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No, they weren't. Take a look at This diagram

I doubt the problem with Sony is a lack of careful chip design. The problem Sony is having with the EE is that it is freak-ass complicated. Read This ArsTechnica article for details about why the EE is so complex. Also read This article for information about why the GS is so complex. In total, the EE + GS consist of about 55 million transistors, which is comparable to the 63 million in the GeForce4. Unlike NVIDIA, however, Sony did not have the luxury of an established, evolving architecture (GeForce1 -> GeForce 4) that allowed NVIDIA to implement it's complex chips with relatively few problems.

I doubt the problem with Sony is a lack of careful chip design. The problem Sony is having with the EE is that it is freak-ass complicated. Read This ArsTechnica article for details about why the EE is so complex. Also read This article for information about why the GS is so complex. In total, the EE + GS consist of about 55 million transistors, which is comparable to the 63 million in the GeForce4. Unlike NVIDIA, however, Sony did not have the luxury of an established, evolving architecture (GeForce1 -> GeForce 4) that allowed NVIDIA to implement it's complex chips with relatively few problems.

Which brings us to the next point: that 2.4 Mbps is shared among all users on a cell sector, just like cable bandwidth is shared by everyone in a neighborhood. What's a sector, then? Cell sites are generally divided into three sectors that each cover different parts of the surrounding area, so each site can have up to 7.2 Mbps of bandwidth to play with. In contrast to cable, bandwidth in 1xEV is intelligently scheduled to maximize throughput for everyone. The modems actively monitor signal strength and request the highest data rate they can handle without dropping too many packets. If the packet error rate gets too high, the system switches to a more reliable transmission scheme and the data rate is throttled down. The cell site uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm that tracks the modem's average receive signal strength from millisecond to millisecond and takes advantage of local peaks in the signal conditions to send packets when they are most likely to get through. That way, bandwidth is not wasted on packets that will likely have to be retransmitted anyway, and one user with a bad connection can't cause a storm of retransmits that slows down service for everyone. Of course, if everybody on your sector is doing large downloads at the same time, the bandwidth will be divvied up among them, factoring in signal conditions. Of some consolation is that fact that your typical usage scenario is rather more sporadic: you download a web page for maybe 10 seconds, then stare at it for a minute, and so on. When you aren't actually downloading, the airwaves are free for someone else to surf. The likelihood of everyone clicking at once is very low, and the average response as seen by any particular user is pretty good; that's the miracle of statistical multiplexing.

Arstechnica has a very good article on what the heck .NET is.

The design of the box alone makes it look like it is an 'MS Office Look-alike' and thus giving it status in corporate eyes.

Um, resource and data forks have nothing to do with the use of type/creator information. OK, the metadata may be stored in the resource fork (I'm not sure about this), but type/creator information can be stored in a non-forked structure as well.

But you're right about the type/creator system being vastly superior to file name extensions.

But the protocol VNC uses is just weird -- as near as I can tell, the client sends raw keystrokes & mouse positions and clicks and so on, and the remote server sends raw bitmaps.

I don't really know but I seem to recall remote display was one of the supposed advantages to using Quartz. Since it is a sort of "Display PDF" I would think there must be better ways of doing remote display than simply pushing pixels.

Theres an old article on Quartz/Aqua on Ars Techinica. It doesn't say anything about remote display but it discusses the technology and may provide some clues as to how they might be doing it.

Part I.

Part II.

Part I.

Part II.

As far as I understand the problem, altivec is very performant but only handles single precision floats, not doubles.

While single precision floats are largely enough for multi-media processing (filters, compression, etc...), in general, number crunching is done in double precision and the floating point tests of SEPC reflect this. You don't always need double for scientific calculations, but this is altoghter another discussion.

Maybe one day we'll see a multimedia component of SPEC or Altivec will support double precision numbers (the author even mentions this at the end of the article) but until then Altivec is out and this has nothing to do with a bias of the author.

As for OS X being optimised for this kind of stuff, we are talking applications that nearly never call the OS for anything, so the impact of OS X is probably nil. The truth is, floating point calculation is not really important for most users and both Intel and PowerPC processors are optimised for integer calculations. There was a good article about this on Ars Technica.

One reason I could see to explain the large difference lies in the compiler: there has been much more work on gcc to optimise for the Intel instruction set than for the PPC instruction set. Like most RISC processors, the performance of a PPC processor is hugely influenced by the compiler.

Does a 1.2Ghz PC have one of THESE for you to play with? :)

What's the deal with all the pseudo-latin branding in the tech industry lately? We've got ArsTechnica, ArsDigita, and apparently now DesignTechnica.

Honestly, what's next? DigitalArs(e)?

This thread on the arstechnica forums goes into details about how IRQ sharing works under Win2K and XP. Look for a post by PeterB.

Somewhat more informative than the party line.

Citrix is extremely expensive. Our solution ran some $20k - on the cheap even. Add to that the cost of Terminal Server Client Access Licenses, Windows Client Access Licenses, Citrix Client Access Licenses, and a license for every app (per user) you're going to run off the server. Oh, and Office has extra licensing requirements as well. And don't forget training.

On the plus side, Citrix is a breeze to use and manage. The 2000 release is rock-solid stable, though I haven't evaluated XP yet. The huge price tag really turns me off. Make damned sure you lock your box down tighter than a choirboy's ass - check out this ArsTechnica article for a good place to start. Keep up at BugTraq and other security spots for exploits.

I bought 10 old 233MMX Pentium workstations loaded with RAM for a song that I'm using to add/replace workstations. However, from a pricing standpoint there are (so far) few advantages to running Windows-free on the client side if you have to use a lot of Microsoft applications. This is by design.

I've evaluated StarOffice, but it's just not going to cut the mustard for document compatibility (reading *and* writing). However, I'm very happy with Corel Office and plan to migrate to that company-wide.

EspressigoBy day.

CappuccinoBy night.

seem to disagree with your POV. I'm admittedly biased, (see my site, but I'm not the only one. In fact, I'd much prefer to have the web designer set the background color, as very often you run across sites that assume you have your default background color set to white, so there main logo is black text with a drop shadow on a white rectangle--which looks like crap if your background color is grey (default UNIX Netscape) or light blue or tan.

Admittedly people need to be careful and judicious when designing pages. Putting red text on a fractal background image or lime green text on an off blue background are evil. If you want to try overriding somebodie's site with images=off background=grey text=black, good luck, but you may find the site to be an ugly mess.

actually, according to this article, you can do it in real time. of course, that doesn't factor in the time spent re-rendering each frame to get the PERFECT aki ross porno film, which is factored in, according to that second article.

bullshit. show me how accessable your mac cube is...

The mac cube is this accessible.

When Apple transitioned from the M68K line to the PPC, they were in the same situation - 68K code would run faster on a 40Mhz 68040 than on a 40Mhz PPC 601. The reason consumers didn't mind was that the the PPC 601 started at 60Mhz (approximately the break-even point to the emulation layer), and (to the end user) didn't cost significantly more.

While that's a valid point, it also bears pointing out that Pentium IV is at 2200 MHz whereas Itanium is at 800MHz -- about 1/3rd the clock speed. That ratio is going to remain for awhile too -- McKinley will come out at 1000 MHz, while Pentium IV continues its mad march toward 3000MHz and beyond. You acknowledge this fact implicitly with your next statement (re: Itanium not viable until approx same speed at approx same cost), but I felt it'd be interesting to point out just how large a gap there is.

These ratios spell doom for hardware-level emulation of the Pentium on the Itanium. Unless Intel has some serious magic, having a 100% cycle-for-cycle perfect emulation of the Pentium III or even Pentium IV on the Itanium die will never run better than 1/3rd the speed of the real thing, since the fundamental clock rate is so far off. The only real way to get close is to do a software-level translation and get a boost from scheduling for the native hardware.

It's interesting to note, BTW, that HP's Dynamo project does a software translation of PA-8000 code targeting (guess what) a PA-8000 CPU, and rather than slowing things down, it actually gets 20% speedups! Ars Technica also did a piece on this. Perhaps that's why HP doesn't have hardware-level translation from PA-RISC to Itanium on the die like Intel does -- they (HP) are in a better position to just translate the PA-RISC code to IA-64 when needed. (Also, in the UNIX world, it's just simply less necessary.)

I'm not gonna bother with a proper reply, as I'm pretty sure that you're a troll. .Net, although similar in some respects to Java, isn't Java. It has no Java code, or anythin like that.

SWING, JDBC? .Net uses Windows Forms and ADO.net. You are but a fool. If you really want to know about .net, read about it in this article on ArsTechnica.

tlhf

xxx

You muppet

I'm not gonna bother with a proper reply, as I'm pretty sure that you're a troll. .Net, although similar in some respects to Java, isn't Java. It has no Java code, or anythin like that.

SWING, JDBC? .Net uses Windows Forms and ADO.net. You are but a fool. If you really want to know about .net, read about it in this article on ArsTechnica.

tlhf

xxx

You muppet

You can find a short discussion of some differences here. Same family, younger and perhaps fresher.

Ars Technica has an article that looks into what the .NET Framework is supposed to be, the CLR, metadata, and .NET vs. COM. Some of the stuff has probably been covered elsewhere, but it's still an informative read nonetheless.

Here's a link to an article that explains it.

Some people might really like the new iMac from a physical/enclosure design standpoint, but might not like OSX (see plenty of articles as to why), or might just prefer Linux. So, buy the Mac, run Linux on it, and you get basically what you want.

Also, the whole "because it's there" thing.

-brennan

I could have spared myself the research headache, and gone straight to the source for an answer.

I guess I deserve a (-1, Clueless) mod for that.

so apparently we all read arstechnica too. this was on there long before it showed up on slashdot. i don't blame the /. editors for this, but i'd hope that the people posting news would take a bit more ethical responsibility and report the source. see the original arstechnica article for more details.

way back when, they said "it's the last movie we'll ever make" because they're so over their budget.
-ac.

(this was from here.)

I have never, ever seen an SGI machine crash. I cannot say the same for Macintoshes (and certainly not for Wintel). In fact, I've seen anecdotal evidence that MacOS X.0 had stability problems.

A suggestion: get yourself a decent history of Apple, and read it. Not only did the ][ predate the machines that you list by several years, but it was an evolutionary improvement on its own predecessors, which were mostly hobbyist machines that were more like the build-your-own projects listed on Ars Technica, only much, much harder. Not to mention that Apple didn't invent the GUI, of course, but bought it from Xerox--and where did they get the money for that, or for developing the Mac? Why, from Woz' little "command-line interface" machine. Apple ][ revenue kept the company going for years before the Mac turned a profit.

OK, it's not quite the same, but Ars Technica have had a premium membership service that gives you access to technical PDFs and other info not normally available. Apparently it's been quite successful, so there's some sort of a market for paid-content.

Personally I don't think game box / PVR is a good combo - I'd prefer a dedicated PVR

Amen brother. Extracting saved video from a TiVO (at high resolution) is enough to cause live (buffered) TV to stutter and get out of sync.

Of course, the TiVO does sport a lower-end embedded PPC chipset and dedicated MPEG-2 de/coder, so running a web server and twice the I/O is probably pushing it a little.

Joe Consumer wants a consistent experience, be it gaming, PVR, or pizza delivery.

"Also regarding the investment in a new platform and coming from the x86 world, I'm a bit interested about the PowerPC performance in comparison to what I could get with a x86 notebook. I've read some articles and pages that suggest that PowerPCs may not be fast (or, in fact, may be quite slower than their x86 counterparts):

John Carmacks Opinion

Considering Carmack made this statement when x86 had just broken the gigahertz barrier and The G4 was actually faster than it is now due to the 512k cache, and that Apple has crippled both the Titanium and new iMac G4s with 100mhz front side busses, PPC has got to be eons behind x86 in performance by now...

usefull links:

Ars Technica G4 -vs- K7 Analysis

Ars Technica G4 -vs- P4 Analysis

"Also regarding the investment in a new platform and coming from the x86 world, I'm a bit interested about the PowerPC performance in comparison to what I could get with a x86 notebook. I've read some articles and pages that suggest that PowerPCs may not be fast (or, in fact, may be quite slower than their x86 counterparts):

John Carmacks Opinion

Considering Carmack made this statement when x86 had just broken the gigahertz barrier and The G4 was actually faster than it is now due to the 512k cache, and that Apple has crippled both the Titanium and new iMac G4s with 100mhz front side busses, PPC has got to be eons behind x86 in performance by now...

usefull links:

Ars Technica G4 -vs- K7 Analysis

Ars Technica G4 -vs- P4 Analysis

Great little machine, if you've got the money for it, and have a reason for wanting it...(easy machine to haul around for gaming sessions). But this machine's exactly what you're looking for.

Great little machine, if you've got the money for it, and have a reason for wanting it...(easy machine to haul around for gaming sessions). But this machine's exactly what you're looking for.

On a related note, Ars Technica recently pushed out a Flat Panel buyer's guide.

Check out the cappuccino pc

We have about 4 of these in our lab..

Check out the cappuccino PC We have two of these in our group here. Very compact, yet can be had with a P-III processor, 1394, USB, 10/100 Ethernet, etc etc.

Still though, after having to wallow through Cringley's painful lack of comprehension of basic technical knowledge, reading the ArsTechnica piece again was quite refreshing.

I am sure that someone could human engineer the error messages. and since they would actually never go to MS, but maybe to some Bogus Site, like Microsoft-security.com some folks could be fooled by this. I am thinking of the Pay-Pal Scam that was running around a few days back, using simple email. It wouldn't be that hard for people who were expert to fudge something to send a user to La la land, with appropriate dialogs, disclaimers, etc. etc.

The best new game engine is in Max Payne. You can read about Max Payne here and here.

I'm not terribly shocked--using a 3-letter extension to store that much metadata is absurd.

Luckily, the MacOS doesn't do tha.... oh, wait.... they do now...

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here, but you're right the RISC CPUs do kinda chunk the microcode overboard. If you want more details I suggest you check out the Black Papers on ArsTechnica. They have a great article on CISC vs. RISC.

JOhn

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here, but you're right the RISC CPUs do kinda chunk the microcode overboard. If you want more details I suggest you check out the Black Papers on ArsTechnica. They have a great article on CISC vs. RISC.

JOhn

Auto hacking isn't dead, it's mutated and evolved. No longer can you rebuild your carburator with a Swiss Army knife, like you could on old VW Bugs.. No longer can you do those little tweaks that let you eek a few extra HP's out of your 'Cuda..

Similarly the computer hackery of yore has passed from sight, only to be replaced with OC madness, case modification, heavy-duty server setups in one's broom closet, and so on..

It used to be that hackers would race hard-drives across table tops, and race Mustangs down the main drag. Now, the script-kiddies and rice-boys put skins on their virus generators and Acura Type R stickers on their Dodge Neons!!!

Flash has replaced content. It's all about appearances, and who cracks first.. Neon light kits under the chasis of either your Dell or your Civic warn that you are clearly a force to be reckoned with.. A 40 pound spoiler and a muffler the size of a coffee can are the automotive equivalent of running an animated desktop hack or semi-transparent windows - performance be damned!!

Just as in computing, auto-hacking has simply grown, and become so widely exposed that it's attracted it's own brand of poseur. There's the wankers who put stickers on their cars, because race cars have stickers, so stickers turn mom's old beater into a renegade from Indy.. There's the wankers who assign unique audio events to every window action and have true-color, animated mouse pointers.

Then there are guys who rewire their own auto audio systems, making sure the trunk DOES NOT rattle when they turn the music up, and those who put performance parts in and then actually USE them in motocross events. These are the overclockers and liquid-coolers of the auto-hacking world.

Take a look at the Honda Insight, and note the very cool side-mirror to LCD screen hack.. There is still auto-hacking.. But like real PC hacking, it takes effort, perseverence and creativity.

The PS2 only has one actual CPU, the MIPS-based Emotion Engine. Far more detail is available in this nice ArsTechnica article.

Yes and no.

Quartz specifies a new graphics layer, but one that is object-API compatible with OpenStep. OpenStep applications should port without major graphical overhaul.

Quartz is based on PDF, much as NeXT and Sun NeWS were based on PostScript.

Ars Technicha went over this in detail:

An example of an early third generation display layer is the Display Postscript system used by NeXTSTEP. Since the display layer has to keep track of all these vector shapes itself, it makes sense to use an existing vector graphics definition language like Postscript instead of creating a new one from scratch. Using Postscript saves work and allows easy interchange and printing of graphics from such a system.

Quartz does not use Postscript as its internal graphics representation language. Instead, it uses Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) standard which is a superset of Adobe Postscript. PDF has several advantages over Postscript, including better color management, internal compression, font independence, and interactivity. (Check out the PDF specs for more information.) PDF is also is a free and open standard, which saves Apple from paying Postscript licensing fees.