09-29-2006, 12:28 PM | #1 | |
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2.7 delayed and not worthwhile anyway?
I just saw the news at iRex forums...
i'm too mad right now to write a proper post, so I'll give you a copy and past of my post at the irex forums: Quote:
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09-29-2006, 01:23 PM | #2 |
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Commander: See the poll I have posted both in the main iLiad forum here and on the iRex board.
You are certainly not the only person getting annoyed by this and other issues. Last edited by Riocaz; 09-29-2006 at 01:30 PM. |
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09-29-2006, 05:18 PM | #3 |
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So I guess that means the zoom and pan for PDF's got axed from 2.7?
I can't understand that, Postscript zooms, pans, sheers, slices, dices and does Julianne fries! It took me a couple screens of code to write a tool to rotate and crop, it wouldn't be any more difficult in xpdf for crying out loud. They need to release the sources and get out of the way, this is getting embarrassing. |
09-29-2006, 05:32 PM | #4 |
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@scotty1024
I've often dissagreed with you, but this time I'm 100% on your side! I myself am not a programmer...I couldn't do any better than iRex does, but I think there are MANY people out there who can!!! |
09-29-2006, 06:23 PM | #5 | |
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v2.6 - my battery life was 7 hours. v2.6.1 - my battery life is 9 hours. It looks like they have been making progress in power management to me. |
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09-30-2006, 02:13 AM | #6 |
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but at that rate it will take a year to get my 21 hours, wasn't the device supposed to be released in the next few months before they decided to give it to is early.
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09-30-2006, 04:43 AM | #7 | |
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Like I've said before, I expect to see IMPROVEMENT on each new release - and so far I have. When iRex says "we are done", then I'll compare what I have to what they originally promised. Then, and only then, will I have the right to complain that something doesn't work as promised. |
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09-30-2006, 05:12 AM | #8 | |
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The other thing is that "constant improvement" will not suffice for battery life, IMO. Being something like a programmer myself, and having programming students, I know a little bit how these things work. Essentially, you can spend some time and implement the main powersaving method (turning off things between updates), that will give you a big boost in battery life. But afterwards, everything you can do is minor improvements, tweak a parameter here and there, optimize some code somewhere and so on. But each of these minor steps is difficult, and gives just small battery life improvements. And this is what happened - in 2.5 and 2.6, they got the big boost from implementing PM, resulting in a factor of over 2. And now there will be a few small steps ("5-10%"), barely noticable, and then it will stop there. So "10 hours" is the final answer, unless they throw away their software design and begin basically from scratch, with something better - which will likely not happen. It's a stone old lesson in software design (resp. anything design) - if the basic structure is bad, you can't go too far. And the Iliads software design is made such that you can get first results really quickly, but then get stuck. It's a power management nightmare. |
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09-30-2006, 05:39 AM | #9 | ||||
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Quote:
The way I read it was that battery life was extended 5-10% for the 2.7 release. Probably because they wasted their time on useless features like PDF pan/zoom (which will not do what many users expect) instead of power management. Quote:
Quote:
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09-30-2006, 06:21 AM | #10 | |||
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Nope. I just know something about how these things work, so I made a guess. When 2.5 came out, I predicted (and wrote it in these forums several times) that there will be some more improvement, and then just mini-steps, with a long-term result of 10 hours. So far, it happened precisely how I figured it would. Quote:
The downside (and this was also tought in my software engineering courses, btw) is that the resulting code is suboptimal, and breaks down when your system has unusual constraints that were not known when the modules were developed. You get stuck in the situation where improvement is only possible by refactoring all of the general-purpose modules for the new constraint. (Say, skim through xpdf, gtk and matchbox to see where floating-point arithmetic is used out of laziness) None of the Iliad's modules was written for a system with a .5 Hz screen refresh rate, and hence, there is complex, frequently failing code to handle the screen refreshes. There is a full-blown window manager running that can draw windows, window borders, move and resize windows, maintain stacks of partially visible windows - but all of these features are useless, though they waste energy. (If you are good at working the stylus: A double-click-and-move with the stylus onto the invisible border of the toolbar window will move that window.) That's the problem: All of these things just waste a little bit of energy and run-time, but it sums up. And the only way to get real improvements is to rewrite them all. |
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09-30-2006, 01:10 PM | #11 |
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@ali
What you say makes perfect sense to me...especially the bit about power management. I was expecting things to happen like this: Henrycat's device had no power management onboard, it lasted for about 4 hours. WiFi was on all the time, Wacom was on, Processor running full-speed and lots of unoptimized code. Now, Power.management is enabled and the battery-life goes to about 20 hours (everything is off or low-power as long as you don't refresh the screen, connect to network or write with the stylus). Then it's time for the baby-steps we're seeing now, little tweaking here and there giving us slightly improved battery-life. End of Story. I've complained about this at the iRex forums a while ago, and was told that it is a difficult process, that some drivers don't like low-power mode and stuff like that. That made me seriously doubtful...and the announcement of 5-10% increase for 2.7 that was over a month of dev. work and will still be a good 2 weeks "under construction" sounds more like "cleaning code" than like serious base-level Power-management work. |
09-30-2006, 04:00 PM | #12 | |||
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Now that doesn't mean that they will meet all their original promises then. Perhaps they were over-optimistic. But regardless, officially the iLiad it still in test. To judge it until it's officially production is unfair and inaccurate. Quote:
Yes, it's suboptimal code. That's the trade off. But with very few exceptions (like systems that require 100Hz responses to real-time events), that trade off is worth it for flexibility. Quote:
So, we have a choice: we can have a system that is optimized for the hardware, making the device fast and easy on the power - with the downside that any problems will probably require a large change to the system. Also, supporting new hardware is much more difficult. Or we can have a system that is less optimized and modular, making the device a little slower and a little more power hungry - with the upside that problems are quickly and easily corrected and support for new hardware much easier. I've already dealt with such a choice and that's why I haven't used a Microsoft product at home since 2001. |
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09-30-2006, 04:11 PM | #13 |
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I wish they'd release the SDK and the necessary tools to flash the iLiad ourselves. If they finally did, I couldn't care less about 2.7, 2.8 and whatsoever, and hang out with you guys here instead.
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09-30-2006, 05:54 PM | #14 | ||
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10-01-2006, 06:44 PM | #15 |
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What makes me really mad is how long in takes them to implement trivial features. Usually you would expect such an update to be ready in a week (even with pan&zoom) and not in 2 months.
What are they wasting their time with? |
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