given that Mac's don't break down near as often as PC's
This is not a given, It is just something mac users like to repeat to help them justify their over-priced systems.
That study you are refering to is only in your mac-loving mind.
Compare a Mac to a cheap PC and I think you'll find that the Mac is more reliable. Now if you compare a Mac to a higher quality PC then they will be very similar. However, once you pay for a higher quality PC you're paying almost as much as you would for a Mac.
But this is all really besides the point. What the previous poster was really trying to say is that it costs less to run the MacOS then Windows. This is mainly due the the high cost of support.
Mac proprietary hardware results in fewer driver problems. Viruses run rampant on Windows - not so on Macs. Everything from networking to setting up a printer / scanner is easier on a Mac. Macs just work, it's that simple. Well, assuming you have supported peripherals.
Now I'm not saying everyone should get a Mac but there are people who would be a lot better off running MacOS. For many other people it would be a waste of money. For most people in this forum it would probably be a waste of money because they have the skills required to keep a cheap PC going. But if your time is valuable you should really give some consideration to getting a Mac.
So very true.. I can't believe other people havn't picked up on this.
It seems to me that the 50MHz frequency it best suited for broadcasting. As soon as you try to establish 2 way communications all those little portable devices burn up their batteries.
This ram drive thingy has a 6 _micro_second latency (if memory serves), roughly 1000X faster. Stick that in your RAID pipe and smoke it.:)
Actually, memory has a much slower latency then that. In fact, the latency hasn't changed much from the early 90's when we were all using 8 bit SIMMs. What has changed is that we now stream consecutive words of memory out at very high speeds. So while a 400MHz DDR memory module may be able to send a word every 2.5 uS, it still takes ~ 40 uS for that first word to arrive. And only consecutive words can take advantage of that bandwith.
And you also forgot to mention that all this data still has to go through the HD controller. Doing so greatly reduces the speed benefit gained from using memory.
The thing I really do like about this setup is that it would be perfectly quiet.
Right now, advertising sells music. So long as the labels control advertising (music videos), they will control what music is sold. What worries them about the internet isn't the loss of sales, it's the eventual loss of their monopoly by introducing another form of advertising.
Just imagine a future where artists don't need to sign with a label to make it big. This is the future the internet enables, and the future the labels want to kill.
The labels are smart. There greatest fear isn't the loss of sales, it's that the industry will someday no longer need them.
The SACD specification currently provides for digital output of the DSD data stream using a proprietary interface only. This enables players to use separated transports or specialized amplifiers which can decode DSD. Currently players from Sharp, Accuphase and dCS implement such an interface. At this time there is no open digital interface standard though a protocol is under consideration. Until receivers, pre-amplifiers etc. implement a corresponding interface, digital output is of no use however. Most players support digital output for CDs and the CD-compatible layer of hybrid SACDs.
So once a protocol is created I'm sure all the new players will support it. Also note that current players can still support digital output - it's just it'll use the CD data in place of the higher quality SACD data.
Personally, I really like the idea of an open standard. If it truely is open, someone will be able to take that digital data and convert it into MP3/AIFF/WAV directly. Very nice.
Even though a given embedded application may not *need* a 64bit CPU, economies of production and fabrication suggest that it may be *cheaper* to use a 64bit CPU as chip makers are likely to make more of them and less 32bit CPUs.
The economies of scale arguement actually work against you. You're assuming that there will be more CPUs for PCs then embedded devices. You're wrong, the embedded market is much larger then the PC market. For example, a person might own one PC. Great, but they also own a printer, digital camera, television, VCR, automobile,,, the list goes on. All these devices use embedded CPUs and don't require access to over 4gigs of memory. Since it costs more to make a 64bit CPU, these devices will continue to use 32bit CPUs. In this market, a price difference of a couple of bucks is enough to create a custom CPU. And will a TV perform better with a faster CPU? I think not.
No, Motorola 8XXX chips are eBook compliant chips. The eBook specs support both 64bit and 32bit cores.
The is absolutely no reason to go with a 64bit CPU unless you have to do a lot of work with 64bit integers (unlikely) or you need greater then 4gigs of memory space (more likely). The eBook spec supports future CPUs for Macintosh computers that require lots of RAM (64bit) and future CPUs for the embedded market that require very little memory (32bit). Those CPUs that are currently available are 32bit CPUs.
And yes, there was the failed PPC 620 CPU but that never really made it out into any products so there haven't been any real 64bit PPC CPUs to date (although I'm sure they're coming.)
As far as Power chips running PPC code - I don't think so, although I could be wrong. From what I understand, the PPC601 was a transition chip to the PPC architecture. It was designed by IBM and able to run much of the Power instruction set - thus making Power applications easy to port. Then came the 603 and 604 CPUs designed by Motorola. They were much different from the original 601. This is all when IBM had great plans of the PPC architecture being able to do everything and taking over 8x86 - it didn't happen. From there, the architectures diverged with PPC going towards efficiency and Power going for, well, power.
To make a long story short, PPC can _almost_ run the Power instruction set of 1990 - or at least code is easy to port. However, the Power architecture was never designed to run the PPC instruction set. A Power CPU of today won't run a program compiled for PPC.
Even if desktop PC's migrate to 64 bit in the next couple of years, you still have all the other embedded devices out there running on 32bit CPUs. There is no need for these devices to use a 64bit CPU - for these applications 8megs of memory is plenty, 4gigs is just crazy!! This is why 8bit CPUs (and even some 4bit) are still in production today and in much greater quantity then those 32bit CPUs found in desktop computers.
If linux is to be used in such devices, it'll have to support 32bit architectures.
PS, PPC chips are 32bits. IBM Power chips are 64bits but they are actually different from PPC chips. Code written for one doesn't run on the other - something the Mac rumor mongers simply don't understand with their "Apple is going to use a IBM Power CPU" bs.
Apple doesn't support USB 2.0 - as many other people have pointed out, Orange Micro (www.orangemicro.com) offers PCI cards and drivers for OSX.
Having said that, one has to commend Apple for the architecture inside OSX. A third company wouldn't have been able to create drivers that quickly if OSX never had good plumming. I guess since it started getting designed around 98, they could see USB / Firewire becoming the standard for external IO and designed the OS to allow for easy integration of such devices. I once read the docs about the OSX driver architecture and was impressed - many well thought out layers of abstraction - but that was a long time ago.
So long as they aren't being used at the same time. I don't have the exact details with me but I've read the MSOffice licence and they have it worded so that if someone purchases Word for work they can also install it on their home machine.
Why work in Canada when you can move to the states and make more money? As long as doctors in the states get paid as much they do then doctors in Canada will move to the states. This alone doesn't sound that bad - after all, doctors in the states do deserve their pay.
The problem is that in the states doctors pay $$$$ to get their license while in Canada much of the training costs are paid by the government. My sister just became an MD and she is now 100G in debt - that's 10g Canadian per year. Students in the states pay at least that much per term. They've got big debts to pay off when they graduate and deserve to get pain accordingly. If my sister were to move to the states she could pay of her dept in a year where it would take an American trained doctor several years.
The current system isn't fair for either Americans or Canadians. Canadians foot the bill to train doctors that work in the states and American doctors have to compete with Canadians that don't have half of their debt load. It's actually good for the American public - bad for the doctors. Up hear in Canada we call it the "brain drain."
The two possible solutions are to have Canadians pay more for their education, costing the government less money which they can put back into paying higher wages - or to reduce the pay of American doctors and "make it all right" by providing more funding for their education / startup costs. I personally favor the first option as having a high cost of education simply limits good educations to those that can afford them. Ever wonder why all American doctors have rich parents? It is not because only the rich kids are intelligent.
The chipset probably won't have AGP or PCI support, or limited, so why on earth would you want it in a desktop?
You're talking about the chipset - not the CPU. It's very possible, if not likely that they will produce more then one chipset. How many chipsets does the P4 now have?
If MS were to cancel a very profitable line of software running on a competitor's OS for no apparent reason.
It is actually in Microsoft's best interest to make Office X even if it wan't that profitable. Microsoft knows that Apple doesn't pose a threat to it's market share. By supporting Apple's OS they say to the courts that they're really not that bad.
To be Pure-OO, everything must be an object and derived from one single base type -- that is not the case in Java because of the primitives (int, byte, etc)
Not true. What Java lacks is dynamic binding / linking. For example, take two classes - Obj1 and Obj2. Obj1 can't be compiled if it makes a method call to Obj2 and doesn't have some sort of reference to that object - like a header file. A true OO programming language would allow you to do this because everything is linked at run time.
Take a good look at ObjectiveC. It is completely ANSI C compatible and is also a true object oriented programming language. SmallTalk is another prime example of a true OO language.
You're right when you say that Java isn't a pure-OO language but you're reasoning is incorrect.
One thing that MacOSX suffers from is lack of a speedy browser. I recently downloaded Navigator - a gecko based OSX browser. It's very immature but looks great, doesn't crash, and feels twice as fast as anything else out there. All it needs is a few more features and it'll be the browser to beat on OSX. While the developers of Navigator deserve some recognition, most of it goes the the developers of the excellent gecko engine. Thanks everyone - you know who you are...
I believe the point the poster was trying to make is that while mini-disks are currently at 160MB, they have newer disks in R&D. A year ago I read an article on/. about Sharp pushing the size up to 4GB - most likely using multi-layer blue laser technology. While 4GB will certainly not make it out until blue lasers are very common, a smaller 700MB or possibly even 1GB disk is technically viable.
Think of it this way, minidisks are actually very old - over ten years since their introduction. It's very possible to apply recent technologies, similar to what is now common in DVD players, to increase their capacity. Such a disk would make minidisks very competitive with the iPod and such.
For it to really work you would also need a radiator to cool the water. A fan blowing air over the rad would also be required for small rads.
The way it's currently implemented there is really no point. Good air heat sinks remain close to room temperature so they'll cool just as well as this water cooler. To actually improve the cooling you need so either cool the water or utilize a peltor with the water cooler to drop the temp below room temperature.
What exactly do you think happens to all the CO2 and other pollutants we pump into the atmosphere? They just disappear?
Uh, yes. Just ask your neighborhood tree or plant what they like to eat. They'll tell you they like water (which there will be more of if the earth warms and there is more evaporation) and CO2 (which apparently we're poisoning the atmosphere with).
So, yes, thanks to the plants CO2 does disappear.
Uh, no. We're taking carbon from deep underground (oil) and putting it into the atmosphere. Plants may take that carbon back out of the atmosphere but it's just temporary. As soon as that plant dies and burns/rots the carbon goes back into the atmosphere. The carbon never makes it back underground from where it originally came.
The way I see it the only environmentally safe fuel to burn is hydrogen. Solar/wind power can be stored in the form of hydrogen that can used to power automobiles. I guess alcohols based from grains/plants would also be good as they wouldn't change the CO2 ratio of the atmosphere. Either way, it all comes from solar power.
- Squirrel comes inside.
- Unknown visitor checks out the place.
- Squirrel goes back outside.
While the web page talks about two different cats, I'm sure that the software can't detect a difference between them. Just look at the log - only Squirrel is _ever_ detected. If you look at 03/12/2002, be sure to also look at the next few days. You will then see where the algorithm screws up. But one still has to give this guy credit, it's a very cool idea and well implemented. Just don't try to sell it - it's not there yet.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw this. Seriously, the arguement that yEnc encoded files will consume less space on servers seems very flawed. Any good server should see a uuEncoded message and store it in compressed form on the server.
When you know it's a uuEncoded file, it should be very easy to write a speedy compression algorithm. Even just use a standard Huffman algorithm - it was originally designed to be implemented by hardware for storage devices (think tape drives) and wouldn't impose any real overhead on a modern server. I just can't see why we have to implement a new standard before it's ready.
It seems that Microsoft is trying it's best to help AMD against Intel
If Microsoft goes with the AMD solution it's because it's a better solution for their Xbox2. Lets face it, the Xbox2 doesn't need much CPU power - all the work is done in the GPU. AMD offers CPUs that offer plenty of power but more importandly, are smaller and cheaper to produce. If Microsoft does go with AMD, this is why.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not a given, It is just something mac users like to repeat to help them justify their over-priced systems. That study you are refering to is only in your mac-loving mind.
Compare a Mac to a cheap PC and I think you'll find that the Mac is more reliable. Now if you compare a Mac to a higher quality PC then they will be very similar. However, once you pay for a higher quality PC you're paying almost as much as you would for a Mac.
But this is all really besides the point. What the previous poster was really trying to say is that it costs less to run the MacOS then Windows. This is mainly due the the high cost of support.
Mac proprietary hardware results in fewer driver problems. Viruses run rampant on Windows - not so on Macs. Everything from networking to setting up a printer / scanner is easier on a Mac. Macs just work, it's that simple. Well, assuming you have supported peripherals.
Now I'm not saying everyone should get a Mac but there are people who would be a lot better off running MacOS. For many other people it would be a waste of money. For most people in this forum it would probably be a waste of money because they have the skills required to keep a cheap PC going. But if your time is valuable you should really give some consideration to getting a Mac.
Willy
25Watts at 1.2GHz
.13 process because they'll use far less power.
40Watts at 1.8GHz..
The new powerbooks will probably use the new Motorola G4 that is based on a
It seems to me that the 50MHz frequency it best suited for broadcasting. As soon as you try to establish 2 way communications all those little portable devices burn up their batteries.
Actually, memory has a much slower latency then that. In fact, the latency hasn't changed much from the early 90's when we were all using 8 bit SIMMs. What has changed is that we now stream consecutive words of memory out at very high speeds. So while a 400MHz DDR memory module may be able to send a word every 2.5 uS, it still takes ~ 40 uS for that first word to arrive. And only consecutive words can take advantage of that bandwith.
And you also forgot to mention that all this data still has to go through the HD controller. Doing so greatly reduces the speed benefit gained from using memory.
The thing I really do like about this setup is that it would be perfectly quiet.
Just imagine a future where artists don't need to sign with a label to make it big. This is the future the internet enables, and the future the labels want to kill.
The labels are smart. There greatest fear isn't the loss of sales, it's that the industry will someday no longer need them.
The SACD specification currently provides for digital output of the DSD data stream using a proprietary interface only. This enables players to use separated transports or specialized amplifiers which can decode DSD. Currently players from Sharp, Accuphase and dCS implement such an interface. At this time there is no open digital interface standard though a protocol is under consideration. Until receivers, pre-amplifiers etc. implement a corresponding interface, digital output is of no use however. Most players support digital output for CDs and the CD-compatible layer of hybrid SACDs.
So once a protocol is created I'm sure all the new players will support it. Also note that current players can still support digital output - it's just it'll use the CD data in place of the higher quality SACD data.
Personally, I really like the idea of an open standard. If it truely is open, someone will be able to take that digital data and convert it into MP3/AIFF/WAV directly. Very nice.
IEEE-1394b allows for many things, including an optical cable that should solve the electrical isolation problems.
The economies of scale arguement actually work against you. You're assuming that there will be more CPUs for PCs then embedded devices. You're wrong, the embedded market is much larger then the PC market. For example, a person might own one PC. Great, but they also own a printer, digital camera, television, VCR, automobile,,, the list goes on. All these devices use embedded CPUs and don't require access to over 4gigs of memory. Since it costs more to make a 64bit CPU, these devices will continue to use 32bit CPUs. In this market, a price difference of a couple of bucks is enough to create a custom CPU. And will a TV perform better with a faster CPU? I think not.
No, Motorola 8XXX chips are eBook compliant chips. The eBook specs support both 64bit and 32bit cores.
The is absolutely no reason to go with a 64bit CPU unless you have to do a lot of work with 64bit integers (unlikely) or you need greater then 4gigs of memory space (more likely). The eBook spec supports future CPUs for Macintosh computers that require lots of RAM (64bit) and future CPUs for the embedded market that require very little memory (32bit). Those CPUs that are currently available are 32bit CPUs.
And yes, there was the failed PPC 620 CPU but that never really made it out into any products so there haven't been any real 64bit PPC CPUs to date (although I'm sure they're coming.)
As far as Power chips running PPC code - I don't think so, although I could be wrong. From what I understand, the PPC601 was a transition chip to the PPC architecture. It was designed by IBM and able to run much of the Power instruction set - thus making Power applications easy to port. Then came the 603 and 604 CPUs designed by Motorola. They were much different from the original 601. This is all when IBM had great plans of the PPC architecture being able to do everything and taking over 8x86 - it didn't happen. From there, the architectures diverged with PPC going towards efficiency and Power going for, well, power.
To make a long story short, PPC can _almost_ run the Power instruction set of 1990 - or at least code is easy to port. However, the Power architecture was never designed to run the PPC instruction set. A Power CPU of today won't run a program compiled for PPC.
Even if desktop PC's migrate to 64 bit in the next couple of years, you still have all the other embedded devices out there running on 32bit CPUs. There is no need for these devices to use a 64bit CPU - for these applications 8megs of memory is plenty, 4gigs is just crazy!! This is why 8bit CPUs (and even some 4bit) are still in production today and in much greater quantity then those 32bit CPUs found in desktop computers.
If linux is to be used in such devices, it'll have to support 32bit architectures.
PS, PPC chips are 32bits. IBM Power chips are 64bits but they are actually different from PPC chips. Code written for one doesn't run on the other - something the Mac rumor mongers simply don't understand with their "Apple is going to use a IBM Power CPU" bs.
Apple doesn't support USB 2.0 - as many other people have pointed out, Orange Micro (www.orangemicro.com) offers PCI cards and drivers for OSX.
Having said that, one has to commend Apple for the architecture inside OSX. A third company wouldn't have been able to create drivers that quickly if OSX never had good plumming. I guess since it started getting designed around 98, they could see USB / Firewire becoming the standard for external IO and designed the OS to allow for easy integration of such devices. I once read the docs about the OSX driver architecture and was impressed - many well thought out layers of abstraction - but that was a long time ago.
So long as they aren't being used at the same time. I don't have the exact details with me but I've read the MSOffice licence and they have it worded so that if someone purchases Word for work they can also install it on their home machine.
The problem is that in the states doctors pay $$$$ to get their license while in Canada much of the training costs are paid by the government. My sister just became an MD and she is now 100G in debt - that's 10g Canadian per year. Students in the states pay at least that much per term. They've got big debts to pay off when they graduate and deserve to get pain accordingly. If my sister were to move to the states she could pay of her dept in a year where it would take an American trained doctor several years.
The current system isn't fair for either Americans or Canadians. Canadians foot the bill to train doctors that work in the states and American doctors have to compete with Canadians that don't have half of their debt load. It's actually good for the American public - bad for the doctors. Up hear in Canada we call it the "brain drain."
The two possible solutions are to have Canadians pay more for their education, costing the government less money which they can put back into paying higher wages - or to reduce the pay of American doctors and "make it all right" by providing more funding for their education / startup costs. I personally favor the first option as having a high cost of education simply limits good educations to those that can afford them. Ever wonder why all American doctors have rich parents? It is not because only the rich kids are intelligent.
I found canadacomputers.com to be a much better place to shop. Have had some problems with NCIX.
Willy
Check out this movie trailer for "Simone" staring Al Pachino:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/simone.html
Willy
You're talking about the chipset - not the CPU. It's very possible, if not likely that they will produce more then one chipset. How many chipsets does the P4 now have?
It is actually in Microsoft's best interest to make Office X even if it wan't that profitable. Microsoft knows that Apple doesn't pose a threat to it's market share. By supporting Apple's OS they say to the courts that they're really not that bad.
Willy
Not true. What Java lacks is dynamic binding / linking. For example, take two classes - Obj1 and Obj2. Obj1 can't be compiled if it makes a method call to Obj2 and doesn't have some sort of reference to that object - like a header file. A true OO programming language would allow you to do this because everything is linked at run time.
Take a good look at ObjectiveC. It is completely ANSI C compatible and is also a true object oriented programming language. SmallTalk is another prime example of a true OO language.
You're right when you say that Java isn't a pure-OO language but you're reasoning is incorrect.
Willy
One thing that MacOSX suffers from is lack of a speedy browser. I recently downloaded Navigator - a gecko based OSX browser. It's very immature but looks great, doesn't crash, and feels twice as fast as anything else out there. All it needs is a few more features and it'll be the browser to beat on OSX. While the developers of Navigator deserve some recognition, most of it goes the the developers of the excellent gecko engine. Thanks everyone - you know who you are...
Willy
Think of it this way, minidisks are actually very old - over ten years since their introduction. It's very possible to apply recent technologies, similar to what is now common in DVD players, to increase their capacity. Such a disk would make minidisks very competitive with the iPod and such.
Willy
The way it's currently implemented there is really no point. Good air heat sinks remain close to room temperature so they'll cool just as well as this water cooler. To actually improve the cooling you need so either cool the water or utilize a peltor with the water cooler to drop the temp below room temperature.
Willy
Uh, yes. Just ask your neighborhood tree or plant what they like to eat. They'll tell you they like water (which there will be more of if the earth warms and there is more evaporation) and CO2 (which apparently we're poisoning the atmosphere with).
So, yes, thanks to the plants CO2 does disappear.
Uh, no. We're taking carbon from deep underground (oil) and putting it into the atmosphere. Plants may take that carbon back out of the atmosphere but it's just temporary. As soon as that plant dies and burns/rots the carbon goes back into the atmosphere. The carbon never makes it back underground from where it originally came.
The way I see it the only environmentally safe fuel to burn is hydrogen. Solar/wind power can be stored in the form of hydrogen that can used to power automobiles. I guess alcohols based from grains/plants would also be good as they wouldn't change the CO2 ratio of the atmosphere. Either way, it all comes from solar power.
Willy
- Unknown visitor checks out the place.
- Squirrel goes back outside.
While the web page talks about two different cats, I'm sure that the software can't detect a difference between them. Just look at the log - only Squirrel is _ever_ detected. If you look at 03/12/2002, be sure to also look at the next few days. You will then see where the algorithm screws up. But one still has to give this guy credit, it's a very cool idea and well implemented. Just don't try to sell it - it's not there yet.
Willy
When you know it's a uuEncoded file, it should be very easy to write a speedy compression algorithm. Even just use a standard Huffman algorithm - it was originally designed to be implemented by hardware for storage devices (think tape drives) and wouldn't impose any real overhead on a modern server. I just can't see why we have to implement a new standard before it's ready.
Willy
If Microsoft goes with the AMD solution it's because it's a better solution for their Xbox2. Lets face it, the Xbox2 doesn't need much CPU power - all the work is done in the GPU. AMD offers CPUs that offer plenty of power but more importandly, are smaller and cheaper to produce. If Microsoft does go with AMD, this is why.
William