Plus you can quite easily get into the underlying UNIX core, and tamper with things - having such a functional GUI, and being able to fire up a terminal and use things like openssh, pico, etc right out of the box just totally sold me.
Indeed, and many of the more popular open-source UNIX/Linux/X11 tools compile and run cleanly on OSX. Even the cvs version of EMACS will compile and run cleanly (as a Carbon application, no need for X11!) on OSX.
I don't know where people are getting the idea that you need an iPod if you have iTunes. I've been using a Nomad IIc flash-player, and iTunes recognizes it and works with it through the USB interface just fine. Is this some FUD or what?
Gutenburg's innovation spurred the Reformation and brought academic study back to the common man.
You're right: we have lots of great books for academic study available to the common man. Now if only we can find a suitable number of comman men to read them...;)
Hold off on purchasing new hardware for a few weeks to see if the 970 rumours are true. How dumb would it be to hold off this long only to purchase new hardware at the worst possible time?
He might just be talking about updating to OSX, not to new Macs.
No new software purchases required, unless you absolutely, positively have to have the 64-bit version. The processor runs mixed mode better than most. It is not emulating 32-bit code like the Itanium has to.
No, they couldn't. Every app would need to be rewritten, right on the heels of the 9 to X transition that isn't even finished yet. Switching to x86 is a complex nightmare that may be Apple's doomsday plan, but it is far from simple.
It's probably not as hard as you would think technically, considering that the NeXT OS that OSX is based on ran on x86 hardware for a while. Additionally, Apple already has experience from it's CISC->RISC processor transition in 1994. Except this time it would be RISC->CISC.
That being said, I don't think it would be a good business move for Apple. The last thing Apple needs to do is become a pure software company on the x86 platform. The only proprietary OS that survives in that desert is Windows (Linux is not proprietary).
Apple will always be a tiny little niche segment of the market, so long as they stick to a proprietary closed system.
They have to stay in that niche. "Open" x86 platform is where old proprietary OS goes to die. The only reason Microsoft tolerates Linux is because they can't find a way to "cut off their air supply." Thousands of programmers working for free is a hard thing to shut down from a business perspective... not that they haven't tried.
If MS had a shoddy browser like Konqueror (well Konq's not that bad, but bear with me) people'd flock to Netscape and there'd be none of this nonsense over MS trying to secure a monopoly via the browser.
"Good enough to not risk hosing delicate Windows 98 with a new browser install" != "Good enough." Not to mention the fact that there are literally millions who go no further than their nose or what comes on the machine from the store. AOL-users/installers were among the "adventurous" and "high-tech" of that bunch.
First they moved to a modern RISC-based ISA in 1994. Then they moved to a UNIX/NeXT-base OS with OSX in 2000. Now they're moving into a Power-4-workstation -derived 64-bit processor that will come out of the gate (at its lowest clockrate) neck-n-neck with the highest clockrate x86 CPU's in their prime.
Right there in the article is a comparison to the P4 3Gz, which the 970 is only slightly faster than. Now, compare the price of a p4 3.0 (or a duel p4 2.6 or such) to the price of a 970...
Now consider the 1.4GHz single-processor 970 is goint to be the bottom-of-the-line PPC tower.
I find in hard to believe that MacBidouille actually have been able to benchmark a computer not announced by Apple, based on a chip that's not available before the end of the year according to it's manufacturer IBM.
Engineering samples of both the chips and the boards are out for development and review before any product is manufactured en masse. They would otherwise have no idea if it worked before they produced it. So this is not very "hard to believe" for me.
In the past, the OS desktop has been a single graphics surface, and each window was defined as a region on this shared surface. Each application was responsible for drawing to only its window regions of the shared surface. Visually, windows appear to overlap and usually only the front-most window at any pixel is actually drawn.
The Microsoft Windows Longhorn desktop is being drawn in a completely different way than all previous versions. Every window will have its own, full window-sized surface to draw to. The desktop will be dynamically composed many times a second from the contents of each window.
You people keep talking like this thing is shipping now. News flash: it isn't.
News flash: It's maybe 2-3 months (tops) behind the Opteron as far as commercial fab production is concerned.
Even when it does, its price/performance vs. Opteron may be pretty poor.
The estimated SPEC marks indicate they are similar. But SPEC doesn't include Altivec/3D-Now, however, and Altivec is a much nicer SIMD unit. Additionally, the cost (but maybe not the price) will be lower for the 970 because it is a smaller piece of silicon.
Take a closer look. The G5 is the 85xx series. Moto is not shipping, and has not shipped, an 85xx series PPC.
Take and even closer look... the 8540 was one of that guy's links. I really have to wonder about this... because a DDR-RAM controller is missing on the 7455, but is there on the 8540.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll give you my money, and then you take a cut, and then you give it back to me as a "voucher!" This is so cool!
I don't know where people are getting the idea that you need an iPod if you have iTunes. I've been using a Nomad IIc flash-player, and iTunes recognizes it and works with it through the USB interface just fine. Is this some FUD or what?
$3 million for 3.0 teraflop, vs. $5.2 million for the 17.6 teraflop
You don't need a calculator to know that.
Does this count as patricide on the part of Microsoft?
You heard it here first! ;)
No new software purchases required, unless you absolutely, positively have to have the 64-bit version. The processor runs mixed mode better than most. It is not emulating 32-bit code like the Itanium has to.
That being said, I don't think it would be a good business move for Apple. The last thing Apple needs to do is become a pure software company on the x86 platform. The only proprietary OS that survives in that desert is Windows (Linux is not proprietary).
Software Assurance Explained.
;)
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?AID=RWT10150 2203725
First they moved to a modern RISC-based ISA in 1994. Then they moved to a UNIX/NeXT-base OS with OSX in 2000. Now they're moving into a Power-4-workstation -derived 64-bit processor that will come out of the gate (at its lowest clockrate) neck-n-neck with the highest clockrate x86 CPU's in their prime.
Throw in things like brilliant X11 support, a desktop graphics subsystem only dreamed about for other OS's now, and even a Nightly Phoenix/Firebird build for OSX.
It's going to be a great time to upgrade a Mac, or buy one if you don't alreay have one.
No one says they have to run 64-bit apps right away. Microsoft ran 16-bit software on 32-bit processors for how many years?
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.h tml
This bears some looking into!