> Jobs is the largest individual shareholder at Disney, and he could insist that its films be DRM-free.
He could... but he isn't the majority shareholder. He's on the BoD, but he's not the chairman or the president or the COO or the CEO. Disney (as a company) is responsible to _all_ it's shareholders to make money.
> Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
If you've ever done any serious engineering, you'd know that to be untrue ("just add the code in, then ship it - what could go wrong?"). Apple has to balance support / documentation / engineering costs against any returns they'll get from putting the code in.
Re:Hopefully not as terrible as the first
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm... I really like Halo. Strangely, I've got a CS degree, I'm a programmer by trade, I've played Doom, Doom2, Heretic, Descent, Descent2, Quake, Quake2, AvP, AvP2, GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, HL and UT. I can't dance, and I couldn't weave a basket if you put a gun to my head. I _can_ swim though.
The only FPS game that I can remember being as much fun as Halo was Doom(2).
And I _hate_ using the KB/Mouse to play games. It's _far_ too much like work.
I wonder that it doesn't bother Palm that they are tying their future to a company (Microsoft) that also happens to be their biggest competitor (PocketPC).
It'd be worth a little money to retain some freedom, I think.
I also wonder if Microsoft's use of PowerPC chips in Xbox2 is a similar sort of freedom from Intel.
"Why is that we can simulate purposeless murder on mass scale like exhibited in GTA and its ilk, but most of us would consider it abhorrent for a game to have a player able to enact even one simulated rape or pedophilic sexual encounter? What makes the simulated shooting down of 30 innocent people in a video game more socially acceptable? "
Because there is no situation at _all_ in which rape or pedophilia are acceptable.
There are _many_ situations in which killing is at least somewhat acceptable (self-defense, executions, war).
>I'm still confused as to why metadata isn't being taken seriously by the rest of the computing world.
It isn't being taken seriously by much of the UNIX world.
Microsoft is actively heading in that direction WinFS is essentially an integrated database of arbitrary indexed attributes related to file data. Even NTFS supports arbitrary numbers of forks in a file, which is a step up from HFS/+ 's 2 fork system.
Drives do have large caches, but the data needs to be moved from the drive to the cache at some point. And keep in mind that you're talking about an 2 - 8MB cache for a 100GB+ drive in many cases.
"Multiple readheads" isn't a huge advantage, I think. The multiple readheads are 1 per platter, and are all on the same armature - they can't move around independantly.
Given that Apple isn't marketing this (it started with people looking at the kernel source), I'd guess that they did actual performance measurements and found an improvement.
In large part that's because you aren't using most of those files. Probably 99% of your files can be fragmented (even heavily) and it won't make a difference because they aren't used (often or at all).
"Make the common case fast",
That's what this is all about. Defragment only the files that you actually _use_.
Of course, since there are performance requirements to doing this on the fly, it still has limitations. (i.e. nothing over 20MB, nothing with 8 fragments).
The hotfile clustering has the same idea - put only the files read the most into the hotband. Same sort of limitations apply (1.2MB, read-only files)
To clarify, there are 2 separate file optimizations going on here.
The first is automatic file defragmentation. When a file is opened, if it is highly fragmented (8+ fragments) and under 20MB in size, it is defragmented. This works by just moving the file to a new, arbitrary, location. This only happens on Journaled HFS+ volumes.
The second is the "Adaptive Hot File Clustering". Over a period of days, the OS keeps track of files that are read frequently - these are files under 10MB, and which are never written to. At the end of each tracking cycle, the "hottest" files (the files that have been read the most times) are moved to a "hotband" on the disk - this is a part of the disk which is particularly fast given the physical disk characteristics (currently sized at 5MB per GB). "Cold" files are evicted to make room. As a side effect of being moved into the hotband, files are defragmented. Currently, AHFC only works on the boot volume, and only for Journaled HFS+ volumes over 10GB.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they have Java 1.6:
http://developer.apple.com/java/
"Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 2 delivers improved reliability and compatibility for Java SE 6..."
the whole trackpad is a physical button, it's not a software thing.
> Jobs is the largest individual shareholder at Disney, and he could insist that its films be DRM-free.
He could... but he isn't the majority shareholder. He's on the BoD, but he's not the chairman or the president or the COO or the CEO. Disney (as a company) is responsible to _all_ it's shareholders to make money.
> Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
If you've ever done any serious engineering, you'd know that to be untrue ("just add the code in, then ship it - what could go wrong?"). Apple has to balance support / documentation / engineering costs against any returns they'll get from putting the code in.
Does Dell really sell in 2 weeks what Apple sells in a year?
r p/pressoffice/en/2006/2006_02_16_rr_001?c=us&l=en& s=corp
s .htmls .htmls .htmls .html
FY'06 Revenue (billions):
Dell: 55.91
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/co
Apple: 19.32
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/oct/18result
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/jul/19result
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/apr/19result
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/jan/18result
Hmmm... I really like Halo. Strangely, I've got a CS degree, I'm a programmer by trade, I've played Doom, Doom2, Heretic, Descent, Descent2, Quake, Quake2, AvP, AvP2, GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, HL and UT. I can't dance, and I couldn't weave a basket if you put a gun to my head. I _can_ swim though.
The only FPS game that I can remember being as much fun as Halo was Doom(2).
And I _hate_ using the KB/Mouse to play games. It's _far_ too much like work.
I wonder that it doesn't bother Palm that they are tying their future to a company (Microsoft) that also happens to be their biggest competitor (PocketPC).
It'd be worth a little money to retain some freedom, I think.
I also wonder if Microsoft's use of PowerPC chips in Xbox2 is a similar sort of freedom from Intel.
"Why is that we can simulate purposeless murder on mass scale like exhibited in GTA and its ilk, but most of us would consider it abhorrent for a game to have a player able to enact even one simulated rape or pedophilic sexual encounter? What makes the simulated shooting down of 30 innocent people in a video game more socially acceptable? "
Because there is no situation at _all_ in which rape or pedophilia are acceptable.
There are _many_ situations in which killing is at least somewhat acceptable (self-defense, executions, war).
> With HFS+ and UFS, you simply don't need to defrag.
This is a bizarre statement, given that Apple obviously believes that HFS+ needs at least _some_ defragging.
> The upside is that 95% of this is simply marketing to wow the Windows users raised on FAT. IMHO.
Except Apple isn't marketing it anywhere that I can see.
>I'm still confused as to why metadata isn't being taken seriously by the rest of the computing world.
It isn't being taken seriously by much of the UNIX world.
Microsoft is actively heading in that direction WinFS is essentially an integrated database of arbitrary indexed attributes related to file data. Even NTFS supports arbitrary numbers of forks in a file, which is a step up from HFS/+ 's 2 fork system.
Drives do have large caches, but the data needs to be moved from the drive to the cache at some point. And keep in mind that you're talking about an 2 - 8MB cache for a 100GB+ drive in many cases.
"Multiple readheads" isn't a huge advantage, I think. The multiple readheads are 1 per platter, and are all on the same armature - they can't move around independantly.
Given that Apple isn't marketing this (it started with people looking at the kernel source), I'd guess that they did actual performance measurements and found an improvement.
Nope:
Link
In large part that's because you aren't using most of those files. Probably 99% of your files can be fragmented (even heavily) and it won't make a difference because they aren't used (often or at all).
"Make the common case fast",
That's what this is all about. Defragment only the files that you actually _use_.
Of course, since there are performance requirements to doing this on the fly, it still has limitations. (i.e. nothing over 20MB, nothing with 8 fragments).
The hotfile clustering has the same idea - put only the files read the most into the hotband. Same sort of limitations apply (1.2MB, read-only files)
The summary appears to not be quite right.
To clarify, there are 2 separate file optimizations going on here.
The first is automatic file defragmentation. When a file is opened, if it is highly fragmented (8+ fragments) and under 20MB in size, it is defragmented. This works by just moving the file to a new, arbitrary, location. This only happens on Journaled HFS+ volumes.
The second is the "Adaptive Hot File Clustering". Over a period of days, the OS keeps track of files that are read frequently - these are files under 10MB, and which are never written to. At the end of each tracking cycle, the "hottest" files (the files that have been read the most times) are moved to a "hotband" on the disk - this is a part of the disk which is particularly fast given the physical disk characteristics (currently sized at 5MB per GB). "Cold" files are evicted to make room. As a side effect of being moved into the hotband, files are defragmented. Currently, AHFC only works on the boot volume, and only for Journaled HFS+ volumes over 10GB.