yes that is very helpful. I don't recall exactly what I did, but it is useful to know that even though what I tried to do failed, it is reasonable to think of applying effects and taking an immediate look.
My perception was everything works really well and then I applied one or two effects and it all completely fell apart, to the extent I felt like I'd broken it somehow.
At my naive level of understanding, I didn't think the effects could really be too demanding. I think I put on a volume attenuation and a gamma correction (think horribly loud punk rock gig in poorly lit basement bar).
I definitely did get an entirely new level of respect for iMovie after struggling like that with FCE. What an incredibly awesome program for the money! One of my projects in iMovie/iDVD partially helped a friends band get a deal. Not by my skill, but these free Apple packages let the raw performances shine, without any appreciable editing skill.
I've run Final Cut Pro on similar hardware and it works just fine for me. That's fast enough for the first level of their real time rendering, so you get dissolves and the like instantly.
What sort of problems are you having with it? Perhaps I can be of help.
That's kind of you. I tried to apply effects to the footage and the mouse pointer got a sort of flashing yellow light in it and then performance went to hell. Maybe I did something wrong, FCE was a recent purchase (or more accurately I haven't put in many hours with it yet), How do you like the HDR-FX1? I'm thinking of getting one but will hold off until after NAB. You're fortunate that you have FCE because Final Cut Pro has not yet been updated for HDV support. It will be at NAB, of course, but I'll have to get the upgrade (in the $499 range again, no doubt) while you can just upgrade to the latest FCE for $100.
Initial results played back on the LCD viewfinder seem very nice. I really appreciate the much better lens than my DCR-TR80. I don't have a widescreen or high-def TV yet, so I can't really see the results in their full glory. Have only played with it anyway - filmed stuff on my coffee table. Tomorrow I am filming a gig in Manhattan, I have high hopes. And yes a mere $100 to get the FCE-HD upgrade seems like excellent value. If my Powerbook had not been off for repair twice in the past month I would no doubt already have that
Re:There are other differences...
on
Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 4, Informative
What is the number one reason people stay away from Mac? I submit that it is price. Not price of the OS Tiger, but price of "The Comptuer" you have to buy. Imagine the ability to have something as solid, feature rich, and protected as Tiger, that you can run on a relatively powerful system you made from parts you bought off of newegg for $600. Personally, I believe that's worth waiting for.
The Mac Mini starts at $500 and it's a bit nicer than a home-brew $600 system would be, since it's very small, cool and quiet.
I do take your point that the $600 homebrew PC you mention would likely have a bit more oomph in the CPU and graphics card, however you should also bear in mind that Mac OS X is really quite efficient at many things, for example Apple really gets the most performance possible out of its carefully chosen components, so things like video editing are surprisingly good on "weak" PowerPC G4 cpus. I have done about 10 DVD projects on my powerbook which has significantly less raw compute and pixel-pushing power than a Mac Mini.
Depending on your actual needs, the Mac Mini could really meet your needs and budget well (I would recommend simply giving one a try in a shop, ideally running the applications you would want touse).
Not a direct reply perhaps, but I think of Final Cut Pro as sort of a "G5 purchase coercion kit". I have Final Cut Express and have tried to use it on my original 12" powerbook (867 MHz, 640MB, 60GB). It's only -just- possible, and certainly not nice. You get just a taste of a real editing suite, enough to hook you.
So I've been itching for a G5 for quite a while, and I just bought an HDR-FX1, so now I REALLY need some horsepower in the editing suite area!
You're never, ever going to choose between Xcode and Visual Studio. Ever. You're never going to sit down and ask yourself, "Gee, should I use Xcode or Visual Studio?" Instead, you're going to have made some other decisions like "Should I write this program for the Mac or for the PC?" and those decisions will dictate whether you use Xcode or Visual Studio.
So comparing the two makes no sense whatsoever.
The only possible motivation for anybody to want to compare them would be to come to the conclusion that one or the other sucks, which is just childish nonsense.
You assume a fair bit here. Actually, I am choosing between XCode, Visual Studio and various other development environments right now. I would like to learn some new languages and techniques, and I'm interested in both XCode, Visual Studio and other very very different "environments" like "Processing" (web site). I have both PCs and Macs, and with MSDN Universal (from work) there's no cost differential between XCode and Visual Studio. I would just like a comfortable dev environment for my own personal programming projects. I got as far as running some XCode wizard (the screensaver one I think) and couldn't quite see how to do stuff in C++. I'm familiar with Visual Studio 6.0 for C++, but not Visual Studio.NET, so there would be a fair bit of relearning even if I chose the Microsoft platform. I had a quick look at Processing last year and that seems like fun, and if I have to learn something, why not something completely different like that.
If I decide to go the Java route there are a bunch more alternatives and once again PC vs. Mac is an issue, but for my own personal projects I use whichever I want as the mood takes me (my most recent project was in C++ using raw Xlib for graphics on SPARC/Solaris).
A: You do know that Xcode only runs on the Mac, right? You can't compare these things. They don't run on the same platforms.
I have to disagree with this point. Development environments can definitely be compared across systems. Not at the fine-grain level perhaps, but on the overall experience.
I'll give an example:- I maintained parts of an application that ran both on Solaris and on Windows for many years. Although all kinds of neat development environments can be assembled from freely available tools, or even bought (e.g. Sun's various IDEs) on Solaris, Visual Studio definitely had an edge. The Windows-only developers had a productivity advantage. Pre-compiled headers, fast intel cpus, very fast tools, including really good source code browsing with cross-referencing etc. It's all built in for a reasonable price, so everyone used them. On Unix some people had pretty good tools, some people used vi and print statements, and it showed.
They had a channel on AvantGo, so every day I'd have updated tech news on my Palm Pilot.
It was absolute garbage
. It seemed like it was being written by an intern surfing CNET in the mornings, then writing the stories from memory in the afternoons, whilst watching MTV.
Having a dual-proc PowerPC with G5 (PPC 970) processors will increase the chances that Linus will think about performance issues for such hardware. The 970 has a longer pipeline than the G4, for example, so it's possible to leave quite a bit of performance on the table with code that stalls the pipeline a lot.
If Linus' insights on this for Linux can help the OS X people even find 1% better performance for any publically quoted benchmark, it will have paid for itself many times over.
The only code segments you really have to worry about hand optimising are loops which happen a huge number of times.
Actually I have to disagree somewhat. It's easy to find a function which gets called a huge number of times, optimise the hell out of it and show that you've gotten close to the best performance for that function, and therefore assume you've gotten the best speedup you're going to get without herculean feats. However, I find it's often much easier to dig into the number of times the function gets called.
If the function has to be called a fixed number of times (for example, once per item in a list or array) then yes, there's no room for improvement other than making the function itself more efficint.
However a lot of code has a somewhat tangled call tree, and I find that the number of calls to some very common function is a product of multipliers in the call-chain previous.
To give a common example - a piece of data is received that updates a table. Table elements can depend on each other, so a recalc is performed and then a redraw. Seems fine, but what if the data update was the first in a list all packaged together. Before tweaking recalc and redraw routines, you could get more bang for the buck by changing it to set a "something changed" flag for each update in the batch, and then only recalc and redraw at the end of the batch, or on a timer.
No, DCOM is distributed COM, not identical to COM, but a superset.
In theory, yes; that'd be the case if we were talking about something like a standard. In reality, there's only a single implementation of COM, which today includes the distributed object support; it's all DCOM now.
Not true. The product I work on has it's own implementation of COM, but does not use DCOM at all. The standard parts of COM are well-published in books (e.g. the Don Box COM book, the Microsoft ATL book etc - both excellent), DCOM is a non-mandatory layer on top, we use a different (probably inferior) remoting mechanism
No, DCOM is distributed COM, not identical to COM, but a superset. COM itself is a component-object model that is a nice piece of work in my opinion.
COM is a binary, language independent standard for using services provided by objects without depending on the implementation.
Instead of direct linkage to functions, for example, clients must request access to interfaces, and only use the services if the request succeeds.
Interfaces amount to a C-Cstyle struct with function pointers, with the first three methods being QueryInterface(), AddRef() and Release(). The latter two functions are merely ref-counting for tidiness, so the primary way to use services depends on driving QueryInterface to discover other Interfaces and then call them.
There is a nifty mapping of this struct definition into C++ pure virtual base classes so that COM programming in C++ can be quite nice (especially with smart pointers).
It's really other stuff layered on top of COM in the standard Windows way that makes the whole programming experience less pleasant (e.g. MFC message maps, ATL thunking - thinks that just puzzle me when I bump into the code).
By the way, this all works pretty nicely on Unix (especially modern ones like Solaris or Linux). You just need a certain maturity in the C++ compiler so that static_cast works nicely to have all of this goodness available, and you need to link your "DLL"s (aka shared objects) properly (reduce the scope of the functions you aren't making available to clients of the library e.g. with linker mapfiles).
Unfortunately Eric S. Raymond's "The Art of Unix Programming" is hopelessly weak when it dismisses these aspects of Windows programming which for me somewhat undermined the entire book. Then again, I don't think ESR is very fond of C++, which was one of the big problems that COM solved (e.g. the unstable C++ ABI for many, many years).
I'd get one, but not unless I couldn't get the memory upgrade from Crucial and have it work flawlessly without lockups (seen this often in a co-worker's memory anemic PowerBook 15"
Just as another data point, I have an original 12" Powerbook G4/superdrive/60GB hard drive. I put 512MB ordered from Crucial in the memory hatch on the underside and it works flawlessly all the time (except when I STILL run out of memory!!).
What happended to SGI is an allegory for what has happened to America in general. Cheap mass-produced commodity junk has taken the profit out of the market, and forced everyone to lower their standards. Veyr much like the SouthPark episode "Something Wallmart this way comes." Ultimately we will all end up buying $100 dollar commodity computers, not because they are good or powerful, but because they will be all we can afford on our $10/hr jobs as janitors of the Microsoft plumbing.
I've thought about this, and I've come to the conclusion that we all choose this future each and every day. We all want stuff cheaper and we vote with our pocket-books. Mostly it works out for the better. In the days when SGI were so great, nobody I knew had one, even at work.In those days I worked on military command and control systems. 3d graphics would have been great, but it was just out of the question. 24-bit colour was a big deal as I remember.
Anyway, as excited as we all were by 3d screenshots in Byte and glowing testimonials about how the SGI machine under test could rotate and light and display the model in real time, the best time ever to be an OpenGL programmer is right now - nowadays almost all professional windows users have a machine that can run lightweight 3d displays even in software rendering, and if your app is smart enough to check for acceleration and use it if present, the things that can be done are out of this world.
Not just in the lab or in a CAVE, but actually out there on hundreds of thousands, or millions of PCs. Nvidia and ATI are where it's at (no matter how much of it was invented elsewhere) and I'm glad. Those $100 computers probably will be quite powerful, compated to the bulk of the history of computing. Hell, even if PCs were free with your cornflakes, there would still be money to be made selling services that are accessed via PC. All IMHO of course.
Douglas Hofstadter highlighted an important distinction when discussing speech that is pertinent to this.
What he calls the "Use/Mention" distinction is very important - it's racist to use the N word, however if someone else uses it publically, the fact of it being used can be mentioned without this being racist also, consider, for example a (hypothetical) news story :
Porkbarrel B. Votebuyer, the legendary, and legendarily corrupt representative was today relieved of his duties for calling a colleague a "Damn Nigger Lover"
The reader needs to know what he said to understand how he could be fired on the spot.
I can sympathize with the surprise of coming across the word in a headline, but since the link is to a page with that exact headline, and that page is a good faith examination of anonymous racial taunting in an on-line game, I think it's a valid mention of the N word.
There are dramatic moments in Star Wars, but overall the level of drama is sadly lacking (that's the problem with them, succinctly put, for adults).
Maybe Star Trek does a bit better, but it's still pretty juvenile. I mean, I loved the moment when Picard orders quantum torpedoes against the Borg in First Contact. It was fantastic, but it's still no "Das Boot". You always know that most of the crew will survive, good will prevail over evil (and you always know, broadly, who they are).
I think that's part of the reason we all like it, frankly, plenty of "real drama" is hard work, and a major bummer. Mystic River - who had an uplift from that as they left the cinema? Certainly not me, and I thought it was overrated (drama?, yes, great? not really).
Light sabers? Jabba the Hutt? The Force? These are fantasy tropes given sci-fi trappings. But to hear Geordi talk about Dilithium crystals and the holochamber is to recognize you're not seeing Swords and Sorcery wreathed in chrome, but true science-fiction.
Hardly... When Star Trek scripts are written they just leave blanks for the techno-speak and have someone else make it up later, because it doesn't matter one jot what it says or how convincing it is. Every time they reverse the polarity, emit a tachyon beam, or encounter a space-time anomaly, they may as well be turning on a lightsaber, engaging hyperdrive or using the force.
For me, the only useful measure is whether an attempt is made to extrapolate from commonly accepted scientific principles and existing gadgets to plausible future ones. If such an attempt is made (e.g. many Arthur C Clarke novels) it's called "hard science fiction". If not it's "soft Sci Fi" or "fantasy".
As much as I like both Star Wars and Star Trek, the weak science is occasionally annoying - if literally anything can happen at any moment, we may as well just read Stephen King and levitate lawnmowers with our minds.
Sorry? Is the reviewer entirely serious? I mean, when I was younger, I -thought- Star Trek was fairly serious Sci Fi, but the older I get, the smaller the gap between Star Trek and Star Wars gets.
It's still story and character oriented non-science based. Problems with Star Trek physics are well documented.
In Star Trek it's common for the captain of the space ship to "beam" down to a planet, unprotected by a space suit, meet "aliens" who are completely humanoid, and often converse with them, and occasionally fall in love with them. It's not entirely clear which parts are because of magical 24th century technology and which parts are simply rather infantile wish fulfillment.
I've never seen an HP9000, and of course there are lots of cheap and nasty Sun model like Ultra 5, 10, Blade 100.
However, my Sun Blade 1000 meets your description of the HPs to a tee. Very nice build quality indeed. Tool-free case. SCA-II form-factor FCAL disks. Monster cpu modules which need a torque wrench for correct fitting. Almost cable-free inside (everything clipped and tidy). Large quiet fans. Load-controlled cpu cooling. Takes a serious workload indefinitely without sweat. Lashings of expansion space (dual UPA graphics).
People knock HP-UX but personally I find it pretty good, plus the hardware is a damn site more reliable than Suns sorry offerings.
Does this refer to the Ultra-SPARC II cache problems? That was quite a long time ago now. The only other problem I've run across personally was the GbE chipset bug in the v240 (maybe others). That was Broadcom's bug... oh yeah, and of course hard drives wear out practically every day. Anything more interesting?
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yes that is very helpful. I don't recall exactly what I did, but it is useful to know that even though what I tried to do failed, it is reasonable to think of applying effects and taking an immediate look.
My perception was everything works really well and then I applied one or two effects and it all completely fell apart, to the extent I felt like I'd broken it somehow.
At my naive level of understanding, I didn't think the effects could really be too demanding. I think I put on a volume attenuation and a gamma correction (think horribly loud punk rock gig in poorly lit basement bar).
I definitely did get an entirely new level of respect for iMovie after struggling like that with FCE. What an incredibly awesome program for the money! One of my projects in iMovie/iDVD partially helped a friends band get a deal. Not by my skill, but these free Apple packages let the raw performances shine, without any appreciable editing skill.
I've run Final Cut Pro on similar hardware and it works just fine for me. That's fast enough for the first level of their real time rendering, so you get dissolves and the like instantly.
What sort of problems are you having with it? Perhaps I can be of help.
That's kind of you. I tried to apply effects to the footage and the mouse pointer got a sort of flashing yellow light in it and then performance went to hell. Maybe I did something wrong, FCE was a recent purchase (or more accurately I haven't put in many hours with it yet),
How do you like the HDR-FX1? I'm thinking of getting one but will hold off until after NAB. You're fortunate that you have FCE because Final Cut Pro has not yet been updated for HDV support. It will be at NAB, of course, but I'll have to get the upgrade (in the $499 range again, no doubt) while you can just upgrade to the latest FCE for $100.
Initial results played back on the LCD viewfinder seem very nice. I really appreciate the much better lens than my DCR-TR80. I don't have a widescreen or high-def TV yet, so I can't really see the results in their full glory. Have only played with it anyway - filmed stuff on my coffee table. Tomorrow I am filming a gig in Manhattan, I have high hopes. And yes a mere $100 to get the FCE-HD upgrade seems like excellent value. If my Powerbook had not been off for repair twice in the past month I would no doubt already have that
What is the number one reason people stay away from Mac? I submit that it is price. Not price of the OS Tiger, but price of "The Comptuer" you have to buy. Imagine the ability to have something as solid, feature rich, and protected as Tiger, that you can run on a relatively powerful system you made from parts you bought off of newegg for $600. Personally, I believe that's worth waiting for.
The Mac Mini starts at $500 and it's a bit nicer than a home-brew $600 system would be, since it's very small, cool and quiet.
I do take your point that the $600 homebrew PC you mention would likely have a bit more oomph in the CPU and graphics card, however you should also bear in mind that Mac OS X is really quite efficient at many things, for example Apple really gets the most performance possible out of its carefully chosen components, so things like video editing are surprisingly good on "weak" PowerPC G4 cpus. I have done about 10 DVD projects on my powerbook which has significantly less raw compute and pixel-pushing power than a Mac Mini.
Depending on your actual needs, the Mac Mini could really meet your needs and budget well (I would recommend simply giving one a try in a shop, ideally running the applications you would want touse).
Not a direct reply perhaps, but I think of Final Cut Pro as sort of a "G5 purchase coercion kit". I have Final Cut Express and have tried to use it on my original 12" powerbook (867 MHz, 640MB, 60GB). It's only -just- possible, and certainly not nice. You get just a taste of a real editing suite, enough to hook you.
So I've been itching for a G5 for quite a while, and I just bought an HDR-FX1, so now I REALLY need some horsepower in the editing suite area!
You're never, ever going to choose between Xcode and Visual Studio. Ever. You're never going to sit down and ask yourself, "Gee, should I use Xcode or Visual Studio?" Instead, you're going to have made some other decisions like "Should I write this program for the Mac or for the PC?" and those decisions will dictate whether you use Xcode or Visual Studio.
So comparing the two makes no sense whatsoever.
The only possible motivation for anybody to want to compare them would be to come to the conclusion that one or the other sucks, which is just childish nonsense.
You assume a fair bit here. Actually, I am choosing between XCode, Visual Studio and various other development environments right now. I would like to learn some new languages and techniques, and I'm interested in both XCode, Visual Studio and other very very different "environments" like "Processing" (web site). I have both PCs and Macs, and with MSDN Universal (from work) there's no cost differential between XCode and Visual Studio. I would just like a comfortable dev environment for my own personal programming projects. I got as far as running some XCode wizard (the screensaver one I think) and couldn't quite see how to do stuff in C++. I'm familiar with Visual Studio 6.0 for C++, but not Visual Studio.NET, so there would be a fair bit of relearning even if I chose the Microsoft platform. I had a quick look at Processing last year and that seems like fun, and if I have to learn something, why not something completely different like that.
If I decide to go the Java route there are a bunch more alternatives and once again PC vs. Mac is an issue, but for my own personal projects I use whichever I want as the mood takes me (my most recent project was in C++ using raw Xlib for graphics on SPARC/Solaris).
A: You do know that Xcode only runs on the Mac, right? You can't compare these things. They don't run on the same platforms.
I have to disagree with this point. Development environments can definitely be compared across systems. Not at the fine-grain level perhaps, but on the overall experience.
I'll give an example :- I maintained parts of an application that ran both on Solaris and on Windows for many years. Although all kinds of neat development environments can be assembled from freely available tools, or even bought (e.g. Sun's various IDEs) on Solaris, Visual Studio definitely had an edge. The Windows-only developers had a productivity advantage. Pre-compiled headers, fast intel cpus, very fast tools, including really good source code browsing with cross-referencing etc. It's all built in for a reasonable price, so everyone used them. On Unix some people had pretty good tools, some people used vi and print statements, and it showed.
Solaris 9 came on DVD as well as CD, that was a couple of years ago. SuSE also comes on DVD I believe, but I don't know for how long.
perforce does - the pricing link on the front page takes you to the prices on this page
They had a channel on AvantGo, so every day I'd have updated tech news on my Palm Pilot.
It was absolute garbage
. It seemed like it was being written by an intern surfing CNET in the mornings, then writing the stories from memory in the afternoons, whilst watching MTV.I removed the channel!
Having a dual-proc PowerPC with G5 (PPC 970) processors will increase the chances that Linus will think about performance issues for such hardware. The 970 has a longer pipeline than the G4, for example, so it's possible to leave quite a bit of performance on the table with code that stalls the pipeline a lot.
If Linus' insights on this for Linux can help the OS X people even find 1% better performance for any publically quoted benchmark, it will have paid for itself many times over.
This is just a SWAG (simple wild-assed guess).
Actually I have to disagree somewhat. It's easy to find a function which gets called a huge number of times, optimise the hell out of it and show that you've gotten close to the best performance for that function, and therefore assume you've gotten the best speedup you're going to get without herculean feats. However, I find it's often much easier to dig into the number of times the function gets called.
If the function has to be called a fixed number of times (for example, once per item in a list or array) then yes, there's no room for improvement other than making the function itself more efficint.
However a lot of code has a somewhat tangled call tree, and I find that the number of calls to some very common function is a product of multipliers in the call-chain previous.
To give a common example - a piece of data is received that updates a table. Table elements can depend on each other, so a recalc is performed and then a redraw. Seems fine, but what if the data update was the first in a list all packaged together. Before tweaking recalc and redraw routines, you could get more bang for the buck by changing it to set a "something changed" flag for each update in the batch, and then only recalc and redraw at the end of the batch, or on a timer.
In theory, yes; that'd be the case if we were talking about something like a standard. In reality, there's only a single implementation of COM, which today includes the distributed object support; it's all DCOM now.
Not true. The product I work on has it's own implementation of COM, but does not use DCOM at all. The standard parts of COM are well-published in books (e.g. the Don Box COM book, the Microsoft ATL book etc - both excellent), DCOM is a non-mandatory layer on top, we use a different (probably inferior) remoting mechanism
Microsoft's COM (also known as DCOM)
No, DCOM is distributed COM, not identical to COM, but a superset. COM itself is a component-object model that is a nice piece of work in my opinion.
COM is a binary, language independent standard for using services provided by objects without depending on the implementation.
Instead of direct linkage to functions, for example, clients must request access to interfaces, and only use the services if the request succeeds.
Interfaces amount to a C-Cstyle struct with function pointers, with the first three methods being QueryInterface(), AddRef() and Release(). The latter two functions are merely ref-counting for tidiness, so the primary way to use services depends on driving QueryInterface to discover other Interfaces and then call them.
There is a nifty mapping of this struct definition into C++ pure virtual base classes so that COM programming in C++ can be quite nice (especially with smart pointers).
It's really other stuff layered on top of COM in the standard Windows way that makes the whole programming experience less pleasant (e.g. MFC message maps, ATL thunking - thinks that just puzzle me when I bump into the code).
By the way, this all works pretty nicely on Unix (especially modern ones like Solaris or Linux). You just need a certain maturity in the C++ compiler so that static_cast works nicely to have all of this goodness available, and you need to link your "DLL"s (aka shared objects) properly (reduce the scope of the functions you aren't making available to clients of the library e.g. with linker mapfiles).
Unfortunately Eric S. Raymond's "The Art of Unix Programming" is hopelessly weak when it dismisses these aspects of Windows programming which for me somewhat undermined the entire book. Then again, I don't think ESR is very fond of C++, which was one of the big problems that COM solved (e.g. the unstable C++ ABI for many, many years).
FTFA??br. Fuck the fucking Assholes?
If you would only RTFA, then you'd be able to quote FTFA
I'd get one, but not unless I couldn't get the memory upgrade from Crucial and have it work flawlessly without lockups (seen this often in a co-worker's memory anemic PowerBook 15"
Just as another data point, I have an original 12" Powerbook G4/superdrive/60GB hard drive. I put 512MB ordered from Crucial in the memory hatch on the underside and it works flawlessly all the time (except when I STILL run out of memory!!).
What happended to SGI is an allegory for what has happened to America in general. Cheap mass-produced commodity junk has taken the profit out of the market, and forced everyone to lower their standards. Veyr much like the SouthPark episode "Something Wallmart this way comes." Ultimately we will all end up buying $100 dollar commodity computers, not because they are good or powerful, but because they will be all we can afford on our $10/hr jobs as janitors of the Microsoft plumbing.
I've thought about this, and I've come to the conclusion that we all choose this future each and every day. We all want stuff cheaper and we vote with our pocket-books. Mostly it works out for the better. In the days when SGI were so great, nobody I knew had one, even at work.In those days I worked on military command and control systems. 3d graphics would have been great, but it was just out of the question. 24-bit colour was a big deal as I remember.
Anyway, as excited as we all were by 3d screenshots in Byte and glowing testimonials about how the SGI machine under test could rotate and light and display the model in real time, the best time ever to be an OpenGL programmer is right now - nowadays almost all professional windows users have a machine that can run lightweight 3d displays even in software rendering, and if your app is smart enough to check for acceleration and use it if present, the things that can be done are out of this world.
Not just in the lab or in a CAVE, but actually out there on hundreds of thousands, or millions of PCs. Nvidia and ATI are where it's at (no matter how much of it was invented elsewhere) and I'm glad. Those $100 computers probably will be quite powerful, compated to the bulk of the history of computing. Hell, even if PCs were free with your cornflakes, there would still be money to be made selling services that are accessed via PC. All IMHO of course.
Agreed, I wimped out.
Douglas Hofstadter highlighted an important distinction when discussing speech that is pertinent to this.
What he calls the "Use/Mention" distinction is very important - it's racist to use the N word, however if someone else uses it publically, the fact of it being used can be mentioned without this being racist also, consider, for example a (hypothetical) news story :
Porkbarrel B. Votebuyer, the legendary, and legendarily corrupt representative was today relieved of his duties for calling a colleague a "Damn Nigger Lover"
The reader needs to know what he said to understand how he could be fired on the spot.
I can sympathize with the surprise of coming across the word in a headline, but since the link is to a page with that exact headline, and that page is a good faith examination of anonymous racial taunting in an on-line game, I think it's a valid mention of the N word.
There are dramatic moments in Star Wars, but overall the level of drama is sadly lacking (that's the problem with them, succinctly put, for adults).
Maybe Star Trek does a bit better, but it's still pretty juvenile. I mean, I loved the moment when Picard orders quantum torpedoes against the Borg in First Contact. It was fantastic, but it's still no "Das Boot". You always know that most of the crew will survive, good will prevail over evil (and you always know, broadly, who they are).
I think that's part of the reason we all like it, frankly, plenty of "real drama" is hard work, and a major bummer. Mystic River - who had an uplift from that as they left the cinema? Certainly not me, and I thought it was overrated (drama?, yes, great? not really).
Light sabers? Jabba the Hutt? The Force? These are fantasy tropes given sci-fi trappings. But to hear Geordi talk about Dilithium crystals and the holochamber is to recognize you're not seeing Swords and Sorcery wreathed in chrome, but true science-fiction.
Hardly... When Star Trek scripts are written they just leave blanks for the techno-speak and have someone else make it up later, because it doesn't matter one jot what it says or how convincing it is. Every time they reverse the polarity, emit a tachyon beam, or encounter a space-time anomaly, they may as well be turning on a lightsaber, engaging hyperdrive or using the force.
For me, the only useful measure is whether an attempt is made to extrapolate from commonly accepted scientific principles and existing gadgets to plausible future ones. If such an attempt is made (e.g. many Arthur C Clarke novels) it's called "hard science fiction". If not it's "soft Sci Fi" or "fantasy".
As much as I like both Star Wars and Star Trek, the weak science is occasionally annoying - if literally anything can happen at any moment, we may as well just read Stephen King and levitate lawnmowers with our minds.
Sorry? Is the reviewer entirely serious? I mean, when I was younger, I -thought- Star Trek was fairly serious Sci Fi, but the older I get, the smaller the gap between Star Trek and Star Wars gets.
It's still story and character oriented non-science based. Problems with Star Trek physics are well documented.
In Star Trek it's common for the captain of the space ship to "beam" down to a planet, unprotected by a space suit, meet "aliens" who are completely humanoid, and often converse with them, and occasionally fall in love with them. It's not entirely clear which parts are because of magical 24th century technology and which parts are simply rather infantile wish fulfillment.
Hint : these are not posessions
I've never seen an HP9000, and of course there are lots of cheap and nasty Sun model like Ultra 5, 10, Blade 100.
However, my Sun Blade 1000 meets your description of the HPs to a tee. Very nice build quality indeed. Tool-free case. SCA-II form-factor FCAL disks. Monster cpu modules which need a torque wrench for correct fitting. Almost cable-free inside (everything clipped and tidy). Large quiet fans. Load-controlled cpu cooling. Takes a serious workload indefinitely without sweat. Lashings of expansion space (dual UPA graphics).
No
People knock HP-UX but personally I find it pretty good, plus the hardware is a damn site more reliable than Suns sorry offerings.
Does this refer to the Ultra-SPARC II cache problems? That was quite a long time ago now. The only other problem I've run across personally was the GbE chipset bug in the v240 (maybe others). That was Broadcom's bug... oh yeah, and of course hard drives wear out practically every day. Anything more interesting?