The Year Five Billion problem. By then, our sun should have gone nova and incinerated the planet. I don't care what kind of computer you have -- that is going to cause a malfunction.
Take a good look at SDMI. Embeded within the specifications is the groundwork to eliminate that pesky "fair use" copying. Technology will enable the industry to eliminate what the courts would not.
Well, then. I used to be able to make backup copies of all of my music CDs, because they tend to get scratched over time. Now, with SDMI, I cannot do that.
How about a class action law suit against RIAA or whoever? They are deliberately ignoring the decisions of the United States court system to increase their own profits at the expense of consumers.
They love suing anybody who walks in front of them. Let's try turning the tables on them.
Visual C++ is a very nice piece of kit, thank you.
I see that my use of the word "tool" was ambiguous. I was using the word "tool" to refer to things like MFC and ATL, not the compilers and IDEs themselves. I've noticed MS Visual C++ has some nice features. Their "Edit & Continue" feature is very cool.
MSVC still cannot touch Borland C++Builder in terms of ease-of-use and elegance of the visual development environment.
I cannot understand why anyone would buy into Microsoft's development tools and technologies. They have shown time and time again that they cannot design a technology that will stand the test of time, and they will happily scrap anything that doesn't suit their business strategy, no matter how many developers it leaves out in the cold.
With every release of Windows, Microsoft scraps the old APIs and introduces new ones. The new ones don't solve many problems but are gratuitously incompatible with everything else.
ActiveX on the web was going to be the wave of the future. A bunch of people bought into that. Now, ActiveX on the web is an embarrassment to MS, to the point where they have changed the name just to help people forget about it. I hope you didn't stake your future on ActiveX.
DCOM was going to be the future of MS Windows IPC, but this article mentions that MS is depreciating DCOM in favor of some XML/HTTP based system. And DCOM hasn't even been fully realized yet!
And "Visual J++" was Microsoft's solution to Java. "Get all the benefits of Java with all the power of Windows", they said. Anyone who bought into that and staked their future on WFC and all that Windows-only Java are now going to find themselves at the unemployment office.
I could go on and on. Microsoft continually demonstrates they are quite happy to give their customers -- end-users and developers alike -- the shaft. My only question is, why do people continue to not only accept this, but yell, "Thank you Sir, can I have another?"
Exactly, which is why arguing that paying 1000$ for a 300mhz iMac that will out perform the 600$ K6-400 you put together on your own time is bad is just silly.
If you paid $600 for such a system, you are getting ripped off. I can build you a K6-3 system, at 400 MHz, with 32 MB of RAM, and 4 GB HDD, for around $300 without a monitor.
Compare the two in real world tests, and you will find that system is performance equivalent to the iMac in everything except floating point-heavy applications. (AMD's regular floating point sucks on the K6 line, and they readily admit this. The Athlon kicks butt, but is still rather high in price due to its performance advantage.)
Oh, sure, the iMac does very well on Apple's favorite Photoshop tests -- but those are optimized very heavily for the Mac. Compare generic PowerPC performance to a 3DNow! optimized application, and AMD will win. Let us be fair, in both directions.
And it is worth pointing out that the generic PC has a number of advantages over the iMac. There is more room for expansion. It uses standard components that are easily replaced if something fails or needs to be upgraded. There is more software and hardware available for the PC then the iMac.
I think, in the end, you will find the PC to be a better buy in terms of price-performance. Of course, the iMac's easy-to-setup design and easy-to-use OS may well make it the better choice for the home user who just wants to do email and web browsing (if they afford the $1000 price tag -- a lot of people I know cannot).
add in the labor for the machine, if... it takes you 5 hours
It takes me less then an hour to put together a bare-bones system and test the hardware.
Getting the OS installed is another story. Installing MacOS is very easy. Meanwhile, I think making someone install Windows violates the Genevia Conventions. But then, that is why I use Linux. Let's say I'm installing Linux on both machines, which makes them about equal (actually, the PC is better, since Linux on the PPC is still a little rough around the edges).
So unless you are a power user an iMac is an excellent machine to purchase. I recommend them to families all the time.
No doubt about it, the Macintosh wins hands down in terms of ease-of-use everytime. It has for years. I still find many aspects of the MacOS very elegant.
You just said that you can't measure performance. Therefore, the only real way to go is price/performance.
No, I said that comparing performance "at the same clock" is invalid. Instead, you need to use real-world benchmarks and divide the results by price. That gives you a price-performance ratio, which you can then use for comparison. Read more carefully, please.
A "damn good" PC for $300?
Yes. Around 400 or 500 MHz, 32 to 64 MB of RAM, 4 GB HDD. No monitor, though. Make it $400, then.
Hell, there are companies who will give you a good PC for free, provided you sign up for Internet service with them. That gives you a price-performance ratio so good, it cannot be calculated.;-)
And I can get my hands on an iMac for about half the price you quoted.
I don't get it. You flame my cheap PC prices, but then go on to boast how an iMac does not have to cost list. Just as you can get iMacs for less then list price, you can get very nice Intel-based PCs for less then the $1200 Dell wants to sell you one at.
No, but that is because my 15" monitor hasn't been plugged in for several months. But it was also much warmer then my 19" Samsung monitor is, which has been on all day.
Try feeling underneath the computer.
Heat rises.
The monitor heats the air in the center of the machine, which rises, and exits through the top. Cooler air enters through the bottom to replace it, running across the motherboard, cooling the good stuff.
Perhaps the motherboard really is staying cool enough. I don't know, and I doubt CompUSA is going to let me open one up to check. My point is mainly that there is an awful lot of thermal energy coming off the top of that case, to the point where boosting air flow with a fan is in order.
You're ignoring the fact that every Mac ever built will outperform every PC ever built if you compare a set of similar numbers (ie. same #Mhz, same #RAM).
Comparing different architectures "at the same clock" is patently useless. The reason is that different architectures do different amounts of work per clock cycle, depending on things like the number of pipelines, RISC vs CISC, etc.
The only way to accurately compare system performance (after you eliminate systems that don't do what you want, of course) is by using price-performance ratios. How much bang do you get for your buck?
Given the fact that I can get a damn good PC for less then $300, but have to shell out $1000+ for a Mac, I think I know what I would pick. (Plus, there are too many Windows-only games, so for me personally, I would go PC so I can still boot into Windows to play games.)
My personal pet peeve is that the menu bar is permanently docked at the top of the screen and doesn't stay attached to the application that owns it.
There are advantages to that method: For one, you don't waste screen real estate duplicating the menu bar in every window. For another, it means you always know where to find the menu, no matter where a window is. I'm not saying one is better then the other, just that Apple's method is not without merit.
A lot of people have been saying it means "Compact Edition", but I always heard "Consumer Electronics". And if you think about it, Microsoft would never call it "Compact Edition", because that would admit that "regular" Windows is not compact.
Because ther is NO FAN in new iMac and said Confucius before No Fan No Noise...
Yeah, and if you leave one of them new iMac's on all day, the rear vents get hot enough to fry an egg! I nearly burned myself touching them in a CompUSA display. Leaving out the fan was a bad idea, IMHO. With the monitor, hard drive, and video card all packed into such a tight space, overheating is going to be a serious problem.
I essentially agree with you on your points about why Wince has problems -- forcing inappropriate metaphors and techniques onto the UI for handheld device.
It is worth pointing out that Unix learned this long ago. The GUI in Unix is not bound up in the OS itself, like it is on Windows. Even if you run X, the "look and feel" can be changed at will. This is one of Unix's greatest strengths.
Linux does an even better job. One of the reasons Linux scales so well between platforms is that you have the complete source. Thus, if you are targeting an embedded system, you can reconfigure the kernel to exclude inappropriate and unneeded parts, and recompile.
I am not sure if the X protocol would be appropriate for a handheld device. On the one hand, X tends to have a lot of overhead, enough to swamp a device like the Palm Pilot. On the other hand, hardware keeps improving all the time, and having a single protocol for the low-level graphics interface has some nice advantages. I've used a prototype of Compaq's Itsy, and it runs X on a credit card sized screen with no apparent performance problem. And the ability to run a program on a big machine, but have it display on a handheld with a wireless connection, would be very cool. I think only time will tell how this will turn out.
Of course, if you went the X route on a handheld, the UI toolkits used by most of the software for the handheld would have to be different, or you run into the same problems as Wince. But building on the foundation of X would still have advantages, and you could run a "desktop UI style" program in a pinch if you had do.
Anyone else here remember PC/GEOS from GeoWorks? It was a GUI for MS-DOS that enabled multitasking, long file names, and more cool stuff, all on an 8086 CPU. There was also a version of it for PDA's (Tandy's now-defunct Zoomer being the most popular one to use it, IIRC). One of the really neat things about GEOS was the fact that the GUI functions were abstracted before being presented to the applications. Thus, you could take a program from the desktop version, put in on the handheld, and its UI would change to a pen-based metaphor automatically. Very cool.
what the [expletive] are you talking about? my post doesn't have question marks in place of apostrophes.
Try viewing it in a browser other then MSIE on MS Windows.
MSIE uses non-standard Microsoft codes in place of the apostrophe and quotation marks. They look fine to you, but anyone not using MSIE or not using Windows is laughing at you.
The obligatory two bits
on
Interface Zen
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· Score: 2
I think a lot of keyboard preference comes from what you grew up on. I think this stems from the fact that a keyboard is an unnaturual interface. It is a device for entering a language, but built using letters. Oh, I can't think of a better way to do it, short of voice recognition, but that doesn't change the fact that a keyboard is never going to be natural.
Thus, those who grew up with CONTROL to the left of A and ESC to the left of 1 will find modern PC keyboards useless. Myself, I grew up on the classic IBM 101-key layout, and that is what I use. I have zero trouble with CONTROL being where it is. In fact, the dual CONTROL and ALT keys allow me to use one hand for shifting and one hand for the prime key, whereas a single CONTROL key gets in the way.
I don't type using home row. I use what I term "Modified hunt-and-peck". I don't have to look at the keyboard anymore, buy my typing style appears somewhat random. I often comapre it to a line printer, which has a chain of letter faces in continuous rotation. Whenever the right letter is over the right spot, a hammer strikes. Likewise, I move my fingers around constantly, and when they are over the key I want, I press down. It works.
I find both vi and emacs to be not want I want. I grew up in DOS land, and am used to keybindings making heavy use of the cursor movement keys: Arrows, page up/down, HOME and END. Shift states (CONTROL, mainly) are used to move in larger steps (words, pages, etc.). (This doesn't worth a damn over Telnet, unfortunately.)
To someone like me, who grew up with this style, emacs seems like a random puzzle of control strokes, and vi fits the old joke: "vi has two modes: The one that beeps, and the one that doesn't." My mind thinks editors should not have states, and commands are single character shifted strokes (again, usually CONTROL, sometimes ALT).
The function keys are reserved for programmable macros or very infrequently used commands. With one exception: File commands get put on unshifted function keys. I still go for F2 whenever I want to save something.:)
I also find myself automatically adapting to the "penalty box", as Tom puts it. If I'm typing a lot of numbers, my right hand mindlessly migrates to the number pad. If I'm doing a lot of movement, it hovers over the cursor keys. If I'm using a lot of shifted strokes, one hand takes up station over CONTROL, the other punches keys. Thus, I get no big penalty for lots of shifts.
Of course, a typing teacher would likely have heart failure watching me, but hey, that's life.
This is a simple trivia quiz, not an estimation quiz.
Estimation is the process of making reasonable assumptions based on incomplete or limited data. You need to have some data to base your estimates on, however.
I could perhaps estimate the length of the Golden Gate Bridge or the weight of a Boeing 747, but only if I had a frame of reference. As I have only seen the GGB in artistic visuals not intended to give a sense of scale, and I have only seen a 747 in Hollyweird movies, I couldn't provide a worthwhile estimate for those.
I happened to know that the Shuttle orbits in about 90 minutes, and that roughly 50 people signed the Declaration of Independence, so I did well on those. But the significant factor here my knowledge of trivia, not estimation skills.
A true test of estimation would be to give you various pictures of things, with a known quantity for scale, and ask you to figure out dimensions, weight, volume, etc.
Yes, I am replying to my own post, to add something to it.
I originally intended for comment #53 to be funny and informative. Funny, because here we have a whole article that fits a -1 moderation category, and informative, for the links.
I suppose it is somewhat redundent, but as I pointed out, the whole article is. I think moderating me down to zero was a little uncalled for, but who am I to argue with Slashdot?
In any event, in no way did I intend to insult or attack the the two Robs and the rest of the Slashdot masters. I realize they are human and make mistakes. I think laughing at the mistakes (not the people, mind you) is a great way to releave stress, and that was part of the intent of my post. If I offended anyone (and I suspect I did, given the -2 moderation I got), I apologize.
Every time a Red Hat corporate takeover rumor comes along, it stirs up this big discussion about Red Hat, Linux, commercialism, etc., etc. Why?
I can see why people might debate the pros and cons of this or that company as a prospective choice, but I don't see why the fact that Red Hat is looking at potential purchaces is such a hot discussion.
This is what companies do. They aim to make money, generally by providing quality products and services. One excellent way to do that is to buy companies which mesh well with your own. The resulting whole is often greater then the sum of its parts.
Red Hat is a company. Way back from the start, one of their slogans has been "Red Hat -- The Commercial Linux People". Since their IPO, they've had wads of cash, so now is the time to do it. It makes perfect sense.
I cannot see why this is so often debated. Cause for discussion would be if Red Hat just sat there pumping out CDs without doing anything new.
One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it...
Very true, but on the other hand, a lack of cash and developers will not make a project succeed. If there are those would like to work on Mozilla full time, but need a job to feed their families, maybe this will enable them to do both.
I knew something was funny when the story link for this article was black instead of green like it usually is. Can you moderate an article as redundant?
Well, OK, let it be two atoms for a cancer. But Plutonium just stays the most toxic material known, you only need a fraction of a milligram to kill someone...
You can say the same for air.
Inject a tiny bubble of air directly into someone's bloodstream in the right place, and it will travel into the heart, block the (mumble) artery, and stop their heart dead.
The fact is that nearly anything can be used to kill someone if you do it just right. Plutonium is hardly the only substance which qualifies. This particular bit of FUD, while true, was sensationalized in the 1970s for propaganda purposes.
I saw it last night, and I liked it. I'm a geek (and proud of it), so anything all CGI is cool in my book. And I'm not so old that I can't enjoy the sort of fun a kid can have. Given that Pixar adds enough sofis... sophista... grown-up stuff to appeal to adults, and it is a pretty good movie.
The "Star Wars" pardoy bit was great! The climax on the elevator had me laughing so hard I nearly passed out.
I've seen references here to various animated shorts that Pixar has done. Does anyone know where those of us who cannot go to film festivals might be able to see some of this stuff?
Anyone have a link to anything about the "Renderman" software the credits say they used? I'm just curious. I tried renderman.com but all I got was a server error.:(
I realized something with this film: The first "Toy Story" was the only Disney animated film I've ever heard of without a character singing a song in the middle. Disney realized their error and corrected it for this movie, to increase sound-track sales, no doubt.
Me:At Chernobyl, they won't be able to pick up the pieces for hundreds of years.
You:Actually, reactors 1 and 2 were restarted quite soon after the accident.
I was refering to the reactor that exploded.
Also, I believe the entire complex was pretty well contaminated, to the point where a long term posting there would be hazardous to your health.
The area rendered uninhabitable is comparable in size to your average East European coal strip mine.
Oh, you can screw up damn near anything if you try hard enough. But the thing is, you don't have to strip mine coal. But if a nuclear plant blows, you have no choice but to entomb it for hundreds of years.
You can also undo strip mining a lot easier and quicker then you can undo a nuclear accident. Given sufficient replacement earth and some seeds and transplants to get things started, you can fix what we have done wrong.
...launch the waste on a trajectory into the Sun...
Riiiight. Remember Challenger? I can't think of a better way to contaminate a large area with nuclear fallout then trying to launch it into space.
This is not feasible at the moment due to the exorbitant cost and high risks of launching something, but in 50 years at the latest it will be...
I would like to see your proof that 50 years from now, all of our space launch problems will magically solved.:-)
Even if you could make it cheap and reasonably safe, remember Murphy's Law. No matter how safe it is, it will not be perfect -- perfection is outside of the human condition. All it takes is one accident, and you risk making my home state unhealthy to live in for much longer then I like.
Incidentally, the best proposals I have heard for cheap, clean power do involve space: Put the power plants themselves up there. You can do this with nuclear power if you like, but building our own reactor is silly when we already have one with Sol. All you need are some high quality mirrors, and you can beam nearly unlimited power directly to Earth.
... by then we will probably have fusion.
It would be nice, but it is far from a sure thing. Remember "Atomic power will be too cheap to meter"?:-)
You may already know this, but fusion is not as magically clean as some people would like to think. Oh, there is no long-term, high-level waste from spent fuel like there is with conventional fission. But the fussion reaction releases high-energy particles which irradiate the reactor plant itself. Far easier to deal with fission, but still a not insignificant problem.
You also have to remember that the longer something stays radioactive, the safer it is.
Only if you are standing next to it. The big danger with high-level waste is corrosion due to water. A leak in the roof can result in the local water table being contaminated with enough radioactive material to make drinking it unsafe.
Oh, sure, the discovery that radon has much the same effect is pretty chilling. But even if you are standing in a burning building, you shouldn't pour gasoline on the fire.:)
One thing that does look promising is artificially accelerating the decay of the waste. By bombarding the waste with high energy radiation, some scientists think they may be able to reduce the danger period from hundreds of years to a few decades, something which we can manage fairly well. That leaves only accidents (and possibly cost) as the show-stopper.
Actually, contrary to Raymond's "Halloween document," there hasn't been a new fork of the BSDs in several years.
I wasn't quoting Eric Raymond, and I was not referring only to the past few years. Don't reply to ESR or RMS; reply to me, if you please.
BSD forked into many, mutually incompatible systems. There are the three major "free" forks: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. IIRC, they all derive from a 386BSD project which is now defunct. Furthermore, many (most?) commercial Unixes trace their roots to those original, source available without restrictions, Unixes from AT&T and UCB.
That is what I am refering to when I say BSD forked. Unix could have been the universal future of interoperability between all computers; instead, it turned into a bunch of petty turf wars between Unix vendors. As others have put it, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
However, there are now a couple of dozen forks of Linux, and more are appearing all the time.
There are? I was not aware of any. Perhaps you refer to the various projects like RT-Linux, HA-Linux, ucLinux, and so on? There is a difference here between those and your typical BSD fork.
What we have here are a number of side projects. A bunch of people have a particular need or see a particular problem. To maximize development efficency, they start hacking in a high-density, limited system. Their work remains freely available -- because of the GPL -- and in every case I know of, they are ideally aiming to remerge with the Linux kernel proper. If not, the mainstream kernel people can take ideas they like and incorporate them back into the main kernell. The GPL ensures that nobody can make a propriatary, closed Linux variant. That is the major selling point of the GPL. Yes, it causes problems with some people, but many others feel it is worth it.
Hence, the fragmentation of Linux into many incompatible distributions.
I would like to call that FUD, but I was called out for over using that term, so I will instead call it an outright lie.
As far as I know, there is not one single Linux distribution which is not compatible with every other Linux distribution out there (platform specific dependcies aside -- don't complain that LinuxPPC doesn't run on your Alpha).
Do problems occur because someone's pre-compiled, third-party binary was dynamically linked against a different C library then which it was compiled for? Yes, that is not unheard of. But the problem comes from user X's system being out of date. Try to run a modern FreeBSD binary on a first-release 386BSD system, and I suspect you will have similar problems. You can hardly expect libraries to magically distribute themselves.
I am not saying the GPL is the end-all and be-all of all existance, like certain people (*cough* Stallman *cough*) do. I am simply asserting that, like any license, it has its strengths and weaknesses, and that many people believe the strengths are worth the weaknesses.
Commodore 64 with 300 baud VicModem, surfing the BBS scene in Nanaimo, BC, Canada.
Oh yeah? Well, in my day, all we had were tin cans and string! You had to attach the can directly to the CPU with tinfoil! We were lucky to get two characters per second, and were happy if we just got one!
You youngsters these days, why, you have no idea how good you got it. We used to have a 4K disk the size of this *room*, and you didn't hear us complaining! Oh no, we knew to be grateful for what we had! Why, we didn't even have keyboards at first! We had to *chip* the characters into the screen! With our teeth!
And ya know what else.... why.... um.... what was I saying?
Slashdot Mirror
kids with keyboards who need to be spanked.
What good would spanking a keyboard do?
(Yah, yah, I know, I'm tired...)
The Year Five Billion problem. By then, our sun should have gone nova and incinerated the planet. I don't care what kind of computer you have -- that is going to cause a malfunction.
Take a good look at SDMI. Embeded within the specifications is the groundwork to eliminate that pesky "fair use" copying. Technology will enable the industry to eliminate what the courts would not.
Well, then. I used to be able to make backup copies of all of my music CDs, because they tend to get scratched over time. Now, with SDMI, I cannot do that.
How about a class action law suit against RIAA or whoever? They are deliberately ignoring the decisions of the United States court system to increase their own profits at the expense of consumers.
They love suing anybody who walks in front of them. Let's try turning the tables on them.
Visual C++ is a very nice piece of kit, thank you.
I see that my use of the word "tool" was ambiguous. I was using the word "tool" to refer to things like MFC and ATL, not the compilers and IDEs themselves. I've noticed MS Visual C++ has some nice features. Their "Edit & Continue" feature is very cool.
MSVC still cannot touch Borland C++Builder in terms of ease-of-use and elegance of the visual development environment.
I cannot understand why anyone would buy into Microsoft's development tools and technologies. They have shown time and time again that they cannot design a technology that will stand the test of time, and they will happily scrap anything that doesn't suit their business strategy, no matter how many developers it leaves out in the cold.
With every release of Windows, Microsoft scraps the old APIs and introduces new ones. The new ones don't solve many problems but are gratuitously incompatible with everything else.
ActiveX on the web was going to be the wave of the future. A bunch of people bought into that. Now, ActiveX on the web is an embarrassment to MS, to the point where they have changed the name just to help people forget about it. I hope you didn't stake your future on ActiveX.
DCOM was going to be the future of MS Windows IPC, but this article mentions that MS is depreciating DCOM in favor of some XML/HTTP based system. And DCOM hasn't even been fully realized yet!
And "Visual J++" was Microsoft's solution to Java. "Get all the benefits of Java with all the power of Windows", they said. Anyone who bought into that and staked their future on WFC and all that Windows-only Java are now going to find themselves at the unemployment office.
I could go on and on. Microsoft continually demonstrates they are quite happy to give their customers -- end-users and developers alike -- the shaft. My only question is, why do people continue to not only accept this, but yell, "Thank you Sir, can I have another?"
Exactly, which is why arguing that paying 1000$ for a 300mhz iMac that will out perform the 600$ K6-400 you put together on your own time is bad is just silly.
If you paid $600 for such a system, you are getting ripped off. I can build you a K6-3 system, at 400 MHz, with 32 MB of RAM, and 4 GB HDD, for around $300 without a monitor.
Compare the two in real world tests, and you will find that system is performance equivalent to the iMac in everything except floating point-heavy applications. (AMD's regular floating point sucks on the K6 line, and they readily admit this. The Athlon kicks butt, but is still rather high in price due to its performance advantage.)
Oh, sure, the iMac does very well on Apple's favorite Photoshop tests -- but those are optimized very heavily for the Mac. Compare generic PowerPC performance to a 3DNow! optimized application, and AMD will win. Let us be fair, in both directions.
And it is worth pointing out that the generic PC has a number of advantages over the iMac. There is more room for expansion. It uses standard components that are easily replaced if something fails or needs to be upgraded. There is more software and hardware available for the PC then the iMac.
I think, in the end, you will find the PC to be a better buy in terms of price-performance. Of course, the iMac's easy-to-setup design and easy-to-use OS may well make it the better choice for the home user who just wants to do email and web browsing (if they afford the $1000 price tag -- a lot of people I know cannot).
add in the labor for the machine, if... it takes you 5 hours
It takes me less then an hour to put together a bare-bones system and test the hardware.
Getting the OS installed is another story. Installing MacOS is very easy. Meanwhile, I think making someone install Windows violates the Genevia Conventions. But then, that is why I use Linux. Let's say I'm installing Linux on both machines, which makes them about equal (actually, the PC is better, since Linux on the PPC is still a little rough around the edges).
So unless you are a power user an iMac is an excellent machine to purchase. I recommend them to families all the time.
No doubt about it, the Macintosh wins hands down in terms of ease-of-use everytime. It has for years. I still find many aspects of the MacOS very elegant.
You just said that you can't measure performance. Therefore, the only real way to go is price/performance.
;-)
No, I said that comparing performance "at the same clock" is invalid. Instead, you need to use real-world benchmarks and divide the results by price. That gives you a price-performance ratio, which you can then use for comparison. Read more carefully, please.
A "damn good" PC for $300?
Yes. Around 400 or 500 MHz, 32 to 64 MB of RAM, 4 GB HDD. No monitor, though. Make it $400, then.
Hell, there are companies who will give you a good PC for free, provided you sign up for Internet service with them. That gives you a price-performance ratio so good, it cannot be calculated.
And I can get my hands on an iMac for about half the price you quoted.
I don't get it. You flame my cheap PC prices, but then go on to boast how an iMac does not have to cost list. Just as you can get iMacs for less then list price, you can get very nice Intel-based PCs for less then the $1200 Dell wants to sell you one at.
Might it be as warm as, say, your 15" monitor?
No, but that is because my 15" monitor hasn't been plugged in for several months. But it was also much warmer then my 19" Samsung monitor is, which has been on all day.
Try feeling underneath the computer.
Heat rises.
The monitor heats the air in the center of the machine, which rises, and exits through the top. Cooler air enters through the bottom to replace it, running across the motherboard, cooling the good stuff.
Perhaps the motherboard really is staying cool enough. I don't know, and I doubt CompUSA is going to let me open one up to check. My point is mainly that there is an awful lot of thermal energy coming off the top of that case, to the point where boosting air flow with a fan is in order.
You're ignoring the fact that every Mac ever built will outperform every PC ever built if you compare a set of similar numbers (ie. same #Mhz, same #RAM).
Comparing different architectures "at the same clock" is patently useless. The reason is that different architectures do different amounts of work per clock cycle, depending on things like the number of pipelines, RISC vs CISC, etc.
The only way to accurately compare system performance (after you eliminate systems that don't do what you want, of course) is by using price-performance ratios. How much bang do you get for your buck?
Given the fact that I can get a damn good PC for less then $300, but have to shell out $1000+ for a Mac, I think I know what I would pick. (Plus, there are too many Windows-only games, so for me personally, I would go PC so I can still boot into Windows to play games.)
My personal pet peeve is that the menu bar is permanently docked at the top of the screen and doesn't stay attached to the application that owns it.
There are advantages to that method: For one, you don't waste screen real estate duplicating the menu bar in every window. For another, it means you always know where to find the menu, no matter where a window is. I'm not saying one is better then the other, just that Apple's method is not without merit.
There must be some old meaning to CE!
A lot of people have been saying it means "Compact Edition", but I always heard "Consumer Electronics". And if you think about it, Microsoft would never call it "Compact Edition", because that would admit that "regular" Windows is not compact.
There are also the jokes:
- Crashes Easy
- Crashed Everything
- Caveat Emptor
- Chaotic Evil
- Cannot Execute
- Complete Excrement
Because ther is NO FAN in new iMac and said Confucius before No Fan No Noise...
Yeah, and if you leave one of them new iMac's on all day, the rear vents get hot enough to fry an egg! I nearly burned myself touching them in a CompUSA display. Leaving out the fan was a bad idea, IMHO. With the monitor, hard drive, and video card all packed into such a tight space, overheating is going to be a serious problem.
I essentially agree with you on your points about why Wince has problems -- forcing inappropriate metaphors and techniques onto the UI for handheld device.
;-)
It is worth pointing out that Unix learned this long ago. The GUI in Unix is not bound up in the OS itself, like it is on Windows. Even if you run X, the "look and feel" can be changed at will. This is one of Unix's greatest strengths.
Linux does an even better job. One of the reasons Linux scales so well between platforms is that you have the complete source. Thus, if you are targeting an embedded system, you can reconfigure the kernel to exclude inappropriate and unneeded parts, and recompile.
I am not sure if the X protocol would be appropriate for a handheld device. On the one hand, X tends to have a lot of overhead, enough to swamp a device like the Palm Pilot. On the other hand, hardware keeps improving all the time, and having a single protocol for the low-level graphics interface has some nice advantages. I've used a prototype of Compaq's Itsy, and it runs X on a credit card sized screen with no apparent performance problem. And the ability to run a program on a big machine, but have it display on a handheld with a wireless connection, would be very cool. I think only time will tell how this will turn out.
Of course, if you went the X route on a handheld, the UI toolkits used by most of the software for the handheld would have to be different, or you run into the same problems as Wince. But building on the foundation of X would still have advantages, and you could run a "desktop UI style" program in a pinch if you had do.
Anyone else here remember PC/GEOS from GeoWorks? It was a GUI for MS-DOS that enabled multitasking, long file names, and more cool stuff, all on an 8086 CPU. There was also a version of it for PDA's (Tandy's now-defunct Zoomer being the most popular one to use it, IIRC). One of the really neat things about GEOS was the fact that the GUI functions were abstracted before being presented to the applications. Thus, you could take a program from the desktop version, put in on the handheld, and its UI would change to a pen-based metaphor automatically. Very cool.
Just my 1/4 of a byte.
what the [expletive] are you talking about? my post doesn't have question marks in place of apostrophes.
Try viewing it in a browser other then MSIE on MS Windows.
MSIE uses non-standard Microsoft codes in place of the apostrophe and quotation marks. They look fine to you, but anyone not using MSIE or not using Windows is laughing at you.
I think a lot of keyboard preference comes from what you grew up on. I think this stems from the fact that a keyboard is an unnaturual interface. It is a device for entering a language, but built using letters. Oh, I can't think of a better way to do it, short of voice recognition, but that doesn't change the fact that a keyboard is never going to be natural.
:)
:-)
Thus, those who grew up with CONTROL to the left of A and ESC to the left of 1 will find modern PC keyboards useless. Myself, I grew up on the classic IBM 101-key layout, and that is what I use. I have zero trouble with CONTROL being where it is. In fact, the dual CONTROL and ALT keys allow me to use one hand for shifting and one hand for the prime key, whereas a single CONTROL key gets in the way.
I don't type using home row. I use what I term "Modified hunt-and-peck". I don't have to look at the keyboard anymore, buy my typing style appears somewhat random. I often comapre it to a line printer, which has a chain of letter faces in continuous rotation. Whenever the right letter is over the right spot, a hammer strikes. Likewise, I move my fingers around constantly, and when they are over the key I want, I press down. It works.
I find both vi and emacs to be not want I want. I grew up in DOS land, and am used to keybindings making heavy use of the cursor movement keys: Arrows, page up/down, HOME and END. Shift states (CONTROL, mainly) are used to move in larger steps (words, pages, etc.). (This doesn't worth a damn over Telnet, unfortunately.)
To someone like me, who grew up with this style, emacs seems like a random puzzle of control strokes, and vi fits the old joke: "vi has two modes: The one that beeps, and the one that doesn't." My mind thinks editors should not have states, and commands are single character shifted strokes (again, usually CONTROL, sometimes ALT).
The function keys are reserved for programmable macros or very infrequently used commands. With one exception: File commands get put on unshifted function keys. I still go for F2 whenever I want to save something.
I also find myself automatically adapting to the "penalty box", as Tom puts it. If I'm typing a lot of numbers, my right hand mindlessly migrates to the number pad. If I'm doing a lot of movement, it hovers over the cursor keys. If I'm using a lot of shifted strokes, one hand takes up station over CONTROL, the other punches keys. Thus, I get no big penalty for lots of shifts.
Of course, a typing teacher would likely have heart failure watching me, but hey, that's life.
But what I wouldn't give for Boxer on Linux!
This is a simple trivia quiz, not an estimation quiz.
Estimation is the process of making reasonable assumptions based on incomplete or limited data. You need to have some data to base your estimates on, however.
I could perhaps estimate the length of the Golden Gate Bridge or the weight of a Boeing 747, but only if I had a frame of reference. As I have only seen the GGB in artistic visuals not intended to give a sense of scale, and I have only seen a 747 in Hollyweird movies, I couldn't provide a worthwhile estimate for those.
I happened to know that the Shuttle orbits in about 90 minutes, and that roughly 50 people signed the Declaration of Independence, so I did well on those. But the significant factor here my knowledge of trivia, not estimation skills.
A true test of estimation would be to give you various pictures of things, with a known quantity for scale, and ask you to figure out dimensions, weight, volume, etc.
Yes, I am replying to my own post, to add something to it.
I originally intended for comment #53 to be funny and informative. Funny, because here we have a whole article that fits a -1 moderation category, and informative, for the links.
I suppose it is somewhat redundent, but as I pointed out, the whole article is. I think moderating me down to zero was a little uncalled for, but who am I to argue with Slashdot?
In any event, in no way did I intend to insult or attack the the two Robs and the rest of the Slashdot masters. I realize they are human and make mistakes. I think laughing at the mistakes (not the people, mind you) is a great way to releave stress, and that was part of the intent of my post. If I offended anyone (and I suspect I did, given the -2 moderation I got), I apologize.
Cheers,
Every time a Red Hat corporate takeover rumor comes along, it stirs up this big discussion about Red Hat, Linux, commercialism, etc., etc. Why?
I can see why people might debate the pros and cons of this or that company as a prospective choice, but I don't see why the fact that Red Hat is looking at potential purchaces is such a hot discussion.
This is what companies do. They aim to make money, generally by providing quality products and services. One excellent way to do that is to buy companies which mesh well with your own. The resulting whole is often greater then the sum of its parts.
Red Hat is a company. Way back from the start, one of their slogans has been "Red Hat -- The Commercial Linux People". Since their IPO, they've had wads of cash, so now is the time to do it. It makes perfect sense.
I cannot see why this is so often debated. Cause for discussion would be if Red Hat just sat there pumping out CDs without doing anything new.
/SOAPBOX
Now wouldn't that be funny. If you thought AOL and Netscape were bad, can you imagine the culture clash if Microsoft and Red Hat were to merge?
One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it...
Very true, but on the other hand, a lack of cash and developers will not make a project succeed. If there are those would like to work on Mozilla full time, but need a job to feed their families, maybe this will enable them to do both.
This exact same story was posted by Roblimo last week on Sat Nov 20. In that very discussion, I posted a comment detailing how this was Old News, and that Linux Today ran a related story the month before that!
For those who want all the links in one comment: The Linux Today article referenced an article in the Danish version of ComputerWorld, and the comments on LinuxToday pointed out this project's home page.
I knew something was funny when the story link for this article was black instead of green like it usually is. Can you moderate an article as redundant?
Well, OK, let it be two atoms for a cancer. But Plutonium just stays the most toxic material known, you only need a fraction of a milligram to kill someone...
You can say the same for air.
Inject a tiny bubble of air directly into someone's bloodstream in the right place, and it will travel into the heart, block the (mumble) artery, and stop their heart dead.
The fact is that nearly anything can be used to kill someone if you do it just right. Plutonium is hardly the only substance which qualifies. This particular bit of FUD, while true, was sensationalized in the 1970s for propaganda purposes.
I saw it last night, and I liked it. I'm a geek (and proud of it), so anything all CGI is cool in my book. And I'm not so old that I can't enjoy the sort of fun a kid can have. Given that Pixar adds enough sofis... sophista... grown-up stuff to appeal to adults, and it is a pretty good movie.
:(
The "Star Wars" pardoy bit was great! The climax on the elevator had me laughing so hard I nearly passed out.
I've seen references here to various animated shorts that Pixar has done. Does anyone know where those of us who cannot go to film festivals might be able to see some of this stuff?
Anyone have a link to anything about the "Renderman" software the credits say they used? I'm just curious. I tried renderman.com but all I got was a server error.
I realized something with this film: The first "Toy Story" was the only Disney animated film I've ever heard of without a character singing a song in the middle. Disney realized their error and corrected it for this movie, to increase sound-track sales, no doubt.
Me: At Chernobyl, they won't be able to pick up the pieces for hundreds of years.
...launch the waste on a trajectory into the Sun...
:-)
... by then we will probably have fusion.
:-)
:)
You: Actually, reactors 1 and 2 were restarted quite soon after the accident.
I was refering to the reactor that exploded.
Also, I believe the entire complex was pretty well contaminated, to the point where a long term posting there would be hazardous to your health.
The area rendered uninhabitable is comparable in size to your average East European coal strip mine.
Oh, you can screw up damn near anything if you try hard enough. But the thing is, you don't have to strip mine coal. But if a nuclear plant blows, you have no choice but to entomb it for hundreds of years.
You can also undo strip mining a lot easier and quicker then you can undo a nuclear accident. Given sufficient replacement earth and some seeds and transplants to get things started, you can fix what we have done wrong.
Riiiight. Remember Challenger? I can't think of a better way to contaminate a large area with nuclear fallout then trying to launch it into space.
This is not feasible at the moment due to the exorbitant cost and high risks of launching something, but in 50 years at the latest it will be...
I would like to see your proof that 50 years from now, all of our space launch problems will magically solved.
Even if you could make it cheap and reasonably safe, remember Murphy's Law. No matter how safe it is, it will not be perfect -- perfection is outside of the human condition. All it takes is one accident, and you risk making my home state unhealthy to live in for much longer then I like.
Incidentally, the best proposals I have heard for cheap, clean power do involve space: Put the power plants themselves up there. You can do this with nuclear power if you like, but building our own reactor is silly when we already have one with Sol. All you need are some high quality mirrors, and you can beam nearly unlimited power directly to Earth.
It would be nice, but it is far from a sure thing. Remember "Atomic power will be too cheap to meter"?
You may already know this, but fusion is not as magically clean as some people would like to think. Oh, there is no long-term, high-level waste from spent fuel like there is with conventional fission. But the fussion reaction releases high-energy particles which irradiate the reactor plant itself. Far easier to deal with fission, but still a not insignificant problem.
You also have to remember that the longer something stays radioactive, the safer it is.
Only if you are standing next to it. The big danger with high-level waste is corrosion due to water. A leak in the roof can result in the local water table being contaminated with enough radioactive material to make drinking it unsafe.
Oh, sure, the discovery that radon has much the same effect is pretty chilling. But even if you are standing in a burning building, you shouldn't pour gasoline on the fire.
One thing that does look promising is artificially accelerating the decay of the waste. By bombarding the waste with high energy radiation, some scientists think they may be able to reduce the danger period from hundreds of years to a few decades, something which we can manage fairly well. That leaves only accidents (and possibly cost) as the show-stopper.
Actually, contrary to Raymond's "Halloween document," there hasn't been a new fork of the BSDs in several years.
I wasn't quoting Eric Raymond, and I was not referring only to the past few years. Don't reply to ESR or RMS; reply to me, if you please.
BSD forked into many, mutually incompatible systems. There are the three major "free" forks: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. IIRC, they all derive from a 386BSD project which is now defunct. Furthermore, many (most?) commercial Unixes trace their roots to those original, source available without restrictions, Unixes from AT&T and UCB.
That is what I am refering to when I say BSD forked. Unix could have been the universal future of interoperability between all computers; instead, it turned into a bunch of petty turf wars between Unix vendors. As others have put it, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
However, there are now a couple of dozen forks of Linux, and more are appearing all the time.
There are? I was not aware of any. Perhaps you refer to the various projects like RT-Linux, HA-Linux, ucLinux, and so on? There is a difference here between those and your typical BSD fork.
What we have here are a number of side projects. A bunch of people have a particular need or see a particular problem. To maximize development efficency, they start hacking in a high-density, limited system. Their work remains freely available -- because of the GPL -- and in every case I know of, they are ideally aiming to remerge with the Linux kernel proper. If not, the mainstream kernel people can take ideas they like and incorporate them back into the main kernell. The GPL ensures that nobody can make a propriatary, closed Linux variant. That is the major selling point of the GPL. Yes, it causes problems with some people, but many others feel it is worth it.
Hence, the fragmentation of Linux into many incompatible distributions.
I would like to call that FUD, but I was called out for over using that term, so I will instead call it an outright lie.
As far as I know, there is not one single Linux distribution which is not compatible with every other Linux distribution out there (platform specific dependcies aside -- don't complain that LinuxPPC doesn't run on your Alpha).
Do problems occur because someone's pre-compiled, third-party binary was dynamically linked against a different C library then which it was compiled for? Yes, that is not unheard of. But the problem comes from user X's system being out of date. Try to run a modern FreeBSD binary on a first-release 386BSD system, and I suspect you will have similar problems. You can hardly expect libraries to magically distribute themselves.
I am not saying the GPL is the end-all and be-all of all existance, like certain people (*cough* Stallman *cough*) do. I am simply asserting that, like any license, it has its strengths and weaknesses, and that many people believe the strengths are worth the weaknesses.
I can win this hands down.
Commodore 64 with 300 baud VicModem, surfing the BBS scene in Nanaimo, BC, Canada.
Oh yeah? Well, in my day, all we had were tin cans and string! You had to attach the can directly to the CPU with tinfoil! We were lucky to get two characters per second, and were happy if we just got one!
You youngsters these days, why, you have no idea how good you got it. We used to have a 4K disk the size of this *room*, and you didn't hear us complaining! Oh no, we knew to be grateful for what we had! Why, we didn't even have keyboards at first! We had to *chip* the characters into the screen! With our teeth!
And ya know what else.... why.... um.... what was I saying?