So as you can see it does do something to the hardware. And, according to Connectix, there is no performance hit by using little-endian bytes on the G3 / G4. Doesn't mean Apple should change the system, but it shows they could if they wanted to.
You're confusing two things:
1. The PowerPC is bi-endian, in that it can boot into both big and little endian memory access modes.
2. The PowerPC has some instructions (lwbrx and stwbrx) that can byte swap (integer) loads and stores on the fly.
The paragraph you quoted refers to the lwbrx and stwbrx instructions - they were very expensive if the address was misaligned (it punted to an exception handler which performed two aligned reads, combined them, then swapped the result).
The TiVO that's available in the UK is a regular PAL device - there's a UK TiVO FAQ with more info. If you have a sky/cable box, you just plug it into the back of the TiVO and the TiVO into the back of your TV.
It's preconfigured to dial a UK freephone number to pick up listings, and works just like the US version. I don't know if they've launched it anywhere else in Europe, so if you're not in the UK you might have to live without the listings feature (which makes it less useful).
I've had one for about a year now (in the UK), and would never go back...
If you're talking about the LaunchCFMApp process, this is just to let Launch Services, which is Mach-O, prepare and launch apps which are built as CFM binaries.
It's not "middle-ware", and it's not used to launch Carbon apps which are packaged as Mach-O.
Pudge is Chris Nandor. Long-standing MacPerl person, and now working for OSDN by the looks of things. The story was posted to the Apple section first, and presumably made it to the front page from there.
When they refer to Photoshop as native OS X, they do indeed mean Cocoa
No, they mean Carbon. A prototype Photoshop 5.0 was one of the first demos of Carbon, at 1998's WWDC.
Cocoa apps are completely native.
As are Carbon apps.
3rd party rack-mounted cases are already out there - from Marathon or GVS. Given how important style is to Apple at the moment, I doubt they're going to branch out into purely functional cases anytime soon...
I've only dealt with app level code so far, but from my few perusals of the lower levels of the library and my browsings of simple directx code, it seems as if the complexity would make for pretty slow and buggy engines.
Probably not - my day job for the last 6 months was the Mac port of Black & White, and we wrote a similar D3D->GL shim for that. Mapping from one API to the other is fairly straightforward, and the most expensive part of both is simply shoving the geometry/texture data down from the app to the API (assuming you cache out redundant state changes).
It doesn't really matter if that goes down through DrawPrimitive (D3D) or glDrawElements (GL): if that's your bottleneck, the cost is pretty much the same either way.
The article is talking about internal tools though - not the final shipping product, but all the little pre-production tools that get written along the way.
Since most of these are written on a pretty ad-hoc basis without any real design, a RAD approach does make a lot of sense.
Probably the best news so far, I was able to insert a modified AOL connection file into the stolen machine today, with my home number as the primary dialin and my sister's number as the secondary. Coincidentally, I've since gotten about 15 calls from a particular person I don't know, and my sister has gotten about the same amount of calls from the same person.
It's one thing to render a couple megs of textures and low res models quickly. It's another to render 300mb of textures on a high res (100million polygons) object in realtime.
That doesn't have much to do with the API though - if you're pushing that much data around then your performance is going to come from hardware, not from calling glDrawElements vs DrawPrimitive. Although MS have a foot in the hardware door with the XBox, patents on hardware would be more valuable to someone like nVidia/ATI than MS.
You would need to know exactly which patents had been purchased to guess at their motives - the SECC filing just talks about "intellectual property rights", which may or may not mean patents (although the Reg seems to think so).
-dair (my guess would be it's just a reflex reaction: they saw something interesting on offer, and snapped them up to prevent someone else from doing so)
They're a species of toad, introduced to Australia in the '30s as a failed attempt at pest control. They're named after sugarcane, which was the crop they were originally intended to protect.
-dair
Re:Timothy McVeigh was a fundamentalist...
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2
Not this again. That Red Cross building had been abandoned months ago and was being used by Taliban forces. The Red Cross itself issued a statement confirming that fact.
He means the other Red Cross building, which was bombed on the 15th.
1 - dock icon areas do not extend to edge of dock.
They do in 10.1.
2 - dock changes size and icons move as it gets used
Turn the magnification option off.
4 - it has vi so when I go to the apple help and type in vi I expect to see at least something.
Do you expect to see man pages for all of the GUI tools? If you're planning on using the command line, use the command line's help system.
5 - stupid windowesque scroll bars - the scroll-bars were one of the things which NeXT got right for Steve's sake;-)
What's wrong with them? The up/down arrows can be grouped together as per NeXT, so the only difference is they're not stuck on the left hand side of the window.
Here in Denmark it has been said that if a terrorist had been from here, we would not have turned him over to the US (since we can't turn over any criminal who might get death penalty)
This actually applies Europe-wide. The EU Human Rights act prevents extradition to countries who would impose the death penalty - places like China, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, America, etc. Extradition to the US could only take place if the US agreed not to execute, but instead impose a custodial sentence.
No mention was made of sending shows over the internet...rather, it was to other units on a LAN.
From their FAQ:
Q. How do I share television programs with my friends?
A. If your friend has a ReplayTV 4000, they can "talk" to each other over the broadband Internet connections.
It sounds as if you need a ReplayTV unit at each end, but capturing what they send to each other would be trivial. The datastream is probably encrypted, but you have to wonder how long that would last.
-dair
Re:Hate to say, sounds like a dot-bomb strategy...
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 1
BTW, what does VMS stand for? Virtual Memory System?
I have been forced to use other major alternatives at various companies I've worked for (the most notable being Perforce and MS SourceSafe) and CVS is vastly superior to the others I have used.
What didn't you like about Perforce? I found it much more powerful than CVS.
The best feature was atomic commits, so you could look through the changelog for the repository as a whole rather than having to do it for individual files. Being able to see "Fixed bug foo - affected foo1.c, foo2.c, foo3.c" and "Fixed bug bar - affected foo1.c, bar1.c, bar2.c" was much easier than with CVS (where you get individual change logs for foo1.c, foo2.c, foo3.c, bar1.c, and bar2.c and have to cross-reference yourself to find out what files a particular bug-fix touched).
Perforce is quite expensive, but a two client license is free so it's worth checking out.
The project I'm excited about is Subversion.
Definitely looks like it has potential - it supports atomic commits as well.
While working on a grant at SDSU, I heard of an instructor in Maryland who found that her students who used a DOS-based PC to write english papers received better grades then did the Apple Mac counterparts.
I assume this is the "Can the Machine Maim the Message" study by Marcia Peoples Halio
? If so there's an interesting rebuttal of it here. From what's described there, it doesn't sound like a terribly thorough review.
Only 20 papers were selected for review out of more than 4,000 in total. The review itself was carried out by a bit of software rather than a human, and the paper apparently doesn't consider the point that the DOS users and the Mac users were using different word processing packages (one good? one bad? who knows?) let alone different operating systems.
The fact is that computers are tools to help people: by definition the tool that people find easiest to use is the right one for them. For most people today, that's graphical. It won't always be that way, but it won't always be the command line.
-dair (I refuse to believe we'll still be using awk in 300 years)
I learned DOS and UNIX on the command line. Windows and Mac will stunt your understanding of how a computer works, and make you think only of pushing around cute little icons. WIMP interfaces make people dumb. They can't understand how the computer works, so they end up relying on 'geeks' to fix their problems.
You're fooling yourself if you think knowing a shell means you know more about how a computer works. It means you know how to use a shell, nothing more. It's like saying you'll know more about how a TV works if you stick to an old set with manual tuning buttons that predates IR remotes.
Graphical user interfaces are one of the biggest steps forward we've made in interacting with computers - throwing them away because they're somehow less "real" than a command line is stupid.
Like I said, PC card slots can be used for future, not-invented-yet technology. Since the iBook doesn't have them, you're out of luck.
So what's wrong with USB or FireWire? I find it hard to believe that an incredibly useful not-yet-invented technology would only be available in PC card form and not in a little breakout box that'll let you hook it up to anything with a USB port.
Let's face it - if it's that useful, you'll probably want to plug it into a desktop too (and I doubt it'll be through a USB based PC card reader).
Slashdot Mirror
1. The PowerPC is bi-endian, in that it can boot into both big and little endian memory access modes.
2. The PowerPC has some instructions (lwbrx and stwbrx) that can byte swap (integer) loads and stores on the fly.
The paragraph you quoted refers to the lwbrx and stwbrx instructions - they were very expensive if the address was misaligned (it punted to an exception handler which performed two aligned reads, combined them, then swapped the result).
-dair
The TiVO that's available in the UK is a regular PAL device - there's a UK TiVO FAQ with more info. If you have a sky/cable box, you just plug it into the back of the TiVO and the TiVO into the back of your TV.
It's preconfigured to dial a UK freephone number to pick up listings, and works just like the US version. I don't know if they've launched it anywhere else in Europe, so if you're not in the UK you might have to live without the listings feature (which makes it less useful).
I've had one for about a year now (in the UK), and would never go back...
-dair
If you're talking about the LaunchCFMApp process, this is just to let Launch Services, which is Mach-O, prepare and launch apps which are built as CFM binaries.
It's not "middle-ware", and it's not used to launch Carbon apps which are packaged as Mach-O.
-dair
And why can he post stuff to the frontpage?
Pudge is Chris Nandor. Long-standing MacPerl person, and now working for OSDN by the looks of things. The story was posted to the Apple section first, and presumably made it to the front page from there.
-dair
When they refer to Photoshop as native OS X, they do indeed mean Cocoa
No, they mean Carbon. A prototype Photoshop 5.0 was one of the first demos of Carbon, at 1998's WWDC.
Cocoa apps are completely native.
As are Carbon apps.
-dair
3rd party rack-mounted cases are already out there - from Marathon or GVS. Given how important style is to Apple at the moment, I doubt they're going to branch out into purely functional cases anytime soon...
-dair
It doesn't really matter if that goes down through DrawPrimitive (D3D) or glDrawElements (GL): if that's your bottleneck, the cost is pretty much the same either way.
-dair
Try closing the lid on a TiBook while iTunes is running.
Just tried it, didn't crash for me (at least with 10.1.2).
-dair
The article is talking about internal tools though - not the final shipping product, but all the little pre-production tools that get written along the way.
Since most of these are written on a pretty ad-hoc basis without any real design, a RAD approach does make a lot of sense.
-dair
-dair
You would need to know exactly which patents had been purchased to guess at their motives - the SECC filing just talks about "intellectual property rights", which may or may not mean patents (although the Reg seems to think so).
-dair (my guess would be it's just a reflex reaction: they saw something interesting on offer, and snapped them up to prevent someone else from doing so)
Pablo Fernicola went from Apple to Microsoft to lead D3D
I thought it was the DirectAnimation group he joined (or some similar 2D thing).
-dair (and to stay marginally on topic, you can get an LGPL implementation of QD3D here)
-dair
Read the FAQ, or use the Automatic Removal Tool.
-dair
They're a species of toad, introduced to Australia in the '30s as a failed attempt at pest control. They're named after sugarcane, which was the crop they were originally intended to protect.
-dair
-dair
1 - dock icon areas do not extend to edge of dock.
;-)
They do in 10.1.
2 - dock changes size and icons move as it gets used
Turn the magnification option off.
4 - it has vi so when I go to the apple help and type in vi I expect to see at least something.
Do you expect to see man pages for all of the GUI tools? If you're planning on using the command line, use the command line's help system.
5 - stupid windowesque scroll bars - the scroll-bars were one of the things which NeXT got right for Steve's sake
What's wrong with them? The up/down arrows can be grouped together as per NeXT, so the only difference is they're not stuck on the left hand side of the window.
-dair
-dair
-dair
Q. How do I share television programs with my friends?
A. If your friend has a ReplayTV 4000, they can "talk" to each other over the broadband Internet connections.
It sounds as if you need a ReplayTV unit at each end, but capturing what they send to each other would be trivial. The datastream is probably encrypted, but you have to wonder how long that would last.
-dair
-dair
The best feature was atomic commits, so you could look through the changelog for the repository as a whole rather than having to do it for individual files. Being able to see "Fixed bug foo - affected foo1.c, foo2.c, foo3.c" and "Fixed bug bar - affected foo1.c, bar1.c, bar2.c" was much easier than with CVS (where you get individual change logs for foo1.c, foo2.c, foo3.c, bar1.c, and bar2.c and have to cross-reference yourself to find out what files a particular bug-fix touched).
Perforce is quite expensive, but a two client license is free so it's worth checking out. Definitely looks like it has potential - it supports atomic commits as well.
-dair
Only 20 papers were selected for review out of more than 4,000 in total. The review itself was carried out by a bit of software rather than a human, and the paper apparently doesn't consider the point that the DOS users and the Mac users were using different word processing packages (one good? one bad? who knows?) let alone different operating systems.
The fact is that computers are tools to help people: by definition the tool that people find easiest to use is the right one for them. For most people today, that's graphical. It won't always be that way, but it won't always be the command line.
-dair (I refuse to believe we'll still be using awk in 300 years)
Graphical user interfaces are one of the biggest steps forward we've made in interacting with computers - throwing them away because they're somehow less "real" than a command line is stupid.
-dair
Let's face it - if it's that useful, you'll probably want to plug it into a desktop too (and I doubt it'll be through a USB based PC card reader).
-dair