But they don't talk about their "super computer performace" or "pentium destroying" stuff at all when referring to iMacs, so far as i've seen... They only talk about that in reference to the G4's which are the only machines graphics professionals look at... The line of the iMac is that it's a consumers machine, that's pretty fast, really good looking, and very easy to set up and use... for instance, a search on the iMac homepage yields no references to the Pentium whatsoever...
Except photoshop is the Mac's "killer application". There exists a huge market of users who buy macs specificcally because of photoshops ptimization on that platform. Yes, Adobe doesn't spend nearly the time on the Wintel version as it does on the mac version optimizing routines and such, but what does that have to do with the fact that the Mac trounces the fastest available Intel machine, which happens to be running at more than twice its' speed?
The price differntial between the Ultimate mac and a Dell Dimension 8100 configured as evenly as possible (1.5 GHz P4, 256 MB PC800 RDRAM, 60 GB hard drive, 12x CDRW - not DVD, and Firewire), both without monitors is $713.
The dell, discounting any other costs, is paid for in 55 hours of photoshop work (at $50/hr)
The mac, is paid for in 46 hours of photoshop work, assuming it's at least 33% faster.
So really, even though the sticker price is more, the mac ends up costing less in the long run, because it pays for itself quicker and generates money at a faster rate than the "cheaper" dell...
Seems they've dropped their line about multiprocessors, since the only model that ships with them is the 533 MHz model. I can't seem to find any information on if they include an empty socket or not for the other configurations... I'd hope so, because honestly, it seems cheaper if they'ed just manufacture all G4 motherboards with two sockets rather than having to have two separate lines of motherboards in their assembling plants...
Past that, though... I want one. Either a powerbook G4, or powermac G4... If it turns out to be the powerbook, though, i'll advise myself to hold off a few month, lest any kinks arise...
Why is anyone crying wolf? This isn't about censoring the internet. Private companies bar their employees from accessing porn from their computers, why should employees of the gov't expect differntly?
You want to look at porn, you've got a computer at home to do so with. No computer, you can still buy your magazines, rent your movies, etc... I'd have a really hard time, actually, knowing that my taxes were going to partially fund peoples' porn surfing, unless for some reason, it trully was explicitly tied into their job responsibilities.
And if for some reaon, a public emplyee needs access to porn to fulfill their job requirements, i'm sure the proper paper work can be filled out so that the blocking mechanisms are removed for them at the router, firewall, or proxy server.
Next case, please.... Or actually no more of this sort of thing:)
My address was forever in the 24.x.x.x range (on ATT cable)... now it's in the 64.x.x.x or 66.x.x.x range (i believe)... I had a power outage, so when it came back, my router grabbed a new IP address in a completely different range, for some odd reason...
I'm guessing almost that IP lookups would be the best way to geographically locate users... because no matter what IP ATT gives me, i'm still xxxx.ne.mediaone.net
NeXTStep and OpenStep were very highly used in financial institutions/banks for one. The ease of development lent it greatly to use in a nubmer of vertical market apps, if memory serves.
It's funny how the "features" a modern OS should have contains items such as "preemptive multi-taksing", "protected memory", and "SMP support" (i know there's one other buzzword, but i foget what it is). Nowhere, in the "definition" of a modern OS is any mention of a usable, consistant UI.
I'll forever stand by the notion that even with Mac OS 9, Mac users are much more productive than counterparts on Windows NT/2000 simply because, even though they may crash more, the operating itself lends itself much more to productivity issues. Macs have much more consistant menus, keyboard shortcuts, and other interfaces between applications compared to any of the Windows family, let alone any linux distro/BSD/or other unix.
Couple that with Apple's complete lack of enterprise network/server support and I wonder who you think is suddenly going to start dropping Linux for servers.
Ermm... Apple picked up this nifty little thing when they bought out NeXT, first called NeXTStep and later OpenSTEP. It's actually quite well regarded in the enterprize, although some of that might have died off in the past few years due to the uncertainity in the direction OS X was taking... But in the end apple's releasing an OS thats based on one of the most preeminant enterprise operating systems that ever shipped...
Macs come bundled with apps that most of their users will use, as well as ones that are mostly self explanitory. Such as Acrobat Reader, Quicktime, et al. No one needs to call Apple on those two. They might need to on Telnet, wondering what in the world that application might be, for one thing...
The point of the breakup isn't to punish, it's to more evenly level the playing field. That's why the gov't isn't asking for a $20 billion fine. So if Microsoft so drastically alters their business that the old penalties are no longer valid or reasonable, so be it.
.NET is a huge gamble for Microsoft... It's by no means a sure fire way for them to escape punishment and still retain their strangle hold on the desktop market...
500 MHz is fine for quite a long time. Remember, NASA just recently (well in the last year or two) upgraded the Hubble from 10 year old 386's to brand new 486's... It's not like they need to be running Gnome, MS Office, Photoshop or any other resource hungry application...
AFAIR, the original power macs (60 to 80 MHz PPC601's), with their GeoPorts which were basically serial ports controlled by the CPU rather than an extra chip, could flood a T1 on each port, while still remaining relatively responsive for the foreground applications.
500 MHz G4's should be robust enough to tons of bandwidth flying through them...
I'm sorry, but i don't feel like leading legal mumbo-jumbo...:)
What you're saying though, can't be true IMO, because why would Fedex offer 2 or 3 day delivery, and UPS offer 5 or 7 day ground delivery? That'd be breaking the law according to the rules you laid out.
it's been a few years since i worked for a mailer, but so far as i remember, the DMA does infact maintain a "not list" of sorts. You can put your name in there, and 90% of mailers will run their lists against that list to make sure they're not wasting printing or postage costs on someon whos sure not to respond.
Yes, it's not 100% reliable. And yes, there's no recourse if someone decides to not run their list against the DMA's. But hey, that's free enterprize, right?
reply what are you talking about? Theres still FedEx, UPS, and Airborn... Not to mention the numerous couriers in every city. I do believe anyone could try to compete against the post office, it's just that they're so entrechened it makes no sense to attempt to under cut them, but rather offer a faster more efficient service than they do...
1st class postage costs so much more than bulk mail because even if it's 1st class bulk mail, it;s pre-sorted. And then if you send enough and can stand the fact that it'll arrive slower, you can opt for 3rd class. Direct mailers send so much that they have buying power in a sense. They pay so much more that anyone else does they deserve lower rates...
Of course a year or two ago when the rates last increased.... it was 2nd (magazine) and 3rd (bulk) class mailers that got hit with the brunt of it. Should have read the DM News then to see some true rage!
i don't pay per kilobyte or even by the megabyte i download. Those CD's do take an actual toll on the environment, especially consiering that every one they send me ends up unopened in the trash. Same with 99% of the junk mail i receive. Yeah, someone out there may need to pay for the bandwidth, and yeah, call me whatever you'd like, but i figure a few cents here and there is much better than the waste that real world junkmail does to our real world environment.
It's actually not the TV industries fault so much as the US Government who's mandating the switch so that they can re-auction off televisions space in the spectrum to wireless companies.
They keep setting deadlines for broadcasters to go digital, and a number of them are indeed broadcasting some shows digitally, but since there's so much more content available analogly (i know, not a word), digital sets don't sell. Which makes their price high.
Once the analog is killed off, at least the price of digital sets will plummet due to huge demand, but i don't think that benefit overules the costs and headaches involved, unless the FCC has a plan in mind to replace everyone's TV's at zero cost. Which they don't.
I simply can't see how the benefits outweigh the costs.
What exactly are the costs? A few hundred man years to develop something that will probably be in service for the next 20? That's a drop in the bucket. The chips themselves will probably run a couple dollar a piece tops, so even if the TV or movie industry footed the bill themselves, it's still hardly amount to anything compared to the theoretical gains of increased movie rentals since people wouldn't be able to tape them off TV anymore...
I think my point is, intel was speccing the Merced, it set it's target MHz rating based on it's usual progress (Moore's Law). That was before AMD was deemed a threat. Through the last year or so of head on competition, and with that competition only posed to heat up even more in order to fight for a larger piece of the slowing PC market, the Pentium familly is racing ahead of performance expectations.
Merced/Itanium/IA64 hasn't been subjected to that competition at all. Intel's just been taking their time designing it, but already, the chip is proving difficult to run past 600 or 700 MHz. Thats the same speed that it was expected to arrive at years back, when we were using 233, 266 and 300 MHz Pentium II's.
Yes, more instructions per cycle, but the race between Athlon and Pentium is pushing x86 performance higher than Intel ever expected. So, for all but the most memory intensive operations, the x86 may be able to win out over Itanium just based on clockspeed. The expectations of the Itanium haven't been increased to reflect market conditions.
If amds chips will perform as well as intels chips do in servers this will very good for consumers, since amds chips cost 30% less than intels do(usually).
Well... this case is a bit different... Usually AMD has created chips that are *compatible* with Intels offerings... This time they aren't. I don't know, but i'm guessing that this time Intel patented their instruction set or otherwise protected it in order to make sure no AMD's arise on that front for many years.
So it's just a matter of which architecture developers follow. That said. I'm betting AMD will turn out the big winner, in light of they're not looking to abandon their platform as Intel is. The Itanium looked really powerful on paper a few years back when Intel was saying it'd debut at 600 or 700 MHz, but now AMD's at 1.2 GHz, the P4 is at 1.4 GHz, et al...And as much as Intel wants it, the market they're going after is actually quite small. Yes, high margin, but still incredibly small compared to the market which brought them their current riches.... And their chip will be the least estabilshed brand. So while AMD can eventually "float" the higher end market, intel's offering basically end up being stuck in a sink or swim predicament...
ANd if that happens... What'll AMD decide to charge for their chips if they've clearly bested intel?
First, it's still the issue of that without paying anything, most average joes would not use napster because they feel they may be violating the law, so even if it was based on Napster code but didn't have the fee, I don't think people would use it.
I think that 50 million users is a pretty accurate snapshot of people. And with a base that size, surely there are some "average joes" in there. And once it's converted to a pay service affiliated with a variety of labels., ostensibly, it will no longer be illegal stigma that goes with it, or in worry of being so. Or at least eventually the the number of legal songs may approach 50% or more...
Yeah... i was rather pissed that though LinuxPPC installed fine on the first shot on my Umax C500 mac clone (180 MHz PPC 603e), since the box didn't have ethernet onboard, and since LinuxPPC didn't supply a driver for my Asante ethernet card, it turned into a rather useless install...
Oh well... in the end things worked out... Now i've a 7100 with VideoVision to do video capture, an Athlon/Linux system to act as the server, and the Umax machine to be the edittor... Sweet little setup thanks to the 100 mbps connection between the later two.
But really... IF you're going to run linux, at this point i'm assuming it should be run on only x86 hardware, unless you're wanting to get your hands really dirty coaxing it to run...
PC innovation never truely took off until IBM was opened up and anyone could make clones.
What are you talking about? All that occured since IBM created the PC (as in the IBM PC, not the personal computer) is that other companies and the industry as a whole have kept making it smaller and faster. There's not a whole lot of innovation going on the personal computing market, compared to the early days, before the x86/Wintel archetecture became such an intrenched standard.
And Sony's trinitron doesn't prevent anyone else from making monitors. They just created a means of displaying an incredibly sharp image. If the extra sharpness matters, then you can get a Sony picture tube. IF it doesn't, you can go elsewhere. And there's no stopping anyone else from creating a new means of sharping a CRT's display... I'd say that was a bad example, when so many much better examples exist...
Such as Intel patenting the P6 bus, so that there can't exist pin compatible non-intel CPUs that use intel's chipsents. Things like that, i'd say hamper the industry a lot more than a patent on a specific (optional) display technology.
Well, why don't you go out and invent and market a revolutionary new engine? People might want it, but then you might bump into the old if it's not broken there's no point in fixing it problem. Cars last decades and drive for hundreds of thousands of miles. The engines in most cars outlasts the bodies. There's just not much point in improving a proven design, IMHO.
Yes, fuel efficiency and the type of fuels used could stand to be worked on some more, but in the end the internal combustion model will be with us for a while longer. Because it works.
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But they don't talk about their "super computer performace" or "pentium destroying" stuff at all when referring to iMacs, so far as i've seen... They only talk about that in reference to the G4's which are the only machines graphics professionals look at... The line of the iMac is that it's a consumers machine, that's pretty fast, really good looking, and very easy to set up and use... for instance, a search on the iMac homepage yields no references to the Pentium whatsoever...
Except photoshop is the Mac's "killer application". There exists a huge market of users who buy macs specificcally because of photoshops ptimization on that platform. Yes, Adobe doesn't spend nearly the time on the Wintel version as it does on the mac version optimizing routines and such, but what does that have to do with the fact that the Mac trounces the fastest available Intel machine, which happens to be running at more than twice its' speed?
The price differntial between the Ultimate mac and a Dell Dimension 8100 configured as evenly as possible (1.5 GHz P4, 256 MB PC800 RDRAM, 60 GB hard drive, 12x CDRW - not DVD, and Firewire), both without monitors is $713.
The dell, discounting any other costs, is paid for in 55 hours of photoshop work (at $50/hr)
The mac, is paid for in 46 hours of photoshop work, assuming it's at least 33% faster.
So really, even though the sticker price is more, the mac ends up costing less in the long run, because it pays for itself quicker and generates money at a faster rate than the "cheaper" dell...
Seems they've dropped their line about multiprocessors, since the only model that ships with them is the 533 MHz model. I can't seem to find any information on if they include an empty socket or not for the other configurations... I'd hope so, because honestly, it seems cheaper if they'ed just manufacture all G4 motherboards with two sockets rather than having to have two separate lines of motherboards in their assembling plants...
Past that, though... I want one. Either a powerbook G4, or powermac G4... If it turns out to be the powerbook, though, i'll advise myself to hold off a few month, lest any kinks arise...
Why is anyone crying wolf? This isn't about censoring the internet. Private companies bar their employees from accessing porn from their computers, why should employees of the gov't expect differntly?
:)
You want to look at porn, you've got a computer at home to do so with. No computer, you can still buy your magazines, rent your movies, etc... I'd have a really hard time, actually, knowing that my taxes were going to partially fund peoples' porn surfing, unless for some reason, it trully was explicitly tied into their job responsibilities.
And if for some reaon, a public emplyee needs access to porn to fulfill their job requirements, i'm sure the proper paper work can be filled out so that the blocking mechanisms are removed for them at the router, firewall, or proxy server.
Next case, please.... Or actually no more of this sort of thing
My address was forever in the 24.x.x.x range (on ATT cable)... now it's in the 64.x.x.x or 66.x.x.x range (i believe)... I had a power outage, so when it came back, my router grabbed a new IP address in a completely different range, for some odd reason...
I'm guessing almost that IP lookups would be the best way to geographically locate users... because no matter what IP ATT gives me, i'm still xxxx.ne.mediaone.net
NeXTStep and OpenStep were very highly used in financial institutions/banks for one. The ease of development lent it greatly to use in a nubmer of vertical market apps, if memory serves.
It's funny how the "features" a modern OS should have contains items such as "preemptive multi-taksing", "protected memory", and "SMP support" (i know there's one other buzzword, but i foget what it is). Nowhere, in the "definition" of a modern OS is any mention of a usable, consistant UI.
I'll forever stand by the notion that even with Mac OS 9, Mac users are much more productive than counterparts on Windows NT/2000 simply because, even though they may crash more, the operating itself lends itself much more to productivity issues. Macs have much more consistant menus, keyboard shortcuts, and other interfaces between applications compared to any of the Windows family, let alone any linux distro/BSD/or other unix.
Couple that with Apple's complete lack of enterprise network/server support and I wonder who you think is suddenly going to start dropping Linux for servers.
Ermm... Apple picked up this nifty little thing when they bought out NeXT, first called NeXTStep and later OpenSTEP. It's actually quite well regarded in the enterprize, although some of that might have died off in the past few years due to the uncertainity in the direction OS X was taking... But in the end apple's releasing an OS thats based on one of the most preeminant enterprise operating systems that ever shipped...
Is downloading NCSA Telnet just too hard?
Macs come bundled with apps that most of their users will use, as well as ones that are mostly self explanitory. Such as Acrobat Reader, Quicktime, et al. No one needs to call Apple on those two. They might need to on Telnet, wondering what in the world that application might be, for one thing...
The point of the breakup isn't to punish, it's to more evenly level the playing field. That's why the gov't isn't asking for a $20 billion fine. So if Microsoft so drastically alters their business that the old penalties are no longer valid or reasonable, so be it.
.NET is a huge gamble for Microsoft... It's by no means a sure fire way for them to escape punishment and still retain their strangle hold on the desktop market...
My opinion.
500 MHz is fine for quite a long time. Remember, NASA just recently (well in the last year or two) upgraded the Hubble from 10 year old 386's to brand new 486's... It's not like they need to be running Gnome, MS Office, Photoshop or any other resource hungry application...
AFAIR, the original power macs (60 to 80 MHz PPC601's), with their GeoPorts which were basically serial ports controlled by the CPU rather than an extra chip, could flood a T1 on each port, while still remaining relatively responsive for the foreground applications.
500 MHz G4's should be robust enough to tons of bandwidth flying through them...
I'm sorry, but i don't feel like leading legal mumbo-jumbo... :)
What you're saying though, can't be true IMO, because why would Fedex offer 2 or 3 day delivery, and UPS offer 5 or 7 day ground delivery? That'd be breaking the law according to the rules you laid out.
it's been a few years since i worked for a mailer, but so far as i remember, the DMA does infact maintain a "not list" of sorts. You can put your name in there, and 90% of mailers will run their lists against that list to make sure they're not wasting printing or postage costs on someon whos sure not to respond.
Yes, it's not 100% reliable. And yes, there's no recourse if someone decides to not run their list against the DMA's. But hey, that's free enterprize, right?
reply what are you talking about? Theres still FedEx, UPS, and Airborn... Not to mention the numerous couriers in every city. I do believe anyone could try to compete against the post office, it's just that they're so entrechened it makes no sense to attempt to under cut them, but rather offer a faster more efficient service than they do...
1st class postage costs so much more than bulk mail because even if it's 1st class bulk mail, it;s pre-sorted. And then if you send enough and can stand the fact that it'll arrive slower, you can opt for 3rd class. Direct mailers send so much that they have buying power in a sense. They pay so much more that anyone else does they deserve lower rates...
Of course a year or two ago when the rates last increased.... it was 2nd (magazine) and 3rd (bulk) class mailers that got hit with the brunt of it. Should have read the DM News then to see some true rage!
i don't pay per kilobyte or even by the megabyte i download. Those CD's do take an actual toll on the environment, especially consiering that every one they send me ends up unopened in the trash. Same with 99% of the junk mail i receive. Yeah, someone out there may need to pay for the bandwidth, and yeah, call me whatever you'd like, but i figure a few cents here and there is much better than the waste that real world junkmail does to our real world environment.
Money comes and goes. We, and our world, don't.
It's actually not the TV industries fault so much as the US Government who's mandating the switch so that they can re-auction off televisions space in the spectrum to wireless companies.
They keep setting deadlines for broadcasters to go digital, and a number of them are indeed broadcasting some shows digitally, but since there's so much more content available analogly (i know, not a word), digital sets don't sell. Which makes their price high.
Once the analog is killed off, at least the price of digital sets will plummet due to huge demand, but i don't think that benefit overules the costs and headaches involved, unless the FCC has a plan in mind to replace everyone's TV's at zero cost. Which they don't.
I simply can't see how the benefits outweigh the costs.
What exactly are the costs? A few hundred man years to develop something that will probably be in service for the next 20? That's a drop in the bucket. The chips themselves will probably run a couple dollar a piece tops, so even if the TV or movie industry footed the bill themselves, it's still hardly amount to anything compared to the theoretical gains of increased movie rentals since people wouldn't be able to tape them off TV anymore...
I think my point is, intel was speccing the Merced, it set it's target MHz rating based on it's usual progress (Moore's Law). That was before AMD was deemed a threat. Through the last year or so of head on competition, and with that competition only posed to heat up even more in order to fight for a larger piece of the slowing PC market, the Pentium familly is racing ahead of performance expectations.
Merced/Itanium/IA64 hasn't been subjected to that competition at all. Intel's just been taking their time designing it, but already, the chip is proving difficult to run past 600 or 700 MHz. Thats the same speed that it was expected to arrive at years back, when we were using 233, 266 and 300 MHz Pentium II's.
Yes, more instructions per cycle, but the race between Athlon and Pentium is pushing x86 performance higher than Intel ever expected. So, for all but the most memory intensive operations, the x86 may be able to win out over Itanium just based on clockspeed. The expectations of the Itanium haven't been increased to reflect market conditions.
If that makes sense?
If amds chips will perform as well as intels chips do in servers this will very good for consumers, since amds chips cost 30% less than intels do(usually).
Well... this case is a bit different... Usually AMD has created chips that are *compatible* with Intels offerings... This time they aren't. I don't know, but i'm guessing that this time Intel patented their instruction set or otherwise protected it in order to make sure no AMD's arise on that front for many years.
So it's just a matter of which architecture developers follow. That said. I'm betting AMD will turn out the big winner, in light of they're not looking to abandon their platform as Intel is. The Itanium looked really powerful on paper a few years back when Intel was saying it'd debut at 600 or 700 MHz, but now AMD's at 1.2 GHz, the P4 is at 1.4 GHz, et al...And as much as Intel wants it, the market they're going after is actually quite small. Yes, high margin, but still incredibly small compared to the market which brought them their current riches.... And their chip will be the least estabilshed brand. So while AMD can eventually "float" the higher end market, intel's offering basically end up being stuck in a sink or swim predicament...
ANd if that happens... What'll AMD decide to charge for their chips if they've clearly bested intel?
First, it's still the issue of that without paying anything, most average joes would not use napster because they feel they may be violating the law, so even if it was based on Napster code but didn't have the fee, I don't think people would use it.
I think that 50 million users is a pretty accurate snapshot of people. And with a base that size, surely there are some "average joes" in there. And once it's converted to a pay service affiliated with a variety of labels., ostensibly, it will no longer be illegal stigma that goes with it, or in worry of being so. Or at least eventually the the number of legal songs may approach 50% or more...
Yeah... i was rather pissed that though LinuxPPC installed fine on the first shot on my Umax C500 mac clone (180 MHz PPC 603e), since the box didn't have ethernet onboard, and since LinuxPPC didn't supply a driver for my Asante ethernet card, it turned into a rather useless install...
Oh well... in the end things worked out... Now i've a 7100 with VideoVision to do video capture, an Athlon/Linux system to act as the server, and the Umax machine to be the edittor... Sweet little setup thanks to the 100 mbps connection between the later two.
But really... IF you're going to run linux, at this point i'm assuming it should be run on only x86 hardware, unless you're wanting to get your hands really dirty coaxing it to run...
Ermmm... obviously OS X, because once it ships it'll be the default installed OS. Kind of like how IE kicked Netscape out of the market.
That's all we've accomplished since 1950, really.
PC innovation never truely took off until IBM was opened up and anyone could make clones.
What are you talking about? All that occured since IBM created the PC (as in the IBM PC, not the personal computer) is that other companies and the industry as a whole have kept making it smaller and faster. There's not a whole lot of innovation going on the personal computing market, compared to the early days, before the x86/Wintel archetecture became such an intrenched standard.
And Sony's trinitron doesn't prevent anyone else from making monitors. They just created a means of displaying an incredibly sharp image. If the extra sharpness matters, then you can get a Sony picture tube. IF it doesn't, you can go elsewhere. And there's no stopping anyone else from creating a new means of sharping a CRT's display... I'd say that was a bad example, when so many much better examples exist...
Such as Intel patenting the P6 bus, so that there can't exist pin compatible non-intel CPUs that use intel's chipsents. Things like that, i'd say hamper the industry a lot more than a patent on a specific (optional) display technology.
Well, why don't you go out and invent and market a revolutionary new engine? People might want it, but then you might bump into the old if it's not broken there's no point in fixing it problem. Cars last decades and drive for hundreds of thousands of miles. The engines in most cars outlasts the bodies. There's just not much point in improving a proven design, IMHO.
Yes, fuel efficiency and the type of fuels used could stand to be worked on some more, but in the end the internal combustion model will be with us for a while longer. Because it works.