Chrome is a killer browser. Because it is _very_ fast and renders correctly most of the time.
The problem is that they insist on ALSO breaking a lot of UI conventions and inventing their own. That's nice, but one should have the choice to use a "normal" UI. Firefox with the Chrome engine, or Chrome enginge with Firefox UI would be a killer.
that modern PCs aren't able to go into a 2 watts mode that still listens to signals from keyboard, mouse, remote connections from the network etc. to wake it up.
Wake On LAN is too esoteric. Stand by (or suspend or hibernate) works great, but is not seamlessly able to just wake up when I do a remote connection or move the mouse.
Frankly, a computer doing nothing than just idling in Windows (or Linux, or...) shouldn't use more than a couple of watts.
Macs are expensive. They're not high-end. They're just expensive. My computers perform a lot better than any Mac and they are all cheaper than the cheapest Mac.
This is a modest Athlon 64 X2 2200 Mhz with 1GB of RAM. I realize that modern systems have more power than this, especially more RAM, but on the other hand it's not like Windows 7 is accessing the page file all the time. In fact, when I have done this kind of test, there's no hard disk activity at all, and plenty of free physical memory.
Also, we're talking about netbooks here which are even slower than this system. And while XP shines on this system, Windows 7 and Vista does not.
My XP does not get slower with time, as you suggest. But then, I'm fairly conscious about what software I install and which services are running etc.
Also, remember that I am comparing a newly installed Windows 7 with an "old" XP install, so even if it _is_ slower than a newly installed XP, the newly installed Windows 7 is still even slower, much more so in fact.
On one hand, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy.
On the other hand, I use their software everyday at work. And if the market leader massively improves their (somewhat crappy) software, it forces the competitors to get better too.
For instance, IE8 seems much faster and better than IE7 (and of course IE6). This will hopefully wake up Mozilla and force them to improve on Firefox.
Regarding Windows 7, I can see that the memory footprint is lower, and that's a good thing.
=====> But it still _feels_ much slower than XP in everyday use! =====
I am talking about the little things that make up the experience of responsiveness. It just takes a noticeable amount of milliseconds more when I click on an icon, until the OS reacts. Opening a new browser window just have that extra lag. Copying files feels slower. Etc.
At first, I sort of liked Windows 7 and ran it for a couple of weeks. Then I booted back into XP (not a fresh installation of XP, mind you). I was depressed by how much snappier XP feels. I was hoping to have a good reason to ditch XP.
Makers of desktop operating systems should focus intensively on responsiveness. The OS should react as fast as possible on any user request, regardless of whatever else it is doing.
It's fair enough that some heavy calculation takes longer time if you have some other heavy job or service running, but the initial latency from any user request until you get some sort of reaction should be as low as possible. And XP is much better in this regard than Windows 7 or Vista (and also faster than all Linux distros I've been running).
To use an analogy from network land: I would much rather have 10 ms ping times and 1 Mbps than 1000 ms ping times and 100 Mbps.
I am one of those young developers, I've got about three years of full time experience after university.
I didn't expect the things you mention, but I expected something else.
I expected a focus on quality and a need for the knowledge and experience I had gained before and during my formal education. I expected software companies to take software as serious as bridge building engineering companies take bridge building.
What I have found in the companies that I have been in and that I know of otherwise, is that the even the most basic of quality requirements and technical decency are rejected.
Just make the quickest and dirtiest fix and ship something that is at best a broken prototype. That WILL come back to bite our proverbial ass later.
Whenever I question this or try to go for the long term quality solution and do things the right way, I get a response from seniors that feels a little bit like they think I am just being narcissistic. Just make it work. Quickly. No time for the fancy stuff (meaning the most basic stuff). Just keep pushing a growing mountain of technical debt in front of you.
Announcer: Tonight on Guinness Book of World Records. A man who owns the current record for least amount of faces, with none. You'll also see the world's smelliest tumor. Lisa: Eew, these records used to be real accomplishments, now they're just gross. Announcer: Plus, you'll meet a dog that can't predict anything! And.. three other things!
This is certainly true in the USA and in countries with a high level of corruption. It is not so true in certain European countries, especially the Scandinavian countries.
" As I expected, STL's sort ran faster than C's qsort, because C++'s templates generate optimized code for a particular data type and a particular comparison function. STL's sort also ran faster than the hand-coded quicksort routine, and it ran faster than the special-case library routine. (However, this may simply be unique to sorting, and may not extend to other algorithms.)
STL's solution exceeds the best solutions (special-case library functions or my hand-written code) in C, in terms of execution speed. "
Another case is the use of expression templates. Most other cases involve compile-time template meta-programming too.
There are many examples of C++ being faster than C. Google is your friend. I actually find it a little bit ridiculous that _I_ have the burden of proof, while you guys can blindly _assume_ that C is always faster or as fast as C++.
Of course, I didn't use any of these techniques in my benchmarks, but there might be different optimizations at play here. Who knows? I tried both gcc/g++, Intel C/C++ and MSVC/C++ when benchmarking.
Try reproducing it yourself. It takes only a few minutes to write such a benchmark. Write a better one if you want to. I have no stock in any of these languages (C++ used to be my main language). I was as suprised as you guys seem to be, to see Java and C# being as fast as they were.
I made a benchmark written in a pure C subset of C/C++/C#/Java in all of these languages. A simple benchmark involving calculations with integers (primes) and floating point numbers (sums of products of square roots of primes). The result, when running a bazillion iterations:
C# and Java took 50 seconds, C++ took 49 seconds and C took 51 seconds. Other benchmarks I made showed similar results.
So for pure calculating, C#/Java + JIT is equally fast. For big real-life systems involving a lot of other stuff, the results might be different.
But it is a long time ago that Java et. al. were 3 times slower than native code.
Ada + a modern library meets most of the requirements. To ease learning, an "ugly" version of Ada using C/C++/Java/C#-like syntax could easily be made.
I also have an extensive experience with C++, and I tend to agree with a lot of the criticism that it gets.
But the problem is that no alternative exists for the type of problems where C++ is used extensively. I guess the most important area is games.
The world really NEEDS a language (the last low-level language) with the low-level performance of C++/C and with a full, modern library, and modern language features (threading, modern module system (not based on #includes and a crude preprocessor...), optional strong typing system a la Ada with optional runtime-checking etc etc etc.
Basically, a really nice, compiled, well-performing, modern low-level language could easily exist. But it doesn't. So we'll have to settle for C++ until someone makes something better.
Radiohead is the most important rock band in the last 10 years, and not because of their pay-what-you-want and open-source-music-video ideas, but because of their great music.
They will be in the music history books 100 years from now.
Their music is not easily accessible, it takes 10-20 listenings before you get it, but after that it just keeps growing on you. And it never gets old, like so much music does. Truly the mark of a classic.
Slashdot Mirror
Chrome is a killer browser. Because it is _very_ fast and renders correctly most of the time.
The problem is that they insist on ALSO breaking a lot of UI conventions and inventing their own. That's nice, but one should have the choice to use a "normal" UI. Firefox with the Chrome engine, or Chrome enginge with Firefox UI would be a killer.
that modern PCs aren't able to go into a 2 watts mode that still listens to signals from keyboard, mouse, remote connections from the network etc. to wake it up.
Wake On LAN is too esoteric. Stand by (or suspend or hibernate) works great, but is not seamlessly able to just wake up when I do a remote connection or move the mouse.
Frankly, a computer doing nothing than just idling in Windows (or Linux, or...) shouldn't use more than a couple of watts.
Problem solved.
Apple is evil. Much, much, much more evil than Microsoft.
Closed technologies, controlled monopolized pricing etc. Inferior technology sold to fanboys as "better".
Macs are expensive. They're not high-end. They're just expensive. My computers perform a lot better than any Mac and they are all cheaper than the cheapest Mac.
Macs are expensive.
This is a modest Athlon 64 X2 2200 Mhz with 1GB of RAM. I realize that modern systems have more power than this, especially more RAM, but on the other hand it's not like Windows 7 is accessing the page file all the time. In fact, when I have done this kind of test, there's no hard disk activity at all, and plenty of free physical memory.
Also, we're talking about netbooks here which are even slower than this system. And while XP shines on this system, Windows 7 and Vista does not.
My XP does not get slower with time, as you suggest. But then, I'm fairly conscious about what software I install and which services are running etc.
Also, remember that I am comparing a newly installed Windows 7 with an "old" XP install, so even if it _is_ slower than a newly installed XP, the newly installed Windows 7 is still even slower, much more so in fact.
I really want to like Windows 7.
On one hand, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy.
On the other hand, I use their software everyday at work. And if the market leader massively improves their (somewhat crappy) software, it forces the competitors to get better too.
For instance, IE8 seems much faster and better than IE7 (and of course IE6). This will hopefully wake up Mozilla and force them to improve on Firefox.
Regarding Windows 7, I can see that the memory footprint is lower, and that's a good thing.
=====> But it still _feels_ much slower than XP in everyday use! =====
I am talking about the little things that make up the experience of responsiveness. It just takes a noticeable amount of milliseconds more when I click on an icon, until the OS reacts. Opening a new browser window just have that extra lag. Copying files feels slower. Etc.
At first, I sort of liked Windows 7 and ran it for a couple of weeks. Then I booted back into XP (not a fresh installation of XP, mind you). I was depressed by how much snappier XP feels. I was hoping to have a good reason to ditch XP.
Makers of desktop operating systems should focus intensively on responsiveness. The OS should react as fast as possible on any user request, regardless of whatever else it is doing.
It's fair enough that some heavy calculation takes longer time if you have some other heavy job or service running, but the initial latency from any user request until you get some sort of reaction should be as low as possible. And XP is much better in this regard than Windows 7 or Vista (and also faster than all Linux distros I've been running).
To use an analogy from network land: I would much rather have 10 ms ping times and 1 Mbps than 1000 ms ping times and 100 Mbps.
I am one of those young developers, I've got about three years of full time experience after university.
I didn't expect the things you mention, but I expected something else.
I expected a focus on quality and a need for the knowledge and experience I had gained before and during my formal education. I expected software companies to take software as serious as bridge building engineering companies take bridge building.
What I have found in the companies that I have been in and that I know of otherwise, is that the even the most basic of quality requirements and technical decency are rejected.
Just make the quickest and dirtiest fix and ship something that is at best a broken prototype. That WILL come back to bite our proverbial ass later.
Whenever I question this or try to go for the long term quality solution and do things the right way, I get a response from seniors that feels a little bit like they think I am just being narcissistic. Just make it work. Quickly. No time for the fancy stuff (meaning the most basic stuff). Just keep pushing a growing mountain of technical debt in front of you.
This reminds me that Simpsons episode...
Announcer: Tonight on Guinness Book of World Records. A man who owns the current record for least amount of faces, with none. You'll also see the world's smelliest tumor.
Lisa: Eew, these records used to be real accomplishments, now they're just gross.
Announcer: Plus, you'll meet a dog that can't predict anything! And.. three other things!
You know, some of us try to lower our CO2 footprint by not using power needlessly.
Can anyone say DRM? Consumers do not like DRM and thus are not buying Blu-Ray. The poor economy is also a factor.
Why are they buying DVD then?
A clean install of XP will give you notepad etc. and will boot in 15 seconds or so on a pc that's not older then 4 years or so.
This is certainly true in the USA and in countries with a high level of corruption. It is not so true in certain European countries, especially the Scandinavian countries.
Forgot to mention that I turned on all optimizations on all compilers in my benchmarks.
There are several instances, many of which have been mentioned many times by Stroustrup et. al.
I guess the case most of referred to is that of sorting. Quoting from a random web page http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/rants/c++-vs-c/ (but it has been reproduced a billion times):
" As I expected, STL's sort ran faster than C's qsort, because C++'s templates generate optimized code for a particular data type and a particular comparison function. STL's sort also ran faster than the hand-coded quicksort routine, and it ran faster than the special-case library routine. (However, this may simply be unique to sorting, and may not extend to other algorithms.)
STL's solution exceeds the best solutions (special-case library functions or my hand-written code) in C, in terms of execution speed.
"
Another case is the use of expression templates. Most other cases involve compile-time template meta-programming too.
There are many examples of C++ being faster than C. Google is your friend. I actually find it a little bit ridiculous that _I_ have the burden of proof, while you guys can blindly _assume_ that C is always faster or as fast as C++.
Of course, I didn't use any of these techniques in my benchmarks, but there might be different optimizations at play here. Who knows? I tried both gcc/g++, Intel C/C++ and MSVC/C++ when benchmarking.
Try reproducing it yourself. It takes only a few minutes to write such a benchmark. Write a better one if you want to. I have no stock in any of these languages (C++ used to be my main language). I was as suprised as you guys seem to be, to see Java and C# being as fast as they were.
I can't speak to the C# benchmark, but I can't imagine any case where C++ would outperform C in straightforward computation.
Funny that you can't imagine that.
About the memory, you are correct (for now).
About the speed:
I made a benchmark written in a pure C subset of C/C++/C#/Java in all of these languages. A simple benchmark involving calculations with integers (primes) and floating point numbers (sums of products of square roots of primes). The result, when running a bazillion iterations:
C# and Java took 50 seconds, C++ took 49 seconds and C took 51 seconds. Other benchmarks I made showed similar results.
So for pure calculating, C#/Java + JIT is equally fast. For big real-life systems involving a lot of other stuff, the results might be different.
But it is a long time ago that Java et. al. were 3 times slower than native code.
Ada + a modern library meets most of the requirements. To ease learning, an "ugly" version of Ada using C/C++/Java/C#-like syntax could easily be made.
D is okay, but it it not the solution.
I also have an extensive experience with C++, and I tend to agree with a lot of the criticism that it gets.
But the problem is that no alternative exists for the type of problems where C++ is used extensively. I guess the most important area is games.
The world really NEEDS a language (the last low-level language) with the low-level performance of C++/C and with a full, modern library, and modern language features (threading, modern module system (not based on #includes and a crude preprocessor...), optional strong typing system a la Ada with optional runtime-checking etc etc etc.
Basically, a really nice, compiled, well-performing, modern low-level language could easily exist. But it doesn't. So we'll have to settle for C++ until someone makes something better.
If DX was made cross-platform, I bet it would be easier for game developers to target other platforms with DX.
Why haven't someone made DX for Linux?
Radiohead is the most important rock band in the last 10 years, and not because of their pay-what-you-want and open-source-music-video ideas, but because of their great music.
They will be in the music history books 100 years from now.
Their music is not easily accessible, it takes 10-20 listenings before you get it, but after that it just keeps growing on you. And it never gets old, like so much music does. Truly the mark of a classic.
I thought you were talking about a dildo...
came flying out from the fire.
2.2 Mbps? No thanks...
That's not even good enough for my 32" tv, let alone my 77" front projector screen on which I watch all my movies.
Yes. The chroma bug lives on. Even in HD-DVD and Blu-ray players :( /David