As many others have pointed out the G3 in my particular Powerbook draws anywhere from 5 to 12 watts. I could have a dual G3 Powerbook with the same power requirements as a single Duron chip. On the battery I get a playable framerate with Quake 3 for about two and a half hours. If I were doing work on the battery I get about four hours, five if I really work at it. How do PC notebook makers even compare their supposedly mobile solutions? I can understand desktop replacement class laptops getting shit battery life but how do companies like Dell sell macho laptops that have 59Wh batteries that are lucky to finish a DVD on a single charge (to the defense of all, running your CD/DVD drive really tears up the battery no matter which processor you've got although some more than others). This is probably just the Barcadi and coke talking.
Two things are very amusing to me in articles like this, the first is that people equate resale price with wholesale price for some reason (tip: buying in bulk reduces unit cost and buying strait from the manufacturer rather than a wholeseller reduces the price even more) and use places like Pricewatch to figure out chip prices. OEMs spend alot less on hardware than us prols do (yet their margins remain slim due to the fact they have to pay people to assemble their boxes whereas we often do it for ourselves for free). The other amusing aspect of these articles is coming to the assumption that when a new technology is released it instantly appears in all current piece of hardware already produced. If AMD doesn't have a fast 64-bit I/O right now that X company can use right now, they will not get the contract that requires a fast 64-bit I/O (mentioned in the article). Saying Sun used AMD chips they would have to wait for the next generation of boxes to put in any new features. This is bad for them because people wanting those features won't buy the box without the features in question. Anyways, whatever Sun decides on I hope they will use the Cobalt aquisition to the advantage of some of their current products. I think foremost might be a software migration of the Cobalts boxes. They could (maybe even ought to) stick a Lite version of Solaris 8 on these with iPlanet as a webserver and PC Netlink in place of Samba ect.. Netlink is an often overlooked Solaris app that will run NT directory, file and print, and authentication services. Using iPlanet gives them a pretty good leverage with JSP and Servlets. As for hardware these are good products to show off their Crypto Accelerator add-in cards. Having hardware assisted encryption would go a really long way towards getting the most umph out of server appliances.
Name a recent President who was truly qualified for the position. Bulletprood security is neigh impossible. It's hard enough to secure a fortified position, any time you transit anything you increase the security concerns ten fold. Demoncracy isn't about getting what you want, it's about getting what the majority wants. We however live in a Democratic republic which means the majority gets to choose from a small list of options decided by a not necessarily concerted means. Read up on this country's governmental system before you start going on about getting what "we" and "you" want.
Electronic voting is no more "insecure" as paper ballot voting. It does however give people the chance of adding better scrutiny to vote counting. After the votes are tabulated by the county they ought to be sent to several independent counting firms under firm disclosure regulations. The hardware and software ought to be up for public audit and the machines built to higher security standards (C3 or higher) than the typical desktop workstation. Partisan politics really fucked up this recent election and distribution of the tallying functions ought to provide adequate redundancy. If a firm comes up with a different number than all the rest that county's ballots are then sent out to the rest of the firms so they can verify the descrepency. I'd rather have Wang GS doing the hardware and software than Dell, Unisys and Microsoft though.
Because they are assuming no one will pay for the Linux version. Lots of people pay for the unlocked version of Quicktime which makes it profitable. Linux users are by far historically against paying for any set of 1's and 0's stored on their hard drives. If you pay for it they will develop it. Which is why I originally said you need to convince Apple people will indeed pay for the Linux port of Quicktime in order for them to develop it. Porting it will cost a fair deal of money (there is alot to port) as well as more licensing fees they'll need to pay for CODECs.
As plenty of other people have said, spend more money on speakers than you spend on the receiver. For my little setup I bagged a JVC RX6008v receiver from Costco with speakers for the cheap. The speakers are small which reduces some of their sound range but the receiver has specific settings for smaller speakers to help adjust them. It's got a shitload of inputs and outputs, lots of RCA style plugs as well as optical and coax digital plugs, S-Video to boot. As for speakers, pick up an audiophile magazine and see how sets stand up to their reviews, I rather enjoy the speakers I hooked up to my JVC (the rear speakers came with the rig while the fronts and center I already had). Monsoon just released a pretty bigass pair of flat speakers for home theaters at CES and I'm pretty sure they are available now or will be soon. Which are 1000$ for the pair. The good thing with the flat panels is you don't end up with defined sound cones. If you want to get a little more hardcore build your own speakers and match them to your TV's housing or entertainment center's finish.
How come Linuz users whine so much about Microsoft products, supposedly they never use them. If you don't want to pay for a copy of Whistler don't. No one is forcing you to upgrade from your pirated copy of Windows 2000. If you're buying a site license (as smart IT people do) you can image until your site license runs out and stick that install on lots of systems. For business this isn't too much of a big deal (many of which probably won't upgrade over Win2k until they need hardware replacement) and for home users this isn't much of a problem as long as you aren't trying to use someone else's copy. Due to a really interesting lack of information the Yahoo article doesn't really say shit. You have to provide hardware information to the MS run clearing house. So what is going to be requested and what sort of fail-overs will be enacted? Since they aren't saying yet it is pretty fucking stupid to jump to conclusions. Not even Microsoft would be so base as to not allow you to reinstall your purchased copy of Windows on a machine you rebuilt or upgraded.
Hopefully these next two quarters Apple will kick some serious ass against its competitors. In my skewed perception of the world I think out of most other contenders they offer the best OEM package you could ask a computer company for. They've got beaucoup RAM and hard drive space, really fast processors (dispite a low clock speed compared to Intel and AMD processors), and all the built-in extras you need for just about anything. To boot you even have the option of making your box a dual 533 machine. I bet in a few months Newer and Sonnet will come out with dual processor upgrade cards for older G4 Macs. One thing I wish Apple would emphasize is its support for delveopers. The ADC provides beaucoup resources for anyone wanting to develop MacOS software. They ought to also make some inroads into putting Mac programming into the classroom. A good deal of schools teach C on Windows and Unix but I've never heard of any using Macs (although there probably are some). The disadvantage to the ADC is it can be fairly expensive (Select membership is 500 bones). I think they ought to offer a public version of their student membership (which is 99 bones). One thing Apple users miss out on is the amount of little pieces of software (good IRC, FTP, or NNTP clients for instance) that users of other platforms take for granted.
Pay for it fucko. Apple makes alot of money selling Quicktime for a paltry 30$. Linux zealots scream for software to be free if not sourced. If you convince a company those millions of users will pay for the software they will make it.
Why the fuck would you give your computer illiterate dad Photoshop? Besides which if you don't like Apple's don't fucking buy them. Maybe to you a computer is "a tool" but to a good deal of people it is just another part of a home entertainment idea. Most end users shouldn't even be exposed to the complexities of computers that X forces on them. Macs are excellent for people who don't care. Computers are around to do things for people, not the other way around.
A while ago a story ran on slashdot about a 48fps film projector that was backwards compatible with 24fps film reels. I too wish the framerate of movies was increased, staring at computer monitors all the time has messed up my eyes' natural refresh rate and 24fps can be really bothersome at times.
Are you complaining because you're a Luddite or because you merely dislike Microsoft? You're picking out a great evil from a business plan. Most business plans include in them somewhere "we WILL take over the world or at least our market niche for the sake of our shareholders". Who cares if Microsoft buys broadband and owns rights to the Xbox, you don't have to buy the fucking thing if you don't want it. Many of your assumptions are pretty bad ones anyways. According to the market statistics, most people who will buy one already have PCs and a good portion of those have DVD players. You're also misconstruing the whole.NET initiative. It is a label for a set of technologies most of which are merely standards for sharing information. Labeling.NET as bad and evil because it has a Microsoft logo is stupid. Sun has a similar set-up, they've got a whole suite of tools that lets Java apps communicate objects back and forth and runtimes that run Java apps anywhere. Oh my gosh I must be kidding! How the fuck do you think PepsiCo gets those quaint little commercials to show up in front of you anyways? TV stations are using your patronage to make money; will the capitalism never cease?
Convergent Applications have existed before with not much of a glance from consumers. The folks at Oracle tried to sell these to everyone. Of course this has to be taken with a grain of salt, back when Ellison and crew came up with the idea most people had no idea an internet even existed. Now I wonder if such an idea would take off where it basically failed before. However regarding internet appliances, I wonder why their manufacturers don't invest some beaucoup cash into ASP solutions. MSN provides this to an extent with their MSN Companion (which are actually pretty neat). I'd like an IA with an X server on it.
Rendering stuff directly to the framebuffer is good, repeat, good. I used to hate X with a passion; that was before I started playing heavily with it and then started using more and more of its hardcore functions. It's pretty cool getting network and processor monitors on a remote Linux server to appear in a window on your Windows 2000 box and then later that day have them also show up on your Powerbook while you're at school. As a super duper GUI system X is really fantabulous. If you don't need that shit, you're still forced to use it. This is where X-less graphical shit comes in! If you can get GTK+, Qt and hitherto undeveloped GPL equivilent to DirectX to run directly on the framebuffer you've just gone halfway towards supplimenting X as a graphical interface for free unicies. X is great for alot of tasks but really sucks ass in others. There is a huge memory footprint as well as a fair amount of overhead involved with anything using it. Games and shit like handhelds don't need X or any of its neater features. They need a display system that gets right to the point. Good work the Trolls and the GTK dudes. GiPaq?
Re:If we could only send a Jackass to the moon...
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New G4s Coming Our Way
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I'm not saying Apple is deliberately holding back high clocked chips or anything, merely annoucing genuine joy that they are releasing higher clocked models. I wasn't meaning the 1 GHz demonstrations to be something Apple needs in their products, just saying the technology is around for them to hit marks higher than 500 MHz.
Boo for Rotary. Every time I have seen anything involving those guys the founder has come off as a complete jackass. Now they are blaming their failure on "fundamental flaws in the industry" which is some jackass not wanting to take responsibility for having a shitty business plan. The Roton at best is a luke warm idea, orbital vehicles have enough complexities in more traditional configurations without rotors; why would you want to add more complexity (read: things to go horribly fucking wrong and turn you into a short bright flare)? They attempted to design and build a prototype for their contraption (an prohibitively expensive proposition) with a very limited cash flow. Had they hired a smart CEO with business savvy they might have merely kept themselves are a research and development firm for their space vehicle and sold their idea to anyone interested in shouldering the cost of prototyping and deployment. Shooting evolved monkeys into space will be profitable in a few years when a market opens for such a business. First build a market and then capitalize on it; don't be a jackass and try to capitalize on a market that isn't even around.
Where do you think that 20 million dollars goes? Besides the fact that the ISS is being paid for as it's being assembled. That 100 billion dollars is spread out over several years and comes out of NASA's allowance they get from you paying taxes to the federal government all year. NASA is not a private organization, they are a branch of the government and appropriated funds generated from the taxation of citizens. What part don't you understand about this concept? It costs ~2 million dollars to lift a human into space abaord the space shuttle, if you add in operational costs and whatnot you start to figure out where that 20 million is going. No one is going to pay for people to get a free ride anywhere, especially an anywhere thats worth 100 billion dollars and millions of man-hours. There might be a small profit left over from that 20E6 that NASA gets to pocket until POLICY CHANGES (hint) the federal government keeps that profit and redistributes it throughout the entire body of government (as opposed to NASA getting to add it to their operational funding).
Jesus potzer. When executives make comments like this, they are using business logic rather than regular math. Your computer costs so much to run every minute; however this is offset by making money back merely by operating. It is holding an ethereal value of sorts. When you cause it not to operate you send the cost of operation shooting way above the amount of money you make (during normal operation). Since you're no longer inputting money your costs are not offset by an input of money. The imbalance causes your costs to soar and you start losing money like mad. There is a really nice calculus for this sort of mechanism but I can't remember it right now. Does anyone know the one I'm talking about? Anyways you don't need to make a million dollars a minute in order to lose a million dollars per minute.
My wishlist for this next year includes a lithium polymer battery for my 1999 series Powerbook. I would REALLY like to get rid of this 1.something pound Li battery. I don't really give a shit if I get more time to play games or type things up in Appleworks, I just want a damned lighter piece of equipment to carry around. Even halving the weight of the battery would be fine by me. With that out of the way I just really want to say yahoo! (in a non-proper sort of way that doesn't infringe on copyrights). I've been waiting oh so long for Apple to release systems with higher clock speeds. Motorola has demonstrated 1GHz processors and Apple is trudging along with their line of 500MHz G4s. The addition of a higher memory bus speed is also a plus. Now if they would only crank out boxes with 4x AGP enabled they'd be in a great position for games as well as hardware acceleration for Maya and other apps.
Well I stand corrected about the motherboards. Although the point is still valid concerning extra cost for a dual system. They're sticking in the daughtercard and a second processor for the same price as the (when they first came out) single processor systems.
Where the fuck are you getting this? MacOS has supported multiple processors for years. You used to be able to get 9600 MPs that had dual 604e processors. That was back in the days of OS 7.x. Besides that Apple sells it's hardware on a much higher margin than PC manufacturers like Dell or Gateway. They have much higher volume production contracts than most PC makers as well as exclusive deals with people like Motorola. You don't see G4 (MPPC 7400) chips or motherboards in anything else do you? Since the chips don't go through any intermediaries before they get to Apple's assembly facilities they get them at about cost. I don't know if you know but Athlons and Pentium chips cost only a fraction of their retail (or whole for that matter) coming out of the factory. Prices like this vastly decrease the production cost for Macs and that money goes into Apple's cauffers. PC manufacturers often are forced to buy their hardware at wholesale prices which greatly reduces the profit from selling hardware. Oh yeah, Unix is a 31 year old idea. DOS almost as old, MacOS is a baby compared to the two. No OS is perfect, Unix still has lots of areas where it could use some work.
Quad processors wont necessarily increase the speed of AE renders either. Adobe really needs to G4 optimize their products, more than just cracking out a few AltiVec ready filters. Building a line of SMP boxes is the wrong move for Apple at this point. With a bunch of single processor boxes (merely with more RAM and a faster CPU) you can just reuse the same motherboards which means you can buy them en masse and not be at a loss. With a small number of multiprocessor boxes you aren't moving the mobos out in volume which means you can't order large numbers of them. This drives up the cost that smart companies won't pass onto their customers. THis leaves Apple with sagging profits. So they are deep sixing their multiprocessor systems except in server models which don't sell heavily anyways.
Back a looooong time ago (more than 4 years) there was alot of talk about an Alaska-Siberia bridge that would carry automobile, train, and data traffic across the frozen expanse of ocean to Asia. Why might one ask if one were so inclined? Well Asia happens to be a pretty large producer of items that are often sold in places like America. While Russia (especially Siberia) might seem like a rather bland place to run railroads, Asia is exciting and warm. Not only could you run things like rail and data lines you could run another thing people like. Yes you may have guess, oil! Say you were a small-ish island nation with a heavy dependence on foreign oil imports vis a vis Japan. You help fund a solid transportation route between Asia and America, run some piping to somewhere like Korea (where you've got decent export agreements) and blamo you can lower the price of your oil a great deal. Korea and China also get the benefit of the foreign exported oil (and thus contributing to the effort to build such a solid transportation route between continents). Russia invested in rail transport instead of road transport (as opposed to the US) during the cold war and have a huge rail coverage area. If you connect this to the North American continent you suddenly have a fairly inexpensive route through which you can ship manufactured goods and consumables. A Chunnel (or bridge) would not only symbolically link the two continents but would also benefit anyone interested in international trade. The Pacific ocean is pretty fucking big and huge container ships are very expensive (especially when compared to rail transport). If you could start shipping goods from here to Asia by an inexpensive means (rail) you can lower the costs (great for cash starved economies) and increase volume. This of course is not a business plan or idea where to get money to build it (hint: get anyone who can benefit from a land route between continents to chip in some cash) but it is a reason (I think it's a decent to good reason) why would you even WANT to get from Alaska to Siberia by rail. Oh yeah, if suddenly vast amounts of exports started going through Alaska people might remember that it is indeed a state of the Union.
What I have yet to see (personally) is a good distributed way to share public encryption keys. Of all the uses of distributed/P2P file sharing I think key sharing would be one of the coolest uses. Increasing the availability of encryption keys would go along way towards getting people to use encryption and signing more often. Not only would this be a Good Thing for unrelated uses, you can also sign and encrypt your distributed files using the same network resources. Oh, there was a topic...shit.
How is it that when people say Microsoft, everyone points out that Microsoft stuff crashes. I've never seen a Dreamcast BSoD before yet it bears the Powered by Windows CE logo. You bastards! You've polluted everyone's minds with the Linux Hype Machine!
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As many others have pointed out the G3 in my particular Powerbook draws anywhere from 5 to 12 watts. I could have a dual G3 Powerbook with the same power requirements as a single Duron chip. On the battery I get a playable framerate with Quake 3 for about two and a half hours. If I were doing work on the battery I get about four hours, five if I really work at it. How do PC notebook makers even compare their supposedly mobile solutions? I can understand desktop replacement class laptops getting shit battery life but how do companies like Dell sell macho laptops that have 59Wh batteries that are lucky to finish a DVD on a single charge (to the defense of all, running your CD/DVD drive really tears up the battery no matter which processor you've got although some more than others). This is probably just the Barcadi and coke talking.
Two things are very amusing to me in articles like this, the first is that people equate resale price with wholesale price for some reason (tip: buying in bulk reduces unit cost and buying strait from the manufacturer rather than a wholeseller reduces the price even more) and use places like Pricewatch to figure out chip prices. OEMs spend alot less on hardware than us prols do (yet their margins remain slim due to the fact they have to pay people to assemble their boxes whereas we often do it for ourselves for free). The other amusing aspect of these articles is coming to the assumption that when a new technology is released it instantly appears in all current piece of hardware already produced. If AMD doesn't have a fast 64-bit I/O right now that X company can use right now, they will not get the contract that requires a fast 64-bit I/O (mentioned in the article). Saying Sun used AMD chips they would have to wait for the next generation of boxes to put in any new features. This is bad for them because people wanting those features won't buy the box without the features in question. Anyways, whatever Sun decides on I hope they will use the Cobalt aquisition to the advantage of some of their current products. I think foremost might be a software migration of the Cobalts boxes. They could (maybe even ought to) stick a Lite version of Solaris 8 on these with iPlanet as a webserver and PC Netlink in place of Samba ect.. Netlink is an often overlooked Solaris app that will run NT directory, file and print, and authentication services. Using iPlanet gives them a pretty good leverage with JSP and Servlets. As for hardware these are good products to show off their Crypto Accelerator add-in cards. Having hardware assisted encryption would go a really long way towards getting the most umph out of server appliances.
Name a recent President who was truly qualified for the position. Bulletprood security is neigh impossible. It's hard enough to secure a fortified position, any time you transit anything you increase the security concerns ten fold. Demoncracy isn't about getting what you want, it's about getting what the majority wants. We however live in a Democratic republic which means the majority gets to choose from a small list of options decided by a not necessarily concerted means. Read up on this country's governmental system before you start going on about getting what "we" and "you" want.
Electronic voting is no more "insecure" as paper ballot voting. It does however give people the chance of adding better scrutiny to vote counting. After the votes are tabulated by the county they ought to be sent to several independent counting firms under firm disclosure regulations. The hardware and software ought to be up for public audit and the machines built to higher security standards (C3 or higher) than the typical desktop workstation. Partisan politics really fucked up this recent election and distribution of the tallying functions ought to provide adequate redundancy. If a firm comes up with a different number than all the rest that county's ballots are then sent out to the rest of the firms so they can verify the descrepency. I'd rather have Wang GS doing the hardware and software than Dell, Unisys and Microsoft though.
Because they are assuming no one will pay for the Linux version. Lots of people pay for the unlocked version of Quicktime which makes it profitable. Linux users are by far historically against paying for any set of 1's and 0's stored on their hard drives. If you pay for it they will develop it. Which is why I originally said you need to convince Apple people will indeed pay for the Linux port of Quicktime in order for them to develop it. Porting it will cost a fair deal of money (there is alot to port) as well as more licensing fees they'll need to pay for CODECs.
As plenty of other people have said, spend more money on speakers than you spend on the receiver. For my little setup I bagged a JVC RX6008v receiver from Costco with speakers for the cheap. The speakers are small which reduces some of their sound range but the receiver has specific settings for smaller speakers to help adjust them. It's got a shitload of inputs and outputs, lots of RCA style plugs as well as optical and coax digital plugs, S-Video to boot. As for speakers, pick up an audiophile magazine and see how sets stand up to their reviews, I rather enjoy the speakers I hooked up to my JVC (the rear speakers came with the rig while the fronts and center I already had). Monsoon just released a pretty bigass pair of flat speakers for home theaters at CES and I'm pretty sure they are available now or will be soon. Which are 1000$ for the pair. The good thing with the flat panels is you don't end up with defined sound cones. If you want to get a little more hardcore build your own speakers and match them to your TV's housing or entertainment center's finish.
How come Linuz users whine so much about Microsoft products, supposedly they never use them. If you don't want to pay for a copy of Whistler don't. No one is forcing you to upgrade from your pirated copy of Windows 2000. If you're buying a site license (as smart IT people do) you can image until your site license runs out and stick that install on lots of systems. For business this isn't too much of a big deal (many of which probably won't upgrade over Win2k until they need hardware replacement) and for home users this isn't much of a problem as long as you aren't trying to use someone else's copy. Due to a really interesting lack of information the Yahoo article doesn't really say shit. You have to provide hardware information to the MS run clearing house. So what is going to be requested and what sort of fail-overs will be enacted? Since they aren't saying yet it is pretty fucking stupid to jump to conclusions. Not even Microsoft would be so base as to not allow you to reinstall your purchased copy of Windows on a machine you rebuilt or upgraded.
Hopefully these next two quarters Apple will kick some serious ass against its competitors. In my skewed perception of the world I think out of most other contenders they offer the best OEM package you could ask a computer company for. They've got beaucoup RAM and hard drive space, really fast processors (dispite a low clock speed compared to Intel and AMD processors), and all the built-in extras you need for just about anything. To boot you even have the option of making your box a dual 533 machine. I bet in a few months Newer and Sonnet will come out with dual processor upgrade cards for older G4 Macs. One thing I wish Apple would emphasize is its support for delveopers. The ADC provides beaucoup resources for anyone wanting to develop MacOS software. They ought to also make some inroads into putting Mac programming into the classroom. A good deal of schools teach C on Windows and Unix but I've never heard of any using Macs (although there probably are some). The disadvantage to the ADC is it can be fairly expensive (Select membership is 500 bones). I think they ought to offer a public version of their student membership (which is 99 bones). One thing Apple users miss out on is the amount of little pieces of software (good IRC, FTP, or NNTP clients for instance) that users of other platforms take for granted.
Pay for it fucko. Apple makes alot of money selling Quicktime for a paltry 30$. Linux zealots scream for software to be free if not sourced. If you convince a company those millions of users will pay for the software they will make it.
Why the fuck would you give your computer illiterate dad Photoshop? Besides which if you don't like Apple's don't fucking buy them. Maybe to you a computer is "a tool" but to a good deal of people it is just another part of a home entertainment idea. Most end users shouldn't even be exposed to the complexities of computers that X forces on them. Macs are excellent for people who don't care. Computers are around to do things for people, not the other way around.
A while ago a story ran on slashdot about a 48fps film projector that was backwards compatible with 24fps film reels. I too wish the framerate of movies was increased, staring at computer monitors all the time has messed up my eyes' natural refresh rate and 24fps can be really bothersome at times.
Are you complaining because you're a Luddite or because you merely dislike Microsoft? You're picking out a great evil from a business plan. Most business plans include in them somewhere "we WILL take over the world or at least our market niche for the sake of our shareholders". Who cares if Microsoft buys broadband and owns rights to the Xbox, you don't have to buy the fucking thing if you don't want it. Many of your assumptions are pretty bad ones anyways. According to the market statistics, most people who will buy one already have PCs and a good portion of those have DVD players. You're also misconstruing the whole .NET initiative. It is a label for a set of technologies most of which are merely standards for sharing information. Labeling .NET as bad and evil because it has a Microsoft logo is stupid. Sun has a similar set-up, they've got a whole suite of tools that lets Java apps communicate objects back and forth and runtimes that run Java apps anywhere. Oh my gosh I must be kidding! How the fuck do you think PepsiCo gets those quaint little commercials to show up in front of you anyways? TV stations are using your patronage to make money; will the capitalism never cease?
Convergent Applications have existed before with not much of a glance from consumers. The folks at Oracle tried to sell these to everyone. Of course this has to be taken with a grain of salt, back when Ellison and crew came up with the idea most people had no idea an internet even existed. Now I wonder if such an idea would take off where it basically failed before. However regarding internet appliances, I wonder why their manufacturers don't invest some beaucoup cash into ASP solutions. MSN provides this to an extent with their MSN Companion (which are actually pretty neat). I'd like an IA with an X server on it.
Rendering stuff directly to the framebuffer is good, repeat, good. I used to hate X with a passion; that was before I started playing heavily with it and then started using more and more of its hardcore functions. It's pretty cool getting network and processor monitors on a remote Linux server to appear in a window on your Windows 2000 box and then later that day have them also show up on your Powerbook while you're at school. As a super duper GUI system X is really fantabulous. If you don't need that shit, you're still forced to use it. This is where X-less graphical shit comes in! If you can get GTK+, Qt and hitherto undeveloped GPL equivilent to DirectX to run directly on the framebuffer you've just gone halfway towards supplimenting X as a graphical interface for free unicies. X is great for alot of tasks but really sucks ass in others. There is a huge memory footprint as well as a fair amount of overhead involved with anything using it. Games and shit like handhelds don't need X or any of its neater features. They need a display system that gets right to the point. Good work the Trolls and the GTK dudes. GiPaq?
I'm not saying Apple is deliberately holding back high clocked chips or anything, merely annoucing genuine joy that they are releasing higher clocked models. I wasn't meaning the 1 GHz demonstrations to be something Apple needs in their products, just saying the technology is around for them to hit marks higher than 500 MHz.
Boo for Rotary. Every time I have seen anything involving those guys the founder has come off as a complete jackass. Now they are blaming their failure on "fundamental flaws in the industry" which is some jackass not wanting to take responsibility for having a shitty business plan. The Roton at best is a luke warm idea, orbital vehicles have enough complexities in more traditional configurations without rotors; why would you want to add more complexity (read: things to go horribly fucking wrong and turn you into a short bright flare)? They attempted to design and build a prototype for their contraption (an prohibitively expensive proposition) with a very limited cash flow. Had they hired a smart CEO with business savvy they might have merely kept themselves are a research and development firm for their space vehicle and sold their idea to anyone interested in shouldering the cost of prototyping and deployment. Shooting evolved monkeys into space will be profitable in a few years when a market opens for such a business. First build a market and then capitalize on it; don't be a jackass and try to capitalize on a market that isn't even around.
Where do you think that 20 million dollars goes? Besides the fact that the ISS is being paid for as it's being assembled. That 100 billion dollars is spread out over several years and comes out of NASA's allowance they get from you paying taxes to the federal government all year. NASA is not a private organization, they are a branch of the government and appropriated funds generated from the taxation of citizens. What part don't you understand about this concept? It costs ~2 million dollars to lift a human into space abaord the space shuttle, if you add in operational costs and whatnot you start to figure out where that 20 million is going. No one is going to pay for people to get a free ride anywhere, especially an anywhere thats worth 100 billion dollars and millions of man-hours. There might be a small profit left over from that 20E6 that NASA gets to pocket until POLICY CHANGES (hint) the federal government keeps that profit and redistributes it throughout the entire body of government (as opposed to NASA getting to add it to their operational funding).
Jesus potzer. When executives make comments like this, they are using business logic rather than regular math. Your computer costs so much to run every minute; however this is offset by making money back merely by operating. It is holding an ethereal value of sorts. When you cause it not to operate you send the cost of operation shooting way above the amount of money you make (during normal operation). Since you're no longer inputting money your costs are not offset by an input of money. The imbalance causes your costs to soar and you start losing money like mad. There is a really nice calculus for this sort of mechanism but I can't remember it right now. Does anyone know the one I'm talking about? Anyways you don't need to make a million dollars a minute in order to lose a million dollars per minute.
My wishlist for this next year includes a lithium polymer battery for my 1999 series Powerbook. I would REALLY like to get rid of this 1.something pound Li battery. I don't really give a shit if I get more time to play games or type things up in Appleworks, I just want a damned lighter piece of equipment to carry around. Even halving the weight of the battery would be fine by me. With that out of the way I just really want to say yahoo! (in a non-proper sort of way that doesn't infringe on copyrights). I've been waiting oh so long for Apple to release systems with higher clock speeds. Motorola has demonstrated 1GHz processors and Apple is trudging along with their line of 500MHz G4s. The addition of a higher memory bus speed is also a plus. Now if they would only crank out boxes with 4x AGP enabled they'd be in a great position for games as well as hardware acceleration for Maya and other apps.
Well I stand corrected about the motherboards. Although the point is still valid concerning extra cost for a dual system. They're sticking in the daughtercard and a second processor for the same price as the (when they first came out) single processor systems.
Where the fuck are you getting this? MacOS has supported multiple processors for years. You used to be able to get 9600 MPs that had dual 604e processors. That was back in the days of OS 7.x. Besides that Apple sells it's hardware on a much higher margin than PC manufacturers like Dell or Gateway. They have much higher volume production contracts than most PC makers as well as exclusive deals with people like Motorola. You don't see G4 (MPPC 7400) chips or motherboards in anything else do you? Since the chips don't go through any intermediaries before they get to Apple's assembly facilities they get them at about cost. I don't know if you know but Athlons and Pentium chips cost only a fraction of their retail (or whole for that matter) coming out of the factory. Prices like this vastly decrease the production cost for Macs and that money goes into Apple's cauffers. PC manufacturers often are forced to buy their hardware at wholesale prices which greatly reduces the profit from selling hardware. Oh yeah, Unix is a 31 year old idea. DOS almost as old, MacOS is a baby compared to the two. No OS is perfect, Unix still has lots of areas where it could use some work.
Quad processors wont necessarily increase the speed of AE renders either. Adobe really needs to G4 optimize their products, more than just cracking out a few AltiVec ready filters. Building a line of SMP boxes is the wrong move for Apple at this point. With a bunch of single processor boxes (merely with more RAM and a faster CPU) you can just reuse the same motherboards which means you can buy them en masse and not be at a loss. With a small number of multiprocessor boxes you aren't moving the mobos out in volume which means you can't order large numbers of them. This drives up the cost that smart companies won't pass onto their customers. THis leaves Apple with sagging profits. So they are deep sixing their multiprocessor systems except in server models which don't sell heavily anyways.
Back a looooong time ago (more than 4 years) there was alot of talk about an Alaska-Siberia bridge that would carry automobile, train, and data traffic across the frozen expanse of ocean to Asia. Why might one ask if one were so inclined? Well Asia happens to be a pretty large producer of items that are often sold in places like America. While Russia (especially Siberia) might seem like a rather bland place to run railroads, Asia is exciting and warm. Not only could you run things like rail and data lines you could run another thing people like. Yes you may have guess, oil! Say you were a small-ish island nation with a heavy dependence on foreign oil imports vis a vis Japan. You help fund a solid transportation route between Asia and America, run some piping to somewhere like Korea (where you've got decent export agreements) and blamo you can lower the price of your oil a great deal. Korea and China also get the benefit of the foreign exported oil (and thus contributing to the effort to build such a solid transportation route between continents). Russia invested in rail transport instead of road transport (as opposed to the US) during the cold war and have a huge rail coverage area. If you connect this to the North American continent you suddenly have a fairly inexpensive route through which you can ship manufactured goods and consumables. A Chunnel (or bridge) would not only symbolically link the two continents but would also benefit anyone interested in international trade. The Pacific ocean is pretty fucking big and huge container ships are very expensive (especially when compared to rail transport). If you could start shipping goods from here to Asia by an inexpensive means (rail) you can lower the costs (great for cash starved economies) and increase volume. This of course is not a business plan or idea where to get money to build it (hint: get anyone who can benefit from a land route between continents to chip in some cash) but it is a reason (I think it's a decent to good reason) why would you even WANT to get from Alaska to Siberia by rail. Oh yeah, if suddenly vast amounts of exports started going through Alaska people might remember that it is indeed a state of the Union.
What I have yet to see (personally) is a good distributed way to share public encryption keys. Of all the uses of distributed/P2P file sharing I think key sharing would be one of the coolest uses. Increasing the availability of encryption keys would go along way towards getting people to use encryption and signing more often. Not only would this be a Good Thing for unrelated uses, you can also sign and encrypt your distributed files using the same network resources. Oh, there was a topic...shit.
How is it that when people say Microsoft, everyone points out that Microsoft stuff crashes. I've never seen a Dreamcast BSoD before yet it bears the Powered by Windows CE logo. You bastards! You've polluted everyone's minds with the Linux Hype Machine!