Comment Re:yay, pointers... (Score 1) 326
While it is certainly possible for some cases, IMO the programmer should rather know and change their design to avoid it than relying on compiler optimisation.
While it is certainly possible for some cases, IMO the programmer should rather know and change their design to avoid it than relying on compiler optimisation.
You don't need to guess which machine code will it be turned into nor how every transistors work in your CPU while running it, but you will generally need to understand the mechanism of what you are using. For example in C++ don't call virtual method in a tight loop if you want performance, you will need to understand the idea behind virtual method to know that.
Us Asian all have small finger, that helps a bit with the typing, and there are some Android phones with qwerty keyboard too.
Regarding to speed, I agree that Symbian feels much faster, still I hate how they only includea minimal amount of RAM in their phone, my last phone (a Nokia 5230 with 128 Mb RAM, before I dropped it to death) could only open ~3 tabs with Opera Mobile before running out of memory. Nevertheless it was a good phone. But now Nokia has declared Symbian to be a burning ship, I see no reason to use it anymore. That, and with my personal hatred to Nokia for killing off Meego/Meltemi/Qt and then siding with Microsoft make that 5230 the last Nokia phone I buy.
Opera mini does the same, that is why it is so lightweight and can render (albeit sometimes incorrectly) fairly complex webpages on very weak phones, it even re-encode images to webp format to reduce file size. Amazon Silk also does that too, so it is nothing new.
Back to the topic, for the same price for a Asha 303, you could get something like a Samsung Galaxy Pocket, which has GPS and double amount of RAM. In my country (Vietnam, a 3rd world one) Android is gaining market, even at the lower end segment while Nokia is losing out rapidly. I was surprised that if someone I know has proper web-browsing capability now, then it is most likely to be an Android phone or, sigh, iPhone.
Because the driver situation isn't too good, all open source drivers only support up to OpenGL 3.0, performance is somewhat abyssmal, and the stability isn't that good. With my previous nvidia cards, I haven't had one kernel panic related to the graphic card, while with my current integrated Intel card (on my core i5) I have lost count of the time already (suspend/hibernate memory corruption problem). Binary blobs from NVIDIA/AMD aren't good either.
Nonetheless, it is very interesting to know that Valve prefer the open source driver to the closed one http://www.paranormal-entertainment.com/idr/blog/posts/2012-07-19T18%3A54%3A37Z-The_zombies_cometh/ , if so, then I hope Valve entry into Linux gaming will help improving the situation.
Windows UAC prompt runs on a different session (the secured on) instead of the normal session so that hook-based keylogger won't work any more. Also it has higher integrity level than normal apps so keylogger can't inject their version of dlls to steal the password, well, as long as someone doesn't run the keylogger at higher IL anyway.
Well, even if the user is the sole user with admin right, launched process still runs under with lower privilige than full full admin rights, those that need them will be asked by an UAC prompt. And any user who cares about his stuff will always use a password anyway.
I agree, Windows 7 is a very good OS and IMO, regarding to security GNU/Linux can learn a few things from them, like the MAC mechanism preventing keylog from knowing your administrator password (the UAC prompt has higher IL value), with most GNU/Linux distro any apps can sniff your typed root password. Maybe by using SELinux we can prevent this but I haven't seen any distro implements it yet.
I guess their new Metro GUI uses graphical images more extensively, so any kinds of speed up is good, leaving CPU time for other usage or just preventing your CPU to heat up. And browsers such as IE will benefit from this too, as they have to render a lot of images (I don't know about Firefox, maybe they use libjpeg).
Note that some linux distros have already done this by switching to libjpeg-turbo a while ago.
It seems that they use -O3 optimization in GCC, which is dangerous as it could lead to code running incorrectly, even gentoo recommend against it. I think it would be better if they optimize dalvik VM instead of changind build flag.
Er, currently the compositor on X runs independently from the server, a lot of data has to pass between them, creating unneccessary round trips and degrade the peformance (wayland is an effort to unite the server and the compositor). So I don't really think adding compositor will make much performance improvement or any at all.
Same here.
By default KDE loads too much services, most of which I never use. The same goes for its features, I use less than 20% of them. And those 20% of features can be duplicated by combining other pieces of software, most of the cases it will work better too. Back in earlier versions KDE was quite unstable too, crashing a few times a day, although that has improved greatly now. Last but not least, KDE is abit sluggish on my sandy bridge based laptop with 6GB of RAM, which is unacceptable as I expect everything to be as snappy as possible on this kind of hardware.
So, to sum up, I tried KDE and found it works but not as quite well as my other setup, so I abandoned it. Now I use plain xmonad, load a few gnome daemons such as gnome-keyring, gnome-polkit-auth or network manager, for other desktops app such as file manager I use those from GNOME.
PS: I couldn't stand GNOME 3 at all, Unity is okay but not optimal, XFCE lacks a few features such as per-folder-sorting-scheme, same goes for LXDE, KDE is the best out of them but still not as good as my current setup.
Why don't they use ogg vorbis instead? We don't have software patent here so MP3 is as free as Ogg Vorbis, but if they decided to be as free as possible (CC licensed) then the latter would be better.
alsamixer -c0 should let you config the first sound card of your computer, not PulseAudio switches. Note that sometimes you might have two hardware sound cards or more, in that case choose the correct one in alsamixer.
Regarding to system wide daemon, I have never used PulseAudio that way so I can't say anything, but running a sound server as root doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener