The reviewer just doesn't get it.
The reason you get a machine like this is so that you can run the same software, unchanged, on your big 32 or 64 CPU fridge-sized machine in the back room as you can on your desktop workstation. You run the same OS, the same binaries, use the same dev tools and you just know it will work. If it doesn't work, someone from Sun will be around to fix it, quickly.
As for going on about the "Restrictive" license surrounding Solaris. For fuck's sake, it's FREE (as in beer) to download and use - for Sparc and Intel.
And then there are automatic software updates that you have to accept? WTF? is he on drugs?
Sun have recommended patch clusters (AKA Service Packs) and individual patches that you are free to download and install as you choose. There's nothing compulsory about them.
Oh, and there's no.... RESET BUTTON!
I dunno about anyone else who uses Solaris out there, but I've _never_ seen a Sun machine lock up hard, such that a Reset Button would have been the solution...
Stick to reviewing your latest 0verclocked AMD with peltier and watercooling and neon casemods...
- k
And i'm a snob at both...
I've got an Apple PowerBook 12" (fun in a small package) and a Volkswagen Golf VR6 [or the GTI VR6 as it is over there] (even more fun in a small package)
I try to find out all I can about either of them and while my modding done to the car has to date only involved replacing the chip in the ECU with an aftermarket one (GIAC) - all the modding I've done to the PowerBook has involved firstly maxing out it's specs and re-flashing the DVD-R/CD-RW BIOS to double the drive's speed and add DVD-RW capabilities.
Having modded my fair share of PCs I'm happy having a computer (or car) that doesn't need a lot done to it to make it work well =)
Cheers,
Kai
One problem with MD based solutions isn't necessarily the lossy compression on the master you make (although some will not even tolerate this)
What makes MD useless for this kind of activity is the inability to make a bit-for-bit copy of a MD, so you get generation loss every time you dupe the concert.
Almost puts you right back in analogue land =)
-k
Microsoft sales reps are constantly told "Never lose an account to Linux - not at any cost"
Telstra are one of Australia's largest Microsoft customers. They spend $AUD1.5Bn/year on IT (not all of this is on Microsoft)
They're now in a good position (having made this all public) to go to MS and say "We've got a problem. We give you too much money. Fix this problem and we can talk"
-kai
"So I'm reading all over about how companies are desperate for people who know how to work with chicks, especially now that they are so common down in the Mall. But how -- short of a course with a mate's girlfriend or some other exercise in expensive sex for hire -- can I acquire even the most basic information or experience with big tits? There doesn't seem to be many tutorials or introductions online; what would be nice, but I can't seem to find either, would be a simulator that would run on a PC. All I want to know is if I like enough to be seriously interested."
no all that pesky formatting information is totally useless isnt it you dont need any formatting to make text any easier to read while were at it lets ditch capital letters too and punctuation as that doesnt add anything else and now why not just ditch line breaks too and just have a plain stream of raw text its so much easier to understand this way isnt it
What you're not factoring in is that the G5 competes against the Xeon rather than the P4.
Go spec a Dell with a Xeon processor, a DVD burner, Digital Optical Audio I/O and a Huge hard drive (doesn't _have_ to be SATA) and a good graphics card and you will have a more realistic comparison.
Factor in the amazing case design (yes, as a tech it's so much easier to work on Apple machines than anything else) and things turn the other way...
Try adding 8GB of RAM to the PC and... oh, wait, you can't!
As for the benchmarks with HyperThreading tutned OFF they did that to speed up the PC, it was slower in those particular benchmarks with it turned off than it was with it enabled. HyperThreading isn't two real CPUs, it's not magic that speeds up _everything_
- k
It's me, I've been playing Uplink too much, scanning for vulnerable LANs out there.
I've been deleting the logs as I go, but the LAN probes seem to be getting noticed.
- k
=)
It looks like the camera is doing some pretty funky location detectiion - in 3D.
I could only see one camera in their schematics and in all the videos.
How does the robot arm locate the object in a 3 dimensional space, using only one eye?
Other than that, it looks very cool...
-k
This is a very good thing to come from Apple.
They are getting into higher-performance computing clusters, with the release of things like the Xserve Cluster Node that has two FireWire ports. FireWire provides HEAPS lower latency than ethernet, so to link a few cluster nodes together, and avoid paying big money for exotic low-latency interconnects, it's now all included.
- k
An article on/. about something MS is doing, and no one even complaining that in order to view the content on the linked site you have to be using MSIE.
Sorry to burst your bubble regarding RAM capacity, but the 12" PowerBook will not accept anything bigger than a 512MB SO DIMM.
Apple, in their developer notes, acknowledge that there will be SO DIMMs larger than 512MB however the RAM controller in the 12" PowerBook won't take them.
The original "discovery" was made by Louis Solomon of SteelBytes Software
He posted it to ntbugtraq on Monday Feb 24th Here is the original post, where it describes the issue in a clear fashion, and does point out that Microsoft do tell you exactly what information they gather, however most people are unaware of this as they don't read the EULA - like me
Looks slick, interface designed by PROFFESSIONAL UI Designers and Graphic Artists
Works well, doesn't get in the way.
I don't need to waste time tweaking and testing different skins, everything follows the same theme, so I'm never surprised by new apps. Dialogs are well thought out, buttons say what they do, not just OK and Cancel.
Where do they say that they register _who_ buys each tyre?
Sure the tyres have a RFID, it's just like a big barcode on them, they can be tracked during manufacture and sale.
When was the last time your VIN was checked when you bought a new set of tyres?
well, aside from the fact that a mac doesn't have anything as lame as a BIOS, rather it contains a pretty neat forth interpreter in ROM, known as OpenFirmware (very similar, however not as complete as OpenBoot on a Sun).
Here lives a real command line, with direct access to the hardware device tree etc...
Upgrading the firmware on a Mac is as easy as running Apple's FirmwareUpdate (double-click on the icon, no making DOS boot disks or any crap like that) and following the instructions which are:
Let the mac do it's shutdown
Hold down the Programmers interrupt button
Power on the mac till you hear a constant tone
Release the button
let it do it's thing (complete with a nice little progress bar at the bottom of the screen)
Could it be any easier?
-- k
Over at the Weekly World News, there's a shocking space movie of an altogether different kind
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND - A family got the shock of their lives when lightning zapped their satellite dish and the TV turned from nice to nasty -- with XXX extraterrestrial porno flicks!
"We were watching Touched by an Angel with the children when -- kaboom! -- there was a frightful thunderclap," said 31-year-old wife and mother of two, Sheila McCallum.
"The lights flickered for a moment and the TV went blank. When it came back on, we saw a beastly new show that looked like an X-rated alien movie."
The McCallums sat watching in mute horror and disbelief for nearly five minutes trying to decipher the bizarre pornographic images and sounds filling their family room. When they finally realized what they were being subjected to, Sheila took the children, Evan, 8, and Angela, 6, from the room while Angus worked the remote in a fruitless effort to change the channel.
1. Turn off the computer or display.
2. Dampen a clean, soft, lint-free cloth or paper with water only.
3. Wipe the screen. Do not spray liquid directly on the screen.
You may also use a mild glass cleaner that contains no alcohol or ammonia. Most office supply stores sell cleaning kits specifically designed for this purpose.
For more information, refer to Apple's information on the subject.
The reason not to use alcohol is that, over time, it will remove the plasticisers from the front surface of the screen, causing it to become brittle and go yellow.
-- kai
What they are doing is hiding encryption information in the subcode channels of the CD-ROM.
Nearly all drives can happily read subchannels off CD-ROMs but very few CD-R/RW drives can actually write this extended information, as it isn't part of the user data stream.
This subchannel information is used for things like index marks within a track for audio, embedding CD+G graphics (low res, 4096 colour graphics) positioning information and ECC/EDC.
All they are doing is embedding extra information within these channels where writing it back to a CD-R, your burner simply isn't capable of reproducing it.
-- k
For a fantastic utopian, hedonistic society, go and pick up any of Ian M Banks' Culture Novels.
Any of them are good starting points, they may mention parts of other novels in passing, however not knowing the novel in question doesn't lessen the enjoyment. Excession is a classic space opera based around the Culture universe, if you can't decide which one to pick up, get this one
-- k
Sure, it may be possible to freeze something that's alive and thaw it out and have it come back to life. One thing about all these people that are beeing frozen in the hope that their cancer or whatever can be cured is that they are DEAD! It's not like they were alive and frozen, they're all frozen after death. Not only do we need to find a cure for cancer for them but then we need to revive them from death.
waste of money. move along. nothing to see here.
Slashdot Mirror
The reviewer just doesn't get it. The reason you get a machine like this is so that you can run the same software, unchanged, on your big 32 or 64 CPU fridge-sized machine in the back room as you can on your desktop workstation. You run the same OS, the same binaries, use the same dev tools and you just know it will work. If it doesn't work, someone from Sun will be around to fix it, quickly.
As for going on about the "Restrictive" license surrounding Solaris. For fuck's sake, it's FREE (as in beer) to download and use - for Sparc and Intel.
And then there are automatic software updates that you have to accept? WTF? is he on drugs?
Sun have recommended patch clusters (AKA Service Packs) and individual patches that you are free to download and install as you choose. There's nothing compulsory about them.
Oh, and there's no.... RESET BUTTON!
I dunno about anyone else who uses Solaris out there, but I've _never_ seen a Sun machine lock up hard, such that a Reset Button would have been the solution...
Stick to reviewing your latest 0verclocked AMD with peltier and watercooling and neon casemods...
- k
And i'm a snob at both...
I've got an Apple PowerBook 12" (fun in a small package) and a Volkswagen Golf VR6 [or the GTI VR6 as it is over there] (even more fun in a small package)
I try to find out all I can about either of them and while my modding done to the car has to date only involved replacing the chip in the ECU with an aftermarket one (GIAC) - all the modding I've done to the PowerBook has involved firstly maxing out it's specs and re-flashing the DVD-R/CD-RW BIOS to double the drive's speed and add DVD-RW capabilities.
Having modded my fair share of PCs I'm happy having a computer (or car) that doesn't need a lot done to it to make it work well =)
Cheers,
Kai
One problem with MD based solutions isn't necessarily the lossy compression on the master you make (although some will not even tolerate this)
What makes MD useless for this kind of activity is the inability to make a bit-for-bit copy of a MD, so you get generation loss every time you dupe the concert.
Almost puts you right back in analogue land =)
-k
Microsoft sales reps are constantly told "Never lose an account to Linux - not at any cost"
Telstra are one of Australia's largest Microsoft customers. They spend $AUD1.5Bn/year on IT (not all of this is on Microsoft)
They're now in a good position (having made this all public) to go to MS and say "We've got a problem. We give you too much money. Fix this problem and we can talk"
-kai
"So I'm reading all over about how companies are desperate for people who know how to work with chicks, especially now that they are so common down in the Mall. But how -- short of a course with a mate's girlfriend or some other exercise in expensive sex for hire -- can I acquire even the most basic information or experience with big tits? There doesn't seem to be many tutorials or introductions online; what would be nice, but I can't seem to find either, would be a simulator that would run on a PC. All I want to know is if I like enough to be seriously interested."
no all that pesky formatting information is totally useless isnt it you dont need any formatting to make text any easier to read while were at it lets ditch capital letters too and punctuation as that doesnt add anything else and now why not just ditch line breaks too and just have a plain stream of raw text its so much easier to understand this way isnt it
10.2.7 is the special 64-bit aware version of OS X, it only (at this stage) runs on G5's... A G5 won't run anything lower than 10.2.7
What you're not factoring in is that the G5 competes against the Xeon rather than the P4.
Go spec a Dell with a Xeon processor, a DVD burner, Digital Optical Audio I/O and a Huge hard drive (doesn't _have_ to be SATA) and a good graphics card and you will have a more realistic comparison.
Factor in the amazing case design (yes, as a tech it's so much easier to work on Apple machines than anything else) and things turn the other way...
Try adding 8GB of RAM to the PC and... oh, wait, you can't!
As for the benchmarks with HyperThreading tutned OFF they did that to speed up the PC, it was slower in those particular benchmarks with it turned off than it was with it enabled. HyperThreading isn't two real CPUs, it's not magic that speeds up _everything_
- k
It's me, I've been playing Uplink too much, scanning for vulnerable LANs out there.
I've been deleting the logs as I go, but the LAN probes seem to be getting noticed.
- k
=)
It looks like the camera is doing some pretty funky location detectiion - in 3D.
I could only see one camera in their schematics and in all the videos.
How does the robot arm locate the object in a 3 dimensional space, using only one eye?
Other than that, it looks very cool...
-k
This is a very good thing to come from Apple.
They are getting into higher-performance computing clusters, with the release of things like the Xserve Cluster Node that has two FireWire ports. FireWire provides HEAPS lower latency than ethernet, so to link a few cluster nodes together, and avoid paying big money for exotic low-latency interconnects, it's now all included.
- k
An article on /. about something MS is doing, and no one even complaining that in order to view the content on the linked site you have to be using MSIE.
Sorry to burst your bubble regarding RAM capacity, but the 12" PowerBook will not accept anything bigger than a 512MB SO DIMM.
Apple, in their developer notes, acknowledge that there will be SO DIMMs larger than 512MB however the RAM controller in the 12" PowerBook won't take them.
The original "discovery" was made by Louis Solomon of SteelBytes Software
He posted it to ntbugtraq on Monday Feb 24th
Here is the original post, where it describes the issue in a clear fashion, and does point out that Microsoft do tell you exactly what information they gather, however most people are unaware of this as they don't read the EULA - like me
kai
Mac OS X
Looks slick, interface designed by PROFFESSIONAL UI Designers and Graphic Artists
Works well, doesn't get in the way.
I don't need to waste time tweaking and testing different skins, everything follows the same theme, so I'm never surprised by new apps. Dialogs are well thought out, buttons say what they do, not just OK and Cancel.
Where do they say that they register _who_ buys each tyre?
Sure the tyres have a RFID, it's just like a big barcode on them, they can be tracked during manufacture and sale.
When was the last time your VIN was checked when you bought a new set of tyres?
Yes, but if you look at the second and third results for that search, you'll see they're presenting a pretty well balanced argument.
- kai
What the fuck?
Too similar to Terminator 2.
In what way? ummm, they're both in the future...
well, aside from the fact that a mac doesn't have anything as lame as a BIOS, rather it contains a pretty neat forth interpreter in ROM, known as OpenFirmware (very similar, however not as complete as OpenBoot on a Sun).
Here lives a real command line, with direct access to the hardware device tree etc...
Upgrading the firmware on a Mac is as easy as running Apple's FirmwareUpdate (double-click on the icon, no making DOS boot disks or any crap like that) and following the instructions which are:
Let the mac do it's shutdown
Hold down the Programmers interrupt button
Power on the mac till you hear a constant tone
Release the button
let it do it's thing (complete with a nice little progress bar at the bottom of the screen)
Could it be any easier?
-- k
Over at the Weekly World News, there's a shocking space movie of an altogether different kind
...and so on
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND - A family got the shock of their lives when lightning zapped their satellite dish and the TV turned from nice to nasty -- with XXX extraterrestrial porno flicks!
"We were watching Touched by an Angel with the children when -- kaboom! -- there was a frightful thunderclap," said 31-year-old wife and mother of two, Sheila McCallum.
"The lights flickered for a moment and the TV went blank. When it came back on, we saw a beastly new show that looked like an X-rated alien movie."
The McCallums sat watching in mute horror and disbelief for nearly five minutes trying to decipher the bizarre pornographic images and sounds filling their family room. When they finally realized what they were being subjected to, Sheila took the children, Evan, 8, and Angela, 6, from the room while Angus worked the remote in a fruitless effort to change the channel.
To clean the LCD:
1. Turn off the computer or display.
2. Dampen a clean, soft, lint-free cloth or paper with water only.
3. Wipe the screen. Do not spray liquid directly on the screen.
You may also use a mild glass cleaner that contains no alcohol or ammonia. Most office supply stores sell cleaning kits specifically designed for this purpose.
For more information, refer to Apple's information on the subject.
The reason not to use alcohol is that, over time, it will remove the plasticisers from the front surface of the screen, causing it to become brittle and go yellow.
-- kai
What they are doing is hiding encryption information in the subcode channels of the CD-ROM.
Nearly all drives can happily read subchannels off CD-ROMs but very few CD-R/RW drives can actually write this extended information, as it isn't part of the user data stream.
This subchannel information is used for things like index marks within a track for audio, embedding CD+G graphics (low res, 4096 colour graphics) positioning information and ECC/EDC.
All they are doing is embedding extra information within these channels where writing it back to a CD-R, your burner simply isn't capable of reproducing it.
-- k
Now Up to Date and Now Contact from Power On Software will do what you want. Plus the server is free with every client.
-- k
For a fantastic utopian, hedonistic society, go and pick up any of Ian M Banks' Culture Novels.
Any of them are good starting points, they may mention parts of other novels in passing, however not knowing the novel in question doesn't lessen the enjoyment.
Excession is a classic space opera based around the Culture universe, if you can't decide which one to pick up, get this one
-- k
Sure, it may be possible to freeze something that's alive and thaw it out and have it come back to life. One thing about all these people that are beeing frozen in the hope that their cancer or whatever can be cured is that they are DEAD! It's not like they were alive and frozen, they're all frozen after death. Not only do we need to find a cure for cancer for them but then we need to revive them from death.
waste of money. move along. nothing to see here.