Where's Java3D? Where's a steenking measely VRML viewer for OS X? Before you say Cortona, try using it with something other than IE. I would much rather off-load VRML to a stand-alone viewer than rely on a Microsoft-only solution. The OpenGL integration is great, and I'm definitely looking forward to using it on my TiBook, but I really wish more attention was paid to supporting those other existing technologies.
I bought a five thousand dollar powerbook
Uhhh... where exactly did you manage to spend $5K on a PowerBook? I don't think that's even remotely possible. You must be trolling...
Diesels on the other hand take a bit more juice to get going
The amount of 'juice' (lets just call it energy, say), that it takes to start an engine - diesel or gas is totally negligible. Lets say you run a starter at 250 amps at 12 V for 2 seconds. Thats 3 kW, but only for two seconds. Say you have a little 50 hp diesel - that's 37 kW, so the energy used to start the diesel will be restored in less than 0.2 seconds.
Think about the train (as someone else did) - they fire that sucker up in the morning and don't shut it down until they get wherever
The reason for that is trains use diesel in a turbine engine - essentially a jet engine, not the internal combustion engine we're talking about here. Turbines are much more difficult to start (and shut down) compared to internal combustion, that's why they don't shut them down on a train, and why they don't shut them down on a plane either.
The cycling frequency of a diesel-electric hybrid can be altered by altering the size of the battery bank. Basically, you want to run the diesel at constant load and keep it warm between starts. Diesels like to work. They don't like to idle, and they don't like varying loads. Other than that they could care less how often you start them.
Also, I agree with the parent about the TDIs which are great, but don't forget the venerable Mercedez 300 D series. They have good performance, and are built like tanks. Of course the mileage is slightly more than half of the TDIs, but hey, we're running these on BioDiesel made from used vegetable oil, right?
There is one and only one reason that the hybrids are gas-electric instead of diesel-electric. Go and ask any 'environmentalist' you know what they think about diesel. Likelier than not, they will tell you diesels are 'dirty' 'sooty', 'stinky', produce acid rain, etc. All true of a 20 year old diesel, all false for a modern one. Perceptions are hard to change, and Honda and Toyota knew well enough they would have no chance with a diesel electric because of these perceptions in the very same niche market they are trying to sell into. Of course if we didn't have all of this ignorance, we would have 100 MPG diesel-electrics by now. Gas-electric is about the stupidest thing you can do from a technology and efficiency standpoint, but the only thing that could have a market in this country. Pretty sad really.
I used all my old MacOS apps when running LinuxPPC through the magic of Mac-on-linux (MOL). Sorry no link, but you can hit Google as well as I can. This fabulous program would boot up MacOS in an X-Window (yes, you can do a remote X-session with it), or full-screen. I always had it in an X-Window, and everything runs at native speed (there's no emulation here). Networking, cut-n-paste, etc also worked. The fabulous thing was that if you needed the extra CPU cycles, MOL had a way to chache your MacOS session, so you could shut it down almost instantly, and bring it back up almost instantly too (about a second both ways). Give MOL a try. I haven't used Linux on Macs for about a year now (all OS X now), but when I did, it worked great this way.
So I thought - I'm gonna go over to Netflix and queue up Tarkovsky's Solaris. Haven't seen it since like high-school. Guess what. No DVD. Got me thinking. What kind of 'businessman' in their right mind would release such a thing on DVD anyway - only to be seen by like 3 or 4 people. Unfortunately, I don't have a VCR, so I can't watch it that way. Like you'd be able to even rent Solaris on VHS at Blockbuster. Same problem there - 1 rental a year won't pay for the shelf space. So, this great work of art goes on the ash heap of history. I think that if we let the recording industry assert their rights so much, we had better obligate them to keep such obscurities available at all times as well - in all new formats that come into existence. For 70 years after the copyright holder is dead.
WTF for? Why would you want to replicate everything Quicktime does on MacOS on some other OS? Most of that functionality is present in other OSes through other software.
Of all the things that Quicktime does on MacOS, the only relevant bits that are useful to have on other OSes is video encoding, streaming, and viewing. All of those things you can do in Quicktime format with open-source software on Linux (or whatever).
In contrast, where is the open-source RealVideo encoder/server/viewer? A binary is available from RealNetworks for certain platforms that its marketing department doesn't see as a threat. The last Mac OS player is for 8.5. That's about Windows95 vintage. Where's the open-source Windows Media Player encoder/server/player? Lets at least count our blessings that those two POS-wares haven't been embraced by the open-source community.
In all seriousness it is true that the Republicans do favor business more than the Democrats
This statement always bothered me. A truer statement is that Republicans tend to favor certain big businesses over others. Considering that these businesses have competitors (even MS), favoring certain businesses over others is in fact being hostile to business in general.
Why not just store the key on a removable device. Doesn't have to be a fancy smart-card system, could be a USB key-ring thing, or a small external USB/Firewire drive, or a compact flash card. Most of these have Linux drivers which can map the device to some kind of file-system, which gets automounted when you attach it to your box. Whenever somebody does the billing, they pull out their key and have at it.
So, how do you explain why the 'Special' menu appears only in the Finder? What if another application has a 'Special' menu? Why put system-wide actions in menus that appear/disappear/change their contents? Its an Apple system. System-wide actions go under the Apple menu. That's much more intuitive than going to the 'Finder' to do a 'Shutdown'. People accustomed to using OS 9 think of the Finder as the operating system. Its simply a file browsing/launching application. The addition of OS-level tasks to the Finder has thankfully been done away with, thus reducing confuision. The side-effect is increased confusion in those habituated to OS 9. That never makes a good reason to keep on doing things badly (well, unless you are MS or Intel).
DAVE sucks. Period. End of story. OK, it was the only thing availbale to connect to a Win-centric network, but here's why I stopped using it (within about 5 minutes) (on OS 9):
Saw that it uses a control panel and an extension. Thought 'this better be stable and not leak memory, or it will lock up my computer'. Did a simple test: Dragged my HD over to the CIFS share. Errors. Tried again. Different errors. Dragged my HD over to a Linux box running netatalk/SMB acting as a gateway. No errors. Dragged all BIOS and DAVE-related things to the trash. Happy as a clam. Boss uses DAVE, restarts his mac several times a day. Me, almost never. Of course I use OS X now, and never have to restart.
Point two is that in a successful file server/client environment, it is up to the server to talk to the client - not the other way around. The client should be able to talk to the server as configured by the factory - right out of the box. Anything else is a band-aid. Linux/netatalk/SMB was a far superior bandaid to DAVE. Since Thursby released software that locked up the system in unpredictable ways by installing a driver that was not fully tested, I would never again buy another one of their products. Not fully torture testing software that loads into the OS (a driver for example) is grossly irresponsible.
Here's what I don't get: Distributed processing is fine, because the CPU is idling most of the time on most computers. What does this have to do with storage? Is most of the capacity on people's drive's unused? Not in my experience. A distributed backup of everyone on the network to everyone on the network would require everyone to double their storage capacity, and that's without any redundancy.
Even simpler would be to mandate that every copy of every microsoft product shipped from Redmond carries the same price tag - wether its going to OEM, or retail. All Windows cost the same, all Offices cost the same, etc. This would have the desired effect that OEMs will not 'bundle' anything. The consumer buys the hardware and the OS seperately - thus 'feeling' the cost of their OS, and would also preclude Microsoft from engaging in licensing deals and having any sway over the OEM market. At the store, next to your PeeCee (Windows sold separately!), you would have a box with Windows (for $100 or whatever), a box with Linux (for $20 or whatever), etc. That's what I would call restored competition.
Why does everyone assume that OS X should run on all Intel hardware - well I guess its because that's what Cringley implied. The only viable option is that Apple would make the Intel hardware (they're a hardware company, right?). Since the Apple Intel hardware is made out of standard components, it may or may not run on other Intel hardware, but that would not be supported by Apple. Tinkerers can of course make it work, but honestly, how much does the build-it-yourself PC cannibalize the hardware sales of Dell, say? So hardware problem and control over the whole widget are solved. Now on to software.
OS X on Intel could run Windows software natively using the same mechanism as VMware uses to run Windows on Linux. They wouldn't have to support Classic on Intel, and may or may not do carbon. Either way, the Intel OS X would have Cocoa, and by extension iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, etc. Any Objective C Cocoa app would run on Intel OS X with a re-compile. Java and Perl Cocoa apps (mmmm, Perl Cocoa apps...) without doing anything. And on Intel OS X, at least, you can always run your fave Windows apps on a VM at near-full-native-speed.
Of course Bill would just absolutely *hate* that, and may or may not do something untoward. The only real solution is for moto to pull the finger out and start making processors that can emulate Intel faster than Intel can make them run natively. If PPC really is a better processor design, then it should be possible, no? Don't forget, kids: After we've dealt with MS as a monopoly, there's Intel to think about.
The problem I'm having with their maps is that there is no distinction between 'no signal' and 'no data'. This can easily be seen by the oddly shaped coverage oozing down a street. Obviously the signal doesn't preferentially go down the street, there is just no data within the block to know what the signal is doing there. There should really be some sort of distinction for this to be truly useful.
Its not as trivial as it seems because coverage can in fact ooze down the street due to tall buildings lining the block, for example. This can either be directly measured or maybe even modeled if one knows the the types of structures in the map.
Does anyone ever test these things on something other than a beige box? Downloaded the disk image, started it up and no banana. If you're not going to test the 'release' on OS X, then here's a hint: Don't put a link to it on your site. It looks bad. Makes you look like a bunch of slackers. People who use Macs are quite used to not being supported by the latest software anyway, so not having the OS X port until someone actually runs it is much better than having a broken one.
As for OS X browsers, I use Netscape 6.2 and OmniWeb 4.1 beta 1 (v332). The 4.1 OmniWeb is a vast improvement over the previous version and is my prefered browser. There are still problems with JS-heavy sites, but it is generally OK, and although it does crash, nothing compared to Mozilla. Netscape 6.2 is the standby more standards-compliant browser, but it makes pages look decidedly crappier than OmniWeb. This version is completely dis-AOL-ified. I don't know if this is b/c of 6.2 or OS X. Oh yeah, MSIE. I've never used it regularly - only when testing my web apps. Incidentally, I'm always spending the most time working around MSIE's strange behavior even though they work on like 5 different browsers perfectly.
I think you are confusing 'Industry Standard' with 'Monopoly'. An industry standard OS would be possible when OSes are comoditized to the point that the applications we use are OS-agnostic. Until that happens, if we are talking about Windows, we are talking about a monopoly OS - and an illegal one at that, not an 'Industry Standard'. Its a very big difference. And don't give me the 'but everybody uses Windows' tautology. Clearly everybody does not. The question is not what it costs to accommodate everyone (or just one other OS or just one other browser, say), its how many you can afford to turn away. The olympics should turn away very very few. More often than not the cost of a general more inclusive solution is less than an exclusive one anyway. If they hadn't poured quite as much crap into their web site it would have been far more accessible by something other than MSIE on Windows (which I take it is the only browser/OS combination that can get anything out of that site). Crap costs money. Maintaining crap costs even more money. Wait, the site is owned by MSNBC? Well, never mind.
OK, I know its lame to respond to your own comments, but wtf.
This gets me thinking. We can use all the distributed power and bandwidth of this here collection of crack-pots to launch DoS attacks on really lame sites. This could be a Slashdot feature called 'Lame site of the day', and people can just follow the link to bring it on down.
Doesn't work with 4.1 beta 1 either (which fixes lots of JS problems). God I hate sites like that - especially 'big media' sites. What a waste. And why wasn't the link to the site posted in the headline so that it would at least get slashdotted?
I totally don't get this repeating theme of 'Steve is pissed at Motorola Re MHz'. Granted if you were the typical slashdot reader instead of Motorola, you would take your new processor technology and clock it at >> GHz and say 'nya nya' to Intel. And guess what - no one would care and you would quickly disapear into oblivion. The only way Transmeta could gain credibility (apparently Linus wasn't enough by himself) was to emulate the x86. It's sad enough to make you want to cry, really. Intel is the 'Gold Standard' of microprocessor technology, which is a very very sad situation. Here they are cranking out dies the size of piza boxes, doubling as toaster ovens, and everybody is happy with that. Motorola makes a much smaller die that disipates a fraction of the power, and its just as fast as what Intel puts out - and faster in some cases. It makes plenty of profit from doing that - in fact the only way Intel can make a profit with its monstrosity is to crank it out by the bazillion. Its much easier to drive a smaller die that dissipates less power at a higher clock rate. So why don't they? Because they're not your typical slashdot reader. They don't do it because they don't have to - they only have to be as fast as Intel and no faster. When Intel goes to a higher clock rate, Motorola just kicks it up a notch. They just simply don't have to try as hard as Intel. Now if Intel didn't own the microprocessor market, there would be some real competition. Since it does, there isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... Yeah... Transmeta...
Where's Java3D? Where's a steenking measely VRML viewer for OS X? Before you say Cortona, try using it with something other than IE. I would much rather off-load VRML to a stand-alone viewer than rely on a Microsoft-only solution. The OpenGL integration is great, and I'm definitely looking forward to using it on my TiBook, but I really wish more attention was paid to supporting those other existing technologies.
I bought a five thousand dollar powerbook
Uhhh... where exactly did you manage to spend $5K on a PowerBook? I don't think that's even remotely possible. You must be trolling...
Diesels on the other hand take a bit more juice to get going
The amount of 'juice' (lets just call it energy, say), that it takes to start an engine - diesel or gas is totally negligible. Lets say you run a starter at 250 amps at 12 V for 2 seconds. Thats 3 kW, but only for two seconds. Say you have a little 50 hp diesel - that's 37 kW, so the energy used to start the diesel will be restored in less than 0.2 seconds.
Think about the train (as someone else did) - they fire that sucker up in the morning and don't shut it down until they get wherever
The reason for that is trains use diesel in a turbine engine - essentially a jet engine, not the internal combustion engine we're talking about here. Turbines are much more difficult to start (and shut down) compared to internal combustion, that's why they don't shut them down on a train, and why they don't shut them down on a plane either.
The cycling frequency of a diesel-electric hybrid can be altered by altering the size of the battery bank. Basically, you want to run the diesel at constant load and keep it warm between starts. Diesels like to work. They don't like to idle, and they don't like varying loads. Other than that they could care less how often you start them.
Also, I agree with the parent about the TDIs which are great, but don't forget the venerable Mercedez 300 D series. They have good performance, and are built like tanks. Of course the mileage is slightly more than half of the TDIs, but hey, we're running these on BioDiesel made from used vegetable oil, right?
There is one and only one reason that the hybrids are gas-electric instead of diesel-electric. Go and ask any 'environmentalist' you know what they think about diesel. Likelier than not, they will tell you diesels are 'dirty' 'sooty', 'stinky', produce acid rain, etc. All true of a 20 year old diesel, all false for a modern one. Perceptions are hard to change, and Honda and Toyota knew well enough they would have no chance with a diesel electric because of these perceptions in the very same niche market they are trying to sell into. Of course if we didn't have all of this ignorance, we would have 100 MPG diesel-electrics by now. Gas-electric is about the stupidest thing you can do from a technology and efficiency standpoint, but the only thing that could have a market in this country. Pretty sad really.
I used all my old MacOS apps when running LinuxPPC through the magic of Mac-on-linux (MOL). Sorry no link, but you can hit Google as well as I can. This fabulous program would boot up MacOS in an X-Window (yes, you can do a remote X-session with it), or full-screen. I always had it in an X-Window, and everything runs at native speed (there's no emulation here). Networking, cut-n-paste, etc also worked. The fabulous thing was that if you needed the extra CPU cycles, MOL had a way to chache your MacOS session, so you could shut it down almost instantly, and bring it back up almost instantly too (about a second both ways). Give MOL a try. I haven't used Linux on Macs for about a year now (all OS X now), but when I did, it worked great this way.
So I thought - I'm gonna go over to Netflix and queue up Tarkovsky's Solaris. Haven't seen it since like high-school. Guess what. No DVD. Got me thinking. What kind of 'businessman' in their right mind would release such a thing on DVD anyway - only to be seen by like 3 or 4 people. Unfortunately, I don't have a VCR, so I can't watch it that way. Like you'd be able to even rent Solaris on VHS at Blockbuster. Same problem there - 1 rental a year won't pay for the shelf space. So, this great work of art goes on the ash heap of history. I think that if we let the recording industry assert their rights so much, we had better obligate them to keep such obscurities available at all times as well - in all new formats that come into existence. For 70 years after the copyright holder is dead.
No, 'g' is for Graphics, 'C' is for C.
WTF for? Why would you want to replicate everything Quicktime does on MacOS on some other OS? Most of that functionality is present in other OSes through other software.
Of all the things that Quicktime does on MacOS, the only relevant bits that are useful to have on other OSes is video encoding, streaming, and viewing. All of those things you can do in Quicktime format with open-source software on Linux (or whatever).
In contrast, where is the open-source RealVideo encoder/server/viewer? A binary is available from RealNetworks for certain platforms that its marketing department doesn't see as a threat. The last Mac OS player is for 8.5. That's about Windows95 vintage. Where's the open-source Windows Media Player encoder/server/player? Lets at least count our blessings that those two POS-wares haven't been embraced by the open-source community.
What about xanim, CrossOver for viewers?
How about Quicktime 4 Linux/Cinelerra, OpenQuicktime, FFMPEG?
Of course you can stream Quicktime (yes virginia, even MPEG4) from Linux as well, using the open-source Darwin Streaming Server.
Is that enough? What more do you want?
In all seriousness it is true that the Republicans do favor business more than the Democrats
This statement always bothered me. A truer statement is that Republicans tend to favor certain big businesses over others. Considering that these businesses have competitors (even MS), favoring certain businesses over others is in fact being hostile to business in general.
Why not just store the key on a removable device. Doesn't have to be a fancy smart-card system, could be a USB key-ring thing, or a small external USB/Firewire drive, or a compact flash card. Most of these have Linux drivers which can map the device to some kind of file-system, which gets automounted when you attach it to your box. Whenever somebody does the billing, they pull out their key and have at it.
The only true security is an air gap.
So, how do you explain why the 'Special' menu appears only in the Finder? What if another application has a 'Special' menu? Why put system-wide actions in menus that appear/disappear/change their contents? Its an Apple system. System-wide actions go under the Apple menu. That's much more intuitive than going to the 'Finder' to do a 'Shutdown'. People accustomed to using OS 9 think of the Finder as the operating system. Its simply a file browsing/launching application. The addition of OS-level tasks to the Finder has thankfully been done away with, thus reducing confuision. The side-effect is increased confusion in those habituated to OS 9. That never makes a good reason to keep on doing things badly (well, unless you are MS or Intel).
DAVE sucks. Period. End of story. OK, it was the only thing availbale to connect to a Win-centric network, but here's why I stopped using it (within about 5 minutes) (on OS 9):
Saw that it uses a control panel and an extension. Thought 'this better be stable and not leak memory, or it will lock up my computer'. Did a simple test: Dragged my HD over to the CIFS share. Errors. Tried again. Different errors. Dragged my HD over to a Linux box running netatalk/SMB acting as a gateway. No errors. Dragged all BIOS and DAVE-related things to the trash. Happy as a clam. Boss uses DAVE, restarts his mac several times a day. Me, almost never. Of course I use OS X now, and never have to restart.
Point two is that in a successful file server/client environment, it is up to the server to talk to the client - not the other way around. The client should be able to talk to the server as configured by the factory - right out of the box. Anything else is a band-aid. Linux/netatalk/SMB was a far superior bandaid to DAVE. Since Thursby released software that locked up the system in unpredictable ways by installing a driver that was not fully tested, I would never again buy another one of their products. Not fully torture testing software that loads into the OS (a driver for example) is grossly irresponsible.
WTF? Its pronounced vee eye? Get out. I thought it was 'six'.
Here's what I don't get: Distributed processing is fine, because the CPU is idling most of the time on most computers. What does this have to do with storage? Is most of the capacity on people's drive's unused? Not in my experience. A distributed backup of everyone on the network to everyone on the network would require everyone to double their storage capacity, and that's without any redundancy.
Even simpler would be to mandate that every copy of every microsoft product shipped from Redmond carries the same price tag - wether its going to OEM, or retail. All Windows cost the same, all Offices cost the same, etc. This would have the desired effect that OEMs will not 'bundle' anything. The consumer buys the hardware and the OS seperately - thus 'feeling' the cost of their OS, and would also preclude Microsoft from engaging in licensing deals and having any sway over the OEM market. At the store, next to your PeeCee (Windows sold separately!), you would have a box with Windows (for $100 or whatever), a box with Linux (for $20 or whatever), etc. That's what I would call restored competition.
Why does everyone assume that OS X should run on all Intel hardware - well I guess its because that's what Cringley implied. The only viable option is that Apple would make the Intel hardware (they're a hardware company, right?). Since the Apple Intel hardware is made out of standard components, it may or may not run on other Intel hardware, but that would not be supported by Apple. Tinkerers can of course make it work, but honestly, how much does the build-it-yourself PC cannibalize the hardware sales of Dell, say? So hardware problem and control over the whole widget are solved. Now on to software.
OS X on Intel could run Windows software natively using the same mechanism as VMware uses to run Windows on Linux. They wouldn't have to support Classic on Intel, and may or may not do carbon. Either way, the Intel OS X would have Cocoa, and by extension iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, etc. Any Objective C Cocoa app would run on Intel OS X with a re-compile. Java and Perl Cocoa apps (mmmm, Perl Cocoa apps...) without doing anything. And on Intel OS X, at least, you can always run your fave Windows apps on a VM at near-full-native-speed.
Of course Bill would just absolutely *hate* that, and may or may not do something untoward. The only real solution is for moto to pull the finger out and start making processors that can emulate Intel faster than Intel can make them run natively. If PPC really is a better processor design, then it should be possible, no? Don't forget, kids: After we've dealt with MS as a monopoly, there's Intel to think about.
The problem I'm having with their maps is that there is no distinction between 'no signal' and 'no data'. This can easily be seen by the oddly shaped coverage oozing down a street. Obviously the signal doesn't preferentially go down the street, there is just no data within the block to know what the signal is doing there. There should really be some sort of distinction for this to be truly useful.
Its not as trivial as it seems because coverage can in fact ooze down the street due to tall buildings lining the block, for example. This can either be directly measured or maybe even modeled if one knows the the types of structures in the map.
Does anyone ever test these things on something other than a beige box? Downloaded the disk image, started it up and no banana. If you're not going to test the 'release' on OS X, then here's a hint: Don't put a link to it on your site. It looks bad. Makes you look like a bunch of slackers. People who use Macs are quite used to not being supported by the latest software anyway, so not having the OS X port until someone actually runs it is much better than having a broken one.
As for OS X browsers, I use Netscape 6.2 and OmniWeb 4.1 beta 1 (v332). The 4.1 OmniWeb is a vast improvement over the previous version and is my prefered browser. There are still problems with JS-heavy sites, but it is generally OK, and although it does crash, nothing compared to Mozilla. Netscape 6.2 is the standby more standards-compliant browser, but it makes pages look decidedly crappier than OmniWeb. This version is completely dis-AOL-ified. I don't know if this is b/c of 6.2 or OS X. Oh yeah, MSIE. I've never used it regularly - only when testing my web apps. Incidentally, I'm always spending the most time working around MSIE's strange behavior even though they work on like 5 different browsers perfectly.
I think you are confusing 'Industry Standard' with 'Monopoly'. An industry standard OS would be possible when OSes are comoditized to the point that the applications we use are OS-agnostic. Until that happens, if we are talking about Windows, we are talking about a monopoly OS - and an illegal one at that, not an 'Industry Standard'. Its a very big difference. And don't give me the 'but everybody uses Windows' tautology. Clearly everybody does not. The question is not what it costs to accommodate everyone (or just one other OS or just one other browser, say), its how many you can afford to turn away. The olympics should turn away very very few. More often than not the cost of a general more inclusive solution is less than an exclusive one anyway. If they hadn't poured quite as much crap into their web site it would have been far more accessible by something other than MSIE on Windows (which I take it is the only browser/OS combination that can get anything out of that site). Crap costs money. Maintaining crap costs even more money. Wait, the site is owned by MSNBC? Well, never mind.
OK, I know its lame to respond to your own comments, but wtf.
This gets me thinking. We can use all the distributed power and bandwidth of this here collection of crack-pots to launch DoS attacks on really lame sites. This could be a Slashdot feature called 'Lame site of the day', and people can just follow the link to bring it on down.
Just a thought. And a bad one at that.
You guys should have put the site's link in the headline so that this atrocity would get properly slashdotted at least, no?
Doesn't work with 4.1 beta 1 either (which fixes lots of JS problems). God I hate sites like that - especially 'big media' sites. What a waste. And why wasn't the link to the site posted in the headline so that it would at least get slashdotted?
I totally don't get this repeating theme of 'Steve is pissed at Motorola Re MHz'. Granted if you were the typical slashdot reader instead of Motorola, you would take your new processor technology and clock it at >> GHz and say 'nya nya' to Intel. And guess what - no one would care and you would quickly disapear into oblivion. The only way Transmeta could gain credibility (apparently Linus wasn't enough by himself) was to emulate the x86. It's sad enough to make you want to cry, really. Intel is the 'Gold Standard' of microprocessor technology, which is a very very sad situation. Here they are cranking out dies the size of piza boxes, doubling as toaster ovens, and everybody is happy with that. Motorola makes a much smaller die that disipates a fraction of the power, and its just as fast as what Intel puts out - and faster in some cases. It makes plenty of profit from doing that - in fact the only way Intel can make a profit with its monstrosity is to crank it out by the bazillion. Its much easier to drive a smaller die that dissipates less power at a higher clock rate. So why don't they? Because they're not your typical slashdot reader. They don't do it because they don't have to - they only have to be as fast as Intel and no faster. When Intel goes to a higher clock rate, Motorola just kicks it up a notch. They just simply don't have to try as hard as Intel. Now if Intel didn't own the microprocessor market, there would be some real competition. Since it does, there isn't.