So far as I've understood it (I'll go looking for URL's if you insist!) public key crypto (RSA, in particular) is at best only as strong as symetric keys of 1/10th the length (due to using only prime numbers)... Therefore, 512 bit RSA is roughly equivilant to 56-bit DES, which has been breakable (theoretically) for a while now.
Don't be fooled by RSA's huge key sizes in thinking that it's impervious to attack. 128 bit symetric crypto is for now, and in the distant future, considered unbreakable. A 128 bit public key would be breakable by me & my pocket calculator (exageration! actually, no, it isn't;)...
It disturbs me when articles mention the strengths of the encryption of various products, methods, or algorithms, without mentioning the basic differences between them.
Yes, I have heard of them all. I was quite a fan of the BeOS, as a matter of fact. I do think that the wisest move they made was moving to Intel, even if their hand was forced. Since they sell an OS and not a system, Intel is the place for them, simply due to the economies of scale.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD (and anyother's i'm forgetting, BSD or otherwise) exist for the Mac, but that's not where they flourish (I know, Apple is using NetBSD as part of the basis of OS-X). They don't have the developer mindshare needed to support any other OS's.
How would you react, if Apple said, we're completely opening the Mac platform? Cool right? How about all the times they've recanted their plans and promises? That doesn't inspire my confidence to develop on a platform which may be pulled out from under me, or simply abandoned on their part.
As for Linux ever competing with the Mac? We're so far away from that happening. Linux is (in my eyes) geared for developers and variety of different servers. The extreme power user can switch to it right now as well, but the mainstream "windows" audience will be completely lost on it. Mac people don't care about the innards of their computer or the factors at play in how things operate. They simply want a machine to do what they want it to do. Linux is currently light years from this goal. Okay, not light years, but at LEAST 5 years, in my eyes. It's not even a Linux issue so much as a KDE, Gnome, or whatever other GUI becomes popular...
I'm too lazy to check, but i think i was the original poster of this thread...
But it is entirely possible to innovate. The mere fact that it hasn't been done all that much lately doesn't mean that, should Apple die, it would never happen again, as the original poster implied.
True, SGI has had colored boxes for quite some time... But i wouldn't necesarily call them "Mainstream"... Let's face it, aside from Apple, no ones really differentiated their machines with any success... They only differntiat based on price. And given the iMac's popularity, I'd have to say that apparently some people do care for how their computers look. If you just care about what's inside the box, an iMac is quite a rip-off... There's more to it though.
And just because it's possible to innovate, I'd really like to see some real innovation prior to Apple going under (which I don't at all think will happen! but some people seem to instist that they will...)
Because they might sell more hardware to people with no interest in MacOS, but a good bit of interest in the fact that, as of late, the hardware on some of the Macs has been pretty nice. I would never buy a Mac if I could only run MacOS. OTOH, I might consider one if Linux also runs (and I had extra cash burning a hole in my pocket).
Apple isn't a hardware vendor. They're not saying here's the hardware, go do whatever you want with it. They're a systems vendor. Their systems are Mac OS systems. That's what they sell.
I don't think that they would add barely any sales by opening their platforms for others to use because of peoples pre-concieved notion of Apple. Using the iMac as a base unit, and figuring that they make a 10% profit on each machine sold, that's about $120 dollars per machine. If people had the option of buying one without an OS, they'ed probably expect a discout. Figuring a $60 dollar discount, that's now $60 per machine that they're earning. If 10,000 Linux or Be people buy these machines, that's an extra $600,000 in sales. That's a drop in the bucket, for them, for anyone (besides me, of course! What could I do with $600,000, i wonder?:)
You can still get much more of a machine buy buying Wintel. Or you can get a much more powerful machine by buying Alpha or Sparc. PowerPC doesn't fill in any real demand. Therefore, I don't really see what IBM hopes to accomplish by doing this. It is pretty nice of them, and all... But I can't see what the end result will be.
I really wish that articles that get displayed in the mainstream press such as this, would take the paragraph or two to remind people of the difference between the different types of encryption.
And if i got it straight, it implied that the machine could break a key in *two days*... So, given MS Excels limitations, and me not wanting to attempt to type in exponents, it would seem to me that a 546 bit RSA key would be breakable within only 94,136,269.5 years... YIKES... I'm scared.
But then, for only;) $3,435,973,837 dollars, you could get it back to the 2 day range. And that's only 546 bits... who's using that?!? So everyone is using 1024 bit encryption, we can feel safe to say that until the day arrives where the Fed decides to up our taxes to the 99.9999% range, we're safe...
Even then, it'd be several milleniums before they aquired the wealth needed to be able purchase enough of these machines to do the job... And they'ed probably fill up all of Rhode Island!
Just because this machine has the possiblity of rendering 512 bit RSA keys obsolete, it in no way endangers the 128 bit encryption of web browsers/servers (So long as they initiate the key exchange with "at least" 768 bits...)
However, I still don't understand why anyone would use weaker encryption than the strongest available. Such as, recommending 2048-bit PGP keys rather than 4096 bits? If you're taking the time to encrypt your data, surely you can spare a few extra minutes a day to be sure that your data will be safe for an extra 20 years (and that 20 year figure is quite generous!)... Instead, I always see people go "Oh, 512 bits is breakable? Time to change my key to 1024 bits"... Computers are powerful enough these days where you shouldn't need to settle for less than the strongest available.
It seems ludicrious to encrypt data with weaker encryption, most of the time, and stronger encryption only when it's sensitive information. Just by doing that, you're flagging that information as the data that's actually important.
Aside from X, which I'm really fond of for it's ability to display across a network, the only real GUI innovation that the world has seen since the Mac popularized the concept of it has been the, ahem, integration of IE in Windows... Past that, everyone basically uses the "Folder" metaphor... Or, at least everyone with a somewhat mainstream UI... I haven't ever used Gnome, but KDE seems to be a much better implentation of what Microsoft was trying to do.
And who but Apple had the guts to color their boxes? No one. Every trade magazine ragged on Apple to end when the iMac first appeared... now you have Future Power and eMachines knocking of the basic idea of the iMac saying it was an evolutionary step... too bad they can't even think of original colors!
Next: Why in the world should apple care if another OS runs on their hardware. People who buy Mac's get Mac's. If you don't want a mac, don't buy one. Yes, other people have ported OS's to the Mac platform, but aside from Be, they've been second tier products. Show me an Oracle binary i can download that runs on LinuxPPC, and i'll change my tune... If you want to run a Unix (aside from Mac OS X), you really don't want to buy a Mac... I've heard that shortly you'll be able to buy a brand new Alpha System for less than $2000... that's money much better spent!
And Lastly: AGP... With all it was hyped up to be, I'm quite disappointed to see AGP being used as a replacement PCI slot. Intel could have just pushed 64 bit PCI and then we'd all have interchangable slots... Now, you've got 5 PCI slots, if you're lucky, 2 ISA slots, plus an AGP...
I wish i could find a motherboard with 7 PCI slots, 2 CPU slots, keyboard and mouse controller, and no other integrated peripherals
Linux really needs to sit still on a couple platforms, lest it become another Java: "Write once, debug everywhere"... Dare I say, maybe even pair down a little?
If PPC can better the performance of Alpha (NOT likely), then it could take the place at the high end... but you need x86, because that's the cheap, commodity hardware, and that's also where most people start trying out Linux...
PowerPC's are much much cheaper than x86 chips... they're so much smaller that more fit on the wafer and therefore you get more chips per run...
Apple pads their prices a bit, because if they only sold hardware at cost +15% that'd kill off all future development in terms of the OS or anything else... QuickTime, FireWire, etc etc etc...
So, I'd expect that if volume gets pushed up, you'll eventually be able to find these boards, with CPU at equal or lower prices than the Intel equivilants... Or maybe that's just wishful thinking?
Linux is in no way shape or form a source of competition for apple. Linux may run on Macs, but 99.9% of the people who buy Macs are not even remotely interested in Linux. Or maybe they are, til they see a command line, or a foreign GUI, and then they go, oh, that's what all the fuss is about, and switch back to MacOs and go about their way.
When Linux starts displacing Win 9x on the desktop, that'll be time that Apple says to themselves, hmmm... should we start to worry now? Until then...
If Apple goes down, we'll be forever doomed to beige boxes and the current UI's we see on all platforms. Apple doesn't abide by standards? They're incorporating more and more standard hardware into their models with each release. And since the only OS you can run on a Mac is the MacOS (and Linux) who cares? Everything works (PCI, PnP, USB)...
AGP? AGP's useless on PeeCee's... all it did was take the graphics off the main PCI bus... Why isn't AGP using system memory, instead you now buy AGP boards with 32 Megs of RAM on them...
Top Speed 333 MHz... don't bash ANYTHING unless you know enough about it that it's justified. For instance, Apple ships Mac's with 450 MHz processors on 100 MHz system busses... with 3 64-bit PCI slots, and 1 32-bit 66 MHz PCI slot.
You have a license for *one* machine... Just as you're not supposed to take one copy of MS office and install it across your organization. So the theory would be that you'd have to decomission the old mac, yet hold on to it as your "proof of purchase."... I some how doubt apple would mind if the only way you could legally run MacOS on 3rd party PPC hardware was to first purchase an iMac with which you could transfer the license from.
MS Was awarded a patent relating to stylesheets... I don't know if it's clear that it completely encompasses CSS, and i don't think anyone has challenged them, beyond just asking for clarification on where they stand in relation to legal issues they could impose.
Just because it's avaible (for both the Mac & Linux) lends little to the argument. Developers won't use it until they can depend on it being included with the OS. Unless they want to license a version from someone, in which there maybe 4 or 5 different providers who all have slightly different implentations of it, and therefore you'll end up with several different versions of software that provides nearly identical functionality.
I'm not trying to bash anyone here, I'm just saying that we'll see a lot more 3D development once at least Redhat (which happens to seem to be the most popular distro) includes OpenGL as an option in it's installer.
But then you'll see Apps with requirements of Redhat Linux 6.x rather than just saying that they're for "Linux". And you may have to endure downloading the software from another site est the licence includes verbage to the effect that you can't distribute the software with something that you money for.
I don't believe that Redhat 5.2 (the distro i use) included it? If it did, i'm wrong... If it didn't and the newer distro's don't either, then that's what'll hold linux back.
Just because it's available for the OS doesn't mean that it's standard equipment, and that's what is required. Otherwise you'll see SGI with one version, Redhat with another, Caldera with a 3rd, all saying that their versions are somewhat superior to the others...
Ummm it's not the OS per se, just the services it provides...
The MacOS has long had a "WYSIWYG" interface along with, more recently, color management. Hense the reason that it's still the favored platform for graphic designers, even though most if not all the apps are also available on Win32.
It does not, however, include OpenGL... Instead, it's been using Quickdraw 3d, and therefore there aren't as many High-End apps available (yes, lightwave, electric image, and formz exist, but what about the others?)
Win NT does not have color management integrated with the OS. It does have Open GL, which makes it much easier to port Unix 3d Apps...
Linux, does not have OpenGL. It doesn't even have a standard GUI (past X)... This makes it much more difficult to port applications, or else will create immensely bloated applications, as each vendor includes OpenGL functionality rather than using what is already available within the OS, which in Linux's case is nothing.
Then you have Be and their "pervasive" multithreading, therefore makes it a good choice for video apps where nearly uncompressed video is streaming to and from the HD while the OS processes other tasks...
i could go on and on, but i've got work to do! Moral to this story is that the OS is at least as important as the hardware it runs on
Except Microsoft owns 10 or 15% of Avid... Since that happened, Avid's completely pulled away from the Mac. And it's either Avid or Targa who signed a deal with MSFT which prohibeted them from using QuickTime. It became to difficult to separate the functions of the hardware, so it was later determined that they could use QuickTime only if by the time the data made it to the hard drive it was AVI. Don't ask me for sources - it's been too long for me to remember where i read this...
The way you say that makes me shudder. I hope Linux can live up to everything SGI wants it to do... Otherwise we'll lose a great company (granted it's in rough shape right now). They, and every company, should have contigency plans... Looks like that went out the window.
Mac's are great for graphics. NT Workstation is damn good for low & midrange 3D... It's got OpenGL, multithreading, multiprocessors, and a huge assortment of software. Linux, as of this moment, can not match NT in this category... I hope in 6 months to a year that they can. That seams realistic given SGI's influence.
Ummm... Merced's going to be much more expensive than Alpha systems. Look at the Xeon.. Surely you can buy an Alpha for a nominal price above that and have a much faster workstation on your hands. And unless i'm mistaken, Merced's going to be positioned above Xeon for the forseeable future.
You can watch them rise, but actually buy them? No. You've got to be on the trading floor in order to get them as they're coming out...
The day EBAY went public, i put in a buy order at exactly 9:15AM... it went through around 3pm at ___ (I forgot the amount, but basically, it's peak for the day). The next week was hard, in that it dropped and didn't make up the value for at least 10 days...
So if you want to wait for (any) IPO to bounce back up, fine, but then you've got BE, MP3.com barely breaking even (if not being below their IPO price) after 2 weeks, countless others that never quite resurface.
All you hear about in the news are the IPO's that skyrocket. There's also quite a few that tank. Redhat probably won't be one of them because there's so much demand from the user community, most of whom *WILL* try to buy it the moment they go public.
The way the markets been going recently (down!) I wouldn't be suprised if RHAT and whomever else plans to go public postpone their decisions.
DO NOT BUY on the day of the IPO... Only if you have the "letter" should you own any shares that day. If you're buying through an online brokerage, you're not going to be able to get the shares until they've already hit their peak. At which point you can just watch them plumet as the market floods with shares from everyone cashing in. If you must buy it, wait a few weeks, and it'll have stabilized...
SGI has a lot more to contribute to the computing world than a few extra functions for linux. They're kind of like Apple in that respect. Even if you don't use their computers, their innovations are felt around the industry. Witness OpenGL, for one.
If SGI trully does die off, who'll take over the leading edge of graphics? I may be wrong, but it doesn't seem at all that anyone besides SGI (OpenGL) and Apple (QuickTime) have really contributed such radical thoughts to this market segment. Other companies just reimplement their idea's in less graceful ways (Direct3D, ActiveMovie) or simply boost the clock rate...
Same as if Apple had died, if SGI dies, we'll all feel the pain, eventually.
If the documents are destined to be printed, PDF's the way to go. You can then refer to page breaks and even line breaks when discussing them ("For instance, on page 19 in the middle of the 8th line..."). That's not possible with HTML, nor ASCII, nor MS Word, etc... Word's not available on all platforms, and the mathematical fonts used will vary from platform to platform. HTML varies way too much depending on fonts, platform, printer, Text is text - no styling, no typography (subscripts, super scripts, mathmatical symbols)...
Really, the main issue is fonts - mathematical symbols that either won't exist or will have different mappings dependant on platform
That leaves PDF... There's free tools available toeate PDF files, so it's not like you need to spend extra money or anything.
At present rates, in 3 years we'll be seeing 1.5 - 2 GHz chips. Being able to OC a chip from 500 to 600 MHz will be just about useless. That's not really the argument to use... It's what you want to do NOW that matters...
Re:OC'ing... Why is the clock multiplier locked ?
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Well, being that they've been taking a loss with all their other CPU's which basically matched intels performance, (due to production glitches, among other things) there's a reason to try to make the money back at the high end. If you can make due with a 500 MHz part, that's great. Most people can. If you absolutely gotta have the most powerful x86 CPU around, possibly excluding the Xeon), then you'll need to pay a permium...
As for locking the clock mult... That is lame. You should be able to buy any processor, knowing that it's rated to work at that given speed, but if you know and want to take the "risk" of overclocking, that should be your own business... I know - that discussion has taken place a multitude of times already.
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So far as I've understood it (I'll go looking for URL's if you insist!) public key crypto (RSA, in particular) is at best only as strong as symetric keys of 1/10th the length (due to using only prime numbers)... Therefore, 512 bit RSA is roughly equivilant to 56-bit DES, which has been breakable (theoretically) for a while now.
;)...
Don't be fooled by RSA's huge key sizes in thinking that it's impervious to attack. 128 bit symetric crypto is for now, and in the distant future, considered unbreakable. A 128 bit public key would be breakable by me & my pocket calculator (exageration! actually, no, it isn't
It disturbs me when articles mention the strengths of the encryption of various products, methods, or algorithms, without mentioning the basic differences between them.
Yes, I have heard of them all. I was quite a fan of the BeOS, as a matter of fact. I do think that the wisest move they made was moving to Intel, even if their hand was forced. Since they sell an OS and not a system, Intel is the place for them, simply due to the economies of scale.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD (and anyother's i'm forgetting, BSD or otherwise) exist for the Mac, but that's not where they flourish (I know, Apple is using NetBSD as part of the basis of OS-X). They don't have the developer mindshare needed to support any other OS's.
How would you react, if Apple said, we're completely opening the Mac platform? Cool right? How about all the times they've recanted their plans and promises? That doesn't inspire my confidence to develop on a platform which may be pulled out from under me, or simply abandoned on their part.
As for Linux ever competing with the Mac? We're so far away from that happening. Linux is (in my eyes) geared for developers and variety of different servers. The extreme power user can switch to it right now as well, but the mainstream "windows" audience will be completely lost on it. Mac people don't care about the innards of their computer or the factors at play in how things operate. They simply want a machine to do what they want it to do. Linux is currently light years from this goal. Okay, not light years, but at LEAST 5 years, in my eyes. It's not even a Linux issue so much as a KDE, Gnome, or whatever other GUI becomes popular...
I'm too lazy to check, but i think i was the original poster of this thread...
:)
But it is entirely possible to innovate. The mere fact that it hasn't been done all that much lately doesn't mean that, should Apple die, it would never happen again, as the original poster implied.
True, SGI has had colored boxes for quite some time... But i wouldn't necesarily call them "Mainstream"... Let's face it, aside from Apple, no ones really differentiated their machines with any success... They only differntiat based on price. And given the iMac's popularity, I'd have to say that apparently some people do care for how their computers look. If you just care about what's inside the box, an iMac is quite a rip-off... There's more to it though.
And just because it's possible to innovate, I'd really like to see some real innovation prior to Apple going under (which I don't at all think will happen! but some people seem to instist that they will...)
Because they might sell more hardware to people with no interest in MacOS, but a good bit of interest in the fact that, as of late, the hardware on some of the Macs has been pretty nice. I would never buy a Mac if I could only run MacOS. OTOH, I might consider one if Linux also runs (and I had extra cash burning a hole in my pocket).
Apple isn't a hardware vendor. They're not saying here's the hardware, go do whatever you want with it. They're a systems vendor. Their systems are Mac OS systems. That's what they sell.
I don't think that they would add barely any sales by opening their platforms for others to use because of peoples pre-concieved notion of Apple. Using the iMac as a base unit, and figuring that they make a 10% profit on each machine sold, that's about $120 dollars per machine. If people had the option of buying one without an OS, they'ed probably expect a discout. Figuring a $60 dollar discount, that's now $60 per machine that they're earning. If 10,000 Linux or Be people buy these machines, that's an extra $600,000 in sales. That's a drop in the bucket, for them, for anyone (besides me, of course! What could I do with $600,000, i wonder?
You can still get much more of a machine buy buying Wintel. Or you can get a much more powerful machine by buying Alpha or Sparc. PowerPC doesn't fill in any real demand. Therefore, I don't really see what IBM hopes to accomplish by doing this. It is pretty nice of them, and all... But I can't see what the end result will be.
I really wish that articles that get displayed in the mainstream press such as this, would take the paragraph or two to remind people of the difference between the different types of encryption.
;) $3,435,973,837 dollars, you could get it back to the 2 day range. And that's only 546 bits... who's using that?!? So everyone is using 1024 bit encryption, we can feel safe to say that until the day arrives where the Fed decides to up our taxes to the 99.9999% range, we're safe...
And if i got it straight, it implied that the machine could break a key in *two days*... So, given MS Excels limitations, and me not wanting to attempt to type in exponents, it would seem to me that a 546 bit RSA key would be breakable within only 94,136,269.5 years... YIKES... I'm scared.
But then, for only
Even then, it'd be several milleniums before they aquired the wealth needed to be able purchase enough of these machines to do the job... And they'ed probably fill up all of Rhode Island!
Just because this machine has the possiblity of rendering 512 bit RSA keys obsolete, it in no way endangers the 128 bit encryption of web browsers/servers (So long as they initiate the key exchange with "at least" 768 bits...)
However, I still don't understand why anyone would use weaker encryption than the strongest available. Such as, recommending 2048-bit PGP keys rather than 4096 bits? If you're taking the time to encrypt your data, surely you can spare a few extra minutes a day to be sure that your data will be safe for an extra 20 years (and that 20 year figure is quite generous!)... Instead, I always see people go "Oh, 512 bits is breakable? Time to change my key to 1024 bits"... Computers are powerful enough these days where you shouldn't need to settle for less than the strongest available.
It seems ludicrious to encrypt data with weaker encryption, most of the time, and stronger encryption only when it's sensitive information. Just by doing that, you're flagging that information as the data that's actually important.
Aside from X, which I'm really fond of for it's ability to display across a network, the only real GUI innovation that the world has seen since the Mac popularized the concept of it has been the, ahem, integration of IE in Windows... Past that, everyone basically uses the "Folder" metaphor... Or, at least everyone with a somewhat mainstream UI... I haven't ever used Gnome, but KDE seems to be a much better implentation of what Microsoft was trying to do.
And who but Apple had the guts to color their boxes? No one. Every trade magazine ragged on Apple to end when the iMac first appeared... now you have Future Power and eMachines knocking of the basic idea of the iMac saying it was an evolutionary step... too bad they can't even think of original colors!
Next: Why in the world should apple care if another OS runs on their hardware. People who buy Mac's get Mac's. If you don't want a mac, don't buy one. Yes, other people have ported OS's to the Mac platform, but aside from Be, they've been second tier products. Show me an Oracle binary i can download that runs on LinuxPPC, and i'll change my tune... If you want to run a Unix (aside from Mac OS X), you really don't want to buy a Mac... I've heard that shortly you'll be able to buy a brand new Alpha System for less than $2000... that's money much better spent!
And Lastly: AGP... With all it was hyped up to be, I'm quite disappointed to see AGP being used as a replacement PCI slot. Intel could have just pushed 64 bit PCI and then we'd all have interchangable slots... Now, you've got 5 PCI slots, if you're lucky, 2 ISA slots, plus an AGP...
I wish i could find a motherboard with 7 PCI slots, 2 CPU slots, keyboard and mouse controller, and no other integrated peripherals
Linux really needs to sit still on a couple platforms, lest it become another Java: "Write once, debug everywhere"... Dare I say, maybe even pair down a little?
If PPC can better the performance of Alpha (NOT likely), then it could take the place at the high end... but you need x86, because that's the cheap, commodity hardware, and that's also where most people start trying out Linux...
PowerPC's are much much cheaper than x86 chips... they're so much smaller that more fit on the wafer and therefore you get more chips per run...
Apple pads their prices a bit, because if they only sold hardware at cost +15% that'd kill off all future development in terms of the OS or anything else... QuickTime, FireWire, etc etc etc...
So, I'd expect that if volume gets pushed up, you'll eventually be able to find these boards, with CPU at equal or lower prices than the Intel equivilants... Or maybe that's just wishful thinking?
Linux is in no way shape or form a source of competition for apple. Linux may run on Macs, but 99.9% of the people who buy Macs are not even remotely interested in Linux. Or maybe they are, til they see a command line, or a foreign GUI, and then they go, oh, that's what all the fuss is about, and switch back to MacOs and go about their way.
When Linux starts displacing Win 9x on the desktop, that'll be time that Apple says to themselves, hmmm... should we start to worry now? Until then...
If Apple goes down, we'll be forever doomed to beige boxes and the current UI's we see on all platforms. Apple doesn't abide by standards? They're incorporating more and more standard hardware into their models with each release. And since the only OS you can run on a Mac is the MacOS (and Linux) who cares? Everything works (PCI, PnP, USB)...
... all it did was take the graphics off the main PCI bus... Why isn't AGP using system memory, instead you now buy AGP boards with 32 Megs of RAM on them...
AGP? AGP's useless on PeeCee's
Top Speed 333 MHz... don't bash ANYTHING unless you know enough about it that it's justified. For instance, Apple ships Mac's with 450 MHz processors on 100 MHz system busses... with 3 64-bit PCI slots, and 1 32-bit 66 MHz PCI slot.
You have a license for *one* machine... Just as you're not supposed to take one copy of MS office and install it across your organization. So the theory would be that you'd have to decomission the old mac, yet hold on to it as your "proof of purchase."... I some how doubt apple would mind if the only way you could legally run MacOS on 3rd party PPC hardware was to first purchase an iMac with which you could transfer the license from.
MS Was awarded a patent relating to stylesheets... I don't know if it's clear that it completely encompasses CSS, and i don't think anyone has challenged them, beyond just asking for clarification on where they stand in relation to legal issues they could impose.
Just because it's avaible (for both the Mac & Linux) lends little to the argument. Developers won't use it until they can depend on it being included with the OS. Unless they want to license a version from someone, in which there maybe 4 or 5 different providers who all have slightly different implentations of it, and therefore you'll end up with several different versions of software that provides nearly identical functionality.
I'm not trying to bash anyone here, I'm just saying that we'll see a lot more 3D development once at least Redhat (which happens to seem to be the most popular distro) includes OpenGL as an option in it's installer.
But then you'll see Apps with requirements of Redhat Linux 6.x rather than just saying that they're for "Linux". And you may have to endure downloading the software from another site est the licence includes verbage to the effect that you can't distribute the software with something that you money for.
I don't believe that Redhat 5.2 (the distro i use) included it? If it did, i'm wrong... If it didn't and the newer distro's don't either, then that's what'll hold linux back.
Just because it's available for the OS doesn't mean that it's standard equipment, and that's what is required. Otherwise you'll see SGI with one version, Redhat with another, Caldera with a 3rd, all saying that their versions are somewhat superior to the others...
Ummm it's not the OS per se, just the services it provides...
The MacOS has long had a "WYSIWYG" interface along with, more recently, color management. Hense the reason that it's still the favored platform for graphic designers, even though most if not all the apps are also available on Win32.
It does not, however, include OpenGL... Instead, it's been using Quickdraw 3d, and therefore there aren't as many High-End apps available (yes, lightwave, electric image, and formz exist, but what about the others?)
Win NT does not have color management integrated with the OS. It does have Open GL, which makes it much easier to port Unix 3d Apps...
Linux, does not have OpenGL. It doesn't even have a standard GUI (past X)... This makes it much more difficult to port applications, or else will create immensely bloated applications, as each vendor includes OpenGL functionality rather than using what is already available within the OS, which in Linux's case is nothing.
Then you have Be and their "pervasive" multithreading, therefore makes it a good choice for video apps where nearly uncompressed video is streaming to and from the HD while the OS processes other tasks...
i could go on and on, but i've got work to do! Moral to this story is that the OS is at least as important as the hardware it runs on
Except Microsoft owns 10 or 15% of Avid... Since that happened, Avid's completely pulled away from the Mac. And it's either Avid or Targa who signed a deal with MSFT which prohibeted them from using QuickTime. It became to difficult to separate the functions of the hardware, so it was later determined that they could use QuickTime only if by the time the data made it to the hard drive it was AVI. Don't ask me for sources - it's been too long for me to remember where i read this...
Anyways, GOOD LUCK getting SoftImage on Linux...
The way you say that makes me shudder. I hope Linux can live up to everything SGI wants it to do... Otherwise we'll lose a great company (granted it's in rough shape right now). They, and every company, should have contigency plans... Looks like that went out the window.
Mac's are great for graphics. NT Workstation is damn good for low & midrange 3D... It's got OpenGL, multithreading, multiprocessors, and a huge assortment of software. Linux, as of this moment, can not match NT in this category... I hope in 6 months to a year that they can. That seams realistic given SGI's influence.
Ummm... Merced's going to be much more expensive than Alpha systems. Look at the Xeon.. Surely you can buy an Alpha for a nominal price above that and have a much faster workstation on your hands. And unless i'm mistaken, Merced's going to be positioned above Xeon for the forseeable future.
You can watch them rise, but actually buy them? No. You've got to be on the trading floor in order to get them as they're coming out...
The day EBAY went public, i put in a buy order at exactly 9:15AM... it went through around 3pm at ___ (I forgot the amount, but basically, it's peak for the day). The next week was hard, in that it dropped and didn't make up the value for at least 10 days...
So if you want to wait for (any) IPO to bounce back up, fine, but then you've got BE, MP3.com barely breaking even (if not being below their IPO price) after 2 weeks, countless others that never quite resurface.
All you hear about in the news are the IPO's that skyrocket. There's also quite a few that tank. Redhat probably won't be one of them because there's so much demand from the user community, most of whom *WILL* try to buy it the moment they go public.
The way the markets been going recently (down!) I wouldn't be suprised if RHAT and whomever else plans to go public postpone their decisions.
DO NOT BUY on the day of the IPO... Only if you have the "letter" should you own any shares that day. If you're buying through an online brokerage, you're not going to be able to get the shares until they've already hit their peak. At which point you can just watch them plumet as the market floods with shares from everyone cashing in. If you must buy it, wait a few weeks, and it'll have stabilized...
SGI has a lot more to contribute to the computing world than a few extra functions for linux. They're kind of like Apple in that respect. Even if you don't use their computers, their innovations are felt around the industry. Witness OpenGL, for one.
If SGI trully does die off, who'll take over the leading edge of graphics? I may be wrong, but it doesn't seem at all that anyone besides SGI (OpenGL) and Apple (QuickTime) have really contributed such radical thoughts to this market segment. Other companies just reimplement their idea's in less graceful ways (Direct3D, ActiveMovie) or simply boost the clock rate...
Same as if Apple had died, if SGI dies, we'll all feel the pain, eventually.
If the documents are destined to be printed, PDF's the way to go. You can then refer to page breaks and even line breaks when discussing them ("For instance, on page 19 in the middle of the 8th line..."). That's not possible with HTML, nor ASCII, nor MS Word, etc... Word's not available on all platforms, and the mathematical fonts used will vary from platform to platform. HTML varies way too much depending on fonts, platform, printer, Text is text - no styling, no typography (subscripts, super scripts, mathmatical symbols)...
Really, the main issue is fonts - mathematical symbols that either won't exist or will have different mappings dependant on platform
That leaves PDF... There's free tools available toeate PDF files, so it's not like you need to spend extra money or anything.
My 2 cents
Maybe i tried the wrong model, but so far the cheapest configuration i can figure out is 1278.00 - am i wrong?
At present rates, in 3 years we'll be seeing 1.5 - 2 GHz chips. Being able to OC a chip from 500 to 600 MHz will be just about useless. That's not really the argument to use... It's what you want to do NOW that matters...
Well, being that they've been taking a loss with all their other CPU's which basically matched intels performance, (due to production glitches, among other things) there's a reason to try to make the money back at the high end. If you can make due with a 500 MHz part, that's great. Most people can. If you absolutely gotta have the most powerful x86 CPU around, possibly excluding the Xeon), then you'll need to pay a permium...
As for locking the clock mult... That is lame. You should be able to buy any processor, knowing that it's rated to work at that given speed, but if you know and want to take the "risk" of overclocking, that should be your own business... I know - that discussion has taken place a multitude of times already.