Nokia, as publisher, bought the rights to the game, and solicited a developer. They paid the developer a flat fee, and took the loss. If there had been a PROFIT, there would have been profit sharing between all three parties (Nokia, Palladium, and developer Backbone.) As it was, Backbone got a development fee, Palladium got a small licensing fee, and Nokia lost money. (Nokia was expecting the Rifts game to be the breakout 'makes the N-Gage respectable' game, and had even optioned for sequels.)
Just like with the Bruckheimer-produced Rifts movie. The initial licensing fee has been paid to Palladium; and if Bruckheimer ever finds a script he likes, it will be produced. If the movie tanks, Palladium won't lose any money, but they won't GET any, either. If the movie is a blockbuster, Palladium will make money.
And again, he wasn't begging for $850k-$1.3M, he was stating that those were his losses, and wanted fans to help keep the company afloat by buying about $200k worth of merchandise. He was NOT soliciting for donations (overly-rabid fans on the forums started that,) and he wasn't looking for sympathy. He was just trying to keep his life's work alive, and finally decided he needed to let his fans know of his plight.
Yeah, Kevin's a dictator of a publisher (heavily re-writing outside writer's work, or even scrapping it and writing it from scratch himself,) and self-admittedly not a great businessman, but you do have to respect his dedication to the fans of his works.
Read the status updates in that forum. It looks VERY promising. They've had $200,000 worth of business in the two weeks since that 'plea for help' was made. Kevin (the founder of Palladium,) has stated that it looks like they are going to recover now.
(And for those nay-sayers who will just blame their troubles on the N-Gage game... They didn't LOSE any money on it, it just didn't bring any money IN. Nokia is the one who lost money.)
I bet you could drive the price of shit through the roof by putting a Wired magazine in front of Bill Gates with a nice 4 page article on organic fertilizers.
No, you've got it backwards! Microsoft would start offering shit for free, bundled with every copy of MS Windows!
It runs Symbian Series 60, 3rd Edition. One of the most popular 'smart phone' OSes our there. Not as bloated as Windows Smartphone (and much more appropriate for a phone than Windows Mobile.) It has plenty of developer support (not quite as popular as Palm, but plenty of third-party support.) I have file management programs, GPS programs, document readers, and more, for my S60 phone. (Also a Nokia.)
My favorite is the inconsistent floppy disk usage.
A 3.5 inch, high-density floppy disk is 1440 binary kilobytes (or kibibytes, for you wierdos who like the term.) Or 1,474,560 bytes. Yet floppy disk manufacturers (and most consumers) refer to them as 1.44 megabytes. That would imply 1.44 * 1024 * 1024 = 1,509,949.4 bytes, which is incorrect. (Or 1.44 * 1000 * 1000 = 1,440,000, which is also incorrect.) So the commonly accepted terminology is a bastard base-10/base-2 multiplication mix.
Then there are the companies that advertise them as '2 MB unformatted'. There is the 'DMF' format that gets 1,720,320 bytes, (1680 binary kilobytes, also inconsistently called 1.68 MB,) but even that doesn't come close to 2 MB (even 2,000,000 bytes.) (Yes, I know the underlying technical reason, but it's still dumb in the same way computer CRT monitors are advertised based on how physically large the tube is, even the parts of the tube that are under the plastic shroud.)
The true first is the community of Hermiston, Oregon (or, more technically accurately, Morrow county, and a little bit of Umatilla county,) has had a true 100% coverage over 600 square miles. Read the NY Times article (use BugMeNot's suggested user/pass combo of 'spambobby' and 'password', they work.).
RTFA. While the N-Gage game's failure didn't help, it sounds like it didn't hurt their bottom line, either. It was embezzlement that killed them.
If I could find it anywhere, I actually would buy the N-Gage game. I got an N-Gage because it was free, and it was a decent smartphone that can sync with a Mac. I have never bought any games for it, though. When I heard about Rifts being made for it, I've been trying to find it locally, but it looks like I won't be able to.
Sorry, I took miserly in the context of 'stingy', 'tight', or 'frugal', where 'frugal' usually means 'uses less'. For example, I have seen the Toyota Prius described as 'miserly with gas'. Meaning it uses little gas. So in that context, I took it to mean that the MacBook Pro has a LONG battery life, because it is stingy with it's use of electricity.
And, oddly, I hadn't even considered that miserly and miserable have the same word root! (But now that you mention it, it does make perfect sense.)
Why then is the battery life in the MacBooks so miserly?
First, I think you mean miserable, not miserly.
Second, if you believe Apple's intro, Core Duo is 4-5 times faster than G4. Yet if you pay attention to their 'performance per watt' graph, you see that Core Duo is only 4 times better. That means that at equal power consumption, Core Duo should be 4 times faster than G4 (3.88x, to be precise to Apple's numbers.) Yet Apple says it's 4-5x more performance. That means that you are, indeed, using more power than G4, you're just getting significantly more performance for it. Comparing again the chart, G5 would use the same power for WORSE performance.
Not to mention the physically larger, and brighter, screen.
But, to be fair, we do also have to take into account the MacBook Pro's 60 Wh battery compared to the 15" PowerBook G4's 50 Wh battery. That's 20% more juice, for 3-28% more 'power' (4/3.88 to 5/3.88) So, even at the high end, you should only get 6% worse battery life, right? Well, again, that doesn't take the bigger/brighter screen into account.
But, just to let you know, I can get a full 5 hours of battery life out of my MacBook Pro, just as I could with my 12" PowerBook G4. Don't knock battery life until you try it. (And to be fair, compare the same settings on both computers. Don't compare a 15" PowerBook G4 on max battery saving, dimmest display, wireless off to a MacBook Pro on max power, brightest display, wireless on.
You may be thinking of PCI-X, the 64-bit, up-to-533 MHz extension of good old fashioned 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI 2.1.
PCI is a 'parallel' bus, 32 or 64-bits wide, whose connectors can be seen on the first two pictures on the Wikipedia PCI article. You increase the speed of PCI by either moving to 64-bit data paths (and doubling the number of pins,) or increasing the speed (from 33 MHz to 66, 13, 266, or 533 MHz,) either method requires fairly extensive work on the part of the motherboard maker, and requires a chipset that supports it.
PCI Express, on the other hand, is a 'serial' bus that is only 2 bits wide, but significantly faster (2.5 GHz vs. 33 MHz to compare the 'basic' modes in laymans terms. Some documentation says 1 bit wide, but I call it 2 bits, because it's 1 bit each way.) You increase speed in PCI Express by merely dedicating more 'lanes' to a single connector. Common sizes are 1x, 4x, 8x, and 16x (the replacement for AGP for use by graphics cards.) You can see pictures of the different connectors at the Wikipedia PCI Express article.
This means that while basic 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI is 133 MB/s, an "x1", or 1-channel, 1-bit, 2.5 GHz PCI Express link (with approximately 80% fewer pins,) is 250 MB/s. Likewise, top-of-the-line 64-bit, 533 MHz PCI-X is 4.2 GB/s, and AGP 8x is 2.1 GB/s, 16-channel PCI Express (with about the same number of pins as PCI-X,) is 4 GB/s.
No, Apple was late to the game with PCI Express. Dell could very well have been the first OEM to ship a desktop with it; but it was destined to be the standard no matter what Dell had to say about the matter.
Now if Dell ships computers with ONLY PCI Express slots, forcing add-in board makers to move their legacy PCI boards (TV tuners, WiFi cards, etc,) to PCI Express, THEN Dell can claim some leadership. (As Apple did with USB.)
802.11? That's a joke, right? Apple pushed that one, and Dell was late to the game with making it standard on their laptops.
I can see Dell having a major influence on adding AMD's 64-bit extensions to Intel processors though. Dell sells enough server hardware that Intel would be very brave indeed to ignore a Dell request on server features. I'm not saying, and I don't think the OP or the quoted CTO is saying, that Dell invented the AMD 64-bit extensions. Only that Dell was pivotal in convincing Intel to adopt them. Dell canned Itanium, and was probably ready to sign a deal with AMD for Opterons before Intel caved and put AMD64 into Xeons. Moving that to the desktop line is just a nice bonus.
Once upon a time (before Windows had the built-in ability to hibernate,) some PC notebooks did hibernation in BIOS. You actually had to create a partition the same size as how much memory you had, and 'bless' it using a BIOS-specific utility. (I had a Sony whose hard drive died, and when I never was able to recreate the hibernate partition)
As for the RAMdrive, it wouldn't survive during shutdown unless it was implemented as an EFI component. That would get ugly, as even if you managed a solution that compressed your memory to 50%, you'd still have to 'give up' half your memory to have one of these for each OS. (So on my 2 GB MacBook, I'd have to have a 512 MB one for Windows, and another 512 MB one for Mac OS, leaving me with only 1 GB of usable memory. I upgraded FROM 1 GB for a reason...)
An ultra-fast Flash drive would be good, though... (Or, for when we have PCI equipped desktop Macs, a PCI RAMdrive where you load a PCI card up with DIMMs for a 'hardware' RAMdrive that appears as a SCSI device to the system. They also usually have battery backup to survive reboots.)
Sleep (Mac OS) / Standby (Windows): A low-power state in which the contents of main system memory are preserved, but power is cut to most other hardware, including the main processor. On resuming, the processor powers up, but with an empty cache, and the system is usable very quickly as if it was never powered down.
Deep Sleep (Mac OS) / Hibernate (Windows): A state in which the contents of main memory are saved to disk, as well as some configuration parameters, then the system is completely powered off. On turning the computer back on, the OS loader recognizes this saved state on disk, and reloads that image of main memory. The system then resumes as if it had woken from a normal Sleep/Standby. This takes significantly longer to 'wake' from than Sleep/Stanby, as it must load the contents of main memory from disk. This takes longer on systems with more memory, and with slower hard drives. (i.e. A 256 MB RAM system with a 15,000 RPM SCSI hard drive would wake many times faster than a 4 GB RAM system with a 5400 RPM ATA drive.)
It's Deep Sleep/Hibernate that could be subverted. If you could find a way to have the OS loader (the one that in this solution provides a simple graphical Apple or Windows logo,) be certain to load before the Deep Sleep/Hibernate loaders, and check for the Deep Sleep/Hibernate images on each OS' partition, it would be possible to switch between 'hibernating' OSes fairly simply. (Windows has an easy-to-access method for entering Hibernate mode; OS X is more difficult to force into this mode, but it is possible.)
That's actually a great idea. I'll have to see if the current solution happens to support this. (It may already work without having been specifically implemented, just due to the nature of the way Deep Sleep/Hibernate works. I know that in Windows, it's the OS bootloader that checks for the Hibernate image, so the Windows end should work just fine; I'm not sure if in Mac OS it's the OS bootloader that does it, or if the OS sets something in EFI that might actually break the article's hack...)
Exactly. Right now, for my job, I haul around a MacBook pro *AND* a PeeCee laptop. I would much rather just haul around the MacBook and dual-boot when necessary. (Although a high-speed virtual machine through Intel's new on-processor Virtualization Technology would be a much preferred option for me...)
The official instructions call for an HFS+ OS X partition, and an NTFS Windows partition. But, you could add a third FAT32 partition to hold common data, if you so desired. (And if you REALLY wanted to, you could copy OS X's 'Users' folder, and Windows' 'Documents and Settings' folder over to it so that your entire user data structures for both OSes were on one shared partition.)
Yonah supposedly also includes virtualization support. (It was supposed to, I haven't seen any confirmation either way whether or not it actually is in there. Anyone know if it would show in/proc/cpuinfo and what specific flags I should look for? I've got a T2500-based laptop in the other room.)
Also I have not seen any confirmation yet that the new Sossaman actuall supports multiple CPU packages per system. Intel's comparison page for the Xeons lists all of the Xeons I've tried as being MP capable, while the new Xeon LVs are only listed with a system type of "DP" - the die/package already HAS two processors though.
Take a peek at Intel's Advanced Platform Technologies document. In it, it mentions dual, dual-core Xeon LV 2.0 GHz processors.
As to the issue of shared vs. independent cache between the cores - yes, it looks like while most third-party specs for the Yonah list it as "1M + 1M", it is actually 2M of unified cache for both cores according to Intel's docs/marketing for the Yonahs. The 1M+1M spec on some vendor pages (such as NewEgg) might be a holdover from the Athlon 64 X2 (which has independent L2 caches) and the Pentium D (which also appears to have independent L2 caches).
Indeed, both Athlon X2 and Pentium D use separate L2 caches per core. Yonah and Sossaman use a single dual-ported L2 cache. 1M+1M is likely either vendor confusion, or just trying to be clear, if technically incorrect.
That unified cache between the cores could provide a significant performance boost that would make up for the unpleasant shared FSB.
A shared cache will cut down on FSB hits significantly in high-cache-hit circumstances between processors. In the Pentium D, for example, if one core has a piece of data in its cache, and the other core wants that data, well, it has to go to main memory for it, since the two cores aren't aware of what is in each other's cache. On Athlon X2, it's a little better. The two are aware of what are in each other's caches, but must go through the HyperTransport bus (same as to chipset) to get it. At least on Athlon, the memory bus controller is shared between cores, so that the two cores don't have to fight each other for main memory access. (Athlon X2 behaves to main memory similarly to the way Yonah/Sossaman does to L2.)
Unfortunately, it appears that Sossaman still has a shared FSB between sockets and cores. That means effectively 4 processors on the single 667 MHz bus. Intel has hinted that Woodcrest will use separate links to each socket, a la PowerPC 970 and Opteron. That will be a welcome change.
(And I wonder with Intel's push for 4-core and 8+core systems in the coming years... Will they significantly increase the front side bus to the socket, or will each socket start to contain multiple FSB links? I mean, even if you've got a full-speed bus, a single 3 GHz bus for an 8-core 3 GHz chip won't be fast enough to keep those cores fed.)
Where is the error? The article says "In 2001, Apple introduced the iPod, an MP3 player with the unheard-of storage capacity of 5 gigabytes."
The first iPod did, indeed, have a 5 GB hard drive. I fail to see the error. The 'first generation' iPod later increased in capacity to 10 GB, but it was introduced solely at 5 GB.
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Nokia, as publisher, bought the rights to the game, and solicited a developer. They paid the developer a flat fee, and took the loss. If there had been a PROFIT, there would have been profit sharing between all three parties (Nokia, Palladium, and developer Backbone.) As it was, Backbone got a development fee, Palladium got a small licensing fee, and Nokia lost money. (Nokia was expecting the Rifts game to be the breakout 'makes the N-Gage respectable' game, and had even optioned for sequels.)
Just like with the Bruckheimer-produced Rifts movie. The initial licensing fee has been paid to Palladium; and if Bruckheimer ever finds a script he likes, it will be produced. If the movie tanks, Palladium won't lose any money, but they won't GET any, either. If the movie is a blockbuster, Palladium will make money.
And again, he wasn't begging for $850k-$1.3M, he was stating that those were his losses, and wanted fans to help keep the company afloat by buying about $200k worth of merchandise. He was NOT soliciting for donations (overly-rabid fans on the forums started that,) and he wasn't looking for sympathy. He was just trying to keep his life's work alive, and finally decided he needed to let his fans know of his plight.
Yeah, Kevin's a dictator of a publisher (heavily re-writing outside writer's work, or even scrapping it and writing it from scratch himself,) and self-admittedly not a great businessman, but you do have to respect his dedication to the fans of his works.
Read the status updates in that forum. It looks VERY promising. They've had $200,000 worth of business in the two weeks since that 'plea for help' was made. Kevin (the founder of Palladium,) has stated that it looks like they are going to recover now.
(And for those nay-sayers who will just blame their troubles on the N-Gage game... They didn't LOSE any money on it, it just didn't bring any money IN. Nokia is the one who lost money.)
Since when did MS even know Operating Systems?
Stick to Office Suites.
No, you've got it backwards! Microsoft would start offering shit for free, bundled with every copy of MS Windows!
Oh, wait.... They already do.
Nope, I did, too. I was going to post the exact same comment, but decided to look to see if anyone else had, first.
It runs Symbian Series 60, 3rd Edition. One of the most popular 'smart phone' OSes our there. Not as bloated as Windows Smartphone (and much more appropriate for a phone than Windows Mobile.) It has plenty of developer support (not quite as popular as Palm, but plenty of third-party support.) I have file management programs, GPS programs, document readers, and more, for my S60 phone. (Also a Nokia.)
My favorite is the inconsistent floppy disk usage.
A 3.5 inch, high-density floppy disk is 1440 binary kilobytes (or kibibytes, for you wierdos who like the term.) Or 1,474,560 bytes. Yet floppy disk manufacturers (and most consumers) refer to them as 1.44 megabytes. That would imply 1.44 * 1024 * 1024 = 1,509,949.4 bytes, which is incorrect. (Or 1.44 * 1000 * 1000 = 1,440,000, which is also incorrect.) So the commonly accepted terminology is a bastard base-10/base-2 multiplication mix.
Then there are the companies that advertise them as '2 MB unformatted'. There is the 'DMF' format that gets 1,720,320 bytes, (1680 binary kilobytes, also inconsistently called 1.68 MB,) but even that doesn't come close to 2 MB (even 2,000,000 bytes.) (Yes, I know the underlying technical reason, but it's still dumb in the same way computer CRT monitors are advertised based on how physically large the tube is, even the parts of the tube that are under the plastic shroud.)
The true first is the community of Hermiston, Oregon (or, more technically accurately, Morrow county, and a little bit of Umatilla county,) has had a true 100% coverage over 600 square miles. Read the NY Times article (use BugMeNot's suggested user/pass combo of 'spambobby' and 'password', they work.).
RTFA. While the N-Gage game's failure didn't help, it sounds like it didn't hurt their bottom line, either. It was embezzlement that killed them.
If I could find it anywhere, I actually would buy the N-Gage game. I got an N-Gage because it was free, and it was a decent smartphone that can sync with a Mac. I have never bought any games for it, though. When I heard about Rifts being made for it, I've been trying to find it locally, but it looks like I won't be able to.
Sorry, I took miserly in the context of 'stingy', 'tight', or 'frugal', where 'frugal' usually means 'uses less'. For example, I have seen the Toyota Prius described as 'miserly with gas'. Meaning it uses little gas. So in that context, I took it to mean that the MacBook Pro has a LONG battery life, because it is stingy with it's use of electricity.
And, oddly, I hadn't even considered that miserly and miserable have the same word root! (But now that you mention it, it does make perfect sense.)
First, I think you mean miserable, not miserly.
Second, if you believe Apple's intro, Core Duo is 4-5 times faster than G4. Yet if you pay attention to their 'performance per watt' graph, you see that Core Duo is only 4 times better. That means that at equal power consumption, Core Duo should be 4 times faster than G4 (3.88x, to be precise to Apple's numbers.) Yet Apple says it's 4-5x more performance. That means that you are, indeed, using more power than G4, you're just getting significantly more performance for it. Comparing again the chart, G5 would use the same power for WORSE performance.
Not to mention the physically larger, and brighter, screen.
But, to be fair, we do also have to take into account the MacBook Pro's 60 Wh battery compared to the 15" PowerBook G4's 50 Wh battery. That's 20% more juice, for 3-28% more 'power' (4/3.88 to 5/3.88) So, even at the high end, you should only get 6% worse battery life, right? Well, again, that doesn't take the bigger/brighter screen into account.
But, just to let you know, I can get a full 5 hours of battery life out of my MacBook Pro, just as I could with my 12" PowerBook G4. Don't knock battery life until you try it. (And to be fair, compare the same settings on both computers. Don't compare a 15" PowerBook G4 on max battery saving, dimmest display, wireless off to a MacBook Pro on max power, brightest display, wireless on.
As the other AC replied, no.
You may be thinking of PCI-X, the 64-bit, up-to-533 MHz extension of good old fashioned 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI 2.1.
PCI is a 'parallel' bus, 32 or 64-bits wide, whose connectors can be seen on the first two pictures on the Wikipedia PCI article. You increase the speed of PCI by either moving to 64-bit data paths (and doubling the number of pins,) or increasing the speed (from 33 MHz to 66, 13, 266, or 533 MHz,) either method requires fairly extensive work on the part of the motherboard maker, and requires a chipset that supports it.
PCI Express, on the other hand, is a 'serial' bus that is only 2 bits wide, but significantly faster (2.5 GHz vs. 33 MHz to compare the 'basic' modes in laymans terms. Some documentation says 1 bit wide, but I call it 2 bits, because it's 1 bit each way.) You increase speed in PCI Express by merely dedicating more 'lanes' to a single connector. Common sizes are 1x, 4x, 8x, and 16x (the replacement for AGP for use by graphics cards.) You can see pictures of the different connectors at the Wikipedia PCI Express article.
This means that while basic 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI is 133 MB/s, an "x1", or 1-channel, 1-bit, 2.5 GHz PCI Express link (with approximately 80% fewer pins,) is 250 MB/s. Likewise, top-of-the-line 64-bit, 533 MHz PCI-X is 4.2 GB/s, and AGP 8x is 2.1 GB/s, 16-channel PCI Express (with about the same number of pins as PCI-X,) is 4 GB/s.
No, Apple was late to the game with PCI Express. Dell could very well have been the first OEM to ship a desktop with it; but it was destined to be the standard no matter what Dell had to say about the matter.
Now if Dell ships computers with ONLY PCI Express slots, forcing add-in board makers to move their legacy PCI boards (TV tuners, WiFi cards, etc,) to PCI Express, THEN Dell can claim some leadership. (As Apple did with USB.)
802.11? That's a joke, right? Apple pushed that one, and Dell was late to the game with making it standard on their laptops.
I can see Dell having a major influence on adding AMD's 64-bit extensions to Intel processors though. Dell sells enough server hardware that Intel would be very brave indeed to ignore a Dell request on server features. I'm not saying, and I don't think the OP or the quoted CTO is saying, that Dell invented the AMD 64-bit extensions. Only that Dell was pivotal in convincing Intel to adopt them. Dell canned Itanium, and was probably ready to sign a deal with AMD for Opterons before Intel caved and put AMD64 into Xeons. Moving that to the desktop line is just a nice bonus.
I think it's more like Pinocchio claiming he's the master, and Geppetto is the puppet.
You are correct. I wrote it, and knew it didn't look right, but couldn't figure out why.
Thanks.
Man, this went down faster than a transvestite hooker going down on Hugh Grant.
(Yeah, the joke's a few years old, but I still chuckle...)
Come on. Really, if MS does something right and kills spyware/adawre, I'd consider it an acceptable loss to put Lavasoft et al out of business.
Heck, I'd love it if they made Norton, McAfee, etc AntiVirus obsolete, too.
But I know it's not going to happen.
Once upon a time (before Windows had the built-in ability to hibernate,) some PC notebooks did hibernation in BIOS. You actually had to create a partition the same size as how much memory you had, and 'bless' it using a BIOS-specific utility. (I had a Sony whose hard drive died, and when I never was able to recreate the hibernate partition)
As for the RAMdrive, it wouldn't survive during shutdown unless it was implemented as an EFI component. That would get ugly, as even if you managed a solution that compressed your memory to 50%, you'd still have to 'give up' half your memory to have one of these for each OS. (So on my 2 GB MacBook, I'd have to have a 512 MB one for Windows, and another 512 MB one for Mac OS, leaving me with only 1 GB of usable memory. I upgraded FROM 1 GB for a reason...)
An ultra-fast Flash drive would be good, though... (Or, for when we have PCI equipped desktop Macs, a PCI RAMdrive where you load a PCI card up with DIMMs for a 'hardware' RAMdrive that appears as a SCSI device to the system. They also usually have battery backup to survive reboots.)
Sleep (Mac OS) / Standby (Windows): A low-power state in which the contents of main system memory are preserved, but power is cut to most other hardware, including the main processor. On resuming, the processor powers up, but with an empty cache, and the system is usable very quickly as if it was never powered down.
Deep Sleep (Mac OS) / Hibernate (Windows): A state in which the contents of main memory are saved to disk, as well as some configuration parameters, then the system is completely powered off. On turning the computer back on, the OS loader recognizes this saved state on disk, and reloads that image of main memory. The system then resumes as if it had woken from a normal Sleep/Standby. This takes significantly longer to 'wake' from than Sleep/Stanby, as it must load the contents of main memory from disk. This takes longer on systems with more memory, and with slower hard drives. (i.e. A 256 MB RAM system with a 15,000 RPM SCSI hard drive would wake many times faster than a 4 GB RAM system with a 5400 RPM ATA drive.)
It's Deep Sleep/Hibernate that could be subverted. If you could find a way to have the OS loader (the one that in this solution provides a simple graphical Apple or Windows logo,) be certain to load before the Deep Sleep/Hibernate loaders, and check for the Deep Sleep/Hibernate images on each OS' partition, it would be possible to switch between 'hibernating' OSes fairly simply. (Windows has an easy-to-access method for entering Hibernate mode; OS X is more difficult to force into this mode, but it is possible.)
That's actually a great idea. I'll have to see if the current solution happens to support this. (It may already work without having been specifically implemented, just due to the nature of the way Deep Sleep/Hibernate works. I know that in Windows, it's the OS bootloader that checks for the Hibernate image, so the Windows end should work just fine; I'm not sure if in Mac OS it's the OS bootloader that does it, or if the OS sets something in EFI that might actually break the article's hack...)
Exactly. Right now, for my job, I haul around a MacBook pro *AND* a PeeCee laptop. I would much rather just haul around the MacBook and dual-boot when necessary. (Although a high-speed virtual machine through Intel's new on-processor Virtualization Technology would be a much preferred option for me...)
The official instructions call for an HFS+ OS X partition, and an NTFS Windows partition. But, you could add a third FAT32 partition to hold common data, if you so desired. (And if you REALLY wanted to, you could copy OS X's 'Users' folder, and Windows' 'Documents and Settings' folder over to it so that your entire user data structures for both OSes were on one shared partition.)
Yes, Core Duo has Virtualization. Take a peek at Intel's Performance Brief, or a Press Release.
Take a peek at Intel's Advanced Platform Technologies document. In it, it mentions dual, dual-core Xeon LV 2.0 GHz processors.
Indeed, both Athlon X2 and Pentium D use separate L2 caches per core. Yonah and Sossaman use a single dual-ported L2 cache. 1M+1M is likely either vendor confusion, or just trying to be clear, if technically incorrect.
A shared cache will cut down on FSB hits significantly in high-cache-hit circumstances between processors. In the Pentium D, for example, if one core has a piece of data in its cache, and the other core wants that data, well, it has to go to main memory for it, since the two cores aren't aware of what is in each other's cache. On Athlon X2, it's a little better. The two are aware of what are in each other's caches, but must go through the HyperTransport bus (same as to chipset) to get it. At least on Athlon, the memory bus controller is shared between cores, so that the two cores don't have to fight each other for main memory access. (Athlon X2 behaves to main memory similarly to the way Yonah/Sossaman does to L2.)
Unfortunately, it appears that Sossaman still has a shared FSB between sockets and cores. That means effectively 4 processors on the single 667 MHz bus. Intel has hinted that Woodcrest will use separate links to each socket, a la PowerPC 970 and Opteron. That will be a welcome change.
(And I wonder with Intel's push for 4-core and 8+core systems in the coming years... Will they significantly increase the front side bus to the socket, or will each socket start to contain multiple FSB links? I mean, even if you've got a full-speed bus, a single 3 GHz bus for an 8-core 3 GHz chip won't be fast enough to keep those cores fed.)
That would have been an error, then. Odd, I thought I got to the article early. I guess not early enough.
Yeah, looks like a blatant piece of 'advertising by submitting to Slashdot' to me.
The first iPod did, indeed, have a 5 GB hard drive. I fail to see the error. The 'first generation' iPod later increased in capacity to 10 GB, but it was introduced solely at 5 GB.