I guess that would depending on your definition of emulator. (what does.. say.. VMWare classify as?)
By my definition, emulated code is code that is translated at run-time from one ABI to another. Kind of like interpreted code, but binary-to-binary instead of source-to-binary.
The OS X Classic environment provides an interface layer that intercepts system calls from the Classic application and makes that application think it's running on a cooperative-multitasking, shared-memory machine. But there's no translation from one ABI to another going on.
So no, there's no emulation in Mac OS X TruBlueEnvironment.
I think he was also referring to the OS9 > OSX changeover. Switching architectures and including an emulator and all that.
But there are no architectural changes and no emulation involved in running OS 9 apps under OS X. If your app is written to the Carbon API, it just runs. If it isn't, then it runs inside a Classic VM, but that's not emulated. Inside the VM, code executes natively. Sometimes non-Carbon apps, particularly I/O or network bound apps, even run faster under the Classic VM than they do under OS 9!
How can someone possibly think that a 7XX MHz G3 running with slow SDRAM, and a slow IDE harddrive is soo much faster than a 14XX MHz Athlon running DDRAM, and a faster IDE harddrive or a faster scuzzy drive.
My iMac is faster than any other computer I use. Why? Because it spends less time waiting on me.
When I use a PC, I spend more time than I want to futzing around. For instance, when I plug my iBook into the LAN at work, I pull down one menu item and all my network settings change. When I go to the coffee shop and use their 802.11 service, I pull down that menu again and poof! When I go home, poof!
Even in Windows 2000, location management is rudimentary at best, and in most aspects simply absent. With my Mac, I don't have to futz around with that stuff.
Within a certain set of boundaries, it's not about clock speeds, or bus speeds, or hard drive speeds, or any of that shit. It's about the computer not getting in the way when I want to do something.
and what "Transition" are you speaking of? I'm tired of them moving to another, barely compatible platform, including an emulator for the old OS, and calling it "compatible"
Oh, be fair. You had your 68K Mac, and then you had your PowerPC Mac, which would run 68K code in emulation. That's it. We've been using PowerPCs for, what, about 10 years now? I think one major architecture change in 18 years is just fine.
All while ignoring the fundemental problems such as the lack of RAD software like VB and the universally hated AppleTalk protocol.
Bitch all you want. When I plug my iBook into the network at the office, I see all the printers and servers. Immediately. They're just there, you know?
When my boss plugs in his Sony laptop, sometimes he sees the printer and sometimes he doesn't. If he waits a minute, the SMB share on the server will show up. Or maybe it won't.
(Too lazy to click the link? The parent linked to a chart of Apple's stock price over the last two years, showing a fairly significant decline. My link superimposes a chart of Dell's stock price over the same period. The two curves are almost identical. Proving that the parent poster has no idea what he's talking about.)
But should I get the 68k library or the PPC library?
Criticize all you want. The transition from 68K to PowerPC wasn't without bumps. But you know what? It worked. I had one of the first Power Mac 8100s on my desk at work, and all of my applications worked perfectly. Sure, running 68K apps was a little slow, but that problem went away as the big names (Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and so on) came out in PowerPC versions.
Apple was able to pull off the PowerPC transition. The fact that they did it at all was pretty amazing.
Plus which, don't forget the Fat Binary: a single executable that contains both 68K and PowerPC object code. Runs in native mode on either architecture. Great idea, just brilliant. That was an Apple thing.
Oh wait, it says that this text editor isn't compatible with my 5200's SCSI bus when it's not actively terminated.
Oh, wait. I just realized that you're one of those chatbots, aren't you? This sentence was clearly strung together from words and phrases pulled at random out of a dictionary.
macs only appear to be a success because they sell products to the *same* people.
You're simply wrong. According to Apple, of all the people who bought iMacs, 40% of them had never owned a computer of any kind before.
Sure, it's Apple saying that, so consider the source. But despite the apparent prevailing attitude on Slashdot, big companies are not in the habit of out-and-out lying in their marketing materials. There's obviously a grain of truth to the statement.
There are not that many of them, but of those users, there are certainly an abnormal number who are fanatics.
You are clearly an idiot ("little dick syndrome??"), but I feel like responding anyway.
About a month ago I was at a Starbucks in Mt. View, California, checking my email with my iBook. On his way out of the coffee shop, a completely anonymous nobody walked up to me and said, "Nice laptop." I said "thanks," and he walked away.
This sort of thing happens to me fairly regularly.
There may or may not be many Mac fanatics. But you don't have to look very hard to find a Mac admirer. And that's clearly a sign that Apple has done something right.
non stop dvd playback. now its 2002 and no apple laptop can do that
You have no idea what you're talking about. Both Apple laptops currently on the market can play "Titanic" (a little over 3 hours) without swapping batteries, assuming you start with a full charge and don't do anything else while you watch the movie. I've done it myself, on a 14-hour non-stop flight to Australia.
You say: Does this mean we can and should beat the living shit out of jehova's witnesses and other god loving preacher type monstrosities that come my home door? sounds like a great idea to me!
I say: You are clearly a sociopath, and a danger to yourself and others. At worst, your suggestion is criminal; at best, it's stunningly unfunny. Please get up from the computer and check yourself into the nearest facility for the criminally insane immediately. After two weeks of regular group therapy, we'll get together again to see how well you've worked out your violent tendencies.
At what point do the marketing types realize there is a growing segment of the population that 1)actively works to avoid having their "lifestyle information" harvested, and 2)rarely- if ever - does things like click on ads, respond to junk mail or spam, or otherwise do anything that this stuff would help?
Think of it like evolution. Once you get so old that you can no longer reproduce, natural selection doesn't care about you. You're outside the system. The same forces act on you, but your success or failure has no effect whatsoever on your species.
Same thing with advertising. If you don't participate in the see-buy cycle, then you're outside the system. You still get advertised to, but your choices have no effect whatsoever on your market segment.
In other words, as long as there are enough people out there who respond positively or neutrally to this type of thing, then there's a good reason to keep doing it.
Another analogy. People hand out flyers on street corners because, although 90% of the people may ignore the flyers, 10% of the people may respond to them.
On the other hand, if that 90% of the people, instead of ignoring the flyers, punched the flyer-hander-outer in the nose and burned down the flyer-hander-outer's store, you'd see a sharp decline in flyer-hand-outism.
It has nothing to do with the size of pointers. It has everything to do with the size of the registers. How did you get to be posting at +2 with a clue of this size?
A chip with 64-bit registers can operate either as a 32-bit or 64-bit chip. (Or, presumably, as a 4 or 8 or 16, or whatever.) If the application code was compiled to an ABI that uses a 32-bit pointer, then it executes as 32-bit code; and vice versa. See the MIPS R1x000 architecture for information about this.
The thing that distinguishes 64-bit operation from 32-bit operation is that extra-large pointer, which allows contiguous memory addressing in vast excess of the 2 GB limit of 32-bit code.
A chip with one or more 128-bit-wide registers, like say the PowerPC G4 with AltiVec (the precise model number escapes me), is not, de facto, a 128-bit chip. Likewise, Intel chips with MMX have a number of 64-bit registers, but that doesn't make it a 64-bit chip.
You're simply confusing vector processing (operating atomically on a vector, or array, of values) with 128-bit addressing (using a 128-bit-wide pointer to identify memory addresses).
I was only trying to make the point that 128-bits is useful in some niche applications, and it has already been done.
But you and the other guy are talking about two different things. He's talking about 128-bit addressing, or a chip that uses 128-bit pointers. That would allow you to address 2^128 bits of RAM, which is lots, lots. (2^64 is 18 million TB, I think.)
You're talking about vector registers, which are multiples of your pointer or integer size. A chip could grab four 32-bit values in a single fetch and store them in a 128-bit register, so the chip could work on all four of them without having to go back to cache or main memory for the next value. This is not a new idea, but it's also got nothing to do with 128-bit addressing.
Re:Two transition periods?
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Whilst 16 Exobytes might sound like a BIGNUM for RAM, it isn't that much of a bignum for large scale disk arrays.
Actually, it is a very large number for disk arrays.
I'm unaware of a filesystem that can scale as large as XFS; there may be others, though. XFS uses 64-bit addressing, allowing the filesystem to scale to 18 million terabytes (or 18 exabytes, if you prefer). No filesystem in the world has ever remotely approached that size. According to this nifty site, total worldwide disk drive production for the year 2000 only totalled 2.5 million terabytes. So to build a filesystem that's 18 million TB big, you'd have to commandeer all hard drive production, worldwide, for about 12 years.
They estimate that the total amount of data stored on hard drives in the entire world is only about 4 million TB. That means you could theoretically put all the data in the world that is currently stored on hard drives-- all the pr0n, all the MP3s, all the source code, all the PowerPoints, everything-- on one server with one big filesystem, and only use about 1/4 of the filesystem's capacity. Mount it under/earth and set the permissions to 700, please.
Of course, this fact fails to address your basic premise, which seems to be that assigning unique integer addresses to every byte that a computer can access would be a reasonable thing to do.
Even if there were a reason to do such a thing, don't forget that increasing your pointer size decreases your cache efficiency; you can fit twice as many 32-bit pointers in your cache as you can 64-bit pointers, which results in fewer cache misses and overall better performance. (How much better depends on how cache-friendly your task is in the first place, but 32-bit will never be less cache-friendly than 64-bit.)
(FWIW, today's 64-bit processors don't offer all 64 bits of data addressing yet, because no one has a need for more than 40-something, so that's what they offer.)
That's not true. MIPS R1x000 processors, which I use exclusively at work, support either a 32-bit mode with a 32-bit pointer, or a 64-bit mode with a pointer that is a full 64 bits wide. You can malloc() all day long in 64-bit mode.
Can someone post a coherent version of the instructions on how to implement the Maya krack?
It's an intelligence test. If you can't figure out the crack, you have zero chance of ever figuring out Maya.
I've had better luck farting around with NASTRAN or SAP than Maya. It's fantastic software, truly amazing, but utterly impenetrable if you don't have the documentation or a tutorial or something.
Apple will never go back to generic looking cases.
Apple doesn't have to go back to generic-looking cases. A one- or two-rack-unit case doesn't leave a ton of room to be creative, but it's still possible to make 'em distinctive.
Look at the SGI Origin 300 and Origin 3000* for an example of a rackmount system that's distinctive and cool.
* Underneath the rack skins, the bricks in an Origin 3000 are 19-inch rackmount components, between one and four units high. SGI racks come with extra hardware in the back for managing all the cables the system requires, but other than that they're not special.
I thought it was 17Mbit, but heck, I could be wrong!
19 Mbps is the capacity of the broadcast channel. The broadcaster can choose to squeeze it down as far as he wants beneath that, for storage reasons or whatever. So you may be right after all.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that would depending on your definition of emulator. (what does.. say.. VMWare classify as?)
By my definition, emulated code is code that is translated at run-time from one ABI to another. Kind of like interpreted code, but binary-to-binary instead of source-to-binary.
The OS X Classic environment provides an interface layer that intercepts system calls from the Classic application and makes that application think it's running on a cooperative-multitasking, shared-memory machine. But there's no translation from one ABI to another going on.
So no, there's no emulation in Mac OS X TruBlueEnvironment.
I think he was also referring to the OS9 > OSX changeover. Switching architectures and including an emulator and all that.
But there are no architectural changes and no emulation involved in running OS 9 apps under OS X. If your app is written to the Carbon API, it just runs. If it isn't, then it runs inside a Classic VM, but that's not emulated. Inside the VM, code executes natively. Sometimes non-Carbon apps, particularly I/O or network bound apps, even run faster under the Classic VM than they do under OS 9!
How can someone possibly think that a 7XX MHz G3 running with slow SDRAM, and a slow IDE harddrive is soo much faster than a 14XX MHz Athlon running DDRAM, and a faster IDE harddrive or a faster scuzzy drive.
My iMac is faster than any other computer I use. Why? Because it spends less time waiting on me.
When I use a PC, I spend more time than I want to futzing around. For instance, when I plug my iBook into the LAN at work, I pull down one menu item and all my network settings change. When I go to the coffee shop and use their 802.11 service, I pull down that menu again and poof! When I go home, poof!
Even in Windows 2000, location management is rudimentary at best, and in most aspects simply absent. With my Mac, I don't have to futz around with that stuff.
Within a certain set of boundaries, it's not about clock speeds, or bus speeds, or hard drive speeds, or any of that shit. It's about the computer not getting in the way when I want to do something.
and what "Transition" are you speaking of? I'm tired of them moving to another, barely compatible platform, including an emulator for the old OS, and calling it "compatible"
Oh, be fair. You had your 68K Mac, and then you had your PowerPC Mac, which would run 68K code in emulation. That's it. We've been using PowerPCs for, what, about 10 years now? I think one major architecture change in 18 years is just fine.
All while ignoring the fundemental problems such as the lack of RAD software like VB and the universally hated AppleTalk protocol.
Bitch all you want. When I plug my iBook into the network at the office, I see all the printers and servers. Immediately. They're just there, you know?
When my boss plugs in his Sony laptop, sometimes he sees the printer and sometimes he doesn't. If he waits a minute, the SMB share on the server will show up. Or maybe it won't.
Pfeh. I'll choose AFP over AppleTalk any day.
its UNIX *now*, but how the hell did it get a userbase with crappy OS 9 and less?
;-)
Amazing. With all its shortcomings, tons and tons of Mac users still chose OS 9 over any alternative operating system.
You're right. Sure musta sucked.
Here's the last two years. Starting to see a pattern forming?
Why, yes.
(Too lazy to click the link? The parent linked to a chart of Apple's stock price over the last two years, showing a fairly significant decline. My link superimposes a chart of Dell's stock price over the same period. The two curves are almost identical. Proving that the parent poster has no idea what he's talking about.)
But should I get the 68k library or the PPC library?
Criticize all you want. The transition from 68K to PowerPC wasn't without bumps. But you know what? It worked. I had one of the first Power Mac 8100s on my desk at work, and all of my applications worked perfectly. Sure, running 68K apps was a little slow, but that problem went away as the big names (Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and so on) came out in PowerPC versions.
Apple was able to pull off the PowerPC transition. The fact that they did it at all was pretty amazing.
Plus which, don't forget the Fat Binary: a single executable that contains both 68K and PowerPC object code. Runs in native mode on either architecture. Great idea, just brilliant. That was an Apple thing.
Oh wait, it says that this text editor isn't compatible with my 5200's SCSI bus when it's not actively terminated.
Oh, wait. I just realized that you're one of those chatbots, aren't you? This sentence was clearly strung together from words and phrases pulled at random out of a dictionary.
Oh, well.
macs only appear to be a success because they sell products to the *same* people.
You're simply wrong. According to Apple, of all the people who bought iMacs, 40% of them had never owned a computer of any kind before.
Sure, it's Apple saying that, so consider the source. But despite the apparent prevailing attitude on Slashdot, big companies are not in the habit of out-and-out lying in their marketing materials. There's obviously a grain of truth to the statement.
There are not that many of them, but of those users, there are certainly an abnormal number who are fanatics.
You are clearly an idiot ("little dick syndrome??"), but I feel like responding anyway.
About a month ago I was at a Starbucks in Mt. View, California, checking my email with my iBook. On his way out of the coffee shop, a completely anonymous nobody walked up to me and said, "Nice laptop." I said "thanks," and he walked away.
This sort of thing happens to me fairly regularly.
There may or may not be many Mac fanatics. But you don't have to look very hard to find a Mac admirer. And that's clearly a sign that Apple has done something right.
non stop dvd playback. now its 2002 and no apple laptop can do that
You have no idea what you're talking about. Both Apple laptops currently on the market can play "Titanic" (a little over 3 hours) without swapping batteries, assuming you start with a full charge and don't do anything else while you watch the movie. I've done it myself, on a 14-hour non-stop flight to Australia.
You say: Does this mean we can and should beat the living shit out of jehova's witnesses and other god loving preacher type monstrosities that come my home door? sounds like a great idea to me!
I say: You are clearly a sociopath, and a danger to yourself and others. At worst, your suggestion is criminal; at best, it's stunningly unfunny. Please get up from the computer and check yourself into the nearest facility for the criminally insane immediately. After two weeks of regular group therapy, we'll get together again to see how well you've worked out your violent tendencies.
What is that, a suggestion?
The only correct answer to that question is "no."
At what point do the marketing types realize there is a growing segment of the population that 1)actively works to avoid having their "lifestyle information" harvested, and 2)rarely- if ever - does things like click on ads, respond to junk mail or spam, or otherwise do anything that this stuff would help?
Think of it like evolution. Once you get so old that you can no longer reproduce, natural selection doesn't care about you. You're outside the system. The same forces act on you, but your success or failure has no effect whatsoever on your species.
Same thing with advertising. If you don't participate in the see-buy cycle, then you're outside the system. You still get advertised to, but your choices have no effect whatsoever on your market segment.
In other words, as long as there are enough people out there who respond positively or neutrally to this type of thing, then there's a good reason to keep doing it.
Another analogy. People hand out flyers on street corners because, although 90% of the people may ignore the flyers, 10% of the people may respond to them.
On the other hand, if that 90% of the people, instead of ignoring the flyers, punched the flyer-hander-outer in the nose and burned down the flyer-hander-outer's store, you'd see a sharp decline in flyer-hand-outism.
Buy a petaserver from Sony. You use (say) 10Tb of cache for the tape robots, and store up to a petabyte of data.
A petabyte is only 1024 TB. The sizes we're talking about are about seven orders of magnitude larger than that.
Unless, of course, you have 18,000 Sony Petasites at 1000 TB each.
Do you have 18,000 Petasites?
It has nothing to do with the size of pointers. It has everything to do with the size of the registers. How did you get to be posting at +2 with a clue of this size?
A chip with 64-bit registers can operate either as a 32-bit or 64-bit chip. (Or, presumably, as a 4 or 8 or 16, or whatever.) If the application code was compiled to an ABI that uses a 32-bit pointer, then it executes as 32-bit code; and vice versa. See the MIPS R1x000 architecture for information about this.
The thing that distinguishes 64-bit operation from 32-bit operation is that extra-large pointer, which allows contiguous memory addressing in vast excess of the 2 GB limit of 32-bit code.
A chip with one or more 128-bit-wide registers, like say the PowerPC G4 with AltiVec (the precise model number escapes me), is not, de facto, a 128-bit chip. Likewise, Intel chips with MMX have a number of 64-bit registers, but that doesn't make it a 64-bit chip.
You're simply confusing vector processing (operating atomically on a vector, or array, of values) with 128-bit addressing (using a 128-bit-wide pointer to identify memory addresses).
Correct, but a "128-bit processor" doesn't mean one with a 128-bit address bus.
No, it means one with 128-bit-wide pointers. This isn't complicated...
I was only trying to make the point that 128-bits is useful in some niche applications, and it has already been done.
But you and the other guy are talking about two different things. He's talking about 128-bit addressing, or a chip that uses 128-bit pointers. That would allow you to address 2^128 bits of RAM, which is lots, lots. (2^64 is 18 million TB, I think.)
You're talking about vector registers, which are multiples of your pointer or integer size. A chip could grab four 32-bit values in a single fetch and store them in a 128-bit register, so the chip could work on all four of them without having to go back to cache or main memory for the next value. This is not a new idea, but it's also got nothing to do with 128-bit addressing.
Whilst 16 Exobytes might sound like a BIGNUM for RAM, it isn't that much of a bignum for large scale disk arrays.
/earth and set the permissions to 700, please.
Actually, it is a very large number for disk arrays.
I'm unaware of a filesystem that can scale as large as XFS; there may be others, though. XFS uses 64-bit addressing, allowing the filesystem to scale to 18 million terabytes (or 18 exabytes, if you prefer). No filesystem in the world has ever remotely approached that size. According to this nifty site, total worldwide disk drive production for the year 2000 only totalled 2.5 million terabytes. So to build a filesystem that's 18 million TB big, you'd have to commandeer all hard drive production, worldwide, for about 12 years.
They estimate that the total amount of data stored on hard drives in the entire world is only about 4 million TB. That means you could theoretically put all the data in the world that is currently stored on hard drives-- all the pr0n, all the MP3s, all the source code, all the PowerPoints, everything-- on one server with one big filesystem, and only use about 1/4 of the filesystem's capacity. Mount it under
Of course, this fact fails to address your basic premise, which seems to be that assigning unique integer addresses to every byte that a computer can access would be a reasonable thing to do.
Even if there were a reason to do such a thing, don't forget that increasing your pointer size decreases your cache efficiency; you can fit twice as many 32-bit pointers in your cache as you can 64-bit pointers, which results in fewer cache misses and overall better performance. (How much better depends on how cache-friendly your task is in the first place, but 32-bit will never be less cache-friendly than 64-bit.)
(FWIW, today's 64-bit processors don't offer all 64 bits of data addressing yet, because no one has a need for more than 40-something, so that's what they offer.)
That's not true. MIPS R1x000 processors, which I use exclusively at work, support either a 32-bit mode with a 32-bit pointer, or a 64-bit mode with a pointer that is a full 64 bits wide. You can malloc() all day long in 64-bit mode.
Can someone post a coherent version of the instructions on how to implement the Maya krack?
It's an intelligence test. If you can't figure out the crack, you have zero chance of ever figuring out Maya.
I've had better luck farting around with NASTRAN or SAP than Maya. It's fantastic software, truly amazing, but utterly impenetrable if you don't have the documentation or a tutorial or something.
If you can demonstrate that your bandwidth to the Internet is greater than about 800 KB/s, I will personally give you a cookie.
Don't waste your money on an expensive router with a 100 Mbps uplink port unless you can take advantage of it somehow.
The Google Search Appliance isn't a drab beige rackmount.
No, it's a drab yellow rackmount. Spray-painting a standard aluminum OEM case doesn't suffice to make it cool.
Apple will never go back to generic looking cases.
Apple doesn't have to go back to generic-looking cases. A one- or two-rack-unit case doesn't leave a ton of room to be creative, but it's still possible to make 'em distinctive.
Look at the SGI Origin 300 and Origin 3000* for an example of a rackmount system that's distinctive and cool.
* Underneath the rack skins, the bricks in an Origin 3000 are 19-inch rackmount components, between one and four units high. SGI racks come with extra hardware in the back for managing all the cables the system requires, but other than that they're not special.
I thought it was 17Mbit, but heck, I could be wrong!
19 Mbps is the capacity of the broadcast channel. The broadcaster can choose to squeeze it down as far as he wants beneath that, for storage reasons or whatever. So you may be right after all.