You're right. It's all about what you're used to, and what you're capable of doing. However, you didn't actually provide any logical reasons to prove that OS X/Windows/Linux is superior/inferior.
There is an obvious visual cue that OS X windows are meant to be dragged from the bottom right corner present in every window that can be dragged. Many Windows applications behave the same way, and provide this same cue. I'd say that OS X is superior in this respect, simply because it's consistent across the board.
Comparing the manner in which your 3rd-party photo gallery app works doesn't really help compare the two either. If you were talking about iPhoto (I couldn't tell -- those paragraphs were completely incoherent), again, it's no basis for comparison, as Windows includes no similar application.
Not having to remove spyware is also a nice advantage for OS X (at the moment at least).
People really need to stop scrutinizing Apple down to a hair, whilst Microsoft's discovers a dozen gaping holes in its operating system every week, and Dell laptops burst into flames on a regular basis.
First off, Jobs publically stated that there is a bunch of stuff that's still under wraps. This may very well be because it's not done, or because it's of no significance to developers, and doesn't need to be announced in advance. Imagine all the bad press Microsoft could have avoided by never announcing WinFS until they were *positive* that it would be done in time for Longhorn?
Leopard will be resolution-independent -- This is a HUGE feature that the world has needed for the past 10 or so years. We can finially move twoard HD displays without having to squint our eyes because the text on a 4000x3000 monitor would be microscopic.
Carbon apps can now embed Cocoa components. Might breathe some more life into the old legacy apps, as well as making Photoshop and Office a little more tolerable, and a little more mac-like.
Apache 2.0, Ruby on Rails and Subversion are included in the end-user version as well as the server, which I think speaks for itself. How cool is that?
Complete support for 64-bit applications across the OS. Last time I used it, there were some (very noticiable) lingering 32-bit remnants in XP-64 that made it virtually unusable.
All sorts of new APIs that should allow every application take advantage of the cool new features announced in the keynote, as well as extensions to some older APIs (iCal specifically) -- anyone who's used the.Mac Backup application can attest to the wide range of software that builds in support for it.
Congratulations, Aaron. You just made it onto next month's no-fly list! It's a veritable who's-who of international terrorists and United State Senators alike! Keep up the good work.
For my sins I have used a lost of operating systems over the years and they all have their pros and cons, the one thing that seems common across them is that the more scarey they look the less likely they are to break because people don't mess with the difficult ones. Most failures are caused by human error (it's just that no one admits to it) and making server OS's look familiar tempts people to fiddle.
SCO OpenServer.
Scary, old, unsupported (difficult to find anyone willing to work with it), and extremely easy to break, even by end users.
Then again, this is probably the result of bad karma for still running a serial-line network in 2006.
To draw another analogy, Token Ring is also scary, and very easy to break. On the flipside, Mac OS X is much "simpler" to an end-user than Windows is(and to a certain extent, to the developer as well) -- it is also much more difficult to break. I've never seen an OS X installation trashed in such a way that it couldn't be fixed by creating a new user profile. Granted, this is due to OSX's UNIX underpinnings, but the fact remains that it's pretty undeniable that it's a simpler system to use for the user.
I actually find it funny that the thinkpads haven't changed in over 10 years, and yet, they are some of the best looking laptops around. Why Sony and Dell don't learn from this is beyond me. Dell's designs in particular have gone *severely* downhill.
The Dell Latitude CP series looked great, and maintained a consistant design for several years. It was eventually replaced by a series of thinner laptops, but the fact remains that they were great neutral-looking machines. Not particularly flashy, but not boxy either. Dell's first ultraportables were also equally attractive, and looked not unlike a 12" Powerbook (complete with a metal body). The flimsy plastic crap dell's got nowindays just doesn't cut it.
Someone dropped their IBM 701c at my house a few weeks ago, because it had stopped working, and they wanted me to take a look at it. At first glance, I thought that it was a pretty cool looking machine, albeit a little thick. After opening it up, I realized it was over 10 years old. Wow. (The 'repair' was replacing the power brick -- a dog chewed through the cord. Lenovo's still using the same voltage and power connector 10 years later, so we just ordered a brand new charger, and the machine began chugging along once again.)
So, in short, I agree. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Apple's current lineup doesn't appear dated at all, and I don't really see any reason for them to move to a new design. The G5/Mac Pro chasis is particularly sleek and attractive. Sure, it could be a little smaller, but for a workstation, it's still not that bad, and has nice big handles. Space isn't too much of a concern for the Mac Pro's target audience, either, considering that the iMac and Mini are both adequate desktop machines for just about any task.
For the naysayers out there, it's worth pointing out that OS X began life in the early 1990s as NextSTEP. I suppose virtual desktops were an 'obvious' feature to have back then. Not so much of a "copy-cat". It's fine to reuse a genuinely good idea (especially an older one) in a new innovative manner.
I'm not quite so sure for OS X how useful it will be. It's kind of abandoning the KISS philosophy that Jobs has firmly adhered to.
During the time period that this data refers to, AMD's products had a clear lead in price/performance. But they only got a quarter of the market, instead of >90%, which they would have got if purchasers had been knowledgeable and rational.
I don't think AMD has that sort of manufacturing capacity.
nVIDIA came out of nowhere about 5-6 years ago, whilst ATI has been firmly entrenched in the marketplace for a much longer time.
nVIDIA was able to grow so quickly, because their products were faster, less buggy, and better supported than anything on the market at the time. ATI was just barely able to keep up, and everyone else bit the dust.
The consumer-end graphics industry has been known for buggy drivers for almost its entire existance. nVIDIA's biggest innovation was not necessarily in hardware, but in software instead. By shipping a unified driver for all of its products, it was easy for them to fix bugs in the drivers years after the products they supported came out, and continually tweak those drivers. As a result, they wound up with a rock-stable platform that ATI took years to match.
I'm not saying ATI's terrible (I'd consider them to be about average), but in terms of stability and product support, there's little doubt that nVIDIA leads the industry.
AMD on the other hand, I see as a great company with great leadership. I hope that they can turn ATI around, and push out some innovative products. AMD's committed to open standards, and is known for its ethical business practices, not to mention that they tend to do much of their manufacturing and product development within the US.
You really think apple's going to make the same mistake twice, and lock itself to one vendor.
Yes, I'll grant you that intel and apple have a special relationship, but I doubt it's a long-term exclusivity agreement, and if there is some sort of exclusivity in there, then there is almost definitely an escape clause.
They're not going to get burned again like they first did with Motorola, and then again with IBM.
Re:Knowing the drug companies . . .
on
Growing Insulin
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· Score: 1
Don't go comparing the normal laws of supply & demand to insulin. They don't necessarily apply. Insulin is one of the few goods which is perfectly inelastic --- regardless of the price or availability of insulin, the demand will always going be the same.
(Granted, this is isolating just two variables. The price of insulin is controlled by other factors. Supply just isn't one of them.)
There are a few puzzling omissions from the CSS spec.
Namely, centering.
Tell a user that you can do everything with CSS....except for centering text or an element, and chances are that they'll never use it. How the W3C could have left out such a fundamental feature is beyond me.
You also can't do columns....
And of course, it seems like the spec must be incredibly ambiguous given the fact that no two browsers interpret it in the same way
(yes. I know there are various 'hacks' out there that do allow you to center, but that's beside the point....)
Re:Experts should be optional
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Really?
It would appear to me that for the past 5 years, graphic designers have been one of the most technically-literate groups of people out there. They're one of the few demographics that actually "get it" when it comes to things like CSS.
There are some pretty slick sites floating around using nothing but HTML and CSS made by these designers by hand.
and for the record..... CSS is simultaneously one of the best and worst things to happen to the web. Best because it's an amazing tool for ensuring consitency of design, and providing *real* layout control. Worst because the standard was woefully incomplete in its early versions, and implemented differently in every browser.
If you've got a PC around, you might give RawShooter a try. Although it lacks much of the advanced retouching features of Photoshop, it's a great RAW Converter/Organization tool that works great for about 90% of the images I process (the other 10% requiring some sort of adjustment in Photoshop, because as you've said.... it does everything).
And unlike Adobe's products, RawShooter's multithreaded, which makes it fast and responsive on just about any hardware.
As an interesting development, Adobe recently purchased the company behind RawShooter, so it's going to be interesting to see how the products get integrated into each other. It would be very unfortunate if the product just gets killed off.
My prediction is that the future of Aperture is uncertain. It's got a lot of promise, but also a slew of bugs. At least apple made the good-faith effort of providing refunds to the people who purchased it.
Apple's "Pro" stuff has always been quite a bit different.
For one, it took *forever* for the G5 to make its way from the PowerMac to the iMac (at which point, it stopped completely). The G5 was a radically different architecture from the G4, not to mention that Apple's been flip-flopping between IBM and Moterola for years. Apple, of all people, should have learned the lesson not to put all of its eggs in one basket after their falling out with IBM subsequent to Motorola exiting the market.
Likewise, G4 and G3 were simply brand names for a whole series of PowerPC chips, many of which differed greatly in terms of architecture. The chips used in the final incarnations of the G3 iBook were *completely* different (not just in terms of clock speed) from the chips used in the blue and white desktop G3s.
Apple's no stranger to branding several significantly different products as the same thing.
I don't have any numbers of any kind to back this up, so take this with several large dollops of salt, but: I suspect that the number of creative pros who rely on Adobe tools is much, much higher than the number of those who rely on the Apple in-house tools.
Apple and Adobe seem to have had a 'falling out' of sorts in the past few years, namely that Adobe's been relucatant to support Apple's latest and greatest technologies for the sake of preserving platform-compatibility with Windows. Adobe's becoming less and less relevant for mac users every year.
Video editing on the mac is pretty much entirely occupied by users of apple's pro stuff. In its price-range, Final Cut is easily the best video-editing solution out there. Adobe doesn't even support Premiere on the mac anymore.
Graphic artists have been predicting the death of photoshop (or at least photoshop as we know it) for some time now. It's a great app that does many things, but probably isn't the best at doing most of them. For layout (for which Photoshop is used sinfuly often), Quark and InDesign both are remarkably better. For graphic design, Illustrator, or any of the many SVG editing apps coming out would do better... For photo editing, many of the RAW conversion tools beat Photoshop hands down at a wide array of tasks, simply given the nature of RAW editing. Adobe has thankfully (finally) jumped on this bandwagon, and their LightRoom app shows great promise in the areas of RAW conversion and non-destructive editing. Still, there are a good many non-adobe products out there that are just as good. Photoshop's definitely losing its edge as a photographic adjustment tool
I think that future incarnations of Photoshop will be geared more toward retouching photos that have already been post-processed elsewhere. This is the one area where Photoshop has no competition, and it genuine excels in. Hopefully the rest of the 'cruft' will be taken out, and in the place of one giagantic monolithic application, we'll have several small applications tweaked and tuned for doing more specific tasks. By virtue of the fact that it will be easier for competetiors to compete with adobe on these small applications, I have a feeling that we're going to see some very polished software being released for the graphic arts industry in the next few years, as adobe becomes less and less relevant.
You buy the best product available on the market. This way, *everyone* is encouraged to compete and improve their products. I've always die-hard AMD fanboy, but nonetheless, I will most likely be making my next computer run on Intel, simply because at the moment, Intel offers a better value.
If AMD's got a loyal captive audience, they have no need to innovate. If AMD has no need to innovate, Intel has no need to innovate, and everybody loses.
I certainly hope AMD continues to grow and innovate, as they've produced the most significant advances in cpu technology over the past few years, whilst Intel's products have mainly been flops (Itanic, anyone?). The Core line of chips is an odd anomaly, as it wasn't designed by Intel's main R&D branch, and is heavily derived from their *mobile* chips wihch were in turn, based off of the older Pentium 3 architecture.
Pure speculation here, but what's preventing Apple from using an Opteron in their Pro lines? Last I heard, AMD had the competitive edge in the high-end/server market...
It's not doomsday for the world, but doomsday for that particular species in the environment. The species reproduces, and reproduces, until all of the sudden, the environment is suddenly unable to support the species anymore, and the species dies off, leaving a devastated environment in its wake.
It was actually a term coined by mathematicians -- population models for species that are allowed to reproduce with no limits or caps to their population or abilities to reproduce until 'doomsday' -- that is, until the population becomes close to being infinite.
The Wikipedia Article is written by much more knowledgable peolple than I. Go read it if you can get your head around the math used in it.
Okay. I'll agree with you there, but then, why not benchmark with oblivion?
And also, why are we benchmarking CPUs in terms of gaming, when it's already been established that Graphics hardware is more of a limiting factor than the CPU nowindays? Review after review tells us the same thing.
(That said, I run Oblivion on a two-year-old laptop, and although it's hardly ideal, it's passable)
If kids attend classes online for fear of being shot at in the 'real' school, they're gearing themselves up for a life out in the 'real' world where they're just as likely to get shot.
Am I missing the picture here? Spend the money elsewhere correcting the underlying problems, rather than beating around the bush trying to work out a compromise. New York City has proven that it is *very* possible to reduce crime, and go from being one of the most dangerous cities in the world to one of the safest per capita, and do so in an incredibly short amount of time.
Magnet Schools and Charter Schools don't seem like such a great idea anymore either, and put the 'normal' kids at a *severe* disadvantage.
My county disbanded its charter and magnet programs several years back, and redirected the funds to public schools, in addition to making several reforms to improve the schools. People were upset at first, but in a very short amount of time, average test scores in the regular public schools were wildly surpassing those that the charter/magnet programs were seeing when they were in operation. THAT's progress.
On a more observational note, the public school that I attend has many students from charter/magnet schools in it, and the generalized observation shared by most is that they are arrogant, socially-inept, and no smarter than the 'normal' kids. The kids who were smart enough to attend magnet programs, but chose for one reason or another to stay in their local school tend to be the most well-adjusted and intelligent people I come across.
Private schooling is also not the answer, but for very different reasons.
Given that I stopped reading this sort of nonsense long ago, I was surprised to see that people are *still* using Low-Resolution games as a benchmark.
Games have been predominantly GPU-limited for the past 6 years (or in layman's terms --- as long as GPUs have existed in the form they do today, the nVidia GeForce being the first such chip). It made no sense in 1999 to use Quake 3 running at 640x480 as a benchmark, because the game looked a *lot* better at higher resolutions, and the harware was able to cope with it.
This isn't even taking into account the fact that virtually nobody has a monitor capable of displaying more than 100 FPS, nor could one perceptually distinguish any frame rates above 50fps -- most people still run their monitors at 60Hz.
Don't try to fake a real-world benchmark. If the only way to see any difference in game performance when comparing across CPUs is to lower the resolution to the rock-bottom value, then the conclusion should be that the CPU is not a contributing factor to game performance. ATI got into a lot of trouble a few years back by optimizing their drivers to 'fake' Quake 3 framerates over 120 fps (or some really high number like that). Nobody noticed for *months* that the frame rates were artificially inflated.
Gamers are quickly approaching audiophiles in my book in terms of their level of insanity.
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Stop trolling.
You're right. It's all about what you're used to, and what you're capable of doing. However, you didn't actually provide any logical reasons to prove that OS X/Windows/Linux is superior/inferior.
There is an obvious visual cue that OS X windows are meant to be dragged from the bottom right corner present in every window that can be dragged. Many Windows applications behave the same way, and provide this same cue. I'd say that OS X is superior in this respect, simply because it's consistent across the board.
Comparing the manner in which your 3rd-party photo gallery app works doesn't really help compare the two either. If you were talking about iPhoto (I couldn't tell -- those paragraphs were completely incoherent), again, it's no basis for comparison, as Windows includes no similar application.
Not having to remove spyware is also a nice advantage for OS X (at the moment at least).
People really need to stop scrutinizing Apple down to a hair, whilst Microsoft's discovers a dozen gaping holes in its operating system every week, and Dell laptops burst into flames on a regular basis.
With that out of the way, a bunch of other "less exciting" features were announced, albeit not in the keynote.
A few highlights:
Yeah, but then again, so did bottled water.....
SCO OpenServer.
Scary, old, unsupported (difficult to find anyone willing to work with it), and extremely easy to break, even by end users.
Then again, this is probably the result of bad karma for still running a serial-line network in 2006.
To draw another analogy, Token Ring is also scary, and very easy to break. On the flipside, Mac OS X is much "simpler" to an end-user than Windows is(and to a certain extent, to the developer as well) -- it is also much more difficult to break. I've never seen an OS X installation trashed in such a way that it couldn't be fixed by creating a new user profile. Granted, this is due to OSX's UNIX underpinnings, but the fact remains that it's pretty undeniable that it's a simpler system to use for the user.
I actually find it funny that the thinkpads haven't changed in over 10 years, and yet, they are some of the best looking laptops around. Why Sony and Dell don't learn from this is beyond me. Dell's designs in particular have gone *severely* downhill.
The Dell Latitude CP series looked great, and maintained a consistant design for several years. It was eventually replaced by a series of thinner laptops, but the fact remains that they were great neutral-looking machines. Not particularly flashy, but not boxy either. Dell's first ultraportables were also equally attractive, and looked not unlike a 12" Powerbook (complete with a metal body). The flimsy plastic crap dell's got nowindays just doesn't cut it.
Someone dropped their IBM 701c at my house a few weeks ago, because it had stopped working, and they wanted me to take a look at it. At first glance, I thought that it was a pretty cool looking machine, albeit a little thick. After opening it up, I realized it was over 10 years old. Wow. (The 'repair' was replacing the power brick -- a dog chewed through the cord. Lenovo's still using the same voltage and power connector 10 years later, so we just ordered a brand new charger, and the machine began chugging along once again.)
So, in short, I agree. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Apple's current lineup doesn't appear dated at all, and I don't really see any reason for them to move to a new design. The G5/Mac Pro chasis is particularly sleek and attractive. Sure, it could be a little smaller, but for a workstation, it's still not that bad, and has nice big handles. Space isn't too much of a concern for the Mac Pro's target audience, either, considering that the iMac and Mini are both adequate desktop machines for just about any task.
For the naysayers out there, it's worth pointing out that OS X began life in the early 1990s as NextSTEP. I suppose virtual desktops were an 'obvious' feature to have back then. Not so much of a "copy-cat". It's fine to reuse a genuinely good idea (especially an older one) in a new innovative manner.
I'm not quite so sure for OS X how useful it will be. It's kind of abandoning the KISS philosophy that Jobs has firmly adhered to.
so this means that the BSD stack is gone for good?
if so, that's mildly troubling.....
I don't think AMD has that sort of manufacturing capacity.
not to sound rude or anything, but they did, and it failed miserably
You mean, sort of like a..... big brother?
No. The grandparent poster has a point.
nVIDIA came out of nowhere about 5-6 years ago, whilst ATI has been firmly entrenched in the marketplace for a much longer time.
nVIDIA was able to grow so quickly, because their products were faster, less buggy, and better supported than anything on the market at the time. ATI was just barely able to keep up, and everyone else bit the dust.
The consumer-end graphics industry has been known for buggy drivers for almost its entire existance. nVIDIA's biggest innovation was not necessarily in hardware, but in software instead. By shipping a unified driver for all of its products, it was easy for them to fix bugs in the drivers years after the products they supported came out, and continually tweak those drivers. As a result, they wound up with a rock-stable platform that ATI took years to match.
I'm not saying ATI's terrible (I'd consider them to be about average), but in terms of stability and product support, there's little doubt that nVIDIA leads the industry.
AMD on the other hand, I see as a great company with great leadership. I hope that they can turn ATI around, and push out some innovative products. AMD's committed to open standards, and is known for its ethical business practices, not to mention that they tend to do much of their manufacturing and product development within the US.
Who knows how this will all balance out?
You really think apple's going to make the same mistake twice, and lock itself to one vendor.
Yes, I'll grant you that intel and apple have a special relationship, but I doubt it's a long-term exclusivity agreement, and if there is some sort of exclusivity in there, then there is almost definitely an escape clause.
They're not going to get burned again like they first did with Motorola, and then again with IBM.
Don't go comparing the normal laws of supply & demand to insulin. They don't necessarily apply. Insulin is one of the few goods which is perfectly inelastic --- regardless of the price or availability of insulin, the demand will always going be the same.
(Granted, this is isolating just two variables. The price of insulin is controlled by other factors. Supply just isn't one of them.)
There are a few puzzling omissions from the CSS spec.
Namely, centering.
Tell a user that you can do everything with CSS....except for centering text or an element, and chances are that they'll never use it. How the W3C could have left out such a fundamental feature is beyond me.
You also can't do columns....
And of course, it seems like the spec must be incredibly ambiguous given the fact that no two browsers interpret it in the same way
(yes. I know there are various 'hacks' out there that do allow you to center, but that's beside the point....)
Really?
It would appear to me that for the past 5 years, graphic designers have been one of the most technically-literate groups of people out there. They're one of the few demographics that actually "get it" when it comes to things like CSS.
There are some pretty slick sites floating around using nothing but HTML and CSS made by these designers by hand.
and for the record..... CSS is simultaneously one of the best and worst things to happen to the web. Best because it's an amazing tool for ensuring consitency of design, and providing *real* layout control. Worst because the standard was woefully incomplete in its early versions, and implemented differently in every browser.
I think it's becoming increasingly clear to just about every that myspace is an awful, awful thing (from just about every point of view.....)
If people are going to start moving away from myspace to other sites and services, which ones will people flock to?
Right now, my money's on Vox.
I hear you...
If you've got a PC around, you might give RawShooter a try. Although it lacks much of the advanced retouching features of Photoshop, it's a great RAW Converter/Organization tool that works great for about 90% of the images I process (the other 10% requiring some sort of adjustment in Photoshop, because as you've said.... it does everything).
And unlike Adobe's products, RawShooter's multithreaded, which makes it fast and responsive on just about any hardware.
As an interesting development, Adobe recently purchased the company behind RawShooter, so it's going to be interesting to see how the products get integrated into each other. It would be very unfortunate if the product just gets killed off.
My prediction is that the future of Aperture is uncertain. It's got a lot of promise, but also a slew of bugs. At least apple made the good-faith effort of providing refunds to the people who purchased it.
Well, not quite.
Apple's "Pro" stuff has always been quite a bit different.
For one, it took *forever* for the G5 to make its way from the PowerMac to the iMac (at which point, it stopped completely). The G5 was a radically different architecture from the G4, not to mention that Apple's been flip-flopping between IBM and Moterola for years. Apple, of all people, should have learned the lesson not to put all of its eggs in one basket after their falling out with IBM subsequent to Motorola exiting the market.
Likewise, G4 and G3 were simply brand names for a whole series of PowerPC chips, many of which differed greatly in terms of architecture. The chips used in the final incarnations of the G3 iBook were *completely* different (not just in terms of clock speed) from the chips used in the blue and white desktop G3s.
Apple's no stranger to branding several significantly different products as the same thing.
I don't have any numbers of any kind to back this up, so take this with several large dollops of salt, but: I suspect that the number of creative pros who rely on Adobe tools is much, much higher than the number of those who rely on the Apple in-house tools.
Apple and Adobe seem to have had a 'falling out' of sorts in the past few years, namely that Adobe's been relucatant to support Apple's latest and greatest technologies for the sake of preserving platform-compatibility with Windows. Adobe's becoming less and less relevant for mac users every year.
Video editing on the mac is pretty much entirely occupied by users of apple's pro stuff. In its price-range, Final Cut is easily the best video-editing solution out there. Adobe doesn't even support Premiere on the mac anymore.
Graphic artists have been predicting the death of photoshop (or at least photoshop as we know it) for some time now. It's a great app that does many things, but probably isn't the best at doing most of them. For layout (for which Photoshop is used sinfuly often), Quark and InDesign both are remarkably better. For graphic design, Illustrator, or any of the many SVG editing apps coming out would do better... For photo editing, many of the RAW conversion tools beat Photoshop hands down at a wide array of tasks, simply given the nature of RAW editing. Adobe has thankfully (finally) jumped on this bandwagon, and their LightRoom app shows great promise in the areas of RAW conversion and non-destructive editing. Still, there are a good many non-adobe products out there that are just as good. Photoshop's definitely losing its edge as a photographic adjustment tool
I think that future incarnations of Photoshop will be geared more toward retouching photos that have already been post-processed elsewhere. This is the one area where Photoshop has no competition, and it genuine excels in. Hopefully the rest of the 'cruft' will be taken out, and in the place of one giagantic monolithic application, we'll have several small applications tweaked and tuned for doing more specific tasks. By virtue of the fact that it will be easier for competetiors to compete with adobe on these small applications, I have a feeling that we're going to see some very polished software being released for the graphic arts industry in the next few years, as adobe becomes less and less relevant.
Economics 101.
You buy the best product available on the market. This way, *everyone* is encouraged to compete and improve their products. I've always die-hard AMD fanboy, but nonetheless, I will most likely be making my next computer run on Intel, simply because at the moment, Intel offers a better value.
If AMD's got a loyal captive audience, they have no need to innovate. If AMD has no need to innovate, Intel has no need to innovate, and everybody loses.
I certainly hope AMD continues to grow and innovate, as they've produced the most significant advances in cpu technology over the past few years, whilst Intel's products have mainly been flops (Itanic, anyone?). The Core line of chips is an odd anomaly, as it wasn't designed by Intel's main R&D branch, and is heavily derived from their *mobile* chips wihch were in turn, based off of the older Pentium 3 architecture.
Pure speculation here, but what's preventing Apple from using an Opteron in their Pro lines? Last I heard, AMD had the competitive edge in the high-end/server market...
Personally, I'm waiting on an Intel XServe.....
It's not doomsday for the world, but doomsday for that particular species in the environment. The species reproduces, and reproduces, until all of the sudden, the environment is suddenly unable to support the species anymore, and the species dies off, leaving a devastated environment in its wake.
It was actually a term coined by mathematicians -- population models for species that are allowed to reproduce with no limits or caps to their population or abilities to reproduce until 'doomsday' -- that is, until the population becomes close to being infinite.
The Wikipedia Article is written by much more knowledgable peolple than I. Go read it if you can get your head around the math used in it.
Okay. I'll agree with you there, but then, why not benchmark with oblivion?
And also, why are we benchmarking CPUs in terms of gaming, when it's already been established that Graphics hardware is more of a limiting factor than the CPU nowindays? Review after review tells us the same thing.
(That said, I run Oblivion on a two-year-old laptop, and although it's hardly ideal, it's passable)
Then why not correct the underlying problem?
If kids attend classes online for fear of being shot at in the 'real' school, they're gearing themselves up for a life out in the 'real' world where they're just as likely to get shot.
Am I missing the picture here? Spend the money elsewhere correcting the underlying problems, rather than beating around the bush trying to work out a compromise. New York City has proven that it is *very* possible to reduce crime, and go from being one of the most dangerous cities in the world to one of the safest per capita, and do so in an incredibly short amount of time.
Magnet Schools and Charter Schools don't seem like such a great idea anymore either, and put the 'normal' kids at a *severe* disadvantage.
My county disbanded its charter and magnet programs several years back, and redirected the funds to public schools, in addition to making several reforms to improve the schools. People were upset at first, but in a very short amount of time, average test scores in the regular public schools were wildly surpassing those that the charter/magnet programs were seeing when they were in operation. THAT's progress.
On a more observational note, the public school that I attend has many students from charter/magnet schools in it, and the generalized observation shared by most is that they are arrogant, socially-inept, and no smarter than the 'normal' kids. The kids who were smart enough to attend magnet programs, but chose for one reason or another to stay in their local school tend to be the most well-adjusted and intelligent people I come across.
Private schooling is also not the answer, but for very different reasons.
Given that I stopped reading this sort of nonsense long ago, I was surprised to see that people are *still* using Low-Resolution games as a benchmark.
Games have been predominantly GPU-limited for the past 6 years (or in layman's terms --- as long as GPUs have existed in the form they do today, the nVidia GeForce being the first such chip). It made no sense in 1999 to use Quake 3 running at 640x480 as a benchmark, because the game looked a *lot* better at higher resolutions, and the harware was able to cope with it.
This isn't even taking into account the fact that virtually nobody has a monitor capable of displaying more than 100 FPS, nor could one perceptually distinguish any frame rates above 50fps -- most people still run their monitors at 60Hz.
Don't try to fake a real-world benchmark. If the only way to see any difference in game performance when comparing across CPUs is to lower the resolution to the rock-bottom value, then the conclusion should be that the CPU is not a contributing factor to game performance. ATI got into a lot of trouble a few years back by optimizing their drivers to 'fake' Quake 3 framerates over 120 fps (or some really high number like that). Nobody noticed for *months* that the frame rates were artificially inflated.
Gamers are quickly approaching audiophiles in my book in terms of their level of insanity.