It's like they have faith in their government taking their money and using it for the public good rather than allowing them to hoard it for themselves. I think your statement is meant to be an indictment of communism. But all you've demonstrated is that individuals who hoard money are bad and that the people need to be empowered to enforce redistribution of wealth, with force as a deterrent for this type of behavior.
Bear in mind that this is not raytracing. NVidia's backend is server obviously using a path tracing algorithm based on the videos; the images start "grainy" and then clear up as they are streamed. Path tracing works like ray tracing with a huge sampling rate, shooting perhaps 30 rays per pixel. Moreover, whereas ray tracers only have to compute rays recursively when they strike a reflective/refractive surface, path tracers always recurse, usually around 5-10 times, for each of the 30 rays per pixel. (The "graininess" occurs due to the fact that not enough samples have been taken yet; as more samples are taken, it goes away.)
There's also a good chance this is a bidirectional path tracer. There's not enough footage of caustics stuff to tell for sure, but most rendering engines these days use this technique as well. In that case there is an entire other phase consisting of mapping light onto surfaces. This sampling is done before the path tracer actually renders, and is about the same computational intensity.
So a path tracer is around 150x more computationally intensive than a ray tracer; possibly up to 300x for bidirectional path tracers. While "neat, I can make a translucent cube and change its refractive index" is certainly computationally easy enough for a cell phone, the hardware simply isn't appropriate for path tracing algorithms, especially with scenes of any degree of complexity. NVidia seems to be specifically marketing this at the photorealistic rendering market (although I'm not sure how bit that is). POV-Ray in its DOS days (a simple raytracer at the time, although now it supports more advanced rendering features) isn't really in this league.
At a previous job of mine, I was working with the SCons build system; it's basically Make, but written in Python. It's actually really nice if you know Python, but also fairly slow. In it, every filesystem object (files and directories) are maintained as "Nodes" in a big graph.
Anyway, the project was using an old version of SCons along with lots of legacy code, and with this version, for some reason, when my build script was added, a conflict resulted where a Node in the build system representing a file was initialized twice, once as a directory, once as a file (it was actually a file).
Nowhere in my build script was this file even referenced; it wasn't even a dependency of any of the stuff being generated by my code. After hours of trying to find what was causing the conflict, I eventually figured out I could call File("theFile") to (sort of) "cast" the Node as being a File in the build system, and it would work. To this day, I believe that's how it's implemented, and I have no idea why it worked.:)
But if you don't have a mouse when you're using vi, what will you throw when you realize you just destroyed your file because you were in the wrong "mode?"
The renderer is the same binary as the main process, but with some different flags used. I don't quite see why they're doing it this way, as having a separate image for the renderers would be much more efficient. In fact, the only reason not to use a separate image is so that they can just fork() rather than fork()/exec(), but the fact that the command line arguments are different for each process indicates that's not happening anyway. They could definitely reduce the time to create tabs even further, as the image size of a simple renderer would be much smaller than that of the full application. Also, they wouldn't have to link the renderers against Frameworks that expect UI events (although, depending on the layout of their code, this could potentially be resolved with lazy linking). Speaking of which, I think you meant "Carbon" when you said "Cocoa":
[~ : jlatane]% otool -L/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome | grep Cocoa [~ : jlatane]% otool -L/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome | grep Carbon /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Carbon (compatibility version 2.0.0, current version 136.0.0)
Of course, this is just me taking a quick look at their linking setup. The fact that they've got a 26M image that they're essentially just duplicating for each new tab is a little troubling; why didn't they, at the very least, separate WebKit into its own library/Private Framework rather than statically link it in? The only possible performance benefit this design holds is not waiting for dyld to resolve runtime search path information (on OS X), but that's certainly outweighed by the delay of copying such large images. It all seems far too amateur-ish for Google to me.
Well, first off, dependencies are, much more often than just the "Library" directories, in their own "Framework" directories. Check/System/Library/Frameworks for the important core Mac OS X frameworks and/Library/Frameworks for your basic system frameworks. You've also probably got a ~/Library/Frameworks directory but there's probably nothing interesting in there unless you're a developer. The rest of the "Library" directories consists more of non-reusable stuff.
However, plenty of applications do just bundle their own versions of dependencies. Just taking a glance around my system, 26.9 of Adium's 60.2MB consists of the "Frameworks" directory in Adium. 122.2MB of iWeb is Frameworks, many of which would probably be useful if they were universally available to developers (FTPKit?). Open source (and open-source-based) applications tend to be the worst about this since they have a habit of packaging large parts of the Linux ecosystem since minor incompatibilities OS X's BSD-grounded system make proper ports less convenient. Having both Crossover and Crossover Games take so much space with so many identical dependencies is just silly. Other notable applications on this front include Battle for Wesnoth and OOo.
Across all applications, localizations are a bit more of a problem, as you said. An even bigger problem is that binaries are often larger simply because they're written in Obj-C; Obj-C supports some very, very cool runtime features not available in any other compiled language, but they add considerably to the binary size.
In general, though, you're right - OS X is far better than Windows about sharing dependencies properly, but there's pretty much no way to get the tight dependency management Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE has without having a repository-based package manager, which is an entirely different software management philosophy. (Although the idealist in me likes to hope it's not the case, that model doesn't really foster the develop-something-good-and-make-money-quickly environment that I like about Mac OS X, since there's such a big barrier between you and users).
Not just my servers, but all of my hardware is named after Futrama characters. Hermes Conrad, a 320GB storage server, was recently replaced by Dwight Conrad, a new 1TB unit. My Palm is named Cubert Farnsworth, my main system Philip J. Fry (with the boot volume named Bender). And my Mighty Mouse's Bluetooth profile is named Nibbler. My old flash drive is named Morbo, with the new one named Calculon... my Wii is named Lrrr... honestly, it's gone a bit far. I'm going to have to recycle characters within a few years.
While I agree with most of your points, a bunch of extra graphics cards won't really be helpful for ray tracing because of the amount of recursion required. It can be done iteratively with some modifications so it would actually run on GPU hardware, but the overhead in doing this is greater than the performance boost parallelism grants the user.
Besides, ray tracing pretty much sucks compared to modern rasterization techniques until you add in radiosity, caustics, distribution, and other extensions. And if all that's added in, I don't care if you have 12 cores, it will not run in real time.
Since flash memory doesn't have rotational latency or seek times, random read/write speeds should be roughly on par with sequential, unless I'm missing something.
Merry Christmas. NTFS-3G is more than fast enough to read documents from your Windows partitions. The only time its slower speeds will really be a noticeable problem, in my experience, is if you run OS X applications from your NTFS disk. But why would you keep your OS X applications on an NTFS volume?
But, at least in Mac OS X, exited processes consume "inactive" memory - basically being kept in memory until they are launched again. If Vista has a similar implementation, your swapfile may just contain a bunch of pages left over from previously-running applications. Are you experiencing actual system performance problems? Concerning yourself too much with the numbers only can be a bad thing.
Well, if you take ten seconds to look at the download page for NetBeans, you'll notice not only have C/C++ tools been moved, but they've got convenient packages for your needs.
I don't know about current Lenovo Thinkpads, but my old T43 uses an Atheros chipset, so it requires MadWifi. It's got non-free components, but it works pretty well (although Ubuntu's NetworkManager always had trouble with the driver and non-broadcast networks).
Actually, according to Wikipedia, it's perfect for him as long as he runs Windows Vista for read+write. Even if it's XP he can read. I like this new discovery...
16,000 colors? I'm sorry, but I have to call bullshit on that. If I set my computer to 16-bit color (65,536 colors), I can see banding on, for example, gradients in the title bar of a window that are not visible to me at all in 24 or 32-bit color.
I'm still not saying these guys are justified trying to sue Apple over this since I don't know the details. I'm just saying our eyes can definitely detect a lot more color than you seem to think.
I'll agree with you that UBs are the new fat binaries, and that the Intel chips are probably increasing their profit margins, since they're cheaper. But your assertions about graphics are rather... ridiculous.
First off, first-gen Intel GMA graphics are way better than the 16-32MB ATI 7xxx series graphics in the old low-end PPC Macs. And current-gen GMA blows them out of the water. I think nostalgia is clouding your judgment here. I mean, seriously, you can play WoW and whatever else you want with the GMA 950 included in a Macbook. Maybe no Doom 3 or Quake 4, but that's reasonable to me.
And as far as passing the savings on goes... only the Macbook and the cheapest iMac have Intel GMA graphics. Go ahead, try to price a Dell E1405 (the closest thing to a Macbook) configured similarly. I built one like the high-end white Macbook (1GB RAM, WXGA display is near 1280x800, 120GB 5400RPM HD, 2.0GHz C2D) and even without the least-crippled version of Vista, it costs more than the thinner, lighter Macbook. If you want Vista Ultimate, it's more than the black Macbook.
So actually, I would say Apple is passing the savings on to the consumer. More so than even Dell, apparently.
Whoa! Did you just name something created by Microsoft worthy of a patent? Because even though using the video card to render vector fonts is obvious, that method sure seems novel to me.
I'm not sure how exactly it could work, but I bet this could be used in LCDs or some similar displays. One of the biggest problems with them is that the reflection of light on them (for example, your cell phone screen) makes them virtually unusable in broad daylight. If something like this material could be used in such a way that it prevented the reflection of external light but still allowed the display to pass through, we could perhaps see who's calling us in the afternoon. Not to mention the power savings of not having to have an extremely powerful backlight to overcome the noise, as most displays like this do.
I know you said I needn't answer, but I feel that I should nonetheless. The reason I bought an iPod (an iPod nano, actually) is because of the simplicity of managing my music with iTunes. I had owned several Creative (and before that, Rio) players and after the last one broke I started looking more and more at iPods. Both their music management systems are bloated and buggy - say what you will about iTunes's memory footprint, it has never once crashed on me, and with 1GB of RAM the 40-50MB it takes while playing is inconsequential.
Its music management systems are sublime. I can make any playlist I want, and smart playlists, while not a new concept, are exceptionally simple in iTunes. Since I have over 30GB of music and a 4GB MP3 player, managing my music should have been horribly difficult - and it was, even when I had a 20GB Nomad Zen. However, I just have smart playlists set up that contain about 500MB of my least-listened-to, highest-rated songs, 3GB of my most-listened-to, highest-rated songs, 250MB of random stuff that I may just have not gotten around to rating, which I can rate when I hear it on my playlist and then re-sync with iTunes, and some extra space reserved for things like data and extra playlists (for example, I'm currently preparing to play piano for a production of Evita at UNC Chapel Hill, and I have the soundtrack in that extra space so I can make sure I've gotten to know the music).
This simplicity is added to the fact that there is essentially no better MP3 jukebox on Windows, Linux or Mac, at least none that I have found. Songbird may approach it someday (but man, if you want to talk about memory footprints...), and MusikCube is alright but not as simple. WMP is, of course, a joke.
So anyway, what I've been ranting about is that there are some very, very good reasons for the non-trendy, technical guy to buy an iPod.
The problem people have here is that Sony is attempting to market a bad product, with minimal software (well, aside from their perpetual anti-homebrew updates, if you call that software), to people who aren't familiar enough with it (parents, grandparents, etc.) to understand that it's so terrible. The desire for iPods developed before I ever saw an ad by Apple, whereas Sony is trying to create such desire.
The "you have a voicemail" and "you don't have a voicemail" signal is not one that is continually sent on most carriers, in my experience. In other words, the phone gets a signal to tell it there is a voicemail, and the icon stays until it gets a signal that there are no more. It will ignore all new signals for voicemails until it gets the "no more messages" signal. Now what's weird, and I've encountered it on Sprint and their piggyback networks (Embarq, Boost, and many others use their network) along with Cingular, US Cellular, and Alltel. So chances are switching carriers won't fix this problem.
Anyway, on most of these carriers the signal comes when, after listening to all your voicemails, the voice says "There are no more messages." And it's, for some reason, transmitted over the voice connection. So if you hang up before you hear that message, the icon won't go away and the phone won't tell you when you get messages anymore.
However, what you can do when this happens is either:
Enter your voicemail system and leave yourself a message. Most voicemail systems allow this. Hang up, go back to your voicemail, delete it, and then listen to the "there are no more messages" voice and it should go away.
If your voicemail system won't let you leave yourself a message, you can use a friend's phone or your home phone to call it and leave yourself a message.
If this doesn't work, your phone is probably screwed up. Either way, I really don't think changing carriers will help you, and the headache of learning where you can and can't get service with your new carrier probably won't be worth it. Also, prepaid is terrible for the money. Most providers have a $20 or $30 plan that includes 200-300+ minutes. I'd recommend just looking at what's available and downgrading your plan, and only switching if there's no plan that fits your financial needs.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like they have faith in their government taking their money and using it for the public good rather than allowing them to hoard it for themselves. I think your statement is meant to be an indictment of communism. But all you've demonstrated is that individuals who hoard money are bad and that the people need to be empowered to enforce redistribution of wealth, with force as a deterrent for this type of behavior.
Bear in mind that this is not raytracing. NVidia's backend is server obviously using a path tracing algorithm based on the videos; the images start "grainy" and then clear up as they are streamed. Path tracing works like ray tracing with a huge sampling rate, shooting perhaps 30 rays per pixel. Moreover, whereas ray tracers only have to compute rays recursively when they strike a reflective/refractive surface, path tracers always recurse, usually around 5-10 times, for each of the 30 rays per pixel. (The "graininess" occurs due to the fact that not enough samples have been taken yet; as more samples are taken, it goes away.)
There's also a good chance this is a bidirectional path tracer. There's not enough footage of caustics stuff to tell for sure, but most rendering engines these days use this technique as well. In that case there is an entire other phase consisting of mapping light onto surfaces. This sampling is done before the path tracer actually renders, and is about the same computational intensity.
So a path tracer is around 150x more computationally intensive than a ray tracer; possibly up to 300x for bidirectional path tracers. While "neat, I can make a translucent cube and change its refractive index" is certainly computationally easy enough for a cell phone, the hardware simply isn't appropriate for path tracing algorithms, especially with scenes of any degree of complexity. NVidia seems to be specifically marketing this at the photorealistic rendering market (although I'm not sure how bit that is). POV-Ray in its DOS days (a simple raytracer at the time, although now it supports more advanced rendering features) isn't really in this league.
At a previous job of mine, I was working with the SCons build system; it's basically Make, but written in Python. It's actually really nice if you know Python, but also fairly slow. In it, every filesystem object (files and directories) are maintained as "Nodes" in a big graph.
Anyway, the project was using an old version of SCons along with lots of legacy code, and with this version, for some reason, when my build script was added, a conflict resulted where a Node in the build system representing a file was initialized twice, once as a directory, once as a file (it was actually a file).
Nowhere in my build script was this file even referenced; it wasn't even a dependency of any of the stuff being generated by my code. After hours of trying to find what was causing the conflict, I eventually figured out I could call File("theFile") to (sort of) "cast" the Node as being a File in the build system, and it would work. To this day, I believe that's how it's implemented, and I have no idea why it worked. :)
But if you don't have a mouse when you're using vi, what will you throw when you realize you just destroyed your file because you were in the wrong "mode?"
The renderer is the same binary as the main process, but with some different flags used. I don't quite see why they're doing it this way, as having a separate image for the renderers would be much more efficient. In fact, the only reason not to use a separate image is so that they can just fork() rather than fork()/exec(), but the fact that the command line arguments are different for each process indicates that's not happening anyway. They could definitely reduce the time to create tabs even further, as the image size of a simple renderer would be much smaller than that of the full application. Also, they wouldn't have to link the renderers against Frameworks that expect UI events (although, depending on the layout of their code, this could potentially be resolved with lazy linking). Speaking of which, I think you meant "Carbon" when you said "Cocoa":
Of course, this is just me taking a quick look at their linking setup. The fact that they've got a 26M image that they're essentially just duplicating for each new tab is a little troubling; why didn't they, at the very least, separate WebKit into its own library/Private Framework rather than statically link it in? The only possible performance benefit this design holds is not waiting for dyld to resolve runtime search path information (on OS X), but that's certainly outweighed by the delay of copying such large images. It all seems far too amateur-ish for Google to me.
Well, first off, dependencies are, much more often than just the "Library" directories, in their own "Framework" directories. Check /System/Library/Frameworks for the important core Mac OS X frameworks and /Library/Frameworks for your basic system frameworks. You've also probably got a ~/Library/Frameworks directory but there's probably nothing interesting in there unless you're a developer. The rest of the "Library" directories consists more of non-reusable stuff.
However, plenty of applications do just bundle their own versions of dependencies. Just taking a glance around my system, 26.9 of Adium's 60.2MB consists of the "Frameworks" directory in Adium. 122.2MB of iWeb is Frameworks, many of which would probably be useful if they were universally available to developers (FTPKit?). Open source (and open-source-based) applications tend to be the worst about this since they have a habit of packaging large parts of the Linux ecosystem since minor incompatibilities OS X's BSD-grounded system make proper ports less convenient. Having both Crossover and Crossover Games take so much space with so many identical dependencies is just silly. Other notable applications on this front include Battle for Wesnoth and OOo.
Across all applications, localizations are a bit more of a problem, as you said. An even bigger problem is that binaries are often larger simply because they're written in Obj-C; Obj-C supports some very, very cool runtime features not available in any other compiled language, but they add considerably to the binary size.
In general, though, you're right - OS X is far better than Windows about sharing dependencies properly, but there's pretty much no way to get the tight dependency management Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE has without having a repository-based package manager, which is an entirely different software management philosophy. (Although the idealist in me likes to hope it's not the case, that model doesn't really foster the develop-something-good-and-make-money-quickly environment that I like about Mac OS X, since there's such a big barrier between you and users).
Not just my servers, but all of my hardware is named after Futrama characters. Hermes Conrad, a 320GB storage server, was recently replaced by Dwight Conrad, a new 1TB unit. My Palm is named Cubert Farnsworth, my main system Philip J. Fry (with the boot volume named Bender). And my Mighty Mouse's Bluetooth profile is named Nibbler. My old flash drive is named Morbo, with the new one named Calculon... my Wii is named Lrrr... honestly, it's gone a bit far. I'm going to have to recycle characters within a few years.
While I agree with most of your points, a bunch of extra graphics cards won't really be helpful for ray tracing because of the amount of recursion required. It can be done iteratively with some modifications so it would actually run on GPU hardware, but the overhead in doing this is greater than the performance boost parallelism grants the user.
Besides, ray tracing pretty much sucks compared to modern rasterization techniques until you add in radiosity, caustics, distribution, and other extensions. And if all that's added in, I don't care if you have 12 cores, it will not run in real time.
Since flash memory doesn't have rotational latency or seek times, random read/write speeds should be roughly on par with sequential, unless I'm missing something.
Merry Christmas. NTFS-3G is more than fast enough to read documents from your Windows partitions. The only time its slower speeds will really be a noticeable problem, in my experience, is if you run OS X applications from your NTFS disk. But why would you keep your OS X applications on an NTFS volume?
Safari doesn't have Ctrl-Tab because you switch between tabs using Cmd-Shift-[ and Cmd-Shift-].
But, at least in Mac OS X, exited processes consume "inactive" memory - basically being kept in memory until they are launched again. If Vista has a similar implementation, your swapfile may just contain a bunch of pages left over from previously-running applications. Are you experiencing actual system performance problems? Concerning yourself too much with the numbers only can be a bad thing.
Or even a "for" loop, if you still have to program in C90. I suppose while loops is still better than BNEs though...
Well, if you take ten seconds to look at the download page for NetBeans, you'll notice not only have C/C++ tools been moved, but they've got convenient packages for your needs.
I don't know about current Lenovo Thinkpads, but my old T43 uses an Atheros chipset, so it requires MadWifi. It's got non-free components, but it works pretty well (although Ubuntu's NetworkManager always had trouble with the driver and non-broadcast networks).
And spreadsheets work fine in OOo.
Wikipedia article
I'm still not saying these guys are justified trying to sue Apple over this since I don't know the details. I'm just saying our eyes can definitely detect a lot more color than you seem to think.
First off, first-gen Intel GMA graphics are way better than the 16-32MB ATI 7xxx series graphics in the old low-end PPC Macs. And current-gen GMA blows them out of the water. I think nostalgia is clouding your judgment here. I mean, seriously, you can play WoW and whatever else you want with the GMA 950 included in a Macbook. Maybe no Doom 3 or Quake 4, but that's reasonable to me.
And as far as passing the savings on goes... only the Macbook and the cheapest iMac have Intel GMA graphics. Go ahead, try to price a Dell E1405 (the closest thing to a Macbook) configured similarly. I built one like the high-end white Macbook (1GB RAM, WXGA display is near 1280x800, 120GB 5400RPM HD, 2.0GHz C2D) and even without the least-crippled version of Vista, it costs more than the thinner, lighter Macbook. If you want Vista Ultimate, it's more than the black Macbook.
So actually, I would say Apple is passing the savings on to the consumer. More so than even Dell, apparently.
I'm scared.
I'm not sure how exactly it could work, but I bet this could be used in LCDs or some similar displays. One of the biggest problems with them is that the reflection of light on them (for example, your cell phone screen) makes them virtually unusable in broad daylight. If something like this material could be used in such a way that it prevented the reflection of external light but still allowed the display to pass through, we could perhaps see who's calling us in the afternoon. Not to mention the power savings of not having to have an extremely powerful backlight to overcome the noise, as most displays like this do.
I kid, I kid. But seriously now, go UNC!
Its music management systems are sublime. I can make any playlist I want, and smart playlists, while not a new concept, are exceptionally simple in iTunes. Since I have over 30GB of music and a 4GB MP3 player, managing my music should have been horribly difficult - and it was, even when I had a 20GB Nomad Zen. However, I just have smart playlists set up that contain about 500MB of my least-listened-to, highest-rated songs, 3GB of my most-listened-to, highest-rated songs, 250MB of random stuff that I may just have not gotten around to rating, which I can rate when I hear it on my playlist and then re-sync with iTunes, and some extra space reserved for things like data and extra playlists (for example, I'm currently preparing to play piano for a production of Evita at UNC Chapel Hill, and I have the soundtrack in that extra space so I can make sure I've gotten to know the music).
This simplicity is added to the fact that there is essentially no better MP3 jukebox on Windows, Linux or Mac, at least none that I have found. Songbird may approach it someday (but man, if you want to talk about memory footprints...), and MusikCube is alright but not as simple. WMP is, of course, a joke.
So anyway, what I've been ranting about is that there are some very, very good reasons for the non-trendy, technical guy to buy an iPod.
The problem people have here is that Sony is attempting to market a bad product, with minimal software (well, aside from their perpetual anti-homebrew updates, if you call that software), to people who aren't familiar enough with it (parents, grandparents, etc.) to understand that it's so terrible. The desire for iPods developed before I ever saw an ad by Apple, whereas Sony is trying to create such desire.
Anyway, on most of these carriers the signal comes when, after listening to all your voicemails, the voice says "There are no more messages." And it's, for some reason, transmitted over the voice connection. So if you hang up before you hear that message, the icon won't go away and the phone won't tell you when you get messages anymore.
However, what you can do when this happens is either:
- Enter your voicemail system and leave yourself a message. Most voicemail systems allow this. Hang up, go back to your voicemail, delete it, and then listen to the "there are no more messages" voice and it should go away.
- If your voicemail system won't let you leave yourself a message, you can use a friend's phone or your home phone to call it and leave yourself a message.
If this doesn't work, your phone is probably screwed up. Either way, I really don't think changing carriers will help you, and the headache of learning where you can and can't get service with your new carrier probably won't be worth it. Also, prepaid is terrible for the money. Most providers have a $20 or $30 plan that includes 200-300+ minutes. I'd recommend just looking at what's available and downgrading your plan, and only switching if there's no plan that fits your financial needs.