iTunes is blazingly fast on both my Mac Pro and my Macbook Pro. I don't know what you're talking about. I've heard it's not the best on Windows, but since I don't *use* windows apart from for EDA, I don't care.
Finder - far better than any of the others. See, I can make unjustified statements too. When you link to an article that says "here's how to do cut-n-paste rather than copy-n-paste", it's not such a good idea to be critical... The automater services are one of the cool things about OSX (in general) and Finder (in particular).
The BSD subsystem is not poorly done. Another blanket accusation. The reason why Fink (and MacPorts for that matter) roll their own is to maintain a single dependency graph as OS's change - surely that's obvious ?? For those who prefer more flexibility, Apple *provide* macports.
The "overpriced crap" *opinion* you state just makes you come across as a cheapskate who doesn't want to pay the price of entry. If the Mac is as bad as you suggest, you'd be saying things like "thank [insert deity here] I don't have to make the choice of Mac vs [insert system here] because the Mac is too expensive". You'd not be decrying that it's too expensive. Obviously it is desirable for you, or you'd not be complaining about it being more expensive.
Obsolescence: I can run *10* year old software on my current Mac. What's your point ?
Yes, you just hate. You don't like the fact that some people are very happy with their purchase, whereas you would not be. Mac users are the most-satisfied of every PC maker (and have been for years). This behaviour of yours is pretty much the definition of an antisocial troll.
Um, you can be popular without being omnipresent. An Aston-Martin DB9 Vantage is a massively popular car (as in: lots of people would love to own one, and those who have it, love it), but it's not anywhere near as commonplace as a Ford Focus. Popularity does not imply ownership.
Customers who want a company to prosper, to best-realise their investment in buying that hardware, *should* wish the company they've paid cash to (for products) to have high profits and a secure future.
Apple, IMHO, couldn't give a fig for whether they were.1 of a GHz faster or slower than their competition. They care about how the user interacts with the machine. They are far and away better at making that easy than anyone else. End of. No spewed vitriol by a self-confessed hater will change that.
Let's just go through the points the poster regards as OSX 'sucking':
iTunes - What's wrong with iTunes ? It's easy to use, it plays my music (paid for, from the iTunes store, and ripped from personal CDs), and it's trivial to interact with the iPhone with. It's fast, efficient, has that genius thing which I've sometimes even used... Can't see what's not to like.
Finder - Um, it's a hierarchical disk interface, which seems to work pretty well for me. Quick Previews works great, networked drives don't block these days, love the dock, has Spaces for multiple workspaces, love the dashboard, and the way it integrates with Time-machine. Again, what's not to like ?
The BSD subsystem - Say what ? You're actually *complaining* that the BSD userland layer is there, overlaid on top of Mach ? This is one of the reasons I bought the machine!
Support for non-sanctioned hardware - um, who cares ? We're talking about buying Macs here, they're all sanctioned.
Obsolescence - Odd - I can still run PPC programs (I never cared about OS9, that's a 10-year old OS and macs weren't my thing until they metamorphosed into truly excellent unix workstations.)
Either you're just a hater (a far worse breed than the "fanbois", at least the fanbois are positive about their cult) or you're trying to make the opposite point (badly) using irony. Perhaps that's it - really you love Macs, but were trying to be clever.
Here's a thought. You don't get to be the most valuable tech stock on the planet by only appealing to "fanbois". You have to be able to sell to a wide marketplace to get that sort of traction. Apple does. Deal.
I guess I thought that was mind-numbingly obvious - this whole story is about a lawsuit, not the wetness of water. Until any lawsuit comes to trial, it's nothing but supposition.
Seems unlikely that Skyhook would be suing, then, doesn't it ? If Motorola phoned Skyhook and told them "are hands are tied, we can't continue with this because we're contractually bound not to use people like you", then Skyhook wouldn't have a leg to stand on. In that case, why waste loadsacash going to court over it ?
SkyHook had a contract to supply Motorola (worth tens of millions of dollars - lifeblood to a company of that size) and when Andy Rubin (a Google VP) heard about it, he phoned up Motorola. "Conversation" ensued, involving the use of a "stop ship" order to prevent Android from shipping on that Motorola hardware. When the dust settled, Motorola was using Google's location services, not Skyhook's.
This has nothing to do with Google integrating anything, and it's totally evil. Quote from Google-IO: "If you believe in openness, if you believe in choice, if you believe in innovation from everyone, then welcome to Android" - Vic Gundotra, another Google VP. I don't think so Vic. You and Andy ought to talk...
I've thought of it myself (given I've had a green card here for a while), but it seems every second week someone is off for jury duty over here. Back in the UK, the only person I know who was called was my dad, once, in 45 years as an adult.
Personally, I'm not sure the whole 'WooHoo, I can now vote in the US' is worth it - which seems to be the only other *practical* difference between a GC-holder, and a citizen.
Plus, IIRC, the US insist that I'd have to give up my UK citizenship/passport (although, from various friends, I've heard that the UK just send your passport back to you with a "you appear to have misplaced your passport" note:)
So, whatever floats your boat, Linus, but I don't think it's for me.
At this point, I'm guessing you're just a troll. I've claimed nothing that you're arguing against, you're just putting words into my mouth and then making the case against them. Good strawman argument there. End of discussion.
Um, did I claim that the Cray-1 was in the same class as a 600XL ? I don't believe so. I was using an example of how a chip of that vintage has been implemented with speeds approaching 50x the original.
To address your points individually, however:
A vector register is simply local storage that some operations know how to use well - the Cray 1 had 8 registers, each holding 64 64-bit locations, for a total of 4096 bits per register. That's a trivial thing to implement using BlockRam on an S3E. I'd frankly be amazed if he didn't use BlockRam for that, and BlockRam is sufficiently fast to be double-cycled, typically (ie: the clock input to the block-ram can be twice that of the surrounding logic), so that's not the slow-down. Writing the vector ops ought not be too hard, since they're just scaled-up versions of the scalar ones.
Twelve pipelines. The Cray pipelines were just dedicated pipelined architecture for different types of operation (eg: multiply had a different pipeline to add/sub). That's just as easy to do in an FPGA, and pipelining *increases* clock-speed, so that's not the reason why it's so slow.
The Cray-1 had 24 address lines rather than 16. Big whoop. It's far harder to add on the SDRAM controller (or hell, even a trivial SRAM controller) in the FPGA than it is to extend the address bus from 16->24 lines.
I've implemented CPU's (of various bit-sizes), JPEG codecs, even H.264. I know how to write this stuff. The main speed-limiting issue on an S3E will (almost certainly) be that the Cray data-path is 64-bit, none of the things you mention. The interconnect fabric on an S3E just doesn't scale too well past 16 or (pushing it) 32-bit busses. IMHO his critical path will be that enormous 64-bit-wide bus, and even logic duplication will only go so far.
The S3E itself can be clocked internally at 300+ MHz. However, the maximum speed achievable depends on the architecture and layout of the circuit implemented. The maximum clock is dependent on the longest logic and routing delay through the circuit. Since the design is apparently a register for register copy of the original Cray architecture, the original ECL logic still has a speed advantage over the CMOS S3E.
Not having seen the design, I don't know how it's been implemented, but it's possible to have a compatible design that implements all the original specifications without designing it the same way... It's also possible for an FPGA design to run faster than the original part - see the multiple-tens-of-MHz variants of the equally venerable 6502 (which maxed out at ~2MHz at the time) for example.
Clearly, the logic path dictates the final speed. That's why placement is so important, and why hand-placement is far better than the pathetic job the automatic tools produce. Perhaps you were intending that for the parent post to mine, but anyone doing any FPGA work knows about the critical path...
S3E's have DCMs (Digital Clock Managers) making them very flexible in terms of what the internal clock frequencies are, even with a fixed input frequency.
Chances are (I can't get to the site) it just runs at 33MHz as its best-supported clock frequency. An S3E is a pretty cheap and slow FPGA - I remember writing a 32-bit CPU for one, and until I started optimising the logic-placement in the FPGA, it was only running at ~30MHz. I got it up to ~50MHz after tweaking and pipelining, but his design may do more than my simple CPU.
Breaking my statement above about replying, but I'll make sure to put...
THIS IS NOT MEANT TO BE ENTIRELY SERIOUS
... in any post that might potentially benefit from that, in future. I had hoped for a slightly higher-level of intelligence than 'moron' reading it. I've been around here for a long time, and I ought to have known better. [sigh]
It's hard to read the above, so I'll just say that it was supposed to be semi-humorous, I don't really think electing people due to their safe-size is an important criteria, I didn't really expect 'informative' [sigh]
However...
Bush couldn't read the words, even *with* the teleprompter.
I've yet to see the use of a warship-sized banner in any of Obama's speeches..
That money-grab is still (unbelievably) a better deal than was previously available. Sad but true.
The shooting has to be a personal action to count, in this instance. Cheney has "shot" lots of people as well, if you count other-than-personally-doing-it statistics.
The emphasis here was on 'man-sized', not on 'safe'. I'm reasonably sure the Oval Office uses safes, but maybe not 'man-sized' ones in his *office*
Gitmo is still open, but people are at least being processed now. Starting an atrocity and stopping it are two completely different things.
So, only "wrong on all counts" if you have a sufficiently-twisted world-view...
Reply if you must, but this is the last comment from me on the subject, as I said, it was only supposed to be humorous, with one serious thing thrown in for each of them.
Well, since you ask, here's some off the top of my head - there are lots more...:
Obama vs Bush:
Can string a sentence together without making up words or stumbling over words with more than one syllable.
Has not prematurely announced 'mission accomplished' when the mission is barely started.
Actually seems to give a shit about health-care for other-than-the-rich.
Obama vs Cheny:
Thus far at least, he hasn't shot anyone in the face, and then had the victim apologise (!)
Doesn't, to my knowledge, keep a man-sized safe in his office. Always been curious about the 'man-sized' thing...
Doesn't support the indefinite holding of suspects without charge in internment camps. One measure of a society is how you treat undesirables, and Guantanamo bay is an indelible stain on the Bush/Cheney years.
[sigh] I'm not offended. With the ups and (more frequently) downs of my life, it takes a lot to offend me.
That's not a link, it's a rationalisation, and a poor one at that. Apple fucked up - as far as I can tell from reading your journal. Does a fanboy (how I hate that term, no matter to whom it is applied!) often tell you the object of their adulation fucked up ? Perhaps that glove's got the wrong number of fingers for me - here, have it back...
[second sigh] Once Dell had the case notes (that Linux had been on the machine), replacing the disk with a different one and demonstrating that the problem still occurred was irrelevant. This was early days with Linux (it still came on two floppies: a boot-disk and a root-disk) and their position was that Linux had damaged the machines BIOS (hmm, the BIOS is supposed to be read-only...), that it was user-error, and that they weren't going to replace the machine. You don't think I *tried* an FDISK/MBR ??
The 'more careful' comment was supposed to mean I was more careful about how I interacted with Dell, not more careful with the machine itself... Never again did I mention Linux or any possibility of Linux to Dell...
Shit happens. You're not the center of the universe, surprise! It's also not clear to me why you post anti-Apple-owner comments when your complaint is against Apple itself. Perhaps there's some link I'm missing...
People, corporations, (probably aliens too, for all I know) all fuck up sometimes. I had a far worse situation with Dell back when I was a student (and before Macs were unix). They point-blank refused a refund of a machine that had a hardware fault (the screen was on the blink) because it booted up into LILO then Windows or Linux.
Letters, phone-calls etc. were all to no avail, they never did refund me anything. I'd installed linux several times on different machines at college (even my workstation was a Dell '386 with a fast, high-res (at the time) ET-4000 card:-). This was my first ever personal portable, and it ended up as a heap of junk, thanks to Dell. You move on and get over it. That wasn't my last personal Dell machine, but I made sure to be very careful with them after that...
At least Apple sorted it out for you in the end...
We bought one of those last year for my wife. She's put ~16,000 miles on it (~30 mile one-way commute per day). Cost was ~$30k, and it gets (real-world) about 44 mpg. Most of that is highway driving, since we live fairly close to a freeway, but it's still a massive step-up from the ~21mpg she was getting from her 17-year-old Saturn.
So,
a 5-year limit is just bullshit. I more-suspect a choose-this-point-to-make-the-headline policy than seriously thinking everyone changes their car every 5 years. I don't know if we'll get 17 years out of this thing, but we'll certainly get more than 5.
Gas costs have halved over what we were paying before (and diesel is cheaper than gas anyway, year round, where we live).
This is a *huge* car - we went for the speed-wagon variant - I know it's the same wheelbase as the sedan, but going to home-depot is much easier now. I only need to rent their truck when getting the 8'x4' wooden sheets, pretty much everything else fits inside.
I really doubt you can find them because that's all complete bullshit.
MS bought a small (150M, I think) as part of a settlement deal, to prevent Apple cleaning their clock in court - MS had been caught ripping off Apple's code and selling it as their own. They later sold all those shares at a profit. From Apple's perspective, by far the larger concession they got from MS was a promise to keep making MS office for 5(?) years as well... They had $2B in the bank when MS bought those shares.
There's legion of them out there, for ~$25. If you click on the 'specifications' tab, it says "Mac OS X v10.4 Non-booting driver supported by SiliconImage SiI3132". If you want booting support, you'll have to look elsewhere, but when I attach $BIG_DISK, it's not normally for booting with...
Slashdot Mirror
iTunes is blazingly fast on both my Mac Pro and my Macbook Pro. I don't know what you're talking about. I've heard it's not the best on Windows, but since I don't *use* windows apart from for EDA, I don't care.
.1 of a GHz faster or slower than their competition. They care about how the user interacts with the machine. They are far and away better at making that easy than anyone else. End of. No spewed vitriol by a self-confessed hater will change that.
Finder - far better than any of the others. See, I can make unjustified statements too. When you link to an article that says "here's how to do cut-n-paste rather than copy-n-paste", it's not such a good idea to be critical... The automater services are one of the cool things about OSX (in general) and Finder (in particular).
The BSD subsystem is not poorly done. Another blanket accusation. The reason why Fink (and MacPorts for that matter) roll their own is to maintain a single dependency graph as OS's change - surely that's obvious ?? For those who prefer more flexibility, Apple *provide* macports.
The "overpriced crap" *opinion* you state just makes you come across as a cheapskate who doesn't want to pay the price of entry. If the Mac is as bad as you suggest, you'd be saying things like "thank [insert deity here] I don't have to make the choice of Mac vs [insert system here] because the Mac is too expensive". You'd not be decrying that it's too expensive. Obviously it is desirable for you, or you'd not be complaining about it being more expensive.
Obsolescence: I can run *10* year old software on my current Mac. What's your point ?
Yes, you just hate. You don't like the fact that some people are very happy with their purchase, whereas you would not be. Mac users are the most-satisfied of every PC maker (and have been for years). This behaviour of yours is pretty much the definition of an antisocial troll.
Um, you can be popular without being omnipresent. An Aston-Martin DB9 Vantage is a massively popular car (as in: lots of people would love to own one, and those who have it, love it), but it's not anywhere near as commonplace as a Ford Focus. Popularity does not imply ownership.
Customers who want a company to prosper, to best-realise their investment in buying that hardware, *should* wish the company they've paid cash to (for products) to have high profits and a secure future.
Apple, IMHO, couldn't give a fig for whether they were
Simon.
Either you're just a hater (a far worse breed than the "fanbois", at least the fanbois are positive about their cult) or you're trying to make the opposite point (badly) using irony. Perhaps that's it - really you love Macs, but were trying to be clever.
As for market-share, again, who cares ? Sure, those numbers you quote are small, but Apple owns about 50% of the tablet market, about the same as Google (21%) in the mobile-ads market, almost 40% of the worldwide mobile phone profits (with only 3% market-share) and their shares of these markets is (as you say) really small. In other words, they're just getting started and there's a lot of room to grow.
Here's a thought. You don't get to be the most valuable tech stock on the planet by only appealing to "fanbois". You have to be able to sell to a wide marketplace to get that sort of traction. Apple does. Deal.
Simon
I guess I thought that was mind-numbingly obvious - this whole story is about a lawsuit, not the wetness of water. Until any lawsuit comes to trial, it's nothing but supposition.
Simon
Yeah. I see your point. That worked well for them...
Simon
Seems unlikely that Skyhook would be suing, then, doesn't it ? If Motorola phoned Skyhook and told them "are hands are tied, we can't continue with this because we're contractually bound not to use people like you", then Skyhook wouldn't have a leg to stand on. In that case, why waste loadsacash going to court over it ?
Simon
Source: e-week
Simon
I'm just gonna assume you're talking about Andy Rubin there, not me :)
Simon
SkyHook had a contract to supply Motorola (worth tens of millions of dollars - lifeblood to a company of that size) and when Andy Rubin (a Google VP) heard about it, he phoned up Motorola. "Conversation" ensued, involving the use of a "stop ship" order to prevent Android from shipping on that Motorola hardware. When the dust settled, Motorola was using Google's location services, not Skyhook's.
This has nothing to do with Google integrating anything, and it's totally evil. Quote from Google-IO: "If you believe in openness, if you believe in choice, if you believe in innovation from everyone, then welcome to Android" - Vic Gundotra, another Google VP. I don't think so Vic. You and Andy ought to talk...
Simon.
I've thought of it myself (given I've had a green card here for a while), but it seems every second week someone is off for jury duty over here. Back in the UK, the only person I know who was called was my dad, once, in 45 years as an adult.
:)
Personally, I'm not sure the whole 'WooHoo, I can now vote in the US' is worth it - which seems to be the only other *practical* difference between a GC-holder, and a citizen.
Plus, IIRC, the US insist that I'd have to give up my UK citizenship/passport (although, from various friends, I've heard that the UK just send your passport back to you with a "you appear to have misplaced your passport" note
So, whatever floats your boat, Linus, but I don't think it's for me.
Simon.
My expectations may be high, I blame it on my youth, :)
but soon enough, I learn the painful truth
It's as if he *wrote* the song to parody himself...
Simon
... that a good heart, these days, is hard to find... Simon.
At this point, I'm guessing you're just a troll. I've claimed nothing that you're arguing against, you're just putting words into my mouth and then making the case against them. Good strawman argument there. End of discussion.
Simon.
To address your points individually, however:
I've implemented CPU's (of various bit-sizes), JPEG codecs, even H.264. I know how to write this stuff. The main speed-limiting issue on an S3E will (almost certainly) be that the Cray data-path is 64-bit, none of the things you mention. The interconnect fabric on an S3E just doesn't scale too well past 16 or (pushing it) 32-bit busses. IMHO his critical path will be that enormous 64-bit-wide bus, and even logic duplication will only go so far.
Simon
The S3E itself can be clocked internally at 300+ MHz. However, the maximum speed achievable depends on the architecture and layout of the circuit implemented. The maximum clock is dependent on the longest logic and routing delay through the circuit. Since the design is apparently a register for register copy of the original Cray architecture, the original ECL logic still has a speed advantage over the CMOS S3E.
Not having seen the design, I don't know how it's been implemented, but it's possible to have a compatible design that implements all the original specifications without designing it the same way... It's also possible for an FPGA design to run faster than the original part - see the multiple-tens-of-MHz variants of the equally venerable 6502 (which maxed out at ~2MHz at the time) for example.
Clearly, the logic path dictates the final speed. That's why placement is so important, and why hand-placement is far better than the pathetic job the automatic tools produce. Perhaps you were intending that for the parent post to mine, but anyone doing any FPGA work knows about the critical path...
Simon
S3E's have DCMs (Digital Clock Managers) making them very flexible in terms of what the internal clock frequencies are, even with a fixed input frequency.
Chances are (I can't get to the site) it just runs at 33MHz as its best-supported clock frequency. An S3E is a pretty cheap and slow FPGA - I remember writing a 32-bit CPU for one, and until I started optimising the logic-placement in the FPGA, it was only running at ~30MHz. I got it up to ~50MHz after tweaking and pipelining, but his design may do more than my simple CPU.
Simon
Breaking my statement above about replying, but I'll make sure to put ...
... in any post that might potentially benefit from that, in future. I had hoped for a slightly higher-level of intelligence than 'moron' reading it. I've been around here for a long time, and I ought to have known better. [sigh]
THIS IS NOT MEANT TO BE ENTIRELY SERIOUS
Simon
However...
So, only "wrong on all counts" if you have a sufficiently-twisted world-view...
Reply if you must, but this is the last comment from me on the subject, as I said, it was only supposed to be humorous, with one serious thing thrown in for each of them.
Simon
Obama vs Bush:
Obama vs Cheny:
Simon.
[sigh] I'm not offended. With the ups and (more frequently) downs of my life, it takes a lot to offend me.
/MBR ??
That's not a link, it's a rationalisation, and a poor one at that. Apple fucked up - as far as I can tell from reading your journal. Does a fanboy (how I hate that term, no matter to whom it is applied!) often tell you the object of their adulation fucked up ? Perhaps that glove's got the wrong number of fingers for me - here, have it back...
[second sigh] Once Dell had the case notes (that Linux had been on the machine), replacing the disk with a different one and demonstrating that the problem still occurred was irrelevant. This was early days with Linux (it still came on two floppies: a boot-disk and a root-disk) and their position was that Linux had damaged the machines BIOS (hmm, the BIOS is supposed to be read-only...), that it was user-error, and that they weren't going to replace the machine. You don't think I *tried* an FDISK
The 'more careful' comment was supposed to mean I was more careful about how I interacted with Dell, not more careful with the machine itself... Never again did I mention Linux or any possibility of Linux to Dell...
Simon
Shit happens. You're not the center of the universe, surprise! It's also not clear to me why you post anti-Apple-owner comments when your complaint is against Apple itself. Perhaps there's some link I'm missing...
:-). This was my first ever personal portable, and it ended up as a heap of junk, thanks to Dell. You move on and get over it. That wasn't my last personal Dell machine, but I made sure to be very careful with them after that...
People, corporations, (probably aliens too, for all I know) all fuck up sometimes. I had a far worse situation with Dell back when I was a student (and before Macs were unix). They point-blank refused a refund of a machine that had a hardware fault (the screen was on the blink) because it booted up into LILO then Windows or Linux.
Letters, phone-calls etc. were all to no avail, they never did refund me anything. I'd installed linux several times on different machines at college (even my workstation was a Dell '386 with a fast, high-res (at the time) ET-4000 card
At least Apple sorted it out for you in the end...
Simon
Dunno. You tell me ? :)
Simon
.... reminds me of Apple haters ;-)
I really doubt you can find them because that's all complete bullshit.
MS bought a small (150M, I think) as part of a settlement deal, to prevent Apple cleaning their clock in court - MS had been caught ripping off Apple's code and selling it as their own. They later sold all those shares at a profit. From Apple's perspective, by far the larger concession they got from MS was a promise to keep making MS office for 5(?) years as well... They had $2B in the bank when MS bought those shares.
Simon.
There's legion of them out there, for ~$25. If you click on the 'specifications' tab, it says "Mac OS X v10.4 Non-booting driver supported by SiliconImage SiI3132". If you want booting support, you'll have to look elsewhere, but when I attach $BIG_DISK, it's not normally for booting with...
Simon