There's one that involves an optical pen that works with specially marked paper printed with a very fine pattern that it uses to get fine enough resolution for handwriting. The pen stores a number of notes and lets you upload them to your computer or transfer them to your PDA.
That solution works better because the paper (the consumable part) is just ordinary paper printed with the micro-pattern. I suspect that you could in principle print it on a color printer.
The trick is to make the notes compatible with the search and data management tools you already have. I don't see a new stickies program, however cool, being better than something that you could sync to your PDA/Phone/what have you.
Just what are the rest of you putting up with that I haven't while I waited to do better?
Well, that's the other side, isn't it? Time is money. A loaded Mac Pro in a year, or a Mac mini now? Well, the mortgage isn't getting paid by my sitting on my thumbs and not working... so a mini it is. A mini plus a Wintendo to install and test software on, PLUS a KVM and monitor, still cost me less than an iMac... let alone a Mac Pro.
Should I be ashamed to have set my professional priorities high enough to afford quality tools.
No, but do you not think there might be a bigger market for Macs if people who are less willing (or able) to make a Mac Pro a top priority get to play too?
I remember, as a kid, getting kicked out of a store for "stealing the air conditioning". I guess I was.
I wouldn't do this, like I won't "pirate" music or use shareware without paying, but pretty soon this is going to move from these elevated realms of petty crime to the equivalent of hanging out in a hotel lobby on a hot day, using a restroom at a store you're not shopping at, or listening to a concert from the parking lot. Eventually wifi will be free-as-in-toilet-paper too.
The problem isn't threads, it's threading models that depend on shared state to communicate between threads. If you explicitly pass data between threads using a message paradigm you get most of the performance advantages of threads with the ease of programming in independent processes. Design the code around a model like message passing (as in the Amiga Exec, which was really a threaded share-everything environment, or QNX) or a database-style access method (which is what I've been doing in speedtables) and you can implement it using threads or processes, SMP or not, single-host or networked, depending on the requirements.
You don't necessarily need fine-grained locking to do this, depending on the design.
Sometimes shared state is desirable, just as sometimes gotos are desirable, but only in the context of a structured framework (structured programming, message-based intertask communication) where they're the exception rather than the rule.
Bytes when a measure of throughput are also measured in 10^n units.
Bits or words, when used as a unit of storage (and yes that does happen, occasionally) tend to be measured in 2^n units.
Why? Because it's useful to measure storage that way, because it naturally tends to come in 2^n chunks or multiples of 2^n chunks, for the reasons described above, while transfer rates rarely such natural division by powers of two.
We have an SI standard for this nomenclature now. No matter what idiot lawayers want to argue they can't deny the fact that GB is defined for base-10 usage and GiB is base-2.
Given that even people who are advocating this obscure terminology can't get it right (it's IEC, not SI, that defined this standard, and if you want to use SI units, you should be calling them "Octets" not "Bytes"), and that virtually nobody (not even the drive manufacturers) actually uses it outside legalese and fine print, I think you are making unreasonable assumptions and unreasonable demands.
drive manufacturers list capacities in ISO units instead of the traditional binary method?
The fact that binary is traditional for storage is a pretty good argument for NOT assuming that everyone knows it. Particularly when operating systems continue to report capacity that way for good practical reasons.
"Depending on the filesystem used on this drive, and the block size specified when formatting, actual capacity of this drive may be affected."
When you bought drives in unformatted capacity (which you only do for floppies any more) they did in fact have language like that in their fine print. These days the block size on a given drive is fixed so formatted capacity is used.
You're comparing a theoretical maximum performance measurement (one that is also used by disk manufacturers without raising any eyebrows there either) with the total measurable and usable capacity of an actual object that can hold an actual number of blocks of data.
A hard drive is a physical object storing data in chunks that are sized in power-of-two units. A hard drive contains multiples of 512, 1024, or 2048 byte blocks, each containing 8 bits per byte, and the data read from the drive is frequently copied block-for-block to physical RAM that is sized in 2^10, 2^20, and 2^30 byte units. Operating systems use these same units when reporting available disk space. These are natural sizes for talking about storage, and there is a reasonable expectation that you can use all of that storage.
The speed of a network is a theoretical measure of performance in ideal conditions, based on the transmission of data in variable sized chunks up to a maximum that depends on the characteristics of the hardware and protocols, typically 1500 bytes or less per packet. Packets are normally processed after being received... decompressed, decrypted, and unpacked... and so the number of bits or bytes transmitted per second is only loosely related to the size of the data finally received by the user. In addition the rated speed of a network is further reduced by per-packet overhead and by protocol inefficiencies such as collisions in the original 10 Mbit/s ethernet. There is no standardized fixed-size "quantum" that network bandwidth chunks into, and there's no expectation that you can actually fill up all 100 million bits every second outside a lab.
What make you think things are that dramaticly different now.
In the 1990s Mac OS sucked, and Apple had a pretty broad variety of systems available, so there wasn't any real untapped demand for Mac OS on hardware that Apple wasn't producing. Now, Apple could solve the latter by adding a few models to their product line, but even after the success of the Mini they seem incredibly reluctant to do so.
The other potential difference is that in the '90s they had to appeal to clone makers, so they couldn't charge enough for the transportable version of the OS to make back the lost hardware sales. Now, they don't need to worry about that, so they can charge $500 for a legit unlocked OS X and find buyers.
It must be nice having an unlimited toy budget, and if I had one I'd be happy dropping a few grand on a Mac Pro, but look at the Macs the rest of us have to put up with before telling us how cool your tower is.
Why is that the solution? What is apple using for a DHCP client?
It's some kind of home grown network administration thing, you can tell by the use of "ipconfig" instead of "ifconfig" (DEC did the same thing, but called it lanconfig). I don't know if you can just turn off the DHCP part of it... I've had mixed luck doing things like that. Trying to replace their funky automounter with amd turned out to be a bad idea, for example.
If it was a Thinkpad I'd jump at it. I've had mixed luck with Compaq when I was doing network administration: some were very very good but too many turned out to be lemons.
Looking at the specs that one looks pretty nice, though. Does the Lightscribe work under OSX86?
Maybe desktops are different from laptops but when I was looking into laptops, the Macs were generally of similar or better specs than the Vista laptops at the same price point.
When I was making the decision to go with the Macbook ($1200) or Macbook Pro ($2000) I was really tempted by one of the low end Thinkpads.
For $900, it had the exact same specs as the Macbook... in fact it had the same damn chipset, CPU, and GPU. For $200 more (still less than the Macbook) I could get it with a real nVidia GPU instead of the crap Intel it shipped with. For $1100 I'd have gotten a laptop that had every bit of hardware I actually wanted from my Macbook Pro, PLUS a far better keyboard, a two-button touchpad, a trackpoint controller, a hard drive on a sled, an optical drive that could be swapped out and upgraded, and for a little more an actual docking station. Things I can't get in my Macbook Pro at any price.
The only way you get Wintel hardware to cost as much as Mac hardware is if you discount every feature or option that the Mac is missing as worth $0, but make every feature or option that the Mac has a hard requirement.
Yes, but it's also shinning more light Apple's infuriating decision not to offer a reasonable quad-core desktop that doesn't cost more than my car.
I'd be happy if they just had a dual-core or even single-core desktop that didn't suck.
That means: no built in monitor, a decent hard drive, a box you can open without a putty knife, and an nVidia GPU. Preferably with a socketed CPU and a swappable video card, but I'll even compromise there.
I've got one of the early overheating battery-warping Macbook Pros, with a keyboard that aggravates my RSI, and a built-in camera I can't do anything useful with because I can't turn it around (no, videoconferencing has abut as much appeal to me as reaming my sinuses out with a dremel tool). When I had a problem with my hard disk, I called Apple, and they said that I could ship them the computer and be without it for at least a week, or wait a week and go to a "genius bar" to get it replaced. No, they couldn't just ship me a replacement drive, because I couldn't replace it without violating my warranty.
I'll take a computer I can open up and replace the hard drive in any day. I'd have split the difference between the cheap Thinkpad I actually wanted and the Macbook Pro I had to get instead with Apple, if they'd sold a copy of OS X that would run on that Thinkpad. And they'd make better margins selling a copy of OS X for $519 and pocketing $500 of it instead of selling a laptop for $2000 and pocketing $500 of it.
CIISC and RISC describe the architecture. Either can be implemented directly, using horizontal or vertical microcode, or via a translator. RISC is similar to vertical microcode, where each micro-instruction controls part of the core, and VLIW is similar to horizontal microcode, where each micro-instruction controls a number of components at once. Whether you call them "microcode" or "RISC/VLIW" is almost more a matter of marketing at this level, like when Intel started talking about the 486 having a "RISC core". Just don't try and blend them or you're setting yourself up for an EPIC fail.
The way they're describing it, the RISC instruction set is implemented using horizontal microcode that they're calling "VLIW" because it's sexier right now.
Not to mention that Philipp Slusallek was getting 15 FPS in 2005, with an FPGA that had maybe 1% the gates of a modern GPU, and ran at 1/8th the clock rate. It might not have been beating the best conventional raytracers in 2005, but it was doing them with a chip that had the clock rate and gate count of a processor from 1995.
Slashdot Mirror
There's one that involves an optical pen that works with specially marked paper printed with a very fine pattern that it uses to get fine enough resolution for handwriting. The pen stores a number of notes and lets you upload them to your computer or transfer them to your PDA.
That solution works better because the paper (the consumable part) is just ordinary paper printed with the micro-pattern. I suspect that you could in principle print it on a color printer.
The trick is to make the notes compatible with the search and data management tools you already have. I don't see a new stickies program, however cool, being better than something that you could sync to your PDA/Phone/what have you.
Just what are the rest of you putting up with that I haven't while I waited to do better?
Well, that's the other side, isn't it? Time is money. A loaded Mac Pro in a year, or a Mac mini now? Well, the mortgage isn't getting paid by my sitting on my thumbs and not working... so a mini it is. A mini plus a Wintendo to install and test software on, PLUS a KVM and monitor, still cost me less than an iMac... let alone a Mac Pro.
Should I be ashamed to have set my professional priorities high enough to afford quality tools.
No, but do you not think there might be a bigger market for Macs if people who are less willing (or able) to make a Mac Pro a top priority get to play too?
I remember, as a kid, getting kicked out of a store for "stealing the air conditioning". I guess I was.
I wouldn't do this, like I won't "pirate" music or use shareware without paying, but pretty soon this is going to move from these elevated realms of petty crime to the equivalent of hanging out in a hotel lobby on a hot day, using a restroom at a store you're not shopping at, or listening to a concert from the parking lot. Eventually wifi will be free-as-in-toilet-paper too.
The problem isn't threads, it's threading models that depend on shared state to communicate between threads. If you explicitly pass data between threads using a message paradigm you get most of the performance advantages of threads with the ease of programming in independent processes. Design the code around a model like message passing (as in the Amiga Exec, which was really a threaded share-everything environment, or QNX) or a database-style access method (which is what I've been doing in speedtables) and you can implement it using threads or processes, SMP or not, single-host or networked, depending on the requirements.
You don't necessarily need fine-grained locking to do this, depending on the design.
Sometimes shared state is desirable, just as sometimes gotos are desirable, but only in the context of a structured framework (structured programming, message-based intertask communication) where they're the exception rather than the rule.
Bytes when a measure of throughput are also measured in 10^n units.
Bits or words, when used as a unit of storage (and yes that does happen, occasionally) tend to be measured in 2^n units.
Why? Because it's useful to measure storage that way, because it naturally tends to come in 2^n chunks or multiples of 2^n chunks, for the reasons described above, while transfer rates rarely such natural division by powers of two.
Ah, gotcha. I thought you were talking about a hackintosh.
We have an SI standard for this nomenclature now. No matter what idiot lawayers want to argue they can't deny the fact that GB is defined for base-10 usage and GiB is base-2.
Given that even people who are advocating this obscure terminology can't get it right (it's IEC, not SI, that defined this standard, and if you want to use SI units, you should be calling them "Octets" not "Bytes"), and that virtually nobody (not even the drive manufacturers) actually uses it outside legalese and fine print, I think you are making unreasonable assumptions and unreasonable demands.
drive manufacturers list capacities in ISO units instead of the traditional binary method?
The fact that binary is traditional for storage is a pretty good argument for NOT assuming that everyone knows it. Particularly when operating systems continue to report capacity that way for good practical reasons.
"Depending on the filesystem used on this drive, and the block size specified when formatting, actual capacity of this drive may be affected."
When you bought drives in unformatted capacity (which you only do for floppies any more) they did in fact have language like that in their fine print. These days the block size on a given drive is fixed so formatted capacity is used.
You're comparing a theoretical maximum performance measurement (one that is also used by disk manufacturers without raising any eyebrows there either) with the total measurable and usable capacity of an actual object that can hold an actual number of blocks of data.
A hard drive is a physical object storing data in chunks that are sized in power-of-two units. A hard drive contains multiples of 512, 1024, or 2048 byte blocks, each containing 8 bits per byte, and the data read from the drive is frequently copied block-for-block to physical RAM that is sized in 2^10, 2^20, and 2^30 byte units. Operating systems use these same units when reporting available disk space. These are natural sizes for talking about storage, and there is a reasonable expectation that you can use all of that storage.
The speed of a network is a theoretical measure of performance in ideal conditions, based on the transmission of data in variable sized chunks up to a maximum that depends on the characteristics of the hardware and protocols, typically 1500 bytes or less per packet. Packets are normally processed after being received... decompressed, decrypted, and unpacked... and so the number of bits or bytes transmitted per second is only loosely related to the size of the data finally received by the user. In addition the rated speed of a network is further reduced by per-packet overhead and by protocol inefficiencies such as collisions in the original 10 Mbit/s ethernet. There is no standardized fixed-size "quantum" that network bandwidth chunks into, and there's no expectation that you can actually fill up all 100 million bits every second outside a lab.
They're already widely used down here on Earth.
What make you think things are that dramaticly different now.
In the 1990s Mac OS sucked, and Apple had a pretty broad variety of systems available, so there wasn't any real untapped demand for Mac OS on hardware that Apple wasn't producing. Now, Apple could solve the latter by adding a few models to their product line, but even after the success of the Mini they seem incredibly reluctant to do so.
The other potential difference is that in the '90s they had to appeal to clone makers, so they couldn't charge enough for the transportable version of the OS to make back the lost hardware sales. Now, they don't need to worry about that, so they can charge $500 for a legit unlocked OS X and find buyers.
It must be nice having an unlimited toy budget, and if I had one I'd be happy dropping a few grand on a Mac Pro, but look at the Macs the rest of us have to put up with before telling us how cool your tower is.
Ubuntu?
If it's not running OS X why did you even bring it up?
Why is that the solution? What is apple using for a DHCP client?
It's some kind of home grown network administration thing, you can tell by the use of "ipconfig" instead of "ifconfig" (DEC did the same thing, but called it lanconfig). I don't know if you can just turn off the DHCP part of it... I've had mixed luck doing things like that. Trying to replace their funky automounter with amd turned out to be a bad idea, for example.
If it was a Thinkpad I'd jump at it. I've had mixed luck with Compaq when I was doing network administration: some were very very good but too many turned out to be lemons.
Looking at the specs that one looks pretty nice, though. Does the Lightscribe work under OSX86?
(ugly case? I much prefer the matte black)
The solution is to run a script like this: If you prefer, start with MoreSCF and get a less hacky solution that's location-aware and all.
Maybe desktops are different from laptops but when I was looking into laptops, the Macs were generally of similar or better specs than the Vista laptops at the same price point.
When I was making the decision to go with the Macbook ($1200) or Macbook Pro ($2000) I was really tempted by one of the low end Thinkpads.
For $900, it had the exact same specs as the Macbook... in fact it had the same damn chipset, CPU, and GPU. For $200 more (still less than the Macbook) I could get it with a real nVidia GPU instead of the crap Intel it shipped with. For $1100 I'd have gotten a laptop that had every bit of hardware I actually wanted from my Macbook Pro, PLUS a far better keyboard, a two-button touchpad, a trackpoint controller, a hard drive on a sled, an optical drive that could be swapped out and upgraded, and for a little more an actual docking station. Things I can't get in my Macbook Pro at any price.
The only way you get Wintel hardware to cost as much as Mac hardware is if you discount every feature or option that the Mac is missing as worth $0, but make every feature or option that the Mac has a hard requirement.
Yes, but it's also shinning more light Apple's infuriating decision not to offer a reasonable quad-core desktop that doesn't cost more than my car.
I'd be happy if they just had a dual-core or even single-core desktop that didn't suck.
That means: no built in monitor, a decent hard drive, a box you can open without a putty knife, and an nVidia GPU. Preferably with a socketed CPU and a swappable video card, but I'll even compromise there.
I've got one of the early overheating battery-warping Macbook Pros, with a keyboard that aggravates my RSI, and a built-in camera I can't do anything useful with because I can't turn it around (no, videoconferencing has abut as much appeal to me as reaming my sinuses out with a dremel tool). When I had a problem with my hard disk, I called Apple, and they said that I could ship them the computer and be without it for at least a week, or wait a week and go to a "genius bar" to get it replaced. No, they couldn't just ship me a replacement drive, because I couldn't replace it without violating my warranty.
I'll take a computer I can open up and replace the hard drive in any day. I'd have split the difference between the cheap Thinkpad I actually wanted and the Macbook Pro I had to get instead with Apple, if they'd sold a copy of OS X that would run on that Thinkpad. And they'd make better margins selling a copy of OS X for $519 and pocketing $500 of it instead of selling a laptop for $2000 and pocketing $500 of it.
If Apple allows any piece of junk to run OS X then they've lost their business model.
So they won't do that, or they'll change their business model.
Maybe sell "transportable" OSX for $519 instead of $119.
Maybe quit restricting their hardware to boutique toys, to kill the potential market for things like this.
They've got more options than just doing the same thing when it quits working.
The real copy protection, such as it is, is EFI and some obfuscation.
http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/tpmdrmmyth/
CIISC and RISC describe the architecture. Either can be implemented directly, using horizontal or vertical microcode, or via a translator. RISC is similar to vertical microcode, where each micro-instruction controls part of the core, and VLIW is similar to horizontal microcode, where each micro-instruction controls a number of components at once. Whether you call them "microcode" or "RISC/VLIW" is almost more a matter of marketing at this level, like when Intel started talking about the 486 having a "RISC core". Just don't try and blend them or you're setting yourself up for an EPIC fail.
The way they're describing it, the RISC instruction set is implemented using horizontal microcode that they're calling "VLIW" because it's sexier right now.
Certainly not so long as David Kirk is in charge.
Kirk vs Slusallek
Or have they stopped removing features and options that are actually necessary yet?
Not to mention that Philipp Slusallek was getting 15 FPS in 2005, with an FPGA that had maybe 1% the gates of a modern GPU, and ran at 1/8th the clock rate. It might not have been beating the best conventional raytracers in 2005, but it was doing them with a chip that had the clock rate and gate count of a processor from 1995.