One of the things that has bitten Microsoft again and again is this common tendency among multiple groups to embed powerful tools in document handling applications. ActiveX in Internet Explorer and the MS HTML control, the myriad scripting tools in Microsoft Office, and of course the very design of.NET is based on the idea that you can "trust" certain documents and allow them to run effectively native code components.
This is fundamentally different from the way just about everyone else does things, but Microsoft has so long argued that the performance impact of a secure sandbox is unacceptable that it would be inconceivable for them to back down on this design philosophy. If they refused to back out of the ActiveX/HTML IE/Desktop integration in the face of having the company broken up, I can't imagine what wouldpossibly lead them to see the light everywhere else.
Not that I'm going to argue whether the GPL is or isn't nefarious... there's ample debates on that you can browse if you enjoy the firewarks... but I don't think "you have to make the source available" is all that "nefarious".
But you see this all the time. People shipping GPLed software and not providing the source to their version, even when they have modified it. I'm not talking about Sveasoft here, I'm talking about little guys who have no idea they're doing anything wrong because they didn't read or didn't understand the GPL. Or even distributing their own software as GPL while telling people they don't have to comply with the GPL, they're just using it because it's there.
I don't think you should use the GPL for your software if you don't actually mean everything in it to apply. That weakens the GPL and set your users up for a fall.
The only upgrade I've seen that really made any difference in productivity is going dual monitors.
Or REALLY big ones.
My boss just upgraded to a 30" monitor. I've got the old 23" plus my laptop's 17", and damn... that extra 7" seems like a LOT more when you're actually sitting in front of it.
"Corporate/professional use just doesn't get anything more out of Vista than XP"
You misspelled "Windows 2000", and most of the differences even between XP and NT4 are only of interest to the system administrator.
For the end user?
NT4 - Runs all office applications.
Upgrade to Windows 2000 - Runs all office applications and now USB thumb drives work without calling the system administrator.
Upgrade to Windows XP - Runs all office applications and now Bluetooth works without calling the system administrator.
That's pretty much about it, unless you're a gamer and want to upgrade from a Sempron to an Athlon X2 without reinstalling Windows to get the multiprocessor HAL.
I think the article's point was that once you get more and more transistors on there it becomes very difficult to design things to not end up overheating all the time and not use up insane amounts of power, not to mention just becoming extremely complex like x86 cores today.
I wasn't talking so much about the article as a whole, but the insane levels of hyperbole in the particular paragraph I quoted. "We're capable of putting more transistors on a chip than we can think of things to do with". That's not even vaguely true.
More transistors == more power, all else being equal, because it's all those junctions flipping state so quickly that uses the power.
As for the insanity if Intel's processors... that seems to be a perversion particular to Intel. In the past three decades that I've been following the industry, Intel has only managed to produce *one* sane CPU design, the i960, and they promptly caponised it by removing the MMU and relegating it to embedded controls lest it outcompete their cash cow.
The rest... from the 4004 through the 8080, the 8086 and its many descendants, iApx432, i860, and Itanium... have been consistently outperformed by chips with smaller transistor budgets built by companies with far fewer resources. They only occasionally broke past the midrange of the RISC chips, and were usually trailing back with the anemic Sparc. Where they have excelled has been marketing and in the breadth of their support... both hardware and business. IBM went with the 8088 because they could get them in quantity and they could get good cheap support chips for them: if you went with Motorola or Zilog or Western Digital or National Semiconductor you pretty much had to go back to Intel to build the rest of your computer anyway.
Except, of course, that ray tracing is not easily parallelizable as you need a significant amount of data to each of those postage stamp size pieces
The mesh is common to all the processors, and not that big, it can be broadcast. Textures are the big chunk, but most pieces will only need high resolution versions of the textures in their direct view... unless a processor is looking at an optically interesting surface (for reflections or refractions) it can get by with mesh-resolution approximations to the textures outside its part of the scene.
This requires new technology, yes. You need mesh caches shared among not-too-many processors, and techniques to broadcast the mesh to the mesh cache efficiently, and a front-end to apportion the space to the processors and parcel out textures, maybe even go to a finer subdivision for "interesting" areas. But raytracing is practically the poster boy for "embarassingly parallelizable" applications.
Adding cache and cores is also, to some degree, the solution when you are out of ideas.
Not to that great a degree, and we've really only scraped the surface with what we'll be doing with multi-core. DEC laid down a long term plan for the alpha in the early '90s and multi-core was planned for the early '00s right from the start. Compaqtion and having Intel pull a fast one on HP wasn't in their plans, but 4 or 8 cores and enough cache to keep them fed is just the next step.
Another thing we're going to see, particularly for laptops, is super-integrated chipsets. Freescale's e600 would have been the next step for Apple if they'd been faster getting it to market (or if Apple had been less reluctant to break the G4 bus compatibility and they'd gotten started sooner), and it seems to me that adding the GPU in as well makes a lot of sense. Expect to see Intel CPUs with GMAxxx (or their descendants) on-chip, and AMD cutting deals with nVidia and ATI.
There aren't many businesses where manufacturing technology exceeds design technology. Throughout human history we've been able to dream up things we can't yet build, like spaceships, skyscrapers, jet packs, underwater breathing apparatus, or portable computers. But in the semiconductor business the situation is reversed: chip makers can build bigger and more complicated chips than they can design. Manufacturing prowess exceeds design capability. We can fabricate more transistors than we know what to do with.
Not only can I dream up things to do with four million transistors, but there's always plenty of EASY and productive uses for more transistors. More cache, to begin with... when you can still buy chips today with only half a meg of L1 cache you know theres plenty of headroom there. Multiple cores? The aborted EV8 Alpha would have gone up to 4 regular cores per chip, and it was killed by boardroom shenanigans between Intel and HP and Compaq... not technical or business reasons.
And that's just stuff that you could build right now, without designing anything new, if you had the transistor budget. Moving on to more speculative designs... nobody's brought GPUs into the "Tron" era yet... where's the massively parallel raytracing GPUs with tens of thousands of relatively simple cores each rendering a postage-stamp size piece of the scene in photorealistic quality in realtime? There's all kinds of embarassingly parallelizable problems this kind of thing could be applied to, rendering is only the most obvious one...
"The problem is if the used game is available a week after the new game is out for a $5 discount."
If the used game is widely available a week after the new game is out, that means there's a lot of people who decided, within a week, that they weren't going to play that game again. That doesn't mean the used games are a problem, it means that game didn't have a lot of replayability, or even that it was a lousy game. If people are able to resell a newly released game after a couple of plays for (say) 50% of list, that means their risk in buying a new game that might be a lemon is cut in half.
Take the used market away, and people are going to be less likely to buy new games.
By default Parallels doesn't create a fixed size disk, it allocates disk blocks on the fly as you write to unused blocks in the virtual disk... which will completely confuse Windows fragmentation logic (pitiful as that is) and basically give you a maximally fragmented Windows file system.
Your comments make me wonder if you've ever used Garageband for more than five minutes. Format conversion is easy!
Not if you want to save non-audio tracks it isn't.
I ended up deciding that the cheapest solution for getting Garageband data out for my daughter was to upgrade her G3 iMac to a Mac mini... and leave it in Garage band. She was due for an upgrade anyway.
It's not like Macs are for gamers, especially not iMacs which, even if they game relatively well when released, are about as useful with their Radeon X1600 in a year or two as the integrate (overstated, but not by much...
Um, the GMA950 is so bad at 3d that the original Mac mini with its Radeon 9200 does as well as the Core Duo in some benchmarks, and beats the Core Solo, and the comparable iBook with the nVidia go5200 beats the Macbook in others. Yes, that's with Universal applications.
Once you have games that actually take advantage of the dual core, that second CPU isn't going to be "spare" and won't be able to take up slack for the GPU, and the difference between a real Mac and the Core Duo Mini, and this eMac will be even bigger.
More than a quarter of a century ago I inadvertently found a hole in a UNIX based bulletin board system, went in and fixed the code, called the operator to tell him what I'd done and how to fix the rest of the problems, and ended up with a series of contracts.
A few years later I wouldn't have considered it. People who'd not done much more had spent time in court and been threatened with jail. Not much later, you had people actually doing jail time for simply "knocking on doors".
What happened?
The whole "ethical intruder" meme had spread, and people had started cracking into systems and then claiming they were just "rattling doorknobs" to "help security". Of course you couldn't tell an "ethical hacker" from a crook, and the crooks could claim they were just trying to help.
It's the "ethical hackers" themselves that have made it impossible for this kind of activity to be condoned.
Computer games are enough of a distraction as it is.
I have a Wintendo for running games, and it stays at home. There's already too many games that run on my Macbook Pro as it is, but luckily I don't like most of them. The last thing I want is a wider selection of timewasters.
The high speed memory bus that makes it run so fast is greatly appreciated, though I'd rather have had a Freescale MP8641D (which would have even more memory bandwidth than the Core Duo), it seems like Freescale dropped the ball... or they just took it and went home when Apple dumped their product line in 2005.
They keyboard is just as bad as the Powerbooks, and the one-button trackpad is all but unusable even with Sidetrack to simulate 2 buttons. When I say "bad", by the way, I mean "a couple of days using it and my RSI was flaring up again". I got a tiny bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and even if my boss thinks I'm nuts for using it with a Logitech keyboard balanced on it my wrists aren't hurting any more.
They really need to get Lenovo to make a "businessman's macbook" with a Thinkpad shell and keyboard, and Apple's electronics. I don't miss Windows on my Thinkpad at all, but I sure miss that keyboard. And I prefer the Thinkpad's white LED above the screen that illuminated the whole keyboard area to the illuminated keys.
The speakers are (as they say) apalling, but it's not just the speakers. I get more distortion at the same volume level over my harman/kardon speaker system than with my Mac mini. They really need to do something about the whole audio system.
And they need to release a software or firmware upgrade to let us choose between running the fans more and running the computer hotter. I'd be happy to have the fans whooshing away most of the time if it let me actually use my laptop in my lap!
Rosetta works pretty well, but it's all-or-nothing. I've got a boatload of plugins and drivers I can't use until they get upgraded... and since some are abandonware I suspect I'm going to have to find replacements. The big one that may be a show stopper is Palm Hotsync, unless I can find some kind of bridge... I am not using iSync with my Palm, its syncing model if you have multiple computers is completely screwed up unless you use ".MAC", possibly deliberately so.
Wake from sleep is completely unreliable. I've taken to unplugging everything and waiting half a minute before closing the lid, but last night even that failed.
Parallel's Desktop is pretty well done. It's apalling that it's necessary, but I'm grateful that it's possible. Palm Desktop and Hotsync still runs under Windows, maybe I can keep synced that way.
I'm more interested in seeing whether it'll support OpenGL 3d. Given Apple's strong support for OpenGL, running apps that do support both APIs in OpenGL mode is likely to be the best option if it's available.
I was just pointing out that the article does not make any arguments as to why Parallels > Boot Camp
Parallels Desktop for Mac worked quite well. The XP VM was pretty snappy, especially after installing the Parallels tools, which made the mouse cursor seamless with the Mac desktop. Performance was very good; the XP VM ran comparable to a regular mid-range PC. Occasionally the overall system would slow down for a few moments, or the beach ball would appear. Since I had iTunes and Firefox running on the host OS, and had burned some discs at the same time, it felt like acceptable occasional lag given what else I had the machine doing.
"The XP VM [virtual machine] was snappy [...] I had iTunes and Firefox running on the host OS, and had burned some discs at the same time".
He was running Windows and Mac applications concurrently. Boot Camp doesn't do this, it's not a virtual machine environment. Sheesh.
Not only is Parallels not in the same league as boot camp, it's not even playing the same game!
The only advantage Parallels has over Boot Camp is that it can be used for more than just Windows.
If you want to boot any other OS on your Mac you don't need a hack like "Boot Camp". The only reason you need Boot Camp at all is because Windows doesn't support EFI natively. If you want to run UNIX on your Mac you have your choice of a variety of free UNIXes or Apple's native operating system, OS X.
Parallels is a completely different product than Boot Camp. You don't shut down Mac OS X to run Windows under Parallels, or hibernate it, or sleep it, Parallels isn't a boot manager, it's a virtual environment that runs Windows under Mac OS X. You double-click on the loopy infinity icon, and a little while later you've got the Windows desktop (or FreeBSD, or Linux, or whatever you want) in a window under Mac OS X. You can use both at the same time, run your Windows applications at full speed alongside your Mac apps. The only problem I've found so far is that they don't provide OpenGL or DirectX 3d access... their emulated framebuffer is 2d only.
I can see why the Hollywood film studios want tired pricing.
I know you meant tiered, but that slip is telling. DVD pricing is more like CD pricing than box-office pricing. Theatres have flexibility to sell tickets at the rate they want and they're competing with other theatres that are, largely, showing the same movies. So with string competition and fungible content the market acts much more strongly on movie prices than DVD prices, and as you say they've tended towards a flat rate for movies.
The market detests "tired" centrally controlled prices. You want a thriving industry, let the competition flow.
It's sad then that OS X needs so much horsepower to achieve the same level of usability as XP on the TX.
No amount of horsepower can give XP the usability of OS X. My first "modern" Mac was a pre-G3 Powermac 7500 with a Sonnet upgrade card using XPostFacto to run OS X 10.2 Jaguar. That was a G3/400, not even a G4, and within a week I'd quit booting up my Pentium 4 except to play games.
Since then I've upgraded my Wintendo to an Athlon X2 3800+, upgraded my Mac to a Mac Mini (first generation, G4/1.4). The Mac's no mor ethan 1/4 the speed of the Wintendo, probablyless, but I wouldn't dream of trying to use XP for anything but games.
It's not OS X that's making the Macbook Pro run hot. It's the Macbook Pro design team screwing up somewhere. It's a hardware problem (or firmware, in the system management controller) not software,
The reason you don't see articles that say "I'm probably going tobe modded down" modded down so often is because that's kind of a vaccination against the effect.
But I've seen well-written "against the grain" articles get modded down, and I've modded a few up again.
I would rather have had a Thinkpad running Mac OS X. Much better designed hardware all around.
Apple is a software company, when it comes down to it. They make their money from the hardware, yes, but people don't buy it because it's Apple hardware and wouldn't pay that much for that hardware without the Apple software on it - whether that hardware is a Mac or an iPod. Because Apple doesn't make their own hardware. It shows.
Not only isn't Apple a publisher, but if it's against antitrust for Apple to distribute entertainment media that only works with one brand of music player because publishers might start doing that, it's against antitrust for ANY software company to write software that ony runs under Windows.
Bungie, Squaresoft, Nintendo... ? Time to release Super Mario Kart for XBox...?
But Apple is the company that's been placed on a pedestal by it's fanbase and the mainstream media as an enlightened, progressive, cool, hip company, above reproach, and Apple has only played into that.
If Apple was a person "its fanbase and the mainstream media" would be up on charges for stalking.
I get regularly modded down here for pointing at problems like Apple's daft approach to security in Safari. If you want to get on Apple's case for something they can and should do something about, start there.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple and IBM made a laptop together once. They NEED TO do it again.
One of the things that has bitten Microsoft again and again is this common tendency among multiple groups to embed powerful tools in document handling applications. ActiveX in Internet Explorer and the MS HTML control, the myriad scripting tools in Microsoft Office, and of course the very design of .NET is based on the idea that you can "trust" certain documents and allow them to run effectively native code components.
This is fundamentally different from the way just about everyone else does things, but Microsoft has so long argued that the performance impact of a secure sandbox is unacceptable that it would be inconceivable for them to back down on this design philosophy. If they refused to back out of the ActiveX/HTML IE/Desktop integration in the face of having the company broken up, I can't imagine what wouldpossibly lead them to see the light everywhere else.
Not that I'm going to argue whether the GPL is or isn't nefarious... there's ample debates on that you can browse if you enjoy the firewarks... but I don't think "you have to make the source available" is all that "nefarious".
But you see this all the time. People shipping GPLed software and not providing the source to their version, even when they have modified it. I'm not talking about Sveasoft here, I'm talking about little guys who have no idea they're doing anything wrong because they didn't read or didn't understand the GPL. Or even distributing their own software as GPL while telling people they don't have to comply with the GPL, they're just using it because it's there.
I don't think you should use the GPL for your software if you don't actually mean everything in it to apply. That weakens the GPL and set your users up for a fall.
The only upgrade I've seen that really made any difference in productivity is going dual monitors.
Or REALLY big ones.
My boss just upgraded to a 30" monitor. I've got the old 23" plus my laptop's 17", and damn... that extra 7" seems like a LOT more when you're actually sitting in front of it.
"Corporate/professional use just doesn't get anything more out of Vista than XP"
You misspelled "Windows 2000", and most of the differences even between XP and NT4 are only of interest to the system administrator.
For the end user?
NT4 - Runs all office applications.
Upgrade to Windows 2000 - Runs all office applications and now USB thumb drives work without calling the system administrator.
Upgrade to Windows XP - Runs all office applications and now Bluetooth works without calling the system administrator.
That's pretty much about it, unless you're a gamer and want to upgrade from a Sempron to an Athlon X2 without reinstalling Windows to get the multiprocessor HAL.
I think the article's point was that once you get more and more transistors on there it becomes very difficult to design things to not end up overheating all the time and not use up insane amounts of power, not to mention just becoming extremely complex like x86 cores today.
I wasn't talking so much about the article as a whole, but the insane levels of hyperbole in the particular paragraph I quoted. "We're capable of putting more transistors on a chip than we can think of things to do with". That's not even vaguely true.
More transistors == more power, all else being equal, because it's all those junctions flipping state so quickly that uses the power.
As for the insanity if Intel's processors... that seems to be a perversion particular to Intel. In the past three decades that I've been following the industry, Intel has only managed to produce *one* sane CPU design, the i960, and they promptly caponised it by removing the MMU and relegating it to embedded controls lest it outcompete their cash cow.
The rest... from the 4004 through the 8080, the 8086 and its many descendants, iApx432, i860, and Itanium... have been consistently outperformed by chips with smaller transistor budgets built by companies with far fewer resources. They only occasionally broke past the midrange of the RISC chips, and were usually trailing back with the anemic Sparc. Where they have excelled has been marketing and in the breadth of their support... both hardware and business. IBM went with the 8088 because they could get them in quantity and they could get good cheap support chips for them: if you went with Motorola or Zilog or Western Digital or National Semiconductor you pretty much had to go back to Intel to build the rest of your computer anyway.
Except, of course, that ray tracing is not easily parallelizable as you need a significant amount of data to each of those postage stamp size pieces
The mesh is common to all the processors, and not that big, it can be broadcast. Textures are the big chunk, but most pieces will only need high resolution versions of the textures in their direct view... unless a processor is looking at an optically interesting surface (for reflections or refractions) it can get by with mesh-resolution approximations to the textures outside its part of the scene.
This requires new technology, yes. You need mesh caches shared among not-too-many processors, and techniques to broadcast the mesh to the mesh cache efficiently, and a front-end to apportion the space to the processors and parcel out textures, maybe even go to a finer subdivision for "interesting" areas. But raytracing is practically the poster boy for "embarassingly parallelizable" applications.
Adding cache and cores is also, to some degree, the solution when you are out of ideas.
Not to that great a degree, and we've really only scraped the surface with what we'll be doing with multi-core. DEC laid down a long term plan for the alpha in the early '90s and multi-core was planned for the early '00s right from the start. Compaqtion and having Intel pull a fast one on HP wasn't in their plans, but 4 or 8 cores and enough cache to keep them fed is just the next step.
Another thing we're going to see, particularly for laptops, is super-integrated chipsets. Freescale's e600 would have been the next step for Apple if they'd been faster getting it to market (or if Apple had been less reluctant to break the G4 bus compatibility and they'd gotten started sooner), and it seems to me that adding the GPU in as well makes a lot of sense. Expect to see Intel CPUs with GMAxxx (or their descendants) on-chip, and AMD cutting deals with nVidia and ATI.
There aren't many businesses where manufacturing technology exceeds design technology. Throughout human history we've been able to dream up things we can't yet build, like spaceships, skyscrapers, jet packs, underwater breathing apparatus, or portable computers. But in the semiconductor business the situation is reversed: chip makers can build bigger and more complicated chips than they can design. Manufacturing prowess exceeds design capability. We can fabricate more transistors than we know what to do with.
Not only can I dream up things to do with four million transistors, but there's always plenty of EASY and productive uses for more transistors. More cache, to begin with... when you can still buy chips today with only half a meg of L1 cache you know theres plenty of headroom there. Multiple cores? The aborted EV8 Alpha would have gone up to 4 regular cores per chip, and it was killed by boardroom shenanigans between Intel and HP and Compaq... not technical or business reasons.
And that's just stuff that you could build right now, without designing anything new, if you had the transistor budget. Moving on to more speculative designs... nobody's brought GPUs into the "Tron" era yet... where's the massively parallel raytracing GPUs with tens of thousands of relatively simple cores each rendering a postage-stamp size piece of the scene in photorealistic quality in realtime? There's all kinds of embarassingly parallelizable problems this kind of thing could be applied to, rendering is only the most obvious one...
"The problem is if the used game is available a week after the new game is out for a $5 discount."
If the used game is widely available a week after the new game is out, that means there's a lot of people who decided, within a week, that they weren't going to play that game again. That doesn't mean the used games are a problem, it means that game didn't have a lot of replayability, or even that it was a lousy game. If people are able to resell a newly released game after a couple of plays for (say) 50% of list, that means their risk in buying a new game that might be a lemon is cut in half.
Take the used market away, and people are going to be less likely to buy new games.
By default Parallels doesn't create a fixed size disk, it allocates disk blocks on the fly as you write to unused blocks in the virtual disk... which will completely confuse Windows fragmentation logic (pitiful as that is) and basically give you a maximally fragmented Windows file system.
Your comments make me wonder if you've ever used Garageband for more than five minutes. Format conversion is easy!
Not if you want to save non-audio tracks it isn't.
I ended up deciding that the cheapest solution for getting Garageband data out for my daughter was to upgrade her G3 iMac to a Mac mini... and leave it in Garage band. She was due for an upgrade anyway.
It's not like Macs are for gamers, especially not iMacs which, even if they game relatively well when released, are about as useful with their Radeon X1600 in a year or two as the integrate (overstated, but not by much...
Um, the GMA950 is so bad at 3d that the original Mac mini with its Radeon 9200 does as well as the Core Duo in some benchmarks, and beats the Core Solo, and the comparable iBook with the nVidia go5200 beats the Macbook in others. Yes, that's with Universal applications.
Once you have games that actually take advantage of the dual core, that second CPU isn't going to be "spare" and won't be able to take up slack for the GPU, and the difference between a real Mac and the Core Duo Mini, and this eMac will be even bigger.
More than a quarter of a century ago I inadvertently found a hole in a UNIX based bulletin board system, went in and fixed the code, called the operator to tell him what I'd done and how to fix the rest of the problems, and ended up with a series of contracts.
A few years later I wouldn't have considered it. People who'd not done much more had spent time in court and been threatened with jail. Not much later, you had people actually doing jail time for simply "knocking on doors".
What happened?
The whole "ethical intruder" meme had spread, and people had started cracking into systems and then claiming they were just "rattling doorknobs" to "help security". Of course you couldn't tell an "ethical hacker" from a crook, and the crooks could claim they were just trying to help.
It's the "ethical hackers" themselves that have made it impossible for this kind of activity to be condoned.
Computer games are enough of a distraction as it is.
I have a Wintendo for running games, and it stays at home. There's already too many games that run on my Macbook Pro as it is, but luckily I don't like most of them. The last thing I want is a wider selection of timewasters.
The high speed memory bus that makes it run so fast is greatly appreciated, though I'd rather have had a Freescale MP8641D (which would have even more memory bandwidth than the Core Duo), it seems like Freescale dropped the ball... or they just took it and went home when Apple dumped their product line in 2005.
They keyboard is just as bad as the Powerbooks, and the one-button trackpad is all but unusable even with Sidetrack to simulate 2 buttons. When I say "bad", by the way, I mean "a couple of days using it and my RSI was flaring up again". I got a tiny bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and even if my boss thinks I'm nuts for using it with a Logitech keyboard balanced on it my wrists aren't hurting any more.
They really need to get Lenovo to make a "businessman's macbook" with a Thinkpad shell and keyboard, and Apple's electronics. I don't miss Windows on my Thinkpad at all, but I sure miss that keyboard. And I prefer the Thinkpad's white LED above the screen that illuminated the whole keyboard area to the illuminated keys.
The speakers are (as they say) apalling, but it's not just the speakers. I get more distortion at the same volume level over my harman/kardon speaker system than with my Mac mini. They really need to do something about the whole audio system.
And they need to release a software or firmware upgrade to let us choose between running the fans more and running the computer hotter. I'd be happy to have the fans whooshing away most of the time if it let me actually use my laptop in my lap!
Rosetta works pretty well, but it's all-or-nothing. I've got a boatload of plugins and drivers I can't use until they get upgraded... and since some are abandonware I suspect I'm going to have to find replacements. The big one that may be a show stopper is Palm Hotsync, unless I can find some kind of bridge... I am not using iSync with my Palm, its syncing model if you have multiple computers is completely screwed up unless you use ".MAC", possibly deliberately so.
Wake from sleep is completely unreliable. I've taken to unplugging everything and waiting half a minute before closing the lid, but last night even that failed.
Parallel's Desktop is pretty well done. It's apalling that it's necessary, but I'm grateful that it's possible. Palm Desktop and Hotsync still runs under Windows, maybe I can keep synced that way.
I'm more interested in seeing whether it'll support OpenGL 3d. Given Apple's strong support for OpenGL, running apps that do support both APIs in OpenGL mode is likely to be the best option if it's available.
"The XP VM [virtual machine] was snappy [...] I had iTunes and Firefox running on the host OS, and had burned some discs at the same time".
He was running Windows and Mac applications concurrently. Boot Camp doesn't do this, it's not a virtual machine environment. Sheesh.
Boy, you really missed the big one.
... their emulated framebuffer is 2d only.
Not only is Parallels not in the same league as boot camp, it's not even playing the same game!
The only advantage Parallels has over Boot Camp is that it can be used for more than just Windows.
If you want to boot any other OS on your Mac you don't need a hack like "Boot Camp". The only reason you need Boot Camp at all is because Windows doesn't support EFI natively. If you want to run UNIX on your Mac you have your choice of a variety of free UNIXes or Apple's native operating system, OS X.
Parallels is a completely different product than Boot Camp. You don't shut down Mac OS X to run Windows under Parallels, or hibernate it, or sleep it, Parallels isn't a boot manager, it's a virtual environment that runs Windows under Mac OS X. You double-click on the loopy infinity icon, and a little while later you've got the Windows desktop (or FreeBSD, or Linux, or whatever you want) in a window under Mac OS X. You can use both at the same time, run your Windows applications at full speed alongside your Mac apps. The only problem I've found so far is that they don't provide OpenGL or DirectX 3d access
I can see why the Hollywood film studios want tired pricing.
I know you meant tiered, but that slip is telling. DVD pricing is more like CD pricing than box-office pricing. Theatres have flexibility to sell tickets at the rate they want and they're competing with other theatres that are, largely, showing the same movies. So with string competition and fungible content the market acts much more strongly on movie prices than DVD prices, and as you say they've tended towards a flat rate for movies.
The market detests "tired" centrally controlled prices. You want a thriving industry, let the competition flow.
It's sad then that OS X needs so much horsepower to achieve the same level of usability as XP on the TX.
No amount of horsepower can give XP the usability of OS X. My first "modern" Mac was a pre-G3 Powermac 7500 with a Sonnet upgrade card using XPostFacto to run OS X 10.2 Jaguar. That was a G3/400, not even a G4, and within a week I'd quit booting up my Pentium 4 except to play games.
Since then I've upgraded my Wintendo to an Athlon X2 3800+, upgraded my Mac to a Mac Mini (first generation, G4/1.4). The Mac's no mor ethan 1/4 the speed of the Wintendo, probablyless, but I wouldn't dream of trying to use XP for anything but games.
It's not OS X that's making the Macbook Pro run hot. It's the Macbook Pro design team screwing up somewhere. It's a hardware problem (or firmware, in the system management controller) not software,
real Mac user: someone true to who they are, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes.
The troublemakers switched to Free UNIX long ago.
It's Apple who switched... chasing the troublemakers around again.
And thank god they did. They've got a good handle on user interface, but no bloody clue about operating systems.
The reason you don't see articles that say "I'm probably going tobe modded down" modded down so often is because that's kind of a vaccination against the effect.
But I've seen well-written "against the grain" articles get modded down, and I've modded a few up again.
Me too.
I would rather have had a Thinkpad running Mac OS X. Much better designed hardware all around.
Apple is a software company, when it comes down to it. They make their money from the hardware, yes, but people don't buy it because it's Apple hardware and wouldn't pay that much for that hardware without the Apple software on it - whether that hardware is a Mac or an iPod. Because Apple doesn't make their own hardware. It shows.
Not only isn't Apple a publisher, but if it's against antitrust for Apple to distribute entertainment media that only works with one brand of music player because publishers might start doing that, it's against antitrust for ANY software company to write software that ony runs under Windows.
Bungie, Squaresoft, Nintendo... ? Time to release Super Mario Kart for XBox...?
But Apple is the company that's been placed on a pedestal by it's fanbase and the mainstream media as an enlightened, progressive, cool, hip company, above reproach, and Apple has only played into that.
If Apple was a person "its fanbase and the mainstream media" would be up on charges for stalking.
I get regularly modded down here for pointing at problems like Apple's daft approach to security in Safari. If you want to get on Apple's case for something they can and should do something about, start there.