The G5 _can_ handle more RAM, but then, not with the current OS X revision, can it, at least without resorting to similar tricks as the PIII and up have?
I want to see real independent benchmarks (like that will ever happen), and I want to see it compared to Athlon 64, a dual Operon, a P4 EE and a dual Xeon. And with the P4 and Xeon, I want to see results for hyperthreading turned on AND off. I've seen hyperthreading help some things, and hurt other things, so it really is important to try it both ways. I wouldn't mind seeing tests with native compiled Linux on all systems, and tests comparing OSX on G5, XP Pro on P4 & Xeon and XP64 on the Athlon 64 & Opteron.
I think the most prohibitive part is the memory, as 8GB in 1GB sticks is _expensive_ last I checked. Even if they'd just do tests with 1GB in all systems, I'd be happy.
I would actually prefer a solid number of the signalling rate in the logo (I know actual date tranfer rates are lower). I might forget a couple weeks from now if "full" speed is 480Mbps or 12Mbps. That is not a small difference.
The biggest concern is that people might not notice the "full" speed and "high" speed being two vastly different things. It's not as if they are close, 12Mbps and 400Mbps are vastly different animals. It is completely concieveable that a maker of USB 1.1 12Mbps external drives could just touch up the firmware, relabel their drive as a USB 2.0 "high" speed when it is practically crippled compared to a drive that has a "full" speed.
I look at the packaging of USB products and not all of them declare what communication rate they use by number but by "full" and "high", which I don't see how "high" really fits the bill as it is far closer to "low" speed than anything else.
What would people think if, hypothetically, ISDN was merged into the DSL standard and the only information that the modems give you are "full" and "high" speeds? Should people be given the impression that 64kpbs is "high" speed when the real deal is practically warp drive in comparison?
Sometimes I wonder if Sony and Philips broke from the DVD Forum on this matter as a ploy of trying to get more money. The "plus" format still isn't in the DVD standard, and they may be undercutting the DVD forum on price as a way of getting back at them for rejecting their format.
Up until Sony released their dual format drive, it looked like the plus version really was going to win, but now, almost nothing is single format.
I wish they'd just figure out a way to merge them. the dash version is slightly more compatible with set-top players and the plus version does slightly quicker packet writing.
Now, I wish that the dual layer writables would be compatible with existing writers, but at least it is supposed to be compatible with existing readers. At least broad reader compatiblity has to be there or else it won't sell quickly at the start, IMO.
As yet, computer products with DRM and such built into the firmware haven't shown up yet, so any distinction in that regard is meaningless until that changes.
Re:Why review only the beta version?
on
Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 1
The reviewer does acknowledge at the start that it is a pre-release.
And yes, reviewing the full 1.0 would be better, but pre-release versions are supposed to give a good idea of what the release version will look like.
It looks to me that he's found problems that are greater than what bugfixes will help. A prerelease should not have wholesale organizational problems in the software, heck, in my opinion, all the Windows betas I've seen are better than this.
Man, the chip doesn't suck, it just came too late to take away much from the big iron. Itanium actually did beat most of the big iron 64 bit chips, and without shortcutting to 32 bit mode, like most of the others do in benchmarks, except Alpha, which is another 64 bit only chip.
It also has lock-stepping, which is important for computation checking for true high availability systems (think Himalaya systems), few architectures have that.
It _is_ expensive and hot though, and that is what really sucks.
Granted, this system CAN do better with having available "stock" because it isn't a physical object they are renting.
A problem is that Disney (and others) can make movies "virtually out of print" too, so that you can't get them using their movie system either. This is one of the flaws that was often pointed out with DivX. Once a studio decides to pull the movie from the system, it's gone.
You are best off buying your own copy fo a movie if you like it enough. I think that might be the reason why Disney does the "vault" thing is that people figure that they have to get it now or never see it for another decade.
Frankly, I can rent four movies for $5 for five days, and the video shop is only about two miles away, and I live in a place slightly too rural to justify DSL or cable modem. Four miles round trip is a decent walking or biking distance.
Granted, because this product might fill a niche, I can see that this system will generate some buyers, as DivX had buyers too. Because the pricing structure is no better than DivX, there would not be enough to to get staying power if they aren't going to bother being competitively priced. These kind of technologies don't survive well with just a niche, I think you literally need even as much as millions of subscribers to make it sustainable in the long run.
As it is, even renewable sources like solar cells have issues. They take about as much energy to make as they will produce over their lifetimes and also require a lot of caustic chemicals and waste water to produce.
The hydro electric route screws up ecosystems, and there are fewer exploitable rivers anyway. Windmills have a tendency to kill birds. I am certain there are a lot of problems with other renewable systems.
That might be the day that people would refer to a certain patch of land as "the former Redmond, WA" because there might be a crater where it once stood.
OK, maybe not. The US Government would need service packs to keep their networks up.
The CPU can compute, but it is still dependent on the rest of the system. I believe that chipset is more important to system responsiveness than CPU, although I really don't have objective proof for this, and sometimes benchmarks can't show the extents of these differences as they aren't measuring system latency but rather system speed. That said, the relative latency within a P4 is higher but when clock speed is factored in it should still be a lot faster on throughput, and in my tests it is.
I can't compare it to AMD, I was mad enough at them for the poor showing of my K6 systems I thought I'd skip a CPU another generation from them, maybe in a year or two I'll get a Hammer system.
The Inquirer and The Register wites are more prone to this kind of article. More often than not, they have been right but then they really have some stinkers.
You know, I can't disagree. Moving the memory controller must have greatly simplified the chipset design. Even the multiprocessing is greatly simplified as well as the CPUs are the ones that handle that, one may be able to use the exact same chipset for both dual and single chip board designs, possibly even quad designs. The down side is that a lot of dual CPU and definitely all new quad CPU systems need greater I/O, that which the single CPU designs rarely need, such as 64 bit PCI slots, at 66, 100 and 133 MHz speeds.
If you are not using ECC memory, you have made a conscious decision to reject both correctness and security.
True, the same can be said of overclocking as well, but they seem to dismiss it without having real long term experience with it. When frame per second is the goal, then it is easy to ditch ECC.
If the only use of the computer is web surfing and gaming, then there is little justification to pay the extra.
I've had enough experience with (and without) ECC to say that you are right. The most stable computers I've owned had ECC. The systems with lesser stability did not. I think it is worth the extra, but then I like having solid computer first, because I do use the computer to do paying work that help pay for the thing, and I can't loose it.
I dunno if there is an acceptable dose of reasoning on either side.
I know full well that a full copy doesn't equal a full lost sale, but then, I really don't understand the claim of people downloading it to see if it is good before going to the theaters. Why do people go to the theaters if you've already seen it?
I can't see David Letterman actually going and PAYING to see all the crap movies that his guests make!
Huh? Why not? AFIAK, it's not as if he's got money problems.
Heck, maybe it is paid for under the show's budget, he might even get free tickets from the movie's promoters. For movies on home video, rentals can be pretty cheap.
My gosh, if you don't like the price, don't buy it. I'm tired of people making comparisons to sexual violence when it simply doesn't apply. It's not as if people are being tracked down in some back alley and molested. I think it dilutes the meaning of the act.
One person's worthwhile purchase is another's rip-off.
a ~30% increase in speed isn't "half the time", but it is a nice performance increase, and being only one test, it isn't enough to work from, and a more valid test would compare it to P4 running Linux too. Given that media encoding under ia32 is one of the weaker points of the Hammer architecture, then that means it can catch up and possibly beat the P4 here.
In a way it is a shame that the alleged hardware review sites really don't check out Linux in part of their testing. Linux stands to score a major publicity coup, although in reality I doubt gamers really want to deal with Linux yet unless there is something on it they want on it, as XP64 for AMD64 is coming out early next year.
There is a _little_ bit of progressive taxation involved. I can say that usually basic necessity food items are usually not taxed, like bread, meat, cheese, milk, etc. Luxuries like candy and restaurant food often is. And that people with more money usually buy a lot more anyway, so in the end, the overall bite out of their income may end up being the same or more.
I think it is a significant inconvenience to nearly everyone, particularly if it is a call per hour despite having done nothing to get on the telemarketer's call lists. I image that a significant share of the people that DON'T have any profit connection to telemarketing would agree.
IMO, protecting jobs for the sake of protecting jobs is backward. If the quality of life of everyone else has to suffer then I'd rather they be on welfare or flipping burgers like an honest person whose sole job is to pester and harrass people.
Besides, it is bad enough that my parents have given up on owning a home phone, and they've done nothing to deserve it. So I guess the telco is going to have to lay people off for people cutting off phone service?
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The G5 _can_ handle more RAM, but then, not with the current OS X revision, can it, at least without resorting to similar tricks as the PIII and up have?
I want to see real independent benchmarks (like that will ever happen), and I want to see it compared to Athlon 64, a dual Operon, a P4 EE and a dual Xeon. And with the P4 and Xeon, I want to see results for hyperthreading turned on AND off. I've seen hyperthreading help some things, and hurt other things, so it really is important to try it both ways. I wouldn't mind seeing tests with native compiled Linux on all systems, and tests comparing OSX on G5, XP Pro on P4 & Xeon and XP64 on the Athlon 64 & Opteron.
I think the most prohibitive part is the memory, as 8GB in 1GB sticks is _expensive_ last I checked. Even if they'd just do tests with 1GB in all systems, I'd be happy.
I would actually prefer a solid number of the signalling rate in the logo (I know actual date tranfer rates are lower). I might forget a couple weeks from now if "full" speed is 480Mbps or 12Mbps. That is not a small difference.
The biggest concern is that people might not notice the "full" speed and "high" speed being two vastly different things. It's not as if they are close, 12Mbps and 400Mbps are vastly different animals. It is completely concieveable that a maker of USB 1.1 12Mbps external drives could just touch up the firmware, relabel their drive as a USB 2.0 "high" speed when it is practically crippled compared to a drive that has a "full" speed.
I look at the packaging of USB products and not all of them declare what communication rate they use by number but by "full" and "high", which I don't see how "high" really fits the bill as it is far closer to "low" speed than anything else.
What would people think if, hypothetically, ISDN was merged into the DSL standard and the only information that the modems give you are "full" and "high" speeds? Should people be given the impression that 64kpbs is "high" speed when the real deal is practically warp drive in comparison?
Sometimes I wonder if Sony and Philips broke from the DVD Forum on this matter as a ploy of trying to get more money. The "plus" format still isn't in the DVD standard, and they may be undercutting the DVD forum on price as a way of getting back at them for rejecting their format.
Up until Sony released their dual format drive, it looked like the plus version really was going to win, but now, almost nothing is single format.
I wish they'd just figure out a way to merge them. the dash version is slightly more compatible with set-top players and the plus version does slightly quicker packet writing.
Now, I wish that the dual layer writables would be compatible with existing writers, but at least it is supposed to be compatible with existing readers. At least broad reader compatiblity has to be there or else it won't sell quickly at the start, IMO.
brick and mortar!
Isn't a PC's BIOS a kind of firmware?
As yet, computer products with DRM and such built into the firmware haven't shown up yet, so any distinction in that regard is meaningless until that changes.
The reviewer does acknowledge at the start that it is a pre-release.
And yes, reviewing the full 1.0 would be better, but pre-release versions are supposed to give a good idea of what the release version will look like.
It looks to me that he's found problems that are greater than what bugfixes will help. A prerelease should not have wholesale organizational problems in the software, heck, in my opinion, all the Windows betas I've seen are better than this.
Itanium still sucks to this day
Man, the chip doesn't suck, it just came too late to take away much from the big iron. Itanium actually did beat most of the big iron 64 bit chips, and without shortcutting to 32 bit mode, like most of the others do in benchmarks, except Alpha, which is another 64 bit only chip.
It also has lock-stepping, which is important for computation checking for true high availability systems (think Himalaya systems), few architectures have that.
It _is_ expensive and hot though, and that is what really sucks.
Granted, this system CAN do better with having available "stock" because it isn't a physical object they are renting.
A problem is that Disney (and others) can make movies "virtually out of print" too, so that you can't get them using their movie system either. This is one of the flaws that was often pointed out with DivX. Once a studio decides to pull the movie from the system, it's gone.
You are best off buying your own copy fo a movie if you like it enough. I think that might be the reason why Disney does the "vault" thing is that people figure that they have to get it now or never see it for another decade.
Frankly, I can rent four movies for $5 for five days, and the video shop is only about two miles away, and I live in a place slightly too rural to justify DSL or cable modem. Four miles round trip is a decent walking or biking distance.
Granted, because this product might fill a niche, I can see that this system will generate some buyers, as DivX had buyers too. Because the pricing structure is no better than DivX, there would not be enough to to get staying power if they aren't going to bother being competitively priced. These kind of technologies don't survive well with just a niche, I think you literally need even as much as millions of subscribers to make it sustainable in the long run.
IMO, correct.
As it is, even renewable sources like solar cells have issues. They take about as much energy to make as they will produce over their lifetimes and also require a lot of caustic chemicals and waste water to produce.
The hydro electric route screws up ecosystems, and there are fewer exploitable rivers anyway. Windmills have a tendency to kill birds. I am certain there are a lot of problems with other renewable systems.
Broadcast bandwidth is a scarce resource, though, and needs to be regulated or it would be worthless.
:)
Too bad the theory doesn't work as well as one might have hoped. Have you watched TV or listened to the radio lately?
But what could Microsoft do? Sue China?
That might be the day that people would refer to a certain patch of land as "the former Redmond, WA" because there might be a crater where it once stood.
OK, maybe not. The US Government would need service packs to keep their networks up.
The CPU can compute, but it is still dependent on the rest of the system. I believe that chipset is more important to system responsiveness than CPU, although I really don't have objective proof for this, and sometimes benchmarks can't show the extents of these differences as they aren't measuring system latency but rather system speed. That said, the relative latency within a P4 is higher but when clock speed is factored in it should still be a lot faster on throughput, and in my tests it is.
I can't compare it to AMD, I was mad enough at them for the poor showing of my K6 systems I thought I'd skip a CPU another generation from them, maybe in a year or two I'll get a Hammer system.
The Inquirer and The Register wites are more prone to this kind of article. More often than not, they have been right but then they really have some stinkers.
You know, I can't disagree. Moving the memory controller must have greatly simplified the chipset design. Even the multiprocessing is greatly simplified as well as the CPUs are the ones that handle that, one may be able to use the exact same chipset for both dual and single chip board designs, possibly even quad designs. The down side is that a lot of dual CPU and definitely all new quad CPU systems need greater I/O, that which the single CPU designs rarely need, such as 64 bit PCI slots, at 66, 100 and 133 MHz speeds.
If you are not using ECC memory, you have made a conscious decision to reject both correctness and security.
True, the same can be said of overclocking as well, but they seem to dismiss it without having real long term experience with it. When frame per second is the goal, then it is easy to ditch ECC.
If the only use of the computer is web surfing and gaming, then there is little justification to pay the extra.
I've had enough experience with (and without) ECC to say that you are right. The most stable computers I've owned had ECC. The systems with lesser stability did not. I think it is worth the extra, but then I like having solid computer first, because I do use the computer to do paying work that help pay for the thing, and I can't loose it.
You could re-encode it to some other format, it doesn't need to stay in MPEG-2, Dolby Digital format (or are the R2s MPEG audio?).
But you are right, there are a lot of episodes.
The top article says a few years ago, they didn't say how long ago, it could have been ten years ago for all we know.
I dunno if there is an acceptable dose of reasoning on either side.
I know full well that a full copy doesn't equal a full lost sale, but then, I really don't understand the claim of people downloading it to see if it is good before going to the theaters. Why do people go to the theaters if you've already seen it?
I can't see David Letterman actually going and PAYING to see all the crap movies that his guests make!
Huh? Why not? AFIAK, it's not as if he's got money problems.
Heck, maybe it is paid for under the show's budget, he might even get free tickets from the movie's promoters. For movies on home video, rentals can be pretty cheap.
My gosh, if you don't like the price, don't buy it. I'm tired of people making comparisons to sexual violence when it simply doesn't apply. It's not as if people are being tracked down in some back alley and molested. I think it dilutes the meaning of the act.
One person's worthwhile purchase is another's rip-off.
a ~30% increase in speed isn't "half the time", but it is a nice performance increase, and being only one test, it isn't enough to work from, and a more valid test would compare it to P4 running Linux too. Given that media encoding under ia32 is one of the weaker points of the Hammer architecture, then that means it can catch up and possibly beat the P4 here.
In a way it is a shame that the alleged hardware review sites really don't check out Linux in part of their testing. Linux stands to score a major publicity coup, although in reality I doubt gamers really want to deal with Linux yet unless there is something on it they want on it, as XP64 for AMD64 is coming out early next year.
There is a _little_ bit of progressive taxation involved. I can say that usually basic necessity food items are usually not taxed, like bread, meat, cheese, milk, etc. Luxuries like candy and restaurant food often is. And that people with more money usually buy a lot more anyway, so in the end, the overall bite out of their income may end up being the same or more.
crap, I should have proofread.
" like an honest person whose job isn't to pester and harrass people."
I think it is a significant inconvenience to nearly everyone, particularly if it is a call per hour despite having done nothing to get on the telemarketer's call lists. I image that a significant share of the people that DON'T have any profit connection to telemarketing would agree.
IMO, protecting jobs for the sake of protecting jobs is backward. If the quality of life of everyone else has to suffer then I'd rather they be on welfare or flipping burgers like an honest person whose sole job is to pester and harrass people.
Besides, it is bad enough that my parents have given up on owning a home phone, and they've done nothing to deserve it. So I guess the telco is going to have to lay people off for people cutting off phone service?