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Those graphs pretty much show that the two are equal running linux binaries, but BSD is faster in networking, which is generally accepted to be true. Besides, usually with things like quake3 the speed depends entirely on the through put of the graphics card. There are some graphs that show the celeron and athlon tied at q3demos because the graphics card cannot push enough pixels. See the bottom graph. And I wouldn't necessarily trust any graph from Walnut Creek, RedHat, Sun or even Microsoft. Remember they are just in this for the money. They are trying to push as many units as possible by making themselves look the best. Marketing crap at it's greatest.

By and large there will not be a major difference between the two platform, except when accessing devices, because they both execute x86 code, and no matter if the format is elf or not, there is only so many ways to generate code, especially if they both use the same compiler, gcc. Only system calls to the kernel are going to have a big difference.

Gamecube will most likely cost $200 on it's release date (if not less). Nintendo is pushing it as a pure game machine. No set top box plans. It also has some nice combatibily with the recently released Game Boy Advanced (which is sure to be a success). Nintendo's got enough legacy games to ensure at least a number two spot in the market.

As for your prediction of Xbox pushing PS2 out of the market, I'm afraid I disagree. Sony's already capturing a large portion of the market. Just because you don't see PS2s on the shelves doesn't mean nobody has one. The games for the PS2 are also getting better and better. I don't think anybody knows for sure how much untapped power is in this box. You just can't measure it in Mhz and RAM. Read this Ars Technica article for more info.

PS2 also has plenty of legacy games of it's own. Metal Gear Solid2, Gran Turismo 3, and Final Fantasy X are enough reason to own the system. What does Xbox have? I just don't think Microsoft understands this market enough to do well in it. You can't just throw money at it.

As for Indrema, it's hard to say. It could go the way of 3DO. But 3DO went down due it's intial $700 price tag. Indrema could take up a nich as hobbist game development machine. I just haven't seen anything annouced yet for games.

As always, the quality of the games tells the story. Not the hardware.

I personally own a PS2 and I'll be in line for a Gamecube and GameBoy Advance. I'll be watching Indrema closely. As for Xbox, I already own a PC. I don't see the need for another.
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Display PostScript isn't vector based the way Aqua is AFAIK(though I think it COULD be if you tried). Besides, even if it were, there are no environments using Display PostScript in such a way(which was my point). And yes, I am very familiar with GNUStep and MacOS which both used Display PostScript, but once again, not in a vector based GUI. Swing is definitely not vector based.

I think perhaps you're misunderstanding what vector based means. It's not about auto-scaling pixmaps. It's about not having pixmaps at all. All your drawing primitives and much on-screen data are defined by equations. Resizing, translating, rotating are not about matrix multiplications and manipulations ala Gimp/PhotoShop. They're all perfect operations because the transformations are not being applied to a pixmap. No need for anti-aliasing, no need for bicubic interpolation, nearest neighbour or anything like that. I know I'm not even doing it justice, so I'll provide the link to a very informative article about Aqua.

No toolkit will do that for you without expensive matrix transformations. I think if you check out the Berlin webpage under the "Screenshots" section, you may see what I mean.

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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"

I usually go to www.arstechnica.com for the real news. At any rate, this article discusses the emotion engine and why it is so difficult to code for. It also has a few good links for other background info. Needless to say, it's not just a rumor, Cliff.

Have fun! :)

I usually go to www.arstechnica.com for the real news. At any rate, this article discusses the emotion engine and why it is so difficult to code for. It also has a few good links for other background info. Needless to say, it's not just a rumor, Cliff.

Have fun! :)

Hmmm, so the magical debate over CISC vs. RISC rolls on. As I much agree that this machine would be a nice machine to have, I don't think that the $1k price tag is really worth it. Reason being that high end Athalon and Pentium systems can be obtained at a much more attractive price/performance ratio.

Hmmm, now how about raw performance? Granted the Sparc II is a nice CPU, but can it actually compete with an Athalon at 2x the MHz. If so, can it compete in such a wide margin that would justify the price. Check the Spec bench's...

2000 Integer Results
2000 Floating Point Results

Granted, these shouldn't be taken as the ultimate in performance, but I don't see a staggering lead.

As for those in the RISC vs. CISC camps. I hate to inform you that the RISC, CISC is all but dead. Current RISC designs now longer embody the RISC philosophies of days past. CISC cores blend in to the point that one couldn't distinguish it from its called RISC counterparts. Modern CPU's are cutting the edge of new design concepts. If you feel the need to follow up on this. I suggest reading the following...

RISC vs. CISC: the Post-RISC Era

and to track the history of your favorite CPU...
Here is a good place to start..

Hmmm, if you have a few bucks to spare, pick one up. But I don't see it as a vastly superior platform.

...a benefactor system, like arstechnica has.

My question, though, and one I will be actively investigating: how does this affect Windows 2000 machines. I know there are "administration" shares set up (default hidden shares like C$), but I believe... don't quote me on this... that you need a password to view them. Just the same, I'm going to have to read this Ars Technica article in depth on how to secure my Windows 2000 box fully (I've followed most of the instructions, but I never removed the shares). I suggest any of you with Windows 2000 to do the same as well.

And I still have to secure my RedHat side of the box. *sigh*

Assembler really is good to know for some knowledge about what the computer can do. (Or rather how.)

Personally I've only done some rather brief studies of assembler, but I did that on MIPS and I think that was a good idea. It's properly constructed and not patched together like x86. My point being that most normal persons will get more benefit out of studying a sane architecture than jumping on x86 at once.

And while you're at studying assebler why not look at the actual internals as well? Patterson & Hennessy's Computer Architecture (Review at ArsTechnica.) books.

Step 1: Search Google.com
Step 2: follow link
Step 3: Read page, says company named Chic has one
Step 4: Search google again for Chic + Wireless + optical:

Step 5: Click on link: all your mouse are belong to us

ArsTechnica reviewed the Espresso PC, which appears to be the old name for this.

Linux has already been installed on this thing by ArsTechnica! http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/2q00/espresso/e spresso-4.html
They had RedHat installed May 2000. They had many things running, just a little difficulty with the network adapter.

Oh well

Only problem is, the geek world being as incestuous as it is, I'm quite sure a decent percentage of /. read the same Ars article you did.
CATS: YOU ARE ON YOUR WAY TO DESTRUCTION.
CAPTAIN: WHAT YOU SAY!!

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a=b;a^2=ab;a^2-b^2=ab-b^2;(a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b);a+b=b; 2b=b;2=1

if you pretend that you're still going to be using those P3's running Office xxxx in 5 years time, you're wrong.

I plan on using my computer in 5 years. But then again I'm on a Mac.

Anyway, as long as this pricing doesn't move to games, I'm not too worried about it. There is a good explination of the technology over at Ars Technica

My main beef with this is: My parents bought a Pac Bell in Christmas of '99. While, I can't stand to use it, its fine for them. They don't need any more power than a K6-2 333 for the internet and checking e-mail. It came with Word 97 and that's the biggest piece of software they use. That being said, this computer came with virus protection. Which is all nice, fine, and good. Of course we all know that you've got to update your virus protection periodically. It logically follows that we had to pay to update this virus protection. In my mind, this is a perfect parallel with installing Office XP on a monthly subscription. If I can't convince my mother that we need to update our virus protection every month, how is Micro$oft going to convince her to PAY(I bought this computer it should work!) again just to use Word the 3 times a month she uses it.

This will be bad, because the vast majority of people that buy OEM will not upgrade their hardware every 2 years. This is why I wish those damn Internet Appliances would take off. My Parents don't need a full computer for what they do. and I know they don't need to be paying every month or year for software they don't always use.

Static linking is one solution, but it seems a little bit heavy handed. Disk space is one problem, but indeed not major one. Another problem is that the library cannot be shared. This means that two programs using the same library will have to load it in their memory space. This means more memory consumption and more loading time.

Another nice solution could be something like bundles under Mac OS X/Darwin. First the library system knows the version number of each library, and can load the one the application needs - this alone would solve the problem described here. Secondly the library can be installed inside the application's framework, so you have the benefit of static linking without having to build a monolithic program.

This means that you can solve such problems easily. Need a specific library? Move it into the bundle. Can use the normal library? Move it out of the bundle. Simple. The DLL-hell problem comes, IMHO from the rather simplistic dynamic libray handling codesystem.

To have an idea about bundles, have a look at the article in on Ars Technica.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/2q00/espresso/espre sso-1.html

"there once was a big guy named lou
whose limericks would end at line two"

So this new Uber-chip does 75 million triangles, and has a fill rate of 1.2 - 2.6 G/pixels. Doesn't that seem familiar to anybody? Those are the box specs for the PSX2. The extra memory will be quite helpful, but this isn't very impressive so far.

The last thing Aqua is is Usable. It is a usability disaster. Read Tog's comments or the Ars Technica reviews (this one, for example. Aqua is not a usability wonder, it is marketing schlock...

(disclaimer, i am a loyal Mac User, and you would have to pry my powerbook running Platinum from my cold dead fingers. This said, When Aqua hits, i will be running windows...)

I have a hard time understanding what Jeff is complaining about. Mac OS X is doing exactly what he wants. In fact, others have written about it.

What's up with Steve's drawers?
By Michael Gemar, 30 January 2001

...

"It's like, reality, man..."

And this seems to be the point of drawers, and image wells, and banning group boxes - moving the interface closer to a physical analogue. In a recent Ars Technica article, John Siracusa pointed out that Aqua moves away from the explicit "desktop" metaphor to something more abstract. That's true, but as the author also notes, iMovie and iDVD (along with QT Player) seem to involve a much more physical metaphor. Siracusa argued that these brushed-aluminum, single-pane interfaces were rather independent of the principles of Aqua, but I think it should now be clear that, on the contrary, Aqua very much moves the Mac OS toward an appliance model of applications - one "console"; a pane in which any documents appear (as opposed to separate windows for documents); documents from which trays slide out for frequently-used controls; and with little required use of any control elements that aren't physically attached to the main console (remember, "Favorites" and "Bookmarks" can just as easily go into a fixed-location menu).

It's not just that the interface appears more realistic - sure, Aqua has some powerful graphics processing behind it, can do all sorts of fancy tricks and can present more detailed UI elements. But that could have been done with the traditional elements of the Mac OS. What is striking here, and what we have seen with QT Player, iMovie and iDVD, is that Apple is moving toward a vision of appliance-like applications that are perceived and and used as physical objects, with little contact with the rest of the OS UI. These applications don't spawn window after window across your screen but instead appear to contain almost all the interaction in one physical object. (Also consider that this single-pane mode was, until recently, how the OS X Finder was to operate as well.)

Components everywhere, OS nowhere

Now in a sense, this conclusion is not news, as many folks had similar speculations following the release of QT Player and the similar-looking Sherlock. But with Steve proclaiming that the "Digital Hub" is the strategic direction of the Mac, these interface changes make much more sense. While Mac pros may be comfortable with a gazillion windows and palettes sprayed across their screen, regular folks who just want to edit their home movies, rip some CDs or send some email don't want or need such complexity. What they require instead is an interface that is simple, intuitive and much like the kind of things they interact with in the real world. In the Digital Hub model, Apple is not appealing to people who are necessarily computer savvy or who want to learn a new metaphor, even one as seemingly intuitive as a "desktop." Heck, Steve pretty much spilled the beans at the MWSF keynote when he said that the Finder itself will in principle be replaceable by other, simpler ways of interacting with the OS, ways that didn't involve the necessity of full-blown file access - and an e-mail application was explicitly mentioned. (Now which OS X app from Apple uses drawers and a single-pane?) In other words, a user wouldn't interact with the OS, but would interact with various stand-alone apps. The OS would become invisible, and the apps would be all the user sees.

...

If this doesn't make sense, reread those last two sentences.

Regardless of how good the ``emulation'' is, it seems like it'd be faster and more efficient to optimize for the real hardware

Yes, it may seem that way. However the actuality is that compile-time optimization can be inferior to RUN-TIME optimization.

So never minding forward compatibility, you probably will wind up with faster code compiling for intel. As for hand-written Crusoe Assembly, obviously that's theoretically capable of the maximum performance, however depending on the instruction set, from a practical point of view it may not be possible to surpass translated i86 code.

Ars Technica has a pretty good article on Quartz

I think i read this at arstechnica go check it out.

Similar story with the same links is posted on the Ars Technica frontpage today, except Hannibal of Ars is the one that did the research and came up with these articles at Realworldtech.com. At least "Dean Kent" managed to read a few of the links a bit before submitting this info as his own. Perhaps next time you can submit a link to the rightful author's page rather than bypassing it and claiming his hard work as your own.

This argument is fruitless, both sides can produce specs to "prove" they are faster. For example here is one showing Java as faster:

Benchmark here

I am sure there are a boatload of tests out there which "prove" just the opposite. The plain truth is that this really isn't an area where there is a definitive answer. Sometimes one is the better and faster tool, sometimes the other is. For those of you who seem to feel that the only way to get speed is to statically compile something (a la c/c++), you might want to have a look at an alternative approach. The following link goes to an article which outlines a different way of measuring the benefits and drawbacks of the static compile vs. VM speed question.

Dynamo

there is already a bit of discussion at arstechnica on the message boards

ArsTechnica has had a great discussion of the PS2 innards for some time now. The Firingsquad stuff was neat, but I still think the article by John Stokes outweighs it.

It is easy to control all that you see,

Okay, honestly I haven't made it all the way through the article, but it seems like a watered down version of two previous Ars Technica articles (they used the same source, so its not surprising.

emotion engine overview

ps2 vs pc

-brian

Okay, honestly I haven't made it all the way through the article, but it seems like a watered down version of two previous Ars Technica articles (they used the same source, so its not surprising.

emotion engine overview

ps2 vs pc

-brian

Ars Technica, has a better ram guide that explaines these concepts and more. It has been up for a while now. check it out

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Ars also has a great write-up on the (pin) ins and outs of memory. Only they started at the very beggining with SRAM and stuff. They did a really great of not only explaining the (physical) layout of memory but the theory behind every step and technical innvoations too. A lot of it was way over my head but I liked reading it anyways...
RAM Guide: Part I DRAM and SRAM Basics

And one other thing...
And it even features lots of diagrams (although some of the tables seem to have been designed by someone who is color blind, using white text on very bright backgrounds.
Check out this graph... I have no idea what it's explaining but its really spiffy and colorfull!
"Me Ted"

Ars also has a great write-up on the (pin) ins and outs of memory. Only they started at the very beggining with SRAM and stuff. They did a really great of not only explaining the (physical) layout of memory but the theory behind every step and technical innvoations too. A lot of it was way over my head but I liked reading it anyways...
RAM Guide: Part I DRAM and SRAM Basics

And one other thing...
And it even features lots of diagrams (although some of the tables seem to have been designed by someone who is color blind, using white text on very bright backgrounds.
Check out this graph... I have no idea what it's explaining but its really spiffy and colorfull!
"Me Ted"

Don't believe the hype. While the PS2 can handle about twice as many polys in practice, it is seriously let down by memory performance and video memory size.

BTW, the graphics in DOA2: Hardcore kick ass! Can't wait to get home from work to play!

He's right, check this out:

If you look here (scroll down two or three pages) you'll see that the Xeon is useless unless you need a 4-way system - and if your webserving, a cluster of PIIIs is a lot more cost efficent in most cases. (And don't forget the advantages of greater redundancy in clusters.) Don't let the Intel marketing fool you.

I agree, that CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM helps everyone. Since NO gui is perfect (they all have their cool little features and quirks) discussing what makes a good GUI great, helps to design more user-friendly UI's. I don't have time to invest X hours learning a specific GUI, and most people also don't have that kind of spare time -- I have better things to do, like writing game code :)

> This article notes many features present in Windows Whistler (such as an advanced taskbar, ... )

BeOS has had this feature for while. It is very slick. Let's say you open up 10 copies of your web browser (NetPositive) you DON'T see 10 huge buttons spread across the task bar (Deskbar, or the Twitcher), only one. All instances of the same program are listed vertical. IMHO, this is making more efficient use of limited screen real estate.

Which brings me to my next point:

The stupid application title bars DON'T extend across the WHOLE top, in BeOS. All that space between the application name, and the Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons are simply WASTED in most GUIs. Not so, in BeOS. Even more cooler (usefull!) in BeOS, is that you can SHIFT-DRAG any title bar (Be calls this the window tab) along the top of the window! (The direct link to "A Look at the BeOS Windows" doesn't work for some reason) Makes it extremely easy to switch among visible apps.

Seems like everyone, Be, etc, includes virtual desktops/workspaces by default, EXCEPT Microsoft!

And who can forget Be is FREE!

... now only if Be would open source BeOS, and make it true multi-user, it would last "forever" and have a chance of becoming a popular OS. :) This is the one strength that Linux has, TONS of developers working world-wide. Of course Linux's "main fault" is lack of consistent vision, and a lot of redundant work. i.e. Browse sourceforge, and ask yourself do we REALLY NEED Yet-Another-Text-Editor?

Well, I've probably come off as a BeOS zealot. Far from it, I LIKE and use: Win2K, BeOS, Linux, and BSD. Use the respective tool for the proper job, since when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, something Linux may fall into, if it's not carefull. :)

Cheers

Has anyone tried writing a complete virtual processor/virtual peripheral system that performs dynamic binary translation between instruction sets?

One such is HP's Dynamo. It emulates an HP PA-8000 instruction set on, get this, an HP PA-8000. This emulation is faster than the native code, because it can do better optimisation.

Sun's MAJC runs a similar optimising emulator, but it emulates a Java machine.

I would guess that nobody's tried to emulate a complete x86 PC on a non-x86 platform largely because they'd also have to emulate all the features other than the processor: mouse, keyboard, serial, parallel, IDE, USB, etc.

I always figured that the hardcore geek news was found on ArsTechnica and that all of the stuff that made me rub my hands together in glee was on Slashdot, be it technical or tabloid crap.

check out Hannibal's interesting info at Ars Technica. It appears Apple is hiring developer for an active project to do just this.

In case no one's mentioned it, the Ars Technica run down on how SDMI is cracked:

...the Princeton results? This bit on IDG.net clears things up quite a bit. Check it:

"Our focus has always been on the scientific question of whether the SDMI's technologies, if deployed, could be defeated by pirates," the statement read. "We demonstrated that they could be defeated, by making small modifications to the music files so that the watermarks were no longer detectable but the sound quality was still acceptable. "Instead of the scientific question, the SDMI has chosen to focus on who is eligible for the cash prize that they have offered. Since we chose to forgo the cash prize in order to retain our right to publish our results, we understand that the SDMI no longer considers us to be entrants in their contest. Their announcement regarding their contest does not invalidate our scientific results."

So it looks like the Princeton hacks weren't counted. Furthermore, the Princeton team will be releasing their findings to the public, so if one of the "unhacked" technologies gets picked then info on how to defeat it will soon be public knowledge. I'm sure SDMI thinks they're going to sue under the DMCA to shut Princeton up, and I hope they do. It'll make for a great test case for this unconstitutional bit of legislation.

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Well, try reading these 2 papers and maybe that will better explain what i failed to get at:
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/2q00 /ps 2/ps2vspc-1.html
and
http://arstechnica.com/ rev iews/1q00/playstation2/ee-1.html

Well, try reading these 2 papers and maybe that will better explain what i failed to get at:
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/2q00 /ps 2/ps2vspc-1.html
and
http://arstechnica.com/ rev iews/1q00/playstation2/ee-1.html

A quick summary: You can't spell worth a crap. You have the Olsen Twins site for your homepage. You have no idea what you're talking about. Read up on it and try again, grasshopper.

They don't cite references, but they are essentially correct.

As the gap in actual core functionality between so-called RISC and so-called CISC architectures continues to narrow, there will be less of a performance lead by RISC architectures. The Pentium III / Athlon / PowerPC G4 architectures are actually remarkably similar - the main differences lie in the translation firmware that Intel and AMD use to translate old CISC instructions to RISC. Besides that, "RISC" processors have once again started adding layers of new functions that don't fit the RISC model - the PowerPC G4's Velocity Engine is a good example.

Ars Technica has some good articles on these issues, but they're not on the front page anymore.

RISC vs. CISC is an outdated argument - the good debates in the future involve NUMA and other on-the-horizon technologies. This study doesn't really take those into account (beyond a brief mention of IA-64).

Apple may have some information about it on their OS X Developer Documentation page. I notice a mention on page 17 of their document Kernel Environment. In a traditional microkernel, the box marked "BSD" would be outside the bluish grey box marked "Kernel Environment".

Saying moved the BSD kernel into the same kernel space as the Mach microkernel. isn't quite the same was saying moved FreeBSD into the Mach kernel, though.

whoops, sorry for the messed up link.

linkified

-inq

PS2 vs. PC

Even more interesting, however, is the article about the architecture of the Playstation 2's Emotion Engine. I'd suggest that anyone read both of these articles before believing all the claims in that SegaWeb article.