"If the standard CPU benchmarks are to be believed, it should be around a third to a quarter slower - certainly noticeably so. But using it, it seems comparable, sometimes a little bit better, on the same tasks. Even with the extra load of a far more capable OS and a lot more eye-candy."
Perhaps not. I do know that my Athlon XP 2000+ system running Windows XP (with all the graphical goodies turned on) is still way faster than any Mac I've ever used (at least in perceptual feal). I would recommend defragmenting your disk and killing startup programs and checking for spyware - it turned out that I had a bad virus infestation when my computer was running slowly.
"My powerbook is almost a year old, and has a 667mhz G4"
Huh? How do you have a Radeon 9000 64M in a 667mhz G4 Powerbook that's a year old? Such a system does not exist to my knowledge. Perhaps you have the PowerBook G4 with the Radeon 7500 32M, but the Radeon 9000 64M comes only on the 867/1Ghz variants.
"The whole thing with caching has always been that its affect varies drastically depending on what you're doing."
Caching helps you little when the L3 is only two megs and it's slower than the main memory of a new PC.
If you don't have a job, you can get health care from the government. If you do have a job, your employer provides a mandatory health benefit which you can buy.
No, we don't have "Universal health care". But people aren't "rotting in the streets".
"it's already working in Europe"
Socialist health care may work, but it lacks the level of convenience in the US. There are three MRI machines within five miles of this town of 90,000 in northern Colorado. None of them are used 100% of the time. Our system is inefficent but convenient.
Oh, and our taxes are much lower.
"The real question is why the US can't manage to provide health care for its citizens; despite spending twice as much per capita per Europe, US health, health care, and outcomes are worse"
See earlier. Your system is efficent. Ours is convenient. I can walk into a dermatologist's office and wait 20 minutes and get an exam if I suspect a problem. I pay $10 for that visit. I can visit a dentist's office so long as I call a day in advance. That's also $10. I can get a physycal just by walking in. That's $10.
Oh, and we're the ones paying for the development of new drugs. You don't think that R&D is free, do you?
Oh, and there is standardized health care in Hawaii - but only for people who do not recieve it through their employer. In most states, there is low-cost (or free, depending on the wealth of the parents) government-subsidized healthcare for childern.
Oh, and there's health care for seniors. It's called medicare.
So... let's see.
Adult:
Working - Covered by employer Unemployed - COBRA covers 1st year, after that you need to buy it yourself
Senior:
Covered by Medicare
Child:
Government-subsidized low-cost or free.
So, what's the problem? Everyone gets the healthcare they need, except those unemployed for over a year. Guess what, even a minimum wage employer (McDonalds, etc.) is required to provide healthcare if you work full-time (40 hours a week).
So what's the problem? Almost everyone gets healthcare. Our system is just different.
I'm always amazed at the ignorance of Europeans. They think that there is some kind of health-epedemic over here. That people are "rotting in the streets". That you have to pay tens of thousands or you can't get saved.
We have healthcare issues. So does Canada. So do European countries.
"And my experience is that in practice the whole systems tend to perform significantly better than you'd expect if you just look at the CPU benchmark"
This is extremely odd, as Macs have an awful memory subsystem (it's DDR but the because of the slow FSB it can't really get it to the processor). Athlons have a DDR 200Mhz FSB (for the new Barton 3200+) and a 166 or 133Mhz DDR (for the rest of the Bartons and thouroghbreds). P4s have a 100, 133 QDR or 200Mhz QDR FSB.
"AMD with 3 times the clock speed"
I call bullshit. Your PowerBook G4 with the Mobility Radeon 9000 only comes in 867Mhz and 1Ghz versions. That would mean that you have a 2601Mhz or 3000Mhz Athlon XP. The fastest clocked Athlon XP was the Athlon XP 2800+ Thoroughbred-B at 2250 Mhz, 2.6X the clock of your Mac. That's assuming that you have the fastest Atlhon and the 866Mhz Powerbook. What you likely meant is that you have an Athlon XP 2600+, which does not run at 2.6Ghz.
Unless you have a P4 of course.
I think this has more to do with poor ports than anything else. Photoshop is a Mac app, and it is designed for use with Altivec. When they moved it to the PC, they replaced the fast Altivec routines with slower integer routines. Had the program been written for use with SSE, it would likely be much faster.
"Nonetheless, they're comparable"
I'll have to take your word on that. But remember, the bottleneck here is likely the video card and not the system. The Radeon 9000 is hardely the fastest card on the block. The Apple system may be performing better simply because of more optimized code (which makes sense - the game developer may have added optimizations in the port) or drivers (ATI's drivers were crappy until recently). The fact is, a PC at half the Mhz might be able to have very similar results to your faster PC.
"the importance of system design shouldn't be underestimated either."
Yes, I like the design of Macs. The "system controller" is a goood idea - so good that NVIDIA used the same concept for their NForce chipset. The NForce uses HyperTransport (1.2GBytes per second) to connect the northbridge and southbridge, which is connected to the processor via the 3.2GByte/sec memory interface. The southbridge houses audio, Firewire, and ethernet so you aren't limited by the PCI bus. The idea of a L3 cache is also good, but it doesn't seem to have much of a performance impact (perhaps because it is little faster than main memory).
Sorry for jutting in, but you just pointed out a serious problem that I think Linux needs to work hard to overcome: backwards incompatibility. When will the authors of open-source applications learn that it is NOT ok to require a new version of the JVM to work with a new version of the browser, and that it is NOT ok that this new version of the JVM doesn't run on older systems. "Recompile with the older version of GCC" is NOT an acceptable workaraound.
I write software for Windows 2000 and XP, and it still runs fine on Windows 95.
Yes, there are only two browsers on the planet. Internet Explorer has 95% of the market. Mozilla (and derivitives) has 4% of the market. Everything else is 1% or less.
Everyone can rum Mozilla. Mac users can, Linux users can, even BeOS users can.
However, no page should depend on DHTML or even Javascript to function. I have a Danger Hiptop, and it irks me that some pages assume everyone uses Javascript. Use Javascript to enhance your page, not to create it.
1: Not all "64M Radeons" are equal. Your PC might have a completely different chip than the Mobility Radeon 9000 in your laptop. Perhaps it has a Radeon 7500. I don't know. 2: OK, MHZ is not an viable measure of performance. But the PPC isn't any more efficent than a PIII (unless what you are doing is Altivec optimized). At least not according to most benchmarks. So a 1Ghz PPC G4 should perform like a 1.5Ghz P3 (after some Altivec optimization), which is roughly equivilent to a 1.6Ghz Athlon XP, which is roughly equivelent to a Pentium 4 at 2Ghz. Which is fine to run most games. 3: Of course you can attach a USB mouse to your TiBook. But that's an extra perhiferal to lug around with your laptop (granted, you probably want a real mouse to play games anyway).
I'm personally impartial to my Danger smartphone. It's not Palm OS or Windows CE, but it has a kickass microbrowser and over-the-air synchronization of contacts, calendar, etc. It does AIM (I wish it did YIM or MSMIM or Jabber), and has a nice email client. The best part about it is the nice big (much bigger than the thumbkeyboards on Palms) thumbkeyboard that is revealed when you swivel the display. Best of all, there's no touch screen to break and no stylus to lose.
"on the network. For computers to be useful you have to have some level of trust"
This is what Palladium is all about. Executable code is signed, and it can only run if you choose to trust the publisher. Viruses are less of a problem because an infected file will fail signiture verification.
Microsoft may be misguided with Palladium and the DRM goodies that it includes, but the underlying concept of trusted and untrusted code is a good one.
Might I add, however, that the same thing can be done without the complete hardware implementation of Microsoft's product. A simple signed executable system would do the trick. Microsoft already uses this for ActiveX controls.
You need to try a Pocket PC. Standard graphic API for games, everything's always hi-res, a real FS and a real filebrowser, multitasking, standard screen resolution, extensible input area (just look at the number of input options).
Pocket PCs have their problems, but they overcame many of the incompatibility problems taht now plague Palm OS long ago. Palm can't seem to decide if they want to kill Grafitti or not. Sony and Palm have different screen resolutions on their devices (what a mess for trying to program a game). There's a whole legacy architecture to support, so we may not see many native applications for a long time. There's no standardized expansion format (Sony = Memory Stick, Palm = SD).
All Pocket PCs on the market for the past year have had an ARM based processor. They all have 240x320 16K color displays. They all have SD expansion (with a few exceptions). They all have 32M of flash. They all have audio input and output capabilities. They all have a 5-way directional pad and 4 front buttons.
"Finally, a good thing about the lack of acceptance of cellular standards here... no spam!"
Hmmm... you mean that the US doesn't use GSM? There are two major nationwide GSM providers in the US, T-Mobile and AT&T. Cingular is GSM as well.
Hmmm... maybe we don't have GPRS? Nope, I have a very nice GPRS device that works everywhere I go - and I live in northern Colorado.
Hmmm... maybe our SMS systems don't interoperate? Nope, I've sent SMS messages to people with Sprint, Verizon, AT&T (pre and post GSM rollout), T-Mobile, and Cingular. I've recieved SMS messages from people with all of those providers too. Even though Sprint and Verizon use a completely different wireless technology, I've never had a problem.
"I always hear about how all the other countries have superior cellular telephone service than we do here in the states."
There are some differences, but not as much as many Europeans would have you believe. In Europe, everything is GSM, so you can switch providers and keep your phone - but here in the US you can usually get a cellphone for free if you switch. You don't pay for incoming calls, but the person calling you does (here in the US, calling a cellphone costs the same as calling a landline).
In reality, there are three healthy GSM networks in the US (and they have all signed roaming agreements with each other), compatible SMS, and GPRS service. OK, we pay for incoming calls. But whoever's calling does not. Yes, it's a bit backwards. But it works. We deal with it by having plans with free nights and weekends and obscene numbers of minutes.
In the US I get 300 minutes, 1000 weekend minutes, unlimited GPRS data service, unlimited SMS, no long-distance, no roaming, and unlimited calls to anyone on the same network for $40 a month.
I use SMS a lot - all my friends have it on their phones and it interoperates between networks quite well. Much easier than calling someone.
I have a Danger Hiptop. It's a java-powered PDA/Phone with AIM, email, a very nice microbrowser that renders real HTML, and a lot more. http://www.danger.com
I hear it's coming to Europe soon, too, as it is a GSM device.
"And now MMS and video phones is all the rage (if you believe the providers)."
Actually, the situation is exactly the same in the US. T-Mobile is hyping a new Nokia video-camera-phone. Sprint has picture + audio MMS. Verizon and AT&T also have their respective products.
Buy an NForce2 motherboard from Asus or Abit or Shuttle and you'll change your tune very quickly.
1: AMD Athlons are cooler than P4s that perform equivalently. The old "AMD is hot" mantra came from PIII vs Thunderbird. It's not true any more.
2: Via is hardely "Mickey Mouse". How about ATI or NVIDIA? Asus? Abit? Shuttle? Chaintech? Aopen? Are they all "Mickey Mouse" too? You can buy an Athlon motherboard from every major manufacturer except Intel.
3: The Athlon is not crap. It is STILL one of the highest performing architectures on the block. The new XP3200+ beats the P4 3.06 in quite a few tests. It can't quite match the new Canterwood chipset with the P4 3.0C GHz, though.
4: Millions of Athlon systems all over the world have been operating flawlessly for years. Andnadtech, for one, uses Athlons in their servers. HardOCP did, but they switched to Opteron recently. Your reliability may suck. That is the exception, not the rule.
Your post is a troll. And I have three Athlon systems that have been operating fine for years.
How about you don't tell me what to do with my life? People who don't watch TV always talk about how much "better" it is to not watch - but they don't know what TV is all about. TV is about letting someone else do the work. It's about sitting down, zoning out, and not thinking about anything but what's on the tube.
There are lots of good movies that I have seen lately. No, none of them were what I would call "masterpieces", but not everything needs to be.
Sometimes you don't want prime rib. Sometimes you just want a cheeseburger and fries. TV is that cheeseburger.
The new AMD CPUs (ever since the first Athlon XP) have a thermal diode that reads the temperature inside the core. You need a motherboard with thermal protection (just about every Athlon motherboard today) for it to do any good. The motherboard kills the system power as soon as the temp hits 95C, ant it is fast enough to respond to a heatsink being removed.
Now, the real question is - why would you want to remove your heatsink while the system is running? A properly installed heatsink should never fall off.
No, the XBox was not a blunder. Yes, it's too expensive to produce, but that's its only fault. It has the best graphics and sound and networking and features of any console out there.
"The machine is too complicated." Not really. It's basically an NVIDIA IGP+MCP-T (except it uses a PIII instead of an Athlon). It's certainly not as complex as the original PS2 design (the later PS2 designs have been vastly simplified).
"Meanwhile, no doubt people are enjoying it around the world, but I'll bet there are already people high up in Microsoft questioning the decision to produce the Xbox"
No, they aren't. Microsoft didn't question the decision to start their Server division or their Windows CE division. Both lost money for several years before they became profitable. Microsoft is amazing (or at least anticompeditive) in how they will stick with a money-losing proposition for years until it pans out. Just wait, XBox will be rolling in the dough some day.
"No matter how many successful games companies you swallow, making a good, popular, game is part art."
Yes, and that's why 3rd party support is so essential for the XBox. Fortunately, the XBox is a developer magnet. The thing runs Windows and DirectX, so programmers can develop a PC title and an XBox title simultaneously, sharing programmers and code. This essentially makes the XBox "free" to develop for.
"doubt development houses are already finding that a project they're working on for the PC has problems running without major compromises on the Xbox."
Nope. The XBox is a GeForce3-class system. Remember that PC developers MUST develop for the hardware that is available - this usually does not mean Radeon 9800s or GeForce FX 5900s. Most PC games are designed to run, at least decently, on "Intel Extreme AGP Graphics". Even UT2003 runs on "Intel Extreme AGP Graphics" at 60fps, albeit at 640x480 with all the nice effects turned off. id has stated that their development target is the GeForce 3 - exactly what the XBox has (OK, the XBox is UMA, but it's not all that different)
"It's unimaginative and overpriced"
The XBox is extremely imaginative. It's a console built around a standard platform - the PC. Microsoft could probably start putting Athlons in the XBox and no one would know. They could switch the GPU for a GeForce4 Ti. When the XBox 2 comes out, compatibility won't be a problem - the old code will run just fine, but with better framerates. Developers will have no trouble adapting to the new hardware, either - it will be just like developing for the old hardware. Developers could even write games that scale-back their graphics to run on the XBox 1 but load on the eye-candy to run on the XBox 2. The XBox offers real tangable benefits to develoeprs.
For consumers, it costs the same as a PS2. Microsoft is the one eating the cost today, and with every enhancement (the XBox has been through 4 hardware revisions) they make the console cheaper to produce.
Also, the XBox runs at much lower resolutions than a PC.
Also consider an Athlon XP system with a micro-atx motherboard and a zalman cpu cooler (very quiet). If you go for a low-end Thoroughbred based Athlon XP, the peak wattage is only 45W - much less than a P4 based notebook. Plus, the XP 1700+ is going for $42 including shipping on NewEgg, and you can get a micro-ATX motherboard with LAN, audio, GeForce2 graphics, 3xPCI, 1xAGP, and 2 DDR slots for about $70. Add a laptop drive ($50), some DDR ($30 for 256M), a couple of NICs ($10 each), and a cheap case ($40) and you've got yourself a sweet router or server. Much cheaper and smaller than an old iMac or a P4 based system. Also, you can add gigabit lan if you want, PCI RAID for NAS, or use it as a backup system for LAN parties. The problem with the iMac is that it doesn't offer much in the way of expandibility.
Some insightful Slashdot reader never ceases to amaze me by sneaking an (usually even sort of on topic) Apple plug into every article.
Bravo! It's great to be reminded how much we love Apple every time I bring up Slashdot. Just like we're reminded how much we love the USA every time we say the pledge.
Slashdot has a very clear bias, it always has. I don't expect that to stop. But could you at least be slightly less blatant about it?
Actually, low-wattage 1mbps range limited 802.11b chipsets have the same kind of power consumption as BT chipsets. They also are similarly priced, have a similar range, and offer comparable bandwidth.
Slashdot Mirror
"If the standard CPU benchmarks are to be believed, it should be around a third to a quarter slower - certainly noticeably so. But using it, it seems comparable, sometimes a little bit better, on the same tasks. Even with the extra load of a far more capable OS and a lot more eye-candy."
Perhaps not. I do know that my Athlon XP 2000+ system running Windows XP (with all the graphical goodies turned on) is still way faster than any Mac I've ever used (at least in perceptual feal). I would recommend defragmenting your disk and killing startup programs and checking for spyware - it turned out that I had a bad virus infestation when my computer was running slowly.
"My powerbook is almost a year old, and has a 667mhz G4"
Huh? How do you have a Radeon 9000 64M in a 667mhz G4 Powerbook that's a year old? Such a system does not exist to my knowledge. Perhaps you have the PowerBook G4 with the Radeon 7500 32M, but the Radeon 9000 64M comes only on the 867/1Ghz variants.
"The whole thing with caching has always been that its affect varies drastically depending on what you're doing."
Caching helps you little when the L3 is only two megs and it's slower than the main memory of a new PC.
"we wrap mediocre implementations of Unix technology in Macintosh user friendliness"
No, that would be Apple with Mac OS X.
If you don't have a job, you can get health care from the government. If you do have a job, your employer provides a mandatory health benefit which you can buy.
No, we don't have "Universal health care". But people aren't "rotting in the streets".
"it's already working in Europe"
Socialist health care may work, but it lacks the level of convenience in the US. There are three MRI machines within five miles of this town of 90,000 in northern Colorado. None of them are used 100% of the time. Our system is inefficent but convenient.
Oh, and our taxes are much lower.
"The real question is why the US can't manage to provide health care for its citizens; despite spending twice as much per capita per Europe, US health, health care, and outcomes are worse"
See earlier. Your system is efficent. Ours is convenient. I can walk into a dermatologist's office and wait 20 minutes and get an exam if I suspect a problem. I pay $10 for that visit. I can visit a dentist's office so long as I call a day in advance. That's also $10. I can get a physycal just by walking in. That's $10.
Oh, and we're the ones paying for the development of new drugs. You don't think that R&D is free, do you?
Oh, and there is standardized health care in Hawaii - but only for people who do not recieve it through their employer. In most states, there is low-cost (or free, depending on the wealth of the parents) government-subsidized healthcare for childern.
Oh, and there's health care for seniors. It's called medicare.
So... let's see.
Adult:
Working - Covered by employer
Unemployed - COBRA covers 1st year, after that you need to buy it yourself
Senior:
Covered by Medicare
Child:
Government-subsidized low-cost or free.
So, what's the problem? Everyone gets the healthcare they need, except those unemployed for over a year. Guess what, even a minimum wage employer (McDonalds, etc.) is required to provide healthcare if you work full-time (40 hours a week).
So what's the problem? Almost everyone gets healthcare. Our system is just different.
I'm always amazed at the ignorance of Europeans. They think that there is some kind of health-epedemic over here. That people are "rotting in the streets". That you have to pay tens of thousands or you can't get saved.
We have healthcare issues. So does Canada. So do European countries.
"And my experience is that in practice the whole systems tend to perform significantly better than you'd expect if you just look at the CPU benchmark"
This is extremely odd, as Macs have an awful memory subsystem (it's DDR but the because of the slow FSB it can't really get it to the processor). Athlons have a DDR 200Mhz FSB (for the new Barton 3200+) and a 166 or 133Mhz DDR (for the rest of the Bartons and thouroghbreds). P4s have a 100, 133 QDR or 200Mhz QDR FSB.
"AMD with 3 times the clock speed"
I call bullshit. Your PowerBook G4 with the Mobility Radeon 9000 only comes in 867Mhz and 1Ghz versions. That would mean that you have a 2601Mhz or 3000Mhz Athlon XP. The fastest clocked Athlon XP was the Athlon XP 2800+ Thoroughbred-B at 2250 Mhz, 2.6X the clock of your Mac. That's assuming that you have the fastest Atlhon and the 866Mhz Powerbook. What you likely meant is that you have an Athlon XP 2600+, which does not run at 2.6Ghz.
Unless you have a P4 of course.
I think this has more to do with poor ports than anything else. Photoshop is a Mac app, and it is designed for use with Altivec. When they moved it to the PC, they replaced the fast Altivec routines with slower integer routines. Had the program been written for use with SSE, it would likely be much faster.
"Nonetheless, they're comparable"
I'll have to take your word on that. But remember, the bottleneck here is likely the video card and not the system. The Radeon 9000 is hardely the fastest card on the block. The Apple system may be performing better simply because of more optimized code (which makes sense - the game developer may have added optimizations in the port) or drivers (ATI's drivers were crappy until recently). The fact is, a PC at half the Mhz might be able to have very similar results to your faster PC.
"the importance of system design shouldn't be underestimated either."
Yes, I like the design of Macs. The "system controller" is a goood idea - so good that NVIDIA used the same concept for their NForce chipset. The NForce uses HyperTransport (1.2GBytes per second) to connect the northbridge and southbridge, which is connected to the processor via the 3.2GByte/sec memory interface. The southbridge houses audio, Firewire, and ethernet so you aren't limited by the PCI bus. The idea of a L3 cache is also good, but it doesn't seem to have much of a performance impact (perhaps because it is little faster than main memory).
Sorry for jutting in, but you just pointed out a serious problem that I think Linux needs to work hard to overcome: backwards incompatibility. When will the authors of open-source applications learn that it is NOT ok to require a new version of the JVM to work with a new version of the browser, and that it is NOT ok that this new version of the JVM doesn't run on older systems. "Recompile with the older version of GCC" is NOT an acceptable workaraound.
I write software for Windows 2000 and XP, and it still runs fine on Windows 95.
Yes, there are only two browsers on the planet. Internet Explorer has 95% of the market. Mozilla (and derivitives) has 4% of the market. Everything else is 1% or less.
Everyone can rum Mozilla. Mac users can, Linux users can, even BeOS users can.
However, no page should depend on DHTML or even Javascript to function. I have a Danger Hiptop, and it irks me that some pages assume everyone uses Javascript. Use Javascript to enhance your page, not to create it.
1: Not all "64M Radeons" are equal. Your PC might have a completely different chip than the Mobility Radeon 9000 in your laptop. Perhaps it has a Radeon 7500. I don't know.
2: OK, MHZ is not an viable measure of performance. But the PPC isn't any more efficent than a PIII (unless what you are doing is Altivec optimized). At least not according to most benchmarks. So a 1Ghz PPC G4 should perform like a 1.5Ghz P3 (after some Altivec optimization), which is roughly equivilent to a 1.6Ghz Athlon XP, which is roughly equivelent to a Pentium 4 at 2Ghz. Which is fine to run most games.
3: Of course you can attach a USB mouse to your TiBook. But that's an extra perhiferal to lug around with your laptop (granted, you probably want a real mouse to play games anyway).
I'm personally impartial to my Danger smartphone. It's not Palm OS or Windows CE, but it has a kickass microbrowser and over-the-air synchronization of contacts, calendar, etc. It does AIM (I wish it did YIM or MSMIM or Jabber), and has a nice email client. The best part about it is the nice big (much bigger than the thumbkeyboards on Palms) thumbkeyboard that is revealed when you swivel the display. Best of all, there's no touch screen to break and no stylus to lose.
"on the network. For computers to be useful you have to have some level of trust"
This is what Palladium is all about. Executable code is signed, and it can only run if you choose to trust the publisher. Viruses are less of a problem because an infected file will fail signiture verification.
Microsoft may be misguided with Palladium and the DRM goodies that it includes, but the underlying concept of trusted and untrusted code is a good one.
Might I add, however, that the same thing can be done without the complete hardware implementation of Microsoft's product. A simple signed executable system would do the trick. Microsoft already uses this for ActiveX controls.
You need to try a Pocket PC. Standard graphic API for games, everything's always hi-res, a real FS and a real filebrowser, multitasking, standard screen resolution, extensible input area (just look at the number of input options).
Pocket PCs have their problems, but they overcame many of the incompatibility problems taht now plague Palm OS long ago. Palm can't seem to decide if they want to kill Grafitti or not. Sony and Palm have different screen resolutions on their devices (what a mess for trying to program a game). There's a whole legacy architecture to support, so we may not see many native applications for a long time. There's no standardized expansion format (Sony = Memory Stick, Palm = SD).
All Pocket PCs on the market for the past year have had an ARM based processor. They all have 240x320 16K color displays. They all have SD expansion (with a few exceptions). They all have 32M of flash. They all have audio input and output capabilities. They all have a 5-way directional pad and 4 front buttons.
Probably a year or so. Take out the old Apollo plans, dust them off, put in new technology, and build the bugger.
From my understanding, Windows CE 3.0 is "real time", but only barely - and only technically. It's not nearly as "real-time" as QNX.
"Finally, a good thing about the lack of acceptance of cellular standards here... no spam!"
Hmmm... you mean that the US doesn't use GSM? There are two major nationwide GSM providers in the US, T-Mobile and AT&T. Cingular is GSM as well.
Hmmm... maybe we don't have GPRS?
Nope, I have a very nice GPRS device that works everywhere I go - and I live in northern Colorado.
Hmmm... maybe our SMS systems don't interoperate?
Nope, I've sent SMS messages to people with Sprint, Verizon, AT&T (pre and post GSM rollout), T-Mobile, and Cingular. I've recieved SMS messages from people with all of those providers too. Even though Sprint and Verizon use a completely different wireless technology, I've never had a problem.
"I always hear about how all the other countries have superior cellular telephone service than we do here in the states."
There are some differences, but not as much as many Europeans would have you believe. In Europe, everything is GSM, so you can switch providers and keep your phone - but here in the US you can usually get a cellphone for free if you switch. You don't pay for incoming calls, but the person calling you does (here in the US, calling a cellphone costs the same as calling a landline).
In reality, there are three healthy GSM networks in the US (and they have all signed roaming agreements with each other), compatible SMS, and GPRS service. OK, we pay for incoming calls. But whoever's calling does not. Yes, it's a bit backwards. But it works. We deal with it by having plans with free nights and weekends and obscene numbers of minutes.
In the US I get 300 minutes, 1000 weekend minutes, unlimited GPRS data service, unlimited SMS, no long-distance, no roaming, and unlimited calls to anyone on the same network for $40 a month.
I use SMS a lot - all my friends have it on their phones and it interoperates between networks quite well. Much easier than calling someone.
I have a Danger Hiptop. It's a java-powered PDA/Phone with AIM, email, a very nice
microbrowser that renders real HTML, and a lot more. http://www.danger.com
I hear it's coming to Europe soon, too, as it is a GSM device.
"And now MMS and video phones is all the rage (if you believe the providers)."
Actually, the situation is exactly the same in the US. T-Mobile is hyping a new Nokia video-camera-phone. Sprint has picture + audio MMS. Verizon and AT&T also have their respective products.
Take a look at Yoshi's Island (SNES) or Yoshi's Story (N64). Both have plenty of levels of 2D playforming and great graphics.
Buy an NForce2 motherboard from Asus or Abit or Shuttle and you'll change your tune very quickly.
1: AMD Athlons are cooler than P4s that perform equivalently. The old "AMD is hot" mantra came from PIII vs Thunderbird. It's not true any more.
2: Via is hardely "Mickey Mouse". How about ATI or NVIDIA? Asus? Abit? Shuttle? Chaintech? Aopen? Are they all "Mickey Mouse" too? You can buy an Athlon motherboard from every major manufacturer except Intel.
3: The Athlon is not crap. It is STILL one of the highest performing architectures on the block. The new XP3200+ beats the P4 3.06 in quite a few tests. It can't quite match the new Canterwood chipset with the P4 3.0C GHz, though.
4: Millions of Athlon systems all over the world have been operating flawlessly for years. Andnadtech, for one, uses Athlons in their servers. HardOCP did, but they switched to Opteron recently. Your reliability may suck. That is the exception, not the rule.
Your post is a troll. And I have three Athlon systems that have been operating fine for years.
How about you don't tell me what to do with my life? People who don't watch TV always talk about how much "better" it is to not watch - but they don't know what TV is all about. TV is about letting someone else do the work. It's about sitting down, zoning out, and not thinking about anything but what's on the tube.
There are lots of good movies that I have seen lately. No, none of them were what I would call "masterpieces", but not everything needs to be.
Sometimes you don't want prime rib. Sometimes you just want a cheeseburger and fries. TV is that cheeseburger.
To encode MPEG2 in real time, you need either:
1: A hardware MPEG 2 card such as the WinTV PVR (about $100, usually)
or
2: A hot processor
The new AMD CPUs (ever since the first Athlon XP) have a thermal diode that reads the temperature inside the core. You need a motherboard with thermal protection (just about every Athlon motherboard today) for it to do any good. The motherboard kills the system power as soon as the temp hits 95C, ant it is fast enough to respond to a heatsink being removed.
Now, the real question is - why would you want to remove your heatsink while the system is running? A properly installed heatsink should never fall off.
No, the XBox was not a blunder. Yes, it's too expensive to produce, but that's its only fault. It has the best graphics and sound and networking and features of any console out there.
"The machine is too complicated."
Not really. It's basically an NVIDIA IGP+MCP-T (except it uses a PIII instead of an Athlon). It's certainly not as complex as the original PS2 design (the later PS2 designs have been vastly simplified).
"Meanwhile, no doubt people are enjoying it around the world, but I'll bet there are already people high up in Microsoft questioning the decision to produce the Xbox"
No, they aren't. Microsoft didn't question the decision to start their Server division or their Windows CE division. Both lost money for several years before they became profitable. Microsoft is amazing (or at least anticompeditive) in how they will stick with a money-losing proposition for years until it pans out. Just wait, XBox will be rolling in the dough some day.
"No matter how many successful games companies you swallow, making a good, popular, game is part art."
Yes, and that's why 3rd party support is so essential for the XBox. Fortunately, the XBox is a developer magnet. The thing runs Windows and DirectX, so programmers can develop a PC title and an XBox title simultaneously, sharing programmers and code. This essentially makes the XBox "free" to develop for.
"doubt development houses are already finding that a project they're working on for the PC has problems running without major compromises on the Xbox."
Nope. The XBox is a GeForce3-class system. Remember that PC developers MUST develop for the hardware that is available - this usually does not mean Radeon 9800s or GeForce FX 5900s. Most PC games are designed to run, at least decently, on "Intel Extreme AGP Graphics". Even UT2003 runs on "Intel Extreme AGP Graphics" at 60fps, albeit at 640x480 with all the nice effects turned off. id has stated that their development target is the GeForce 3 - exactly what the XBox has (OK, the XBox is UMA, but it's not all that different)
"It's unimaginative and overpriced"
The XBox is extremely imaginative. It's a console built around a standard platform - the PC. Microsoft could probably start putting Athlons in the XBox and no one would know. They could switch the GPU for a GeForce4 Ti. When the XBox 2 comes out, compatibility won't be a problem - the old code will run just fine, but with better framerates. Developers will have no trouble adapting to the new hardware, either - it will be just like developing for the old hardware. Developers could even write games that scale-back their graphics to run on the XBox 1 but load on the eye-candy to run on the XBox 2. The XBox offers real tangable benefits to develoeprs.
For consumers, it costs the same as a PS2. Microsoft is the one eating the cost today, and with every enhancement (the XBox has been through 4 hardware revisions) they make the console cheaper to produce.
Also, the XBox runs at much lower resolutions than a PC.
I'm getting tired. It's 3:30 AM. Good Night.
Yeah, but GIF never had alpha channel support either. 256-color PNGs offer the same quality as GIFs but with a smaller filesize.
Also consider an Athlon XP system with a micro-atx motherboard and a zalman cpu cooler (very quiet). If you go for a low-end Thoroughbred based Athlon XP, the peak wattage is only 45W - much less than a P4 based notebook. Plus, the XP 1700+ is going for $42 including shipping on NewEgg, and you can get a micro-ATX motherboard with LAN, audio, GeForce2 graphics, 3xPCI, 1xAGP, and 2 DDR slots for about $70. Add a laptop drive ($50), some DDR ($30 for 256M), a couple of NICs ($10 each), and a cheap case ($40) and you've got yourself a sweet router or server. Much cheaper and smaller than an old iMac or a P4 based system. Also, you can add gigabit lan if you want, PCI RAID for NAS, or use it as a backup system for LAN parties. The problem with the iMac is that it doesn't offer much in the way of expandibility.
Some insightful Slashdot reader never ceases to amaze me by sneaking an (usually even sort of on topic) Apple plug into every article.
Bravo! It's great to be reminded how much we love Apple every time I bring up Slashdot. Just like we're reminded how much we love the USA every time we say the pledge.
Slashdot has a very clear bias, it always has. I don't expect that to stop. But could you at least be slightly less blatant about it?
Actually, low-wattage 1mbps range limited 802.11b chipsets have the same kind of power consumption as BT chipsets. They also are similarly priced, have a similar range, and offer comparable bandwidth.