Chrome 5 beta vs. FireFox 3.7 alpha “Minefield” [vs. IE8]
by MM on May.11, 2010, under Online Stuff
After learning about Firefox 3.7 (Minefield) today, I decided to do some diagnostic tests on the latest development releases of both Firefox and Chrome. My results actually shocked me, compared to what I had gotten before with Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 4.x.
Update: I decided to throw IE8 into the mix just to see how that played out.
Chrome 5.0.375.38 beta vs. FireFox 3.7a5 “Minefield”
Cold start with 10 tabs (cnn.com):
~ About the test: done three minutes after a reboot of the OS. Both browsers, after having a cleared cache, were required to open ten tabs of the website http://cnn.com. This site was chosen due to high amounts of ads. The time was measured from clicking the browser shortcut until all page-loading icons disappeared. Lower is better.
IE = 25s
Firefox = 32s
Chrome = 50s
Surprisingly, IE performed twice as quickly as Chrome on a cold start. Firefox followed closely behind though, trailing IE by just seven seconds.
Warm start with 10 tabs (cnn.com):
~ About the test: Both browsers were started just after the cold start test. They were required to open the same tabs in the same quantities. Again, the time was measured from clicking the shortcut until all page-loading icons disappeared. Lower is better.
Firefox = 3.5s
Chrome = 8s
IE = 15s
Minefield easily won, being over twice as fast as Chrome, and about four times as fast as IE.
Go under the cut for the rest of the tests… (continue reading…)
Next-Generation Processors
by MM on May.01, 2010, under Online Stuff
Intel is supposed to unveil its Core i9 (codename Gulftown) processor in Q2 2010. And, of course, AMD is unveiling The “Leo” / Phenom II X6 CPU (codename Thuban) a bit later. Both of these computers have six cores, with 12MB of L3 cache on the Core i9 and 6MB on the Leo.
Most details on the Leo haven’t been figured out yet, since only the i9 has been fully tested. However, it’s interesting that the i9 will be built using 32nm processor architecture, based on Westmere (found in the Core i3 processor), but AMD continues to use 45nm architecture, à la Nehalem.
Six cores seems nice and all, but I don’t see the practical applications for a desktop environment. True, the Core i9 performs up to 50% better than the Core i7 with high-end operations such as 3D modeling and video rendering, but most end-user tasks are unaffected. It is more power-saving and doesn’t heat up as much, but with an estimated price tag of $1000 to $1200 dollars, there isn’t much to be gained for desktop users.
Where this really starts to get interesting in servers. Recall that the Core i9 shows an extremely high performance increase (up to 50%) in tasks suited to parallelization, and especially so in servers. Expect big websites to be moving to Core i9 servers as soon as it’s released.
Footnote: I’m aware of the correct usage of “à la”, and also that Nehalem architecture was used by Intel, not AMD, but for the purposes of comparison it seemed appropriate.
NexAm Rants, Evan, and Akismet
by MM on Apr.01, 2010, under Blog Updates, MapleStory, Online Stuff
I just wanted to tell the creator(s) of Akismet, this is the most amazing tool I’ve ever seen. I can finally go back to allowing comment posts without moderation.
In other news, I’ve been working on Evan for two days now, and I’ve gotten him to level 31 (not much, but I was trying to enjoy the class.) Here’s how he looks so far:
- xXxPlatinum and Mir casting various skills. (By the way, I play in Khaini if you want to add me.)
The class seems really fun. The low speed gets me down a bit, but the attacks seem devastating. Until today I thought my Evan would be my new main… (continue reading…)
Cygnus Parallels in MapleStory
by MM on Mar.30, 2010, under MapleStory, Online Stuff
The spoiler: Nexon is most likely releasing a class group with the same job advancement types as Cygnus Knights, but this group will only have a Mage, Archer, and Pirate class.
The rationale, and some speculation:
A little while ago I read this blog post by spadow: http://spadow.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/kmst-v303-new-jobs-accuracy-avoidability-back-to/
The new job IDs, as you can see, are 3000, 3211, 3212, 3311, 3312, 3511, and 3512. I decided to examine the patterns in some other MapleStory jobs. Each job ID is four characters long (for adventurers, you just add a leading zero), and each digit denotes a certain aspect of the job.
- The first number tells you which class group the job is in: 0 means Adventurers, 1 means Cygnus Knights, 2 means Heroes, and 3 is the new ID that Nexon has added to the .wz files of kMST.
- The second digit denotes what “type” of class it is, i.e. 0 is Beginner, 1 is Warrior, 2 is Mage, 3 is Archer, 4 is Rogue, and 5 is Pirate.
- The third digit denotes the “branch” of the job. For example, Ice/Lightning, Fire/Poison, and Cleric are all branches of the Adventurer mage (02xx).
- The final number denotes which “stage of advancement” the job is in, i.e. second, third, or fourth job.
When examining these IDs, it was easy to tell that it would be a totally new class group, but because the second digits only included 0, 2, 3, and 5, there would only be Beginner, Mage, Archer, and Pirate classes. The beginner class only has one branch, just like all other beginner classes in the game. However, I discovered something extremely similar between the remaining three classes that links them heavily to the Cygnus Knights… (continue reading…)
GGF (GMS Games Forums)
by MM on Mar.20, 2010, under Online Stuff
I’ve put GGF back up and sent out a mass e-mail to all registered members notifying them about the 10,000th post contest. (In short, the person with the 10,000th post on the whole board will receive VIP status, GC, and a cash prize).
Also, GGF got a new skin (base: BF_Vista. base’s base: subsilver2), and I’m currently in the process of making a l33t (1337) language pack for users. Finally…
SlimeRevamped, NotesML, and Games
by MM on Feb.26, 2010, under My Life, Online Stuff
The design of my site SlimeRevamped, now just under a month old, has been pretty much finalized. The site is already in the GMS Network, but I’m still thinking about what to do with it – sell it off, add NetworkSlime, or just continue adding games? I feel like I’m getting bored of slime games so I probably won’t pick the last option, but whatever.
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In other news, I’ve devised an XML language for taking notes. Yeah, you heard right. It probably has no practical use other than being both human-readable and machine-readable, though once I add graph/MathML support it’ll be cooler than Word.
In yet another collection of news, I beat Plants vs. Zombies today (on my iPod Touch).
In completely different news, I’m still debating whether or not to resume work on Gyzer v1. I’m also debating whether or not to start up on GGF again.
Did you hate the layout of that post? I did.
More Website Restructuring
by MM on Jan.28, 2010, under My Life, Online Stuff
And with that, officialgms.com is right back up! As you may be able to see, I’ve added a homepage to replace the redirect to the forums. In addition, due to the imminent expiry of favico.us, Favico has been moved to favico.officialgms.com.
On another note, four-day weekend! That means tons of updates to SlimeRevamped!
Slime Revamped
by MM on Jan.28, 2010, under Online Stuff
My new site, SlimeRevamped, is finally up! You can get to it from the blogroll.
SlimeRevamped aims to offer the most comprehensive list of slime games to its users. Even some of my own mods are hosted there.
New Websites
by MM on Jan.26, 2010, under Blog Updates, Online Stuff
I’ve gone on a domain shopping spree today, and bought two new domain names and renewed one. I’ve also dropped two domains.
I renewed officialgms.com, which should be back up by Thursday.
One of my new domains is slimerevamped.com, which will soon be home to slime volleyball-inspired games (including my own mods).
The other is gyzer.net, which ties into my dropping gyzer.com due to it being bought out by a domain squatter.
My final dropped domain is favico.us. This will expire soon and I will not be renewing it.
Updated MM’s LP
by MM on Jan.25, 2010, under Online Stuff
Yep, I finally got around to it. And wow does this pack a punch. I’ll need to add a login system at some point so that you can save progress. But wow.
Twenty-eight levels now, guys. Keep going at it.
For those of you who don’t know what MM’s LP is, you can find it here.
