So, we can get a stripped golf with a built-in MP3 player (BFD) but we (in the US)
will NOT be able to get the four door Golf with the 180hp turbo gas engine?
It's worth noting that VW is bringing the 180HP 1.8T here to the US. (Read about it here:
http://www.vwvortex.com/news/03_01/03_13/index.sht ml )
Currently, you can buy a 5-door Golf with the 150HP 1.8T engine.
(cite: http://www.vw.com/configurator2001/country35/langu age70/model16100/version16440/engine56712/exterior 16125/interior16139/index.html )
It stands to reason that you will be able to buy a 2002 Golf with the exact same specifications, only with 180HP rather than 150.
So some HTML files are "owned" by your editor, others by Netscape. Not at all what I would call "intuitive".
I suppose it's not "intuitive". But it is more flexible than the win32 way, and it is set up exactly how I want it.:) Anyway, the icon changes depending on what app "owns" the file, so I can instantly tell which program will open a file, by default, just by looking.
Well, it doesn't fit the standard GUI mentality of today's systems - but I submit that said mentality is badly broken in several ways. It is not, as is so often claimed, intuitive; it's limiting; it's inflexible (no, "skinning" is not flexibility).
Well... I think the basic operations of current GUIs are reasonably intuitive, once you've learned some basic rules. (double click, etc...). But yeah, I'd agree that GUIs aren't as flexible as they could be, and the fact that my mom -still- needs help copying a file to a floppy disk after 8 years using her Mac shows that there's plenty of room for improvement.
Basically, with all its faults, I still find the MacOS GUI to be the smoothest "desktop experience" out there, esp. when compared to the clunky win32 interface... I have high hopes for MacOS X. MacOS quality interface (hopefully better, but that remains to be seen) WITH a Unix command line. To me, that's about the best I can imagine...
Old Radio Shack Color Computer eh? Suppose I should get out my old Vic20... wonder if my cassette tapes still hold the programs I wrote when I was 7... or if I can remember hot to retrieve them!:)
Yeah, I may not have as many "toys" as the next guy, but guess what? Except for my mortgage, I don't have any debt, and
haven't had any in years.
I remember my parents stories about the Depression, and have always taken them to heart.
That's right! I'm doing the exact same thing. (I think I'm considerably younger than you, as I'm too young to remember the 70s and my parents weren't around for the depression.) But this is absolutely the right attitude. Pay off all bills, right away, as you get them. I don't buy something unless I could be comfortable with paying for it in cash, up front. If I feel I couldn't do that, then I can't afford it. So I don't buy it. That simple.
The only exceptions for that rule are: buying a new car or a house. Someday, I should be able to get away with not having to get financing for a car, either.
Bottom line is, I have very little sympathy for people making loads of money that are constantly having debt problems. They're digging their own graves.
(And before anyone flames me, I most certainly do have sympathy for people who do their best, but circumstances hurt them. For example what happens when a family member gets sick and requires expensive care, and then the car breaks down to the tune of $1000.... that is TOTALLY different than someone who buys a BMW M5 and then complains that they're badly in debt...)
See, that's just it - you don't know. You know what they wanted to open it with last time, not what they want to do with it last
time. Do I want to render that HTML? Edit it? View it's source? Grep it? Spellcheck it? Do a wordcount?
Data is data, and tying it to one specific program can be extremely annoying to a user with a reasonable amount of sophistication.
In fact, it encourages poor application design, where each application has to try to do everything you might want on that data and
thus ends up doing it poorly, and proprietary data formats, since each type of file only will be manipulated by one program.
Hmmm... I think you might be confusing CLI design with GUI design. Let me explain.
Taking your HTML example, it's handled on my Mac system in this way: The HTML files that I am editing all are "owned" by my text editor. When I want to check out what I did, I open the HTML file from within Netscape. Any HTML file I have that I'm not trying to edit is typically owned by Netscape. So, I have exactly the behavior I want for editing or viewing HTML. Double clicking a file does what I want/expect in each case.
Your other three examples really don't fit the GUI mentality. Grepping? Why would grepping care what program is set by default to open the file? It should search all the files you specify in the regexp. As for the last two, Spell check and word count, in a GUI environment, you typically do those inside your editor. Usually there's no GUI utility that you'd only spell check or only word count with, the way you would in a CLI environment. This is counter to the Unix philosophy. Well, that's the GUI for you, and that's why I like also having the CLI as an option.
I disagree that this creates more proprietary file formats. My graphics programs all handle.jpg.tif.gif.pict.bmp and whatnot. Source code is still all text, just with different types and creators. An MP3 is an MP3 whether MacAmp (or something else) owns it. Where's the proprietary formats? Its predominantly microsoft that goes off and pulls that crap.
I do agree that this encourages each app to implement its own "search" function on its own. However aren't CORBA, libraries and whatnot supposed to allow any app to use a uniform search function that someone else wrote for you? Of course, that's only good if people actually use it.
Personally, I find the MacOS file type method to be the most flexible method I've ever used. BeOS used a similar scheme, only it used the MIME type; it behaved much the same way. Certainly, it's infinitely more flexible than the windows method, using only.xyz extensions to determine ownership. There,.html is ALWAYS a Netscape or IE file, and you have to work extra to treat it any different way. This always annoys me.
I guess my feeling is, the MacOS has it right, when it comes to the way file types are maintained, from a GUI point of view. Your other objections can be taken care of by using the command line the way you clearly want to. The MacOS has never had that option up until MacOS X...
I currently have a 486 laptop with 20meg of RAM running Debian 2.2r2. It plays.mp3 files with a recompiled mpg123 under X
just fine.
Now I will grant you the hard drive issue. You need some kind of large media for storing.mp3 files. However a 486 will play
them just fine as long as you have very little overhead.
I'm very impressed that you got a 486 to play back an MP3... what did you do differently to compile mpg123 that it plays on your system? I had a 486/66 DX2 with 24MB RAM, and MPG123 just couldn't do it, not even in just console mode. It "skipped" horribly just playing back only one channel. This is with RH 6.2.
I say "had" because I then got an 83MHz Pentium Overdrive processor for it through eBay. Now it works better, but the CPU utilization is around 60%. So again I ask, what optimizations did you recompile MPG123 with? Thanks for any insight...
I'm actually also going the Compact Flash boot route. I solved the "cFlash is too small for MP3" problem by burning MP3 CDs for it. Works pretty well so far. I'm about 1/2 done with the project.
These desk setups remind me of a cross between a dentist's chair and a trade show booth!
Hmmmm, though even the dentist's chair doesn't have power swiveling like most of those computer desks do. That said, they're pretty cool and if I had a few grand laying around with nothing better to do with it (ha!), I'd get myself one. I've long been thinking about how a perfect computer desk workspace would function, and this is pretty darn close to what I'd like. And the chair looks extremely comfy...
Well, Hemos, the exact opposite thing happened to you as to me-- I used to have local service in E. Pennsylvania from Bell Atlantic. We in my house signed up for AT&T, and MCI slammed me, twice! It was really really annoying, though we at least figured it out before we owed them too much money for long distance. After that, we found out about "locking" your long distance provider. Soooo, why isn't that the -default- way of doing it???
Personally, I've always felt that MCI is the slimier company to deal with, partly because of the way they slammed me, but also with their whole "friends and family" scam, er, "long distance plan". You know, the one where you get a cheaper rate if you have "friends and family" and so does the person you're calling, too. Works like this: you sign up for it, give names/numbers of friends and family, they call you up and pressure you to switch. Whatever! Load of crap... Encouraging people to hand over their friends' privacy in return for a measly $0.03/min (or whatever) savings...
Anyway, welcome to the Boston area Hemos. Glad you like it, but don't you find it ridiculously expensive around here? That's about 2/3 the reason I plan on leaving in the next few months...
...for example, Interesting, then only one instance of Interesting should appear on a meta moderation page, and a meta moderation of Fair or Unfair should be applied to all the moderations with the same value. This would further increase the amount of meta moderation done without adding any user effort.
Maybe I am just unlucky, but I see this kind of duplicate almost every day.
Hey, I've thought this exact same thing as you. However, I just thought of a potential for abuse. If someone were to purposefully do a bad meta-moderation (ie., the post in question truly was "insightful", the moderation applied was "insightful", but the meta moderator voted "unfair") then in one stroke that meta moderator could foul up a number of moderators' otherwise very proper sensibilities. With the current system, the potential for this abuse is a bit better limited.
I'm not sure how to deal with that scenario. Would it happen frequently enough that this would be a problem? Only the Slashdot crew really knows, I think. Suggestions?
All of you giggling and postulating about Bill Gates being wary of a Microsoft breakup should be aware that he may be laughing all the way to the bank in the near future.
You're very likely to be right about that. But that isn't the point! Bill Gates' net worth isn't too interesting to me, other than as a point of trivia. The point is to put an end to the days when MS could illegally take advantage of their monopoly status. Breaking up the company, combined with whatever other restrictions they place on MS, will hopefully achieve this goal. That's great! That's the point.
If investors (not just Mr. Gates) make a profit from this a la Standard Oil, well, so be it...
...which behaves remarkably similarly to the Apple menu on the top left of the MacOS's screen. Let's see, Start menu has find file; Apple menu has find file. Start menu has control panels, Apple menu has control panels. You can start programs from the Start menu, you can start programs from the Apple menu. This works the same. In windows you create a "shortcut" to an executable and put it in a special folder. In MacOS, you create an Alias to an executable and... put it in a special folder. The MacOS has behaved that way since system 7.0.0, which came out in about '91, give or take a year. Which is significantly earlier than late '95. Which sort of ruins the illusion of innovation on MS's part on this one, doesn't it?
There are two differences: a lot more marketing was thrown at the idea when 95 came out, and Win32 installers throw a bunch of shortcuts in there automatically. Which personally annoys me. (In MacOS, you do it yourself, which come to think of it, is decidedly Linux-like, n'est-ce pas?)
The only "innovation" here on MS's part was the name.
Careful. There are two versions of Corel Linux being sold - Deluxe and Standard. I was looking in the Woodbury, MN CompUSA yesterday and happened to notice that the Deluxe version (which, among other things, includes Civ:CTP) was put in big cardboard display holders at the front of the store, whereas the Standard version was mixed in with the rest of the Linux stuff on the shelves.
You probably saw the Deluxe version.
Ahhh, yes, I believe you are right. As I read on in this topic, I saw others talking about pricing and this is almost certainly the case.
PS, I meant to mention this in my original post... it looked as though people had been pawing through the Corel Linux display. So maybe they sold a few at that location already. (I hope so...)
I was in the local CompUSA, and there were HUGE stacks of Corel Linux by the entrance. They were -very- visible, and CompUSA clearly weren't messing around when it came to trying to sell them. --snip-- Please remember, where I am is -not- "tech-land". This is the middle of nowhere,
I saw this at a CompUSA, too. The Natick, MA CompUSA location has a fairly large display of Corel Linux for sale located prominently right by the entrance. I was pleasantly surprised to see it there. Unlike the area where you are, I would describe Natick (Eastern MA about 1/2 way between 495 and 128 along I-90) as being in the middle of a technically competent area.
What was bad about it was the price: $80?! It's great it's easy enough to install that the average user can reasonably take it on, but at that price, I wonder how many casually interested people will bite? Still, I hope it catches on, and this exposure can't hurt.
I'm not going to argue with most of this, since I'm certainly no expert in this area. But even as a non-expert, there are some fairly poor assumtions here.
SPECfp at 31.8. IBM's Power PC 604e parts have slightly lower integer performance and much lower floating point performance at the same clock rates as the RS-II (375 MHz 604e runs 15.1 SPECint, 10.1 SPECfp,) so even if there are some other G4 improvements, I doubt the 500 MHz G4 will be beating a 733 MHz Pentium III.
How, exactly, are you extrapolating anticipated G4 results from a PPC 604e? Some background. Both the 603e and 604e PPC chips were so-called G2 chips. The 604e was marketed as the more high-end chip, with a 1MB L2 cache and so on, and the 603e found its way into consumer models like the Performa. The G3 was actually a highly suped-up version of the 603e, AFAIK, basically a 603e with a backside cache. If you look at the Motorola PowerPC Microprocessor Strategy diagram (sorry, I don't have the link, but it's a PDF file that was linked to some time back here on/. ) you can see that the 604e was actually an evolutionary dead end. They started phasing that chip out two years ago. Now, I'm not sure how much the G4 has in common with the G3, but major differences include that it is now a copper process chip, with an on-die L2 cache and Altivec instructions (the so-called "velocity engine"). Now, how can you possibly extrapolate G4 performance from 604e performance? AFAIK, about all they have in common is the instruction set. And even then, with Alitvec instructions, that isn't even true.
Note that these benchmarks don't measure performance of vector-processing chip features like MMX used by a few apps like Photoshop.
As I mentioned, PPC now has the Altivec (Velocity Engine) vector processing that is supposedly at least a match for MMX. Again, I don't know specifics on performance comparisons (other than from Apple propeganda.;)
Jeeze. Don't bash products whose evolution you clearly know little about. I mean, when a software guy like me can poke statements on hardware full of holes....:)
It's pretty easy in the MacOS, and doesn't even require downloading that 20 or 30 MB (!!!) file from their site. (from an earlier posting)
Use ResEdit. I've thoroughly customized my copy of Navigator on my Mac at home. I've removed and changed buttons, pasted in my own graphics for the splash screen, changed the mouse pointers, added my name to the credits found in about:netscape, and so on.:) People usually do a double take when they see it running since it looks so different. Good stuff.
As for stability, I have stand alone navigator 4.6? installed. I have infrequent problems with it. In linux, I've gotten to the point where I've written a shell script aimed at cleaning up after Netscape when it craps out. (includes a kill -9 and an rm -f ~/.netscape/lock to remove that goddamn "lock" file....) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I do a lot of classical music stuff. All the women that I've ever met and had any serious kind of interest in have been somehow related to the various musical organizations I've been in. Not one of the girls I've ever had any serious interest in were from any of my engineering classes. Including my GF. (She's an engineering major, but that's not how I met her. Went to a different college...)
You don't go scuba diving to look for giraffes. In my experience, you won't have much luck finding a girlfriend in CS, if only due to the male:female ratio there! -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I agree-- I wouldn't work outrageous hours/week, either. Where's the fun in that? If there's a project that -needs- to get finished, OK. But in general, I have the standard 40 hour work week.
I work so that I can afford to live, not the other way around. I'm never in any danger of getting bored outside of work. I have so many interesting little projects (computer related and otherwise) that I'd like to do outside of work that I doubt I'll ever run out of stuff to do anytime soon.
And to be more on-topic, I have a great relationship with my girlfriend. I've spend enough time single to know that there's no way I will allow any company to get in the way of that! -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth noting that VW is bringing the 180HP 1.8T here to the US. (Read about it here: http://www.vwvortex.com/news/03_01/03_13/index.sht ml )
Currently, you can buy a 5-door Golf with the 150HP 1.8T engine. (cite: http://www.vw.com/configurator2001/country35/langu age70/model16100/version16440/engine56712/exterior 16125/interior16139/index.html )
It stands to reason that you will be able to buy a 2002 Golf with the exact same specifications, only with 180HP rather than 150.
You can thank me later. :)
--Thad ('99.5 Jetta GLS VR6, aww yeah)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
They sure do! Any woman that's ever ridden in my Jetta has oohed and ahhed over it. Even the ones that ordinarily don't give a crap about cars.
'99.5 Jetta GLS VR6 :) (ps, love the rims on the Wolfsburg Edition)
--Thad
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I suppose it's not "intuitive". But it is more flexible than the win32 way, and it is set up exactly how I want it. :) Anyway, the icon changes depending on what app "owns" the file, so I can instantly tell which program will open a file, by default, just by looking.
Well, it doesn't fit the standard GUI mentality of today's systems - but I submit that said mentality is badly broken in several ways. It is not, as is so often claimed, intuitive; it's limiting; it's inflexible (no, "skinning" is not flexibility).
Well... I think the basic operations of current GUIs are reasonably intuitive, once you've learned some basic rules. (double click, etc...). But yeah, I'd agree that GUIs aren't as flexible as they could be, and the fact that my mom -still- needs help copying a file to a floppy disk after 8 years using her Mac shows that there's plenty of room for improvement.
Basically, with all its faults, I still find the MacOS GUI to be the smoothest "desktop experience" out there, esp. when compared to the clunky win32 interface... I have high hopes for MacOS X. MacOS quality interface (hopefully better, but that remains to be seen) WITH a Unix command line. To me, that's about the best I can imagine...
Old Radio Shack Color Computer eh? Suppose I should get out my old Vic20... wonder if my cassette tapes still hold the programs I wrote when I was 7... or if I can remember hot to retrieve them! :)
--Thad
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I remember my parents stories about the Depression, and have always taken them to heart.
That's right! I'm doing the exact same thing. (I think I'm considerably younger than you, as I'm too young to remember the 70s and my parents weren't around for the depression.) But this is absolutely the right attitude. Pay off all bills, right away, as you get them. I don't buy something unless I could be comfortable with paying for it in cash, up front. If I feel I couldn't do that, then I can't afford it. So I don't buy it. That simple.
The only exceptions for that rule are: buying a new car or a house. Someday, I should be able to get away with not having to get financing for a car, either.
Bottom line is, I have very little sympathy for people making loads of money that are constantly having debt problems. They're digging their own graves.
(And before anyone flames me, I most certainly do have sympathy for people who do their best, but circumstances hurt them. For example what happens when a family member gets sick and requires expensive care, and then the car breaks down to the tune of $1000.... that is TOTALLY different than someone who buys a BMW M5 and then complains that they're badly in debt...)
--Thad
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Data is data, and tying it to one specific program can be extremely annoying to a user with a reasonable amount of sophistication. In fact, it encourages poor application design, where each application has to try to do everything you might want on that data and thus ends up doing it poorly, and proprietary data formats, since each type of file only will be manipulated by one program.
Hmmm... I think you might be confusing CLI design with GUI design. Let me explain.
Taking your HTML example, it's handled on my Mac system in this way: The HTML files that I am editing all are "owned" by my text editor. When I want to check out what I did, I open the HTML file from within Netscape. Any HTML file I have that I'm not trying to edit is typically owned by Netscape. So, I have exactly the behavior I want for editing or viewing HTML. Double clicking a file does what I want/expect in each case.
Your other three examples really don't fit the GUI mentality. Grepping? Why would grepping care what program is set by default to open the file? It should search all the files you specify in the regexp. As for the last two, Spell check and word count, in a GUI environment, you typically do those inside your editor. Usually there's no GUI utility that you'd only spell check or only word count with, the way you would in a CLI environment. This is counter to the Unix philosophy. Well, that's the GUI for you, and that's why I like also having the CLI as an option.
I disagree that this creates more proprietary file formats. My graphics programs all handle .jpg .tif .gif .pict .bmp and whatnot. Source code is still all text, just with different types and creators. An MP3 is an MP3 whether MacAmp (or something else) owns it. Where's the proprietary formats? Its predominantly microsoft that goes off and pulls that crap.
I do agree that this encourages each app to implement its own "search" function on its own. However aren't CORBA, libraries and whatnot supposed to allow any app to use a uniform search function that someone else wrote for you? Of course, that's only good if people actually use it.
Personally, I find the MacOS file type method to be the most flexible method I've ever used. BeOS used a similar scheme, only it used the MIME type; it behaved much the same way. Certainly, it's infinitely more flexible than the windows method, using only .xyz extensions to determine ownership. There, .html is ALWAYS a Netscape or IE file, and you have to work extra to treat it any different way. This always annoys me.
I guess my feeling is, the MacOS has it right, when it comes to the way file types are maintained, from a GUI point of view. Your other objections can be taken care of by using the command line the way you clearly want to. The MacOS has never had that option up until MacOS X...
hmmm, hope all that made some sense... :)
--Thad
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Now I will grant you the hard drive issue. You need some kind of large media for storing .mp3 files. However a 486 will play
them just fine as long as you have very little overhead.
I'm very impressed that you got a 486 to play back an MP3... what did you do differently to compile mpg123 that it plays on your system? I had a 486/66 DX2 with 24MB RAM, and MPG123 just couldn't do it, not even in just console mode. It "skipped" horribly just playing back only one channel. This is with RH 6.2.
I say "had" because I then got an 83MHz Pentium Overdrive processor for it through eBay. Now it works better, but the CPU utilization is around 60%. So again I ask, what optimizations did you recompile MPG123 with? Thanks for any insight...
I'm actually also going the Compact Flash boot route. I solved the "cFlash is too small for MP3" problem by burning MP3 CDs for it. Works pretty well so far. I'm about 1/2 done with the project.
--Thad
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Hmmmm, though even the dentist's chair doesn't have power swiveling like most of those computer desks do. That said, they're pretty cool and if I had a few grand laying around with nothing better to do with it (ha!), I'd get myself one. I've long been thinking about how a perfect computer desk workspace would function, and this is pretty darn close to what I'd like. And the chair looks extremely comfy...
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Personally, I've always felt that MCI is the slimier company to deal with, partly because of the way they slammed me, but also with their whole "friends and family" scam, er, "long distance plan". You know, the one where you get a cheaper rate if you have "friends and family" and so does the person you're calling, too. Works like this: you sign up for it, give names/numbers of friends and family, they call you up and pressure you to switch. Whatever! Load of crap... Encouraging people to hand over their friends' privacy in return for a measly $0.03/min (or whatever) savings...
Anyway, welcome to the Boston area Hemos. Glad you like it, but don't you find it ridiculously expensive around here? That's about 2/3 the reason I plan on leaving in the next few months...
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Maybe I am just unlucky, but I see this kind of duplicate almost every day.
Hey, I've thought this exact same thing as you. However, I just thought of a potential for abuse. If someone were to purposefully do a bad meta-moderation (ie., the post in question truly was "insightful", the moderation applied was "insightful", but the meta moderator voted "unfair") then in one stroke that meta moderator could foul up a number of moderators' otherwise very proper sensibilities. With the current system, the potential for this abuse is a bit better limited.
I'm not sure how to deal with that scenario. Would it happen frequently enough that this would be a problem? Only the Slashdot crew really knows, I think. Suggestions?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
You're very likely to be right about that. But that isn't the point! Bill Gates' net worth isn't too interesting to me, other than as a point of trivia. The point is to put an end to the days when MS could illegally take advantage of their monopoly status. Breaking up the company, combined with whatever other restrictions they place on MS, will hopefully achieve this goal. That's great! That's the point.
If investors (not just Mr. Gates) make a profit from this a la Standard Oil, well, so be it...
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
There are two differences: a lot more marketing was thrown at the idea when 95 came out, and Win32 installers throw a bunch of shortcuts in there automatically. Which personally annoys me. (In MacOS, you do it yourself, which come to think of it, is decidedly Linux-like, n'est-ce pas?)
The only "innovation" here on MS's part was the name.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
You probably saw the Deluxe version.
Ahhh, yes, I believe you are right. As I read on in this topic, I saw others talking about pricing and this is almost certainly the case.
PS, I meant to mention this in my original post... it looked as though people had been pawing through the Corel Linux display. So maybe they sold a few at that location already. (I hope so...)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
--snip--
Please remember, where I am is -not- "tech-land". This is the middle of nowhere,
I saw this at a CompUSA, too. The Natick, MA CompUSA location has a fairly large display of Corel Linux for sale located prominently right by the entrance. I was pleasantly surprised to see it there. Unlike the area where you are, I would describe Natick (Eastern MA about 1/2 way between 495 and 128 along I-90) as being in the middle of a technically competent area.
What was bad about it was the price: $80?! It's great it's easy enough to install that the average user can reasonably take it on, but at that price, I wonder how many casually interested people will bite? Still, I hope it catches on, and this exposure can't hurt.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
HA!
That's the best laugh I've had all week! I'm still laughing at this one... I think its the "unspeakable" part that's best...
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
SPECfp at 31.8. IBM's Power PC 604e parts have slightly lower integer performance and much lower floating point performance at the same clock rates as the RS-II (375 MHz 604e runs 15.1 SPECint, 10.1 SPECfp,) so even if there are some other G4 improvements, I doubt the 500 MHz G4 will be beating a 733 MHz Pentium III.
How, exactly, are you extrapolating anticipated G4 results from a PPC 604e? Some background. Both the 603e and 604e PPC chips were so-called G2 chips. The 604e was marketed as the more high-end chip, with a 1MB L2 cache and so on, and the 603e found its way into consumer models like the Performa. The G3 was actually a highly suped-up version of the 603e, AFAIK, basically a 603e with a backside cache. If you look at the Motorola PowerPC Microprocessor Strategy diagram (sorry, I don't have the link, but it's a PDF file that was linked to some time back here on /. ) you can see that the 604e was actually an evolutionary dead end. They started phasing that chip out two years ago. Now, I'm not sure how much the G4 has in common with the G3, but major differences include that it is now a copper process chip, with an on-die L2 cache and Altivec instructions (the so-called "velocity engine"). Now, how can you possibly extrapolate G4 performance from 604e performance? AFAIK, about all they have in common is the instruction set. And even then, with Alitvec instructions, that isn't even true.
Note that these benchmarks don't measure performance of vector-processing chip features like MMX used by a few apps like Photoshop.
As I mentioned, PPC now has the Altivec (Velocity Engine) vector processing that is supposedly at least a match for MMX. Again, I don't know specifics on performance comparisons (other than from Apple propeganda. ;)
Jeeze. Don't bash products whose evolution you clearly know little about. I mean, when a software guy like me can poke statements on hardware full of holes.... :)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Use ResEdit. I've thoroughly customized my copy of Navigator on my Mac at home. I've removed and changed buttons, pasted in my own graphics for the splash screen, changed the mouse pointers, added my name to the credits found in about:netscape, and so on. :) People usually do a double take when they see it running since it looks so different. Good stuff.
As for stability, I have stand alone navigator 4.6? installed. I have infrequent problems with it. In linux, I've gotten to the point where I've written a shell script aimed at cleaning up after Netscape when it craps out. (includes a kill -9 and an rm -f ~/.netscape/lock to remove that goddamn "lock" file....)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
You don't go scuba diving to look for giraffes. In my experience, you won't have much luck finding a girlfriend in CS, if only due to the male:female ratio there!
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I work so that I can afford to live, not the other way around. I'm never in any danger of getting bored outside of work. I have so many interesting little projects (computer related and otherwise) that I'd like to do outside of work that I doubt I'll ever run out of stuff to do anytime soon.
And to be more on-topic, I have a great relationship with my girlfriend. I've spend enough time single to know that there's no way I will allow any company to get in the way of that!
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