which trails its internal builds by anywhere from months to years.
Google's Webkit which could be anywhere from two months newer to two months older than Apple's, and demonstrates that no such proprietary hacking is necessary to get ActiveX to work.
MS's Webkit which would probably be a direct copy of Google's, with a hack to require all sorts of extraneous metadata to turn it on. MS won't do any other hacking because they believe it is not possible to do.
Microsoft will never open-source Trident. It'd be like letting the entire world look at your dirty laundry.
All the folks saying you can't play a 7-note chord on a 6-string guitar should familiarize themselves with harmonics.
http://www.harmony-central.com/Guitar/harmonics.html
The harmonic series is a mathematical definition, generally used when talking about frequencies. The harmonic series is important in musical applications because most instruments (including guitar) produce sounds that contain harmonic frequencies. The natural frequencies of the string mentioned above form a harmonic series.
A frequency is harmonic if it is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency. The fundamental is the first harmonic (although it's generally referred to as the fundamental). The second harmonic is two times the frequency of the fundamental, the third harmonics is three times the fundamental, and so on. So with a fundamental of 100 Hz, the second harmonic is 200 Hz, the third is 300 Hz, the fourth is 400 Hz, etc.
Rather than working with numbers, you can think of the harmonic series in terms of musical intervals. The first harmonic is the fundamental. The second harmonic is an octave above. The third harmonic is an octave and a fifth above the fundamental. The fourth harmonic is two octaves above the fundamental. The fifth harmonic is a another major third higher, the sixth is another minor third higher, and the series continues.
Really? I do it a lot.
I bet EAGBDE sounds better. In whichever order. /troll
A note played on the lower strings of a 12 string may simply not register as two simultaneous notes, particularly on an old 4 track recording with lots of bounced tracks.
I wish Slashdot allowed editing.
I wanted to add: if you'd like I'd be happy to upload an mp3 demonstrating it.
"You can play at most six notes at once on a guitar"
This simply isn't true. It's trivial to play two notes on the same string at the same time by lightly resting a finger at certain points along the string, isolating two or more harmonics.