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Can Anyone Explain This?

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Some cheeky dude claims on Reddit:

Quote :

Dear Adobe, make a Linux port of Flash that doesn't make my CPU set on fire every time I was a YouTube video. Thanks

What is he talking about? Flash takes up too much resources on Linux systems? Boost CPU usage tremendously?

Add a reply

Adobe's flash player on Linux will set your cpu on fire and crash your firefox on a regular basis.

The windows version does the same thing it's just marginally better.

It's adobe's fault

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Reply to linux_0

Hopefully the new HTML5 <video> tag will become popular, and we can finally see the end of Adobe's flash videos. Of course, Microsoft will probably take forever to implement that into their browser, if they even do. But in the meantime, web developers should start posting messages to download Firefox 3.5 to view the videos they do have on their site with the <video> tag to get the ball rolling.

Reply to DarkNet

What? You ain't using Silverlight ;-)

It will take a long time for Flash usage to drop, just to much content out there already and 'developers' trained in it.

Reply to audiovoodoo

Flash is a piece of bloated crap that needs to die in a blast furnace. RIP (rest in pain)

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to randomizer

I can't find the +20 ingenious++ button.

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Reply to linux_0

Ever come across a 100% flash-based web site? If not, you don't really know how much I want Flash to die. It's all about eye candy and not about efficiency. It takes forever to load what would take seconds if built around HTML/PHP, and every menu item you click requires the whole interface to move and change and wow you with it's visual brilliance; all the while causing uncontrollable frustration to build up as you spend 5 minutes navigating through a mere 3 web pages.

Reply to randomizer

Yes I can definitely say I have! Those sites are incredibly frustrating, I wish there was a "get me the heck outta here" button

Back in the day some of the nicer/smarter people at least had the decency to but a "click here" link to bypass the flash.

You hardly see that any more. It's sad.

And don't get me started about security! Flash like any other executable content can be used for all kinds of mischief.

5 minutes worth of wait for 3 web pages sounds about right. Most flash sites are heavy on looks but have zero useful or informative content.

You're left thinking to yourself, I wasted 15minutes of my life for this?!?! Followed by some explicit language I can't repeat here.

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Reply to linux_0

I may be wrong, but I get this strange feeling that you don't like Flash!

It always seems to be broken on my Linux boxes, or more trouble than it's worth to get it working, so I just tend to ignore Flash-based web sites. Strange that people go to such lengths to make their site inaccessible.

Reply to ijack

randomizer wrote :

Flash is a piece of bloated crap that needs to die in a blast furnace. RIP (rest in pain)

Haha. its almost as bad as the x86 intruction set.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to amdfangirl

amdfangirl wrote :

Haha. its almost as bad as the x86 instruction set.

The instruction set or the programming model? I find both pretty good nowadays (64-bit of course) with all those general-purpose registers, flat memory model, and fairly orthogonal instruction set. (The original 8086 instructions set was, I agree, a complete mess - especially when compared with the elegance of the 68000.)

Reply to ijack

Well, it's just that there are more efficient instruction sets out there and the fact x86 is so propitiatory, screws up competition.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to amdfangirl

It's not the fault of the processor or the instruction set. IBM are really the ones that set the IT world off in the direction of modern x86 PC's with the IBM A/T compatible clones flooding the market after IBM released the spec.

You may or may not be aware that back in the days of Windows NT 3, 3.5 and 4 that MS actually produced binaries for MIPS, RISC and x86. I had NT 3.5 to 4.0 running on a DEC Alpha back in 1994, the systems had been part of a VMS cluster and we moved a few nodes out of the cluster for the pilot project we were working on. MS dropped that support when they moved to Server 2000. It was intended to let them take some of the big iron servers that were out there running Unix and VMS and allow IT departments to leverage existing investment. As it was most people realised it was a chance to get out of tied in agreements and invest in commodity HW. Back then the only serious and supported x86 *nix environment was from SCO... I'll not have to explain why nobody liked that I'm sure.

Reply to audiovoodoo

amdfangirl wrote :

the fact x86 is so propitiatory, screws up competition.

I'd have to disagree with that. Out of all the architectures it seems to me that x86 is the least propriatory, being implemented by two huge corporations and a few smaller ones over the years. The openness of the x86, and PC architecture in general, is one of its best points and explains why both have been so overwhelmingly successful. In neither case is the design the best around.

Reply to ijack

Just out of interest I had a look on the Wiki to see how many there have been:

Wiki - List of IA32 compatible processor Manufacturers

Also worth a look is:

Wiki -86 From that we get:

Quote :

At various times, companies such as IBM, NEC[8], AMD, TI, STM, Fujitsu, OKI, Siemens, Cyrix, Intersil, C&T, NexGen, and UMC started to design and/or manufacture x86 processors intended for personal computers as well as embedded systems. Such x86 implementations are seldom plain copies but often employ different internal microarchitectures as well as different solutions at the electronic and physical levels. Quite naturally, early compatible chips were 16-bit, while 32-bit designs appeared much later. For the personal computer market, real quantities started to appear around 1990 with i386 and i486 compatible processors, often named similarly to Intel's original chips. Other companies, which designed or manufactured x86 or x87 processors, include ITT Corporation, National Semiconductor, ULSI System Technology, and Weitek.

Following the fully pipelined i486, Intel introduced the Pentium brand name (which, unlike numbers, could be trademarked) for their new line of superscalar x86 designs. With the x86 naming scheme now legally cleared, IBM partnered with Cyrix to produce the 5x86 and then the very efficient 6x86 (M1) and 6x86MX (MII) lines of Cyrix designs, which were the first x86 chips implementing register renaming to enable speculative execution. AMD meanwhile designed and manufactured the advanced but delayed 5k86 (K5), which, internally, was heavily based on AMD's earlier 29K RISC design; similar to NexGen's Nx586, it used a strategy where dedicated pipeline stages decode x86 instructions into uniform and easily handled micro-operations, a method that has remained the basis for most (not all) x86 designs to this day.

Not all the innovations that people think are part of the big two actually are, a lot of them were acquired over the years buy buying out the smaller makers.

Reply to audiovoodoo

Wait, are we limiting this discussion to architectures that are present in personal computers? Or can we include embedded systems ISAs? I'd say the ARM ISA is at least as "open" as x86 as everyone and their mom in the embedded space makes ARM processors. As for personal computers and the server space, the SPARC ISA is truly an open ISA. You can even get the entire 7 million line verilog listing for the UltraSPARC T1.

Comparing IBM clones to other platforms such as the Mac or consoles, I'd they are much more open, which is one of the features that I like the most. If one vendor is price gouging, I can always go to another, and the competition between them makes for a pretty sweet deal for consumers.

But like I said, if we include ISAs that are not necessarily in the personal computer space, the ARM and SPARC ISAs are definitely at least as open as x86 if not more so.

--Zorak

Reply to Zorak

Great point Zorak the UltraSPARC T1 has indeed been open sourced. I'm not aware of any other major CPU which is open source.

Theoretically, if you have your own fab you can make your own UltraSPARC T1.

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