No, the reason why people don't complain is because Buick's strategy is to wait until GM has ironed out the problems in their other lines and then release their variant of the product. For instance, the Rainier is built on the GMT360 platform, which is essentially the same as the Chevy Trailblazer and GMC Envoy. These two were released in 2002. The Buick didn't come out until 2004.
The CTS is NOT identical to the Chevy Impala. The CTS is built on GM's rear wheel drive Sigma platform. Currently, the only other things built on this platform are the Cadillac SRX and the upcoming '05 STS. The CTS-V rides on the same platform as the CTS, it's just been tuned for better performance and includes the 5.7L V8 that's in the Corvette Z06.
The impala is built on the aging front-drive "W-Car" platform. This platform is shared with the Chevy Monte Carlo, Pontiac Grand Prix and Buick Regal.
The $10,000+ buys you a much more moden platform, rear-wheel drive, a much better interior, a much better standard engine, a much better transmission, and an all-around better car.
Did you happen to check the University's library? They may have a large volume scanner that you can use. It's worth a shot, and they may even let you use it for free.
University libraries tend to have high-volume document scanners left over from specific projects that they may not use on a daily basis. They may have used it to say, convert all of the thesises they have on file to a digital form or for a digital peridical archive or something like that.
Saab's have Turbocharged engines. They're not all that rare or exotic.
Also, there was an infatuation with Turbos in the mid-eighties - especially with Chrysler. They put out a lot of turbo charged cars, such as the Dodge Daytona. Unfotunately, the turbo units put out then had a horrible history of burning up and requiring more maintainence than non-turbo engines.
Just about every auto company in the industry has the same policy. Ford, GM, and others have been doing it for years. If you start to write about rumors or unreleased products, your publication gets blacklisted. You will no longer be given credentials to attened press events, sneak previews, advance test drives, new vehicle launches and other things. It would essentially be a death penalty for many publications.
Why? Because like Apple, the auto companies sell their products based on design and image. New designs leaked out early enough can allow your competition to get a jump on you. Furthermore, like Apple, the auto companies present sales depend on conceling future products. Rumors about upcoming models cause auto companies to lose money. Perod.
All Apple is doing is coming up to 1950's era PR policies invented by the industry that defined the process of selling an image. The automotive press seems to flourish despite what some people call "oppressive policies." The rumormongering sites still exist and the other publications still give honest reviews of automotive products.
There are two really great ones that I know. These aren't really flea markets per-say, their surplus equipment dealer. They have a lot of other stuff, though.
Sunnyvale, CA - WeirdStuff warehouse. It's at the end of Mathilda avenue, around the corner from the NASA Ames research labs. If you need a TRS-80 or an Apple II, then stop here. They are a "dumping ground" for the bay area tech companies. Their prices aren't that great, though.
Ann Arbor, MI - University of Michigan property disposition. They have a ton of old computer junk there. It's the dumping ground for the entire University of Michigan system. It's on the U's North Campus. If you're lucky, you might even score a well-worn in Mammogram machine!
If you carried all of that stuff in my hometown, it wouldn't be "your stuff" anymore - if you catch my drift. I don't enjoy being robbed, beaten, and left for dead.:-)
You just need to leave the gadgets locked at home...
Yes, but that $2 Million was all raised by student fundraising efforts. It all came from private industry sponsors- mostly automotive companies and automotive suppliers. It was a moumental task in itself to raise that much money.
Of course they will make money on the Titanium - in fact, they will probabily make a killing on it. The PowerBook has always been a high-margin item, and I doubt that they would sacrifice this. Whoever wrote this article forgot a few things:
The G4 Processor has a much smaller die size than the x86 competitors. It can be manufactured more cheaply - especially now that they have been getting good yields at lower speeds.
Apple owns a sizeable portion of Korea's Samsung electronics, which is the company that manufactures those larger screens. Therefore they are in a much better position to get a sweet deal on those screens than many other manufacturers.
The Titanium case will actually cut down on many costs. Sure, the material itself is cheaper, but think about this: most laptops today have a plastic outer skin molded over a magnesium or aluminum skeleton. This process requires two sets of machines, and two toolings to do - both very expensive. By going to a hard, titanium "exoskeleton", you can eliminate one of the toolings by eliminating the inner skeleton. Furthermore, assembly is made much easier, since the parts simply "bolt-on" to the case, rather than being bolted first to the skeleton, and then to the plastic case.
There are many other ingenious ways that they've been able to save money on the product, but I don't have time to list them now. Obviously, the person who wrote the article had not even considered the obvious.
The 500MHz PPC is a fast chip. Keep in mind that many of the x86 processors were "artifically" increased to 1GHz. They do that by lengthening the processor's pipelines. This increases the clock speed, but at the same time the processor is doing less work for every clock. The G4s in these laptops are the same ones in the desktops. The chips that AMD and Intel are producing are actually hobbled. Transmeta's chips haven't been well accepted in the marketplace yet, as they haven't been able to live up to the hype. I'd say that Apple has a pretty decent machine here and I think that they'll sell alot of them. There's been a pent up demand for a G4 laptop for quite some time now.
I would have to disagree. Some time ago, Stereo Review did a head to head between several expensive cable brands and a spool of Radio Shack cable with Radio Shack connectors soldered on. Despite costing signifcantly less, the Radio Shack rig had no decernable difference. Save your money. Put the money you would have spent into a better set of speakers and a better amp. Just make sure that you have wires with a low enough gauge to carry the power your speakers will consume. Your speaker manufacturer can provide some guidelines for this.
"Connect your DVD player via the S-video cable and Digital optical/coax cable to the AMPs inputs.
(Get good quality cables for this!)"
Okay, so I possibly understand your reasoning about the S-video cable, but high quality coax/optical cables won't make any difference. These are digital signals - either the bits get there or they don't. The sound doesn't change unless you start dropping bits. If you're dropping some bits here and there, then you'll be able to hear that for sure.
(make sure all the speaker cables are the same legth.).
This is good advice - especially in a surround setup.
Just about any embedded design company has a UNIX or UNIX-like development system. Most notibly, the telecomm equipment companies. Those large phone switches, cross connects and Cellular equipment systems all run some form of embedded or non-embedded UNIX or UNIX-like operating system. It's a great place for UNIX lovers! Some of these companies include Lucent, Tellabs, Motorola, and Alcatel.
Legislation will never work on the global internet. Just as there are countries that are not so friendly with the US government who will launder money for you, there will be countries that host these types of services. Why would they do that? Possibly in hopes of luring skilled, high-tech workers to their locale- or keep the ones that are there right now.
The only thing that can crush these services is the lack of internet bandwidth. If they get too popular, then they will become irrelevant under their own loads.
AU/X was an impressive system at first glance. However, once you went out and played with it, you found that it had quite a few notable problems.
First of which, the "MacOS Look & Feel" was quite detached from the UNIX core. It was, quite simply MacOS running as a process on the UNIX server. In the first few versions, a modified MacOS 6 was included. In later versions, a modified MacOS 7 was included. This arrangement was very familar to anyone who had used Apple MAE (Macintosh Application Environment) product. MAE was a similar product that allowed you to bring up a classic MacOS environment on a SunOS or HP-UX workstation.
While it did give users the MacOS look and feel, it didn't give them much more. MacOS processes were still cooperatively scheduled inside the MacOS process. A crashing process would wipe out the whole environment. This was not good.
Even worse was the developer support for the environment. The UNIX environment had a few APIs to access the Mac Toolbox, but it did not have nearly the API set required to make the rich graphical environments that Mac users wanted. Coming back to my first point, is that even if you had written an A/UX graphical app, if the Mac environment crashed, so did your graphical app, eventhough it was running in a protected memory space.
Basically, what Apple had shipped was an OS that gobbled up RAM and only ran on the high-end machines, such as the Mac II (only if you had installed the upgrade PMMU chip) or the IIx. These setups cost $8,000 for a base system. The 8Mb of recommended RAM was enormously expensive in 1988. Why would users buy it? It made their hardware slower and their massive memories useless. Whereas MacOS 7.1 would only use up 2 Mb, A/UX would gobble up all 8 Mb when the MacOS environment was running. To it's credit, one of the good things that A/UX did do was virtual memory. It would dynamically allocate memory to the MacOS environment as it was used. You still had to give all of the MacOS applications hard memory allocations, but the environment would expand itself as needed.
Oh, there was one more thing. When it was first released, most "classic" MacOS applications wouldn't run in the MacOS environment. The MacOS environment required that applications be "32-bit clean". In the System 6 days, there were many apps that weren't- including many popular ones. This problem would pop up when system 7 came along, but by then most developers had revved their apps to be clean. Before system 7 was released, it became well known if you could get your app to run on AU/X, you could run on 7. Thus, A/UX did serve as an important development tool.
No, you can actually use the Metrowerks CodeWarrior compiler, which can make an earnest attempt at Altivec compilation. That is, if you set your target to an Altivec application.
Because, then you would have even uglier seams in the screen. This works fine for JumboTron stadium screens, where the seams can be an inch or so apart. However, the seam would have to less than a few micrometers in width in order for the display to look uniform. A display like this would be a living nightmare to backlight as well. You'd have odd areas in the display where you would have a bright sqauare and a slightly darker one. This will become more visiable as the screen ages. Each square would have to be individually backlit, because the frames of the square would get in the way of a single backlight. Furthermore, this type of layout would add alot of weight to the laptop.
I also believe that failure rates would be just as high, since you would actually have to run the traces that drive the individual display components around in an odd fashon (i.e. how would you get the wires up to the center block of pixels?). It's these fragle traces that go bad and cause stuck pixels and stuck lines, not the actual element on the display itself.
We've run mac servers for various things. Guess what- they all work well, and they all handle a load just fine. Just because the OS doesn't support pre-emptive multitasking, it doesn't mean that the applications can't be multithreaded. If you only have one process running on the machine, which is a well written multithreaded server application, your machine should be solid. The application can handle all preemptiveness itself between its own threads. Sure, this makes programming a little bit trickier, but it can be done. The only thing that you may end up taking a hit on are the creation and destruction of threads, and I/O if the theads are requesting I/O at the same time.
Oh, and one more thing MacOS's TCP/IP stack is multithreaded as well- something that Linux is currently lacking (not to mention a main performance roadblock).
The floppy drive in my Mac has been broken for over two years. To be honest, I don't really miss it at all. I don't really need it for anything- I back up all my files to tape (which is much more useful than anything for backups, since it holds 4GB+). Smaller files (i.e all of the documents that I create are backed up to a fileserver on the internet). Since Macs have never really had a problem with booting from a CD, installing MacOS releases has been a breeze.
Furthermore, the only thing that I use the floppy drive in my Intel box is for reloading Windows NT when it barfs (now that I have a BIOS that supports booting from the CDROM, I don't even need to do this anymore). I did use it once to install FreeBSD, but I've been downloading all of the patches over the net.
I guess the lesson here is that if you don't run windows, you don't need a floppy.:-)
I believe that Apple already has such a card with dual ATI RAGE 128's on it for their Power Mac G3 line. Don't really have to worry about OS support there, either- both the hardware and the OS have been able to support Multiple Monitors since the Mac II was released in 1987.
Hooray for the Mac user... and here I thought that I was the only one.:-)
No, really, my congrats go out to all of the Slashdot crew for these pages... you have given me many joyful moments of sheer procrastination. Nothing else on the web has captured my attention more than Slashdot.
Nope. If you look back into the annuls of history, you'll see that the first 386 was released by Compaq running a version of MS-DOS that was modified to run on the 386. Now, PC-DOS that Microsoft was licensed to sell to IBM is a different story. It's development didn't always parallel the development of MS-DOS. So, while everyone else was running MS-DOS on 386en, genuine IBM hardware was running PC-DOS on 286en. I actually just read this last week while doing research for a history paper.:-)
This is an interesting comment comming from a company that makes most of its money selling word processors and spreadsheets. These products are basically what supports MS's OS development, since OS development has a comparatively high overhead in R & D and support costs. I wonder if Gates knows this?:-) It's also interesting to note that while he says that the free-software market is only good for these applications programs, he doesn't take into account that free software hasn't made much of an inroads in these areas. Rather, it has made its most visable progress in the OS/Server market a la linux and FreeBSD.
Slashdot Mirror
You can ssh from a Treo 600 and it's free. Check this out:
http://www.tussh.com/
No, the reason why people don't complain is because Buick's strategy is to wait until GM has ironed out the problems in their other lines and then release their variant of the product. For instance, the Rainier is built on the GMT360 platform, which is essentially the same as the Chevy Trailblazer and GMC Envoy. These two were released in 2002. The Buick didn't come out until 2004.
The CTS is NOT identical to the Chevy Impala. The CTS is built on GM's rear wheel drive Sigma platform. Currently, the only other things built on this platform are the Cadillac SRX and the upcoming '05 STS. The CTS-V rides on the same platform as the CTS, it's just been tuned for better performance and includes the 5.7L V8 that's in the Corvette Z06.
The impala is built on the aging front-drive "W-Car" platform. This platform is shared with the Chevy Monte Carlo, Pontiac Grand Prix and Buick Regal.
The $10,000+ buys you a much more moden platform, rear-wheel drive, a much better interior, a much better standard engine, a much better transmission, and an all-around better car.
Are the giant fighting robots finally going to get along?
Did you happen to check the University's library? They may have a large volume scanner that you can use. It's worth a shot, and they may even let you use it for free.
University libraries tend to have high-volume document scanners left over from specific projects that they may not use on a daily basis. They may have used it to say, convert all of the thesises they have on file to a digital form or for a digital peridical archive or something like that.
Saab's have Turbocharged engines. They're not all that rare or exotic.
Also, there was an infatuation with Turbos in the mid-eighties - especially with Chrysler. They put out a lot of turbo charged cars, such as the Dodge Daytona. Unfotunately, the turbo units put out then had a horrible history of burning up and requiring more maintainence than non-turbo engines.
http://www.apple.com
Windows free, 24x7 support, and even CD Recording.
Just about every auto company in the industry has the same policy. Ford, GM, and others have been doing it for years. If you start to write about rumors or unreleased products, your publication gets blacklisted. You will no longer be given credentials to attened press events, sneak previews, advance test drives, new vehicle launches and other things. It would essentially be a death penalty for many publications.
Why? Because like Apple, the auto companies sell their products based on design and image. New designs leaked out early enough can allow your competition to get a jump on you. Furthermore, like Apple, the auto companies present sales depend on conceling future products. Rumors about upcoming models cause auto companies to lose money. Perod.
All Apple is doing is coming up to 1950's era PR policies invented by the industry that defined the process of selling an image. The automotive press seems to flourish despite what some people call "oppressive policies." The rumormongering sites still exist and the other publications still give honest reviews of automotive products.
There are two really great ones that I know. These aren't really flea markets per-say, their surplus equipment dealer. They have a lot of other stuff, though.
Sunnyvale, CA - WeirdStuff warehouse. It's at the end of Mathilda avenue, around the corner from the NASA Ames research labs. If you need a TRS-80 or an Apple II, then stop here. They are a "dumping ground" for the bay area tech companies. Their prices aren't that great, though.
Ann Arbor, MI - University of Michigan property disposition. They have a ton of old computer junk there. It's the dumping ground for the entire University of Michigan system. It's on the U's North Campus. If you're lucky, you might even score a well-worn in Mammogram machine!
If you carried all of that stuff in my hometown, it wouldn't be "your stuff" anymore - if you catch my drift. I don't enjoy being robbed, beaten, and left for dead. :-)
You just need to leave the gadgets locked at home...
Yes, but that $2 Million was all raised by student fundraising efforts. It all came from private industry sponsors- mostly automotive companies and automotive suppliers. It was a moumental task in itself to raise that much money.
Err - I mean that the Titanium material is more expensive, not cheaper as I had mentioned above. Sorry about that.
Of course they will make money on the Titanium - in fact, they will probabily make a killing on it. The PowerBook has always been a high-margin item, and I doubt that they would sacrifice this. Whoever wrote this article forgot a few things:
The G4 Processor has a much smaller die size than the x86 competitors. It can be manufactured more cheaply - especially now that they have been getting good yields at lower speeds.
Apple owns a sizeable portion of Korea's Samsung electronics, which is the company that manufactures those larger screens. Therefore they are in a much better position to get a sweet deal on those screens than many other manufacturers.
The Titanium case will actually cut down on many costs. Sure, the material itself is cheaper, but think about this: most laptops today have a plastic outer skin molded over a magnesium or aluminum skeleton. This process requires two sets of machines, and two toolings to do - both very expensive. By going to a hard, titanium "exoskeleton", you can eliminate one of the toolings by eliminating the inner skeleton. Furthermore, assembly is made much easier, since the parts simply "bolt-on" to the case, rather than being bolted first to the skeleton, and then to the plastic case.
There are many other ingenious ways that they've been able to save money on the product, but I don't have time to list them now. Obviously, the person who wrote the article had not even considered the obvious.
The 500MHz PPC is a fast chip. Keep in mind that many of the x86 processors were "artifically" increased to 1GHz. They do that by lengthening the processor's pipelines. This increases the clock speed, but at the same time the processor is doing less work for every clock. The G4s in these laptops are the same ones in the desktops. The chips that AMD and Intel are producing are actually hobbled. Transmeta's chips haven't been well accepted in the marketplace yet, as they haven't been able to live up to the hype. I'd say that Apple has a pretty decent machine here and I think that they'll sell alot of them. There's been a pent up demand for a G4 laptop for quite some time now.
"Connect your DVD player via the S-video cable and Digital optical/coax cable to the AMPs inputs.
(Get good quality cables for this!)"
Okay, so I possibly understand your reasoning about the S-video cable, but high quality coax/optical cables won't make any difference. These are digital signals - either the bits get there or they don't. The sound doesn't change unless you start dropping bits. If you're dropping some bits here and there, then you'll be able to hear that for sure.
(make sure all the speaker cables are the same legth.).
This is good advice - especially in a surround setup.
Just about any embedded design company has a UNIX or UNIX-like development system. Most notibly, the telecomm equipment companies. Those large phone switches, cross connects and Cellular equipment systems all run some form of embedded or non-embedded UNIX or UNIX-like operating system. It's a great place for UNIX lovers! Some of these companies include Lucent, Tellabs, Motorola, and Alcatel.
Legislation will never work on the global internet. Just as there are countries that are not so friendly with the US government who will launder money for you, there will be countries that host these types of services. Why would they do that? Possibly in hopes of luring skilled, high-tech workers to their locale- or keep the ones that are there right now.
The only thing that can crush these services is the lack of internet bandwidth. If they get too popular, then they will become irrelevant under their own loads.
AU/X was an impressive system at first glance. However, once you went out and played with it, you found that it had quite a few notable problems.
:-)
First of which, the "MacOS Look & Feel" was quite detached from the UNIX core. It was, quite simply MacOS running as a process on the UNIX server. In the first few versions, a modified MacOS 6 was included. In later versions, a modified MacOS 7 was included. This arrangement was very familar to anyone who had used Apple MAE (Macintosh Application Environment) product. MAE was a similar product that allowed you to bring up a classic MacOS environment on a SunOS or HP-UX workstation.
While it did give users the MacOS look and feel, it didn't give them much more. MacOS processes were still cooperatively scheduled inside the MacOS process. A crashing process would wipe out the whole environment. This was not good.
Even worse was the developer support for the environment. The UNIX environment had a few APIs to access the Mac Toolbox, but it did not have nearly the API set required to make the rich graphical environments that Mac users wanted. Coming back to my first point, is that even if you had written an A/UX graphical app, if the Mac environment crashed, so did your graphical app, eventhough it was running in a protected memory space.
Basically, what Apple had shipped was an OS that gobbled up RAM and only ran on the high-end machines, such as the Mac II (only if you had installed the upgrade PMMU chip) or the IIx. These setups cost $8,000 for a base system. The 8Mb of recommended RAM was enormously expensive in 1988. Why would users buy it? It made their hardware slower and their massive memories useless. Whereas MacOS 7.1 would only use up 2 Mb, A/UX would gobble up all 8 Mb when the MacOS environment was running. To it's credit, one of the good things that A/UX did do was virtual memory. It would dynamically allocate memory to the MacOS environment as it was used. You still had to give all of the MacOS applications hard memory allocations, but the environment would expand itself as needed.
Oh, there was one more thing. When it was first released, most "classic" MacOS applications wouldn't run in the MacOS environment. The MacOS environment required that applications be "32-bit clean". In the System 6 days, there were many apps that weren't- including many popular ones. This problem would pop up when system 7 came along, but by then most developers had revved their apps to be clean. Before system 7 was released, it became well known if you could get your app to run on AU/X, you could run on 7. Thus, A/UX did serve as an important development tool.
That's all I have right now.
No, you can actually use the Metrowerks CodeWarrior compiler, which can make an earnest attempt at Altivec compilation. That is, if you set your target to an Altivec application.
Because, then you would have even uglier seams in the screen. This works fine for JumboTron stadium screens, where the seams can be an inch or so apart. However, the seam would have to less than a few micrometers in width in order for the display to look uniform. A display like this would be a living nightmare to backlight as well. You'd have odd areas in the display where you would have a bright sqauare and a slightly darker one. This will become more visiable as the screen ages. Each square would have to be individually backlit, because the frames of the square would get in the way of a single backlight. Furthermore, this type of layout would add alot of weight to the laptop.
I also believe that failure rates would be just as high, since you would actually have to run the traces that drive the individual display components around in an odd fashon (i.e. how would you get the wires up to the center block of pixels?). It's these fragle traces that go bad and cause stuck pixels and stuck lines, not the actual element on the display itself.
Umm, no.... it came up just fine.
We've run mac servers for various things. Guess what- they all work well, and they all handle a load just fine. Just because the OS doesn't support pre-emptive multitasking, it doesn't mean that the applications can't be multithreaded. If you only have one process running on the machine, which is a well written multithreaded server application, your machine should be solid. The application can handle all preemptiveness itself between its own threads. Sure, this makes programming a little bit trickier, but it can be done. The only thing that you may end up taking a hit on are the creation and destruction of threads, and I/O if the theads are requesting I/O at the same time.
Oh, and one more thing MacOS's TCP/IP stack is multithreaded as well- something that Linux is currently lacking (not to mention a main performance roadblock).
The floppy drive in my Mac has been broken for over two years. To be honest, I don't really miss it at all. I don't really need it for anything- I back up all my files to tape (which is much more useful than anything for backups, since it holds 4GB+). Smaller files (i.e all of the documents that I create are backed up to a fileserver on the internet). Since Macs have never really had a problem with booting from a CD, installing MacOS releases has been a breeze.
:-)
Furthermore, the only thing that I use the floppy drive in my Intel box is for reloading Windows NT when it barfs (now that I have a BIOS that supports booting from the CDROM, I don't even need to do this anymore). I did use it once to install FreeBSD, but I've been downloading all of the patches over the net.
I guess the lesson here is that if you don't run windows, you don't need a floppy.
I believe that Apple already has such a card with dual ATI RAGE 128's on it for their Power Mac G3 line. Don't really have to worry about OS support there, either- both the hardware and the OS have been able to support Multiple Monitors since the Mac II was released in 1987.
-Sol
Hooray for the Mac user... and here I thought that I was the only one. :-)
No, really, my congrats go out to all of the Slashdot crew for these pages... you have given me many joyful moments of sheer procrastination. Nothing else on the web has captured my attention more than Slashdot.
-Sol
Nope. If you look back into the annuls of history, you'll see that the first 386 was released by Compaq running a version of MS-DOS that was modified to run on the 386. Now, PC-DOS that Microsoft was licensed to sell to IBM is a different story. It's development didn't always parallel the development of MS-DOS. So, while everyone else was running MS-DOS on 386en, genuine IBM hardware was running PC-DOS on 286en. I actually just read this last week while doing research for a history paper. :-)
-Sol
This is an interesting comment comming from a company that makes most of its money selling word processors and spreadsheets. These products are basically what supports MS's OS development, since OS development has a comparatively high overhead in R & D and support costs. I wonder if Gates knows this? :-) It's also interesting to note that while he says that the free-software market is only good for these applications programs, he doesn't take into account that free software hasn't made much of an inroads in these areas. Rather, it has made its most visable progress in the OS/Server market a la linux and FreeBSD.
-Sol