It really should be of no worry to you - a broadcast is a packet that is sent to multiple machines. It is an issue on a large network because all of the machines are sending broadcast messages in order to locate other machines. Since you will be pretty much segmented off, it should not be an issue.
A-men, brotha! Either the Huppaguge drivers, Windows, or a combination of the two. I've had my WinTV car dunning in Win98, WinNT, Win2K, and BeOS. Guess which one does it best? Be, hands down.
In Windows, the TV app takes 5-10 seconds to start, and sometimes fails to initialize the card until I launch the app a second time. In Be, the card works flawlessly and comes up instantly. While I have found Windows 2000 to be fairly enjoyable in comparison to earlier revisions, it's still nowhere near the quality it could be.
Personally, I think it's an issue of so much legacy code that is still in the way. MS is moving backwards with their OSes lately, dumbing down NT in stead of bringing 9x up to date. It's sad, really. At least I can reboot into a better OS whenever I want...
And you trashed the Mac in your above post since it used AGP 2X? Know your facts. You claimed the mac uses yesterday's mediocre technologies, while the hardware is actually every bit as up-to-date as most x86 hardware. G4s have 66 MHz PCI on all slots, which doubles bandwidth for cards that support it. This is obviously useful.
AGP 4X, on the other hand, has been proven to be of limited utility. For most cards, the bottleneck is from the GPU to onboard RAM. It has nothing to do with the system bus. The jump from AGP 2X to 4X incrases performance by the slightest margin, that is all.
Grrrr...yes, this is slighty OT etc. - but I had to get it out of my system.
Either way, my point is that Apple lowers themselves to things like that, and it still doesn't do them any good.
Exhibit A: The iMac. It definitely does them good. Maybe not with you, but it works for other people.
My main problem is with the marketing dept.
I can respect that, though I do not agree with it. Everyone has a different idea of what is acceptable and what is not in marketing, I happen to beleive that Apple is comparing rather than mudlinging, I reserve that term for straight trash talk whose only point is to state that another product is crap. If you point out how your product is better, then it's compare and contrast.
The last point I would like to make is that the reason Apple has to say "The G3 is faster" is because as far as your average Joe is concerned, the Pentium is the only thing ever invented for a processor. Most of the public is ill-informed, the best source of information they heve is their 11-year-old neighbor kid but they insist on following what the Intel ads and the Best Buy salesmen tell them. nevermind that AMD and Apple offer superior (IMHO) products.
You're pulling the Elvis line and the line preceeding it from an old "Why Mac" book that quoted various users when they were asked why they liked their Macs so much. These are some of the more obscure ones even - At elast mentions the stories people told in the book about having mountains of hardware all connected with no IRQ conflicts, etc - the real meat of the subject.
So these 'Vague Statements' weren't even created by Apple, they just included what some USERS said in promotional materials.
Also, about mudslinging - that doesn't seem very low-down-and-dirty to me. The '1984' commercial was more of a bandwagon technique - saying not to jsut go with the flow, be different, use a Mac.
Pentium-toasting? That's more related to your 'specs' beef - and this is still nothing like the 'Pentiums aren't dolphin-safe' or anything liek that. geez...
Curious point... unless they have changed the MacOS X chooser connection, I didn't see the MacOS X Server's AppleTalk name as
a chooser item. You had to enter the IP AND have AppleshareIP Client !! A drawback for older systems running >7.6.1.
That's because, as I understand it, AppleTalk is dead, it is not going to be a part of OS X. It's all AppleTalk-over-TCP/IP now.
Yes, MacOS X uses an API based on Display PostScript, I do believe - but it's also based on the PDF format also, so basically you have one monstrous Adobe-supported graphics environment.
On another note, there is work to add X server support to Mac OS X. In fact, I remember reading that John Carmack of all people was part of an effort to do just that. Also, as another has mentioned, Tenon Systems is working on an X server, so there should be a few options.
In all fairness, this is more of a testament to Unreal's lack of quality D3D code. Only the more recent versions of UT have had code that can compete with OpenGL on any serious level - and even then the Direct3D code is slower and does not look as good.
But, this can still shed a little light on the subject. The two big games now that really tax your 3D hardware (Quake III and UT) prefer to use OpenGL. Thare has got to be good reason for doing so, or they wouldn't both do it. The only reason may be portability - as it was for Quake - but I don't think that's the case for Unreal. It was first realeased for Windows and released for MacOS a while later. The thing is, OpenGL wasn't even part of the original Unreal. So the MacOS version used RAVE (the MacOS standard) instead.
The fact thaqt Epic added OpenGL support later, and spent more time optimising it, tells me that they obviously see good reason to do so. I just don't know what that reason would be.
BUT doesn't S-Video still rely on one of the other standards, like a carrier/protocol relation ship? Somewhat like this: PAL and NTSC are to component video and S-Video as TCP/IP and IPX/SPX are to 10BaseT and 10Base2. One level is the video format or protocol, while the other is the physical standard for the signal's transmission.
If this is the case (and I beleive it is, but I am by no means an expert) then S-Video solves nothing for you, you need to convert your PAL to NTSC.
Well, you can broadcast a signal for a lot less than some of you people think - the hardware to take a stereo ouput to the air is under $65. Hook that up to a computer with WinAmp (or XMMS;^) and you have yourself your own private station. One company offers kits for this stuff online, I have a few links: Ramsey Electronics a specific kit
Install it (be sure to include DirectCD!) and watch the machine die a slow horrible painful death...at least it did for me. That's why everyone has to upgrade to EZ-CD v.4...
New Macs have no internal SCSI be default, it's UDMA/66 and Firewire for high-speed buses. You can get the SCSI card as a build-to-order option though; it's about $50.
Also, the Velocity Engine (or AltiVec as Motorola calls it) is a 128 bit unit in the G4 chip. Also, while the PowerPC may be 32 bit in current implementations, these processors are actually following a subset of the PPC spec. The real standard is for a 64 bit design; hopefully this will bring the Mac platform through a fairly quick and painless transition when the time comes. (Similar to the PC transition from 24 to 32 bit. Old software will still work fine, new software can take advantage of the new features though. This is in direct opposition to the radical architecture changes taking place on the Intel side moving away from x86.)
Pretty much everything is cross-compatible any more.
On the hardware level, you can use SVGA monitors, IDE (ATA/66 even) hard drives, PC100 memory, PCI cards, perfectly fine. The one catch *may* be drivers. This is of course not an issue with hard drives, memory, and the sort. But many other peripherals such as the video card do need separate drivers. Unfortunately, ATI has the best cards for the Mac at the moment, but that is changing. 3dfx and (supposedly) nVidia are in the process of bringing support to the Mac.
Looking at the Apple store screen, pretty much everything is a DIY thing. I'll go through it with you. A current G4 gives you these choices:
CPU - Buy it now, it'll be pretty damn expensive to upgrade
RAM - Horribly expensive. get 64 MB, put your own PC100 into the remaining slots
Hard Drive - A little expensive, you can put an IDE drive in these machines pretty easily.
Monitor - Unless aesthetics mean *that* much, buy your own and pay half as much.
Zip - buy from Apple if you want it to look right - only the pre-builts come with the proper bezel for Zip installation.
DVD/CD - I really don't know. Should be compatible with standard ATAPI drives.
Video card - Well, you're stuck with the ATI card. Enjoy it. You should be able to upgrade later.
SCSI - If you want SCSI, go ahead. It's a decent price, and comes built for you. 3rd party options exist also. (such as Initio and Adaptec)
Modem - Apple has a special connector for this, so for an internal modem this is your option.
AirPort - These are VERY cool. For one machine though, there's no point.
Warranty - Don't bother. You probably won't need it.
Interesting you should mention that, as it is exactly the reason we still have one of those machines in existence. MacDNS.cait.org is our secondary DNS server, and also handles a little light FTP work for a project we didn't have the time to put elsewhere.
MkLinux works fine, and I actuially prefer some of it's features to LinuxPPC. (Like the color-coded boot sequence thanks in part to Mach.)
I certainly wouldn't recommend those machines as a high-traffic web server or anything, but they do make good machines for light serving because of their relatively compact size. Just remember to max out the RAM...
Seriously OT, but I figure I should help a little here - a Performa 6116CD will not run LinuxPPC, YellowDog, or any of thos other derivatives - you are pretty much stuck with MkLinux as far as I know.
This is because the 6116 is basically a Power Macintosh 6100 with a different software bundle, and the 6100 is a NuBus Mac, not a PCI Mac.
Sorry to say it, but you are out of luck with YDL and most other distros.
Because they're *good* machines, quality all around. BTW, it's a 16MB Rage 128 Pro, not a simple 8 meg Rage 128. I know, still not top-of-the-line, but it's a functional card.
Also, why not give the PC 256 MB of memory? In my experience, a Mac is mroe fun with 128 than a PC will ever be, I get huge speedups between 128 and 256 on my PC.
Really, I can't argue with the cost. But the fact remains you are buying quality. Macs are nice machines. I'm not saying that Dells are the Festivas of the computer world, be they certainly aren't Lincolns either...
Also, some of the Hauppauge WinTV cards have AM/FM stereo support, in addition to the TV. So with them not only can you rip the Britney Spears your local pop station is broadcasting to MP3, but you can also get the Matrix from HBO into a.mpeg file.;)
I know I have had luck recording live webcasts, etc. with my SBLive in Windows, since it supports "what you hear" as a recording source, it records everything coming out of it instead of a single analog source like most cards.
Yeah, AltiVec adds a lot of instructions, but there's no way it doubles the total number available. The section of Motorola's "Programming Environments for 32-Bit Microprocessors" book that lists the PPC instruction set is 219 pages. IIRC, the entire AltiVec book is only a little bigger than that. If I had it here right now, I'd check, but I don't so I won't.;)
This is just a little detail, but I don't think AltiVec doubles the instruction set size. Maybe another 50%, but I don't think much more.
While the wattage is important, you got one fact wrong: A gigahertz Athlon produces much more than a few milliwatts, they are actually in the range of 50-100 watts IIRC. Sure, it's a far cry from my 800 watt microwave oven, but still significant.
Slashdot Mirror
"Siqnal 11" submitted this story. Note the "q" replacing the "g" - this ain't the same person. At least not the same nick.
Expletives ahead. Maybe the /. post should warn of language that some may find offensive contained within the Wired story.
(then again, maybe not...)
Yeah, the stuff from the grocery store (MS) is higher in fat and in general not as good for you too...
It may be easier to prepare, but the extra effort you put into your garden may well be worth it.
;)
This is the story on /. that I believe he intended...
Care to include a link to a real story?
It really should be of no worry to you - a broadcast is a packet that is sent to multiple machines. It is an issue on a large network because all of the machines are sending broadcast messages in order to locate other machines. Since you will be pretty much segmented off, it should not be an issue.
Apparently the Hauppauge drivers suck :(
A-men, brotha! Either the Huppaguge drivers, Windows, or a combination of the two. I've had my WinTV car dunning in Win98, WinNT, Win2K, and BeOS. Guess which one does it best? Be, hands down.
In Windows, the TV app takes 5-10 seconds to start, and sometimes fails to initialize the card until I launch the app a second time. In Be, the card works flawlessly and comes up instantly. While I have found Windows 2000 to be fairly enjoyable in comparison to earlier revisions, it's still nowhere near the quality it could be.
Personally, I think it's an issue of so much legacy code that is still in the way. MS is moving backwards with their OSes lately, dumbing down NT in stead of bringing 9x up to date. It's sad, really. At least I can reboot into a better OS whenever I want...
-Smitty
And you trashed the Mac in your above post since it used AGP 2X? Know your facts. You claimed the mac uses yesterday's mediocre technologies, while the hardware is actually every bit as up-to-date as most x86 hardware. G4s have 66 MHz PCI on all slots, which doubles bandwidth for cards that support it. This is obviously useful.
AGP 4X, on the other hand, has been proven to be of limited utility. For most cards, the bottleneck is from the GPU to onboard RAM. It has nothing to do with the system bus. The jump from AGP 2X to 4X incrases performance by the slightest margin, that is all.
Grrrr...yes, this is slighty OT etc. - but I had to get it out of my system.
-Smitty
Oh, and Quake3Arena was more fun that Unreal Tournament. ;),br>
I don't know...I think UT wins hands-down for out-of-box experience, but Q3 mods like Q3F pick up some slack.
-Smitty
Either way, my point is that Apple lowers themselves to things like that, and it still doesn't do them any good.
Exhibit A: The iMac. It definitely does them good. Maybe not with you, but it works for other people.
My main problem is with the marketing dept.
I can respect that, though I do not agree with it. Everyone has a different idea of what is acceptable and what is not in marketing, I happen to beleive that Apple is comparing rather than mudlinging, I reserve that term for straight trash talk whose only point is to state that another product is crap. If you point out how your product is better, then it's compare and contrast.
The last point I would like to make is that the reason Apple has to say "The G3 is faster" is because as far as your average Joe is concerned, the Pentium is the only thing ever invented for a processor. Most of the public is ill-informed, the best source of information they heve is their 11-year-old neighbor kid but they insist on following what the Intel ads and the Best Buy salesmen tell them. nevermind that AMD and Apple offer superior (IMHO) products.
-Smitty
Oh come ON!
You're pulling the Elvis line and the line preceeding it from an old "Why Mac" book that quoted various users when they were asked why they liked their Macs so much. These are some of the more obscure ones even - At elast mentions the stories people told in the book about having mountains of hardware all connected with no IRQ conflicts, etc - the real meat of the subject.
So these 'Vague Statements' weren't even created by Apple, they just included what some USERS said in promotional materials.
Also, about mudslinging - that doesn't seem very low-down-and-dirty to me. The '1984' commercial was more of a bandwagon technique - saying not to jsut go with the flow, be different, use a Mac.
Pentium-toasting? That's more related to your 'specs' beef - and this is still nothing like the 'Pentiums aren't dolphin-safe' or anything liek that. geez...
-Smitty
Curious point... unless they have changed the MacOS X chooser connection, I didn't see the MacOS X Server's AppleTalk name as a chooser item. You had to enter the IP AND have AppleshareIP Client !! A drawback for older systems running >7.6.1 .
That's because, as I understand it, AppleTalk is dead, it is not going to be a part of OS X. It's all AppleTalk-over-TCP/IP now.
-Smitty
Yes, MacOS X uses an API based on Display PostScript, I do believe - but it's also based on the PDF format also, so basically you have one monstrous Adobe-supported graphics environment.
On another note, there is work to add X server support to Mac OS X. In fact, I remember reading that John Carmack of all people was part of an effort to do just that. Also, as another has mentioned, Tenon Systems is working on an X server, so there should be a few options.
-Smitty
In all fairness, this is more of a testament to Unreal's lack of quality D3D code. Only the more recent versions of UT have had code that can compete with OpenGL on any serious level - and even then the Direct3D code is slower and does not look as good.
But, this can still shed a little light on the subject. The two big games now that really tax your 3D hardware (Quake III and UT) prefer to use OpenGL. Thare has got to be good reason for doing so, or they wouldn't both do it. The only reason may be portability - as it was for Quake - but I don't think that's the case for Unreal. It was first realeased for Windows and released for MacOS a while later. The thing is, OpenGL wasn't even part of the original Unreal. So the MacOS version used RAVE (the MacOS standard) instead.
The fact thaqt Epic added OpenGL support later, and spent more time optimising it, tells me that they obviously see good reason to do so. I just don't know what that reason would be.
-Smitty
BUT doesn't S-Video still rely on one of the other standards, like a carrier/protocol relation ship? Somewhat like this: PAL and NTSC are to component video and S-Video as TCP/IP and IPX/SPX are to 10BaseT and 10Base2. One level is the video format or protocol, while the other is the physical standard for the signal's transmission.
If this is the case (and I beleive it is, but I am by no means an expert) then S-Video solves nothing for you, you need to convert your PAL to NTSC.
Any corrections more than welcome.
-Smitty
-Smitty
Well, you can broadcast a signal for a lot less than some of you people think - the hardware to take a stereo ouput to the air is under $65. Hook that up to a computer with WinAmp (or XMMS ;^) and you have yourself your own private station.
One company offers kits for this stuff online, I have a few links:
Ramsey Electronics
a specific kit
-Smitty
Install it (be sure to include DirectCD!)
and watch the machine die a slow horrible painful death...at least it did for me. That's why everyone has to upgrade to EZ-CD v.4...
-Smitty
(hopefully) concluding the string of corrections:
New Macs have no internal SCSI be default, it's UDMA/66 and Firewire for high-speed buses. You can get the SCSI card as a build-to-order option though; it's about $50.
Also, the Velocity Engine (or AltiVec as Motorola calls it) is a 128 bit unit in the G4 chip. Also, while the PowerPC may be 32 bit in current implementations, these processors are actually following a subset of the PPC spec. The real standard is for a 64 bit design; hopefully this will bring the Mac platform through a fairly quick and painless transition when the time comes. (Similar to the PC transition from 24 to 32 bit. Old software will still work fine, new software can take advantage of the new features though. This is in direct opposition to the radical architecture changes taking place on the Intel side moving away from x86.)
-Smitty
Pretty much everything is cross-compatible any more.
On the hardware level, you can use SVGA monitors, IDE (ATA/66 even) hard drives, PC100 memory, PCI cards, perfectly fine. The one catch *may* be drivers. This is of course not an issue with hard drives, memory, and the sort. But many other peripherals such as the video card do need separate drivers. Unfortunately, ATI has the best cards for the Mac at the moment, but that is changing. 3dfx and (supposedly) nVidia are in the process of bringing support to the Mac.
Looking at the Apple store screen, pretty much everything is a DIY thing. I'll go through it with you. A current G4 gives you these choices:
CPU - Buy it now, it'll be pretty damn expensive to upgrade
RAM - Horribly expensive. get 64 MB, put your own PC100 into the remaining slots
Hard Drive - A little expensive, you can put an IDE drive in these machines pretty easily.
Monitor - Unless aesthetics mean *that* much, buy your own and pay half as much.
Zip - buy from Apple if you want it to look right - only the pre-builts come with the proper bezel for Zip installation.
DVD/CD - I really don't know. Should be compatible with standard ATAPI drives.
Video card - Well, you're stuck with the ATI card. Enjoy it. You should be able to upgrade later.
SCSI - If you want SCSI, go ahead. It's a decent price, and comes built for you. 3rd party options exist also. (such as Initio and Adaptec)
Modem - Apple has a special connector for this, so for an internal modem this is your option.
AirPort - These are VERY cool. For one machine though, there's no point.
Warranty - Don't bother. You probably won't need it.
Hope this helps a little,
-Smitty
Interesting you should mention that, as it is exactly the reason we still have one of those machines in existence. MacDNS.cait.org is our secondary DNS server, and also handles a little light FTP work for a project we didn't have the time to put elsewhere.
MkLinux works fine, and I actuially prefer some of it's features to LinuxPPC. (Like the color-coded boot sequence thanks in part to Mach.)
I certainly wouldn't recommend those machines as a high-traffic web server or anything, but they do make good machines for light serving because of their relatively compact size. Just remember to max out the RAM...
-Smitty
Seriously OT, but I figure I should help a little here - a Performa 6116CD will not run LinuxPPC, YellowDog, or any of thos other derivatives - you are pretty much stuck with MkLinux as far as I know.
This is because the 6116 is basically a Power Macintosh 6100 with a different software bundle, and the 6100 is a NuBus Mac, not a PCI Mac.
Sorry to say it, but you are out of luck with YDL and most other distros.
-Smitty
Because they're *good* machines, quality all around. BTW, it's a 16MB Rage 128 Pro, not a simple 8 meg Rage 128. I know, still not top-of-the-line, but it's a functional card.
Also, why not give the PC 256 MB of memory? In my experience, a Mac is mroe fun with 128 than a PC will ever be, I get huge speedups between 128 and 256 on my PC.
Really, I can't argue with the cost. But the fact remains you are buying quality. Macs are nice machines. I'm not saying that Dells are the Festivas of the computer world, be they certainly aren't Lincolns either...
-Smitty
Also, some of the Hauppauge WinTV cards have AM/FM stereo support, in addition to the TV. So with them not only can you rip the Britney Spears your local pop station is broadcasting to MP3, but you can also get the Matrix from HBO into a .mpeg file. ;)
I know I have had luck recording live webcasts, etc. with my SBLive in Windows, since it supports "what you hear" as a recording source, it records everything coming out of it instead of a single analog source like most cards.
-Smitty
Yeah, AltiVec adds a lot of instructions, but there's no way it doubles the total number available. The section of Motorola's "Programming Environments for 32-Bit Microprocessors" book that lists the PPC instruction set is 219 pages. IIRC, the entire AltiVec book is only a little bigger than that. If I had it here right now, I'd check, but I don't so I won't. ;)
This is just a little detail, but I don't think AltiVec doubles the instruction set size. Maybe another 50%, but I don't think much more.
-Smitty
While the wattage is important, you got one fact wrong: A gigahertz Athlon produces much more than a few milliwatts, they are actually in the range of 50-100 watts IIRC. Sure, it's a far cry from my 800 watt microwave oven, but still significant.
-Smitty