After years of "No really! 68k chips are faster than Intel chips!" followed by years of "No really! PowerPC chips are faster than Intel chips!", maybe Apple just plain didn't want to deal with "No really! AMD chips are faster than Intel chips!"
Going with Intel means they no longer have to waste time arguing that their chips are really faster even though the clock rates are lower. Which, granted, wouldn't have been quite such a big issue now that Intel's finally stopped marketing entirely on cycles-per-second, but there's still a psychological bonus to be had from going with the chip supplier who sets the comparison against which everyone else compares themselves.
It's not that they're staffed by incompetents, it's that they're trying to increase security by making people think they're incompetent so they won't assume IT can fix their messes!
Because iTunes is designed as an incentive for people to buy iPods.
Predatory would be more along the lines of Creative suing Apple for using menus on its music player.
If you want to buy a Creative player, that's fine. You can do so, and use every online music provider that's not Apple--none of which will let themselves work on an iPod, either, I might add. Apple's not saying you can't play any music on your Creative player, just that you can't buy it from them in particular.
Do you think it's predatory that HP won't sell you ink for your Canon printer?
That might be true if the XBox360's CPU and the Cell in the PS3 were the same sort of chips that you'd want to have in a PowerMac. They're not. They're extremely specialized for their respective tasks.
One of the theories as to why IBM wasn't going to be able to supply Apple enough for them to stay with the PowerPC was because they would be using so much of their capacity churning out CPUs for Microsoft and Sony. And also, keep in mind that the XBox and PS3 CPUs are going to stick at a constant speed for their lifetimes, whereas Apple would quite like steady speed boosts.
So, to sum up, the fact that the PS3 and XBox 360 are using PPC-derivative processors is actually more of an argument for Apple to ditch the PPC than for them to stick with it.
The UltraSPARC chips have been 64 bit for quite a while now. A more useful article summary would have pointed out the actual newsworthy bit of this story, which is that they're rolling out 64 bit x86 servers (running AMD Opterons).
Raising application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents, but it does have the following effects: 1. It allows the USPTO to hire more staffers to determine validity of patents 2. It allows the USPTO to hire more qualified staffers to determine the validity of patents.
Which would you rather be, a highly paid programmer or a lowly-paid patent clerk? If they can raise the salary offerred to trained CS people, they could compete with software companies and maybe get a person who'll look at it and say "Um. You're trying to patent a menu. There have been menus since the invention of the video terminal. Denied."
If you want to do this while also helping the small inventors out, maybe add a "Frivolous patent deposit" to the cost of filing. Then if the patent examiner determines that someone's trying to patent something that any reasonably competent third year CS underground would be likely to whip up in a college project without even thinking about it, the USPTO gets to keep the money. But if it turns out that it's really something novel, the money's refunded.
You know, I'm seeing a lot of posts saying things along the lines of "If this were a Microsoft study, everyone would be calling foul, but since it's IBM and it's pro-Linux, everyone's going to accept it unquestioningly!"
I have not actually seen any posts accepting it unquestioningly. At least none getting significantly modded up.
So, you know. Calm down. Talk about the actual article, don't just complain about Slashdot.
Yeah, it's been really rough since they instituted those new laws requiring everyone to read every article on Slashdot thoroughly. I used to just read through the titles of most articles and then just read the ones that looked interesting, but now I have to read each and every one, including the comments.
Yeah, I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Linux fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Linux box (a PIII/750 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my PowerMac 8600/300 running OS9, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this linux box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
As in, you won't be able to use the new peripherals that will come out for the new Intel Macs on your old PPC Mac? No.
Pretty much all peripherals out there are cross platform nowadays, at least electrically (there may be driver issues). I.e., cards are always* PCI or AGP; hard drives are always some flavor of IDE or SCSI; External peripherals are always USB or FireWire. All of these work now on PPC Macs and x86 PCs, so there's no reason to think they won't continue to do so with x86 Macs and x86 PCs.
(* For values of 'always' equal to 'nearly always' in each of those examples. There are always counterexamples and companies sticking to old standards like the PC parallel port, but they aren't really mainstream)
If you're talking about software written for the x86 Macs running on your PPC Mac, then yeah, software compiled for X86 only probably won't run on the PPC (although I'm not certain of that. Given that they have Rosetta to JIT translate PPC to x86, they might be able to go the other way, too). However, most software will be compiled for both x86 and PPC, since it's trivial to do so (and the PPC macs will be around for a good long while even after the transition, since people won't immediately throw away their current machines, and since the plan says that the high end machines will still be sold with PPCs for a while after the low end machines like the Mini switch to x86).
Actually, look into some artificial life experiments. There have been experiments in which software "animals" in a virtual environment have the ability to reproduce and mutate (roughly equivalent to real mutation through radiation, poor cell transcription, etc), and said alife animals do, in fact, evolve.
I'll grant you that it doesn't prove that evolution is how *we* got here, but it does show that the ideas behind evolution are valid.
Slashdot Mirror
...and metamoderated unfair again.
(And I'm even an Apple fanboy. I just realize that there's a difference between "A differing opinion" and a troll)
If it helps, I just metamoderated one of your 'Redundant' mods as unfair. :)
--AC
Are you sure IBM sold vaccum cleaners?
Are you maybe just confused because they sold computers that really sucked?
I never said that the chips Apple was using weren't faster than their x86 counterparts. I just said that maybe they were tired of having to argue it.
After years of "No really! 68k chips are faster than Intel chips!" followed by years of "No really! PowerPC chips are faster than Intel chips!", maybe Apple just plain didn't want to deal with "No really! AMD chips are faster than Intel chips!"
Going with Intel means they no longer have to waste time arguing that their chips are really faster even though the clock rates are lower. Which, granted, wouldn't have been quite such a big issue now that Intel's finally stopped marketing entirely on cycles-per-second, but there's still a psychological bonus to be had from going with the chip supplier who sets the comparison against which everyone else compares themselves.
It's not that they're staffed by incompetents, it's that they're trying to increase security by making people think they're incompetent so they won't assume IT can fix their messes!
It's brilliant!
Apple only hits us because he loves us. And really, we do mouth off a bit too much...
Because iTunes is designed as an incentive for people to buy iPods.
Predatory would be more along the lines of Creative suing Apple for using menus on its music player.
If you want to buy a Creative player, that's fine. You can do so, and use every online music provider that's not Apple--none of which will let themselves work on an iPod, either, I might add. Apple's not saying you can't play any music on your Creative player, just that you can't buy it from them in particular.
Do you think it's predatory that HP won't sell you ink for your Canon printer?
That might be true if the XBox360's CPU and the Cell in the PS3 were the same sort of chips that you'd want to have in a PowerMac. They're not. They're extremely specialized for their respective tasks.
One of the theories as to why IBM wasn't going to be able to supply Apple enough for them to stay with the PowerPC was because they would be using so much of their capacity churning out CPUs for Microsoft and Sony. And also, keep in mind that the XBox and PS3 CPUs are going to stick at a constant speed for their lifetimes, whereas Apple would quite like steady speed boosts.
So, to sum up, the fact that the PS3 and XBox 360 are using PPC-derivative processors is actually more of an argument for Apple to ditch the PPC than for them to stick with it.
With these clicky buckling springs, they'll be able to sniff my password from miles away!
The UltraSPARC chips have been 64 bit for quite a while now. A more useful article summary would have pointed out the actual newsworthy bit of this story, which is that they're rolling out 64 bit x86 servers (running AMD Opterons).
If it helps, I just metamoderated that troll mod as unfair. :)
Raising application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents, but it does have the following effects:
1. It allows the USPTO to hire more staffers to determine validity of patents
2. It allows the USPTO to hire more qualified staffers to determine the validity of patents.
Which would you rather be, a highly paid programmer or a lowly-paid patent clerk? If they can raise the salary offerred to trained CS people, they could compete with software companies and maybe get a person who'll look at it and say "Um. You're trying to patent a menu. There have been menus since the invention of the video terminal. Denied."
If you want to do this while also helping the small inventors out, maybe add a "Frivolous patent deposit" to the cost of filing. Then if the patent examiner determines that someone's trying to patent something that any reasonably competent third year CS underground would be likely to whip up in a college project without even thinking about it, the USPTO gets to keep the money. But if it turns out that it's really something novel, the money's refunded.
You know, I'm seeing a lot of posts saying things along the lines of "If this were a Microsoft study, everyone would be calling foul, but since it's IBM and it's pro-Linux, everyone's going to accept it unquestioningly!"
I have not actually seen any posts accepting it unquestioningly. At least none getting significantly modded up.
So, you know. Calm down. Talk about the actual article, don't just complain about Slashdot.
(Yes, I know this post is hypocritcal)
No Americans understand any rhyming slang ever.
(At least, none that I know, including myself)
Yeah, it's been really rough since they instituted those new laws requiring everyone to read every article on Slashdot thoroughly. I used to just read through the titles of most articles and then just read the ones that looked interesting, but now I have to read each and every one, including the comments.
It's getting so I can barely get any work done.
Please reread the last line of my post.
Yeah, I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Linux fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Linux box (a PIII/750 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my PowerMac 8600/300 running OS9, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this linux box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
(This post is a joke, incidentally)
Oh no! If all of those people from slashdot click that link, we'll slashdot Slashdot!
As in, you won't be able to use the new peripherals that will come out for the new Intel Macs on your old PPC Mac? No.
Pretty much all peripherals out there are cross platform nowadays, at least electrically (there may be driver issues). I.e., cards are always* PCI or AGP; hard drives are always some flavor of IDE or SCSI; External peripherals are always USB or FireWire. All of these work now on PPC Macs and x86 PCs, so there's no reason to think they won't continue to do so with x86 Macs and x86 PCs.
(* For values of 'always' equal to 'nearly always' in each of those examples. There are always counterexamples and companies sticking to old standards like the PC parallel port, but they aren't really mainstream)
If you're talking about software written for the x86 Macs running on your PPC Mac, then yeah, software compiled for X86 only probably won't run on the PPC (although I'm not certain of that. Given that they have Rosetta to JIT translate PPC to x86, they might be able to go the other way, too). However, most software will be compiled for both x86 and PPC, since it's trivial to do so (and the PPC macs will be around for a good long while even after the transition, since people won't immediately throw away their current machines, and since the plan says that the high end machines will still be sold with PPCs for a while after the low end machines like the Mini switch to x86).
So, quick answer, no.
Actually, look into some artificial life experiments. There have been experiments in which software "animals" in a virtual environment have the ability to reproduce and mutate (roughly equivalent to real mutation through radiation, poor cell transcription, etc), and said alife animals do, in fact, evolve.
I'll grant you that it doesn't prove that evolution is how *we* got here, but it does show that the ideas behind evolution are valid.
Please do not feed the troll.
(Check his username. Look at the other things he's posted.)
Small quibble: Macs didn't get SCSI until the Mac Plus.
Will a beowulf cluster of these run OSX?
(I honestly can't tell if I'm being +5 funny or -1 troll some days...)
If that's 36% in Canadian percentages, that's only like 27% US.
--AC