Would people please stop comparing GIMP to Photoshop? Photoshop beats it in every aspect, hands down, with the exception of running through a web browser. But cooltext.com is far from a web based image editting application.
Photoshop is scriptable via applescript with the appropriate plug-ins. It has a thorough history tracking which you can save and saveable actions, so you can perform one task once and then apply that same task to 100 different files if you so desire. Saved actions will generate anything that the GIMP can, plus it will output Pantone and other spot colors, CMYK, etc etc etc.
I really think that GIMP enthusiasts should go to a design studio and watch a photoshop artist in action before trying to compare the two. The difference between the two is immense, and slashdot seems to remember photoshop 2.0 rather than 5.5
Well, so much for the posts I moderated upwards, so here goes:
Somebody BOUGHT the Metallica CD. That person then ripped the mp3s. They then logged on to the Napster system. Presumably, they began downloading someone else's music.
And other people started downloading music from them. Not only that, but the music that they're downloading can generally be assumed to be from another user who, like them, bought the CD. Neither of them bought the rights to the music to redistribute it. Neither of them are giving royalties to the band. And Napster devised the system that allowed this to happen. That's why Napster's bad.
No money is being made by anyone in this system (unless a user burns a cd and then ILLEGALLY sells it)
No one's making money right now. But napsters a company. They're taking VC cash. Since no venture capitalist would just give away money, the only assumption that can be made is that Napsters told them of how they intend to make money. And since currently their primary/only business is in enabling people to share/swap/copy music, one can presume that's how they intend to make their money. Hence, Napster will be making money from the artists and labels investments of their time and money.
If drugs are smuggled onto an airplane, is it the airplane's fault or the person carrying the drugs?
Depends on the person and the plane. If the plane crosses the border every night below radar, then not only will the flyer of the plane get in trouble, but in all likelihood, the owner will be busted as well. At the very least, in the US, they'll immediately lose possession of the plane. And we're not talking little Cesna's here... Napsters basically the Jumbo Jet with ton's of hidden compartments compared to every other way in the world you could pirate music.
If you think music should be free, why don't you go out and make some for us and share it with the world??
IE exists for Windows 3.1 Windows 98, Windows NT (x86, Alpha, presumably MIPS and PowerPC as well), Windows 2000, Mac OS, Solaris , HP UX...
Without being a programmewas said at the trial., I'd say likelebhood is that IE relies on no features of Win32, but insteadell makes extnsive use of the features added by IE.
Why, specificeally won't TUX ever be able to run under FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or even Darwin/OS-X? The source is all available for those... Thouse of the GPL they'll never be able to SHIP with the module installed, developers could make patches for those OSes, could they not?
P'raps you're forgetting the Apple II compatibility cards that Apple made for the Mac LC series?
That for coexistance, since they were both marketed at the educational market. They (Apple) knew the Apple II was on it's way out, but schools weren't biting on the LC because their software wouldn't work on the newer machines, so apple fashioned up a card for them.
Bullhonkies. The slowest PowerPC machine (I own one) ran 68K code in emulation about as fast as the next-to-top-of-the-line machine that it replaced. PowerMac 6100 (60 MHz PPC 601) ran 68K code about as fast as the Quadra 610, a 25 MHz 68040. The only folks who would have found a slowdown were those who upgraded 6 month old machines like a Quadra 840/AV (33 MHz 68040) to the PowerPCs.
Nope. If you looked at the old Speedometer results, the first time a PowerPC based machine eclipsed the speed of the 840AV (which incedentally was 40 MHz, not 33), was with the arrival of the 8500/120 and 9500/120 - 132. Prior to that, the 840 AV was the speed champ when running 68k applications. The 6100 could soundly beat a IIfx, but even a Quadra 605 beat it when running, again, 68k apps. I remember switching back and forth from 6100 to 650 in those days....
Sigh. More half-truths. Apple did not write the 68K emulator to emulate the floating-point hardware, that is true. Apple's programmer guidelines were to use SANE (Standard Apple Numeric Environment) calls -- which were PowerPC native the first time out. So well-written, floating-point intensive 68K software got a big performance boost when running on PowerPC.
Tons of Adobe Photoshop plug-ins where written to access the FPU directly, and hence crashed the computer. Infini-D and Strata Studio Pro did too... Illustrator and Freehand also had some problem with a few of their standard plug ins. And there was a non-native version of dimensions that didn't need an FPU which ran remarkably slower than the same version of the program that did use the FPU when on 040's... The Power Mac's could only run the hobbled version of that, too...
That's my version of the history that i experienced... You may have fared better... I was just trying to say that Apple's undertaken much larger transitions in the past than dropping SCSI and serial ports... You might groan for a little while, but once everyone catches up, every transition that I can think that they've done has paid off big time.
The 1st amendment shouldnt come to mind. It only gaurentees that the government will not tell people what they can and cannot say or refuse them the right/ability to say it. This is a matter of one company and another company. Nowhere is the government involved, so the 1st amendment doesn't apply.
Kind of like laws against (i know, the obvious) yelling fired in a crowded theatre, as well as laws against false advertising, slander, libel, verbal assault, threats, etc... Should all of those be protected under the first amendment as well?
Oh yeah... and shouldn't spam be a 1st ammendment issue for that matter? People jump to defend the 1st amemdment until it lands them with an extra 5 messages on their hard drive and then they say it's trespassing, or what not.
I don't know where I"m going with this anymore, so i'll stop.
Go compare prices for a new computer. Yep. Mac's cost more. it's a matter of economies of scale... More than that, Mercedes cost more than Fords which cost more than Yugos... which would you rather have?
Go look at the software available. Hmmmm.... Quicken, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, QuickTime, Dreamweaver, Premiere, Fireworks, Flash, Director...
It almost looks like the wish list of software that the Linux community would like to see ported to it. Windows may have 500 million times more programs available for it than any other platform, but so many of them are crap that it doesn't matter.
Go try and program in OS X. That's kind of hard being that OS X isn't even completed yet. Yeah, you can program on Linux while it's being developed, but OS X is a MUCH larger undertaking Linux... They're simultateoulsy developing a kernel, file system, compatibiltiy layer, user interface... I'd rather wait til it's done.
Go try to run software with a single button mouse. Why don't you? I do all day long and it's really not that hard. You point. You click. You type something. Oh, you want a pop up menu? Hold the control key and there it is. The only reason that *nix users feel like a mac's useless because it only has one mouse button is because their software is designed for three buttons. If the developers had specced out the programs to make use of only one mouse button, you really would not have lost that much, if anything.
Aside from the Apple II/III to the Macintosh change there has been nothing as extreme from the beige to the see through change in hardware compatibility.
There was no transition from the Apple II to the Macintosh. They were two completely distinct product lines that coexisted for quite a long time together.
Remember the 68040 to PowerPC changeover? A LOT of people upgraded their machines only to find their non-native software running much slower than it had previously. And applications that needed access to the floating point unit wouldn't run at all. That's a pretty drastic change. If you've forgotten about that, then that means that in the end they managed the transition very smoothly.
NuBus to PCI was also pretty painful for the video editting crowd. There they were screwed for a while, craving faster machines but being stuck with the much slower ones simply because the cards they needed were't available in PCI form factors, or they were but required a huge investment all over again. But most everyone I talked to back then was eager to see PCI versions of their cards and took everything in stride. These were people with $20,000+ Avid systems to $2000 Radius Video Vision or Targa 2000 cards...
They managed fine, but your ISDN and scanner prevent you from buying their machines...
The ISDN modem died because serial ports went away... Though there are USB to Serial adapeters which could have saved your modem.
Likewise SCSI dropped out as well, but for things like scanners, a USB to SCSI adapter could still save that as well.
What Apple did was an incredibly gutsy move than only some of the PC market are trying to do, walk away from legacy connections. Apple did a great job at it, i don't know why you're complaining. Just leave the scanner attatched to the computer it was plugged into before, ore else buy one of those cheap USB scanners. It's not like you bought the computer thinking it would support your peripherals only to find it wouldn't.
Regardless of all that, I can't fathom your stance of "i won't buy a new mac until OS X is out." Does that mean they won't be a "bully" once OS X arrives? Nor will OS X revive your ISDN modem or scanner. But you'll let them off the hook and buy their hardware once they produce the software you want? Makes no sense... and granted I'm an apple fan and i still can't figure out the logic....
How about the 10 year+ one that Apple had System 7 running on 486 hardware?
Or that Sun was going to buy them out? (I think that one was earlier than the Disney rumors)
Or that Oracle was going to buy them out?
Or Copland/Gershwin (Apple's previous aborted efforts at modernizing the Mac) (Yes, those were supplanted by OS X, but they stayed on their copland strategy for quite a long time)
I could fill up this page with defunct Apple rumors, but i won't:) Just wanted to point out that Apples always had the rumormills running around them. And that's good, if you consider that any publicity is good publicity... Apple just got a story on Slashdot today for no other reason than a 3 year old unsubstantiated rumor.
Hmmm... Apple branded Palms with Newton hardwriting??? Sorry to say, I think I've finally gotten Grafiti engrained in my head... So unless it can help me write a LOT faster, i'd just assume stick with the stock Palm handwriting engine...
Actually, Steve Jobs is in no way a computer guy in terms of what you see at slashdot. He's a showman and entertainer, though so far he's found his niche in the computer industry, that doesn't preclude him from wanting to go elsewhere. Why would he want to chair disney? Well, he chairs Apple and Pixar, and Disney really isn't that far a leap from where he's at with Pixar right now.
If these rumors are true (which i can't see... why would Disney want to buy apple now that they've completed their "recovery"? Theye'd have to pay $1.25-$1.50 on the $1.00 in order for it to make sense for the shareholders, and at the price that Apple's at these days, that'd end up being what? $30 billion. Nevermind that 2 years ago they were worth around $2 billion. To reiterate, now is not the time to buy apple.
Yes, Jobs would love to run Disney (according to what I've read, esepcaially telling is Gil Amelio's final pages in his "700 days at apple book" where he issues a warning to Michael Eisener (That's the right name, right?) to beware if Steve Jobs ever sets his sites on running Disney.
The only problem is that it makes no sense for Disney to buy Apple. Pixar, yes. Apple, no. And if they can't be unwoven, that's going to be an aweful lot to spend in order to get a new CEO/Chariman.
How is it "insightful" that AMD's evil because they sell a chip that consumers want to buy??? And encouraging people to swap archicectures to machines that cost 100%-500% MORE than equivalent x86 machines? It's not like those chips make any bit of difference in the consumers mind.
Any company that walks away from the x86 processor business is a dumb company. That'd be like leaving money on the table. Buckets full of money. And x86 is really the only market to be in right now... hmmm? Should i go after 10% of a 100 million units a year or 50% of 5 million units??? Which way does the math work best?
Your right, the clones were faster, cheaper, and Apple couldn't compete with them. In an open field, Apple can't compete. Instead they used their monopoly powers over that platform to stifle competitors to the point of bankruptcy. For Microsoft this would be considered illegal, but for Apple this is innovating!
I think we're stuck on this one. Of course, anyone can take a design that Apple made and do it cheaper, because they don't need to pay all the money that goes into Apple's R&D budget. If those companies had to actually go through all the steps that apple did in the first place, and finance it, they would have lost their "cheaper" advantage quickly.
As far as faster goes, yes they were faster, too. Apple's flaw in that category was that they were much bigger than the cloners and had suffered numerous supply shortages. Since the cloners had smaller markets, they could bring out faster systems than apple because they weren't expected to be able to satisfy the entire demand.
Okay, so what was the last major innovation to come out of Apple? The over-bloated Quicktime format? See thru cases? What exactly have they innovated in the last 5 years? They did do up a spec for Firewire, then demanded licensing fees that pretty much assured little in the way of industry support.
Like them or not, Apple was the one that introduced people to the idea that computers didn't need to be big boxes hidden under desks. Most of slashdot thinks it's absurd that anyone would want a colored computer, but the rest of the world obviously didn't. Witness the rush to knock-off the iMac's design. The second wave of iMac inspiration is arriving now with the so-called "legacy free" PC's. With their stylish casing, USB only expansion, and lack of floppy drives, etc they're obviously derived from the iMac original spirit.
The over-bloated Quicktime format?
I'd definetly NOT consider QuickTime to be bloated... Sorenson video is one of the most compact codec's available. Their player is without a doubt bloated, but that's hardly a file format. Anyone else can make a quicktime player, if they so desired.
They've got a GUI that's integrating Win95 features into it and call it innovating.
Windows 95 crudely stole from the Mac, so it's only fair that Apple take back some of the features that Microsoft actually got right, don't you think? Past that, I haven't played with OS X yet, so i can't say for sure, but from the screenshots and reviews I've read of it's interface, it's bringing an elegance that every other GUI is missing... Alpha channel support, anti-aliasing, etc... those aren't innovations, granted, but it's about time that they made their way into GUI's, since the average CPU spends so much of it's time idle anyways.
They've got this beautiful G4 processor that Motorola provided them, and the darn things still run slower than an equivalent PIII with NT on them.
I've never heard that one before. G4's simply blow "speedier" Pentiums from the water. I guess you haven't used a Mac recently, or else you'd know. But of course you haven't, since you hate them so much.
The one time lead in graphics processing is LONG gone due to some really great cards on the PC side.
Tell that to the pre-press industry. Where's the color management in Windows or Linux? Non existant. Where's it in the Mac? ColorSync.
The network stack sucks, and won't talk to anything other than other Macs on a LAN without glitchy 3rd party support. Until OS X hits the streets you sure wouldn't want to use one as a server
even when OS X hits the streets, you still won't want to use one as a server. Mac's are CONSUMER platforms. Yes, the innards will be based on unix, but that's all. The Mac is all about making computing easier for users, not serving up lots of web pages.
even OS X has to rely upon FreeBSD's inovations.
Which innovations are those? It doesn't use a BSD kernel, just a BSD personality on top of the Mach kernel. Besides which, I'd hardly consider BSD, Linux, or any other Unix variant to be an innovative platform. The reason they're so stable is because they DON'T innovate. Take that in the most positive sense that you can, slashdot:)
I've also noticed that these true inovations have come from a far more open platform than Apple.
Make up your mind. First you bash Apple for having a not-invented-here problem, then I point out that they have indeed transitioned to basically industry standard parts, and then you bash them for using those parts? That makes no sense.
My original question still stands. Why is it that the open source community continues to think so fondly of a truly closed source mind set? Can you get any more closed than Apple?
Even without being as open as you'd like them to be, Apple really does fuel the industry with ideas, which is why they're liked around here, I think. If it's colored cases, cool UI's, or taking advantage of new hardware, Apple provides a vision that no one else possesses. They might not have the right ethics for the community, but they have a heart that everyone still endears themselves to.
The only reason apple killed off the clones was because the clones quite simply were not doing anything to expand the market. After years of hearing "If only they'ed allow clones, the cloners could go after the market segments that apple can't reach", so they opened up, licensed a few cloners, and then sat back for a year and a half and watched them gobble up their core markets. Since they didn't have to pay any R&D, they could undercut Apple and decided that was the easiest way to make money.
Before then, during then, and since then, Apple continutes to be one of the most trully innovative companies around. In general, if you sit back and watch, where Apple goes, the rest of the industry follows within a year or so... Now if apple wasn't there, who'd take the lead? Microsoft? no. There aren't any other contenders.
And as for the not-invented here syndrom... witness PCI, SDRAM, IDE drives, AGP, USB, etc. About the only real difference between mac hardware and PC hardware is the CPU and the chipset.
Are you going to make an email petition? And how many of those email address from hotmail.com, netscape.net, excite.com, and the list goes on forever, are actually from one person apiece?
If i was someone that mattered (i'm not, though), i'd promtly delete any email that arrived in my box that stated, "These are the email addresses of people who agree with this". Yes, you could use real names, but it still comes down to if all you're going to do is sit at your computer and rattle off an email, how much effort do you expect your senator to make? as opposed to seeing you and 500 other people hustling down the street gathering support?
500 people will make the local news. 1000 will probably make national coverage. 10,000 signatures won't get anywhere though.
Besides which, it's a great excuse to get outside and away from the computer, don't you think?
Your music sounds like it could be decent but the recording of it just it aweful, I'm sorry.
Maybe if you tried to make some money off of it, you'd be more prepared to go into a studio and really lay it out. It sounds like you all just got into a room and set up a single microphone to pick up the entire thing. Not the right way to do it...
But how can you improve the process without spending money. And why would you want to spend the kind of money involved if you're not intending to get anything from it? Simple. You won't. Is that the world we get to look forward to? A world full of badly recorded garage acts that are making music for the sheer joy of making music versus a world full of people trying to make their living from their music and therefore investing a LOT more time, energy, and money to make it work?
They went belly up because they couldn't figure out where their systems could be applied. There was talk about making it so you could pay a few cents to read a news artical online, but that gave way to the advertiser supported internet we see now.
There was also the problem of traceability. People wanted to keep their transactions to themselves, but anonymous cybercash suffered from lots of security loopholes that (I don't think) were solved in any reasonable manner.
Micropayments would be good, given the fees associated with credit card transactions, but the most foreseeable thing right now is using your credit card to fund an account where the money is taken from... Which will get really old if you have to give your info to 50 different sites.
That's the ENTIRE POINT of what's been said. There are bands out there that can consistently put together a full CD's worth of quality material, they're just not promoted as much by the labels, if it all. When people talk about leveling the playing field, it's so that those bands can enjoy more exposure as well.
But if all you're after is what the labels give you, then you might as well forget about it. The internet will not increase the quality of any artists music. It'll only help more artists reach you.
If all you want is what you've already gotten, then there's nothing here for you.
DOS succeeded because, largely, it stayed compatible with it's predecessors (except when Microsoft wanted to break a competitors app)
OS/2 ran DOS and Windows apps just fine, to allow people to transition from Windows to it.
Windows succeeded because it allowed people to run multiple DOS apps while they were waiting for Windows apps to arrive
Windows 95 succeeded because it allowed people to run 3.1 apps while they waited for 32-bit apps to appear.
Ditto NT 4.0
Windows 2000 still runs Win 95 and Win NT apps as it waits for it's own apps to arrive.
Linux is based on Unix, which makes it basically backwards compatible in spirit with 20 years of Unix-ness.
About the only operating systems I can think of that have been introduced in a LONG time are the Palm OS (which doesn't count, since it's a completely different platform altogether) and BeOS (Witness how the BeOS is spreading like wildfire).
Among other things, the reason that Intel's platform has stayed popular for so long is because it's stayed compatible with users' devices and software.
Same for the Mac... Apple performed nearly seemless transitions in the moves from 68040 to PowerPC (less floating point dependant apps) and from NuBus to PCI...
Moral: If you want to keep your users, you need to stay compatible.
It's also worth noting that until June 30th, Microsoft Windows 2000 running SQL Server 2000 on a Compaq machine had taken the price/performance lead AND the sheer performance lead. Alas, I haven't read SPEC's rules yet, but their disqualified numbers are here.
Yes, I know... I found this out on the Register.
But it looks like IBM's toasted those disqualified numbers anyhow... cool!
It was all over the place last year in the news... The DOJ was coming down on them, they settled and agreed to change some of their practices and the DOJ dropped their suit. Do the research yourself. I'm not about to hunt through the quagmire of the web for it, but i know it exists... It's been referenced in recent Business Week (probably 2 monts old) issues as well, when BW was talking about how dumb Microsoft was for saying "neener neener" (that's a quote:) to the government, and then drawing comparissons to how Intel talked pretty hard until the last moment and then they gave in before going to court and risking being legally termed a "Monopoly".
As far as the end user is concerned, the Crusoe is just a low powered x86. Just as the Athlon and Pentium III's are x86 processors, when everything about them is different than the 386 that they decended from.
If someone ports linux to it....
Funny... they have Linus on staff, but they're not doing it. And it's not really possible, since they're not disclosing the chips native language to anybody.
And what makes you believe that dropping the power usage of the CPU from 6 watts (what intel's old portable Pentium's ran at) to 1 watt is going to miraculously give you 32 more hours of battery life? As has been recanted numerous times here, it's not the processor that eats up the battery as much as the hard drive and backlit display.
If Intel can get the power usage and price down to Crusoe levels, Transmeta's market will dry up. EVeryone's quite aware that the direction the industry is taking is towards portable, always on, internet connected devices. EVeryon includes Intel. They're not just going to look the other way as Transmeta tries to get it's foot hold into the next big market.
Except Transmeta's completely isolated from the market shakiness since they're a private company. Intel can put forth an offer, but they can't just buy up all the stock and take over the company unless they want to be bought./
It wouldn't be anti-competitive as long as they were in fact making money from the chips. At least that's how I understood it from the Microsoft trial. The moment that Intel starts selling it's mobile processors at a loss is when the government would step in.
Remember, intel made some concessions to the DOJ a year or year and a half back in order to NOT be found to be a monopoly (they were smart where Microsoft wasn't and actually backed down from the US government). That also affords them some leeway in how they chose to compete with Transmeta. Unlike Microsoft, again, Intel has some healthy competitors to point to (Via and AMD)...Ã
I've submitted it a few times but it's always rejected, but there's been lots of word on the web about Intel introducing it's own low power processors (1-2 watts, apparently) in the next month or two. Intel's not sitting still when seeing transmeta eye a segment of their market.
If their chips really do use as little power as the reports say, then there goes transmeta's major advantage. They'll be left to compete on price and performance. They might win the price battle, but currently, i'd expect intel to win the performance battle (i'd rather a 600 MHz Pentium III than a 700 MHz Crusoe, all other things being equal, which they WILL be soon).
with a few exceptions (007, Zelda64, etc)all N64 games are inherently boring. I'd say that 85% of N64 games have a play life of 1~2 weeks. I suppose that this is due to the low storage capacity of the cartridges.
Well, thanks to those exceptions, you've ruled out that the size of the cartridge has anything to do with the quality of the games... If one can do make a great game, anyone can make a great game, given the same constraints.
Maybe it's the game developers faults that their games are so lame?
Slashdot Mirror
Would people please stop comparing GIMP to Photoshop? Photoshop beats it in every aspect, hands down, with the exception of running through a web browser. But cooltext.com is far from a web based image editting application.
Photoshop is scriptable via applescript with the appropriate plug-ins. It has a thorough history tracking which you can save and saveable actions, so you can perform one task once and then apply that same task to 100 different files if you so desire. Saved actions will generate anything that the GIMP can, plus it will output Pantone and other spot colors, CMYK, etc etc etc.
I really think that GIMP enthusiasts should go to a design studio and watch a photoshop artist in action before trying to compare the two. The difference between the two is immense, and slashdot seems to remember photoshop 2.0 rather than 5.5
Well, so much for the posts I moderated upwards, so here goes:
Somebody BOUGHT the Metallica CD.
That person then ripped the mp3s.
They then logged on to the Napster system.
Presumably, they began downloading someone else's music.
And other people started downloading music from them. Not only that, but the music that they're downloading can generally be assumed to be from another user who, like them, bought the CD. Neither of them bought the rights to the music to redistribute it. Neither of them are giving royalties to the band. And Napster devised the system that allowed this to happen. That's why Napster's bad.
No money is being made by anyone in this system (unless a user burns a cd and then ILLEGALLY sells it)
No one's making money right now. But napsters a company. They're taking VC cash. Since no venture capitalist would just give away money, the only assumption that can be made is that Napsters told them of how they intend to make money. And since currently their primary/only business is in enabling people to share/swap/copy music, one can presume that's how they intend to make their money. Hence, Napster will be making money from the artists and labels investments of their time and money.
If drugs are smuggled onto an airplane, is it the airplane's fault or the person carrying the drugs?
Depends on the person and the plane. If the plane crosses the border every night below radar, then not only will the flyer of the plane get in trouble, but in all likelihood, the owner will be busted as well. At the very least, in the US, they'll immediately lose possession of the plane. And we're not talking little Cesna's here... Napsters basically the Jumbo Jet with ton's of hidden compartments compared to every other way in the world you could pirate music.
If you think music should be free, why don't you go out and make some for us and share it with the world??
IE exists for Windows 3.1 Windows 98, Windows NT (x86, Alpha, presumably MIPS and PowerPC as well), Windows 2000, Mac OS, Solaris , HP UX...
Without being a programmewas said at the trial., I'd say likelebhood is that IE relies on no features of Win32, but insteadell makes extnsive use of the features added by IE.
Why, specificeally won't TUX ever be able to run under FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or even Darwin/OS-X? The source is all available for those... Thouse of the GPL they'll never be able to SHIP with the module installed, developers could make patches for those OSes, could they not?
P'raps you're forgetting the Apple II compatibility cards that Apple made for the Mac LC series?
That for coexistance, since they were both marketed at the educational market. They (Apple) knew the Apple II was on it's way out, but schools weren't biting on the LC because their software wouldn't work on the newer machines, so apple fashioned up a card for them.
Bullhonkies. The slowest PowerPC machine (I own one) ran 68K code in emulation about as fast as the next-to-top-of-the-line machine that it replaced. PowerMac 6100 (60 MHz PPC 601) ran 68K code about as fast as the Quadra 610, a 25 MHz 68040. The only folks who would have found a slowdown were those who upgraded 6 month old machines like a Quadra 840/AV (33 MHz 68040) to the PowerPCs.
Nope. If you looked at the old Speedometer results, the first time a PowerPC based machine eclipsed the speed of the 840AV (which incedentally was 40 MHz, not 33), was with the arrival of the 8500/120 and 9500/120 - 132. Prior to that, the 840 AV was the speed champ when running 68k applications. The 6100 could soundly beat a IIfx, but even a Quadra 605 beat it when running, again, 68k apps. I remember switching back and forth from 6100 to 650 in those days....
Sigh. More half-truths. Apple did not write the 68K emulator to emulate the floating-point hardware, that is true. Apple's programmer guidelines were to use SANE (Standard Apple Numeric Environment) calls -- which were PowerPC native the first time out. So well-written, floating-point intensive 68K software got a big performance boost when running on PowerPC.
Tons of Adobe Photoshop plug-ins where written to access the FPU directly, and hence crashed the computer. Infini-D and Strata Studio Pro did too... Illustrator and Freehand also had some problem with a few of their standard plug ins. And there was a non-native version of dimensions that didn't need an FPU which ran remarkably slower than the same version of the program that did use the FPU when on 040's... The Power Mac's could only run the hobbled version of that, too...
That's my version of the history that i experienced... You may have fared better... I was just trying to say that Apple's undertaken much larger transitions in the past than dropping SCSI and serial ports... You might groan for a little while, but once everyone catches up, every transition that I can think that they've done has paid off big time.
The 1st amendment shouldnt come to mind. It only gaurentees that the government will not tell people what they can and cannot say or refuse them the right/ability to say it. This is a matter of one company and another company. Nowhere is the government involved, so the 1st amendment doesn't apply.
Kind of like laws against (i know, the obvious) yelling fired in a crowded theatre, as well as laws against false advertising, slander, libel, verbal assault, threats, etc... Should all of those be protected under the first amendment as well?
Oh yeah... and shouldn't spam be a 1st ammendment issue for that matter? People jump to defend the 1st amemdment until it lands them with an extra 5 messages on their hard drive and then they say it's trespassing, or what not.
I don't know where I"m going with this anymore, so i'll stop.
Go compare prices for a new computer.
Yep. Mac's cost more. it's a matter of economies of scale... More than that, Mercedes cost more than Fords which cost more than Yugos... which would you rather have?
Go look at the software available.
Hmmmm.... Quicken, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, QuickTime, Dreamweaver, Premiere, Fireworks, Flash, Director...
It almost looks like the wish list of software that the Linux community would like to see ported to it. Windows may have 500 million times more programs available for it than any other platform, but so many of them are crap that it doesn't matter.
Go try and program in OS X.
That's kind of hard being that OS X isn't even completed yet. Yeah, you can program on Linux while it's being developed, but OS X is a MUCH larger undertaking Linux... They're simultateoulsy developing a kernel, file system, compatibiltiy layer, user interface... I'd rather wait til it's done.
Go try to run software with a single button mouse.
Why don't you? I do all day long and it's really not that hard. You point. You click. You type something. Oh, you want a pop up menu? Hold the control key and there it is. The only reason that *nix users feel like a mac's useless because it only has one mouse button is because their software is designed for three buttons. If the developers had specced out the programs to make use of only one mouse button, you really would not have lost that much, if anything.
Aside from the Apple II/III to the Macintosh change there has been nothing as extreme from the beige to the see through change in hardware compatibility.
There was no transition from the Apple II to the Macintosh. They were two completely distinct product lines that coexisted for quite a long time together.
Remember the 68040 to PowerPC changeover? A LOT of people upgraded their machines only to find their non-native software running much slower than it had previously. And applications that needed access to the floating point unit wouldn't run at all. That's a pretty drastic change. If you've forgotten about that, then that means that in the end they managed the transition very smoothly.
NuBus to PCI was also pretty painful for the video editting crowd. There they were screwed for a while, craving faster machines but being stuck with the much slower ones simply because the cards they needed were't available in PCI form factors, or they were but required a huge investment all over again. But most everyone I talked to back then was eager to see PCI versions of their cards and took everything in stride. These were people with $20,000+ Avid systems to $2000 Radius Video Vision or Targa 2000 cards...
They managed fine, but your ISDN and scanner prevent you from buying their machines...
The ISDN modem died because serial ports went away... Though there are USB to Serial adapeters which could have saved your modem.
Likewise SCSI dropped out as well, but for things like scanners, a USB to SCSI adapter could still save that as well.
What Apple did was an incredibly gutsy move than only some of the PC market are trying to do, walk away from legacy connections. Apple did a great job at it, i don't know why you're complaining. Just leave the scanner attatched to the computer it was plugged into before, ore else buy one of those cheap USB scanners. It's not like you bought the computer thinking it would support your peripherals only to find it wouldn't.
Regardless of all that, I can't fathom your stance of "i won't buy a new mac until OS X is out." Does that mean they won't be a "bully" once OS X arrives? Nor will OS X revive your ISDN modem or scanner. But you'll let them off the hook and buy their hardware once they produce the software you want? Makes no sense... and granted I'm an apple fan and i still can't figure out the logic....
Unfullfilled rumors in the Mac world???
:) Just wanted to point out that Apples always had the rumormills running around them. And that's good, if you consider that any publicity is good publicity... Apple just got a story on Slashdot today for no other reason than a 3 year old unsubstantiated rumor.
How about the 10 year+ one that Apple had System 7 running on 486 hardware?
Or that Sun was going to buy them out? (I think that one was earlier than the Disney rumors)
Or that Oracle was going to buy them out?
Or Copland/Gershwin (Apple's previous aborted efforts at modernizing the Mac) (Yes, those were supplanted by OS X, but they stayed on their copland strategy for quite a long time)
I could fill up this page with defunct Apple rumors, but i won't
Hmmm... Apple branded Palms with Newton hardwriting??? Sorry to say, I think I've finally gotten Grafiti engrained in my head... So unless it can help me write a LOT faster, i'd just assume stick with the stock Palm handwriting engine...
Actually, Steve Jobs is in no way a computer guy in terms of what you see at slashdot. He's a showman and entertainer, though so far he's found his niche in the computer industry, that doesn't preclude him from wanting to go elsewhere. Why would he want to chair disney? Well, he chairs Apple and Pixar, and Disney really isn't that far a leap from where he's at with Pixar right now.
If these rumors are true (which i can't see... why would Disney want to buy apple now that they've completed their "recovery"? Theye'd have to pay $1.25-$1.50 on the $1.00 in order for it to make sense for the shareholders, and at the price that Apple's at these days, that'd end up being what? $30 billion. Nevermind that 2 years ago they were worth around $2 billion. To reiterate, now is not the time to buy apple.
Yes, Jobs would love to run Disney (according to what I've read, esepcaially telling is Gil Amelio's final pages in his "700 days at apple book" where he issues a warning to Michael Eisener (That's the right name, right?) to beware if Steve Jobs ever sets his sites on running Disney.
The only problem is that it makes no sense for Disney to buy Apple. Pixar, yes. Apple, no. And if they can't be unwoven, that's going to be an aweful lot to spend in order to get a new CEO/Chariman.
How is it "insightful" that AMD's evil because they sell a chip that consumers want to buy??? And encouraging people to swap archicectures to machines that cost 100%-500% MORE than equivalent x86 machines? It's not like those chips make any bit of difference in the consumers mind.
Any company that walks away from the x86 processor business is a dumb company. That'd be like leaving money on the table. Buckets full of money. And x86 is really the only market to be in right now... hmmm? Should i go after 10% of a 100 million units a year or 50% of 5 million units??? Which way does the math work best?
Your right, the clones were faster, cheaper, and Apple couldn't compete with them. In an open field, Apple can't compete. Instead they used their monopoly powers over that platform to stifle competitors to the point of bankruptcy. For Microsoft this would be considered illegal, but for Apple this is innovating!
:)
I think we're stuck on this one. Of course, anyone can take a design that Apple made and do it cheaper, because they don't need to pay all the money that goes into Apple's R&D budget. If those companies had to actually go through all the steps that apple did in the first place, and finance it, they would have lost their "cheaper" advantage quickly.
As far as faster goes, yes they were faster, too. Apple's flaw in that category was that they were much bigger than the cloners and had suffered numerous supply shortages. Since the cloners had smaller markets, they could bring out faster systems than apple because they weren't expected to be able to satisfy the entire demand.
Okay, so what was the last major innovation to come out of Apple? The over-bloated Quicktime format? See thru cases? What exactly have they innovated in the last 5 years? They did do up a spec for Firewire, then demanded licensing fees that pretty much assured little in the way of industry support.
Like them or not, Apple was the one that introduced people to the idea that computers didn't need to be big boxes hidden under desks. Most of slashdot thinks it's absurd that anyone would want a colored computer, but the rest of the world obviously didn't. Witness the rush to knock-off the iMac's design. The second wave of iMac inspiration is arriving now with the so-called "legacy free" PC's. With their stylish casing, USB only expansion, and lack of floppy drives, etc they're obviously derived from the iMac original spirit.
The over-bloated Quicktime format?
I'd definetly NOT consider QuickTime to be bloated... Sorenson video is one of the most compact codec's available. Their player is without a doubt bloated, but that's hardly a file format. Anyone else can make a quicktime player, if they so desired.
They've got a GUI that's integrating Win95 features into it and call it innovating.
Windows 95 crudely stole from the Mac, so it's only fair that Apple take back some of the features that Microsoft actually got right, don't you think? Past that, I haven't played with OS X yet, so i can't say for sure, but from the screenshots and reviews I've read of it's interface, it's bringing an elegance that every other GUI is missing... Alpha channel support, anti-aliasing, etc... those aren't innovations, granted, but it's about time that they made their way into GUI's, since the average CPU spends so much of it's time idle anyways.
They've got this beautiful G4 processor that
Motorola provided them, and the darn things still run slower than an equivalent PIII with NT on them.
I've never heard that one before. G4's simply blow "speedier" Pentiums from the water. I guess you haven't used a Mac recently, or else you'd know. But of course you haven't, since you hate them so much.
The one time lead in graphics processing is LONG gone due to some really great cards on the PC side.
Tell that to the pre-press industry. Where's the color management in Windows or Linux? Non existant. Where's it in the Mac? ColorSync.
The network stack sucks, and won't talk to anything other than other Macs on a LAN without glitchy 3rd party support. Until OS X hits the streets you sure wouldn't want to use one as a server
even when OS X hits the streets, you still won't want to use one as a server. Mac's are CONSUMER platforms. Yes, the innards will be based on unix, but that's all. The Mac is all about making computing easier for users, not serving up lots of web pages.
even OS X has to rely upon FreeBSD's inovations.
Which innovations are those? It doesn't use a BSD kernel, just a BSD personality on top of the Mach kernel. Besides which, I'd hardly consider BSD, Linux, or any other Unix variant to be an innovative platform. The reason they're so stable is because they DON'T innovate. Take that in the most positive sense that you can, slashdot
I've also noticed that these true inovations have come from a far more open platform than Apple.
Make up your mind. First you bash Apple for having a not-invented-here problem, then I point out that they have indeed transitioned to basically industry standard parts, and then you bash them for using those parts? That makes no sense.
My original question still stands. Why is it that the open source community continues to think so fondly of a truly closed source mind set? Can you get any more closed than Apple?
Even without being as open as you'd like them to be, Apple really does fuel the industry with ideas, which is why they're liked around here, I think. If it's colored cases, cool UI's, or taking advantage of new hardware, Apple provides a vision that no one else possesses. They might not have the right ethics for the community, but they have a heart that everyone still endears themselves to.
Your comments seem to be outdated by quite a bit.
The only reason apple killed off the clones was because the clones quite simply were not doing anything to expand the market. After years of hearing "If only they'ed allow clones, the cloners could go after the market segments that apple can't reach", so they opened up, licensed a few cloners, and then sat back for a year and a half and watched them gobble up their core markets. Since they didn't have to pay any R&D, they could undercut Apple and decided that was the easiest way to make money.
Before then, during then, and since then, Apple continutes to be one of the most trully innovative companies around. In general, if you sit back and watch, where Apple goes, the rest of the industry follows within a year or so... Now if apple wasn't there, who'd take the lead? Microsoft? no. There aren't any other contenders.
And as for the not-invented here syndrom... witness PCI, SDRAM, IDE drives, AGP, USB, etc. About the only real difference between mac hardware and PC hardware is the CPU and the chipset.
Are you going to make an email petition? And how many of those email address from hotmail.com, netscape.net, excite.com, and the list goes on forever, are actually from one person apiece?
If i was someone that mattered (i'm not, though), i'd promtly delete any email that arrived in my box that stated, "These are the email addresses of people who agree with this". Yes, you could use real names, but it still comes down to if all you're going to do is sit at your computer and rattle off an email, how much effort do you expect your senator to make? as opposed to seeing you and 500 other people hustling down the street gathering support?
500 people will make the local news. 1000 will probably make national coverage. 10,000 signatures won't get anywhere though.
Besides which, it's a great excuse to get outside and away from the computer, don't you think?
Your music sounds like it could be decent but the recording of it just it aweful, I'm sorry.
Maybe if you tried to make some money off of it, you'd be more prepared to go into a studio and really lay it out. It sounds like you all just got into a room and set up a single microphone to pick up the entire thing. Not the right way to do it...
But how can you improve the process without spending money. And why would you want to spend the kind of money involved if you're not intending to get anything from it? Simple. You won't. Is that the world we get to look forward to? A world full of badly recorded garage acts that are making music for the sheer joy of making music versus a world full of people trying to make their living from their music and therefore investing a LOT more time, energy, and money to make it work?
I'd take the later, myself.
They went belly up because they couldn't figure out where their systems could be applied. There was talk about making it so you could pay a few cents to read a news artical online, but that gave way to the advertiser supported internet we see now.
There was also the problem of traceability. People wanted to keep their transactions to themselves, but anonymous cybercash suffered from lots of security loopholes that (I don't think) were solved in any reasonable manner.
Micropayments would be good, given the fees associated with credit card transactions, but the most foreseeable thing right now is using your credit card to fund an account where the money is taken from... Which will get really old if you have to give your info to 50 different sites.
That's the ENTIRE POINT of what's been said. There are bands out there that can consistently put together a full CD's worth of quality material, they're just not promoted as much by the labels, if it all. When people talk about leveling the playing field, it's so that those bands can enjoy more exposure as well.
But if all you're after is what the labels give you, then you might as well forget about it. The internet will not increase the quality of any artists music. It'll only help more artists reach you.
If all you want is what you've already gotten, then there's nothing here for you.
Because people might want to use it, that's why.
DOS succeeded because, largely, it stayed compatible with it's predecessors (except when Microsoft wanted to break a competitors app)
OS/2 ran DOS and Windows apps just fine, to allow people to transition from Windows to it.
Windows succeeded because it allowed people to run multiple DOS apps while they were waiting for Windows apps to arrive
Windows 95 succeeded because it allowed people to run 3.1 apps while they waited for 32-bit apps to appear.
Ditto NT 4.0
Windows 2000 still runs Win 95 and Win NT apps as it waits for it's own apps to arrive.
Linux is based on Unix, which makes it basically backwards compatible in spirit with 20 years of Unix-ness.
About the only operating systems I can think of that have been introduced in a LONG time are the Palm OS (which doesn't count, since it's a completely different platform altogether) and BeOS (Witness how the BeOS is spreading like wildfire).
Among other things, the reason that Intel's platform has stayed popular for so long is because it's stayed compatible with users' devices and software.
Same for the Mac... Apple performed nearly seemless transitions in the moves from 68040 to PowerPC (less floating point dependant apps) and from NuBus to PCI...
Moral: If you want to keep your users, you need to stay compatible.
It's also worth noting that until June 30th, Microsoft Windows 2000 running SQL Server 2000 on a Compaq machine had taken the price/performance lead AND the sheer performance lead. Alas, I haven't read SPEC's rules yet, but their disqualified numbers are here.
Yes, I know... I found this out on the Register.
But it looks like IBM's toasted those disqualified numbers anyhow... cool!
It was all over the place last year in the news... The DOJ was coming down on them, they settled and agreed to change some of their practices and the DOJ dropped their suit. Do the research yourself. I'm not about to hunt through the quagmire of the web for it, but i know it exists... It's been referenced in recent Business Week (probably 2 monts old) issues as well, when BW was talking about how dumb Microsoft was for saying "neener neener" (that's a quote :) to the government, and then drawing comparissons to how Intel talked pretty hard until the last moment and then they gave in before going to court and risking being legally termed a "Monopoly".
As far as the end user is concerned, the Crusoe is just a low powered x86. Just as the Athlon and Pentium III's are x86 processors, when everything about them is different than the 386 that they decended from.
If someone ports linux to it....
Funny... they have Linus on staff, but they're not doing it. And it's not really possible, since they're not disclosing the chips native language to anybody.
And what makes you believe that dropping the power usage of the CPU from 6 watts (what intel's old portable Pentium's ran at) to 1 watt is going to miraculously give you 32 more hours of battery life? As has been recanted numerous times here, it's not the processor that eats up the battery as much as the hard drive and backlit display.
If Intel can get the power usage and price down to Crusoe levels, Transmeta's market will dry up. EVeryone's quite aware that the direction the industry is taking is towards portable, always on, internet connected devices. EVeryon includes Intel. They're not just going to look the other way as Transmeta tries to get it's foot hold into the next big market.
Except Transmeta's completely isolated from the market shakiness since they're a private company. Intel can put forth an offer, but they can't just buy up all the stock and take over the company unless they want to be bought./
It wouldn't be anti-competitive as long as they were in fact making money from the chips. At least that's how I understood it from the Microsoft trial. The moment that Intel starts selling it's mobile processors at a loss is when the government would step in.
Remember, intel made some concessions to the DOJ a year or year and a half back in order to NOT be found to be a monopoly (they were smart where Microsoft wasn't and actually backed down from the US government). That also affords them some leeway in how they chose to compete with Transmeta. Unlike Microsoft, again, Intel has some healthy competitors to point to (Via and AMD)...Ã
I've submitted it a few times but it's always rejected, but there's been lots of word on the web about Intel introducing it's own low power processors (1-2 watts, apparently) in the next month or two. Intel's not sitting still when seeing transmeta eye a segment of their market.
If their chips really do use as little power as the reports say, then there goes transmeta's major advantage. They'll be left to compete on price and performance. They might win the price battle, but currently, i'd expect intel to win the performance battle (i'd rather a 600 MHz Pentium III than a 700 MHz Crusoe, all other things being equal, which they WILL be soon).
with a few exceptions (007, Zelda64, etc)all N64 games are inherently boring. I'd say that 85% of N64 games have a play life of 1~2 weeks. I suppose that this is due to the low storage capacity of the cartridges.
Well, thanks to those exceptions, you've ruled out that the size of the cartridge has anything to do with the quality of the games... If one can do make a great game, anyone can make a great game, given the same constraints.
Maybe it's the game developers faults that their games are so lame?