If people can call Linux an operating system, then I can call Mac OS X "Unix".
Re:The writer TOTALLY doesn't get it.
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
evolved this way through error and natural selection.
Actually the system has not evolved at all. The coin and dollar denominations are decided and enforced by a committee and political dancing. There is no chance for evolution in the system. If there where, the penny would be gone and the government would stop issuing these stupid new useless coins every few years.
The user notes that he knows about that preference of not loading images.
What is missing in Safari is the ability to manually load individual images when you have images set to not load.
Apparenlty MSIE has this feature, I know iCab has it (along with a lot of other's I'd like to see in Safari).
When images aren't loaded, you can right-click (cmd-click) on the image placeholder and choose something like "load image", and only that image will be loaded. In iCab this is especially useful, as sometimes your image filtering rules cause a useful image to not load. That's the price I pay for not being forced to load all those damned flashy GIFs and springy FLASH animations though.
I'm sure this will make it in to Safari at some point, perhaps the initial non-beta release. While we're at it, I'd like a way to disable the "You seem to be looking for something" dialog when you click the "back" button more than few times. So many of the site's don't change their page titles, and going back one-by-one is the only way to locate the content again without page previews.
I DLed the new Safari a few hours a go and just tried sending a bug report.
It worked flawlessly, just as it did the last time I used it.
Perhaps there was a transitory problem on the network when you tried?
Re:What the heck is 'Altivec' anyway?
on
Inside the PowerPC 970
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Altivec is Motorola's name for the vector processing unit. The unit handles SIMD commands. SIMD stands for Single Instruction, Multiple Data. Basically, intead of looping through a list of 50,000 values one by one and multiplying each value by PI for instance, you simply tell the CPU where the list is, and to multiply it by PI.
In a much simplified analogy, it's like lighting 200 candles with a flame thrower instead of one by one with a match.
The record companies (claim they) are loosing billions of dollars to piracy/sharing. They attempt to solve this problem by copy protecting the CDs and forcing you (ineffectually) to use embedded players when the CD is played in a computer
Am I the only one that sees the next step: advertisements on the CD. Most audio CDs only fill 80% of a standard 640MB CD, never mind the extra storage you can get on a 700MB CD. I don't think they'll do video, but I certainly see audio only, or Flash based animation type ads. Your listening to your new CD lawfully through the embeded player on your PC, a track ends. Your are trated to a 30 second "radio" spot for some detergent, new running shoe, or a car. This happens three or four times during the length of the CD.
The record company is happy now because even if your pirate the CD, they will have made money from selling the advertising time to some big sponsor.
Of course, the embeded player will not allow you to skip the ad, or fast forward past it.
The higher-end these components are the less likely you are to neeed upgrading ot a new machine in the future. I've finally decided that my G3/333 needs replacement after about 4 years. I just DLed the new UT2003 demo. I get about.5 frames per second. Mind you, each frame is rendered beautifully and with stunning detail (even of the lowest settings).
The speed imrovements of the bus and memory speed increases I can not debate as I have not seen any benchmarks that attempt to quantify that difference alone (throttling down/up CPUs, etc). Game slike UT2003 and beyond will start making 2x AGP look sluggish rather soon now. the USB2 I answered in another reply. There was a thread on Slashdot and on another site where users had confirmed that the new MoBo has a USB2 chipset and that different drivers intalled will enable it. Not having access to a new G4 (donations welcomed) I can not verify the information myself and trust (haha) the posters.
I just don't see where the cost savings will come from to get to your target price range that still allow Apple to maintain a profit margin that allow the level of R&D they must maintain.
To design and produce a quality and vertical version of the Xserve would be expenive, but lets say it could still cost $100 less than the current tower case. Processors in several grades: Save $140 using an 800Mhz G4 instead of 1GHz? Optional HDs: $60 for not installing the 60Gig Optional optical media: $50 for not installing DVD-ROM/CDRW drive The FireWire and USB optional would save maybe $20 in parts not installed on the mobo. Optional video: $90 saved for the chip and connector To remove the FW,USB and video by redesigning a new motherboard would likely elminate these savings.
So, omitting the "add-in" hardware from Apple's low-cost G4 tower could potentially get the price down to $1040 from $1500 That still leaves $540 that we have to cut to reach the high end of your desired range. Let's assume that Apple is willing to halve their profit margin on this machine just to get market share and that cut accounts for $300. The machine retail price is still $740, or $240 more than your upper target price, and there isn't much more one can remove and still have a functional system. I fact, you have to ADD cost to figure in your labor for all the configuration and troubleshooting you'll be doing.
I think the only way you can get hardware at the prices you are looking for is to have a company produce it that doesn't have to support R&D, and is willing to run on razor thin profit margins and hope that volume will keep the profits up. IE Dell, Gateway, and the other un-inspired harware spewers.
I thought it was confirmed that Apple's most recent systems have USB2 chipset on them, and that a driver change would enable it. Similar to the way a prefeene fil edit enables Quartz Extreme on PCI Radeon cards.
This is not always the case. Competition will drive prices lower, but will not necessarily advance technology. R&D isn't financed on a 5% margin. Look at Gateway, Dell, or any PC clone maker and figure out what they've innovated in the last 5 years. Nothing.
My understanding is that there is actually no technical barrier to anyone building a mac clone motherboard. The ROM used to be the killer as it required licensing from Apple, but since OpenFirmware that has not been the case. I think that because as of the G4 - AGP, there is no ROM version or size listed in the Apple Specifications database.
So that simply leaves making a MoBo that can run PPC chips, and interface with things the way Mac OS X expects.
Using the prices the author posts in the review, adding in $120 for Mac OS X and $50 for labor the real cost for hardware for this machine comes to $944, and that doesn't include shipping. Let's assume $5 per item and that's another $20 for a total of $964 for this "low cost Mac"
Okay, but Apple sells a spiffy new machine for $1,500. That's a difference of $536. Now the question is this:
Are the "extras" you get with the new Apple Mac worth the extra $536? Lets look at the "extras":
(numbers in parenthesis are estimated upgrade costs) 1. Support and warranty. You have someone to point the finger at with hardware failures (priceless??) 2. 200Mhz faster CPU speed ($225 assumes purchasing 1Ghz instead of 800) 3. 33Mhz?? faster bus speed (can't upgrade) 4. 2x faster memory (can't upgrade) 5. 32MB more Video RAM ( $65 more than the 7000 for the Radeon 8500) 6. GPU is about 2x more powerful 7. FireWire 800 ($100 includes USB2) 8. USB 2.0 9. Built-in AirPort antenna 10. AGP port is 2x faster (can't upgrade) 11. A better looking case
The things that can be upgraded will cost $390 to do so, and a total build-it-yourself cost of $1,356. And this machine still doesn't perform as well as the new system will, and would cost only $140 less than the new Apple PowerMac.
Archival data tapes are designed to last from 30 to over 100 years if maintained reasonably well. Disk drives have what, 1 year warranties now? When a disk drive is not in use the magnetic media still does degrade, and the heads can stick to the platters over time (unless you have a newer head parking drive). To guarantee that the drives were not degrading you would need to exercise them on a regular basis. To me, this defies the purpose of archiving.
It is true that tape can break, melt, snap etc. But why exactly are you going to be storing your archival tapes in your hot car in summer? Even if the tape breaks, you can still access every other part of the tape that is not damaged. It's a simple splice job that you can perform at home. If your HD fails at a bad spot the entire file or even disk may need expensive recovery proceedures. If you drop the drive, you will likely damage all the contents (head crash, media scratch or warping). If you drop a tape you will damage the case and can respool the tape to a new cartridge.
There is simply no comparison. For stability during long term storage, tape is the best option. Yes, HDs can be used but in the end you will pay more and waste more time averting the potential failure points.
Most of the suggestions I saw are to put the video on to some sort of rotational media. Disk drives, or DVD are the two most common offerings.
There's one thing I think that history has show us is that rotational media go obsolete quite quickly, and when they do the technologies to play them quickly disappear from the marketplace. If you go this route, you will also need to archive the entire playing system, not just the media. In that vein, the TiVo idea is perhaps your best bet. Ex: if you performed this project 15 years ago, you would likely have used MFM or RLL drives, now you can't buy them, their controllers or cables, and I don't think modern hardware or OSes would even know what to do with them.
Tape has a much longer life-span in the consumer marketplace. Without too much difficulty, one can still purchase an open reel tape deck, an 8 track or cassette player. Try finding a phonograph that plays 78rpm records though. It's damned near impossible.
I fear CDs and DVDs will get the same treatment. Once the next thing replaces them, their players will disappear from the market. and locating one in 15 years may prove difficult. For instance, once we get enough bandwidth, video on demand may get us to all toss out our DVD players and disks.
I think the best compromise you can make is to use MiniDV. Especially if you have a compatible camcorder or deck already. The benefits are: 1. No problems dealing with time-code transcoding or creep 2. No audio sync problems 3. Digital storage on tape. Later generations will not suffer degradation 4. Easily imported to computer for duplication or storage on other media (back to VHS for example) 5. If similar to other tape formats, will endure longer than most rotational media of its generation 6. You can fit two hours of VHS tape on to an 80 minute MiniDV if you use EP; which on MOST devices yields no degradation of video or audio. I personally have not encountered any more dropouts from EP than from SP on any of four devices I've used.
I might even import the video from MiniDV to computer, perform some enhancements (sharpness, color, contrast) then write it back out to MiniDV. Then write back out to VHS so you can watch the video on a regular basis. You don't want to use your digital master tape for regular viewing.
I just want to point one thing out to you: 15 years ago you would be doing that on MFM or RLL interface drives. Now nobody knows what those are. The same will happen in another 15 years with IDE. Some sort of tape mechanism is the best way to go. Heck, I can SILL purchase open reel and 8track players.
300 million people live in the US (fewer actually closer to 290M)
Apple's market share here is liberally 5% or about 15 million
Of those, lets assume that only 40% actually own hardware and software capable of accessing the service
That's a consumer base of about 6 million. Or one in six people purchased a song on average
Now let's (very unscientifically) go back and extrapolate that to the Windows population release date:
60% of the population runs a Windows computer (a number out of my arse): 180 million Wintel users
Lets say that 60% of the WinTel population own a system and software capable of running the to-be-released iTunes 4 for Windows. That's 108 million
If one in six of those potential buyers purchases just one song each, that's a release week of 18 million songs sold.
And the for the world: Assuming that Apple gets licensing, and with the following numbers, I think they have some leverage. The record labels should be drooling over this type of product movement.
Population 6.3 billion Minus the US is 6 billion (yes, the US accounts for less that 5% of the world population. They sure don't act like it)
Let's aim low 20% of the world has the hardware and software capable of accessing the service: 1.2 billion potential customers.
one in twenty of those are actually interested in, and use the service to purchase one song: 60 million songs sold in the first week!
** Note: all these numbers except the populations and the first week US sales figures are totally made up. I did absolutely NO research on world PC usage statistics or Internet access. The census figures are drawn from www.populationconnection.org. These calculations are based on speculation, and are not meant to indicate Apple's or anyone else's actual foreseeable income.
I remember the FPU issue. I also a recall a simple 20KB freeware download that fixed the issue that was released by third parties about a week after the changeover.
I don't think I ever wrote that there weren't problems with the transitions or that they were seamless, just that they did not require the vendors to immediately re-compile or wose, re-write, thier apps to run on the new platform.
Thanks for remiding me about the NuBus->PCI, I knew I was omitting a biggie but just could not recall it at such a late hour. But that was just an inconvienence to the few nut cases like myself who had a Quadra 900 with all 5 (or most) of the NuBus slots filled up.
You need to learn some more about the PPC arcitecture. PPC was designed from the ground up to scale to 64bit without affecting the performance of 32bit apps on the same processor. 32 and 64bit comingled apps can live quite happily on the same machine. There is no porting or special software required. When a developer gets around to porting their app(s) to 64bitness, they can take advantage of newer features and higher performance.
The 32/64 bit conversion should go at least as smoothly as all the others: System 6->System 7+,68K->PPC,G3->G4, OS9->OS x. In each case the developer was under no pressure to release (properly written) software specially compiled for the new arcitecture, the hardware and/or OS masked the change and allowed the older apps to "just work".
Running any version of MacOS in 64MB of memory is rather constricting, but I think there's either something wrong with your hardware, you're running an older OS (Pre 9), or you have virtual memory turned on and the OS is attempting to use the swap space as a copy buffer (realted to tthe older OS issue and low-memory)
I don't know what you mean by "they". If you mean the tester in this article, I have no idea. Why didn't they test any number of codecs (sorenson, MPEG4, DV,...) If you mean the people who developed DV... probably because the codec you describe was not developed when DV was. DV is I think about a decade old now. You also say that the codec "often gives me a 3:1 compression ratio". DV is guaranteed to give you 5:1; no matter what. You can bet the farm on DV's data rate and that is VERY important when writing to tape.
Forgive me, I mixed up some terminology. It's simply semantics As for the whole "equals follows", the key is that there must be an equal sign between the attribute "type" and the value "crash". The equal sign must be the next token processesed after the attribute name. If the equal sign is ommited, that is invalid HTML and should be ignored.
It is a buffer underflow in that the buffer holding the attribue's value is expected to contain something, meaning more than nothing. When the buffer contains less data than expected (nothing in this case), but the program still allows processing of the buffer, that is a buffer underflow. The problem stems from a buffer of smaller size than expected. If the rendering engine simply checked that any value for the "type" attribute contains at least one character, this would not be an issue, and the rendering engine would probably just ignore the type attribute and use the default if one was defined.
Either of these checks would prevent the engine from crashing.
I made no such complaint about MS's security record. I stated that BG made security and stability the prime issue in the company. As I stated in another reply, the fact is that many of their updates are to repair problems caused by previous updates. I don't run any M.S. software so I have no first had knowledge of what exactly these things fix.
I do know (for comparison) that most major Unix systems only need to release security updates every few weeks at most to months.
Except that many of teh updates are to fix problems caused by previous updates. It is a reccomendation of Microsoft that all people running Windows should run virus protection software. A recent HotFix for XP casued the operating system to slow to a crawl after the hotfix was installed, if the user had virus protectio software installed. Seriously... what kind of bonehead maneuver is it to release a patch that you haven't tested as being compatible with software that you officially recommend??
I like the "neither technology nor laws are yet capable of completely dealing with the plague." So they'll just give up completely.
Pehaps we should also apply this to: the "drug war", the "war on terror", welfare/social assistance. In each case, no amount of technology and no volume of new laws will completely solve the problem. I hearby suggest that we give up on those fronts as well. Take the billions of dollars that is used for those purposes and cut taxes by the same amount. There's your tax cut funding Mr. Bush!
Slashdot Mirror
If people can call Linux an operating system, then I can call Mac OS X "Unix".
Actually the system has not evolved at all. The coin and dollar denominations are decided and enforced by a committee and political dancing. There is no chance for evolution in the system. If there where, the penny would be gone and the government would stop issuing these stupid new useless coins every few years.
The user notes that he knows about that preference of not loading images.
What is missing in Safari is the ability to manually load individual images when you have images set to not load.
Apparenlty MSIE has this feature, I know iCab has it (along with a lot of other's I'd like to see in Safari).
When images aren't loaded, you can right-click (cmd-click) on the image placeholder and choose something like "load image", and only that image will be loaded. In iCab this is especially useful, as sometimes your image filtering rules cause a useful image to not load. That's the price I pay for not being forced to load all those damned flashy GIFs and springy FLASH animations though.
I'm sure this will make it in to Safari at some point, perhaps the initial non-beta release. While we're at it, I'd like a way to disable the "You seem to be looking for something" dialog when you click the "back" button more than few times. So many of the site's don't change their page titles, and going back one-by-one is the only way to locate the content again without page previews.
I DLed the new Safari a few hours a go and just tried sending a bug report.
It worked flawlessly, just as it did the last time I used it.
Perhaps there was a transitory problem on the network when you tried?
Altivec is Motorola's name for the vector processing unit. The unit handles SIMD commands. SIMD stands for Single Instruction, Multiple Data. Basically, intead of looping through a list of 50,000 values one by one and multiplying each value by PI for instance, you simply tell the CPU where the list is, and to multiply it by PI.
In a much simplified analogy, it's like lighting 200 candles with a flame thrower instead of one by one with a match.
Okay, okay...
The record companies (claim they) are loosing billions of dollars to piracy/sharing. They attempt to solve this problem by copy protecting the CDs and forcing you (ineffectually) to use embedded players when the CD is played in a computer
Am I the only one that sees the next step: advertisements on the CD. Most audio CDs only fill 80% of a standard 640MB CD, never mind the extra storage you can get on a 700MB CD. I don't think they'll do video, but I certainly see audio only, or Flash based animation type ads.
Your listening to your new CD lawfully through the embeded player on your PC, a track ends. Your are trated to a 30 second "radio" spot for some detergent, new running shoe, or a car. This happens three or four times during the length of the CD.
The record company is happy now because even if your pirate the CD, they will have made money from selling the advertising time to some big sponsor.
Of course, the embeded player will not allow you to skip the ad, or fast forward past it.
Damn I'm happy I can already use the iTMS.
The higher-end these components are the less likely you are to neeed upgrading ot a new machine in the future. I've finally decided that my G3/333 needs replacement after about 4 years. I just DLed the new UT2003 demo. I get about .5 frames per second. Mind you, each frame is rendered beautifully and with stunning detail (even of the lowest settings).
The speed imrovements of the bus and memory speed increases I can not debate as I have not seen any benchmarks that attempt to quantify that difference alone (throttling down/up CPUs, etc). Game slike UT2003 and beyond will start making 2x AGP look sluggish rather soon now.
the USB2 I answered in another reply. There was a thread on Slashdot and on another site where users had confirmed that the new MoBo has a USB2 chipset and that different drivers intalled will enable it. Not having access to a new G4 (donations welcomed) I can not verify the information myself and trust (haha) the posters.
I just don't see where the cost savings will come from to get to your target price range that still allow Apple to maintain a profit margin that allow the level of R&D they must maintain.
To design and produce a quality and vertical version of the Xserve would be expenive, but lets say it could still cost $100 less than the current tower case.
Processors in several grades: Save $140 using an 800Mhz G4 instead of 1GHz?
Optional HDs: $60 for not installing the 60Gig
Optional optical media: $50 for not installing DVD-ROM/CDRW drive
The FireWire and USB optional would save maybe $20 in parts not installed on the mobo.
Optional video: $90 saved for the chip and connector
To remove the FW,USB and video by redesigning a new motherboard would likely elminate these savings.
So, omitting the "add-in" hardware from Apple's low-cost G4 tower could potentially get the price down to $1040 from $1500
That still leaves $540 that we have to cut to reach the high end of your desired range.
Let's assume that Apple is willing to halve their profit margin on this machine just to get market share and that cut accounts for $300. The machine retail price is still $740, or $240 more than your upper target price, and there isn't much more one can remove and still have a functional system. I fact, you have to ADD cost to figure in your labor for all the configuration and troubleshooting you'll be doing.
I think the only way you can get hardware at the prices you are looking for is to have a company produce it that doesn't have to support R&D, and is willing to run on razor thin profit margins and hope that volume will keep the profits up. IE Dell, Gateway, and the other un-inspired harware spewers.
I thought it was confirmed that Apple's most recent systems have USB2 chipset on them, and that a driver change would enable it. Similar to the way a prefeene fil edit enables Quartz Extreme on PCI Radeon cards.
Slashdot article
Quoted MacNN report
This is not always the case. Competition will drive prices lower, but will not necessarily advance technology. R&D isn't financed on a 5% margin. Look at Gateway, Dell, or any PC clone maker and figure out what they've innovated in the last 5 years. Nothing.
My understanding is that there is actually no technical barrier to anyone building a mac clone motherboard. The ROM used to be the killer as it required licensing from Apple, but since OpenFirmware that has not been the case. I think that because as of the G4 - AGP, there is no ROM version or size listed in the Apple Specifications database.
So that simply leaves making a MoBo that can run PPC chips, and interface with things the way Mac OS X expects.
Using the prices the author posts in the review, adding in $120 for Mac OS X and $50 for labor the real cost for hardware for this machine comes to $944, and that doesn't include shipping. Let's assume $5 per item and that's another $20 for a total of $964 for this "low cost Mac"
Okay, but Apple sells a spiffy new machine for $1,500. That's a difference of $536. Now the question is this:
Are the "extras" you get with the new Apple Mac worth the extra $536? Lets look at the "extras":
(numbers in parenthesis are estimated upgrade costs)
1. Support and warranty. You have someone to point the finger at with hardware failures (priceless??)
2. 200Mhz faster CPU speed ($225 assumes purchasing 1Ghz instead of 800)
3. 33Mhz?? faster bus speed (can't upgrade)
4. 2x faster memory (can't upgrade)
5. 32MB more Video RAM ( $65 more than the 7000 for the Radeon 8500)
6. GPU is about 2x more powerful
7. FireWire 800 ($100 includes USB2)
8. USB 2.0
9. Built-in AirPort antenna
10. AGP port is 2x faster (can't upgrade)
11. A better looking case
The things that can be upgraded will cost $390 to do so, and a total build-it-yourself cost of $1,356.
And this machine still doesn't perform as well as the new system will, and would cost only $140 less than the new Apple PowerMac.
I'll take the Apple eqipment for the extra $140.
I think your logic is somewhat flawed.
Archival data tapes are designed to last from 30 to over 100 years if maintained reasonably well. Disk drives have what, 1 year warranties now? When a disk drive is not in use the magnetic media still does degrade, and the heads can stick to the platters over time (unless you have a newer head parking drive).
To guarantee that the drives were not degrading you would need to exercise them on a regular basis. To me, this defies the purpose of archiving.
It is true that tape can break, melt, snap etc. But why exactly are you going to be storing your archival tapes in your hot car in summer?
Even if the tape breaks, you can still access every other part of the tape that is not damaged. It's a simple splice job that you can perform at home.
If your HD fails at a bad spot the entire file or even disk may need expensive recovery proceedures.
If you drop the drive, you will likely damage all the contents (head crash, media scratch or warping). If you drop a tape you will damage the case and can respool the tape to a new cartridge.
There is simply no comparison. For stability during long term storage, tape is the best option. Yes, HDs can be used but in the end you will pay more and waste more time averting the potential failure points.
I find that a little hard to swallow when there have only been two consumer optical disk formats to use for comparison. CD and DVD.
Most of the suggestions I saw are to put the video on to some sort of rotational media. Disk drives, or DVD are the two most common offerings.
There's one thing I think that history has show us is that rotational media go obsolete quite quickly, and when they do the technologies to play them quickly disappear from the marketplace. If you go this route, you will also need to archive the entire playing system, not just the media. In that vein, the TiVo idea is perhaps your best bet. Ex: if you performed this project 15 years ago, you would likely have used MFM or RLL drives, now you can't buy them, their controllers or cables, and I don't think modern hardware or OSes would even know what to do with them.
Tape has a much longer life-span in the consumer marketplace. Without too much difficulty, one can still purchase an open reel tape deck, an 8 track or cassette player. Try finding a phonograph that plays 78rpm records though. It's damned near impossible.
I fear CDs and DVDs will get the same treatment. Once the next thing replaces them, their players will disappear from the market. and locating one in 15 years may prove difficult. For instance, once we get enough bandwidth, video on demand may get us to all toss out our DVD players and disks.
I think the best compromise you can make is to use MiniDV. Especially if you have a compatible camcorder or deck already.
The benefits are:
1. No problems dealing with time-code transcoding or creep
2. No audio sync problems
3. Digital storage on tape. Later generations will not suffer degradation
4. Easily imported to computer for duplication or storage on other media (back to VHS for example)
5. If similar to other tape formats, will endure longer than most rotational media of its generation
6. You can fit two hours of VHS tape on to an 80 minute MiniDV if you use EP; which on MOST devices yields no degradation of video or audio. I personally have not encountered any more dropouts from EP than from SP on any of four devices I've used.
I might even import the video from MiniDV to computer, perform some enhancements (sharpness, color, contrast) then write it back out to MiniDV. Then write back out to VHS so you can watch the video on a regular basis. You don't want to use your digital master tape for regular viewing.
I just want to point one thing out to you:
15 years ago you would be doing that on MFM or RLL interface drives. Now nobody knows what those are. The same will happen in another 15 years with IDE.
Some sort of tape mechanism is the best way to go. Heck, I can SILL purchase open reel and 8track players.
Just do some math:
300 million people live in the US (fewer actually closer to 290M)
Apple's market share here is liberally 5% or about 15 million
Of those, lets assume that only 40% actually own hardware and software capable of accessing the service
That's a consumer base of about 6 million. Or one in six people purchased a song on average
Now let's (very unscientifically) go back and extrapolate that to the Windows population release date:
60% of the population runs a Windows computer (a number out of my arse): 180 million Wintel users
Lets say that 60% of the WinTel population own a system and software capable of running the to-be-released iTunes 4 for Windows. That's 108 million
If one in six of those potential buyers purchases just one song each, that's a release week of 18 million songs sold.
And the for the world:
Assuming that Apple gets licensing, and with the following numbers, I think they have some leverage. The record labels should be drooling over this type of product movement.
Population 6.3 billion
Minus the US is 6 billion (yes, the US accounts for less that 5% of the world population. They sure don't act like it)
Let's aim low
20% of the world has the hardware and software capable of accessing the service: 1.2 billion potential customers.
one in twenty of those are actually interested in, and use the service to purchase one song: 60 million songs sold in the first week!
** Note: all these numbers except the populations and the first week US sales figures are totally made up. I did absolutely NO research on world PC usage statistics or Internet access. The census figures are drawn from www.populationconnection.org. These calculations are based on speculation, and are not meant to indicate Apple's or anyone else's actual foreseeable income.
I remember the FPU issue. I also a recall a simple 20KB freeware download that fixed the issue that was released by third parties about a week after the changeover.
I don't think I ever wrote that there weren't problems with the transitions or that they were seamless, just that they did not require the vendors to immediately re-compile or wose, re-write, thier apps to run on the new platform.
Thanks for remiding me about the NuBus->PCI, I knew I was omitting a biggie but just could not recall it at such a late hour. But that was just an inconvienence to the few nut cases like myself who had a Quadra 900 with all 5 (or most) of the NuBus slots filled up.
You need to learn some more about the PPC arcitecture.
PPC was designed from the ground up to scale to 64bit without affecting the performance of 32bit apps on the same processor. 32 and 64bit comingled apps can live quite happily on the same machine. There is no porting or special software required.
When a developer gets around to porting their app(s) to 64bitness, they can take advantage of newer features and higher performance.
The 32/64 bit conversion should go at least as smoothly as all the others: System 6->System 7+,68K->PPC,G3->G4, OS9->OS x. In each case the developer was under no pressure to release (properly written) software specially compiled for the new arcitecture, the hardware and/or OS masked the change and allowed the older apps to "just work".
Running any version of MacOS in 64MB of memory is rather constricting, but I think there's either something wrong with your hardware, you're running an older OS (Pre 9), or you have virtual memory turned on and the OS is attempting to use the swap space as a copy buffer (realted to tthe older OS issue and low-memory)
I don't know what you mean by "they". ...)
If you mean the tester in this article, I have no idea. Why didn't they test any number of codecs (sorenson, MPEG4, DV,
If you mean the people who developed DV... probably because the codec you describe was not developed when DV was. DV is I think about a decade old now. You also say that the codec "often gives me a 3:1 compression ratio". DV is guaranteed to give you 5:1; no matter what. You can bet the farm on DV's data rate and that is VERY important when writing to tape.
Thought this was important such than a non-A/C should post it also:
DV is compressed at a fixed 5:1 ratio.
Uncompressed video at a resolution of 720x480x24 is ~1MB per frame and 1.7GB per minute (at 30fps). DV uses about 220MB per minute including sound.
Forgive me, I mixed up some terminology. It's simply semantics
As for the whole "equals follows", the key is that there must be an equal sign between the attribute "type" and the value "crash". The equal sign must be the next token processesed after the attribute name. If the equal sign is ommited, that is invalid HTML and should be ignored.
It is a buffer underflow in that the buffer holding the attribue's value is expected to contain something, meaning more than nothing. When the buffer contains less data than expected (nothing in this case), but the program still allows processing of the buffer, that is a buffer underflow. The problem stems from a buffer of smaller size than expected.
If the rendering engine simply checked that any value for the "type" attribute contains at least one character, this would not be an issue, and the rendering engine would probably just ignore the type attribute and use the default if one was defined.
Either of these checks would prevent the engine from crashing.
I made no such complaint about MS's security record. I stated that BG made security and stability the prime issue in the company.
As I stated in another reply, the fact is that many of their updates are to repair problems caused by previous updates. I don't run any M.S. software so I have no first had knowledge of what exactly these things fix.
I do know (for comparison) that most major Unix systems only need to release security updates every few weeks at most to months.
Except that many of teh updates are to fix problems caused by previous updates. It is a reccomendation of Microsoft that all people running Windows should run virus protection software. A recent HotFix for XP casued the operating system to slow to a crawl after the hotfix was installed, if the user had virus protectio software installed.
Seriously... what kind of bonehead maneuver is it to release a patch that you haven't tested as being compatible with software that you officially recommend??
I like the "neither technology nor laws are yet capable of completely dealing with the plague."
So they'll just give up completely.
Pehaps we should also apply this to: the "drug war", the "war on terror", welfare/social assistance.
In each case, no amount of technology and no volume of new laws will completely solve the problem. I hearby suggest that we give up on those fronts as well.
Take the billions of dollars that is used for those purposes and cut taxes by the same amount. There's your tax cut funding Mr. Bush!