I've known about the G4 for a year...I've been saving my money for that long.
The facts are this: The P3 is a souped-up pentium pro. It's a 4 year old core, whose insides are based on a 20 year old concept. There is RISC stuff on the outside. X86 is a crunchy outside with a chewy center...the G4 is crunchy all the way through.
Not only is the G4 made with copper, but the core is newer, runs cooler, and just plain has more registers to work with. KNI/MMX and 3dNow are ok SIMD implementations which are hobbled by the x86's lack of enough registers. AltiVec has lots of registers, and is 128 bits wide.
Regardless of the OS you run on it; and regardless of how fast it is compared to other processors, it is better hardware based on newer concepts. I would take a G4 over an x86 right now simply because it isn't an implementation who's core growth strategy is to work around the limits of a 2 decade old concept.
I don't care what you think of Apple or the MacOS, the G4 is simply superoir CPU tecnology compared to the kluge that is known as the modern x86.
sounds like my powermac 6500. Thing shipped with and Avid card, fm/tv tuner, remote contol, built in subwoofer and a volume control on the front. This was a couple of years ago.
The problem with this kind of "all in one" consumer machine is they're pretty much all "jack of all trades, master of none". If you actually want to get done what you bought the computer to do, you're going to need a machine designed to do it.
in other words...I really like my swiss army knife, but I'm not coing to cut a path through the jungle with it...I'll use a machete.
I always imagined an application or OS which would keep an eye (top) on which processes took the most time/resources, spawn a couple of mutated copies to run alongside the original during idle time, and keep the version that was most efficient. This way, the code would self-optimize. Care would have to be taken to make sure the apps produced the same result when given identicle information, but after we're sure that's the case...let's have a go at it.
It would be neat to see if we could set up a version control network that would submit new strains of code up the tree for consideration...so that everybody's machine helps optimize the app in the background.
Even if this is insanely unfeasable...it still is an interesting thought
I don't think the technical merits of distros will falter or stray much...the distros are getting most of their software via GPL. What I'm worried about is distro's slinging mud at each other in the media. Gates proved that it doesn't matter how good your product is as long as you make your market THINK it's the best (or only) way to go. If we have n commercial linux companies bad mouthing the other guy's product...when it's all linux anyway, then are they all bad mouthing linux in the eyes of the otherwise clueless newbie?
"don't use distribution X...they're still using kernel x.x.x" what does this say about the kernel in general in the public's eye?
yeah..kinda like saying track stars are running shoe addicts because they wear running shoes. Duh. Being a construction worker does NOT make you a hammer addict.
The Layer I,II and III codecs for MPEG are ok. However, the file format that's been adopted as MPEG-4 has been out for over a year, and has a wider range of audio codecs available. You can even embed and mp2 or 3 inside it, in addition to video, text, URL tracks, sprites, VR, MIDI, Flash and much more.
If you haven't figured it out already, I'm talking about quicktime.
Artillery unit A (our side) puts some rounds down range. The enemy (battery b) uses radar to find out where the rounds came from, and fires right back at A. At this point, A better pack up the LAN and guns and run or they die. Once they get some place safe, they have to put the LAN back together. Sometimes this can take hours, and the people who are tasked with doing that are too busy trying to fire back to remember what ifconfig does. Having Jini available as your first choice could cut this time dramatically.
Even if JINI only works.01% of the time, that can still save thousands of lives.
If there is firewire support somewhere (most likely LinuxPPC because they wrote usb stuff for the new mac HW, and firewire shipped on those boxes too) then there are lots of options. Panasonic makes some good DVCpro decks that can take both DVCpro tapes (like in professional DV cams) or MiniDV (prosumer and consumer level DV). These are firewire decks, and you can transfer the video to your RAID as files over a network (400Mbps) with no loss of quality or dropped frames. Lots of DV cams support FireWire too.
I don't know about support for controlling the decks in firewire, but I know they can be triggered via rs-232 with the grass valley protocols very reliably (I work at a cable station, and that arrangement has never failed me for playback)
Also, you can play analog video from an analog source into the video ins on the DVCpro decks, and it'll do the digitizing for you, without the need for a card or anything.
windowmaker compiles just fine on my powermac 6500. I'm running MkLinux DR3, so we're talking about the linux kernel sitting on top of MACH 3.0. Many Red Hat utils are standard with this release too (netcfg for one). I'd say the biggest reasons to use PPC for linux are small voltage requirements, Copper process (some people are still using aluminum), RISC (not just a crunchy RISC outside and a chewy CISC x86 center), 32 registers vs 8 (better SIMD down the road), and a smaller sized processor that brings down price.
Or you can still use Intel. If LinuxPPC is as close to a linux distro as you need, I don't see any reason NOT to be using a PPC, especially Since Apple is on the brink of releasing G4 boxes.
over the past couple of months this german ct magazine has reported a bunch of things. Of it all, and looking at the consensus of the/. threads it has spawned, I believe that this ct magazine has a tendency to exagerate to the extent of fallacy. Yes, the mac os x cgi article had some merit, but it was not the beast they made it out to be. The same sort of thing happens in all their articles that make their way to this site. I think we need to take anything they say with a grain of salt, if not mocking laughter
Just a friendly reminder. MTV got to be the 500 pound gorilla of the music industry by making exclusivity pacts with artists and labels. If you wanted to see your favorite band's video, it was ONLY on MTV. Up until recently, if you wanted to market your music to 12-24 year olds, you had to be on MTV. Period if you are looking for any kind of exposure or commercial success.
They may try the same thing here. Exclusive web streams of content. Exclusive rights to distribute online. This is their growth strategy and it works real well.
The weak link in MP3's is that you have to know an artist exists before you can search for their content. If MTV makes it so that to hear your favorite music, you HAVE to go to their site first, then maybe people are more likely to go there when they want music in general. If this is the case, then they control who gets online mega-exposure. Every band can make a website, but only a heavy like MTV can make people come.
In other words...the indie online advantage is being threatened.
MTV wants to be the microsoft of music. Either you do it their way, or not at all.
It is my understanding that the FBI operates within the borders of the US and its territories, while the CIA conducts operations outside those borders. This line is clearly defined.
How is it that EXPORTING encryption can make the FBI's job harder if it's scope isn't supposed to expand beyond our borders? Am I wrong about the previous distinction, or is the FBI illegally conducting operations abroad?
Even in cases where we have American soil somewhere else (embassies), the US Marines or State Dept. take care of securtity. The FBI would be wasting their time and probably breaking any number of laws by monitoring the communications of foriegn nationals in this situation.
This seems more like an NSA thing to me than something the FBI would want. US citizens have strong crypto. The FBI has no legal business abroad (I think...let me know if I'm wrong). Why do they even care about Exports??
The fact is that the FBI can't STOP terrorist acts. You can speak in code on a pay phone and they wouldn't even think to listen in until you did something terrible. Why would any net-savvy international terrorist use email anyway, when they know they'll be leaving copies all over the net on the way to the destination. And some idiot on the other end could leave the plaintext on his drive. An anonymous phone call to some other anonymous person leaves no copies. RE...probably more secure anyway (if you talk in code or something...there always IS echelon) The reasonable explanation for weak crypto is to gather evidence after the fact. Export controls DON'T save lives, they just make for craftier terrorists.
International terrorists who commit acts of terror within the US are going to buy crypto here legally, and give it to their friends abroad regardless of the law.
It seems that the FBI likes to be able to imprision anyone who wants to send a secure message to mom back in the old country about dad's surprise birthday party. So if we can't find the REAL perpetrators of a terrorist act, they still get to arrest and charge any immigrant with a net connection and blame him. This way, Jan, Lou and the Prez (whoever's in office at the time) still get to look good on the TV news.
Meanwhile...we're losing lots of money in international markets.
anyway...tell me if I said something we all don't know already.
Hmmmmmm. seems like you could go way cheap if you didn't mind doing some soldering and whatnot. Modulate the outs/ins on cat5 so that you could hook up both modualted signals (10baseT, 4 for 100) to cheap walkie talkies. Splice the the wires in the cable and hook them up to a squelch, so that the "talk" button is pushed when a packet goes out (you'll probably lose the first packet, but tcp/ip should send it again) and releaed when not sending. One tranciever recieves, one sends, have this setup on each device.
I am by no means an electrical/radio engineer, but it seems to me that this would be a cool hack if somebody pulled it off.
As you all may remember from high school psychology, the brain has a couple of input buffers (sensory register and short term memory)until the data is encoded for long term memory. There are 2 ways of doing this. Accomidation and assimilation. The first time you are made aware of something, you develop a cognitive model of it (ie...class car has properties 4 wheels, steering wheel...etc). That is accommidation. If you were to see another car, you remember the differences from the original model. This is assimilation. So instead of literally remembering eveything, like a hard drive, as the sophistication of your cognitive models increases, so does your storage capacity. In other words...the more you know, the greater your ability to store data. Nature is full of neat little feedback loops like this. It's called chaos, and I think it has worked rahter well in this instance. With a finite amount of neurons, we've created potentially infinite storage. If we modeled filesystems and file formats like this, it would be a whole lot more efficient to store data, and could possibly add protection against data loss.
So you really expect people to be able to use all of the power of Unix and the Unix shells without having to go through the same learning curve?
No. This will be the first time mainstream consumers have a Unix-style OS under the hood that they have access to; As opposed to Win9x and current MacOS, where novice users explore and become power users on that platform down the road. If consumers have OS X, then any exploration (inevitable with kids) they do under the hood teaches them the basics of Unix. Thus, these people are more likely to embrace linux, because it won't be too much new to them. Part of expanding into a consumer market is instilling consumer confidence. OS X consumer will do that for linux to some degree. WM's are and always have been a holy war. As yet, I have seen two trends in linux GUI. Either it's fast and not full featured, or it has what I need, but is slow and takes tons of ram. The only two GUI's I've worked with that are fast and small enough to run on non-unix specific hardware (x86 and PPC), while still allowing the user to navigate and work within the filesystem without wanting to hurl the CPU out the window are Win32, MacOS and Be. I haven't used os/2. I use WindowMaker on my MkLinux box, but I've used others. I find Linux GUI's to be feature incomplete, slow, and resource greedy. I've seen demos of Quartz (OS X's imaging model and and GUI server) and it is fast and intuitive, while still giving you full access (user optional) to the BSD layer. I don't know how much ram it takes, but I do know that I shouldn't have to add another 32 megs of ram to my system if I want to run a decent GUI. I could use that extra ram to do something productive.
But a computer is not a hammer; a computer is an extremely powerful and general-purpose tool. It's capable of doing a great many things, and this requires a great deal of configurability.
Good point. What I'm trying to say is that 5% of what you do on a system should be config, 95% should be the work you got the machine for in the first place. Right now, I don't see ANY OS that meets that criteria, but outside of the server realm linux is at the way back of the pack. Where is system level color matching??? Guess I'll have to code that myself. Where's SMPTE timecode, or any multi-codec video standard for that matter. Guess I'll have to port over quicktime and the associated codecs myself too. I can go on for hours. The point is that right now, if I want to create any kind of multimedia art that doesn't suck on linux, I've got a lot of coding to do. If I do it on OS X, MacOS, NT worstation, I get to focus on my work, and I can use my coding talent on the project I'm working on, rather than reinventing the wheel. I've rewritten line drawing functions enough to know I don't want to walk down that road again if I don't have too
Right now, Linux is my server OS of choice. Hopefully, with the help of the Open Source Community, it will mature into something everybody can use (the versitile tool you talk about). Right now, it isn't there. Not even close.
I'm getting tired of ranting here. I replied to this thread to counterattack the premises of some untoward generalizations. I believe I've done that, but am probaly starting to do what I set out to stop here, so this is all for now.
that's nice. I remember reading an osopinion piece yesterday about how different OS's have their respective strenghts and weaknesses. I'll stay open minded about your attack, if you stay open minded about a few points.
1. I'll be willing to bet real money that the last time you coded, you wrote a bug. You probably fixed it too. That's just the way that song goes.
2. If you like Unix/Linux so much, you should be happy that Apple saw the light. When was the last time MS open sourced something (or did something close). Did you know the Yellow Box compiler borrows a lot of code from GCC. There are more things OS X and Linux have in common than set them apart.
3. If you don't like apple's hardware, then don't use it. Port darwin to one of the PPCP boards motorola still makes. The G4 has the only SIMD implementation that doesn't suck, and has the registers to use it. I don't know if you are familiar with SIMD(MMX/KNI/3DNow/AltiVec), but it can greatly speed up string handling by cramming multiple instances of that 8 bit data type into the whole space of the machine word. So if you had a 64 bit processor, you can handle 8 characters during one clock cycle. If you could speed up string handling by 8x, then how much faster is dynamic HTML generation??? The API's are in C, as opposed to assembler in some x86 implementations. BTW...hasn't it been 4 years since intel shipped a NEW core. Talk about mediocrity. And they only have what, 8 registers available for SIMD, as opposed to PPC's 32. Gimme a break, they're still using aluminum in their IC's. My guess is for real perfomance next year, run linuxPPC on a pair of multiple-core g4's (multiple cores per CPU means faster SMP, because they are communicating on the same durned piece of silicon/COPPER). Lots of bang for the buck.
4. For 90% of the users on the planet, Linux is unusable, and the learning curve required to FIND SOFTWARE that does what you need to do is bad enough to keep poeple away. OS X consumer will be a Unix style OS with a UI that isn't intimidating, and will probably be the mose useable and intuitive WM around. THIS OS WILL SHOW PEOPLE WHAT'S SO COOL ABOUT LINUX. I predict that OS X consumer will probably be the catalyst that accellerates Linux's acceptence in the consumer market.
5. Computers are tools. You shouldn't HAVE to think about how a hammer works, and it should NEVER get in the way of going about hammering nails. Right now, I spend more time tinkering with the System in Linux than getting any work done (for non-server tasks, it's an awesome server OS, and I reccomend it highly). Until linux gets out of my way and lets me work, I will continue to use MacOS and Be to develop multimedia content.
anyway...gotta go to work...DVCpro camera is calling me...
Sizzler has a REALLY bad commercial. There are Luke and Han type-characters eating at sizzler. During the chatter about Sizzler, they are using all kinds of bad star wars puns. "Q:How do you eat it? A:Use the fork" is one of the worst. The acting sucks too
Dreamwaever is probably one of the only visual editors that doesn't suck entirely. It also ships with a great text editor (BBEdit on mac, HomeSite on windows). The difference in text editors here is not an issue, because they are both just working with text files.
Most other visual editors put all kinds of crap in your code, or embed tons of spacer gif's all over the place, making for large files that choke slow connections. Using DW with a text editor gives you powerful visual tools and real-time control over your code.
Hey...the thing to focus on here is that apple is TRYING to support open source. If there are issues we'd like resoved in their license, we should help them draft a new version, rather than just bitch about it. That's what we're about, isn't it...helping each other???
Slashdot Mirror
I've known about the G4 for a year...I've been saving my money for that long.
The facts are this: The P3 is a souped-up pentium pro. It's a 4 year old core, whose insides are based on a 20 year old concept. There is RISC stuff on the outside. X86 is a crunchy outside with a chewy center...the G4 is crunchy all the way through.
Not only is the G4 made with copper, but the core is newer, runs cooler, and just plain has more registers to work with. KNI/MMX and 3dNow are ok SIMD implementations which are hobbled by the x86's lack of enough registers. AltiVec has lots of registers, and is 128 bits wide.
Regardless of the OS you run on it; and regardless of how fast it is compared to other processors, it is better hardware based on newer concepts. I would take a G4 over an x86 right now simply because it isn't an implementation who's core growth strategy is to work around the limits of a 2 decade old concept.
I don't care what you think of Apple or the MacOS, the G4 is simply superoir CPU tecnology compared to the kluge that is known as the modern x86.
dan
hmmmmm...
Win32 doesn't run on merced...but linux does.
-SMACK-
Hotmail gets cracked
-POW-
Sun grabs stardivision, makes staroffice free
-SNAP-
G4 macs may be announced today (mmmmmmm...linuxppc)
-BLAMMO-
# #
\____/ !!!!
I wait a good 20 seconds for the focalink ad server
holy crap...mac os X's native document format is PDF!!
holy crap!!
sounds like my powermac 6500. Thing shipped with and Avid card, fm/tv tuner, remote contol, built in subwoofer and a volume control on the front. This was a couple of years ago.
The problem with this kind of "all in one" consumer machine is they're pretty much all "jack of all trades, master of none". If you actually want to get done what you bought the computer to do, you're going to need a machine designed to do it.
in other words...I really like my swiss army knife, but I'm not coing to cut a path through the jungle with it...I'll use a machete.
dan
I always imagined an application or OS which would keep an eye (top) on which processes took the most time/resources, spawn a couple of mutated copies to run alongside the original during idle time, and keep the version that was most efficient. This way, the code would self-optimize. Care would have to be taken to make sure the apps produced the same result when given identicle information, but after we're sure that's the case...let's have a go at it.
It would be neat to see if we could set up a version control network that would submit new strains of code up the tree for consideration...so that everybody's machine helps optimize the app in the background.
Even if this is insanely unfeasable...it still is an interesting thought
I don't think the technical merits of distros will falter or stray much...the distros are getting most of their software via GPL. What I'm worried about is distro's slinging mud at each other in the media. Gates proved that it doesn't matter how good your product is as long as you make your market THINK it's the best (or only) way to go. If we have n commercial linux companies bad mouthing the other guy's product...when it's all linux anyway, then are they all bad mouthing linux in the eyes of the otherwise clueless newbie?
"don't use distribution X...they're still using kernel x.x.x" what does this say about the kernel in general in the public's eye?
yeah..kinda like saying track stars are running shoe addicts because they wear running shoes. Duh. Being a construction worker does NOT make you a hammer addict.
The Layer I,II and III codecs for MPEG are ok. However, the file format that's been adopted as MPEG-4 has been out for over a year, and has a wider range of audio codecs available. You can even embed and mp2 or 3 inside it, in addition to video, text, URL tracks, sprites, VR, MIDI, Flash and much more.
If you haven't figured it out already, I'm talking about quicktime.
Case Study:
.01% of the time, that can still save thousands of lives.
Artillery unit A (our side) puts some rounds down range. The enemy (battery b) uses radar to find out where the rounds came from, and fires right back at A. At this point, A better pack up the LAN and guns and run or they die. Once they get some place safe, they have to put the LAN back together. Sometimes this can take hours, and the people who are tasked with doing that are too busy trying to fire back to remember what ifconfig does. Having Jini available as your first choice could cut this time dramatically.
Even if JINI only works
If there is firewire support somewhere (most likely LinuxPPC because they wrote usb stuff for the new mac HW, and firewire shipped on those boxes too) then there are lots of options. Panasonic makes some good DVCpro decks that can take both DVCpro tapes (like in professional DV cams) or MiniDV (prosumer and consumer level DV). These are firewire decks, and you can transfer the video to your RAID as files over a network (400Mbps) with no loss of quality or dropped frames. Lots of DV cams support FireWire too.
I don't know about support for controlling the decks in firewire, but I know they can be triggered via rs-232 with the grass valley protocols very reliably (I work at a cable station, and that arrangement has never failed me for playback)
Also, you can play analog video from an analog source into the video ins on the DVCpro decks, and it'll do the digitizing for you, without the need for a card or anything.
dan
windowmaker compiles just fine on my powermac 6500. I'm running MkLinux DR3, so we're talking about the linux kernel sitting on top of MACH 3.0. Many Red Hat utils are standard with this release too (netcfg for one). I'd say the biggest reasons to use PPC for linux are small voltage requirements, Copper process (some people are still using aluminum), RISC (not just a crunchy RISC outside and a chewy CISC x86 center), 32 registers vs 8 (better SIMD down the road), and a smaller sized processor that brings down price.
Or you can still use Intel. If LinuxPPC is as close to a linux distro as you need, I don't see any reason NOT to be using a PPC, especially Since Apple is on the brink of releasing G4 boxes.
over the past couple of months this german ct magazine has reported a bunch of things. Of it all, and looking at the consensus of the /. threads it has spawned, I believe that this ct magazine has a tendency to exagerate to the extent of fallacy. Yes, the mac os x cgi article had some merit, but it was not the beast they made it out to be. The same sort of thing happens in all their articles that make their way to this site. I think we need to take anything they say with a grain of salt, if not mocking laughter
Hey all,
Just a friendly reminder. MTV got to be the 500 pound gorilla of the music industry by making exclusivity pacts with artists and labels. If you wanted to see your favorite band's video, it was ONLY on MTV. Up until recently, if you wanted to market your music to 12-24 year olds, you had to be on MTV. Period if you are looking for any kind of exposure or commercial success.
They may try the same thing here. Exclusive web streams of content. Exclusive rights to distribute online. This is their growth strategy and it works real well.
The weak link in MP3's is that you have to know an artist exists before you can search for their content. If MTV makes it so that to hear your favorite music, you HAVE to go to their site first, then maybe people are more likely to go there when they want music in general. If this is the case, then they control who gets online mega-exposure. Every band can make a website, but only a heavy like MTV can make people come.
In other words...the indie online advantage is being threatened.
MTV wants to be the microsoft of music. Either you do it their way, or not at all.
dan
HMMMmmmmmmm...
It is my understanding that the FBI operates within the borders of the US and its territories, while the CIA conducts operations outside those borders. This line is clearly defined.
How is it that EXPORTING encryption can make the FBI's job harder if it's scope isn't supposed to expand beyond our borders? Am I wrong about the previous distinction, or is the FBI illegally conducting operations abroad?
Even in cases where we have American soil somewhere else (embassies), the US Marines or State Dept. take care of securtity. The FBI would be wasting their time and probably breaking any number of laws by monitoring the communications of foriegn nationals in this situation.
This seems more like an NSA thing to me than something the FBI would want. US citizens have strong crypto. The FBI has no legal business abroad (I think...let me know if I'm wrong). Why do they even care about Exports??
The fact is that the FBI can't STOP terrorist acts. You can speak in code on a pay phone and they wouldn't even think to listen in until you did something terrible. Why would any net-savvy international terrorist use email anyway, when they know they'll be leaving copies all over the net on the way to the destination. And some idiot on the other end could leave the plaintext on his drive. An anonymous phone call to some other anonymous person leaves no copies. RE...probably more secure anyway (if you talk in code or something...there always IS echelon) The reasonable explanation for weak crypto is to gather evidence after the fact. Export controls DON'T save lives, they just make for craftier terrorists.
International terrorists who commit acts of terror within the US are going to buy crypto here legally, and give it to their friends abroad regardless of the law.
It seems that the FBI likes to be able to imprision anyone who wants to send a secure message to mom back in the old country about dad's surprise birthday party. So if we can't find the REAL perpetrators of a terrorist act, they still get to arrest and charge any immigrant with a net connection and blame him. This way, Jan, Lou and the Prez (whoever's in office at the time) still get to look good on the TV news.
Meanwhile...we're losing lots of money in international markets.
anyway...tell me if I said something we all don't know already.
dan
Hmmmmmm. seems like you could go way cheap if you didn't mind doing some soldering and whatnot. Modulate the outs/ins on cat5 so that you could hook up both modualted signals (10baseT, 4 for 100) to cheap walkie talkies. Splice the the wires in the cable and hook them up to a squelch, so that the "talk" button is pushed when a packet goes out (you'll probably lose the first packet, but tcp/ip should send it again) and releaed when not sending. One tranciever recieves, one sends, have this setup on each device.
I am by no means an electrical/radio engineer, but it seems to me that this would be a cool hack if somebody pulled it off.
dan
Well,
As you all may remember from high school psychology, the brain has a couple of input buffers (sensory register and short term memory)until the data is encoded for long term memory. There are 2 ways of doing this. Accomidation and assimilation. The first time you are made aware of something, you develop a cognitive model of it (ie...class car has properties 4 wheels, steering wheel...etc). That is accommidation. If you were to see another car, you remember the differences from the original model. This is assimilation. So instead of literally remembering eveything, like a hard drive, as the sophistication of your cognitive models increases, so does your storage capacity. In other words...the more you know, the greater your ability to store data. Nature is full of neat little feedback loops like this. It's called chaos, and I think it has worked rahter well in this instance. With a finite amount of neurons, we've created potentially infinite storage. If we modeled filesystems and file formats like this, it would be a whole lot more efficient to store data, and could possibly add protection against data loss.
anyway, have fun with the thread
So you really expect people to be able to use all of the power of Unix and the Unix shells without having to go through the same learning curve?
No. This will be the first time mainstream consumers have a Unix-style OS under the hood that they have access to; As opposed to Win9x and current MacOS, where novice users explore and become power users on that platform down the road. If consumers have OS X, then any exploration (inevitable with kids) they do under the hood teaches them the basics of Unix. Thus, these people are more likely to embrace linux, because it won't be too much new to them. Part of expanding into a consumer market is instilling consumer confidence. OS X consumer will do that for linux to some degree. WM's are and always have been a holy war. As yet, I have seen two trends in linux GUI. Either it's fast and not full featured, or it has what I need, but is slow and takes tons of ram. The only two GUI's I've worked with that are fast and small enough to run on non-unix specific hardware (x86 and PPC), while still allowing the user to navigate and work within the filesystem without wanting to hurl the CPU out the window are Win32, MacOS and Be. I haven't used os/2. I use WindowMaker on my MkLinux box, but I've used others. I find Linux GUI's to be feature incomplete, slow, and resource greedy. I've seen demos of Quartz (OS X's imaging model and and GUI server) and it is fast and intuitive, while still giving you full access (user optional) to the BSD layer. I don't know how much ram it takes, but I do know that I shouldn't have to add another 32 megs of ram to my system if I want to run a decent GUI. I could use that extra ram to do something productive.
But a computer is not a hammer; a computer is an extremely powerful and general-purpose tool. It's capable of doing a great many things, and this requires a great deal of configurability.
Good point. What I'm trying to say is that 5% of what you do on a system should be config, 95% should be the work you got the machine for in the first place. Right now, I don't see ANY OS that meets that criteria, but outside of the server realm linux is at the way back of the pack. Where is system level color matching??? Guess I'll have to code that myself. Where's SMPTE timecode, or any multi-codec video standard for that matter. Guess I'll have to port over quicktime and the associated codecs myself too. I can go on for hours. The point is that right now, if I want to create any kind of multimedia art that doesn't suck on linux, I've got a lot of coding to do. If I do it on OS X, MacOS, NT worstation, I get to focus on my work, and I can use my coding talent on the project I'm working on, rather than reinventing the wheel. I've rewritten line drawing functions enough to know I don't want to walk down that road again if I don't have too
Right now, Linux is my server OS of choice. Hopefully, with the help of the Open Source Community, it will mature into something everybody can use (the versitile tool you talk about). Right now, it isn't there. Not even close.
I'm getting tired of ranting here. I replied to this thread to counterattack the premises of some untoward generalizations. I believe I've done that, but am probaly starting to do what I set out to stop here, so this is all for now.
that's nice. I remember reading an osopinion piece yesterday about how different OS's have their respective strenghts and weaknesses. I'll stay open minded about your attack, if you stay open minded about a few points.
1. I'll be willing to bet real money that the last time you coded, you wrote a bug. You probably fixed it too. That's just the way that song goes.
2. If you like Unix/Linux so much, you should be happy that Apple saw the light. When was the last time MS open sourced something (or did something close). Did you know the Yellow Box compiler borrows a lot of code from GCC. There are more things OS X and Linux have in common than set them apart.
3. If you don't like apple's hardware, then don't use it. Port darwin to one of the PPCP boards motorola still makes. The G4 has the only SIMD implementation that doesn't suck, and has the registers to use it. I don't know if you are familiar with SIMD(MMX/KNI/3DNow/AltiVec), but it can greatly speed up string handling by cramming multiple instances of that 8 bit data type into the whole space of the machine word. So if you had a 64 bit processor, you can handle 8 characters during one clock cycle. If you could speed up string handling by 8x, then how much faster is dynamic HTML generation??? The API's are in C, as opposed to assembler in some x86 implementations. BTW...hasn't it been 4 years since intel shipped a NEW core. Talk about mediocrity. And they only have what, 8 registers available for SIMD, as opposed to PPC's 32. Gimme a break, they're still using aluminum in their IC's. My guess is for real perfomance next year, run linuxPPC on a pair of multiple-core g4's (multiple cores per CPU means faster SMP, because they are communicating on the same durned piece of silicon/COPPER). Lots of bang for the buck.
4. For 90% of the users on the planet, Linux is unusable, and the learning curve required to FIND SOFTWARE that does what you need to do is bad enough to keep poeple away. OS X consumer will be a Unix style OS with a UI that isn't intimidating, and will probably be the mose useable and intuitive WM around. THIS OS WILL SHOW PEOPLE WHAT'S SO COOL ABOUT LINUX. I predict that OS X consumer will probably be the catalyst that accellerates Linux's acceptence in the consumer market.
5. Computers are tools. You shouldn't HAVE to think about how a hammer works, and it should NEVER get in the way of going about hammering nails. Right now, I spend more time tinkering with the System in Linux than getting any work done (for non-server tasks, it's an awesome server OS, and I reccomend it highly). Until linux gets out of my way and lets me work, I will continue to use MacOS and Be to develop multimedia content.
anyway...gotta go to work...DVCpro camera is calling me...
dan
Sizzler has a REALLY bad commercial. There are Luke and Han type-characters eating at sizzler. During the chatter about Sizzler, they are using all kinds of bad star wars puns. "Q:How do you eat it? A:Use the fork" is one of the worst. The acting sucks too
Dreamwaever is probably one of the only visual editors that doesn't suck entirely. It also ships with a great text editor (BBEdit on mac, HomeSite on windows). The difference in text editors here is not an issue, because they are both just working with text files.
Most other visual editors put all kinds of crap in your code, or embed tons of spacer gif's all over the place, making for large files that choke slow connections. Using DW with a text editor gives you powerful visual tools and real-time control over your code.
Hey...the thing to focus on here is that apple is TRYING to support open source. If there are issues we'd like resoved in their license, we should help them draft a new version, rather than just bitch about it. That's what we're about, isn't it...helping each other???