Some of the difference is due to the JVM’s shared libraries already being
loaded the second time, and probably also some is due to the class files
and/or image file being in your drive’s cache if you didn’t do any disk
I/O between runs.
The (optical) wheel mouse I bought was worth every penny of the US$25 I
spent on it, though you probably get better sushi where you are than I
did in Wisconsin.
Intel 965GM, Linux, no conformance options that I can see
I discovered two unexpected things about the demo today when I was playing
with Compiz-Fusion:
When I depress a mouse button, regardless of which one, the whole image
disappears until I move the mouse.
There are some squares which keep flickering between grey and painted
as I move the map around.
I’m not sure what the cause of all of this is—it could be greater
contention for texture space when the whole desktop is accellerated, or
it could be something broken, either with the demo, X, or Compiz-Fusion.
I’ll be upgrading to Fedora 9 when I return home in June; it’s always
possible that the problem will go away when I do that.
It’s a compositing manager for X. It’s becomming pretty popular these
days. I wouldn’t be surprised if within a year or so we’ll find that
it’s turned on by default in most Linux distributions.
Where would I put that ot test it?
Aha, I see what the problem is—this is a glitch due to some interaction
between the demo and the Avant Window Navigator, which is sitting beneath
it. Most likely this will go away when I upgrade to Fedora 9.
Sorry, I don’t mean that the whole desktop is one big texture, but that
various things on the desktop are hardware accelerated.
I can’t really investigate it with the profile, as now it says that 93%
of the time is spent in some native OpenGL method into which the profiler
can’t see.
I’m sure the maximum texture size is more than 256x256 everywhere.
It was commented out in the copy I had. I uncommented it, but that made
no difference that I could see. I still get the gray window between
button press and mouse movement.
It’s the default OS on most of the computers at my instiute at the
University of Amsterdam. It’s also on a lot of the machines at IRIT
in Toulouse where I am now. All of the machines I own run it. I have
two friends running Ubuntu. Small sample size will prevent you from
concluding on the basis of this that it’s several hundred times more
popular than Ubuntu.
I can’t say much about relative popularity, honestly, other than that
it seems well supported enough to put out two new releases per year.
Yes, that means the Java code executed after mipmap creation is about as
efficient as it can be.