Actually, no. The first 64 bit PPC processor was the IBM 620. It was created in roughly the same time frame as the PPC 603, and PPC 604 chips. It never found widespread adoption. Also it is possible with Mac-On-Linux to run MacOS on a Power based system. The IBM Power series uses a superset of the PPC ISA.
The 620 was not designed to go into a desktop. I think that Jobs mis-spoke and he meant first 64-bit PC as in "Personal Computer". I really don't know of anyone using an Itanic as a desktop, although I do know a few people who use US II and US III based machines as desktops.... but calling an UltraSparc a "Personal Computer" is kind of a stretch.
Re:The Apple We All Know and Love
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iBox Episode 2
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· Score: 1
Yes, iBooks start at $1k, that's with 128M of SDRAM and a CDROM drive.
Have you priced a cheap compaq laptop rencently? My sister bought one that has been constantly screwed up. I have been the one roped into fixing it. She spent about $1k too.
BTW: Low end compaq laptop. $1100. Radeon 7000 (No RAM), Celeron 2G, XP Home, 15" LCD, 256M RAM, 40GHD, DVD-CDRW, Modem, 10/100 LAN.
The iBook has better vid, and a slower proc. The Compaq has no actual video memory ("shared"), and only ships with XP Home, which REQUIRES registration and craps out if you change hardware too often (which I find unacceptable). The iBook is $200 more. Actually the 256M of Ram is kind of decieving since 64 of that is used for video.
If you want to rant about hadicapping low end hardware, trashing "shared" video memory might be a good place to start. I hate the concept. It's one reason I had hoped that PCI-X might have come on scene faster, since I knew that part of the AGP spec would be abused.
Re:The Apple We All Know and Love
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iBox Episode 2
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· Score: 1
Some interesting notes here:
I run a bunch of OSes. Including WinXP, Win2kAS, FreeBSD 5, Slackware Linux 8, YellowDog 2.something, OSX 10.2, OSX Server 10.1 + 10.2, NetBSD 1.5, Solaris 7, and a few more including an IRIX machine I just picked up which needs some work.
1) the "BMW" of computers
My G4 has a case I'd kill to be able to put my Athlon or P3s into. My only complaint is that the case is of the quicksilver variety and needs a second 5 1/4 inch bay. It has 4 3.5 inch bays that are the easier to get to than anything else I own (well except for my SGI Iris Indigo which has quick release SCSI bays). to add my last hard drive I pulled the latch on the side of the case opening it, droppped the drive into the bottom of the case, plugged it in and closed the case. Also the handles on the corner of the box are damned nifty. The design of the case is simply delightful from an engineering standpoint. Also the plastic side panels make the machine quieter. Oh the new cases have 2 5.25 inch bays, and 4 3.5 inch bays and 3 IDE controllers. Actually I have a couple of full tower causes that are more expandable, but they are much larger. It is a given that the FSB is choked and the even though the G4 is more efficient, there is enough of a clock speed deficit that my Athlon is far faster at sheer number crunching for almost everything. (although Acrobat seems to run about the same on both for some odd reason *shrug*) G4 is 733Mhz, Athlon is 1733Mhz.
2) OSX is the greatest OS since sliced bread
It's fscking badass. How about some features that are never mentioned. No fscking registry (damn I have hated the registry since 95). What a wonderful single point of failure. Bundles, these are folders with a.app extension that are treated as executable. They look and act like an app but can be explored and edited. They contain the text of most apps (in XML format) which can be edited with a text editor. The binary (or multiple binaries, NeXT used these to run the same bundle on multiple procs. The same app would run natively on NeXT PPC or NeXT x86). They contain all neccesary shared libraries (no shared library (.dll or.so) hell. It actually runs a ton of commercial apps natively (Office, Adobe stuff, Quickbooks, and a bunch of other crap) It actually runs a ton of Unix apps natively (Apache, Sendmail, Links, Vi, Mplayer, and so on) The config files are either nearly identical to thier *nix counterparts (Apache) or they are in XML (Dock prefs) I can get the source for 70% of the system (actually I *have* the source to much of it) My grandmother can use it with ease. It comes with a coolie IDE for free. I could go on. I would like the multiple concurrent user thing from XP.... ummm, and a few games, like hmm NeverWinter Nights, but that's almost shipping for mac, and UT 2003 but that's actually shipping now... umm Kazaa, that's actually the major thing, but I have a dedicated K6-2 Kazaa box, so....
3) Apple is a "friendly" company
Apple is a corporation. Point me at a really nice one.... Does one exist? However they did release the bug fixes back to the Konquerer team (I've been using konq for years) which is cool in my book. They released some stuff for GCC and a ton of the source for their OS... and some other neat stuff from the geek perspective. So at least from my way of seeing it, they are waayyy cooler than M$.
4) "Consumer" vs. "Pro"
Optiplex vs Dimension vs Precision (Dell Sucks) Presario vs Compaq Business Desktop (Compaq/HP Sucks) ThinkCentre vs NetVista vs IntelliStation (IBM Sucks) It should have been clear to you that all vendors play this game before you ever mentioned it. Oh and the new Dells that my employer bought are about as expandable as an iMac. Tiny cases, everything onboard, no PCI, no AGP.... However the monitor is not built in. IBM however makes a flat panel that has a PC built into it, with about zero expansion. Oh and the De
>Deaths from tobacco cigarettes in the US, 2002: 400,000 >Deaths from Marijuana in the US, 2002: 0.00
Actually this is complete and utter fiction. I spent two and a half years on a rescue squad. A significant percentage of auto accidents are caused by drivers who are high on pot. Some are pot and alcohol (a really bad combination for driving), and some are just pot. I have seen more than a few drivers who were stoned out of their minds (and not drunk) who missed the curve and hit a tree. I dont have any real statistics on how many actual fatalities were caused by stoned drivers, however I am completely certain the number is NOT zero.
While it may be possible that not a single case of cancer has been attributed to smoking pot, I would imagine that cancer patients who have smoked a great deal of marijuana would hardly be inclined to volunteer that fact. Given the current "witch hunt" mentality of the current political establisment, I would bet that it would be hard to find anyone who may have gotten cancer from an illegal substance who would purposely also create legal issues for themselves. Basically speaking, if I smoked a ton a weed, and got cancer there is no way in hell that I would also want to face possible jail time on top of fighting cancer.
The truth is that lighting something on fire and inhaling SMOKE is damaging to your body. Then again, drinking a great deal of alcohol tends to pickle your liver, however that's not illegal.
All that being said, I think that pot should be legal for medical purposes. It's an incredible anti-nausea agent, and pain management substance, and is great in brownies... LOL. The current and previous administration's policies with regards to marijuana are stupid. I am however not recommending it's use. I know quite a few guys that I went to school with (I'm 30) who are still living in my home town, still working at Burger King, renting a shabby apartment (or living with parents), and still just "hanging out man, and smoking weed". They are functionally 15 to 17 years old from a social and emotional stand point. They have not changed a bit since high school (hint: this is not a good thing). I'm buying a house and they are sneaking around trying to score some doobage. It's really depressing for me to catch up with these guys.
The implication that OEM AMD processors are without any warranty whatsoever is appalling to me. If they ship me a dead chip, they need to replace it. While I am aware of the problems with morons who crack/fry/kill their CPUs due to ignorance/OCing, I have been piecing x86 boxes together fo years. If they won't warranty their stuff (OEM or not), I won't buy it. I won't build machines based on them for my customers either. Either stand up and take a stand on what you have made (AMD's chips), or I cannot in good conscience base my professional reputation on those products. For the record, I don't overclock anything that is still in warranty (I have a k6-2 I just overclocked, because I could care less if it dies, and if it does I have a couple of spare CPUs).
This news really gives me pause. I was planning on getting a water cooled case for my current OEM Athlon 2100+ so that the damned thing would be quieter, and then another for the x86-64 I was planning to build before to terribly long. However the removal of that as an option.... I would rather not go back to Intel, but they at least stand behind their stuff.
Idiot. The source for the the rendering engine was released the day they introduced the browser. There was a post on the appropriate mailing list from the Apple Safari team lead to the Konqueror team lead thanking him for his work and pointing out where to get the revised source code. The head of the Konqueror team thanked the Apple team lead, pointing out that they had squashed a really annoying bug that he no longer had to worry about.
Next time before you open your mouth, at least read the vendors site.
BTW Windows 2000 also uses BSD tech. I have yet to read or hear anything from Microsoft thanking or even acknowledging the efforts of the BSD developers that involuntarily contributed to Win2k's network stack. If someone has read something of this nature, I'd be interested in a link if possible.
Actually USB 2.0 is not faster than Firewire. The numbers that you are quoting are "Thoeretical Throughput". Reality paints a different picture. Every engineer that I know who has worked with both in laboratory situations (which generally are closer to theoretical maximums than real world situations) has stated that USB 2.0 generally tops at far below 480Mb/sec. and that Firewire is generally faster.
Furthermore, USB 2.0 is far inferior to Firewire in that it doesn't scale devices well. If you have two devices hooked up to USB 2.0 each device gets 1/2 the bandwidth. If you hook up 5 devices, each gets 96Mb of bandwith or 12MB/sec of bandwidth. What this means is that if you have a printer, scanner, webcam, a USB 2.0 Hub, and a USB 2.0 hard drive, each gets the same 12MB of bandwidth. It doesn't matter that the printer is not printing, the scanner isn't scanning, the web cam is only using 1MB/sec of bandwidth, the hub is passive, and the hard drive is maxxing out it's share of the bus.
Firewire on the other hand can have a DV camera (not sending information), a web cam using 1MB/sec, a scanner (not in use), a hub, and a hard drive which still can access 90+ MB of Bandwidth.
For cheesy non-bandwidth intensive things (mice, keyboards, printers (inkjet), crappy scanners, web cams, joysticks, keychain flash storage, et al) USB is a fine interface. I perfer USB for these things.
For something like DV cameras, high resolution scanners, hard drive enclosures, et al, Firewire is a superior interface.
I do not want a firewire mouse. Nor do I want a firewire keyboard.
While it is a possibility that Firewire could have been pushed to the point where it eclipsed the bandwidth ceiling on SATA, it's not designed to do the job that SATA is designed for. Firewire is not compatable with standard ATA drivers. It would require a reworking of the architectures (and BIOSes) of every PC mainboard on earth (except perhaps Apple). What this basically amounts to is that the amount you would have to pay to get the same amount of storage would go way up while the transition was taking place. Also I'd imagine there would be a bunch of buggyness while everyone rewrote drivers.
Basically most technologies answer a given need. USB meets certain needs very well (smart, very compatable, non-bandwith dependant devices). Firewire meets it's needs very well (smarter, somewhat compatable, bandwidth dependant devices). SATA meets it's needs very well (dumb, extremely compatable, bandwidth dependant devices)
This is not news. Macs on average are slower than Wintel on average for processor dependant tasks. However in my experience in places where the CPU is not the bottle-neck, but how much time it takes to tell the machine to do something (through the interface), I have come to find my G4 faster.
Furtermore, for that matter using all M$ tech, IIS is faster than Apache. Still I don't use IIS, even though I have access to it, I use Apache. I can get a different car than my Saturn that is faster for a small amount more money as well, however I'll probably buy another Saturn.
Basically I only use what I trust for things that matter. I don't trust Microsoft for anything important, nor do I trust Ford to sell me a car with non-exploding tires. There is an old Russian saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. When someone takes you for a ride, you can continue taking it, or get off.
So after using Windows from version 2 to ME/2000, I have gotten off of the stupid ride. (Windows is reserved for educational purposes, to keep current on network administration, and as a toy) I like commercial software, like Photoshop, M$ Office (last major M$ app I use), and much of what the shrink-wrapped world has to offer. I don't have to deny myself these things with MOSX. Nor do I have give root to some company that I don't trust. The box is MINE, the os is MINE (xml is cool), I AM ROOT. This is non-negotiable. This is why I run FreeBSD, Slackware, MacOS X, YellowDog, NetBSD, et al.
I also like a nice interface. Although at first I didn't like the idea of a GUI when they first hit the scene, I have come to have finer tastes in my interfaces. I generally run Enlightenment (becauase I like it). Aqua or one of the toned down third party themes is also a decent UI with notable exceptions. Personally I find XP's "Fischer Price" look annoying and generally set it back to a 95/98/ME/2000 mode.
For that matter I also prefer Unreal Tournament to Quake III, alot. I actually don't really like Quake III much at all. Hence I paid for a copy of one and not the other.
Do I wish that PPC processors are faster? Yes, but then again I want the same for x86. Since I have both x86 and PPC machines it would be kinda lame to get into a pissing match with myself about which is faster... So while my x86 boxen are faster running photshop in Windows, I use my Mac for everything not entertainment.
Note: My last project was a 4200x4400 aerial photograph copiled from 462 mini-pictures pulled off of the M$ Terraserver. The Photoshop file was 110 megs and on my G4 733/640M RAM, there was only noticable lag once I had 420 or 440 layers.
Your case has 4 5.25 inch bays and 8 3.5 inch bays? And it's still a light case? Aluminum is a light-weight metal, however I doubt that it is that light. Further, I'd imagine that pushing that many drives would require an incredibly high wattage power supply. Wouldn't that also add to the weight?
The folks at Bungie promised that the sell-out to Microsoft would in no way affect the shipping of Halo for the Macintosh and Windows platforms. It seems like another year will pass without it materializing. Apparently money is just more important than a once-loyal fan base.
Apparently Halo 2 for X-Box is now in serious development. I doubt there will even be a promise to port it to Mac/PC that can later be broken.
>3) Click on "Browse", choose a location then >click "Backup" 4)
Why should I have to have copies of my music on EVERY machine in my place when I have a perfectly good file server with a couple of hundred Gigs of storage space. I have 10+ Gigs of Music, so that would mean, umm, I'd have to waste over 60 Gigs of storage to listen to MUSIC I PAID FOR. Furthermore since when did M$'s proprietary formats support: MacOS X, MacOS 9, Slackware Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, BeOS, SunOS, and IRIX?
My network is somewhat diverse. If I pay for music I will use it when and where I want to. Saturn doesn't tell me where I can drive my car, nor do they tell me who can drive my car. If they did I would tell them what they could put their cars. Hence the fact that there is no way in hell I will submit to orwellian maneuvers by a convicted monopoly.
USB 2.0 has a theoretical transfer ceiling of 480Mb/s. Firewire has a theoretical transfer ceiling of 400Mb/s.
Supposedly ATA 133 means that hard drives can transfer data at 133MB/s, where everyone here should know (with an off the shelf drive) that in no case whatsoever will you ever max out the channel on one of these UDMA cards for even 2 seconds. U160 SCSI on the other hand with a few drives can really come close to maxxing out the channel at a sustained rate. One of the arrays we have at work runs at 95% of theoretical maximum. Anyone know of a UDMA card pushing even 50% of theoretical?
Engineers that I have talked to, as well as many posts that I have read state that in laboratory conditions USB 2.0 has rarely sustained much more than 1/2 of it's theoretical bandwidth. Furthermore USB is a time-division bus. So if you have 2 devices plugged into a channel each device gets 1/2 of the total bandwidth, 3 devices get 1/3, 4 devices get 1/4, etc.... Firewire is packet based and therefore can support one device using 10% of the bandwidth leaving the other 90% for another devices that can take advantage of it.
USB IMHO really only good for slower order devices that don't have bandwidth needs, du to the above limitations. Firewire was not designed for keyboards and mice, it was designed as a bus for fast external connections. Firewire has the further advantage that it can act as a bus between devices. USB _requires_ a computer. You can plug a Firewire Digi-cam into a Firewire enabled VCR with no computer present. USB does not work that way.
I don't take large storage devices, CD burners, hard drives, MP3 players, digital camcorders (don't even think they bother with USB), seriously if they have a USB connection on them. This is very similar to when I ran Macs and PCs with SCSI and my friends all had parallel crap. If you want cheap USB is built in, if you want better then you may actually have to pay a bit more.
Side note. I would like to see benchmarks for transfers of 256Mb or 1Gb of data to each of these drives by a reputable source. I am interested in exactly how big the differences in transfer time are. MP3 players that hold less than 256Mb are rather useless as far as I am concerned.
The majority of international opinion asserts that Israel's current actions seem to be reaching across the line from defense into some degree of unjust persecution, and without saying that the following comparison itself is accurate, a significant and growing minority of observers have compared the most recent Israeli actions to Nazi treatment of German Jews in the immediate pre-war period, with organized military killing of civilians in their homes (other than the organizations specifically responsible for the the suicide bombings, ie. who provide the explosives).
This basically amounts to what could be called state sponsored terrorism, at a smaller scale than that which we all like to trash Saddam Hussein for. (At least the Israeli's are not using chemical weapons.) But I digress. The Israeli's have all of the military power in the area and they are abusing it to a great degree. Which I strongly disagree with. However unlike the way the "Muslim" world likes to pretend, this is going on in many many more places than we'd like to believe. This is happening on a daily basis all over the African continent. This is happening in South America, daily. This is also happening in the Middle East in other countries other than Israel. However they, like many people in the US apparently don't have the brain power or force of intellect, or maybe the self-honesty to admit that the Israelis are not the only bad guys. I didn't see them step up to the plate and demand justice when Saddam Hussein was killing entire villages of muslims with chemical weapons. I don't see them bitching about anything that happens to anyone who isn't muslim (apparently in their eyes if you aren't muslim you dont' matter, and if they don't collectively feel that way they really don't express it publicly).
I do appreciate dark humor in many situations, but this is not one in which I believe the attempted joke helps anyone to cope, except for people who do have enough doubt about the justice here to be bothered by their conscience, and would prefer to laugh it off. US citizens support Israel's military through massive aid derived from their income tax; it's appropriate to have real concern when you're partially responsible for something as open to doubt as the actions going on now.
Now here is where you begin to really lose any hope of retaining respectable logic. Here is where you come across with the terrorist "noone is innocent" bullshit line. Does this Mean that it is acceptable to erase the main population of Iraq since they indirectly support Saddam Hussein's mass killing of the Kurdish muslim population? I don't think so.
You also sound deluded into some strange thinking that the US is a free country. What the hell ever gave you that idea. While I personally detest what Isreal is doing I am not giving my government money to give to Israel. My government is taking my money from me to give to Israel, and they don't give a shit how I feel about it. That's like if someone steals my car from me and then kills someone with it, blaming me for the death. That logic is pretty broken.
The average citizen of the US is basically working at their job simply trying to make sure that their bills get payed on time. Most people in the US probably don't know where on a world map the West Bank is unless they have just seen one on TV. Most people in the US don't understand what is going on anywhere else in the world. Actually most people in the US don't want to give money to any nation unless it is for food or medicine. Furthermore it's not like the US system allows a serious choice. Vote democrat and Isreal/whomever gets money and guns. Vote republican and Isreal/whomever gets money and guns. Vote indepandant and Israel/whomever will most likely get money and guns.
DivX is simply a codec. It is not a media layer. Codecs can be added and removed from applications and media layers. Example: I watch DivX movies under Quicktime using a file conatining the codec (although there are a few differing bastardised versions of MPEG4, generally the 3ivx, 4ivx, and 5ivx codecs I have installed here handle most formats.
Furthermore even with windows if you want support for many of these codecs you still have to go out and hunt down the codec. One of the most annoying things with avi files is the you never know what format they are in. The avi format actually can use as many as 15 separate formats (codecs) which are incompatable with each other.
What I have yet to see anywhere else is a single multimedia layer comprising MIDI synth, picture, video, panoramas, etc.
/rant/
It really is not Apple's fault that Linux developers have payed so little attention to developing Linux based solutions for Apple formats. I finbd it amazing how much of the horrible proprietary windows junk finds it's way to my linux/BSD boxen and how poor support is for Apple things. And then the galling thing is that Apple takes the blame for it here. One example was a suggestion that Apple by using their own filesystem for the iPod was horrible and proprietary and they should have used Fat 32. (reality check here) Apple should ditch their own file format and use Microsofts? kidding, right?
Microsft calls GPL evil, and Apple hires OSS developers and gives source code for core of their _current OS_ away and some of you guys still bash Apple for M$... go figure...
/rant/
Have you checked out what you get from Intel in the 64 Bit arena?
$7,995 A7202A 64-bit Intel Itanium processor
733MHz, 18GB SCSI HDD, NVIDIA® Quadro2 Pro, 1GB SDRAM, DVD, LS-120/240 SuperFloppy, Windows XP 64-bit Edition and HP-UX 11i v1.5 media included at no extra charge
$14,495 A7203A Dual 64-bit Intel Itanium
processor 800MHz, 18GB SCSI HDD, NVIDIA Quadro2 Pro, 2GB SDRAM, DVD, LS-120/240 SuperFloppy, Windows XP 64-bit Edition and HP-UX 11i v1.5 media included at no extra charge
Now some of this stuff is higher order, but I will guarantee you that doing the 64 bit thing will be cheaper with Apple. I could very easily upgrade a Macintosh from $1699 or $2499 to something far cooler than these machines for far far less than $8000.
We can assume that the current pricing holds as it has for the past few years.
$4,746 M8360LL/A867MHz PowerPC G4 867Mhz
128MB SDRAM - 1 DIMM, 2x36GB Ultra160 SCSI - Dual card, Zip 250 Drive, Apple SuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce3 - 64MB, DDR-SDRAM, Ultra SCSI PCI card & cable adapter, 56K internal modem, AirPort Card, Apple Pro Keyboard - U.S. English, Mac OS - U.S. English, 3yr AppleCare Protection Plan-Power Mac+Display, Gigabit Ethernet, Two USB ports, Two FireWire ports, Apple Pro Mouse
Let's guess that new machines use DDR SDRAM, 4 sticks of IBM PC 266 DDR off of
coastmemory.com for 1Gig of RAM:
$148 4x AN2664U/256/Q2V 256Mb 266MHz 2100 DDR Dimm IBM BRAND
$4,894 is the new grand total.
Pretty damned competitive if you ask me especially if they come out at 1.2, 1.4, and 1.6 Ghz since the machine profiled will be 1.4Ghz if pricing structure stays the same, which it has varied very very little over the past 2 years. Add to this that OS X will run all of the old 32 bit MacOS (those by Adobe, Microsoft, ID, Bungie, etc) applications with no speed loss while also running great UNIX apps (unlike Itanium), has a Native 32 bit mode (not Itanium), etc
What if I don't have a copy of windows, but I do have an x86 box?
Oh, I see in your world everyone who has a PC dualboots or perhaps even tho they don't legally own a copy of windows they must have pirated it.
This is the exact thing that disgusts me. That because you have a "PC" you must have windows on it or something like that.... This sort of thing is why I run into people all the time who think that since every PC runs windows (right?), that Linux or BSD must be something that runs on windows.....
Go ahead, don't take my word for it, run to your local CompUSA or Fry's, or where ever and ask people if a PC has to have windows to work. You will get responses like "All PCs have windows", I have even heard people who thought that windows was somehow _built into_ PCs.
And you wonder why Microsoft has a stranglehold on OEM's. Labelling games as requiring hardware (without mention of the software) makes people think that somehow the OS is built into the hardware... I used to work in retail, you'd be sickened by the misconceptions 80% of the public has. I just hate seeing this sort of thing added to.
Don't add to the public's misconceptions. If you cannot say something accurately, shut the hell up.
1.11 Will Star Wars Galaxies be a PC only game?
We are currently designing the game for the PC, but we haven't ruled out any of the other platforms. We will let you know of any definitive plans for a port of the game as soon as they emerge.
Well, I have a PC. It has 128 Megs of RAM, about 5G or more free hard drive space, a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, and a 500 Mhz k6-2 processor.
Since they specify that this is a PC game, does this mean I can run it after booting FreeBSD 4.3?
Seriously I am sick of this whole PC == Intel compatible processor based machine that is obviously running windows (I mean that is the only OS that runs on Intel boxen right?!). If you ask me my Mac is also a Personal Computer. Now if somehow I get a SunBlade I'll concede that it is a workstation and not a Personal Computer (even though I'd probably spend too much time tinkering with stuff on it to get anything useful done).
I used to think hardcore Mac users were the most arrogrant computer users in the world, because so many of them are convinced Macs runnning MacOS are better than everything else even though they haven't used much else.
I am convincved however that this is an error on my part.
I am now conviced that hardcore windows users are the most arrogant in the world by far, since they not only don't they know anything about anything else, but they expect everyone to be forced to use what they do.
Re:better *hardware* not better wince
on
Palm In Trouble?
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· Score: 1
Actually it was simply my thought that WinCE PDAs would be mostly useless since they lack the most important feature of all.
Interoperability
Simply put, it isn't that M$ doesn't play well with others with regards to WinCE, it's that they don't play with others at all. I have a pretty diverse computing setup. I run Slackware, FreeBSD, MacOS, MacOS X, and Win98SE. I suppose that I could sync it to Windows, but since it's sole purpose is as a game station, I am unsure what information or files I would sync to the PDA or why....
Amazingly the Palm devices can sync to all of these save maybe MacOS X, and there may be a hack to make that work, I have yet to check on it....
The sick thing is that I am always hearing people talk about how compatible windows is. And how M$ is making so much stuff work together..... Any moron can make stuff that is compatible with his own stuff. This lack of perspective really disgusts me.
Apple also had a version of UNIX called AUX which they dumped a while back. They are certainly not new to the UNIX game. They also produced a version of Linux based on mach called MkLinux but that's another story entirely.
The interesting thing about it is that there several machines that they made that were never designed to run ANY version of MacOS, only one of which was AUX only. They also shipped several models that ran AIX, which is IBM's version of UNIX. You can see datasheets of these machines here: AUX only machines Workgroup Server 95 AIX only machines Network Server 500/132 Network Server 700/150 Network Server 700/200
I am not certain, but I am pretty sure that AUX was a certified version of UNIX.
Backwards compatibility is how the PowerPC got it's foothold into the market
Compatible with what?
Compatible with the chips that used to ship in older macs, as in Motorola 68000 series processors? Not on your life. The Motorola 68k series architecture is about as old as the x86 architecture. The 68000 series was introduced at about the same time as the 8086, sometime roughly around 1978. The 68000 series is also a decidedly CISC architecture.
The PowerPC was a ground up rework of what Motorola was doing, based on IBM designs for the most part. THe PPC processors are RISC or post-RISC processors unlike the MC68000 series. The instruction set is designed to be able to make the transition from a 32 bit architecture to a 64 bit architecture.
The reason that Apple chose to use the PPC series of processors had nothing to do with compatibility with the processors they were using since they are in no way compatible. They wrote an emulator into MacOS to emulate a MC68040 processor for older programs. Some programs were FAT binaries that were forked with a PPC binary portion and a 68k binary portion.
I have always wondered what would have happened if M$ had actually taken the time to write an emulator for the 23 year old x86 instructions for something like an Alpha and then rework all of their own code to support it natively. I wonder how much faster PCs would be now...
Anyways OmniWeb rocks, I finally have spell checking while typing comments on Slashdot.
Actually this is really horrible news. EA does basically nothing as multiplatform. Which means that it will be one more game that only runs on windows. Yeah, need more windows only games to compete with the existing 10,000 windows games. yeah whatever. I recently decided against buying Majesty because even though it is multi-platform, the Mac and Windows versions cannot multi-paly with each other because the windows version uses Direct-Play. Direct-Play mostly rules out Linux Windows multi-player games as well since it is so proprietary.
Advocate companies that avoid this sort of crap. Advocate use of OpenPlay, which is an Apple open source game networking API that runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It's open source as well, so it can be fixed and expanded as needed.
Actually you should read some of the articles about windows XPs built in contenbt control. M$ and the hard drive manufacturers are working in the same direction.
Actually in those days I really didn't use macs very much at all. One of my friends happened to be a VMS BOFH, at a school with a mac based campus. At the time I was mostly a DOS user. I also had acesss on the HP frame for internet access at another college near there where I was actually attending. However I was never really impressed with Doom. I dunno, I was just not that impressed. I suppose that the graphics (I thought the monsters looked rather lame IMHO) turned me off. I did like the Warcraft series as well as Moral Decay a MUD that I used to play on via DOS machines hooked up to the HP frame via lanman or some shit like that (if I remember correctly).
To me, (and BTW I am writing this from Konquerer on FreeBSD which connects to the net through a Slackware Linux box running NAT) Marathon was more real to me as a game than anythinng else I played until that point and for years afterwards. BTW here is a link to the Marathon Story.
Firing 199 shots from a pistol without reloading hurts what could be called "the suspension of disbelief". Adding reload to a game is not an amazing thing as far as how hard it is, but the important part is that it adds a level of realism. Having Aliens in a game that are neat and insectoid is cool, but having them have political parties/factions that are fighting/warring with each other is awesome.
Now obviously I have not played every game ever made, but I have played a few, and some of them were FPS. Halflife looks great, the aliens/other dimensional creatures look kinda bleah to me. I like how flexibly you can move and interact, but on the same token I got annoyed at the 15 or so keyboard keys to move/jump/whatever and quit playing before really getting used to it. I also have yet to see it on Linux or MacOS or BSD.
In my apartment is: my k6-2 500 Win98SE/FreeBSD, my powermac 8500 MacOS 9.1/YellowDog, my roomate's iMac MacOS 9.1/MacOS X PB/Win2000 on VPC/Win ME on VPC/Slack 7.2(2.4 kernal) on VPC, my roomate's pent 233 Slackware, and a Powermac 7100 DOS MacOS 8.6/Win95. On our VPN there are a few more windows boxes and a few more slackware boxes. I like playing my friends. Generally I don't like playing single player. (Exception Baldur's Gate II rocked ass) So, I really like games like Quake II. Quake II runs on nearly everything here. So does Warcraft II, Starcraft, etc.
So here is what it all boils down to:
1)It is open source now, who cares what it was before.
2)It runs on the MacOS, Windows, Linux, and BeOS (and since FreeBSD has Linux compat mode maybe even FreeBSD).
3)This can give people who program better than I, and are game enthusiasts perhaps a platform to build a new game (as in moded all to hell, or just built onto existing code). It should be possible to make this thing capable of doing a Larger scale online FPS. Perhaps nothing approaching Everquest, but like say 50 players?? *shrug*
4)If you don't like it, prefer windows only games, are afraid of running more than one platform, whatever YOU DON'T HAVE TO DOWNLOAD/PLAY IT.
5)The Aleph One team has been working very hard on this for a while and they deserve some respect for their efforts. If you have not created/developed on a GPL or open source project for the community at large, then you have no room to trash these guys.
I remember playing Marathon 1 and 2 in an all Mac computer lab in the early 90s. I still prefer some things about it to any of th new shooters.
#1)It actually had a plot. And not only did it have a plot, it ws one worthy of a great SF novel. Also unlike the Highlander series the followups to the first one actually built apon the plot instead of going off in an alien direction.
#2)When you emptied your clip, you had to reload which took a bit of time depending on what you were firing. Not too common in the FPS of today. Also reloading the rocket launcher took longer than reloading a pistol.
#3)This is the first FPS I ever saw that seemed to realize hey 2 hands means that I can hold two pistols... or for that matter two combat shotguns, a personal favorite.
#4)The Marathon Infinity (not Open GL of course) would run on a 40 Mhz 68040 and not suck.
#5)The audio system was awesome for it's time, the closer you were to water the louder it was. There were many things that were like this. Also incorporated into the game was stereo panning of sound.
#6)First FPS I ever saw to do 16 bit color.
#7)It also had many other the type of things for multiplayer that Quake II needed a lithium server for. Example ring of shadows, invicibility, etc.
All in all I am glad to see a resurgence in it. Was a great game and am very much looking into dl and compiling it on the various linux boxen I have.
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Actually, no. The first 64 bit PPC processor was the IBM 620. It was created in roughly the same time frame as the PPC 603, and PPC 604 chips. It never found widespread adoption. Also it is possible with Mac-On-Linux to run MacOS on a Power based system. The IBM Power series uses a superset of the PPC ISA.
The 620 was not designed to go into a desktop. I think that Jobs mis-spoke and he meant first 64-bit PC as in "Personal Computer". I really don't know of anyone using an Itanic as a desktop, although I do know a few people who use US II and US III based machines as desktops.... but calling an UltraSparc a "Personal Computer" is kind of a stretch.
Yes, iBooks start at $1k, that's with 128M of SDRAM and a CDROM drive.
Have you priced a cheap compaq laptop rencently?
My sister bought one that has been constantly screwed up. I have been the one roped into fixing it. She spent about $1k too.
BTW:
Low end compaq laptop. $1100. Radeon 7000 (No RAM), Celeron 2G, XP Home, 15" LCD, 256M RAM, 40GHD, DVD-CDRW, Modem, 10/100 LAN.
Low end iBook. $1300. Radeon 7500 (32M RAM), G3 900, OSX 10.2, 12" LCD, 128M RAM, 40GHD, DVD-CDRW, Modem, 10/100 LAN.
The iBook has better vid, and a slower proc. The Compaq has no actual video memory ("shared"), and only ships with XP Home, which REQUIRES registration and craps out if you change hardware too often (which I find unacceptable). The iBook is $200 more. Actually the 256M of Ram is kind of decieving since 64 of that is used for video.
If you want to rant about hadicapping low end hardware, trashing "shared" video memory might be a good place to start. I hate the concept. It's one reason I had hoped that PCI-X might have come on scene faster, since I knew that part of the AGP spec would be abused.
Some interesting notes here:
.app extension that are treated as executable. They look and act like an app but can be explored and edited. They contain the text of most apps (in XML format) which can be edited with a text editor. The binary (or multiple binaries, NeXT used these to run the same bundle on multiple procs. The same app would run natively on NeXT PPC or NeXT x86). They contain all neccesary shared libraries (no shared library (.dll or .so) hell.
I run a bunch of OSes. Including WinXP, Win2kAS, FreeBSD 5, Slackware Linux 8, YellowDog 2.something, OSX 10.2, OSX Server 10.1 + 10.2, NetBSD 1.5, Solaris 7, and a few more including an IRIX machine I just picked up which needs some work.
1) the "BMW" of computers
My G4 has a case I'd kill to be able to put my Athlon or P3s into. My only complaint is that the case is of the quicksilver variety and needs a second 5 1/4 inch bay. It has 4 3.5 inch bays that are the easier to get to than anything else I own (well except for my SGI Iris Indigo which has quick release SCSI bays). to add my last hard drive I pulled the latch on the side of the case opening it, droppped the drive into the bottom of the case, plugged it in and closed the case. Also the handles on the corner of the box are damned nifty. The design of the case is simply delightful from an engineering standpoint. Also the plastic side panels make the machine quieter.
Oh the new cases have 2 5.25 inch bays, and 4 3.5 inch bays and 3 IDE controllers. Actually I have a couple of full tower causes that are more expandable, but they are much larger.
It is a given that the FSB is choked and the even though the G4 is more efficient, there is enough of a clock speed deficit that my Athlon is far faster at sheer number crunching for almost everything. (although Acrobat seems to run about the same on both for some odd reason *shrug*) G4 is 733Mhz, Athlon is 1733Mhz.
2) OSX is the greatest OS since sliced bread
It's fscking badass. How about some features that are never mentioned.
No fscking registry (damn I have hated the registry since 95). What a wonderful single point of failure.
Bundles, these are folders with a
It actually runs a ton of commercial apps natively (Office, Adobe stuff, Quickbooks, and a bunch of other crap)
It actually runs a ton of Unix apps natively (Apache, Sendmail, Links, Vi, Mplayer, and so on)
The config files are either nearly identical to thier *nix counterparts (Apache) or they are in XML (Dock prefs)
I can get the source for 70% of the system (actually I *have* the source to much of it)
My grandmother can use it with ease.
It comes with a coolie IDE for free.
I could go on.
I would like the multiple concurrent user thing from XP.... ummm, and a few games, like hmm NeverWinter Nights, but that's almost shipping for mac, and UT 2003 but that's actually shipping now... umm Kazaa, that's actually the major thing, but I have a dedicated K6-2 Kazaa box, so....
3) Apple is a "friendly" company
Apple is a corporation. Point me at a really nice one.... Does one exist?
However they did release the bug fixes back to the Konquerer team (I've been using konq for years) which is cool in my book. They released some stuff for GCC and a ton of the source for their OS... and some other neat stuff from the geek perspective. So at least from my way of seeing it, they are waayyy cooler than M$.
4) "Consumer" vs. "Pro"
Optiplex vs Dimension vs Precision (Dell Sucks)
Presario vs Compaq Business Desktop (Compaq/HP Sucks)
ThinkCentre vs NetVista vs IntelliStation (IBM Sucks)
It should have been clear to you that all vendors play this game before you ever mentioned it.
Oh and the new Dells that my employer bought are about as expandable as an iMac. Tiny cases, everything onboard, no PCI, no AGP.... However the monitor is not built in. IBM however makes a flat panel that has a PC built into it, with about zero expansion. Oh and the De
>Deaths from tobacco cigarettes in the US, 2002: 400,000
>Deaths from Marijuana in the US, 2002: 0.00
Actually this is complete and utter fiction. I spent two and a half years on a rescue squad. A significant percentage of auto accidents are caused by drivers who are high on pot. Some are pot and alcohol (a really bad combination for driving), and some are just pot. I have seen more than a few drivers who were stoned out of their minds (and not drunk) who missed the curve and hit a tree. I dont have any real statistics on how many actual fatalities were caused by stoned drivers, however I am completely certain the number is NOT zero.
While it may be possible that not a single case of cancer has been attributed to smoking pot, I would imagine that cancer patients who have smoked a great deal of marijuana would hardly be inclined to volunteer that fact. Given the current "witch hunt" mentality of the current political establisment, I would bet that it would be hard to find anyone who may have gotten cancer from an illegal substance who would purposely also create legal issues for themselves. Basically speaking, if I smoked a ton a weed, and got cancer there is no way in hell that I would also want to face possible jail time on top of fighting cancer.
The truth is that lighting something on fire and inhaling SMOKE is damaging to your body. Then again, drinking a great deal of alcohol tends to pickle your liver, however that's not illegal.
All that being said, I think that pot should be legal for medical purposes. It's an incredible anti-nausea agent, and pain management substance, and is great in brownies... LOL. The current and previous administration's policies with regards to marijuana are stupid. I am however not recommending it's use. I know quite a few guys that I went to school with (I'm 30) who are still living in my home town, still working at Burger King, renting a shabby apartment (or living with parents), and still just "hanging out man, and smoking weed". They are functionally 15 to 17 years old from a social and emotional stand point. They have not changed a bit since high school (hint: this is not a good thing). I'm buying a house and they are sneaking around trying to score some doobage. It's really depressing for me to catch up with these guys.
The implication that OEM AMD processors are without any warranty whatsoever is appalling to me. If they ship me a dead chip, they need to replace it. While I am aware of the problems with morons who crack/fry/kill their CPUs due to ignorance/OCing, I have been piecing x86 boxes together fo years. If they won't warranty their stuff (OEM or not), I won't buy it. I won't build machines based on them for my customers either. Either stand up and take a stand on what you have made (AMD's chips), or I cannot in good conscience base my professional reputation on those products. For the record, I don't overclock anything that is still in warranty (I have a k6-2 I just overclocked, because I could care less if it dies, and if it does I have a couple of spare CPUs).
This news really gives me pause. I was planning on getting a water cooled case for my current OEM Athlon 2100+ so that the damned thing would be quieter, and then another for the x86-64 I was planning to build before to terribly long. However the removal of that as an option.... I would rather not go back to Intel, but they at least stand behind their stuff.
Idiot. The source for the the rendering engine was released the day they introduced the browser. There was a post on the appropriate mailing list from the Apple Safari team lead to the Konqueror team lead thanking him for his work and pointing out where to get the revised source code. The head of the Konqueror team thanked the Apple team lead, pointing out that they had squashed a really annoying bug that he no longer had to worry about.
o re /index.html
Next time before you open your mouth, at least read the vendors site.
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webc
BTW Windows 2000 also uses BSD tech. I have yet to read or hear anything from Microsoft thanking or even acknowledging the efforts of the BSD developers that involuntarily contributed to Win2k's network stack. If someone has read something of this nature, I'd be interested in a link if possible.
Actually USB 2.0 is not faster than Firewire. The numbers that you are quoting are "Thoeretical Throughput". Reality paints a different picture. Every engineer that I know who has worked with both in laboratory situations (which generally are closer to theoretical maximums than real world situations) has stated that USB 2.0 generally tops at far below 480Mb/sec. and that Firewire is generally faster.
Furthermore, USB 2.0 is far inferior to Firewire in that it doesn't scale devices well. If you have two devices hooked up to USB 2.0 each device gets 1/2 the bandwidth. If you hook up 5 devices, each gets 96Mb of bandwith or 12MB/sec of bandwidth. What this means is that if you have a printer, scanner, webcam, a USB 2.0 Hub, and a USB 2.0 hard drive, each gets the same 12MB of bandwidth. It doesn't matter that the printer is not printing, the scanner isn't scanning, the web cam is only using 1MB/sec of bandwidth, the hub is passive, and the hard drive is maxxing out it's share of the bus.
Firewire on the other hand can have a DV camera (not sending information), a web cam using 1MB/sec, a scanner (not in use), a hub, and a hard drive which still can access 90+ MB of Bandwidth.
For cheesy non-bandwidth intensive things (mice, keyboards, printers (inkjet), crappy scanners, web cams, joysticks, keychain flash storage, et al) USB is a fine interface. I perfer USB for these things.
For something like DV cameras, high resolution scanners, hard drive enclosures, et al, Firewire is a superior interface.
I do not want a firewire mouse. Nor do I want a firewire keyboard.
While it is a possibility that Firewire could have been pushed to the point where it eclipsed the bandwidth ceiling on SATA, it's not designed to do the job that SATA is designed for. Firewire is not compatable with standard ATA drivers. It would require a reworking of the architectures (and BIOSes) of every PC mainboard on earth (except perhaps Apple). What this basically amounts to is that the amount you would have to pay to get the same amount of storage would go way up while the transition was taking place. Also I'd imagine there would be a bunch of buggyness while everyone rewrote drivers.
Basically most technologies answer a given need. USB meets certain needs very well (smart, very compatable, non-bandwith dependant devices). Firewire meets it's needs very well (smarter, somewhat compatable, bandwidth dependant devices). SATA meets it's needs very well (dumb, extremely compatable, bandwidth dependant devices)
This is not news. Macs on average are slower than Wintel on average for processor dependant tasks. However in my experience in places where the CPU is not the bottle-neck, but how much time it takes to tell the machine to do something (through the interface), I have come to find my G4 faster.
Furtermore, for that matter using all M$ tech, IIS is faster than Apache. Still I don't use IIS, even though I have access to it, I use Apache. I can get a different car than my Saturn that is faster for a small amount more money as well, however I'll probably buy another Saturn.
Basically I only use what I trust for things that matter. I don't trust Microsoft for anything important, nor do I trust Ford to sell me a car with non-exploding tires. There is an old Russian saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. When someone takes you for a ride, you can continue taking it, or get off.
So after using Windows from version 2 to ME/2000, I have gotten off of the stupid ride. (Windows is reserved for educational purposes, to keep current on network administration, and as a toy) I like commercial software, like Photoshop, M$ Office (last major M$ app I use), and much of what the shrink-wrapped world has to offer. I don't have to deny myself these things with MOSX. Nor do I have give root to some company that I don't trust. The box is MINE, the os is MINE (xml is cool), I AM ROOT. This is non-negotiable. This is why I run FreeBSD, Slackware, MacOS X, YellowDog, NetBSD, et al.
I also like a nice interface. Although at first I didn't like the idea of a GUI when they first hit the scene, I have come to have finer tastes in my interfaces. I generally run Enlightenment (becauase I like it). Aqua or one of the toned down third party themes is also a decent UI with notable exceptions. Personally I find XP's "Fischer Price" look annoying and generally set it back to a 95/98/ME/2000 mode.
For that matter I also prefer Unreal Tournament to Quake III, alot. I actually don't really like Quake III much at all. Hence I paid for a copy of one and not the other.
Do I wish that PPC processors are faster? Yes, but then again I want the same for x86. Since I have both x86 and PPC machines it would be kinda lame to get into a pissing match with myself about which is faster... So while my x86 boxen are faster running photshop in Windows, I use my Mac for everything not entertainment.
Note: My last project was a 4200x4400 aerial photograph copiled from 462 mini-pictures pulled off of the M$ Terraserver. The Photoshop file was 110 megs and on my G4 733/640M RAM, there was only noticable lag once I had 420 or 440 layers.
Your case has 4 5.25 inch bays and 8 3.5 inch bays? And it's still a light case? Aluminum is a light-weight metal, however I doubt that it is that light. Further, I'd imagine that pushing that many drives would require an incredibly high wattage power supply. Wouldn't that also add to the weight?
The folks at Bungie promised that the sell-out to Microsoft would in no way affect the shipping of Halo for the Macintosh and Windows platforms. It seems like another year will pass without it materializing. Apparently money is just more important than a once-loyal fan base.
Apparently Halo 2 for X-Box is now in serious development. I doubt there will even be a promise to port it to Mac/PC that can later be broken.
>3) Click on "Browse", choose a location then
>click "Backup" 4)
Why should I have to have copies of my music on EVERY machine in my place when I have a perfectly good file server with a couple of hundred Gigs of storage space. I have 10+ Gigs of Music, so that would mean, umm, I'd have to waste over 60 Gigs of storage to listen to MUSIC I PAID FOR. Furthermore since when did M$'s proprietary formats support: MacOS X, MacOS 9, Slackware Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, BeOS, SunOS, and IRIX?
My network is somewhat diverse. If I pay for music I will use it when and where I want to. Saturn doesn't tell me where I can drive my car, nor do they tell me who can drive my car. If they did I would tell them what they could put their cars. Hence the fact that there is no way in hell I will submit to orwellian maneuvers by a convicted monopoly.
USB 2.0 has a theoretical transfer ceiling of 480Mb/s.
Firewire has a theoretical transfer ceiling of 400Mb/s.
Supposedly ATA 133 means that hard drives can transfer data at 133MB/s, where everyone here should know (with an off the shelf drive) that in no case whatsoever will you ever max out the channel on one of these UDMA cards for even 2 seconds. U160 SCSI on the other hand with a few drives can really come close to maxxing out the channel at a sustained rate. One of the arrays we have at work runs at 95% of theoretical maximum. Anyone know of a UDMA card pushing even 50% of theoretical?
Engineers that I have talked to, as well as many posts that I have read state that in laboratory conditions USB 2.0 has rarely sustained much more than 1/2 of it's theoretical bandwidth. Furthermore USB is a time-division bus. So if you have 2 devices plugged into a channel each device gets 1/2 of the total bandwidth, 3 devices get 1/3, 4 devices get 1/4, etc.... Firewire is packet based and therefore can support one device using 10% of the bandwidth leaving the other 90% for another devices that can take advantage of it.
USB IMHO really only good for slower order devices that don't have bandwidth needs, du to the above limitations. Firewire was not designed for keyboards and mice, it was designed as a bus for fast external connections. Firewire has the further advantage that it can act as a bus between devices. USB _requires_ a computer. You can plug a Firewire Digi-cam into a Firewire enabled VCR with no computer present. USB does not work that way.
I don't take large storage devices, CD burners, hard drives, MP3 players, digital camcorders (don't even think they bother with USB), seriously if they have a USB connection on them. This is very similar to when I ran Macs and PCs with SCSI and my friends all had parallel crap. If you want cheap USB is built in, if you want better then you may actually have to pay a bit more.
Side note. I would like to see benchmarks for transfers of 256Mb or 1Gb of data to each of these drives by a reputable source. I am interested in exactly how big the differences in transfer time are. MP3 players that hold less than 256Mb are rather useless as far as I am concerned.
This basically amounts to what could be called state sponsored terrorism, at a smaller scale than that which we all like to trash Saddam Hussein for. (At least the Israeli's are not using chemical weapons.) But I digress. The Israeli's have all of the military power in the area and they are abusing it to a great degree. Which I strongly disagree with. However unlike the way the "Muslim" world likes to pretend, this is going on in many many more places than we'd like to believe. This is happening on a daily basis all over the African continent. This is happening in South America, daily. This is also happening in the Middle East in other countries other than Israel. However they, like many people in the US apparently don't have the brain power or force of intellect, or maybe the self-honesty to admit that the Israelis are not the only bad guys. I didn't see them step up to the plate and demand justice when Saddam Hussein was killing entire villages of muslims with chemical weapons. I don't see them bitching about anything that happens to anyone who isn't muslim (apparently in their eyes if you aren't muslim you dont' matter, and if they don't collectively feel that way they really don't express it publicly).
Now here is where you begin to really lose any hope of retaining respectable logic. Here is where you come across with the terrorist "noone is innocent" bullshit line. Does this Mean that it is acceptable to erase the main population of Iraq since they indirectly support Saddam Hussein's mass killing of the Kurdish muslim population? I don't think so.
You also sound deluded into some strange thinking that the US is a free country. What the hell ever gave you that idea. While I personally detest what Isreal is doing I am not giving my government money to give to Israel. My government is taking my money from me to give to Israel, and they don't give a shit how I feel about it. That's like if someone steals my car from me and then kills someone with it, blaming me for the death. That logic is pretty broken.
The average citizen of the US is basically working at their job simply trying to make sure that their bills get payed on time. Most people in the US probably don't know where on a world map the West Bank is unless they have just seen one on TV. Most people in the US don't understand what is going on anywhere else in the world. Actually most people in the US don't want to give money to any nation unless it is for food or medicine. Furthermore it's not like the US system allows a serious choice. Vote democrat and Isreal/whomever gets money and guns. Vote republican and Isreal/whomever gets money and guns. Vote indepandant and Israel/whomever will most likely get money and guns.
DivX is simply a codec. It is not a media layer. Codecs can be added and removed from applications and media layers. Example: I watch DivX movies under Quicktime using a file conatining the codec (although there are a few differing bastardised versions of MPEG4, generally the 3ivx, 4ivx, and 5ivx codecs I have installed here handle most formats.
Furthermore even with windows if you want support for many of these codecs you still have to go out and hunt down the codec. One of the most annoying things with avi files is the you never know what format they are in. The avi format actually can use as many as 15 separate formats (codecs) which are incompatable with each other.
What I have yet to see anywhere else is a single multimedia layer comprising MIDI synth, picture, video, panoramas, etc.
/rant/
It really is not Apple's fault that Linux developers have payed so little attention to developing Linux based solutions for Apple formats. I finbd it amazing how much of the horrible proprietary windows junk finds it's way to my linux/BSD boxen and how poor support is for Apple things. And then the galling thing is that Apple takes the blame for it here. One example was a suggestion that Apple by using their own filesystem for the iPod was horrible and proprietary and they should have used Fat 32. (reality check here) Apple should ditch their own file format and use Microsofts? kidding, right?
Microsft calls GPL evil, and Apple hires OSS developers and gives source code for core of their _current OS_ away and some of you guys still bash Apple for M$... go figure...
/rant/
Have you checked out what you get from Intel in the 64 Bit arena?
$7,995 A7202A 64-bit Intel Itanium processor
733MHz, 18GB SCSI HDD, NVIDIA® Quadro2 Pro, 1GB SDRAM, DVD, LS-120/240 SuperFloppy, Windows XP 64-bit Edition and HP-UX 11i v1.5 media included at no extra charge
$14,495 A7203A Dual 64-bit Intel Itanium
processor 800MHz, 18GB SCSI HDD, NVIDIA Quadro2 Pro, 2GB SDRAM, DVD, LS-120/240 SuperFloppy, Windows XP 64-bit Edition and HP-UX 11i v1.5 media included at no extra charge
Now some of this stuff is higher order, but I will guarantee you that doing the 64 bit thing will be cheaper with Apple. I could very easily upgrade a Macintosh from $1699 or $2499 to something far cooler than these machines for far far less than $8000.
We can assume that the current pricing holds as it has for the past few years.
$4,746 M8360LL/A867MHz PowerPC G4 867Mhz
128MB SDRAM - 1 DIMM, 2x36GB Ultra160 SCSI - Dual card, Zip 250 Drive, Apple SuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce3 - 64MB, DDR-SDRAM, Ultra SCSI PCI card & cable adapter, 56K internal modem, AirPort Card, Apple Pro Keyboard - U.S. English, Mac OS - U.S. English, 3yr AppleCare Protection Plan-Power Mac+Display, Gigabit Ethernet, Two USB ports, Two FireWire ports, Apple Pro Mouse
Let's guess that new machines use DDR SDRAM, 4 sticks of IBM PC 266 DDR off of
coastmemory.com for 1Gig of RAM:
$148 4x AN2664U/256/Q2V 256Mb 266MHz 2100 DDR Dimm IBM BRAND
$4,894 is the new grand total.
Pretty damned competitive if you ask me especially if they come out at 1.2, 1.4, and 1.6 Ghz since the machine profiled will be 1.4Ghz if pricing structure stays the same, which it has varied very very little over the past 2 years. Add to this that OS X will run all of the old 32 bit MacOS (those by Adobe, Microsoft, ID, Bungie, etc) applications with no speed loss while also running great UNIX apps (unlike Itanium), has a Native 32 bit mode (not Itanium), etc
What if I don't have a copy of windows, but I do have an x86 box?
Oh, I see in your world everyone who has a PC dualboots or perhaps even tho they don't legally own a copy of windows they must have pirated it.
This is the exact thing that disgusts me. That because you have a "PC" you must have windows on it or something like that.... This sort of thing is why I run into people all the time who think that since every PC runs windows (right?), that Linux or BSD must be something that runs on windows.....
Go ahead, don't take my word for it, run to your local CompUSA or Fry's, or where ever and ask people if a PC has to have windows to work. You will get responses like "All PCs have windows", I have even heard people who thought that windows was somehow _built into_ PCs.
And you wonder why Microsoft has a stranglehold on OEM's. Labelling games as requiring hardware (without mention of the software) makes people think that somehow the OS is built into the hardware... I used to work in retail, you'd be sickened by the misconceptions 80% of the public has. I just hate seeing this sort of thing added to.
Don't add to the public's misconceptions. If you cannot say something accurately, shut the hell up.
According to the site:
1.11 Will Star Wars Galaxies be a PC only game?
We are currently designing the game for the PC, but we haven't ruled out any of the other platforms. We will let you know of any definitive plans for a port of the game as soon as they emerge.
Well, I have a PC. It has 128 Megs of RAM, about 5G or more free hard drive space, a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, and a 500 Mhz k6-2 processor.
Since they specify that this is a PC game, does this mean I can run it after booting FreeBSD 4.3?
Seriously I am sick of this whole PC == Intel compatible processor based machine that is obviously running windows (I mean that is the only OS that runs on Intel boxen right?!). If you ask me my Mac is also a Personal Computer. Now if somehow I get a SunBlade I'll concede that it is a workstation and not a Personal Computer (even though I'd probably spend too much time tinkering with stuff on it to get anything useful done).
I used to think hardcore Mac users were the most arrogrant computer users in the world, because so many of them are convinced Macs runnning MacOS are better than everything else even though they haven't used much else.
I am convincved however that this is an error on my part.
I am now conviced that hardcore windows users are the most arrogant in the world by far, since they not only don't they know anything about anything else, but they expect everyone to be forced to use what they do.
Actually it was simply my thought that WinCE PDAs would be mostly useless since they lack the most important feature of all.
Interoperability
Simply put, it isn't that M$ doesn't play well with others with regards to WinCE, it's that they don't play with others at all. I have a pretty diverse computing setup. I run Slackware, FreeBSD, MacOS, MacOS X, and Win98SE. I suppose that I could sync it to Windows, but since it's sole purpose is as a game station, I am unsure what information or files I would sync to the PDA or why....
Amazingly the Palm devices can sync to all of these save maybe MacOS X, and there may be a hack to make that work, I have yet to check on it....
The sick thing is that I am always hearing people talk about how compatible windows is. And how M$ is making so much stuff work together..... Any moron can make stuff that is compatible with his own stuff. This lack of perspective really disgusts me.
Apple also had a version of UNIX called AUX which they dumped a while back. They are certainly not new to the UNIX game. They also produced a version of Linux based on mach called MkLinux but that's another story entirely.
The interesting thing about it is that there several machines that they made that were never designed to run ANY version of MacOS, only one of which was AUX only. They also shipped several models that ran AIX, which is IBM's version of UNIX. You can see datasheets of these machines here:
AUX only machines
Workgroup Server 95
AIX only machines
Network Server 500/132
Network Server 700/150
Network Server 700/200
I am not certain, but I am pretty sure that AUX was a certified version of UNIX.
Backwards compatibility is how the PowerPC got it's foothold into the market
Compatible with what?
Compatible with the chips that used to ship in older macs, as in Motorola 68000 series processors? Not on your life. The Motorola 68k series architecture is about as old as the x86 architecture. The 68000 series was introduced at about the same time as the 8086, sometime roughly around 1978. The 68000 series is also a decidedly CISC architecture.
The PowerPC was a ground up rework of what Motorola was doing, based on IBM designs for the most part. THe PPC processors are RISC or post-RISC processors unlike the MC68000 series. The instruction set is designed to be able to make the transition from a 32 bit architecture to a 64 bit architecture.
The reason that Apple chose to use the PPC series of processors had nothing to do with compatibility with the processors they were using since they are in no way compatible. They wrote an emulator into MacOS to emulate a MC68040 processor for older programs. Some programs were FAT binaries that were forked with a PPC binary portion and a 68k binary portion.
I have always wondered what would have happened if M$ had actually taken the time to write an emulator for the 23 year old x86 instructions for something like an Alpha and then rework all of their own code to support it natively. I wonder how much faster PCs would be now...
Anyways OmniWeb rocks, I finally have spell checking while typing comments on Slashdot.
Actually this is really horrible news. EA does basically nothing as multiplatform. Which means that it will be one more game that only runs on windows. Yeah, need more windows only games to compete with the existing 10,000 windows games. yeah whatever. I recently decided against buying Majesty because even though it is multi-platform, the Mac and Windows versions cannot multi-paly with each other because the windows version uses Direct-Play. Direct-Play mostly rules out Linux Windows multi-player games as well since it is so proprietary. Advocate companies that avoid this sort of crap. Advocate use of OpenPlay, which is an Apple open source game networking API that runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It's open source as well, so it can be fixed and expanded as needed.
Actually you should read some of the articles about windows XPs built in contenbt control. M$ and the hard drive manufacturers are working in the same direction.
1st I would never call a Sun box a General purpose PC, nor would I insult it by comparing it with wintel boxen.
2nd it isn't Apple that is the porblem with this copy control shit, it seems to me that most of this shit is coming out of Redmond....
Actually in those days I really didn't use macs very much at all. One of my friends happened to be a VMS BOFH, at a school with a mac based campus. At the time I was mostly a DOS user. I also had acesss on the HP frame for internet access at another college near there where I was actually attending. However I was never really impressed with Doom. I dunno, I was just not that impressed. I suppose that the graphics (I thought the monsters looked rather lame IMHO) turned me off. I did like the Warcraft series as well as Moral Decay a MUD that I used to play on via DOS machines hooked up to the HP frame via lanman or some shit like that (if I remember correctly).
To me, (and BTW I am writing this from Konquerer on FreeBSD which connects to the net through a Slackware Linux box running NAT) Marathon was more real to me as a game than anythinng else I played until that point and for years afterwards. BTW here is a link to the Marathon Story.
Firing 199 shots from a pistol without reloading hurts what could be called "the suspension of disbelief". Adding reload to a game is not an amazing thing as far as how hard it is, but the important part is that it adds a level of realism. Having Aliens in a game that are neat and insectoid is cool, but having them have political parties/factions that are fighting/warring with each other is awesome.
Now obviously I have not played every game ever made, but I have played a few, and some of them were FPS. Halflife looks great, the aliens/other dimensional creatures look kinda bleah to me. I like how flexibly you can move and interact, but on the same token I got annoyed at the 15 or so keyboard keys to move/jump/whatever and quit playing before really getting used to it. I also have yet to see it on Linux or MacOS or BSD.
In my apartment is: my k6-2 500 Win98SE/FreeBSD, my powermac 8500 MacOS 9.1/YellowDog, my roomate's iMac MacOS 9.1/MacOS X PB/Win2000 on VPC/Win ME on VPC/Slack 7.2(2.4 kernal) on VPC, my roomate's pent 233 Slackware, and a Powermac 7100 DOS MacOS 8.6/Win95. On our VPN there are a few more windows boxes and a few more slackware boxes. I like playing my friends. Generally I don't like playing single player. (Exception Baldur's Gate II rocked ass) So, I really like games like Quake II. Quake II runs on nearly everything here. So does Warcraft II, Starcraft, etc.
So here is what it all boils down to:
1)It is open source now, who cares what it was before.
2)It runs on the MacOS, Windows, Linux, and BeOS (and since FreeBSD has Linux compat mode maybe even FreeBSD).
3)This can give people who program better than I, and are game enthusiasts perhaps a platform to build a new game (as in moded all to hell, or just built onto existing code). It should be possible to make this thing capable of doing a Larger scale online FPS. Perhaps nothing approaching Everquest, but like say 50 players?? *shrug*
4)If you don't like it, prefer windows only games, are afraid of running more than one platform, whatever YOU DON'T HAVE TO DOWNLOAD/PLAY IT.
5)The Aleph One team has been working very hard on this for a while and they deserve some respect for their efforts. If you have not created/developed on a GPL or open source project for the community at large, then you have no room to trash these guys.
I remember playing Marathon 1 and 2 in an all Mac computer lab in the early 90s. I still prefer some things about it to any of th new shooters.
#1)It actually had a plot. And not only did it have a plot, it ws one worthy of a great SF novel. Also unlike the Highlander series the followups to the first one actually built apon the plot instead of going off in an alien direction.
#2)When you emptied your clip, you had to reload which took a bit of time depending on what you were firing. Not too common in the FPS of today. Also reloading the rocket launcher took longer than reloading a pistol.
#3)This is the first FPS I ever saw that seemed to realize hey 2 hands means that I can hold two pistols... or for that matter two combat shotguns, a personal favorite.
#4)The Marathon Infinity (not Open GL of course) would run on a 40 Mhz 68040 and not suck.
#5)The audio system was awesome for it's time, the closer you were to water the louder it was. There were many things that were like this. Also incorporated into the game was stereo panning of sound.
#6)First FPS I ever saw to do 16 bit color.
#7)It also had many other the type of things for multiplayer that Quake II needed a lithium server for. Example ring of shadows, invicibility, etc.
All in all I am glad to see a resurgence in it. Was a great game and am very much looking into dl and compiling it on the various linux boxen I have.