Most operations you'll do on your desktop are integer-based
Perhaps, but most operations where speed actually matters are going to be almost completely fp-based.
Who cares if it's faster at the things that computers are already blindingly fast at doing anyway? I want the computer which is better at the heavy lifting. I suspect most people do.
This is probably a big part of why the new X-Box is going with PPC: Better fp performance.
Apple is gradually dumping the PPC because of their disappointment with IBM, Motorola, and Freescale, not the CPU architecture itself.
Can anything to do with Captain Jack ever be called "subtle"?
It's too bad they wrote him out, but with David Tennant taking over as the new Doctor, I guess they decided that one young, gay-looking male lead was enough.
That said... The appearance of Jack was a bold move. In this world full of intollerance and bigotry, kudos to the producers of that venerable institution of a show for their brave choice of trusting their audience to accept an American character as Doctor Who companion.:P
Trivia: If you listen carefully to the background chatter in episode 2 when the aliens are gathered in the obvservation lounge, you'll hear what was probably the most subtle of the "bad wolf" references. By the time they got to episode 4, I was already obsessing about it.
perhaps the odd app here and there will be incompatible, but at the same time, there does exist a very wide range of unique PPC apps currently that likely will never make their way to Intel.
I'll even put on my Carnac hat and break it down for you:
1. There will probably be a native WINE port for OS X within months of the first Mac-on-Intel release which will not run on the G5. This will allow the running of various Windows apps without rebooting or even leaving the OS X desktop. Geeks will love the fact that damn near all Windows and Linux software will in CPU-native mode within OS X, but old-school Mac heads probably won't care much.
2. It has already been announced that the Intel Macs will never be capable of running "Classic" applications. Fans of old Mac programs like Quark will be all a-tizzy about squeezing maximum life out of the remaining G5 systems, but nobody else will care.
Pretty much everything else is likely to work just fine on either platform.
I think the grandparent post is referring to large-budget movies of an apocalyptic nature, which always seem to center around the US.
That's because Hollywood (a city in the US) spends more on their movies than anybody else. Up until the rise of cheap CGI, nobody else could afford to do a big-budget apocalypse. Maybe India or Hong Kong, but those countries have been making movies with vastly different themes. Global threats to all human life seem to be a largely American entertainment theme lately.
Anyway, the post we are discussing was clearly implying that American audiences were entirely to provincial and xenophobic to enjoy movies with foreign characters and settings, and that's clearly a load of crap.
While films such as "The Passion of the Christ" and "Titanic" may not have Americans filling all the lead roles, any non-American can see that they are primarily aimed at the US market.
"Titanic" is the #2 movie of all time in Japan, and took in vast sums all over Europe and Asia. It was huge in the US, but it was huge everywhere else, too.
The extremely Roman Catholic "The Passion of the Christ" was vastly more popular in South American countries than in the US. Here it was a big art-house hit, but it was the global audience that made it the #9 all-time top grossing film that it is.
If they were "clearly aimed at the US market", then they missed the mark by a rather wide margin, as both films relied on international popularity to make their money.
Americans can't relate to things that happen to people who aren't American in countries that aren't the US.
Very true. This is why "Casablanca" did so poorly, and why nobody goes to James Bond movies in the US. Or Harry Potter movies.
Also, "Titanic" might not have lost so much money if Rose was American. Too bad, that film looked like it had a chance to make a few bucks.
I could go on all day rattling off failures like "Lawrence of Arabia", "Doctor Zhivago", and "The Passion of the Christ." If only they had American main characters, they might have made money in US theaters.
It was shortly after the dust-up which resulted when he tried to publish that book containing Slashdot posts from other people.
By that point, most Slashbots had already gotten over the awe and wonder of having a "legitimate" journalist writing columns for Slashdot, and whatever credibility he had within geek culture had pretty much evaporated.
He appears to have given up on trying to fit in with geek counterculture (I wonder if he finally realized that there never was any such thing) and he's been writing about dogs for the last five years or so.
This is one thing that City of Heroes definately got right. At the start of the game, you are a superhero with a couple of cool powers. You go on missions. You fight multiple bad guys at once.
You actually have fun.
In the old EQ game, you spend four levels jabbing garter snakes and beetles with a crappy weapon. Kind of a nostalgic feeling for old-school MUD players, but generally very boring.
The thing about the Matrix is, you can point at so many obvious influences which a crazy old lady in Salt Lake City is unlikely to be at all familiar with.
1. Gnosticism and Gnostic Christianity
2. "Wire Fu" movies
3. Japanese anime ("Ghost in the Shell, in particular")
4. Comic books.
5. Older "alternate reality" sci-fi. (For example... There was an episode of Doctor Who in the 1970s in which The Doctor battled The Master in a virtual computer-generated world, also known as "The Matrix", in which laws of physics could be slightly broken.)
Now, you gotta ask, who is more likely to craft a movie around these ultra-geeky elements? A Hollywood weirdo and his transgendered brother, or a lone woman in Utah?
By the way: The Matrix sequels sucked, but the Amimatrix was pretty good, and "Bound" was the bomb, yo!
When you buy a movie or lottery ticket, what did you really buy?
Admission to a theater for an hour and a half, or a really bad wager.
(Prepare for tangent: a rant about lotteries...)
Lotteries used to be called "the numbers racket", and we put people in jail for running them. Now state governments all over the country are using them for revenue streams, but you are a total sucker if you play.
Think about it for a minute... Governments who run lotteries pay out at a rate per dollar collected which would be completely illegal if a casino ran them. Then they collect taxes on the winnings meaning they keep even more of the money.
It's nothing more than a tax on people who can't do math. If you have a friend that plays the lottery every day for a dollar a day, suggest this:
Take all of the $365 you will spend on the lottery this year. Now, go to a casino which has a roulette wheel, and put it all on "00"
No matter what happens, let it ride for four spins.
Your odds of hitting 00 four times in a row are very tiny indeed, but if you do it, you will have nearly 400 Million Dollars!!! That's way better than any "PowerBall" game ever will be... and think of the thrill of that final spin, when you are leaving 1.2 Million on the table.
Or, if you prefer, take this bit of advice from National Lampoon's European Vacation:
"Why don't you give me half the money you were going to bet? Then we'll go out to the parking lot, I'll kick you in the nuts, and we'll call it a day!"
Which is exactly why this deal will never ever happen.
Dell would get a new "prestige" line of computers, which they could sell at a high margin. It's not news that they would like this.
Apple would lose control of their retail prices, lose some control of the hardware choices, introduce a middle-man to make profits they could have for themselves, and gain... what, exactly? Both Dells and Apples are available for on-line purchase. Is there really anybody out there who would be more likely to buy a Mac if it had a "Dell" stamp on the front?
"Let's see... I could buy a Mac from Apple, complete with the free year of AppleCare coverage which means I can storm in to any Apple Store in America and demand that they fix it whenever the slightest thing goes wrong, or I can buy a nearly-identical Mac from Dell for about the same price, and rely on outsourced phone support for any problems I have. Gosh, I think I'd rather take it up the tailpipe! Dude, I'm getting a Dell!!!"
That's because Dell uses cheap components that wear out after a year or two of use, while Apple (traditionally) has built their computers to last.
Your information is a bit out of date.
Cheap commodity PC parts are a lot more reliable these days than they used to be, and Dell has gotten better about part selection over the years.
At the same time, Apple has been using cheaper and cheaper parts in their low-end products, specifically the iBook, eMac, and mini.
So the two have converged quite a bit in terms of hardware reliability. Dells are every bit as good as Apples in terms of build quality.
The only place where Apple wins is support. Take your broken-under-warranty iBook to a local Apple Store, and the guy at the "Genius Bar" with either fix it on the spot or express ship it to their repair shop, to be sent back either directly to you or to the store (your choice.) If you Dell breaks under warranty, enjoy your phone call with some guy from India who's calling himself "Mike" and doing a relatively good job at hiding his accent and chatting about baseball, but is utterly unable to help you resolve your problem in a timely manner.
There would be plenty of nuisance tech calls until the Dell user base got a little more Mac savvy.
All they need is a FAQ to print up and include in each box. Something like this should do it...
Top five "switcher" questions answered:
1. Where is my right mouse button???
A: On the right side of your old USB mouse. Plug it in and use it.
2. No, seriously. My old mouse was PS/2, and a piece of crap anyway. Where's the right button on this shiny new one that came with the Mac?
A: If you insist on using their mouse, then either holding it down for a second or holding the "Ctrl" key down while clicking will do the same thing as a right-click... but honestly, for most programs you will not find yourself needing to right-click. All the menus you need are permanently mounted at the top of the screen, in a very predictable order.
3. How do I upgrade the hardware?
A: The same way you used to upgrade your PC hardware. Duh.
4. Yeah, but what if I want a faster CPU?
A: Macs hold their value well enough that you can sell your current Mac and buy the latest-and-greatest for less than a CPU upgrade of a similar increment in the PC world costs... but if you really insist on making your old box "1337", there are several vendors of CPU upgrades for the Mac, and it's likely to get even easier after the Intel switch.
5. How come there's no software available for it?
A: There is, just not at Best Buy. Go online or use mail order.
That's not really irony, Alanis, but it is amusing.
In spite of the fact that I believe we would have been much better off with a third term of Reagan, senility and all, than the single term of Bush the Elder we ended up with, I maintain that the limit was (and is) a darn good idea.
I think most Americans, regardless of their political views, would agree that it is a Good Thing that neither Bill Clinton nor Bush the Younger can run for the office again in 2008.
I think a big part of the problem is that there is a provence of France called "Brittany."
"Britney" was a popular-ish baby name for girls in the late 80s and early 90s, but unless you are either in your late teens - early 20s, or have a child at that age, you are probably a lot more used to seeing the spelling of the location, rather than the name.
To make matters worse, that's also about the time that fucked-up alternate spellings of names started to become popular, so among all the "Meggan but spelled with a Y" freaks roaming about, there's a good six or seven spellings of Britney floating around out there, in both two-sylable and three-sylable versions.
Remeber that she's two sylables "Brit"... "ney" and you will do fine.
Better yet, forget it. Forget she even exists.
She hasn't been interesting since she stopped wearing those Catholic school uniforms... and even then she was only interesting in a "hey look Ethel, they're putting jailbait skanks on the TV now" kind of way, which stopped being shocking right about when t.A.T.u had their first MTV hit.
The limit of two terms for a US President goes all the way back to George Washington. A lot of our founding ideas were a reaction to what we perceived as the fundamental unfairness of the monarchy, so we took steps to rigidly limit the power of our executive. An 8-year maximum term was one of those steps.
FDR broke it by serving part of a thrid term before his death, and there were a lot of people who wanted to get a third term out of Reagan... but traditionally, it's not an option.
Even if we've got a "really great president" (which seems increasingly unlikely these days, given the candidates put up by both major parties over the last 20 years), it's two terms and out, and, generally speaking, we like it that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Most operations you'll do on your desktop are integer-based
Perhaps, but most operations where speed actually matters are going to be almost completely fp-based.
Who cares if it's faster at the things that computers are already blindingly fast at doing anyway? I want the computer which is better at the heavy lifting. I suspect most people do.
This is probably a big part of why the new X-Box is going with PPC: Better fp performance.
Apple is gradually dumping the PPC because of their disappointment with IBM, Motorola, and Freescale, not the CPU architecture itself.
Can anything to do with Captain Jack ever be called "subtle"?
:P
It's too bad they wrote him out, but with David Tennant taking over as the new Doctor, I guess they decided that one young, gay-looking male lead was enough.
That said... The appearance of Jack was a bold move. In this world full of intollerance and bigotry, kudos to the producers of that venerable institution of a show for their brave choice of trusting their audience to accept an American character as Doctor Who companion.
Nah. Just a coincidence!
(What a great season, by the way.)
Trivia: If you listen carefully to the background chatter in episode 2 when the aliens are gathered in the obvservation lounge, you'll hear what was probably the most subtle of the "bad wolf" references. By the time they got to episode 4, I was already obsessing about it.
perhaps the odd app here and there will be incompatible, but at the same time, there does exist a very wide range of unique PPC apps currently that likely will never make their way to Intel.
I'll even put on my Carnac hat and break it down for you:
1. There will probably be a native WINE port for OS X within months of the first Mac-on-Intel release which will not run on the G5. This will allow the running of various Windows apps without rebooting or even leaving the OS X desktop. Geeks will love the fact that damn near all Windows and Linux software will in CPU-native mode within OS X, but old-school Mac heads probably won't care much.
2. It has already been announced that the Intel Macs will never be capable of running "Classic" applications. Fans of old Mac programs like Quark will be all a-tizzy about squeezing maximum life out of the remaining G5 systems, but nobody else will care.
Pretty much everything else is likely to work just fine on either platform.
I think the grandparent post is referring to large-budget movies of an apocalyptic nature, which always seem to center around the US.
That's because Hollywood (a city in the US) spends more on their movies than anybody else. Up until the rise of cheap CGI, nobody else could afford to do a big-budget apocalypse. Maybe India or Hong Kong, but those countries have been making movies with vastly different themes. Global threats to all human life seem to be a largely American entertainment theme lately.
Anyway, the post we are discussing was clearly implying that American audiences were entirely to provincial and xenophobic to enjoy movies with foreign characters and settings, and that's clearly a load of crap.
While films such as "The Passion of the Christ" and "Titanic" may not have Americans filling all the lead roles, any non-American can see that they are primarily aimed at the US market.
"Titanic" is the #2 movie of all time in Japan, and took in vast sums all over Europe and Asia. It was huge in the US, but it was huge everywhere else, too.
The extremely Roman Catholic "The Passion of the Christ" was vastly more popular in South American countries than in the US. Here it was a big art-house hit, but it was the global audience that made it the #9 all-time top grossing film that it is.
If they were "clearly aimed at the US market", then they missed the mark by a rather wide margin, as both films relied on international popularity to make their money.
Americans can't relate to things that happen to people who aren't American in countries that aren't the US.
Very true. This is why "Casablanca" did so poorly, and why nobody goes to James Bond movies in the US. Or Harry Potter movies.
Also, "Titanic" might not have lost so much money if Rose was American. Too bad, that film looked like it had a chance to make a few bucks.
I could go on all day rattling off failures like "Lawrence of Arabia", "Doctor Zhivago", and "The Passion of the Christ." If only they had American main characters, they might have made money in US theaters.
Has anyone else noticed that the Ebon Hawk has no bathroom?
If there's an airlock, why would you need one?
Katz left /. years ago.
It was shortly after the dust-up which resulted when he tried to publish that book containing Slashdot posts from other people.
By that point, most Slashbots had already gotten over the awe and wonder of having a "legitimate" journalist writing columns for Slashdot, and whatever credibility he had within geek culture had pretty much evaporated.
He appears to have given up on trying to fit in with geek counterculture (I wonder if he finally realized that there never was any such thing) and he's been writing about dogs for the last five years or so.
We need a "John Dvorak" category on Slashdot, so all "stories" related to his latest rants can be filtered out.
IIRC iTunes predates the first iPod.
Also, iTunes was based on SoundJam, which Apple purchased. That goes back a couple years more.
There is no case here.
(IANAL... and glad of it.)
Is that the fault you find in this? That some people are idealistic and would like to live in a world without assholes?
In a world without assholes, everybody would be full of shit.
Sorry. So sorry. The pun was just too easy to ignore.
"Hunting yard trash" is never fun to begin with.
This is one thing that City of Heroes definately got right. At the start of the game, you are a superhero with a couple of cool powers. You go on missions. You fight multiple bad guys at once.
You actually have fun.
In the old EQ game, you spend four levels jabbing garter snakes and beetles with a crappy weapon. Kind of a nostalgic feeling for old-school MUD players, but generally very boring.
I guess not, 'cause Animal House was the Office Space of my generation -- everybody thought it rocked, and we all knew the lines.
You spelled "Caddy Shack" wrong.
"Animal House" and "Stripes" were both funny movies, but "Caddy Shack" was THE comedy of the generation.
although between M$ Office and Open Office, I find myself wondering why they're even bothering...
Because MS Office is expensive and OpenOffice for OS X is crappy?
Business support != home user support.
You are correct that Dell is reknown for excellent support of business customers, however they are also infamous for lousy support of their home PC's.
The thing about the Matrix is, you can point at so many obvious influences which a crazy old lady in Salt Lake City is unlikely to be at all familiar with.
1. Gnosticism and Gnostic Christianity
2. "Wire Fu" movies
3. Japanese anime ("Ghost in the Shell, in particular")
4. Comic books.
5. Older "alternate reality" sci-fi. (For example... There was an episode of Doctor Who in the 1970s in which The Doctor battled The Master in a virtual computer-generated world, also known as "The Matrix", in which laws of physics could be slightly broken.)
Now, you gotta ask, who is more likely to craft a movie around these ultra-geeky elements? A Hollywood weirdo and his transgendered brother, or a lone woman in Utah?
By the way: The Matrix sequels sucked, but the Amimatrix was pretty good, and "Bound" was the bomb, yo!
when you are leaving 1.2 Million on the table.
That should read 12 Million. My bad.
What can I say, I majored in the humanities.
When you buy a movie or lottery ticket, what did you really buy?
Admission to a theater for an hour and a half, or a really bad wager.
(Prepare for tangent: a rant about lotteries...)
Lotteries used to be called "the numbers racket", and we put people in jail for running them. Now state governments all over the country are using them for revenue streams, but you are a total sucker if you play.
Think about it for a minute... Governments who run lotteries pay out at a rate per dollar collected which would be completely illegal if a casino ran them. Then they collect taxes on the winnings meaning they keep even more of the money.
It's nothing more than a tax on people who can't do math. If you have a friend that plays the lottery every day for a dollar a day, suggest this:
Take all of the $365 you will spend on the lottery this year. Now, go to a casino which has a roulette wheel, and put it all on "00"
No matter what happens, let it ride for four spins.
Your odds of hitting 00 four times in a row are very tiny indeed, but if you do it, you will have nearly 400 Million Dollars!!! That's way better than any "PowerBall" game ever will be... and think of the thrill of that final spin, when you are leaving 1.2 Million on the table.
Or, if you prefer, take this bit of advice from National Lampoon's European Vacation:
"Why don't you give me half the money you were going to bet? Then we'll go out to the parking lot, I'll kick you in the nuts, and we'll call it a day!"
Which is exactly why this deal will never ever happen.
Dell would get a new "prestige" line of computers, which they could sell at a high margin. It's not news that they would like this.
Apple would lose control of their retail prices, lose some control of the hardware choices, introduce a middle-man to make profits they could have for themselves, and gain... what, exactly? Both Dells and Apples are available for on-line purchase. Is there really anybody out there who would be more likely to buy a Mac if it had a "Dell" stamp on the front?
"Let's see... I could buy a Mac from Apple, complete with the free year of AppleCare coverage which means I can storm in to any Apple Store in America and demand that they fix it whenever the slightest thing goes wrong, or I can buy a nearly-identical Mac from Dell for about the same price, and rely on outsourced phone support for any problems I have. Gosh, I think I'd rather take it up the tailpipe! Dude, I'm getting a Dell!!!"
That's because Dell uses cheap components that wear out after a year or two of use, while Apple (traditionally) has built their computers to last.
Your information is a bit out of date.
Cheap commodity PC parts are a lot more reliable these days than they used to be, and Dell has gotten better about part selection over the years.
At the same time, Apple has been using cheaper and cheaper parts in their low-end products, specifically the iBook, eMac, and mini.
So the two have converged quite a bit in terms of hardware reliability. Dells are every bit as good as Apples in terms of build quality.
The only place where Apple wins is support. Take your broken-under-warranty iBook to a local Apple Store, and the guy at the "Genius Bar" with either fix it on the spot or express ship it to their repair shop, to be sent back either directly to you or to the store (your choice.) If you Dell breaks under warranty, enjoy your phone call with some guy from India who's calling himself "Mike" and doing a relatively good job at hiding his accent and chatting about baseball, but is utterly unable to help you resolve your problem in a timely manner.
"Chrysler: "We'd love to sell Mercedes".
Mercedes: "We agree."
Mercedes, a division of Daimlier-Chrysler
Sales are up.
And quality is way, way down.
Mercedes used to mean "this car will still be running perfectly long after you're dead of old age."
Now you much are better off buying a Toyota or Nissan. The Japanese cars are nicer to drive, too.
If Dell selling Macs is at all analogous to Chrysler selling Mercedes, then I hope it never happens.
There would be plenty of nuisance tech calls until the Dell user base got a little more Mac savvy.
All they need is a FAQ to print up and include in each box. Something like this should do it...
Top five "switcher" questions answered:
1. Where is my right mouse button???
A: On the right side of your old USB mouse. Plug it in and use it.
2. No, seriously. My old mouse was PS/2, and a piece of crap anyway. Where's the right button on this shiny new one that came with the Mac?
A: If you insist on using their mouse, then either holding it down for a second or holding the "Ctrl" key down while clicking will do the same thing as a right-click... but honestly, for most programs you will not find yourself needing to right-click. All the menus you need are permanently mounted at the top of the screen, in a very predictable order.
3. How do I upgrade the hardware?
A: The same way you used to upgrade your PC hardware. Duh.
4. Yeah, but what if I want a faster CPU?
A: Macs hold their value well enough that you can sell your current Mac and buy the latest-and-greatest for less than a CPU upgrade of a similar increment in the PC world costs... but if you really insist on making your old box "1337", there are several vendors of CPU upgrades for the Mac, and it's likely to get even easier after the Intel switch.
5. How come there's no software available for it?
A: There is, just not at Best Buy. Go online or use mail order.
That's not really irony, Alanis, but it is amusing.
In spite of the fact that I believe we would have been much better off with a third term of Reagan, senility and all, than the single term of Bush the Elder we ended up with, I maintain that the limit was (and is) a darn good idea.
I think most Americans, regardless of their political views, would agree that it is a Good Thing that neither Bill Clinton nor Bush the Younger can run for the office again in 2008.
I think a big part of the problem is that there is a provence of France called "Brittany."
... "ney" and you will do fine.
"Britney" was a popular-ish baby name for girls in the late 80s and early 90s, but unless you are either in your late teens - early 20s, or have a child at that age, you are probably a lot more used to seeing the spelling of the location, rather than the name.
To make matters worse, that's also about the time that fucked-up alternate spellings of names started to become popular, so among all the "Meggan but spelled with a Y" freaks roaming about, there's a good six or seven spellings of Britney floating around out there, in both two-sylable and three-sylable versions.
Remeber that she's two sylables "Brit"
Better yet, forget it. Forget she even exists.
She hasn't been interesting since she stopped wearing those Catholic school uniforms... and even then she was only interesting in a "hey look Ethel, they're putting jailbait skanks on the TV now" kind of way, which stopped being shocking right about when t.A.T.u had their first MTV hit.
The limit of two terms for a US President goes all the way back to George Washington. A lot of our founding ideas were a reaction to what we perceived as the fundamental unfairness of the monarchy, so we took steps to rigidly limit the power of our executive. An 8-year maximum term was one of those steps.
FDR broke it by serving part of a thrid term before his death, and there were a lot of people who wanted to get a third term out of Reagan... but traditionally, it's not an option.
Even if we've got a "really great president" (which seems increasingly unlikely these days, given the candidates put up by both major parties over the last 20 years), it's two terms and out, and, generally speaking, we like it that way.