I understand fair use as something of an exception to copyright law, ALLOWING the users to make backup copies, media transfers and use short segments in reviews / parodies / etc.
It is not guaranteed, and companies are not required to make copying easy. In many cases, defeating copy protections to make backup copies / personal transfers is legal. The defeating part is possibly always legal for your own equipment and as long as you don't distribute copies.
I am not a lawyer, so don't take my word too heavily.
Your little boycott is interesting. I suppose no one has to watch Hollywood trash. Good stuff does come through occassionally, but then it gets plaigurized to heck.
Hmm? Have you tried comparing to ATRAC 3.5? MiniDisc isn't quite a standing-still format, so you'd have to have a recorder that is less than 2 years old to make a fair comparison. I have seen comparisons of people claiming that their newest MD player/recorder was better than 256kbps (neither you nor they mentioned the encoder, it makes a difference in MP3 quality)
This idea is possibly a good one, as current MP3 players are overpriced garbage shackled to Wintel, and uses ludicrously priced Flash upgrades. Why pay 80$ for a 64MB flash cart for !~60 minutes or 128kbps when an MD recordable costs nearly 2$ for 72 minutes, and the player/recorders cost as much as a good MP3 player? For portable applications, the surrounding noise should mask any noticible artifacting either way.
Dude, there are different encoders available. It is simply a method of taking the frequencies that make up most of what we hear and trashing what frequencies are most inaudible, on a frame by frame basis, and writing the file.
So what if Fraunhofer has a patent on one, use a different one, they are available!
The biggest Linux box/cluster/whatever is Avalon I believe, currently ranked #160, and also resides in LANL. Wasn't there one in the 50-60 range as well?
CPLANT. A US based lab made at least one 150 node Alpha Linux cluster, I forget what was different (better) that made it much faster, but it cracked higher into the top 100 than Avalon ever did. Last I checked it was at about 120.
As the other reply indicates, the DVD player implements Macrovision BUT the DVD must turn it on. Most US made DVDs of US made movies enable this circuit, it costs about 2 to 4 cents per disk to licence its use.
I believe the DVD FAQ has more information on this:
http://www.videodiscovery.com/vdyweb/dvd/dvdfaq. html
As others have commented, it does screw up some projectors, but some companies avoid Macrovision simply because it reduces image quality a little bit. I understand the desire to reduce the number of illegal copies, stuff like this tends to eliminate legal copies, such as those buying DVD, not having a player yet, so they want a short term VHS archive copy.
RISC's still take three instructions to load, alter, and store memory alterations, CISC load and store does it in one instruction
You are forgetting that memory-to-memory instructions are a waste of time and bandwidth, and are totally out of favor now that CPUs are so much faster than RAM.
The question is not RISC / CISC, as even Intel says RISC (soon VLIW / EPIC), but using RISC to emulate CISC seems to be quite inefficient if a PPC at 400 MHz can keep up with a 700 MHz chip.
Hay (alfalfa and grass) and mulched grains are put into the 'cigar tube' silos.
More typically stored in bunkers of a sort- three tall walls filled with a mound covered with a plastic type tarp, a loader drives in, scoops what it needs and goes to feed the critters (animals).
Of course, this is possible region specific, to Michigan.
Also, grain dust explosions is due to the fact that flamable materials are made into tiny particles, increasing the burn surface area.
Moist hay can heat up and spontaneously combust if it isn't ventilated, due to decomposition. Two different phenomena.
But if you didn't engage in any trading, you should be angry that the info was not public, not that the people who did know were motivated to trade on it. Who wouldn't be?
The whole idea is to provide a buffer so that certain people can't rush their order before everyone else. Personally, I wish 'playing the market' (speculation I guess) was illegal - not possible due to unpopularity, but most instability in the market is due to people that buy and sell on little tidbits of information (rumors even!) rather than riding the storm out. There is no point in owning stock in a company (or mutual fund) if you can't ride it out. Stocks have plunged just because although a company did great, beat the previous year, they missed an artificial target by a single penny per share! Stocks spike when there are rumors of a good quarter or when companies did even _slightly_ better than expected. I honestly don't understand why companies give such loving devotion to such fickle people and still treat loyal customers like crap.
If you don't believe by subject line, remember this: the 'Great Depresson' was touched off by: stock holders / market crash.
I agree. If the Royal advisors said to Columbus "but there are starving people in Africa", I guess America would be 'discovered' later so that the American Indians wouldn't have been shuffled into reservations so quickly. (I am kidding, don't flame me)
Seriously: -------------- Face it, in no time period will you find people that AREN'T poor, in the past, present or ever in the future. Communism tried to make one class, it always ended in one poor class with a few filthy rich politicians, and a destroyed economy. The hugest fraction of poverty and starvation is due to corruption, mismanagement, greed, etc. Granted, famines do occur due to climate and weather, but this earth is very capable of feeeding its inhabitants. Even if enough money was sent to Chad or where else, it will simply be wasted even worse than the US government wastes its own money. We shouldn't use our money in a futile attempt to feed countries that simply refuse to function properly.
For another, it's got very limited predication support (conditional moves, again IIRC), in constrast to IA-64/EPIC.
The designers of Alpha say that there is plenty of headroom for adding predication support. I think a present user can emulate predication as it is, there is no condition code register (CCR), so boolean results are stored to register. This is NOT the same as having a separate 1 bit predication register file, probably not getting as much benefit as the 21264 has 'only' 6 pipelines for executing instructions.
You cannot summarize the 'goodness' of an architecture or processor with just the # of bits it manipulates at a time, or the MHz of the processor.
True. The problem is that in the next few years, many more apps will NEED 64 bit addressing to operate efficiently. File size is already a problem, as many 32 bit OSs and software are having to work around 2GB or 4GB file size limitations (databases, digital video). For anything that Joe end user does, it won't matter for several years to come.
One objection to Macs I've always had until recently is the one button mouse. IMO it is useless. Try a paint program. 'A' is draw, 'B' is erase. Yes, it can be keyboard shortcutted or you can mouse over to the button bar, but it isn't as efficient. So buy a multibutton mouse, and ditch the Apple one.
Another is the inability to access the finder or some menus _without_ a mouse. I hear quick-keys program does this.
A third issue is the default acceleration that most Mac users seem to be happy with. I like to quickly move the mouse ONE inch (not 12, not 6 - ~2, 30 and 15 cm for people that use a real measuring system) and have the cursor move from one screen edge to the other.
I believe a good UI can use the keyboard and mouse independently, and in any user chosen combination of the two. I do AutoCAD and some Photoshop with both.
Given the absolutely HUGE amounts of whitespace that you used, are you a 2D freak? It looks quite rude. only one open line between paragraphs is needed, and you have two open lines PER SENTENCE.
Gee, let's use the bold tags for extended quotes!? Give me a break. This paper can't be taken seriously. I guess someone forgot about the BLOCKQUOTE tag, designed for the purpose I stated, and formats the quote properly.
Why is it that the QWERTY b!tches never admit that their system stinks? It just makes logical sense to put the common characters on the home row (ASDGHJKL;:'" - what a bunch of crap designed to slow people down). The very idea of Dvorak is to minimize excessive motion, If you say it doesn't, you have not analyzed the situation. While it may not be much faster, it might slow down CTS.
I think there is easily be a better system then both, but I have other things to worry about.
He also outlined company concerns that outside search results might not display the most up-to-date, accurate information.
This is full of crap. eBay's 'current' bid prices from their own search engine are typically many hours old, I have even seen day-old bid prices displayed on bids.
And for some odd reason, the search seems to miss some items quite often, and I haven't figured out why yet. A search checking for a certain word in the title or description overlooks items that have that word in it. I am sure it isn't a spelling problem, and I believe it isn't a caps problem.
'Deep Linking' is one thing, but constantly spidering a dynamic database is stupid, and eBay has a right to limit it, but I believe that they should keep it open until it really shows signs of causing trouble.
I don't know about what your troubles were, but I have had very few problems or complaints with SCSI. I have yet to run into cable length problems. Firewire sure is great in theory, but there aren't any true FW drives that I know about, so far they are external with a FW to IDE bridge that I know about. SCSI IDs have never been a problem, just come up with a consistent, easy to remember numbering scheme. On my system, the hard disks are 0,2,3,4 on one chain, another chain has Zip, CD Changer and SyJet on 5,6,7. And I didn't have to look up my/proc/ or control panel applet.
Yes, IDE drives ARE much cheaper. They'll work for anyone. The problem for me is the lack of decent chaining. One U(2)W card can run 15 drives (not worth trying, but you can), as both IDE chains in a standard computer can only run 4 drives. I have seven disk drives in my system, not including the ones that aren't connected but could be (too lazy). For the end user that doesn't do much with computers, IDE is great. The 'hackers' should demand better for themselves, stressing every part of their system.
I've seen standard Ultra33, UW and U2W drives compared on latency and throughput on random seeks - the same drive, different electronics, nets 50% better on UW, 100% better on U2W.
Last I heard, the 'shark' boards on the G(3|4) units can't boot from FW yet. This sounds like a possible security concern too, but the choice isn't available.
Well, if you have been paying attention to posts in the past weeks concerning the EV6 bus (Alpha / Athlon), you would know what I am writing here.
What Alpha busses do is have a 256 bit wide bus running at 87MHz, and multiplex the data to a narrower, faster bus. The switch bus operates at 64 bit / 350 MHz or faster. The dual processor Alphas have 2 64 bit PCI, 2 RAM _AND_ 2 CPU busses, all switched, interconnected and multiplexed. It is somewhat like a siamese computer, any part of the computer can ask any other part for any data. I believe that the dual 500 MHz systems have a theoretical 5.6GB/s bandwidth.
I think another (better?) answer is that gcc/egcs doesn't have much in the way of DSP type stuff, where you do parallel computations. Alphas get performance inherently, as its FPUs are very good, and it does not have to d!ck with SIMD instructions - something that many compilers don't do well anyways - usually you have to call hand coded assembly to get good performance out of SIMD (= single instruction multiple data, where one instruction is executed on multiple sets of data - like MMX, KNI (SSE), AltiVec, etc)
And the raw bandwidth of even the unreleased G4s trail that of three year old Alpha designs anyways, and now there's the switch-matrix arch that gets close to twice that of the new G4's theoretical bandwidth (EV6 500 ->> ~2.6 GB/s, G4 (7400) -> ~0.8 GB/s). This is the 'theoretical', Alphas still get 1.3GB/s in sustained throughput, 50% more than G4s Theoretical
so, why the sudden spurt of belief in apple now that the G4 is out? probably because it signals all the technological merit that the PowerPC really represents... When Tom's Hardware is comparing 10% different rendering times between an Athlon and Dual Celeron, here comes a piece of APPLE hardware that whups them both
Dude, I have yet to see a web benchmark that compares the rendering performance of a 750 / 7400 (G3/G4) against a Pentium anything. Sorry, if Apple wants to get out of just having a 'Photoshop' niche, it should quit spouting photoshop benchmarks and start showing me performance comparision for an app suite and some SPEC marks. Showing some game performance on good, popular games and comparing them with their x86 versions, fine. But show me a useful set of comparisons. Photoshop is heavily abused as a benchmark to favor Macs, as it was designed for Macs in the first place, with a crude port to Windows. ByteMark doesn't cut it either.
IEEE 1394 (I won't use the FW term as it is a trademark) has been chosen as the connector for digital video, namely HDTV, now called Digital Television, plus all digital broadcast editing interconnects are going to use IEEE 1394 if they are not already doing so.
What is hurting the computer implementation is the perception that licening costs too much, and Apple's 1$ fee wasn't much when they tried, but they bowed to pressure to have that fee included with other licences, in a package of 25 cents per port.
USB is an industry developed standard, so that means no one has particular dominance in setting up the standard. A problem is that it is supposedly a true bus, versus a switch architecture. I don't know if I believe this, as hub chips I've looked up can somehow connect devices of varying speeds on different links, each link having its own set of pins on the chip.
Still, IEEE 1394 looks like a far better choice for video, scanning, digital A/V, as you supposedly get guarantied bandwidth, good data rates and bounded latencies. You can get real-time transfers for audio on USB, but it looks like a b!tch to design and program for.
Dude, what is the problem with GPL? I thought the concerns were addressed in the last few flame wars. If you don't like it, use something else. If you have a complaint that it 'absorbs' BSD code, uh, there was a defect in the BSD licence, you know, the same defect that allows Apple to take BSD, make changes, put it under its own licence and call it its own, and saving many changes for closed source. Of course this may have changed, but it seems that BSD licence assumes that people are more kind hearted than the GPL licence does.
I really don't have a problem with companies not using GPL, but many people are wary of any licence in which donated changes can be absorbed and become closed.
I don't think this is true. The 64 bit addressing won't be used, that is all. Most 64 bit machines don't have the amount of memory alone to justify the 64 bit addressing, but it does improve throughbut.
I really hate it when people brag of having X many coats of (laquer no less!) paint on their custom car, so don't start on computers!
Wanting to have that many coats of paint on anything is asking to have it crack on you. Never mind that Laquer is a crappy paint, most likely to oxidize, crack, and is a huge enviromental hazard in application.
I've always hated uncommented code to the point that I over comment a bit. I always love the ability to pick up a random page of code and be able to understand it just by reading and not having to look up all the function calls and interpreting each line. And I can have a hard time remembering my logic in choosing a particular implementation, so I try to leave notes too.
One reason (if not the only reason) that people hate documenting is that it doesn't directly affect the final product - the compiler preprocesses documentation out of the code stream, docs only are the source code communication between programmers. In short, it feels like a waste of time because we like short term effectiveness and productivity over long term maintainability, programmers feel like they are making a difference in writing things that end up in the compiled program structer. It's all psychological.
I don't have the best 'root' document stating everything a code tree does, but it always has something to start from, and a generalized layout and plan of action.
One thing that might help is write everything in pseudocode, and go back to make real code, leaving the pseudo code as comments. It never hurts to think something through twice rather than coding on the fly and forgetting the details of why you did something, saving much debug and rewrite time.
I like to test and compile my code often, every time I finish even a function or a complex loop / conditional.
I suppose some of you might think I am anal, but I've never had porting problems with my code - not a line changes when compiling for 5 different platforms (NT, Solaris, SunOS, Linux Alpha and Intel/AMD).
While I am not against artistic coding, the scientific method can help a lot, as well as communicable clarity in code writing. The compiler can tell you wether your code is legal according to the given set of rules, it can't tell you anything about future maintainability or readability by you or other people.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand fair use as something of an exception to copyright law, ALLOWING the users to make backup copies, media transfers and use short segments in reviews / parodies / etc.
It is not guaranteed, and companies are not required to make copying easy. In many cases, defeating copy protections to make backup copies / personal transfers is legal. The defeating part is possibly always legal for your own equipment and as long as you don't distribute copies.
I am not a lawyer, so don't take my word too heavily.
Your little boycott is interesting. I suppose no one has to watch Hollywood trash. Good stuff does come through occassionally, but then it gets plaigurized to heck.
Hmm? Have you tried comparing to ATRAC 3.5? MiniDisc isn't quite a standing-still format, so you'd have to have a recorder that is less than 2 years old to make a fair comparison. I have seen comparisons of people claiming that their newest MD player/recorder was better than 256kbps (neither you nor they mentioned the encoder, it makes a difference in MP3 quality)
This idea is possibly a good one, as current MP3 players are overpriced garbage shackled to Wintel, and uses ludicrously priced Flash upgrades. Why pay 80$ for a 64MB flash cart for !~60 minutes or 128kbps when an MD recordable costs nearly 2$ for 72 minutes, and the player/recorders cost as much as a good MP3 player? For portable applications, the surrounding noise should mask any noticible artifacting either way.
Dude, there are different encoders available. It is simply a method of taking the frequencies that make up most of what we hear and trashing what frequencies are most inaudible, on a frame by frame basis, and writing the file.
So what if Fraunhofer has a patent on one, use a different one, they are available!
The biggest Linux box/cluster/whatever is Avalon I believe, currently ranked #160, and also resides in LANL. Wasn't there one in the 50-60 range as well?
CPLANT. A US based lab made at least one 150 node Alpha Linux cluster, I forget what was different (better) that made it much faster, but it cracked higher into the top 100 than Avalon ever did. Last I checked it was at about 120.
As the other reply indicates, the DVD player implements Macrovision BUT the DVD must turn it on. Most US made DVDs of US made movies enable this circuit, it costs about 2 to 4 cents per disk to licence its use.
. html
I believe the DVD FAQ has more information on this:
http://www.videodiscovery.com/vdyweb/dvd/dvdfaq
As others have commented, it does screw up some projectors, but some companies avoid Macrovision simply because it reduces image quality a little bit. I understand the desire to reduce the number of illegal copies, stuff like this tends to eliminate legal copies, such as those buying DVD, not having a player yet, so they want a short term VHS archive copy.
RISC's still take three instructions to load, alter, and store memory alterations, CISC load and store does it in one instruction
You are forgetting that memory-to-memory instructions are a waste of time and bandwidth, and are totally out of favor now that CPUs are so much faster than RAM.
The question is not RISC / CISC, as even Intel says RISC (soon VLIW / EPIC), but using RISC to emulate CISC seems to be quite inefficient if a PPC at 400 MHz can keep up with a 700 MHz chip.
Hay (alfalfa and grass) and mulched grains are put into the 'cigar tube' silos.
More typically stored in bunkers of a sort- three tall walls filled with a mound covered with a plastic type tarp, a loader drives in, scoops what it needs and goes to feed the critters (animals).
Of course, this is possible region specific, to Michigan.
Also, grain dust explosions is due to the fact that flamable materials are made into tiny particles, increasing the burn surface area.
Moist hay can heat up and spontaneously combust if it isn't ventilated, due to decomposition. Two different phenomena.
But if you didn't engage in any trading, you should be angry that the info was not public, not that the people who did know were motivated to trade on it. Who wouldn't be?
The whole idea is to provide a buffer so that certain people can't rush their order before everyone else. Personally, I wish 'playing the market' (speculation I guess) was illegal - not possible due to unpopularity, but most instability in the market is due to people that buy and sell on little tidbits of information (rumors even!) rather than riding the storm out. There is no point in owning stock in a company (or mutual fund) if you can't ride it out. Stocks have plunged just because although a company did great, beat the previous year, they missed an artificial target by a single penny per share! Stocks spike when there are rumors of a good quarter or when companies did even _slightly_ better than expected. I honestly don't understand why companies give such loving devotion to such fickle people and still treat loyal customers like crap.
If you don't believe by subject line, remember this: the 'Great Depresson' was touched off by: stock holders / market crash.
All alpha processors support big and little endian numbers, from the first chip produced, you just flip a flag in the load/store instruction called.
I agree. If the Royal advisors said to Columbus "but there are starving people in Africa", I guess America would be 'discovered' later so that the American Indians wouldn't have been shuffled into reservations so quickly. (I am kidding, don't flame me)
Seriously:
--------------
Face it, in no time period will you find people that AREN'T poor, in the past, present or ever in the future. Communism tried to make one class, it always ended in one poor class with a few filthy rich politicians, and a destroyed economy. The hugest fraction of poverty and starvation is due to corruption, mismanagement, greed, etc. Granted, famines do occur due to climate and weather, but this earth is very capable of feeeding its inhabitants. Even if enough money was sent to Chad or where else, it will simply be wasted even worse than the US government wastes its own money. We shouldn't use our money in a futile attempt to feed countries that simply refuse to function properly.
For another, it's got very limited predication support (conditional moves, again IIRC), in constrast to IA-64/EPIC.
The designers of Alpha say that there is plenty of headroom for adding predication support. I think a present user can emulate predication as it is, there is no condition code register (CCR), so boolean results are stored to register. This is NOT the same as having a separate 1 bit predication register file, probably not getting as much benefit as the 21264 has 'only' 6 pipelines for executing instructions.
You cannot summarize the 'goodness' of an architecture or processor with just the # of bits it manipulates at a time, or the MHz of the processor.
True. The problem is that in the next few years, many more apps will NEED 64 bit addressing to operate efficiently. File size is already a problem, as many 32 bit OSs and software are having to work around 2GB or 4GB file size limitations (databases, digital video). For anything that Joe end user does, it won't matter for several years to come.
One objection to Macs I've always had until recently is the one button mouse. IMO it is useless. Try a paint program. 'A' is draw, 'B' is erase. Yes, it can be keyboard shortcutted or you can mouse over to the button bar, but it isn't as efficient. So buy a multibutton mouse, and ditch the Apple one.
Another is the inability to access the finder or some menus _without_ a mouse. I hear quick-keys program does this.
A third issue is the default acceleration that most Mac users seem to be happy with. I like to quickly move the mouse ONE inch (not 12, not 6 - ~2, 30 and 15 cm for people that use a real measuring system) and have the cursor move from one screen edge to the other.
I believe a good UI can use the keyboard and mouse independently, and in any user chosen combination of the two. I do AutoCAD and some Photoshop with both.
QUICK NOTE: I am not a big gamer or 3D freak..
Given the absolutely HUGE amounts of whitespace that you used, are you a 2D freak? It looks quite rude. only one open line between paragraphs is needed, and you have two open lines PER SENTENCE.
Why is it that the QWERTY b!tches never admit that their system stinks? It just makes logical sense to put the common characters on the home row (ASDGHJKL;:'" - what a bunch of crap designed to slow people down). The very idea of Dvorak is to minimize excessive motion, If you say it doesn't, you have not analyzed the situation. While it may not be much faster, it might slow down CTS.
I think there is easily be a better system then both, but I have other things to worry about.
He also outlined company concerns that outside search results might not display the most up-to-date, accurate information.
This is full of crap. eBay's 'current' bid prices from their own search engine are typically many hours old, I have even seen day-old bid prices displayed on bids.
And for some odd reason, the search seems to miss some items quite often, and I haven't figured out why yet. A search checking for a certain word in the title or description overlooks items that have that word in it. I am sure it isn't a spelling problem, and I believe it isn't a caps problem.
'Deep Linking' is one thing, but constantly spidering a dynamic database is stupid, and eBay has a right to limit it, but I believe that they should keep it open until it really shows signs of causing trouble.
I don't know about what your troubles were, but I have had very few problems or complaints with SCSI. I have yet to run into cable length problems. Firewire sure is great in theory, but there aren't any true FW drives that I know about, so far they are external with a FW to IDE bridge that I know about. SCSI IDs have never been a problem, just come up with a consistent, easy to remember numbering scheme. On my system, the hard disks are 0,2,3,4 on one chain, another chain has Zip, CD Changer and SyJet on 5,6,7. And I didn't have to look up my
Yes, IDE drives ARE much cheaper. They'll work for anyone. The problem for me is the lack of decent chaining. One U(2)W card can run 15 drives (not worth trying, but you can), as both IDE chains in a standard computer can only run 4 drives. I have seven disk drives in my system, not including the ones that aren't connected but could be (too lazy). For the end user that doesn't do much with computers, IDE is great. The 'hackers' should demand better for themselves, stressing every part of their system.
I've seen standard Ultra33, UW and U2W drives compared on latency and throughput on random seeks - the same drive, different electronics, nets 50% better on UW, 100% better on U2W.
Last I heard, the 'shark' boards on the G(3|4) units can't boot from FW yet. This sounds like a possible security concern too, but the choice isn't available.
Well, if you have been paying attention to posts in the past weeks concerning the EV6 bus (Alpha / Athlon), you would know what I am writing here.
What Alpha busses do is have a 256 bit wide bus running at 87MHz, and multiplex the data to a narrower, faster bus. The switch bus operates at 64 bit / 350 MHz or faster. The dual processor Alphas have 2 64 bit PCI, 2 RAM _AND_ 2 CPU busses, all switched, interconnected and multiplexed. It is somewhat like a siamese computer, any part of the computer can ask any other part for any data. I believe that the dual 500 MHz systems have a theoretical 5.6GB/s bandwidth.
I think another (better?) answer is that gcc/egcs doesn't have much in the way of DSP type stuff, where you do parallel computations. Alphas get performance inherently, as its FPUs are very good, and it does not have to d!ck with SIMD instructions - something that many compilers don't do well anyways - usually you have to call hand coded assembly to get good performance out of SIMD (= single instruction multiple data, where one instruction is executed on multiple sets of data - like MMX, KNI (SSE), AltiVec, etc)
And the raw bandwidth of even the unreleased G4s trail that of three year old Alpha designs anyways, and now there's the switch-matrix arch that gets close to twice that of the new G4's theoretical bandwidth (EV6 500 ->> ~2.6 GB/s, G4 (7400) -> ~0.8 GB/s). This is the 'theoretical', Alphas still get 1.3GB/s in sustained throughput, 50% more than G4s Theoretical
so, why the sudden spurt of belief in apple now that the G4 is out? probably because it signals all the technological merit that the PowerPC really represents... When Tom's Hardware is comparing 10% different rendering times between an Athlon and Dual Celeron, here comes a piece of APPLE hardware that whups them both
Dude, I have yet to see a web benchmark that compares the rendering performance of a 750 / 7400 (G3/G4) against a Pentium anything. Sorry, if Apple wants to get out of just having a 'Photoshop' niche, it should quit spouting photoshop benchmarks and start showing me performance comparision for an app suite and some SPEC marks. Showing some game performance on good, popular games and comparing them with their x86 versions, fine. But show me a useful set of comparisons. Photoshop is heavily abused as a benchmark to favor Macs, as it was designed for Macs in the first place, with a crude port to Windows. ByteMark doesn't cut it either.
IEEE 1394 (I won't use the FW term as it is a trademark) has been chosen as the connector for digital video, namely HDTV, now called Digital Television, plus all digital broadcast editing interconnects are going to use IEEE 1394 if they are not already doing so.
What is hurting the computer implementation is the perception that licening costs too much, and Apple's 1$ fee wasn't much when they tried, but they bowed to pressure to have that fee included with other licences, in a package of 25 cents per port.
USB is an industry developed standard, so that means no one has particular dominance in setting up the standard. A problem is that it is supposedly a true bus, versus a switch architecture. I don't know if I believe this, as hub chips I've looked up can somehow connect devices of varying speeds on different links, each link having its own set of pins on the chip.
Still, IEEE 1394 looks like a far better choice for video, scanning, digital A/V, as you supposedly get guarantied bandwidth, good data rates and bounded latencies. You can get real-time transfers for audio on USB, but it looks like a b!tch to design and program for.
Seriously, he looks like the guy that played the early Lex Luthor on the Lois & Clark series:
http://www.apple.com/pr/profiles.html
If I were him, I'd tell Apple to quit being so dodgy about the subject or else he will be considered like the said evil person!
GNU Public Virus^WLicense
Dude, what is the problem with GPL? I thought the concerns were addressed in the last few flame wars. If you don't like it, use something else. If you have a complaint that it 'absorbs' BSD code, uh, there was a defect in the BSD licence, you know, the same defect that allows Apple to take BSD, make changes, put it under its own licence and call it its own, and saving many changes for closed source. Of course this may have changed, but it seems that BSD licence assumes that people are more kind hearted than the GPL licence does.
I really don't have a problem with companies not using GPL, but many people are wary of any licence in which donated changes can be absorbed and become closed.
I don't think this is true. The 64 bit addressing won't be used, that is all. Most 64 bit machines don't have the amount of memory alone to justify the 64 bit addressing, but it does improve throughbut.
I really hate it when people brag of having X many coats of (laquer no less!) paint on their custom car, so don't start on computers!
Wanting to have that many coats of paint on anything is asking to have it crack on you. Never mind that Laquer is a crappy paint, most likely to oxidize, crack, and is a huge enviromental hazard in application.
I've always hated uncommented code to the point that I over comment a bit. I always love the ability to pick up a random page of code and be able to understand it just by reading and not having to look up all the function calls and interpreting each line. And I can have a hard time remembering my logic in choosing a particular implementation, so I try to leave notes too.
One reason (if not the only reason) that people hate documenting is that it doesn't directly affect the final product - the compiler preprocesses documentation out of the code stream, docs only are the source code communication between programmers. In short, it feels like a waste of time because we like short term effectiveness and productivity over long term maintainability, programmers feel like they are making a difference in writing things that end up in the compiled program structer. It's all psychological.
I don't have the best 'root' document stating everything a code tree does, but it always has something to start from, and a generalized layout and plan of action.
One thing that might help is write everything in pseudocode, and go back to make real code, leaving the pseudo code as comments. It never hurts to think something through twice rather than coding on the fly and forgetting the details of why you did something, saving much debug and rewrite time.
I like to test and compile my code often, every time I finish even a function or a complex loop / conditional.
I suppose some of you might think I am anal, but I've never had porting problems with my code - not a line changes when compiling for 5 different platforms (NT, Solaris, SunOS, Linux Alpha and Intel/AMD).
While I am not against artistic coding, the scientific method can help a lot, as well as communicable clarity in code writing. The compiler can tell you wether your code is legal according to the given set of rules, it can't tell you anything about future maintainability or readability by you or other people.