You ever see the episode of Chappelle's Show when Dave was a black blind KKK leader? Aside from a fascinating and insightful piece about how short sighted racism is, it was also hilarious. He also did a segment in which he explored the stereotype that white people are unable to dance, permutated it into the idea that white people only dance to electric guitar, and eventually had an african american who was raised in the suburbs dancing to electric guitar (Because the point was that the stereotype wasn't grounded in a racial trait, but rather a cultural one.)
Exploring "uncomfortable" issues can lead to real insight. (I'm sure there is a pun to be made with insight and inciting to riot, but I'm tired.) If we just get pissy whenever nybody brings up the issue, we can't learn anything. Sticking our fingers in our ears, and chat-spamming with "OMFG THIS IS NOT HAPPENING, FUK YOU TROLL" is not a way to learn to be enlightened.
Re:Slashdot needs a 'HERO' tag
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Saving Huygens
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Quick, somebody register engineeringherodance.org, where we can post animated GIFs of heros of engineering dancing, so that people can become better acquainted with them! What? I'm serious. Yes, really.
I work at a computer store. I can get them at cost. That doesn't mean I wouldn't still be potentially interested in spending a little extra money on a card because I thought it was coming from a cool company. Did you read the post? The guy is proposing a video card with an FPGA onboard. For an interesting tinker toy, that makes it more interesting than just a dumb frame buffer. Oh, and can I put that radeon in my Mac? The fact that there are open source x86 drivers doesn't mean I can just flash it with an OpenFirmware BIOS, and use it in my G3. Being able to use it with open Firmware adds to the geek points, and it adds to the fact that I can use it. My Athlon64 already has a Geforce FX 5700, and I do need good 3D performance in that system. I wouldn't put the toy card in my main rig...:)
I'd like to know just what sort of 3D performance this thing will do. The OP suggests it will have some 3D features, so as long as it'll play a decent game of Quake II or Quake III, it'll probably be worthwhile at $100 US. If we are talking about a Quake I card at $300, then I wouldn't buy it. Dual head operation is a huge bonus for me. If it's dual head, I might be willing to spend a bit more than $100. I know I can get nVidia hardware cheaper, but I'm a zealot, and I'm quite willing to spend ~$50-$100 US on an open toy.
I spent $50 on my dreamcast, and consider it worth it fot a laugh-tinker toy.
I once wrote a DOS image viewer that did true color by mapping the 8 bit pallatte to each of the R, G, and B channels, and displaying the R, G, and B channels in sequence like a three frame animation. It looked horrible, and flickery, but it was great bragging rights.
Regarding the choice of OS... I know this is gonna be a bandwagon comment, since this is slashdot, but I say this as a guy who makes his living fixing windows boxen, and is currently applying for an even better paying job fixing windows boxen... I'm typing this from my iBook.
Whether you choose Mac OS, Linux, BSD, Irix, Solaris, VMS, or the Amiga obviously depends on what sort of apps your users need, but most everything can be done without Windows.
Some people will tell you that Total Cost of Ownership is total bunk, and that Windows isn't more expensive to run. My paycheck *is* the Windows TCO.
Frankly, anybody who gives a damn can always google for the afformentioned terms, and find the websites for the libraries, and information about things like tunnels. I've had plenty of/. articles on topics I wasn't familiar with, but I never bitched about it. Nerd doesn't mean one who knows everything. It means one who is willing to find out.
I agree -- OTOH, if they had a Grown Up Mr. Wizard, it would kick ass if I could go to GUMW.org, and watch episodes online, and also see a set of links and supporting text about the boring parts, so that if I wanted to go deeper, I'd have a nice handy start with all sorts of links to fourier transforms for calculating frinkinson's drag.
It's all a conspiracy to secretly switch us to metric. A kitchen table can be about a square meter. "The size of a bus" is about ten meters. and, so on. Soon, we will start seeing units like a centi-kitchen-table, and it will spell doom for imperial goodness.
I tell women about my underclocking. Because, the powers gave me more than I need, and I want to make it fair to the other guys when I use my extreme prowess to outdo them. Oh, and most all my systems are 64 bits, so they have "wide registers," even if they run them slowly, so as not to rush.
I haven't been on a date since I moved to Colorado several years ago. I don't understand why.
The poster didn't say you should expect a failure rate that high, but you had damn well be able to tolerate it. If you have a ten billion dollar account that needs 100% uptime, hosting on an e machines is a bad idea. OTOH, if you are hosting a Quake server, then occasional outages are probably no big deal.
Well, Furious D was used on the Simpsons, and Tenacious D is already taken as well. Tutorial D doesn't dound professional enough, but you don't want it to sound so complicated that it might interrupt things. I propose that the name be changed to Penis D. It's simple and uncomplicated sounding, but still has a trait of all leaders (who are, themselves, usual;ly also simple.)
I guess this is a troll, but it has a Simpson's reference, so I guess it's all good. Bah, WTF do I care, my Karma is capped.
It's clearly the sort of thing that you have to be in the right mood to see, and some people will never be in that mood. Fortunately for me, the goofy sense of humor in the movie looks like it will compliment my mood just fine!
According to store.apple.com, Mac OS X is $129 US. Don't know why they jacked it up in the UK, but you may want to consider buying it, and shipping it. Alarmingly, you may come out ahead!
I had a short. I split it with him. I had 16 bits, so we each got eight. In order for us to each get a nybble, I would need to save or discard half of my short, before then splitting my remaining byte into two four bit chunks. I am unsure what distortion of logical processes within your fragile little mind caused you to suppose we each had a nybble. That's how my mind works - It's like a Laser!
So, you really think that people are going to spend $50 for an emulator, and over $100 for the OS, so that they can emulate a platform they barely know exists? And then, the slow performance of non-native operation, the lack of the slick full user experience, and the quirks that are in every real-world emulator... All this will inspire them to buy a Mac?
IMHO, this is a system targetted for people who already have a base of Mac OS apps that they want or need to use, and have an existing investment in PC hardware. For example, somebody who needs a laptop, and wants to use it for games, so they have to get a PC, but also occasionally needs Safari for testing web pages, or X Code to do cross platform builds on the road.
I love my iBook, and I love OS-X, but there are relatively few reasons I'd feel a need to run it on my Dell.
I am reminded of an Arthur C Clarke story, written as an address to the planetary government. The speaker was the president of a food company which was going bankrupt in a future where all food was synthesised, and it considered horribly offensive to discuss the consumption of dead flesh.
So, the various food companies constantly invented new protein structures to tittilate the taste buds of their customers. At one point, the speaker's main competitor invents something which absolutely crushes all the other food on ther market. As it turns out, they were synthesising the flesh of humans, which happens to be just about the perfect food for a human, and consequently tastes fantastic.
I assume it was written as a "dark warning" type of piece. I always thought it was a lovely idea.
Have you actually worked with either instruction set? "It's probable that most instructions will map directly" is not a compelling technical argument. I'm not going to clasim to be an expert, but I have dealt in passing with both SSE and Alti-Vec. There isn't a 1:1 mapping. Even if there was, the differences in register layout make emulating AltiVec a bit inconvenient, to say the least.
I'm trying to boggle over how exactly one would go about trying to do it. My brain keeps insisting that register starvation really is an issue. I guess they just have a lot of stuff sitting in L1 cache, and keep a really tight loop for the emulator core. Regardless of the actual marketing claims, if it works, I'm impressed. They should just be very careful about letting Marketing make empty promises. If they fail to deliver, they are sunk, and have no credibility. If they had just made no speed specific claims, they wouldn't have to worry about failing to live up to them.
That, and there would be no apps, a huge amount of cost for technical support, and if 100% of the Apple user base switched over to OS/X x86 (by some miracle every app ever was ported), THEY WOULD STOP BUYING MACS!
Apple has had an "escape plan" for years. The original plan was called Star Trek, and it was a port of classic Mac OS. Now, it's called "If we wanted, we could recompile the GUI for almost any platform gcc targets in probably a few hours."
Good guess, but naturally, Raman Spectroscopy would be any spectroscopic measurement performed by the species which constructed the space ship from "Rendezvous with Rama," by Arthur C. Clarke.
My Mac comes with DVD player software, and iDVD. My windows comes with no support for MPEG-2. Sure, it doesn't have pro level direct MPEG editing built in, but MPEG was never designed as an editing format. It is designed as a distribution format. doing frame accurate editing in an MPEG format is a very annoying experience, because of the way MPEG is stored. Much easier to just take an MPEG, convert it to an QuickTime file for editing, use that, and then output back to MPEG for distribution. You want a codec that is easy to seek randomly, and get at individual frames, and a codec that compresses fast for editing. MPEG has intermediate frames defined only as GOP's with a P-frame at either end, and is horribly asymettric, taking a very long time to encode. Seriously, what is your beef? And what is the mpeg2 encoder that comes with Windows like you claim?
I'm not intimately familiar with the SH4, but some marketing departments insist that a multiply-add instruction really counts as two instructions. It may be something like that to get the theoretical peak number on the SH4, "the equivalent of X instructions..."
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You ever see the episode of Chappelle's Show when Dave was a black blind KKK leader? Aside from a fascinating and insightful piece about how short sighted racism is, it was also hilarious. He also did a segment in which he explored the stereotype that white people are unable to dance, permutated it into the idea that white people only dance to electric guitar, and eventually had an african american who was raised in the suburbs dancing to electric guitar (Because the point was that the stereotype wasn't grounded in a racial trait, but rather a cultural one.)
Exploring "uncomfortable" issues can lead to real insight. (I'm sure there is a pun to be made with insight and inciting to riot, but I'm tired.) If we just get pissy whenever nybody brings up the issue, we can't learn anything. Sticking our fingers in our ears, and chat-spamming with "OMFG THIS IS NOT HAPPENING, FUK YOU TROLL" is not a way to learn to be enlightened.
Quick, somebody register engineeringherodance.org, where we can post animated GIFs of heros of engineering dancing, so that people can become better acquainted with them! What? I'm serious. Yes, really.
I work at a computer store. I can get them at cost. That doesn't mean I wouldn't still be potentially interested in spending a little extra money on a card because I thought it was coming from a cool company. Did you read the post? The guy is proposing a video card with an FPGA onboard. For an interesting tinker toy, that makes it more interesting than just a dumb frame buffer. Oh, and can I put that radeon in my Mac? The fact that there are open source x86 drivers doesn't mean I can just flash it with an OpenFirmware BIOS, and use it in my G3. Being able to use it with open Firmware adds to the geek points, and it adds to the fact that I can use it. My Athlon64 already has a Geforce FX 5700, and I do need good 3D performance in that system. I wouldn't put the toy card in my main rig... :)
I'd like to know just what sort of 3D performance this thing will do. The OP suggests it will have some 3D features, so as long as it'll play a decent game of Quake II or Quake III, it'll probably be worthwhile at $100 US. If we are talking about a Quake I card at $300, then I wouldn't buy it. Dual head operation is a huge bonus for me. If it's dual head, I might be willing to spend a bit more than $100. I know I can get nVidia hardware cheaper, but I'm a zealot, and I'm quite willing to spend ~$50-$100 US on an open toy.
I spent $50 on my dreamcast, and consider it worth it fot a laugh-tinker toy.
You seem to be posting something related to the topic... You must be new here.
I once wrote a DOS image viewer that did true color by mapping the 8 bit pallatte to each of the R, G, and B channels, and displaying the R, G, and B channels in sequence like a three frame animation. It looked horrible, and flickery, but it was great bragging rights.
Regarding the choice of OS... I know this is gonna be a bandwagon comment, since this is slashdot, but I say this as a guy who makes his living fixing windows boxen, and is currently applying for an even better paying job fixing windows boxen... I'm typing this from my iBook.
Whether you choose Mac OS, Linux, BSD, Irix, Solaris, VMS, or the Amiga obviously depends on what sort of apps your users need, but most everything can be done without Windows.
Some people will tell you that Total Cost of Ownership is total bunk, and that Windows isn't more expensive to run. My paycheck *is* the Windows TCO.
Frankly, anybody who gives a damn can always google for the afformentioned terms, and find the websites for the libraries, and information about things like tunnels. I've had plenty of /. articles on topics I wasn't familiar with, but I never bitched about it. Nerd doesn't mean one who knows everything. It means one who is willing to find out.
I agree -- OTOH, if they had a Grown Up Mr. Wizard, it would kick ass if I could go to GUMW.org, and watch episodes online, and also see a set of links and supporting text about the boring parts, so that if I wanted to go deeper, I'd have a nice handy start with all sorts of links to fourier transforms for calculating frinkinson's drag.
It's all a conspiracy to secretly switch us to metric. A kitchen table can be about a square meter. "The size of a bus" is about ten meters. and, so on. Soon, we will start seeing units like a centi-kitchen-table, and it will spell doom for imperial goodness.
I tell women about my underclocking. Because, the powers gave me more than I need, and I want to make it fair to the other guys when I use my extreme prowess to outdo them. Oh, and most all my systems are 64 bits, so they have "wide registers," even if they run them slowly, so as not to rush.
I haven't been on a date since I moved to Colorado several years ago. I don't understand why.
The poster didn't say you should expect a failure rate that high, but you had damn well be able to tolerate it. If you have a ten billion dollar account that needs 100% uptime, hosting on an e machines is a bad idea. OTOH, if you are hosting a Quake server, then occasional outages are probably no big deal.
Sure, for a *single game,* a million is huge, but how many PC's have been used to play any game online at least once?
Well, Furious D was used on the Simpsons, and Tenacious D is already taken as well. Tutorial D doesn't dound professional enough, but you don't want it to sound so complicated that it might interrupt things. I propose that the name be changed to Penis D. It's simple and uncomplicated sounding, but still has a trait of all leaders (who are, themselves, usual;ly also simple.)
I guess this is a troll, but it has a Simpson's reference, so I guess it's all good. Bah, WTF do I care, my Karma is capped.
You are all ugly smelly doo doo heads.
It's clearly the sort of thing that you have to be in the right mood to see, and some people will never be in that mood. Fortunately for me, the goofy sense of humor in the movie looks like it will compliment my mood just fine!
According to store.apple.com, Mac OS X is $129 US. Don't know why they jacked it up in the UK, but you may want to consider buying it, and shipping it. Alarmingly, you may come out ahead!
I had a short. I split it with him. I had 16 bits, so we each got eight. In order for us to each get a nybble, I would need to save or discard half of my short, before then splitting my remaining byte into two four bit chunks. I am unsure what distortion of logical processes within your fragile little mind caused you to suppose we each had a nybble. That's how my mind works - It's like a Laser!
So, you really think that people are going to spend $50 for an emulator, and over $100 for the OS, so that they can emulate a platform they barely know exists? And then, the slow performance of non-native operation, the lack of the slick full user experience, and the quirks that are in every real-world emulator... All this will inspire them to buy a Mac?
IMHO, this is a system targetted for people who already have a base of Mac OS apps that they want or need to use, and have an existing investment in PC hardware. For example, somebody who needs a laptop, and wants to use it for games, so they have to get a PC, but also occasionally needs Safari for testing web pages, or X Code to do cross platform builds on the road.
I love my iBook, and I love OS-X, but there are relatively few reasons I'd feel a need to run it on my Dell.
I am reminded of an Arthur C Clarke story, written as an address to the planetary government. The speaker was the president of a food company which was going bankrupt in a future where all food was synthesised, and it considered horribly offensive to discuss the consumption of dead flesh.
So, the various food companies constantly invented new protein structures to tittilate the taste buds of their customers. At one point, the speaker's main competitor invents something which absolutely crushes all the other food on ther market. As it turns out, they were synthesising the flesh of humans, which happens to be just about the perfect food for a human, and consequently tastes fantastic.
I assume it was written as a "dark warning" type of piece. I always thought it was a lovely idea.
Au Contaire, Monsioueur! With the second, you could insert *everybody's* favorite quantum hyperbole, *simultanously!*
Have you actually worked with either instruction set? "It's probable that most instructions will map directly" is not a compelling technical argument. I'm not going to clasim to be an expert, but I have dealt in passing with both SSE and Alti-Vec. There isn't a 1:1 mapping. Even if there was, the differences in register layout make emulating AltiVec a bit inconvenient, to say the least.
I'm trying to boggle over how exactly one would go about trying to do it. My brain keeps insisting that register starvation really is an issue. I guess they just have a lot of stuff sitting in L1 cache, and keep a really tight loop for the emulator core. Regardless of the actual marketing claims, if it works, I'm impressed. They should just be very careful about letting Marketing make empty promises. If they fail to deliver, they are sunk, and have no credibility. If they had just made no speed specific claims, they wouldn't have to worry about failing to live up to them.
That, and there would be no apps, a huge amount of cost for technical support, and if 100% of the Apple user base switched over to OS/X x86 (by some miracle every app ever was ported), THEY WOULD STOP BUYING MACS!
Apple has had an "escape plan" for years. The original plan was called Star Trek, and it was a port of classic Mac OS. Now, it's called "If we wanted, we could recompile the GUI for almost any platform gcc targets in probably a few hours."
Good guess, but naturally, Raman Spectroscopy would be any spectroscopic measurement performed by the species which constructed the space ship from "Rendezvous with Rama," by Arthur C. Clarke.
My Mac comes with DVD player software, and iDVD. My windows comes with no support for MPEG-2. Sure, it doesn't have pro level direct MPEG editing built in, but MPEG was never designed as an editing format. It is designed as a distribution format. doing frame accurate editing in an MPEG format is a very annoying experience, because of the way MPEG is stored. Much easier to just take an MPEG, convert it to an QuickTime file for editing, use that, and then output back to MPEG for distribution. You want a codec that is easy to seek randomly, and get at individual frames, and a codec that compresses fast for editing. MPEG has intermediate frames defined only as GOP's with a P-frame at either end, and is horribly asymettric, taking a very long time to encode. Seriously, what is your beef? And what is the mpeg2 encoder that comes with Windows like you claim?
I'm not intimately familiar with the SH4, but some marketing departments insist that a multiply-add instruction really counts as two instructions. It may be something like that to get the theoretical peak number on the SH4, "the equivalent of X instructions..."