why did he offer to give free tools to a worldwide project whose primary focus is to reverse-engineering an entire OS?
I'm not sure you know what reverse engineering means. Linux does not need to, and never needed to, reverse engineer Unix or any operating system. Linux is an independent implementation of freely published POSIX specs. The way it works internally is entirely a new invention. Similarly, many Linux programs are designed to emulate the same core functionality as other programs (some of them non-free), but can do so without reverse engineering because the protocols and file formats are freely available, and the implementation can simply be reinvented from scratch.
There are only three areas where reverse engineering happens in Linux development: writing tools (like OpenOffice) that open proprietary file formats, writing emulators like Wine that implement the Windows API, and writing device drivers for devices that don't have full specs. However, I don't think that those account for the majority of the focus of Linux, and it's certainly not hard to make use of Linux without ever running across any of these three areas. (For example, there are lots of device drivers that did not make require any reverse engineering.)
Reverse engineering has a very particular meaning. Writing something similar to something else is not reverse engineering.
When companies are privately owned and are run by some visionary like Henry Ford who wanted to mass produce cars, or Wozniak and Jobs who wanted to mass produce computers, yes, companies are about making products. But publicly owned companies really do have only one purpose: to maximize the return to the stockholders.
Yeah, which is why even though there is some public ownership of Google, more than 50% of the voting shares are privately held, and Google specifically warns investors that their goals for the company are more important to them than short-term profitability.
Seriously, if the shareholders of Apple decided that the best thing for Apple would be to stop making computers and become an investment bank, that's what would happen. More than a few product making companies have gone that route.
I know you're exaggerating, but come on, it's not like "the shareholders of Apple" are a small group of friends somewhere. They're hundreds of thousands of individual people with a few shares each, and a few hundred mutual fund owners, and so on. Under extraordinary circumstances, with a vocal critic of Apple making national headlines for months, they might be tempted to vote on a shareholder resolution to do something like oust Steve Jobs. But the shareholders of a computer company would no sooner vote to turn it into an investment bank than the U.S. population would vote a monkey for president of the U.S.
(Most people think it's the coolest thing ever) Until they realize they can get a cars that has roughly the same overall gas mileage as your car that is not a hybrid and does not have the additional complexity and potential costs of the whole electric part for cheaper then you paid for your car.
Well, that would be true in some other countries. In the United States, unfortunately, the Prius is the most efficient vehicle sold. I wish it weren't the case...
I'd love to see more info on how clean diesel is these days. Every website I've found still says it's worse for the environment. I realize that American emissions standards are bad, although I do live in California, which has far stricter standards than the national ones.
And I agree with you that it's sad that we can't import some of the most efficient cars! My only point is that you shouldn't knock hybrid technology - it can benefit every vehicle - or the Prius - it's an amazing car and clearly more efficient than anything else in its class, for its intended audience. But knocking Americans for not building or importing efficient small cars, that's fine!
The truth is that whitepace-delimited blocks can be a source of difficult-to-find bugs.
So can non-whitespace-delimited blocks. Haven't you ever accidentally lost a } in C in the middle of a complicated function and spent a while searching for it, because the compiler points you to a completely different line with its error message?
It also makes it quite difficult to easily copy n paste code from one place to another.
Not if you use a smart editor that lets you select a block of code and increase or decrease its indentation.
While I agree wholeheartedly that python is a wonderful language to code in, I think that it lacks a sting GUI system. Yes wxPython is cross-platform, but without getting overly detailed here, it definately lacks the detail and robustness of SWT or even Swing. Until wxPython can stand up to those, I think the movement to it for more broad based use with be a bit slow. As far as apeed goes, who cares? We are not programming for 286 machines anymore!
I disagree. I think that wxPython produces far better GUIs than swing, because they're native GUIs. As a result, they're far more responsive, and they're guaranteed to look and feel right. You may think that users don't care, but they do care - they get very confused trying to use Swing GUIs, especially when menus, scroll bars, combo boxes, and such don't act exactly like they do on their native platform.
wxPython is arguably a little bit harder to learn at first. But ultimately I think it's a far more powerful tool.
The biggest surprise was how BAD the original fuel consumption on the Prius was before the modification. 40-45mpg? That's the same as a typical small car would get - and the Prius *is* a small car.
Wow, how many facts can you get wrong in such a short space? First of all, the Prius is significantly larger than a typical compact car (I have an 05 Prius, by the way) - it's closer to a midsize - it comfortably seats 5, plus it's a hatchback, giving it decent storage space. Second, check out the U.S. department of energy's page on fuel efficiency. The Prius has better mileage than EVERY other car listed except for one two-seater from Honda. Third, of course the average driver doesn't practically get the 51-60 MPG claimed. I get 45 MPG actual, just like most Prius owners. But guess what? No other car gets as good gas mileage as the EPA claims either. So either compare EPA numbers from the Prius and some other car, or compare actual mileage by the same driver under the same conditions. Otherwise it's not a fair comparison.
So why pay so much money for all this technology which amounts to a car that's LESS fuel efficient than a lot of normal petrol cars at half the price which can easily get 65+mpg?
The only thing you could be possibly talking about is diesel. Yes, it's true that diesel engines canget you greater fuel efficiency, and they're widely available in other countries, but it's a mistake to believe that it's better for the environment. Diesel exhaust contains 20-100 times more particles than gasoline exhaust. Until diesel can match or improve on the current emissions standards in the U.S., we won't be switching to diesel for ordinary passenger vehicles - that would be a huge step backwards in air quality, even if it did reduce fuel consumption by a small amount.
I also think you're confusing UK gallons with US gallons. Pick one, and then get your numbers straight.
The Prius was featured on the BBC's Top Gear program recently here in the UK and the general gist of the review as far as I remember was "why on earth are all the stupid celebrities and Americans spending a fortune buying these cars from the Japanese which are WORSE for the environment than a normal petrol car at HALF the price?"...and I don't even think the review took into account the enormous additional environmental damage and costs of disposing of the car at each end of it's lifetime (mainly due to the batteries).
Sounds pretty biased to me. The Prius has been winning "car of the year" all around the world. It costs about $3000 more than a typical car in the same class with the same features. In the next few years, as new hybrids are introduced in other classes, you'll be able to purchase a hybrid version of any class of car you want.
If you want to save the environment, buy a small/light car with a small engine (sub 1.2L) and drive it sensibly.
What is it about hybrid technology that you don't like? Don't you realize that there's no reason you couldn't have a hybrid diesel, or a hybrid small/light car, too? Hybrid technology currently costs an extra $3000 or so, but that will only go down over time. Think of the other benefits of hybrid technology: continuously-variable transmission. The ability for your engine to turn off when it's not needed, and quick-start in a fraction of a second when it's needed. Regenerative braking.
The Bad: People get totally freaked out when the engine on a hybrid car shuts down as the electric kicks in.
Yeah, kind of like IE users get freaked out the first time they use FireFox and experience browsing without pop-up ads.
I drive an '05 Prius. I love the fact that the engine cuts off so much. A small fraction of people who ride with me think it's weird at first, but they get used to it after 5 minutes. Most people think it's the coolest thing ever.
I think it says a lot about our culture and society that Google, essentially nothing more than an advanced information filter, is worth more than the manufacturers of the thing that changed transportation and human contact forever.
Yeah, except that Ford and GM make pretty mediocre cars these days! All of the innovation seems to be coming out of Japan and Germany...
Oops, it looks like I was wrong...what the article is talking about is definitely not the same as hyperthreading, but goes far beyond this! Sorry, my bad....
However, I was certainly not "trolling" when I claimed that Hyperthreading really is impressive. As a quick demonstration, I compiled the latest version of ImageMagick (6.2.0) on my dual-Xeon (3.0 GHz) with Hyperthreading on, with 1, 2, 4, and 6 threads (make -j):
make -j 1: 6:26 make -j 2: 4:09 make -j 4: 2:54 make -j 6: 2:48
Anyone have a dual-CPU box without hyperthreading to compare this to? In the past I've tried it, you don't get nearly that much of a speed boost using 4 threads instead of 2, without Hyperthreading.
As many others have already pointed out, Intel has had Hyperthreading available in Pentium 4 and Xeon CPUs for a couple of years now, which does exactly what the article is talking about.
I was skeptical at first, and read some of those articles showing that some applications could actually run slower. But then I tried it for myself, and I have to admit I've been impressed. My main box is a dual-Xeon, each with Hyperthreading turned on. It appears to Linux as if I have four independent CPUs. A few numerical tasks saturate the processors if I have just two of them running in parallel, but several tasks do fine with four or more copies. My favorite is "make -j 4" - starting four gcc processes in parallel works surprisingly well. How long does it take you to compile the Linux kernel?
Why are people here up in arms when GPL code is stolen, but not when copyrighted music or movies are illegally downloaded or swapped?
There's a huge difference between sharing some music, and profiting from somebody else's work. Almost everyone here is against massive commercial pirating - i.e. people making cheap knockoff CDs and selling them for a profit. Companies that incorporate GPL software into their own code and sell it are doing something more like that.
For the compensetory damages, a judge would likely just force Cherry to release all source code changes and enhancements.
There's no reason a judge would have to force them to change the license on their own copyrighted code. The judge could just stop them from distributing Cherry and have them pay monetary damages.
I like the idea of Podcasting, but it doesn't seem to be automatic enough yet.
Is there any Podcasting software (ideally for Mac OS X) that will automatically download new podcasts, transfer them to iTunes with special tags of my choosing (so that I can filter them and put them in a special playlist), and then automatically tell iTunes to initiate an iPod sync? Without those features, I'm not totally sold on Podcasting...
I recommended that one package should be marked with an "O" for "Spirit" and the other with an "S" for "Opportunity". I even donated the Sharpie marker and masking tape for this purpose.
I know you were joking, but keep in mind that the names "Spirit" and "Opportunity" were chosen very late into the mission, as the result of a contest. Within JPL, the probes were known as MER-A and MER-B, and the rovers were known as MER-2 and MER-1. To make things even more confusing, for various sensible reasons they ended up putting MER-2 inside MER-A, and MER-1 inside MER-B, even though that made things more confusing.
So, considering that they were otherwise identical, can't you see how easy it would have been to get otherwise identical parts mixed up...was it supposed to go in MER-B? Or MER-2? I just remember it was the second one of something...
I guess not that many of us switch between totally different XCode projects that frequently, relative to other types of task-switching.
Have you considered multiple users + fast user switching? Kind of a kludge, but it might work, depending on what you do.
Alternatively, Virtual Desktop (from CodeTek) is a great shareware solution for this. You can make some windows "sticky", they'll always be on your screen, but others will only be associated with one desktop.
Seeing how many mac users hook up PC mice to their Macs now I don't see why Apple can't just start shipping Macs with two-button mice.
Actually, it's a better deal than you think: you can sell your Apple mouse on eBay, use the money to buy a quite-decent Logitech mouse with two buttons plus scrollwheel, and have money left over!
An overrated.dot-com is once again ruling the roost. So let's see, given that it took, on average about, say, four and a half years for the other dot coms to collapse after their IPO, that puts google on course for bankruptcy in about 2007?
There are so many differences between Google and 99% of the dot coms that IPO'd, I'm not even sure where to start.
1. Google was already profitable before the IPO - they've been profitable since 2001, in fact. 2. Google did not give away control of their company to investors - public investors only hold 10% of the company, and the founders still fully control it. 3. Even if their share price collapses (it's most likely overvalued, but I'm not sure by how much), there's no reason the company has to collapse. A surprising number of "failed" dot-coms are still around and doing okay, even with tiny share prices. Google is in a much better situation than almost all of them were, in terms of long-term profitability and a sustainable business plan.
In order to implement many complex algorithms on x86, you need to use a motley combination of MMX and SSE. There are many flaws in both; lots of very useful instructions are missing, and MMX can't be used in conjunction with non-SIMD floating-point operations without a huge expensive context switch. One of the biggest flaws in MMX/SSE that I found was the lack of instructions to shuffle data around within a (8-byte or 16-byte) register. The only advantage on a modern x86 CPU is SSE2, which is the only SIMD unit with double-precision floats. But you can only work with two doubles at a time, so the speedup is not that great.
AltiVec, on the other hand, included both floats and integers right from the start, with no penalty for switching between them, and it includes a very detailed and useful set of instructions, including an awesome shuffle instruction. My personal experience, coding for both, is that AltiVec is about twice as useful as MMX/SSE/SSE2 combined.
Also, note that in Mac OS X, many of the standard libraries and system calls are already AltiVec-optimized for you, and Apple also provides a great Vector library with lots of common DSP operations.
The story (probably exagerrated) is probably referring to one of the early performances of music composed by the computer program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence written by David Cope. Click the links for more info; it's a great starting point if you're interested in computer composition.
Nonsense. Give Dell or HP a little time and motivation, and I'm sure they could pull it off. Hell, maybe IBM has a patent rotting in a drawer somewhere to help this kind of thing.
You've got to be kidding. IBM just sold its PC hardware division. Dell doesn't make motherboards, they just put things together - and there aren't ANY shipping motherboards that fit into a Mac mini case...the only one found in this article was a pre-release unit, and even with that one, there was no room for a CD-ROM drive of any type.
I'm sure there will eventually be an equivalent PC this size, but the fact is that it's impossible with any existing technology, and Apple has a huge head start. It will be at least a year before PCs catch up in this particular niche market, and Apple will continue to innovate...
at the same clock speed, what does the G5 offer over the G4?
A much faster system bus. The 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 has a 1 GHz system bus. The 1.8 GHz iMac G5 has a 600 MHz bus. Contrast this with the eMac G4 or PowerBook G4, both of which have a 167 MHz system bus. The iBook G4 has only a 133 MHz bus!
The system bus is what moves data from memory to the processor and back. Lots of Mac applications are bus-limited, rather than processor-limited. The G4 is not designed to handle a fast bus, and the G5 is. Even a 333 MHz bus on a PowerBook G5 would be a dramatic improvement in overall speed for many applications, even for the same clock speed as the G4.
Oh, by the way, the fastest PC only has a 533 MHz bus; most have only 400 MHz or less (though all have more than 167 MHz). That's one reason why the Power Mac G5 overall is just as fast, if not faster, than many PCs with faster processors.
A DIY shuttle-like PC would crush the mac mini in ever respect.
Except size (the Mac Mini is actually significantly smaller than mini-ITX, believe it or not, and WAY smaller than a Shuttle), noise level (the Mac Mini is practically silent), and video/3D performance (the Mac Mini has a respectable 3D graphics card with its own video RAM; any Shuttle that's anywhere close to the Mac Mini's price range uses onboard video).
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why did he offer to give free tools to a worldwide project whose primary focus is to reverse-engineering an entire OS?
I'm not sure you know what reverse engineering means. Linux does not need to, and never needed to, reverse engineer Unix or any operating system. Linux is an independent implementation of freely published POSIX specs. The way it works internally is entirely a new invention. Similarly, many Linux programs are designed to emulate the same core functionality as other programs (some of them non-free), but can do so without reverse engineering because the protocols and file formats are freely available, and the implementation can simply be reinvented from scratch.
There are only three areas where reverse engineering happens in Linux development: writing tools (like OpenOffice) that open proprietary file formats, writing emulators like Wine that implement the Windows API, and writing device drivers for devices that don't have full specs. However, I don't think that those account for the majority of the focus of Linux, and it's certainly not hard to make use of Linux without ever running across any of these three areas. (For example, there are lots of device drivers that did not make require any reverse engineering.)
Reverse engineering has a very particular meaning. Writing something similar to something else is not reverse engineering.
When companies are privately owned and are run by some visionary like Henry Ford who wanted to mass produce cars, or Wozniak and Jobs who wanted to mass produce computers, yes, companies are about making products. But publicly owned companies really do have only one purpose: to maximize the return to the stockholders.
Yeah, which is why even though there is some public ownership of Google, more than 50% of the voting shares are privately held, and Google specifically warns investors that their goals for the company are more important to them than short-term profitability.
Seriously, if the shareholders of Apple decided that the best thing for Apple would be to stop making computers and become an investment bank, that's what would happen. More than a few product making companies have gone that route.
I know you're exaggerating, but come on, it's not like "the shareholders of Apple" are a small group of friends somewhere. They're hundreds of thousands of individual people with a few shares each, and a few hundred mutual fund owners, and so on. Under extraordinary circumstances, with a vocal critic of Apple making national headlines for months, they might be tempted to vote on a shareholder resolution to do something like oust Steve Jobs. But the shareholders of a computer company would no sooner vote to turn it into an investment bank than the U.S. population would vote a monkey for president of the U.S.
(Most people think it's the coolest thing ever) Until they realize they can get a cars that has roughly the same overall gas mileage as your car that is not a hybrid and does not have the additional complexity and potential costs of the whole electric part for cheaper then you paid for your car.
Well, that would be true in some other countries. In the United States, unfortunately, the Prius is the most efficient vehicle sold. I wish it weren't the case...
I'd love to see more info on how clean diesel is these days. Every website I've found still says it's worse for the environment. I realize that American emissions standards are bad, although I do live in California, which has far stricter standards than the national ones.
And I agree with you that it's sad that we can't import some of the most efficient cars! My only point is that you shouldn't knock hybrid technology - it can benefit every vehicle - or the Prius - it's an amazing car and clearly more efficient than anything else in its class, for its intended audience. But knocking Americans for not building or importing efficient small cars, that's fine!
The truth is that whitepace-delimited blocks can be a source of difficult-to-find bugs.
So can non-whitespace-delimited blocks. Haven't you ever accidentally lost a } in C in the middle of a complicated function and spent a while searching for it, because the compiler points you to a completely different line with its error message?
It also makes it quite difficult to easily copy n paste code from one place to another.
Not if you use a smart editor that lets you select a block of code and increase or decrease its indentation.
While I agree wholeheartedly that python is a wonderful language to code in, I think that it lacks a sting GUI system. Yes wxPython is cross-platform, but without getting overly detailed here, it definately lacks the detail and robustness of SWT or even Swing. Until wxPython can stand up to those, I think the movement to it for more broad based use with be a bit slow. As far as apeed goes, who cares? We are not programming for 286 machines anymore!
I disagree. I think that wxPython produces far better GUIs than swing, because they're native GUIs. As a result, they're far more responsive, and they're guaranteed to look and feel right. You may think that users don't care, but they do care - they get very confused trying to use Swing GUIs, especially when menus, scroll bars, combo boxes, and such don't act exactly like they do on their native platform.
wxPython is arguably a little bit harder to learn at first. But ultimately I think it's a far more powerful tool.
The biggest surprise was how BAD the original fuel consumption on the Prius was before the modification. 40-45mpg? That's the same as a typical small car would get - and the Prius *is* a small car.
..and I don't even think the review took into account the enormous additional environmental damage and costs of disposing of the car at each end of it's lifetime (mainly due to the batteries).
Wow, how many facts can you get wrong in such a short space? First of all, the Prius is significantly larger than a typical compact car (I have an 05 Prius, by the way) - it's closer to a midsize - it comfortably seats 5, plus it's a hatchback, giving it decent storage space. Second, check out the U.S. department of energy's page on fuel efficiency. The Prius has better mileage than EVERY other car listed except for one two-seater from Honda. Third, of course the average driver doesn't practically get the 51-60 MPG claimed. I get 45 MPG actual, just like most Prius owners. But guess what? No other car gets as good gas mileage as the EPA claims either. So either compare EPA numbers from the Prius and some other car, or compare actual mileage by the same driver under the same conditions. Otherwise it's not a fair comparison.
So why pay so much money for all this technology which amounts to a car that's LESS fuel efficient than a lot of normal petrol cars at half the price which can easily get 65+mpg?
The only thing you could be possibly talking about is diesel. Yes, it's true that diesel engines canget you greater fuel efficiency, and they're widely available in other countries, but it's a mistake to believe that it's better for the environment. Diesel exhaust contains 20-100 times more particles than gasoline exhaust. Until diesel can match or improve on the current emissions standards in the U.S., we won't be switching to diesel for ordinary passenger vehicles - that would be a huge step backwards in air quality, even if it did reduce fuel consumption by a small amount.
I also think you're confusing UK gallons with US gallons. Pick one, and then get your numbers straight.
The Prius was featured on the BBC's Top Gear program recently here in the UK and the general gist of the review as far as I remember was "why on earth are all the stupid celebrities and Americans spending a fortune buying these cars from the Japanese which are WORSE for the environment than a normal petrol car at HALF the price?".
Sounds pretty biased to me. The Prius has been winning "car of the year" all around the world. It costs about $3000 more than a typical car in the same class with the same features. In the next few years, as new hybrids are introduced in other classes, you'll be able to purchase a hybrid version of any class of car you want.
If you want to save the environment, buy a small/light car with a small engine (sub 1.2L) and drive it sensibly.
What is it about hybrid technology that you don't like? Don't you realize that there's no reason you couldn't have a hybrid diesel, or a hybrid small/light car, too? Hybrid technology currently costs an extra $3000 or so, but that will only go down over time. Think of the other benefits of hybrid technology: continuously-variable transmission. The ability for your engine to turn off when it's not needed, and quick-start in a fraction of a second when it's needed. Regenerative braking.
The Bad: People get totally freaked out when the engine on a hybrid car shuts down as the electric kicks in.
Yeah, kind of like IE users get freaked out the first time they use FireFox and experience browsing without pop-up ads.
I drive an '05 Prius. I love the fact that the engine cuts off so much. A small fraction of people who ride with me think it's weird at first, but they get used to it after 5 minutes. Most people think it's the coolest thing ever.
If you read up on Jack, you'll discover he's far worse than just a maker of poor-quality products...he's actually a liar and con artist!
I think it says a lot about our culture and society that Google, essentially nothing more than an advanced information filter, is worth more than the manufacturers of the thing that changed transportation and human contact forever.
Yeah, except that Ford and GM make pretty mediocre cars these days! All of the innovation seems to be coming out of Japan and Germany...
You know what would cut down the datagram size more? Smaller tag names.
Not really, because any protocols that exchange large amounts of XML data should be compressing the data anyway, right?
Oops, it looks like I was wrong...what the article is talking about is definitely not the same as hyperthreading, but goes far beyond this! Sorry, my bad....
However, I was certainly not "trolling" when I claimed that Hyperthreading really is impressive. As a quick demonstration, I compiled the latest version of ImageMagick (6.2.0) on my dual-Xeon (3.0 GHz) with Hyperthreading on, with 1, 2, 4, and 6 threads (make -j):
make -j 1: 6:26
make -j 2: 4:09
make -j 4: 2:54
make -j 6: 2:48
Anyone have a dual-CPU box without hyperthreading to compare this to? In the past I've tried it, you don't get nearly that much of a speed boost using 4 threads instead of 2, without Hyperthreading.
As many others have already pointed out, Intel has had Hyperthreading available in Pentium 4 and Xeon CPUs for a couple of years now, which does exactly what the article is talking about.
I was skeptical at first, and read some of those articles showing that some applications could actually run slower. But then I tried it for myself, and I have to admit I've been impressed. My main box is a dual-Xeon, each with Hyperthreading turned on. It appears to Linux as if I have four independent CPUs. A few numerical tasks saturate the processors if I have just two of them running in parallel, but several tasks do fine with four or more copies. My favorite is "make -j 4" - starting four gcc processes in parallel works surprisingly well. How long does it take you to compile the Linux kernel?
Why are people here up in arms when GPL code is stolen, but not when copyrighted music or movies are illegally downloaded or swapped?
There's a huge difference between sharing some music, and profiting from somebody else's work. Almost everyone here is against massive commercial pirating - i.e. people making cheap knockoff CDs and selling them for a profit. Companies that incorporate GPL software into their own code and sell it are doing something more like that.
For the compensetory damages, a judge would likely just force Cherry to release all source code changes and enhancements.
There's no reason a judge would have to force them to change the license on their own copyrighted code. The judge could just stop them from distributing Cherry and have them pay monetary damages.
I like the idea of Podcasting, but it doesn't seem to be automatic enough yet.
Is there any Podcasting software (ideally for Mac OS X) that will automatically download new podcasts, transfer them to iTunes with special tags of my choosing (so that I can filter them and put them in a special playlist), and then automatically tell iTunes to initiate an iPod sync? Without those features, I'm not totally sold on Podcasting...
I recommended that one package should be marked with an "O" for "Spirit" and the other with an "S" for "Opportunity". I even donated the Sharpie marker and masking tape for this purpose.
I know you were joking, but keep in mind that the names "Spirit" and "Opportunity" were chosen very late into the mission, as the result of a contest. Within JPL, the probes were known as MER-A and MER-B, and the rovers were known as MER-2 and MER-1. To make things even more confusing, for various sensible reasons they ended up putting MER-2 inside MER-A, and MER-1 inside MER-B, even though that made things more confusing.
So, considering that they were otherwise identical, can't you see how easy it would have been to get otherwise identical parts mixed up...was it supposed to go in MER-B? Or MER-2? I just remember it was the second one of something...
I guess not that many of us switch between totally different XCode projects that frequently, relative to other types of task-switching.
Have you considered multiple users + fast user switching? Kind of a kludge, but it might work, depending on what you do.
Alternatively, Virtual Desktop (from CodeTek) is a great shareware solution for this. You can make some windows "sticky", they'll always be on your screen, but others will only be associated with one desktop.
Seeing how many mac users hook up PC mice to their Macs now I don't see why Apple can't just start shipping Macs with two-button mice.
Actually, it's a better deal than you think: you can sell your Apple mouse on eBay, use the money to buy a quite-decent Logitech mouse with two buttons plus scrollwheel, and have money left over!
An overrated .dot-com is once again ruling the roost. So let's see, given that it took, on average about, say, four and a half years for the other dot coms to collapse after their IPO, that puts google on course for bankruptcy in about 2007?
There are so many differences between Google and 99% of the dot coms that IPO'd, I'm not even sure where to start.
1. Google was already profitable before the IPO - they've been profitable since 2001, in fact.
2. Google did not give away control of their company to investors - public investors only hold 10% of the company, and the founders still fully control it.
3. Even if their share price collapses (it's most likely overvalued, but I'm not sure by how much), there's no reason the company has to collapse. A surprising number of "failed" dot-coms are still around and doing okay, even with tiny share prices. Google is in a much better situation than almost all of them were, in terms of long-term profitability and a sustainable business plan.
Quick summary:
MMX (x86): 8-byte registers, only integer operations
SSE (x86): 16-byte registers, single-precision float ops
AltiVec (PPC): 16-byte registers, integer and single-precision float ops
SSE2 (x86): 16-byte registers, double-precision float ops
In order to implement many complex algorithms on x86, you need to use a motley combination of MMX and SSE. There are many flaws in both; lots of very useful instructions are missing, and MMX can't be used in conjunction with non-SIMD floating-point operations without a huge expensive context switch. One of the biggest flaws in MMX/SSE that I found was the lack of instructions to shuffle data around within a (8-byte or 16-byte) register. The only advantage on a modern x86 CPU is SSE2, which is the only SIMD unit with double-precision floats. But you can only work with two doubles at a time, so the speedup is not that great.
AltiVec, on the other hand, included both floats and integers right from the start, with no penalty for switching between them, and it includes a very detailed and useful set of instructions, including an awesome shuffle instruction. My personal experience, coding for both, is that AltiVec is about twice as useful as MMX/SSE/SSE2 combined.
Also, note that in Mac OS X, many of the standard libraries and system calls are already AltiVec-optimized for you, and Apple also provides a great Vector library with lots of common DSP operations.
The story (probably exagerrated) is probably referring to one of the early performances of music composed by the computer program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence written by David Cope. Click the links for more info; it's a great starting point if you're interested in computer composition.
Nonsense. Give Dell or HP a little time and motivation, and I'm sure they could pull it off. Hell, maybe IBM has a patent rotting in a drawer somewhere to help this kind of thing.
You've got to be kidding. IBM just sold its PC hardware division. Dell doesn't make motherboards, they just put things together - and there aren't ANY shipping motherboards that fit into a Mac mini case...the only one found in this article was a pre-release unit, and even with that one, there was no room for a CD-ROM drive of any type.
I'm sure there will eventually be an equivalent PC this size, but the fact is that it's impossible with any existing technology, and Apple has a huge head start. It will be at least a year before PCs catch up in this particular niche market, and Apple will continue to innovate...
at the same clock speed, what does the G5 offer over the G4?
A much faster system bus. The 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 has a 1 GHz system bus. The 1.8 GHz iMac G5 has a 600 MHz bus. Contrast this with the eMac G4 or PowerBook G4, both of which have a 167 MHz system bus. The iBook G4 has only a 133 MHz bus!
The system bus is what moves data from memory to the processor and back. Lots of Mac applications are bus-limited, rather than processor-limited. The G4 is not designed to handle a fast bus, and the G5 is. Even a 333 MHz bus on a PowerBook G5 would be a dramatic improvement in overall speed for many applications, even for the same clock speed as the G4.
Oh, by the way, the fastest PC only has a 533 MHz bus; most have only 400 MHz or less (though all have more than 167 MHz). That's one reason why the Power Mac G5 overall is just as fast, if not faster, than many PCs with faster processors.
A DIY shuttle-like PC would crush the mac mini in ever respect.
Except size (the Mac Mini is actually significantly smaller than mini-ITX, believe it or not, and WAY smaller than a Shuttle), noise level (the Mac Mini is practically silent), and video/3D performance (the Mac Mini has a respectable 3D graphics card with its own video RAM; any Shuttle that's anywhere close to the Mac Mini's price range uses onboard video).