I've heard this argument scores of times and it still doesn't make any sense. The crowd that buys the $300 cheapo PCs is not one that any computer company truly wants as customers. They will not likely be repeat customers because they will always go for the best apparent deal. One year they're buying a Dell and the next they're buying an HP at Wal*Mart.
They're also a crowd that isn't likely to buy any peripheral services like extended coverage contracts and the like because they're going for the smallest possible hit to their check book. Instead of investing in something that will save them money in the long term they're trying to save over the short term.
This cheapskate crowd also isn't likely to really do much for the Mac software market. Skimping on their computer means they will do what they can to skimp on their software as well. Someone buying an "iSlab" isn't necessarily adding to Roxio, Intuit, or the Omni Group's pool of potential buyers.
So in the end you've got a bunch of people buying Macs that don't make Apple much money, don't necessarily give them repeat sales, cannabalize existing products, and do nothing for the Mac software market. The cheapskate Mac isn't really a good idea when you work it through realistically.
It isn't really a full desktop machine even when docked. It's a machine for $2000 (at least for now) that is only about as powerful as a cheap ass Wal-Mart PC and less capable in many ways than a moderately priced laptop. It also requires docks, keybords, monitors, and a slew of other peripherals in all of the locations you're planning to use the thing.
As a handheld or even simply as a portable computer the U750 falls down horribly. It's a handheld that gets at best three hours on a single charge and won't fit in even the largest of pockets. It's also running an OS whose suspend capability is somewhat of a joke among mobile computer users.
Today's Palms and PocketPCs can do the same sorts of things the U750 and its mini-PC brethren can do for a fraction of the price and size with far longer battery life. The Palm or PocketPC might not be able to run any old Windows application but then again who wants to run Word on a 5" 800x600 display?
Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division
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Sony U750P Handtop
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm at a loss to understand the appeal of these. I can see the appeal of a handheld computer system with a large screen and I grasp the desire to have a lot of storage space on such a handheld. What I don't get is why a PC with its general purpose nature is being shoehorned into such an inappropriate form factor. It seems to me a device truly meant to be a haldheld and not cimply a tiny PC would be an overall better design.
I can see very few instances where something running a StrongARM/XScale chip with 64-128MB of RAM isn't going to be powerful enough to handle chores that would end up relegated to a handheld device. Current PocketPC and Palms can play video, compressed audio, and even 3D games. This is on top of all of the mundane uses like note taking, calendar keeping, and contact management they might be used for.
Running typical desktop software on a handheld device doesn't seem very appealing to me either. Running a full version of Word on a handheld while riding on the train sounds a bit ridiculous to me. A Word document viewer on a lightweight device makes a bit of sense but not the full application. I don't see many people with an overwhelming desire to run Outlook XP on their handhelds.
Then there's the price tag of these suckers. The U750 costs more than most high-powered laptops and quite a bit more than even extremely powerful and feature filled PocketPC and Palm handhelds.
Having been to more than one Sony Style store I can say I'm pretty disappointed with them. Sony wants to have their own stores where it's wall to wall Sony products but doesn't want to make the stores somewhere you want to go to. There's very little difference between a Sony Style store and a Best Buy whereas there is a world of difference between an Apple section of a CompUSA and an Apple Store. If Sony could make some stores a little more enticing, similar to the Sony section of the Metreon, I think their stores would be far more attractive.
Every group is going to have the fanboys, have you ever read through a Gentoo lovefest on Slashdot? Geez.
You're making assumptions about the value of the iBook without giving any sort of idea what you think provides good value which is why I would guess you got moderated down. You're also saying you're paying a lot for just an Apple logo as if the iBook costs $6,000 and requires you to kick a puppy when you buy it.
For most people iBooks are excellent laptops. They're faster than the specifications might lead you to believe and are very stable machines. They also have ridiculously long battery life, I got an iBook from work that routinely gets 5+ hours on the battery while using Airport (802.11g) while my 12" Powerbook only gets a little over four hours doing the same work. OSX itself is a very stable OS and is markedly more secure than Windows XP even if you've taken the many hours required to lock it down.
These are all things I would consider to add value to the purchase. For a thousand bucks you're getting a laptop with built-in WiFi, really long battery life, a stable OS, and an all around good design. You're also getting a laptop that weighs in at less than five pounds which makes it far easier to carry around than larger and heavier laptops.
Core[Image|Video] shaders are written in OGSL and compiled as needed for individual GPUs. It is entirely possible that the shipping version of the framework will include "good enough" translators to compile the OGSL into chip-spacific shader programs. While the 9200 wouldn't be able to have 100% CI/CV functionality it might be able to have enough functionality for a majority of programs to function fine.
Spitzer has a very limited field of view due to the need to keep its heat shield between the main chassis and the Sun. Compton is long since dead. Chandra works only in the x-ray portion of the EM spectrum. The James Webb telescope in the works is an IR-only telescope and it meant primarily as a planet finder.
The Great Observatory missions are excellent compliments to Hubble but not wholesale replacements. Adaptive optics still needs a bit of work to be effective in the visual bands whereas Hubble is working fine right now. The LBT for instance has a defraction limit that is far lower than Hubble's due to its larger mirrors. In any cases where it is not seeing limited it will produce far better images than Hubble all else being equal. That makes the LBT a great compliment to Hubble observations. At the same time Hubble can produce very nice UV and IR images and spectra of those same objects to get quite a bit more information than is available only from the LBT.
The size of a telescope's primary mirror determines its lighter gathering property (LGP). The larger the primary mirror, the more light it collects and thus the more light over a period of time it collects. The Hubble only has a 2.4m (94.5") primrary mirror, the LBT has two 8.4m (331") mirrors that combined act as a single circular 11.8m (465") mirror.
The LBT therefore collects far more light per unit of time than Hubble does. For many types of imaging the LBT ought to be able to get Hubble-quality or better images in less time than it takes Hubble to get them. A four day exposure from Hubble might only take a single day on the LBT.
This however doesn't necessarily answer the question of how far the LBT can see. Hubble is in an enviable position of being extra atmospheric. It can image in parts of the spectrum that are entirely blocked out by the various gasses floating around here on Earth. Hubble is able to take those deep universe images by imaging mostly in the IR band of the spectrum. Galaxies billions upon billions of lightyears away have enormous amounts of redshift. What they originally emitted in visible light has stretched into infrared as it's traveled to reach us. The pretty images NASA releases are just that, pretty images. They're greyscale images that have been given false colors as to be more appealing to non-astronomers.
Hubble will still be able to peer deeper into space than the LBT. The LBT however will be able to image faint visual objects quicker than Hubble (in many cases) and get far better optical resolution of large cosmological structures. A small telescope on the ground might be able to see M31 (the Andromeda galaxy). Hubble might be able to see fairly large structures like globular clusters, large dust clouds, and larger groups of stars. The LBT however will be able to see even smaller structures than Hubble. With higher resolving power the LBT will be able to produce more detailed visual band images which can be combined with other images or studies (Hubble IR or UV images for example) to provide a ton of information about the structure of that galaxy. The LBT isn't designed so much to replace Hubble or anything else, simply to expand our capability to observe and study objects in the sky.
Adaptive optics is great but what about UV and IR spectrography and imaging? One of the HST's best features is the ability to image and get spectrums from UV all the way to IR. Ground based telescopes only get a fraction of the spectrographic information the HST receives. A great deal of the recent information regarding supernovae has come from UV images and spectra from the HST as have excellent H2 and dust maps of our own galaxy. For cosmological structure observations ground based telescopes with adaptive optics can be wonderful tools but at the same time there is a definite need for observatories outside of the atmosphere.
People disagreeing with facts makes them no less factual. To call distributing facts parroting, suggesting that such action is a mindless reflex, is simply ridiculous.
It is hardly delusional to suggest there's fewer Mac games than Windows games. There's a lot of games available and more being released all the time. The "serious gamer" market segment that spends hundreds of dollars every month on new games would be disappointed but people that have jobs and/or real human relationships have a nice selection.
Despite the trollish nature of this post I find that I'm compelled to comment on it.
There's a billion people out there to sell/make software for IIS/Windows... and about 10 people for OS X...
Except for all of the companies/individuals making Mac software, many of them independent developers. You can also count the thousands of FOSS projects that actively maintain Darwin/MacOS X ports of their software or projects that can be run on any POSIX system. If you need software for a specific need there is plenty of it floating about if you bother to actually look.
When was the last time you went to a LAN bash and someone brought along a G4?
The last one I was at. While there's fewer games available for Macs than Windows PCs there's still a nice selection of staple games like Unreal Tournament, Quake, and Warcraft.
Please find me ANY valid reasons (and "it's better" doesn't count) for non-IT people to even consider switching to a platform that is less supported, costs more and is harder (for them) to use (because they have to learn all over again... remember most people who use Windows for about 10 years STILL don't know what they're doing... and they DONT CARE)
Fewer/no major viruses or exploits in the wild. Less downtime due to such things as well as lower annual costs as there's no need to buy yearly updates to AV suites.
The hardware the OS ships on has excellent support as does quite a bit of third party software, all out of the box. Many devices simply work without third party drivers needed.
No ridiculous drive letters. Plugging in an iPod or hard drive sticks an icon on the desktop with at the very lest an apropos icon.
Out of the box the system is extremely functional. You can browse the web, check e-mail, chat on AIM, even host your own website all with software that ships with everey copy of OSX. You can also do these things securely.
Despite being a bit unfamiliar to Windows users the OSX interface is actually easier to work with than Windows. There's no interative interfaces in Finder so you're not interupted when you plug in a digital camera or go to search for files.
There's lots of non-intrusive collaboration between different applications on the system. Storing a contact in your Address Book will put their URL in Safari's bookmarks, add their AIM or.Mac screen name to your iChat buddy list, and Mail will display their picture when you receive messages from them.
Keychain is a system wide framework for storing any sort of form data. The keychain files themselves are symmetrically encrypted with AES-128 and can store your numerous usernames and passwords. Unlike simple web form autofill features Keychain works throughout the whole system. You only need to enter an ISP password or some such once and tell the system to keep it in Keychain.
The situation Linux is in with hardware support is not enviable. There's some hardware that works great in Linux and other hardware that barely works or doesn't work. You could not sell OSX with the tagline "works on some hardware, we hope". It is an OS built around the idea computers ought to be easy to use. Crappy hardware support makes computers more difficult to use.
The idea of MacOS on PCs is a bit preposterous. No one would buy it because it would have little third party support. No third parties would bother supporting it because no one would buy it. Apple is able to put so much money into OSX's development because they make a lot of it on their hardware sales. OSX would have to cost more than $400 to keep revenues roughly equivilent to their heady hardware producing days.
You're not going to pay $400 or more for an OS that needs an all new set of software and has the possibility of not working completely right with all of your hardware. Without any software to run on it besides FOSS that runs on Linux anyways there would be little incentive for you to pay money for it. Vendors won't even ship Linux on their PCs, they're never going to ship OSX. Piracy of Windows is rampant and many Linux users only use it because they can download it for free. That does not bode well for Apple if they try to sell OSX, especially at more than $400 a pop.
The underlying OS is open source and there's yet to be a massive influx of ported *BSD and Linux drivers. There's been a handful of projects porting specific classes of drivers but no large scale efforts. Apple is not structured to be Red Hat and it isn't likely they would ever want to be. Red Hat survives by the skin of its teeth most of the time.
Quicktime is an extremely powerful media framework that pervades the entirety of MacOS. There's no open source equivalent to Quicktime. There's lots of open source media libraries but nothing quite like Quicktime. Open source projects attract some of the most talented software developers in the world. It isn't like Apple's software people are better than anyone else necessarily. They are however being paid to do something (such as make a pervasive media framework in the OS) fulltime. They aren't trying to write such a system in their spare time between going to school and working part time. It is entirely unlikely that a bazaar model of development would have ever conceived of something like Quicktime let alone actually built it. The fact that there's no pervasive media framework in Linux right now is good evidense of that claim I think.There's people that could design and build it but they don't necessarily have the resources or interest to. The Quicktime developers at Apple are being paid to develop Quicktime.
As such relying on people writing software in their spare time is not condusive to being an industry innovator. Many open source projects exist to build FOS versions of closed source commercial products. There's very few open source projects in existance with the goal of "make a computer easier for everyone to use".
The way SSE2 and AltiVec work on a core level is entirely different. On the Mac VecLib is a framework that gives abstracted access to AltiVec functionality so I don't need to write up inline assembly for commonly used mathematical routines. If I took a lot of time to make my program work with the VecLib framework in OSX I'd have to spend even more time making sure the x86 port didn't get futzed up trying to run on the register starved SSE2 unit on someone's P4. The VecLib frame work would have to dance around the P4's 8 vector registers in really grotesque ways to get the same functionality as is provided by the AltiVec unit on G4 and G5 processors.
There's plenty of other frameworks that are heavily tied to AltiVec now. While it would be possible to gut them and get them working fine with SSE2 it would be a huge undertaking. It's taken years to get the good AltiVec support the exists right now, it would take several more to get an x86 port up to snuff.
Soups were really cool because any program on your Newton could access data from other apps without any sort of file translators or anything. While iChat is able to access my Address Book database through the AddressBook.framework a Newton app is able to access your contacts without any special anything.
The Newton is still kicking ass and it has been discontinued for almost eight years.
Soups are just relational databases. Their relational aspect is what made them so useful on the Newton. If you stored an entry in your contacts it wouldn't end up steveha.vcf or something of that sort, instead the data would be added atomically to the Names soup. Later when you go to send an e-mail or fax to the contact (yourself for the sake of explanation) you would simply pick the steveha entry in your names to send it to and all of the appropriate information would be filled in because it would all be related in the database to the steveha entry. A note you wrote would be associated with its creation date and if you decided to file it in a group letting you not worry where it was and what it was called.
This system is incredibly powerful because all sorts of data ends up linked to other sorts of data. It is possible to find all of the e-mails that have been sent to you by a particular person or a bit of text stored in a note you got passed by someone. The Newton through its soups had content searches far before things like Sherlock or Spotlight.
PC vendors buy aluminum frames with motherboards and power supplies attached to them. Once they have those they stick processors, memory, imaged hard drives, and whatever other components their customers ordered or that product line contains in those frames and slap some panels and a logo on the outside. There is practically no true product development or actual research ever performed by these companies.
PC vendors running on razor thin margins are not ever going to do their own development work. Few of them stick with a given hardware component for a significant period of time so by the time an adequate driver was written they'd be shipping a different component in their new hardware.
Despite my futzed formatting I tried to stress the idea that OSX on commodity x86 hardware would be ridiculous. If Apple switched wholesale to x86-64 processors yet kept the systems as a whole Macs-with-OpenFirmware the situation would be much different. Such systems would still be Macs, as you said the PowerPC processor is not what makes a Mac a Mac.
MacOS X is "Darwin plus Apple UI magic". I suppose maybe you meant to say Darwin x86 plus Apple UI magic. The point of Apple selling MacOS on Mac computers is that they get to control the whole widget. As such Apple gets to add all sorts of nice little features into the OS that they know specifically will work in x number of machines.
Quartz Extreme is an excellent example. By the time Jaguar was released most of the current Macs would support it out of the box, by 2003 all Macs sold supported QE. Since Apple was deciding to replace their long used Rage 128s with Radeon and GeForce GPUs they were able to add a very useful feature to the OS that all shipping systems would be able to utilize. Tiger is going to utilize the advanced shader programmability of newer Radeon and GeForce GPUs in two systems called CoreImage and CoreVideo. By the time Tiger ships most if not all Macs being sold will support these features out of the box, many systems sold right now can support these features.
Writing their OS for commodity PCs would pretty much remove that ability. When it wouldn't be guaranteed all of their customers would be able to see the new features it wouldn't be worth while to even add such features. It took Microsoft a long time to get USB and hot plugging working right in Windows. Since so few people had USB ports on their computers there was little impetus to fix USB functionality in the OS. Apple on the otherhand was replacing ADB on their systems with USB and their USB support was pretty exceptional. It's taken Microsoft a long time to get their WiFi support up to a moderately useful level because for long time no PCs were really shipping with WiFi capabilities. Apple however rolled out with extremely good WiFi support because their systems were shipping with WiFi capabilities built in.
When a single company builds the hardware their OS is going to run on they tend to have excellent support for their hardware. Linux from any particular distribution is very hit-or-miss with hardware from particular vendors. Even HP doesn't support every bit of hardware in their laptops that have Linux as an OS option. They only support what SuSE and Red Hat support. Apple supports every piece of hardware on any Mac capable of running the OS.
OSX for commodity PCs would not be the same OSX that runs on Macs. Without spending hundreds of millions of compatibility testing it would be exceedingly difficult for Apple to support the range of hardware that Microsoft does. As we've seen with Linux, hardware vendors do not want to write drivers for any OS but Windows and they're usually none too cooperative in releasing specs for their products.
As such Apple would have to pick up the slack or hope they could get thousands of programmers to contribute homegrown drivers. In the first case they would have to spend lots of money to make sure a huge range of hardware worked properly and in the second they would have a slew of half-complete drivers shipping with the OS. Spending a lot of money supporting the menagerie of PC hardware would make selling OSX for PCs unprofitable in the extreme and shipping half-complete drivers and only offering partial functionality for people's hardware would kill their sales and make the whole enterprise unprofitable.
No one is going to switch to MacOS X-x86 if their hardware isn't likely to run properly. Developers aren't going to bother supporting an OS on another architecture that only a few people use, fewer of which even want to buy their products. You don't see many commercial Linux applications for Linux/PPC or Linux/MIPS. Microsoft killed their Windows NT ports because few third parties bothered porting their applications to non-x86 archtectures even though the OS environment was the same. Vis à vis don't hold your breath waiting for Apple to release OSX for PCs.
Re:The Gmail comparison is unfair...
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.Mac Storage Now 250MB
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Tiger's server version is going to include Blojsom which is a Blosxom workalike written in Java. It is entirely possible at some point.Mac will include a blog service based on Blojsom. I think it would be a good addition to the.Mac package because to me it seems like a natural extension of simply having a website. It'd be cool to be able to just write an entry in TextEdit, save it to your iDisk, and voilà you've got a new post to your blog.
Tiger isn't going to be released until sometime in the first half of 2005, even then it will contain fat binaries which are binaries containing multiple versions of the same executable in different ISAs or what have you. Tiger then will have 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all of its frameworks and the OS will pick which to use at runtime based on what processor the system is running on. This was a capability of OpenStep, fat binaries allowed you to compile for different architectures yet only distribute one executable file without JITC.
After Tiger there isn't likely to be another OSX upgrade until the first half of 2007 or so. So between now and the release of Tiger's successor you've got plenty of time to use a Powerbook. Even when Tiger's successor (Ocelot?) is released it will very likely still support old 32-bit Macs considering there will still be millions of them in use. It was only with Panther's release the Apple dropped official support for the last of the Old World machines, Wallstreet Powerbook and Beige G3 PowerMac, though with a little hacking they work just fine. Those systems were both five years old when Panther was released.
I can think of a great use of 1500 high definition channels: video on demand (almost). As it stands services like TiVo are trying to take the traditonal watch-when-we-broadcast-or-else model used by television broadcasters and turn it into a watch-whenever-you'd-like model. This has proven to be very popular because there's plenty of people that honestly dislike having to sit down at particular times and watch a television show they like. If you love Adult Swim but have to be up at 7:00am you can tell TiVo to record it so you can watch it that evening when you get home.
This model is limited to offering what broadcasters want to air on their particular channel allotment. This stems from the fact they've only got a finite amount of bandwidth available. With a huge amount of bandwidth available DirecTV could really shake up the traditional broadcast model.
Instead of leasing channels to broadcasters DirecTV could instead sell bandwidth to content distributors. Say you wanted to watch a particular episode of the Sopranos. You'd tell your DirecTV DVR what episode you'd like to watch and it would consult a big broadcast content index. It'd find that episode 6 of the Sopranos would be downlinked from 6:45am to 7:45am on channel 751 on Monday. At 6:45am on Monday it would tune to channel 751 and record episode 6 of the Sopranos. You've now got an HD copy of the Sopranos, episode 6, on your DVR that you could watch whenever you wanted.
Instead of leasing a whole channel for HBO to use they could simply sell HBO a bandwidth alotment. HBO could then broadcast an entire season of the Sopranos on whatever channel and whatever hour they wished. Subscribers could pick and choose which episodes they wanted to watch out of those and have their DVR record them. Channel 751 later that day might be downlinking Gilligan's Island episodes for all HBO cares, they're only concerned with the bandwidth they paid for to distribute the Sopranos that week.
Any given week this proposed set of satellites could beam an obscene amount of data down to recievers. I think assigning such bandwidth to a rigid set of virtual "channels" would be a bit ridiculous. We're in the age of smart peripheral devices, televisions are no longer simply dumb boxes that convert radio signals to color pictures. Digital recievers can parse through a large amount of data to find specific things a person is looking for. There's enough computing power in my iPod to search through thousands of songs and pick out particular ones based on my criteria so it can't be terribly difficult to apply this idea to digital satellite broadcasts. Instead of looking through a miniature hard drive the system instead scans thousands of data streams.
The only way an iMac is going to run some particular game as well as a "gaming PC" is if they stick a GF6800 in it and a 2.5GHz G5. Such an iMac would obliderate sales of the PowerMacs. So they come out with this model which will play games pretty well, especially the ones currently available for the Mac and even future games like Doom 3. For the hardcore corporate client I don't see how this doesn't work. It is small and thin and takes up less desk real estate than even the lampshades and their 10" base. They're also reasonably powerful with a lot of screen real estate.
I think this iMac is going to be a huge seller this year. They're as powerful as last year's G5 PowerMacs for a thousand dollar price difference. They also come bolted to nice LCD screens and have enough I/O (including optical audio out) to suit just about anybody.
If ever there was a case where voting with your dollar made sense it was this one -- but too many people just can't get enough of Britney.
Please do yourself a favor and pull your head out of your ass. In case you haven't noticed just about every movie and record album available in the US is published by RIAA or MPAA member companies. Sales of Britney Spears records alone aren't filling the coffers of *AA member companies. This meme is a logical fallasy and a completely ludicrous preposition.
Unfortunately I see this meme perpetuated more and more, people want to equate what is in their opinion bad music with the ridiculous actions of the RIAA. The bands that are cool to like are signed with the same labels as the pop favorites. The same is true of cool movies, they're made and published by the same studios that are responsible for films like Gigli and Kazaam.
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I've heard this argument scores of times and it still doesn't make any sense. The crowd that buys the $300 cheapo PCs is not one that any computer company truly wants as customers. They will not likely be repeat customers because they will always go for the best apparent deal. One year they're buying a Dell and the next they're buying an HP at Wal*Mart.
They're also a crowd that isn't likely to buy any peripheral services like extended coverage contracts and the like because they're going for the smallest possible hit to their check book. Instead of investing in something that will save them money in the long term they're trying to save over the short term.
This cheapskate crowd also isn't likely to really do much for the Mac software market. Skimping on their computer means they will do what they can to skimp on their software as well. Someone buying an "iSlab" isn't necessarily adding to Roxio, Intuit, or the Omni Group's pool of potential buyers.
So in the end you've got a bunch of people buying Macs that don't make Apple much money, don't necessarily give them repeat sales, cannabalize existing products, and do nothing for the Mac software market. The cheapskate Mac isn't really a good idea when you work it through realistically.
It isn't really a full desktop machine even when docked. It's a machine for $2000 (at least for now) that is only about as powerful as a cheap ass Wal-Mart PC and less capable in many ways than a moderately priced laptop. It also requires docks, keybords, monitors, and a slew of other peripherals in all of the locations you're planning to use the thing.
As a handheld or even simply as a portable computer the U750 falls down horribly. It's a handheld that gets at best three hours on a single charge and won't fit in even the largest of pockets. It's also running an OS whose suspend capability is somewhat of a joke among mobile computer users.
Today's Palms and PocketPCs can do the same sorts of things the U750 and its mini-PC brethren can do for a fraction of the price and size with far longer battery life. The Palm or PocketPC might not be able to run any old Windows application but then again who wants to run Word on a 5" 800x600 display?
I'm at a loss to understand the appeal of these. I can see the appeal of a handheld computer system with a large screen and I grasp the desire to have a lot of storage space on such a handheld. What I don't get is why a PC with its general purpose nature is being shoehorned into such an inappropriate form factor. It seems to me a device truly meant to be a haldheld and not cimply a tiny PC would be an overall better design.
I can see very few instances where something running a StrongARM/XScale chip with 64-128MB of RAM isn't going to be powerful enough to handle chores that would end up relegated to a handheld device. Current PocketPC and Palms can play video, compressed audio, and even 3D games. This is on top of all of the mundane uses like note taking, calendar keeping, and contact management they might be used for.
Running typical desktop software on a handheld device doesn't seem very appealing to me either. Running a full version of Word on a handheld while riding on the train sounds a bit ridiculous to me. A Word document viewer on a lightweight device makes a bit of sense but not the full application. I don't see many people with an overwhelming desire to run Outlook XP on their handhelds.
Then there's the price tag of these suckers. The U750 costs more than most high-powered laptops and quite a bit more than even extremely powerful and feature filled PocketPC and Palm handhelds.
No. Doom 3 was demoed by John Carmack at MacWorld Tokyo in 2001. It was demoed on a G4 PowerMac when the GeForce 3 cards were announced for them.
Having been to more than one Sony Style store I can say I'm pretty disappointed with them. Sony wants to have their own stores where it's wall to wall Sony products but doesn't want to make the stores somewhere you want to go to. There's very little difference between a Sony Style store and a Best Buy whereas there is a world of difference between an Apple section of a CompUSA and an Apple Store. If Sony could make some stores a little more enticing, similar to the Sony section of the Metreon, I think their stores would be far more attractive.
Every group is going to have the fanboys, have you ever read through a Gentoo lovefest on Slashdot? Geez.
You're making assumptions about the value of the iBook without giving any sort of idea what you think provides good value which is why I would guess you got moderated down. You're also saying you're paying a lot for just an Apple logo as if the iBook costs $6,000 and requires you to kick a puppy when you buy it.
For most people iBooks are excellent laptops. They're faster than the specifications might lead you to believe and are very stable machines. They also have ridiculously long battery life, I got an iBook from work that routinely gets 5+ hours on the battery while using Airport (802.11g) while my 12" Powerbook only gets a little over four hours doing the same work. OSX itself is a very stable OS and is markedly more secure than Windows XP even if you've taken the many hours required to lock it down.
These are all things I would consider to add value to the purchase. For a thousand bucks you're getting a laptop with built-in WiFi, really long battery life, a stable OS, and an all around good design. You're also getting a laptop that weighs in at less than five pounds which makes it far easier to carry around than larger and heavier laptops.
Core[Image|Video] shaders are written in OGSL and compiled as needed for individual GPUs. It is entirely possible that the shipping version of the framework will include "good enough" translators to compile the OGSL into chip-spacific shader programs. While the 9200 wouldn't be able to have 100% CI/CV functionality it might be able to have enough functionality for a majority of programs to function fine.
Spitzer has a very limited field of view due to the need to keep its heat shield between the main chassis and the Sun. Compton is long since dead. Chandra works only in the x-ray portion of the EM spectrum. The James Webb telescope in the works is an IR-only telescope and it meant primarily as a planet finder.
The Great Observatory missions are excellent compliments to Hubble but not wholesale replacements. Adaptive optics still needs a bit of work to be effective in the visual bands whereas Hubble is working fine right now. The LBT for instance has a defraction limit that is far lower than Hubble's due to its larger mirrors. In any cases where it is not seeing limited it will produce far better images than Hubble all else being equal. That makes the LBT a great compliment to Hubble observations. At the same time Hubble can produce very nice UV and IR images and spectra of those same objects to get quite a bit more information than is available only from the LBT.
The size of a telescope's primary mirror determines its lighter gathering property (LGP). The larger the primary mirror, the more light it collects and thus the more light over a period of time it collects. The Hubble only has a 2.4m (94.5") primrary mirror, the LBT has two 8.4m (331") mirrors that combined act as a single circular 11.8m (465") mirror.
The LBT therefore collects far more light per unit of time than Hubble does. For many types of imaging the LBT ought to be able to get Hubble-quality or better images in less time than it takes Hubble to get them. A four day exposure from Hubble might only take a single day on the LBT.
This however doesn't necessarily answer the question of how far the LBT can see. Hubble is in an enviable position of being extra atmospheric. It can image in parts of the spectrum that are entirely blocked out by the various gasses floating around here on Earth. Hubble is able to take those deep universe images by imaging mostly in the IR band of the spectrum. Galaxies billions upon billions of lightyears away have enormous amounts of redshift. What they originally emitted in visible light has stretched into infrared as it's traveled to reach us. The pretty images NASA releases are just that, pretty images. They're greyscale images that have been given false colors as to be more appealing to non-astronomers.
Hubble will still be able to peer deeper into space than the LBT. The LBT however will be able to image faint visual objects quicker than Hubble (in many cases) and get far better optical resolution of large cosmological structures. A small telescope on the ground might be able to see M31 (the Andromeda galaxy). Hubble might be able to see fairly large structures like globular clusters, large dust clouds, and larger groups of stars. The LBT however will be able to see even smaller structures than Hubble. With higher resolving power the LBT will be able to produce more detailed visual band images which can be combined with other images or studies (Hubble IR or UV images for example) to provide a ton of information about the structure of that galaxy. The LBT isn't designed so much to replace Hubble or anything else, simply to expand our capability to observe and study objects in the sky.
Adaptive optics is great but what about UV and IR spectrography and imaging? One of the HST's best features is the ability to image and get spectrums from UV all the way to IR. Ground based telescopes only get a fraction of the spectrographic information the HST receives. A great deal of the recent information regarding supernovae has come from UV images and spectra from the HST as have excellent H2 and dust maps of our own galaxy. For cosmological structure observations ground based telescopes with adaptive optics can be wonderful tools but at the same time there is a definite need for observatories outside of the atmosphere.
People disagreeing with facts makes them no less factual. To call distributing facts parroting, suggesting that such action is a mindless reflex, is simply ridiculous.
It is hardly delusional to suggest there's fewer Mac games than Windows games. There's a lot of games available and more being released all the time. The "serious gamer" market segment that spends hundreds of dollars every month on new games would be disappointed but people that have jobs and/or real human relationships have a nice selection.
Except for all of the companies/individuals making Mac software, many of them independent developers. You can also count the thousands of FOSS projects that actively maintain Darwin/MacOS X ports of their software or projects that can be run on any POSIX system. If you need software for a specific need there is plenty of it floating about if you bother to actually look.
The last one I was at. While there's fewer games available for Macs than Windows PCs there's still a nice selection of staple games like Unreal Tournament, Quake, and Warcraft.
The situation Linux is in with hardware support is not enviable. There's some hardware that works great in Linux and other hardware that barely works or doesn't work. You could not sell OSX with the tagline "works on some hardware, we hope". It is an OS built around the idea computers ought to be easy to use. Crappy hardware support makes computers more difficult to use.
The idea of MacOS on PCs is a bit preposterous. No one would buy it because it would have little third party support. No third parties would bother supporting it because no one would buy it. Apple is able to put so much money into OSX's development because they make a lot of it on their hardware sales. OSX would have to cost more than $400 to keep revenues roughly equivilent to their heady hardware producing days.
You're not going to pay $400 or more for an OS that needs an all new set of software and has the possibility of not working completely right with all of your hardware. Without any software to run on it besides FOSS that runs on Linux anyways there would be little incentive for you to pay money for it. Vendors won't even ship Linux on their PCs, they're never going to ship OSX. Piracy of Windows is rampant and many Linux users only use it because they can download it for free. That does not bode well for Apple if they try to sell OSX, especially at more than $400 a pop.
The underlying OS is open source and there's yet to be a massive influx of ported *BSD and Linux drivers. There's been a handful of projects porting specific classes of drivers but no large scale efforts. Apple is not structured to be Red Hat and it isn't likely they would ever want to be. Red Hat survives by the skin of its teeth most of the time.
.There's people that could design and build it but they don't necessarily have the resources or interest to. The Quicktime developers at Apple are being paid to develop Quicktime.
Quicktime is an extremely powerful media framework that pervades the entirety of MacOS. There's no open source equivalent to Quicktime. There's lots of open source media libraries but nothing quite like Quicktime. Open source projects attract some of the most talented software developers in the world. It isn't like Apple's software people are better than anyone else necessarily. They are however being paid to do something (such as make a pervasive media framework in the OS) fulltime. They aren't trying to write such a system in their spare time between going to school and working part time. It is entirely unlikely that a bazaar model of development would have ever conceived of something like Quicktime let alone actually built it. The fact that there's no pervasive media framework in Linux right now is good evidense of that claim I think
As such relying on people writing software in their spare time is not condusive to being an industry innovator. Many open source projects exist to build FOS versions of closed source commercial products. There's very few open source projects in existance with the goal of "make a computer easier for everyone to use".
The way SSE2 and AltiVec work on a core level is entirely different. On the Mac VecLib is a framework that gives abstracted access to AltiVec functionality so I don't need to write up inline assembly for commonly used mathematical routines. If I took a lot of time to make my program work with the VecLib framework in OSX I'd have to spend even more time making sure the x86 port didn't get futzed up trying to run on the register starved SSE2 unit on someone's P4. The VecLib frame work would have to dance around the P4's 8 vector registers in really grotesque ways to get the same functionality as is provided by the AltiVec unit on G4 and G5 processors.
There's plenty of other frameworks that are heavily tied to AltiVec now. While it would be possible to gut them and get them working fine with SSE2 it would be a huge undertaking. It's taken years to get the good AltiVec support the exists right now, it would take several more to get an x86 port up to snuff.
Soups were really cool because any program on your Newton could access data from other apps without any sort of file translators or anything. While iChat is able to access my Address Book database through the AddressBook.framework a Newton app is able to access your contacts without any special anything.
The Newton is still kicking ass and it has been discontinued for almost eight years.
Soups are just relational databases. Their relational aspect is what made them so useful on the Newton. If you stored an entry in your contacts it wouldn't end up steveha.vcf or something of that sort, instead the data would be added atomically to the Names soup. Later when you go to send an e-mail or fax to the contact (yourself for the sake of explanation) you would simply pick the steveha entry in your names to send it to and all of the appropriate information would be filled in because it would all be related in the database to the steveha entry. A note you wrote would be associated with its creation date and if you decided to file it in a group letting you not worry where it was and what it was called.
This system is incredibly powerful because all sorts of data ends up linked to other sorts of data. It is possible to find all of the e-mails that have been sent to you by a particular person or a bit of text stored in a note you got passed by someone. The Newton through its soups had content searches far before things like Sherlock or Spotlight.
PC vendors buy aluminum frames with motherboards and power supplies attached to them. Once they have those they stick processors, memory, imaged hard drives, and whatever other components their customers ordered or that product line contains in those frames and slap some panels and a logo on the outside. There is practically no true product development or actual research ever performed by these companies.
PC vendors running on razor thin margins are not ever going to do their own development work. Few of them stick with a given hardware component for a significant period of time so by the time an adequate driver was written they'd be shipping a different component in their new hardware.
Despite my futzed formatting I tried to stress the idea that OSX on commodity x86 hardware would be ridiculous. If Apple switched wholesale to x86-64 processors yet kept the systems as a whole Macs-with-OpenFirmware the situation would be much different. Such systems would still be Macs, as you said the PowerPC processor is not what makes a Mac a Mac.
MacOS X is "Darwin plus Apple UI magic". I suppose maybe you meant to say Darwin x86 plus Apple UI magic. The point of Apple selling MacOS on Mac computers is that they get to control the whole widget. As such Apple gets to add all sorts of nice little features into the OS that they know specifically will work in x number of machines.
Quartz Extreme is an excellent example. By the time Jaguar was released most of the current Macs would support it out of the box, by 2003 all Macs sold supported QE. Since Apple was deciding to replace their long used Rage 128s with Radeon and GeForce GPUs they were able to add a very useful feature to the OS that all shipping systems would be able to utilize. Tiger is going to utilize the advanced shader programmability of newer Radeon and GeForce GPUs in two systems called CoreImage and CoreVideo. By the time Tiger ships most if not all Macs being sold will support these features out of the box, many systems sold right now can support these features.
Writing their OS for commodity PCs would pretty much remove that ability. When it wouldn't be guaranteed all of their customers would be able to see the new features it wouldn't be worth while to even add such features. It took Microsoft a long time to get USB and hot plugging working right in Windows. Since so few people had USB ports on their computers there was little impetus to fix USB functionality in the OS. Apple on the otherhand was replacing ADB on their systems with USB and their USB support was pretty exceptional. It's taken Microsoft a long time to get their WiFi support up to a moderately useful level because for long time no PCs were really shipping with WiFi capabilities. Apple however rolled out with extremely good WiFi support because their systems were shipping with WiFi capabilities built in.
When a single company builds the hardware their OS is going to run on they tend to have excellent support for their hardware. Linux from any particular distribution is very hit-or-miss with hardware from particular vendors. Even HP doesn't support every bit of hardware in their laptops that have Linux as an OS option. They only support what SuSE and Red Hat support. Apple supports every piece of hardware on any Mac capable of running the OS.
OSX for commodity PCs would not be the same OSX that runs on Macs. Without spending hundreds of millions of compatibility testing it would be exceedingly difficult for Apple to support the range of hardware that Microsoft does. As we've seen with Linux, hardware vendors do not want to write drivers for any OS but Windows and they're usually none too cooperative in releasing specs for their products.
As such Apple would have to pick up the slack or hope they could get thousands of programmers to contribute homegrown drivers. In the first case they would have to spend lots of money to make sure a huge range of hardware worked properly and in the second they would have a slew of half-complete drivers shipping with the OS. Spending a lot of money supporting the menagerie of PC hardware would make selling OSX for PCs unprofitable in the extreme and shipping half-complete drivers and only offering partial functionality for people's hardware would kill their sales and make the whole enterprise unprofitable.
No one is going to switch to MacOS X-x86 if their hardware isn't likely to run properly. Developers aren't going to bother supporting an OS on another architecture that only a few people use, fewer of which even want to buy their products. You don't see many commercial Linux applications for Linux/PPC or Linux/MIPS. Microsoft killed their Windows NT ports because few third parties bothered porting their applications to non-x86 archtectures even though the OS environment was the same. Vis à vis don't hold your breath waiting for Apple to release OSX for PCs.
Tiger's server version is going to include Blojsom which is a Blosxom workalike written in Java. It is entirely possible at some point .Mac will include a blog service based on Blojsom. I think it would be a good addition to the .Mac package because to me it seems like a natural extension of simply having a website. It'd be cool to be able to just write an entry in TextEdit, save it to your iDisk, and voilà you've got a new post to your blog.
Tiger isn't going to be released until sometime in the first half of 2005, even then it will contain fat binaries which are binaries containing multiple versions of the same executable in different ISAs or what have you. Tiger then will have 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all of its frameworks and the OS will pick which to use at runtime based on what processor the system is running on. This was a capability of OpenStep, fat binaries allowed you to compile for different architectures yet only distribute one executable file without JITC.
After Tiger there isn't likely to be another OSX upgrade until the first half of 2007 or so. So between now and the release of Tiger's successor you've got plenty of time to use a Powerbook. Even when Tiger's successor (Ocelot?) is released it will very likely still support old 32-bit Macs considering there will still be millions of them in use. It was only with Panther's release the Apple dropped official support for the last of the Old World machines, Wallstreet Powerbook and Beige G3 PowerMac, though with a little hacking they work just fine. Those systems were both five years old when Panther was released.
I can think of a great use of 1500 high definition channels: video on demand (almost). As it stands services like TiVo are trying to take the traditonal watch-when-we-broadcast-or-else model used by television broadcasters and turn it into a watch-whenever-you'd-like model. This has proven to be very popular because there's plenty of people that honestly dislike having to sit down at particular times and watch a television show they like. If you love Adult Swim but have to be up at 7:00am you can tell TiVo to record it so you can watch it that evening when you get home.
This model is limited to offering what broadcasters want to air on their particular channel allotment. This stems from the fact they've only got a finite amount of bandwidth available. With a huge amount of bandwidth available DirecTV could really shake up the traditional broadcast model.
Instead of leasing channels to broadcasters DirecTV could instead sell bandwidth to content distributors. Say you wanted to watch a particular episode of the Sopranos. You'd tell your DirecTV DVR what episode you'd like to watch and it would consult a big broadcast content index. It'd find that episode 6 of the Sopranos would be downlinked from 6:45am to 7:45am on channel 751 on Monday. At 6:45am on Monday it would tune to channel 751 and record episode 6 of the Sopranos. You've now got an HD copy of the Sopranos, episode 6, on your DVR that you could watch whenever you wanted.
Instead of leasing a whole channel for HBO to use they could simply sell HBO a bandwidth alotment. HBO could then broadcast an entire season of the Sopranos on whatever channel and whatever hour they wished. Subscribers could pick and choose which episodes they wanted to watch out of those and have their DVR record them. Channel 751 later that day might be downlinking Gilligan's Island episodes for all HBO cares, they're only concerned with the bandwidth they paid for to distribute the Sopranos that week.
Any given week this proposed set of satellites could beam an obscene amount of data down to recievers. I think assigning such bandwidth to a rigid set of virtual "channels" would be a bit ridiculous. We're in the age of smart peripheral devices, televisions are no longer simply dumb boxes that convert radio signals to color pictures. Digital recievers can parse through a large amount of data to find specific things a person is looking for. There's enough computing power in my iPod to search through thousands of songs and pick out particular ones based on my criteria so it can't be terribly difficult to apply this idea to digital satellite broadcasts. Instead of looking through a miniature hard drive the system instead scans thousands of data streams.
The only way an iMac is going to run some particular game as well as a "gaming PC" is if they stick a GF6800 in it and a 2.5GHz G5. Such an iMac would obliderate sales of the PowerMacs. So they come out with this model which will play games pretty well, especially the ones currently available for the Mac and even future games like Doom 3. For the hardcore corporate client I don't see how this doesn't work. It is small and thin and takes up less desk real estate than even the lampshades and their 10" base. They're also reasonably powerful with a lot of screen real estate.
I think this iMac is going to be a huge seller this year. They're as powerful as last year's G5 PowerMacs for a thousand dollar price difference. They also come bolted to nice LCD screens and have enough I/O (including optical audio out) to suit just about anybody.
Please do yourself a favor and pull your head out of your ass. In case you haven't noticed just about every movie and record album available in the US is published by RIAA or MPAA member companies. Sales of Britney Spears records alone aren't filling the coffers of *AA member companies. This meme is a logical fallasy and a completely ludicrous preposition.
Unfortunately I see this meme perpetuated more and more, people want to equate what is in their opinion bad music with the ridiculous actions of the RIAA. The bands that are cool to like are signed with the same labels as the pop favorites. The same is true of cool movies, they're made and published by the same studios that are responsible for films like Gigli and Kazaam.