Or simply setting the computer to display invisible files. Or put the songs on the mountable disk section of the iPod, then you can drag/drop to any computer that supports FireWire disks.
Not that we need to get off on this tangent, but the brain actually tries to store as little as possible. Faces are recignized as basic shapes, lines and colors for example. Transient and peripheral sensory input is simply processed for a moment (to keep alert for dangers) and then discarded. IF the brain tried to store every detail it would become unnecessary to ever study or re-read something as a student, a time when the brain is most able to learn new things.
Which is one of the major reasons that people have not been migrating to E2K as quickly as MS would have liked.
But the still... exhange is NOT accessing the disk directly, MS just did a brain-dead thing and forces E2K to use the DASD storage stack instead of the one level higher at the "volume" level where total abstraction is possible. One major reason MS did this was to lock people in to their proprietary Microsoft Cluster Server solutions and higher licensing fees for those components. There is no technical reason the E2K must use local storage. At least that'm my understanding of the state of things.
It's not just the quality of the media that is the issue, it's the density of the bits now. At risk of dating my self... When I first started using floppies they where reliable as anything. I could toss a floppy in the fishtank at school, retireve it, take it out of the sleve, dry it, and it would still read all the data perfectly. But then these where 5 1/4" 360KB floppies. Today's 3 1/2" 1,44MB floppies have much higher bit densieties, so it's easier to foul them up.
Either that, or the ozone layer delpleation in the last few years is irradiating the floppies more so they fail more often.:)
But neither SQL nor Exchange require disk level access. Neither app has special version for ATA, SCSI, SAN or NAT storage space. VERY few apps actually require phyical device access (sending commands directly to hardware instead of through the OSI abstractions), or even block level access. The few that I can think of are disk repair an maintenance utilities. Running SQL servers over NAT, NFS or any other sort of "soft" mount works just fine.
Eccept that in my experience most Datacenters are migrating to net attached storage. People are tired of SANs, the high chost of parts and maintenence, the difficultly and expense of backing up, etc. Sure... it SOUNDS great to have 5TB of storage in one unit, but just exactly how do you keep current off-site backups? Oh... that's right... you maintain another 5TB unit in another location and run a dedicated T3 between them, yea... THAT'S affordable.
The SAN was a great idea, Fiber Channel was a great idea, but it never reached critical mss, and now distributed network storage is taking over. iSCSI will propbaly make some inroads, but it will never replace a simple device with network ports actining as a server. The latter is cheap, esily understood, easily maintained, provides 95% of the functionality necessary to any IT department, and the clients are built in to every major OS on the market.
I keep a sparse dock of one of my logins and nothing was added to the dock. Nothing was removed or added to my normal login which has about 20 items kept on the dock. No new aliases were created on my desktop (Such as for mail, Internet or the like). None of my preferences were overwritten or contradicted. My clock stayed at the correct time and date, and my network connection stayed configured manually just the was I had it set. (then again, perhaps my time WAS messed up and the auto-time-set feature reset it before I logged in, I just don't know).
That said, if there were going to be any inherent problems with the installer, I would likely be the one to find them. I'm running on and old Biege G3/333 that is overclocked (CPU and bus), with 3 monitors (one from internal, two from an ATI 7000/PCI), a USB/Firewire card, a SCSI card, third party everything in the system except the motherboard and power supply. Seems to me that if anyone's system broke as a result of the update, that there was something REALLY flakey about the config beforehand, or it is just random coincidence and they are just assigning blame where there really is none.
First, I think a programmer can create a program with capabilites far beyond what the programmer has. For example, the programmers who write code for the F-16 are VERY unlikely to fly the plane as well as the computer does. One may know how toodo something, but doing it well might mean doing it very quickly, very long, very accurately, or under extreem stress. For example. I know how to add, but my computer is far better at adding than I am. It can sum hundreds of colums of 12 digit numbers in a fraction of a second, whereas it might take me 30 seconds to sum 5 four digit numbers and double-check for accuraccy.
Second, without human teachers Kasparov would never have learned chess. Kasparov was "programmed" to play chess at some point also. There is nothing inherent in the human genes or brain structure that makes us know the game of chess as instinct.
At some point, Kasparov became a better chess player than his teachers, just as these chess programs will learn from experience and will (or have) become better chess players than their teachers/programmers. I would seriously doubt that the Junior's programmers could alone, or collaboratively take on Kasparov and come out with a draw as Junior did. But lets put out a call for that: Each of the chess masters responsible for programming Junior should take it on for a match, just like Kasparov. Will the computer be better than the ones who programmed it?
What would be a very interesting match would be to take a chess program written in the spirit of Seti at Home, or Distributed.net with several hundred thousand computers, each running through one move chain and ranking the outcome and reporting back to the master server(s), and pit it against a collaborative team of the five best human players in the world.
In combination with Linux and other open source projects, OS X on x86 could finally break the MS monoply.
How would a combination of LInux and OS X break the Microsoft monopoly? OS X and Linux are two diametrically opposed things, you either run Linux and some bunch of other libraries and apps for a complete OS, or you run OS X. You can't run Linux and OS X at the same time, and you can't interchange them.
As I've argued before, Linux itself is not ever going to have any effect on Microsoft because the public doesn't care about the kernel that runs their machine, they care about the applications, user interface and device compatibility/interoperability. Linux has nothing to do with any of that.
And releasing OS X on Intel/AMD hardware would kill Apple. Without hardware sales, Apple would die. They would have to resort to a draconian licensing "central server" system like XP to prevent 50% piracy rates.
Linux on the desktop is NOT the issue since Linux is a Kernel not an OS; and certainly it is not a a GUI. The window manager, applications and device detection/drivers are the issues desktop users care about.
Linux is not seen by the end user (at least not many end uses I know do programming that interfaces with the kernel of their OS). They don't give a rats bottom about VM handling techniques, or guaranteed time to handle a device interrupt, or how many fromitz boards are installed in their consoles. What they want is to plug in their USB printer and have it configured automatically. They want their scanner to work simply. They want to email their spreadsheets with a single click or three. And they want that at a reasonable price.
What will get OSS software based systems (Be they Linux, BSD, GNU or any other OSS based system) will be ready availability of application software that will behave like the stuff they use now, and be available on store shelves WITH SUPPORT and complete documentation at a reasonable price (free is good). Most consumers like tangible things. They like a box for their software and they like to have a paper book to look at. It gives them something to hold on to and feel like they've spent money on something.
Developers and distro makers sitting around arguing about how to get a specific kernel adopted in companies is a waste of time. They need to strategise about how to market the rest of the system that end users actually care about, and they have little control over those other projects.
Think about this... if Linus T. had internal access to all of MicroSoft's code, and could re-write, extend and generally replace the WinXP kernel with Linux, would it be a victory? The answer is: No... Everyone is still locked in to MS software applications. The kernel is not the issue.
And if you don't believe it, look at Macintosh. They went from a proprietary kernel to BSD/Mach, the end user doesn't care in the end. They just want Word, Excel, Photoshop, et al to run as expected. During the transition there were some arguments about moving toBSD vs Linux or GNU or Be, but the longer, hotter discussions were always over "When will application ____ be ported?". The ___ was initially Photoshop, then we went down the list to Quark, Freehand, Pagemaker, etc. There were even more topics about how X looked, and how easy it was to work with. In most articles, mention of the kernel was a brief comment like "BSD/Unix based".
I just put iMovie 3 through its paces just to see if your statments were true. The machine I used is a PowerMac G3/333 (an old Beiege tower).
I imported ~30 minutes of video from my JVC DVM-70 via my OrangeMicro FW/USB card, no problems. Clips were only split where I had paused the recording. The preview window was choppy during import, but that's happened on every video app I've used. Playback of clips from the timeline was fine. Clicking on certain interface buttons led to a lot of disk churning and some delays and lessened responsiveness. Inserting a transition or an effect took sime time. The app is certainly useable, and reasonably fast on my system. In the hour+ that I used iMovie 3 for my tests, there was not one error, and no crashes, quits, hangs or anything unexpected.
I can only imagine that with even a mere 400MHz G4, things would zip along much faster. A newer machine with duals, and around 1GHz should certainly run this app like a champ.
Perhaps you don't have QuickTime 6.1 installed as the installer for iM3 strongly suggests?
Okay, so he had one hit with the Mac GUI. But this thing (as many others have mentioned) has already been done in stuff like EMACS and VI*.
I recall seeing Jef on TechTV talking about how the computer should be intuative and non modal, so that it knew (for example) that when you started typeing something like "2 * 5 = 10" that instead of putting the numbers in the text window, it would pop up a window with the mathmatical answer, since you obviously wanted to perform a calculation and you would not have to go off and start some calculator application to get your answer. MY question is "What makes that the obvious context"? What about a teacher typing out a math test? You would somehow have to tell the GUI to turn off the auto context switching while you typed out the formule for the test. This in the end seems even more obtuse a mechnism than the relatively common sense method of context/application switching we perform now.
After all, you don't (generally) just randomly change topics in a converstation and expect your listeners to keep up. You provide transitions (context switching) when your topic will change, otherwise you'd sound like a babling phycopath. Ex: So Bob, how are the kids? What's the torque limit on the master link of the drive chain on a 1978 Suziki GS 750S? 1250 x 52 = www.mcparts.com Wow, pretty soon they'll be starting shool.
That doesn't happen in real life, and I don't see why (from what I've read and heard) anyone would expect (or even want) their computer to attempt to interpret that stream and do things with it. That may have been a chat room conversation, a search engine query, salary calculation for a new job, a URL to a web page to browse, and more of the chat room. In that, and the infinite number of other examples, what are the chances that the OS/GUI will correctly guess what context you are intending.
For my time, I much prefer knowing what context my GUI is in, and knowing that it will not switch unless I do something to directly change it. Any automatic method will undoutedly lead to more errors, lot work and time.
Alcohol manufacturers will be required to use nano technology in their beverages so that the alcohol molecules will only affect those who are 21 years or older. No more under age drunkenness, but plenty of under age drinking. The nano-bots will determine the drinker's age through samling the protien compisition of stomac cells. If the drinker is determined to be of legal drinking age, the nano-bots will release their enclosed aclohol molecule to allow intoxication; otherwise the alcocol will remain enclosed in a bucky ball type structure and pass unprocessed through the digestive tract.
At 19:15 on Oct 15th I saw a story on CNN Headline News about this. The "Headline" was:
Fighting back: with fraud?
It seems the non Microsoft media outlets are starting to fire on MS more intensely when they screw up. Perhaps Apple's campaign is starting to pay off? Perhaps Microsoft's policies of abusive licensing and forced upgrades are finally paying off? In either case, it was interesting to see a major media outlet poke fun at MS, and present a fair and unbiased (though only 20 second) piece on the competition.
Because the pages in question where developed with Apple as part of the marketing. Motorola does not have any CPU part that is sold as "G4-1250" or "G5-2200" They're all MPC7450, MPC603 or stuff like that. Likewise with IBM, all the chips have more cryptic part numbers. They only use the "Gx" designations in relation to Apple's use of the chips or as internal short-hand.
I can't locate any "official" pages from IBM or Motorola that refer to a PowerPC Book E type processor as a "G5".
All of that leads me to believe that the "Gx" designations are markeing spin from Apple that Motorola uses in some informal presentations to make it easier for the end users (Mac buyers) to understand those few documents.
The terms "G4" and "G5" do not appear in the Apple trandemark list, but I think they fall outiside the limits of a copyrightable or trademarkable term as they are too short. Though "PowerPC" is trademarked by IBM.
Let me clarify... I wasn't talking about actual hands-on performance. What I meant is that unless something gets a new name, a new model number, a new shape or something, consumers don't see a need to purchase the new product. This is the reason that auto makers hype model years. Most consumers need to sense there is some need to replace a perfetly good product with a new model. Why buy the new PowerMac when you already have a working PowerMac? Because you have a G3 and the new one is a G5. Why get a 2003 car when your 2000 model works fine? bigger number in the model year of course. This is like the "xeneon technology" in that junk air cleaner or "whirl-wind canister" in the new vacuum. They give consumers something that they percieve as a performance improvement. The fact that the name is meaningless, and perhaps even worse at the job than their existing "fan forced" product is irrelevant.
You also forget that Apple has already gone through two major platform changes withoug much trouble by using emulator systems in the OS. The first was 68K to PPC. No-one HAD to recompile anything, it all just worked. The most recent was OS-9 to OS X. Again, emulation allowed most of the older apps to run without recompiling.
There where others like the switch to System 7 I believe where basically the entire OS was re-written in C.
Of course all of this is irrelelavent. The PPC designs have since the early stages planned for seamless progression to4 bit without breaking any 32 bit code.
The 'G5' will be whatever chip Apple slaps on their next 'big' processor upgrade. The G3, G4, G5 designations have nothing to do with the chips themselves or their model numbers. They're just spin that Apple uses to compete with the Pentium 3, Pentium 4, etc lineup. Apple could decide to throw AMD Hammers in their next generation systems and would still call the chip the 'G5'. Ignorant consumers are unlikely to percieve any performace improvements in models unless there is some underlying technology that gets a new name or a new version number. It's like model years in cars, the 2002 has a higher number than the 2001 model, so it MUST be better, and people drool over it.
But Apple's target market and marketing ideas aren't geared toward the user who wants to store lots of text. The market to people who want to store and manipulate lots of digital data, pictures, sound, video, 3D scientific data. True 64bit memory address space is ludicrous to store text/words, but it becomes constraining when you're trying to perform fluid dynamic simulations of major weather systems, or other "real world" events. And it's not just scientific people performing these computations. It's also the new generation of 3D animators, and game creators that need to store, move and calculate on these large data sets.
Yes, PARTS of the PPC are 64bit. Parts of it (AltiVec) are 128bit. But the connections going out of to the machine are not 64 bit yet. This change will allow the entire chip to operate at 64bitness, and also to remain completely compatible with 32bit code (according to the PPC design plans)
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You apparently have a very limited view of the Mac user population.
Except of course that eMusic's selection sucks. and they are bald faced liars about many aspects of their system.
Or simply setting the computer to display invisible files.
Or put the songs on the mountable disk section of the iPod, then you can drag/drop to any computer that supports FireWire disks.
Not that we need to get off on this tangent, but the brain actually tries to store as little as possible. Faces are recignized as basic shapes, lines and colors for example. Transient and peripheral sensory input is simply processed for a moment (to keep alert for dangers) and then discarded.
IF the brain tried to store every detail it would become unnecessary to ever study or re-read something as a student, a time when the brain is most able to learn new things.
Which is one of the major reasons that people have not been migrating to E2K as quickly as MS would have liked.
But the still... exhange is NOT accessing the disk directly, MS just did a brain-dead thing and forces E2K to use the DASD storage stack instead of the one level higher at the "volume" level where total abstraction is possible. One major reason MS did this was to lock people in to their proprietary Microsoft Cluster Server solutions and higher licensing fees for those components. There is no technical reason the E2K must use local storage.
At least that'm my understanding of the state of things.
It's not just the quality of the media that is the issue, it's the density of the bits now.
:)
At risk of dating my self... When I first started using floppies they where reliable as anything. I could toss a floppy in the fishtank at school, retireve it, take it out of the sleve, dry it, and it would still read all the data perfectly.
But then these where 5 1/4" 360KB floppies. Today's 3 1/2" 1,44MB floppies have much higher bit densieties, so it's easier to foul them up.
Either that, or the ozone layer delpleation in the last few years is irradiating the floppies more so they fail more often.
Yes, they're called CDRW disks. They are only slightly more expensive than CDRs, and they are much more reliable than floppies.
With an OS that supports drag and drop burning from the desktop, it's a non-event:
Insert CDRW:
Choose "Erase Disk"
Drag Word file to CDRW
Click the "burn button"
Wait 30 seconds
Comapre that to the floppy version:
Insert floppy
Choose "erase disk" (to reformat and check for bad sectors)
Drag word file to Floppy
Wait 30 seconds
One more step, zero additional wait time.
But neither SQL nor Exchange require disk level access. Neither app has special version for ATA, SCSI, SAN or NAT storage space. VERY few apps actually require phyical device access (sending commands directly to hardware instead of through the OSI abstractions), or even block level access.
The few that I can think of are disk repair an maintenance utilities.
Running SQL servers over NAT, NFS or any other sort of "soft" mount works just fine.
Eccept that in my experience most Datacenters are migrating to net attached storage. People are tired of SANs, the high chost of parts and maintenence, the difficultly and expense of backing up, etc.
Sure... it SOUNDS great to have 5TB of storage in one unit, but just exactly how do you keep current off-site backups? Oh... that's right... you maintain another 5TB unit in another location and run a dedicated T3 between them, yea... THAT'S affordable.
The SAN was a great idea, Fiber Channel was a great idea, but it never reached critical mss, and now distributed network storage is taking over. iSCSI will propbaly make some inroads, but it will never replace a simple device with network ports actining as a server. The latter is cheap, esily understood, easily maintained, provides 95% of the functionality necessary to any IT department, and the clients are built in to every major OS on the market.
But what "new icons"? People keep being very vague about this point.
I keep a sparse dock of one of my logins and nothing was added to the dock. Nothing was removed or added to my normal login which has about 20 items kept on the dock.
No new aliases were created on my desktop (Such as for mail, Internet or the like). None of my preferences were overwritten or contradicted.
My clock stayed at the correct time and date, and my network connection stayed configured manually just the was I had it set. (then again, perhaps my time WAS messed up and the auto-time-set feature reset it before I logged in, I just don't know).
That said, if there were going to be any inherent problems with the installer, I would likely be the one to find them. I'm running on and old Biege G3/333 that is overclocked (CPU and bus), with 3 monitors (one from internal, two from an ATI 7000/PCI), a USB/Firewire card, a SCSI card, third party everything in the system except the motherboard and power supply.
Seems to me that if anyone's system broke as a result of the update, that there was something REALLY flakey about the config beforehand, or it is just random coincidence and they are just assigning blame where there really is none.
I disagree. For several reasons.
First, I think a programmer can create a program with capabilites far beyond what the programmer has. For example, the programmers who write code for the F-16 are VERY unlikely to fly the plane as well as the computer does. One may know how toodo something, but doing it well might mean doing it very quickly, very long, very accurately, or under extreem stress. For example. I know how to add, but my computer is far better at adding than I am. It can sum hundreds of colums of 12 digit numbers in a fraction of a second, whereas it might take me 30 seconds to sum 5 four digit numbers and double-check for accuraccy.
Second, without human teachers Kasparov would never have learned chess. Kasparov was "programmed" to play chess at some point also. There is nothing inherent in the human genes or brain structure that makes us know the game of chess as instinct.
At some point, Kasparov became a better chess player than his teachers, just as these chess programs will learn from experience and will (or have) become better chess players than their teachers/programmers. I would seriously doubt that the Junior's programmers could alone, or collaboratively take on Kasparov and come out with a draw as Junior did. But lets put out a call for that: Each of the chess masters responsible for programming Junior should take it on for a match, just like Kasparov. Will the computer be better than the ones who programmed it?
What would be a very interesting match would be to take a chess program written in the spirit of Seti at Home, or Distributed.net with several hundred thousand computers, each running through one move chain and ranking the outcome and reporting back to the master server(s), and pit it against a collaborative team of the five best human players in the world.
How would a combination of LInux and OS X break the Microsoft monopoly? OS X and Linux are two diametrically opposed things, you either run Linux and some bunch of other libraries and apps for a complete OS, or you run OS X. You can't run Linux and OS X at the same time, and you can't interchange them.
As I've argued before, Linux itself is not ever going to have any effect on Microsoft because the public doesn't care about the kernel that runs their machine, they care about the applications, user interface and device compatibility/interoperability. Linux has nothing to do with any of that.
And releasing OS X on Intel/AMD hardware would kill Apple. Without hardware sales, Apple would die. They would have to resort to a draconian licensing "central server" system like XP to prevent 50% piracy rates.
Linux on the desktop is NOT the issue since Linux is a Kernel not an OS; and certainly it is not a a GUI. The window manager, applications and device detection/drivers are the issues desktop users care about.
Linux is not seen by the end user (at least not many end uses I know do programming that interfaces with the kernel of their OS). They don't give a rats bottom about VM handling techniques, or guaranteed time to handle a device interrupt, or how many fromitz boards are installed in their consoles. What they want is to plug in their USB printer and have it configured automatically. They want their scanner to work simply. They want to email their spreadsheets with a single click or three. And they want that at a reasonable price.
What will get OSS software based systems (Be they Linux, BSD, GNU or any other OSS based system) will be ready availability of application software that will behave like the stuff they use now, and be available on store shelves WITH SUPPORT and complete documentation at a reasonable price (free is good). Most consumers like tangible things. They like a box for their software and they like to have a paper book to look at. It gives them something to hold on to and feel like they've spent money on something.
Developers and distro makers sitting around arguing about how to get a specific kernel adopted in companies is a waste of time. They need to strategise about how to market the rest of the system that end users actually care about, and they have little control over those other projects.
Think about this... if Linus T. had internal access to all of MicroSoft's code, and could re-write, extend and generally replace the WinXP kernel with Linux, would it be a victory? The answer is: No... Everyone is still locked in to MS software applications. The kernel is not the issue.
And if you don't believe it, look at Macintosh. They went from a proprietary kernel to BSD/Mach, the end user doesn't care in the end. They just want Word, Excel, Photoshop, et al to run as expected. During the transition there were some arguments about moving toBSD vs Linux or GNU or Be, but the longer, hotter discussions were always over "When will application ____ be ported?". The ___ was initially Photoshop, then we went down the list to Quark, Freehand, Pagemaker, etc. There were even more topics about how X looked, and how easy it was to work with. In most articles, mention of the kernel was a brief comment like "BSD/Unix based".
I just put iMovie 3 through its paces just to see if your statments were true.
The machine I used is a PowerMac G3/333 (an old Beiege tower).
I imported ~30 minutes of video from my JVC DVM-70 via my OrangeMicro FW/USB card, no problems. Clips were only split where I had paused the recording.
The preview window was choppy during import, but that's happened on every video app I've used.
Playback of clips from the timeline was fine. Clicking on certain interface buttons led to a lot of disk churning and some delays and lessened responsiveness. Inserting a transition or an effect took sime time. The app is certainly useable, and reasonably fast on my system.
In the hour+ that I used iMovie 3 for my tests, there was not one error, and no crashes, quits, hangs or anything unexpected.
I can only imagine that with even a mere 400MHz G4, things would zip along much faster. A newer machine with duals, and around 1GHz should certainly run this app like a champ.
Perhaps you don't have QuickTime 6.1 installed as the installer for iM3 strongly suggests?
Okay, so he had one hit with the Mac GUI. But this thing (as many others have mentioned) has already been done in stuff like EMACS and VI*.
I recall seeing Jef on TechTV talking about how the computer should be intuative and non modal, so that it knew (for example) that when you started typeing something like "2 * 5 = 10" that instead of putting the numbers in the text window, it would pop up a window with the mathmatical answer, since you obviously wanted to perform a calculation and you would not have to go off and start some calculator application to get your answer.
MY question is "What makes that the obvious context"? What about a teacher typing out a math test? You would somehow have to tell the GUI to turn off the auto context switching while you typed out the formule for the test. This in the end seems even more obtuse a mechnism than the relatively common sense method of context/application switching we perform now.
After all, you don't (generally) just randomly change topics in a converstation and expect your listeners to keep up. You provide transitions (context switching) when your topic will change, otherwise you'd sound like a babling phycopath. Ex: So Bob, how are the kids? What's the torque limit on the master link of the drive chain on a 1978 Suziki GS 750S? 1250 x 52 = www.mcparts.com Wow, pretty soon they'll be starting shool.
That doesn't happen in real life, and I don't see why (from what I've read and heard) anyone would expect (or even want) their computer to attempt to interpret that stream and do things with it. That may have been a chat room conversation, a search engine query, salary calculation for a new job, a URL to a web page to browse, and more of the chat room. In that, and the infinite number of other examples, what are the chances that the OS/GUI will correctly guess what context you are intending.
For my time, I much prefer knowing what context my GUI is in, and knowing that it will not switch unless I do something to directly change it. Any automatic method will undoutedly lead to more errors, lot work and time.
So perhaps NASA should re-think their whole space program from the 50s forward?
Alcohol manufacturers will be required to use nano technology in their beverages so that the alcohol molecules will only affect those who are 21 years or older. No more under age drunkenness, but plenty of under age drinking.
The nano-bots will determine the drinker's age through samling the protien compisition of stomac cells. If the drinker is determined to be of legal drinking age, the nano-bots will release their enclosed aclohol molecule to allow intoxication; otherwise the alcocol will remain enclosed in a bucky ball type structure and pass unprocessed through the digestive tract.
It seems the non Microsoft media outlets are starting to fire on MS more intensely when they screw up. Perhaps Apple's campaign is starting to pay off? Perhaps Microsoft's policies of abusive licensing and forced upgrades are finally paying off?
In either case, it was interesting to see a major media outlet poke fun at MS, and present a fair and unbiased (though only 20 second) piece on the competition.
Because the pages in question where developed with Apple as part of the marketing. Motorola does not have any CPU part that is sold as "G4-1250" or "G5-2200" They're all MPC7450, MPC603 or stuff like that.
Likewise with IBM, all the chips have more cryptic part numbers. They only use the "Gx" designations in relation to Apple's use of the chips or as internal short-hand.
I can't locate any "official" pages from IBM or Motorola that refer to a PowerPC Book E type processor as a "G5".
All of that leads me to believe that the "Gx" designations are markeing spin from Apple that Motorola uses in some informal presentations to make it easier for the end users (Mac buyers) to understand those few documents.
The terms "G4" and "G5" do not appear in the Apple trandemark list, but I think they fall outiside the limits of a copyrightable or trademarkable term as they are too short. Though "PowerPC" is trademarked by IBM.
Let me clarify... I wasn't talking about actual hands-on performance. What I meant is that unless something gets a new name, a new model number, a new shape or something, consumers don't see a need to purchase the new product. This is the reason that auto makers hype model years.
Most consumers need to sense there is some need to replace a perfetly good product with a new model. Why buy the new PowerMac when you already have a working PowerMac? Because you have a G3 and the new one is a G5. Why get a 2003 car when your 2000 model works fine? bigger number in the model year of course.
This is like the "xeneon technology" in that junk air cleaner or "whirl-wind canister" in the new vacuum. They give consumers something that they percieve as a performance improvement. The fact that the name is meaningless, and perhaps even worse at the job than their existing "fan forced" product is irrelevant.
You also forget that Apple has already gone through two major platform changes withoug much trouble by using emulator systems in the OS.
The first was 68K to PPC. No-one HAD to recompile anything, it all just worked.
The most recent was OS-9 to OS X. Again, emulation allowed most of the older apps to run without recompiling.
There where others like the switch to System 7 I believe where basically the entire OS was re-written in C.
Of course all of this is irrelelavent. The PPC designs have since the early stages planned for seamless progression to4 bit without breaking any 32 bit code.
The 'G5' will be whatever chip Apple slaps on their next 'big' processor upgrade. The G3, G4, G5 designations have nothing to do with the chips themselves or their model numbers. They're just spin that Apple uses to compete with the Pentium 3, Pentium 4, etc lineup. Apple could decide to throw AMD Hammers in their next generation systems and would still call the chip the 'G5'.
Ignorant consumers are unlikely to percieve any performace improvements in models unless there is some underlying technology that gets a new name or a new version number. It's like model years in cars, the 2002 has a higher number than the 2001 model, so it MUST be better, and people drool over it.
But Apple's target market and marketing ideas aren't geared toward the user who wants to store lots of text. The market to people who want to store and manipulate lots of digital data, pictures, sound, video, 3D scientific data.
True 64bit memory address space is ludicrous to store text/words, but it becomes constraining when you're trying to perform fluid dynamic simulations of major weather systems, or other "real world" events.
And it's not just scientific people performing these computations. It's also the new generation of 3D animators, and game creators that need to store, move and calculate on these large data sets.
Yes, PARTS of the PPC are 64bit. Parts of it (AltiVec) are 128bit. But the connections going out of to the machine are not 64 bit yet. This change will allow the entire chip to operate at 64bitness, and also to remain completely compatible with 32bit code (according to the PPC design plans)