I wonder if he's counting the 3-10 times a week my XP machine says it's sending a bug report back to Microsoft.
Wow... you must not use your computer much. I get 3-10 a day. Off a fresh install. Most of them are from IE, but explorer.exe often goes down too, and I have to manually restart it from the task manager. Oh and Visual Studio 6. Visual Studio.net seems slightly better, but under certain conditions the tabs at the top of the code view sometimes get gibbled. Oh and the tooltips on the taskbar often show up with the correct text but in the wrong sized tooltip, or the other way around, so you get these big god-awful black boxes. And... I could go on for hours.
No... it isn't. If you've ever used resources in Windows development, you'll note that strings are identified with resource IDs, and there is no way to comment the strings in the resources to give translators context. Giving them code is not usually an option, since translators generally can't and don't want to look at code... and shouldn't have to; that's the whole point of resources.
Localizing for OpenStep/Cocoa is a dream after working with that nightmare for years.
It won't change nothing if it's proprietary and doesn't play nice with other OS's (Windows included). [...] Why isn't there an open source package that just makes it easy to share folders/files/printers across all platforms?
Ok, Mr. Whiny Pants, Here you go. Knock your socks off.
Rendezvous isn't designed for file/printer etc. sharing. It's for auto-configuration and identification of network services. So while Rendezvous is designed to help you find webservers, printers, file services, etc. the services themselves are the traditional services. It would suck if it wasn't that way... imagine if you had to use some special Rendezvous protocol for the web services instead of HTTP.
Sure, they're giving back source improvements for things they're getting from the free software world, but how about giving something we've been asking for nicely for years...a native Linux QuickTime player and plugin?
Apple cannot release Quicktime for Linux without a Linux port of the Sorensen codec... Apple licenses that codec as part of Quicktime. They didn't develop it, and they don't develop it now. It's doubtful that they'll make a Quicktime player for Linux because they'd have to spend money to do it. For Windows, it makes sense. If you want to be the de facto media standard, you have to grab the other 95%. Quicktime would disappear without the Windows player. Unfortunately, a Linux player would only be an act of kindness on their part, it wouldn't have any appreciable benefit given the cost of porting and maintaining a Linux version.
What really needs to be provided to translators is the text to translate, limits as to how long the translated string can be (if applicable), and a description of how/when the phrase or word is used.
Interestingly, OpenStep (now Cocoa on MacOS X) provides for this with its NSLocalizedString function. Here's the signature:
I've been pretty impressed with RegionX. I patched my Pismo Powerbook DVD drive's firmware with the regionless patch, and RegionX updates the PRAM values perfectly. I've been using it for over a year; so far so good.
Keep in mind though, that this could potentially hoop your DVD drive, so do it at your own risk. That said, it worked fine for me.
Now focus-follows-mouse for MacOS X, that would be something to shout about
Not gonna happen. Not even possible, in fact. Why? Well the Mac Menu bar sits on the top of the screen, not under the title bar of each window. So moving the mouse from a window in one application to a window in another application would require the menu bar to switch to the other application's menu bar, otherwise the user is left with the uncomfortable (and not at all user-friendly) situation of having Application A's menu bar while working in Application B's window. But it gets worse. Assuming, for the above reasons, that the menu bar has to change when you mouse over another application's window, you're in for a nightmare if you use the menus (and why have menus if you aren't going to use them?). Every time you move the mouse to the menu bar, you have to move the mouse pointer out of the Application's window. And if you have any other windows open in the background from another application, your menu bar is going to magically change every time you move the mouse up to the menu bar, defeating the purpose and causing much swearing.
You could do all sorts of hacks around this, like time-delayed menu-bar switching, but the fact is, the whole metaphor just doesn't work on a Mac. Focus follows mouse is also pretty confusing to most users, since their experience generally comes from either the Mac or Windows world, neither of which has focus follows mouse (actually, you can turn it on in Windows through a registry hack, same goes for tab-completion on the command line). The intended audience of this feature would be UNIX converts, but because of the menu bar deal, they'd be just as annoyed as Mac users. That's why I doubt we'll ever see this in the Mac OS, even as an option.
Now, on my FreeBSD boxes I tend to use focus follows mouse with sloppy focus, and I like it, but it just doesn't work under the Mac OS metaphor, not that I mind.
[...] the Asteroid story was leaked by NASA who want a bigger budget
While it's possible that NASA would enjoy having a bigger budget, you would have found -- if you had read the article -- that the story was leaked by British astronomers through British newspapers. Only later did it appear in the American news.
The only connection NASA has to this whole story is the linked article titled "NASA Scientists Call British Media's Asteroid Hype Unethical Rubbish".
Since QT5, the stupid thumbwheel knob has been gone. Same with the pullout tray that nobody knew about because it was so unintuitive. It's definitely less clunky than Windows Media Player. The brushed metal is still there, but if you can ignore that, it's perfectly fine. The Windows version doesn't have the stupid floating menubar anymore either (again, as of 5). QT4 had a horrific user interface. QT5 is better and QT6 isn't much of a change from QT5.
2001-08-12 would conform to the ISO date form. YYYY-MM-DD. There's no ambiguity if you put the year first, since the ISO form is the only form of which I know that begins with the year. The Americans use MM-DD-YYYY and everyone else uses DD-MM-YYYY (assuming western date system) or the ISO format.
Actually, a square cover whose edges are each 2^0.5 feet long will fit the hole (assuming there's a lip) and not fall in, though it won't necessarily cover the whole hole -- that wasn't a precondition though since the statement was that a round cover was the only shape that won't fall in. This is undeniably cheaper than a circular cover, but I suppose there's always the annoyance of public safety.
No. This is an extensible architecture that allows you to add modules for a ton of algorithms. Think of it more as a pluggable architecture something like Java's JCE.
I'd assumed that OpenSSL would work on MacOSX, given all the spiel about it being Unix based.
Mac OS X ships with TCPWrappers, OpenSSL and OpenSSH installed by default since version 10.0.1. There's a GUI interface available in the System Preferences panel to turn it on and off (if you're an administrator - ie. are in the wheel group).
... Unless you use GNUStep, in which case it's a breeze. Since the GNU version of Interface Builder isn't yet decent, there are tools available to port your MacOS X NIBs to gmodel files and your makefiles to GNUStep makefiles.
You can see out the current state of GNUStep on their progress page. As of April, the GNUStep base is finished. 1.0. Complete. The GUI's pretty damn fine too.
You're right about Carbon apps though. Unless someone ports Carbon to unices other than Mac OS X, it's not going to happen. And I can tell you right now, it's not going to happen. Your best bet for portable apps is Cocoa/GNUStep, which works amazingly well.
And Apple knew this when they stole (stold?) the GUI from Xerox.
Ok. This is off-topic, so I'll make it fast.
Apple did not steal their GUI from Xerox. This is one of the biggest perpetuated myths of all computing history. They were given a tour of the PARC facility, approved by Xerox, and licenced some of their technologies in exchange for a load of Apple stock.
The original Lisa UI was far superior in almost every way to the Xerox GUI; the underlying principles (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) were available on the Xerox UI but Lisa development was approved and began more than three months before the visit to Xerox. The Xerox brass weren't interested in the work being done there, and Apple jumped at the chance to licence it. Xerox disbanded their project and many of the developers (eg. Larry Tessler, Alan Kay, Jef Raskin) fled to Apple.
Xerox lost their lawsuit accusing Apple of infringing on their intellectual property. In fact, most of the stuff that Apple "stole" (such as the concept of a graphical interface and the mouse) were demonstrated by Douglas Englebart in the 1960s.
In any case, this isn't meant to undermine the work that Xerox did. They came up with some revolutionary ideas -- bitmapped displays, overlapping windows, cursors that reflect the current status of the machine -- but it was Apple that took these ideas, expanded on them, and came up with a truly useful and finished product.
Steve Jobs even admits that their core concepts came from Xerox. Here's what he said about their tour:
"... they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system...they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time but still thought they had the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well and within, you know, ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day."
Interesting that the next company he founded, NeXT, was a huge pusher in the development of Objective-C, which has many Smalltalk-like features. And guess where Smalltalk originated. Xerox PARC has always been on the bleeding edge. Some of the most fantastic ideas in computing originated there, but generally, those ideas were improved upond and commercialised elsewhere. It's too bad PARC is finally being disbanded.
I can think of at least 30 BBSs that ran in Victoria in the early 90s that aren't listed.
Absolutely! In fact, most of the longtimers weren't listed at all. Most notably missing were Camelot, Forbidden Night Castle (and the Torture Chamber... ummm, not that I ever visited it or anything), Tommy's Holiday Camp and the two biggest commercial BBSs in town, FarWest and Big Blue & Cousins.
What end's up missing is the money owed to the owners of the content that is being broadcast.
This is ridiculous. Canada is a foreign nation with its own laws; US law does not apply. What they are doing appears to be entirely legal in Canada -- it is not theft. If US broadcasters don't want Canadian broadcasters to pick up their stuff an rebroadcast it, then they should ensure that their signals don't cross the border and use up part of the Canadian broadcast spectrum.
Let's say I own a house with an apple tree. I'm lazy and the edge of it grows over my neighbour's fence into his yard. It's his yard -- if some of the apples fall into it, they're his. If I don't want him to have them, then I shouldn't have let my bloody tree grow into his yard. That's not theft, that's stupidity on my part. If he goes off and sells his apples, good for him. My tree is using up space in his yard, it might be inconvenient to him. If anyone's doing something wrong it's me.
Canadian broadcasters in border regions are similarly limited in the frequencies they can use because alot of the spectrum is being used up by US broadcasts. There are almost 10 Americans for every 1 Canadian, and there are comparatively more broadcasts than that.
Note: the article does say that JumpTV's says its technology will ensure that most of its transmissions will remain within Canada. My assumption is that since the big issue is re-broadcast into the US, they mean that it won't allow rebroadcast into the US. If what they are doing is indeed found to be legal in Canada, which it appears it may be, then they should be allowed to rebroadcast to any other nation whose laws similarly allow this sort of thing. I hope they do this. Either way, blame your own legal system, not Canada's.
As a final note, I don't watch TV, and haven't for more than a decade, so this isn't really of any particular interest to me, except from a legal standpoint. I don't believe Canada should have to comply with US law even when its own laws permit certain operations.
However, the fact that the company has to put in place regional barriers means that this is a Bad Thing.
I'm sorry, but the problem here is that what they're doing isn't legal in the US. From the article, it appears that basically everyone except those in the US will be allowed to watch. This makes sense, what they're doing isn't allowed by US laws, and they're trying to avoid some lawsuits by not "broadcasting" there. If the US legal system allowed this sort of thing, there wouldn't be any need for this regional barrier.
You can't blame a Canadian company for problems with the laws of your own country. The blame for the regional barrier falls squarely on the American legal system. It's not JumpTV's fault whatsoever.
Fix the problem at it's root: the laws of the US; don't try to impose your laws on sovereign nations. This has no similarities to DVD regional encoding whatsoever.
Actually, you're quite wrong. Speaking as a computer engineer (hardware, not software), you are quite right that RISC chips have fewer and simpler instructions. That means that you typically have to execute more instructions to do something than you would on a CISC chip. While a CISC chip might have a divide opcode, your typical RISC chip probably doesn't.
However, you are completely wrong that a RISC chip does less per clock cycle. Given a Pentium and a PowerPC at the same clock speed, the PowerPC will average far more instructions per clock cycle (not that you can execute an instruction in one clock cycle to begin with, a typical instruction cycle on any chip lasts several clock cycles, but we're talking the average work done per clock cycle). Why is it that the RISC chip can do more? Well, since there are far fewer instructions and they are much more basic, you can (and do) execute several instructions in parallel. Now, you can't always do this because one instruction might be a branch, and you can't necessarily know which way you will branch before you get to the branch test instruction, but in general you can execute several instructions in parallel. Of course, there are clever ways of solving the branch problem too, such as guessing which one is going to happen, and evaluating those instructions, then discarding the results if you're wrong. In any case, each clock cycle does effectively achieve more on a PowerPC chip than on an intel chip.
Now, at current clock speeds, you've got the PowerPC in the sub-GHz range and the P4 midway between 1 and 2 GHz range, your P4 is going to beat your PowerPC anyway.
As for the P3 and P4 being more RISC-like than the G4, you nearly made me spew chocolate milk out my nose. Get a good book on computer engineering and learn a bare minimum about the subject. Please, if you're going to make totally uninform\ed comments put [troll] in the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if he's counting the 3-10 times a week my XP machine says it's sending a bug report back to Microsoft.
.net seems slightly better, but under certain conditions the tabs at the top of the code view sometimes get gibbled. Oh and the tooltips on the taskbar often show up with the correct text but in the wrong sized tooltip, or the other way around, so you get these big god-awful black boxes. And... I could go on for hours.
Wow... you must not use your computer much. I get 3-10 a day. Off a fresh install. Most of them are from IE, but explorer.exe often goes down too, and I have to manually restart it from the task manager. Oh and Visual Studio 6. Visual Studio
But I guess that's just 'cause I want to be cool.
Underneath the layer of eye candy that rests on top of OS X is something simple yet powerful -- Linux
Hmmm... shouldn't that be BSD? Oops, I mean... BSD is dead!
No... it isn't. If you've ever used resources in Windows development, you'll note that strings are identified with resource IDs, and there is no way to comment the strings in the resources to give translators context. Giving them code is not usually an option, since translators generally can't and don't want to look at code... and shouldn't have to; that's the whole point of resources.
Localizing for OpenStep/Cocoa is a dream after working with that nightmare for years.
It won't change nothing if it's proprietary and doesn't play nice with other OS's (Windows included). [...] Why isn't there an open source package that just makes it easy to share folders/files/printers across all platforms?
Ok, Mr. Whiny Pants, Here you go. Knock your socks off.
Rendezvous isn't designed for file/printer etc. sharing. It's for auto-configuration and identification of network services. So while Rendezvous is designed to help you find webservers, printers, file services, etc. the services themselves are the traditional services. It would suck if it wasn't that way... imagine if you had to use some special Rendezvous protocol for the web services instead of HTTP.
Sure, they're giving back source improvements for things they're getting from the free software world, but how about giving something we've been asking for nicely for years...a native Linux QuickTime player and plugin?
Apple cannot release Quicktime for Linux without a Linux port of the Sorensen codec... Apple licenses that codec as part of Quicktime. They didn't develop it, and they don't develop it now. It's doubtful that they'll make a Quicktime player for Linux because they'd have to spend money to do it. For Windows, it makes sense. If you want to be the de facto media standard, you have to grab the other 95%. Quicktime would disappear without the Windows player. Unfortunately, a Linux player would only be an act of kindness on their part, it wouldn't have any appreciable benefit given the cost of porting and maintaining a Linux version.
What really needs to be provided to translators is the text to translate, limits as to how long the translated string can be (if applicable), and a description of how/when the phrase or word is used.
Interestingly, OpenStep (now Cocoa on MacOS X) provides for this with its NSLocalizedString function. Here's the signature:
NSString *NSLocalizedString(NSString *key, NSString *comment)
This looks up the key in a localized.strings file in the application bundle, and returns the value for it. The format for a localized.strings file is:
"key string of some sort" = "value to replace it for the current language bundle";
All in all, a pretty decent system.
I've been pretty impressed with RegionX. I patched my Pismo Powerbook DVD drive's firmware with the regionless patch, and RegionX updates the PRAM values perfectly. I've been using it for over a year; so far so good.
Keep in mind though, that this could potentially hoop your DVD drive, so do it at your own risk. That said, it worked fine for me.
Now focus-follows-mouse for MacOS X, that would be something to shout about
Not gonna happen. Not even possible, in fact. Why? Well the Mac Menu bar sits on the top of the screen, not under the title bar of each window. So moving the mouse from a window in one application to a window in another application would require the menu bar to switch to the other application's menu bar, otherwise the user is left with the uncomfortable (and not at all user-friendly) situation of having Application A's menu bar while working in Application B's window. But it gets worse. Assuming, for the above reasons, that the menu bar has to change when you mouse over another application's window, you're in for a nightmare if you use the menus (and why have menus if you aren't going to use them?). Every time you move the mouse to the menu bar, you have to move the mouse pointer out of the Application's window. And if you have any other windows open in the background from another application, your menu bar is going to magically change every time you move the mouse up to the menu bar, defeating the purpose and causing much swearing.
You could do all sorts of hacks around this, like time-delayed menu-bar switching, but the fact is, the whole metaphor just doesn't work on a Mac. Focus follows mouse is also pretty confusing to most users, since their experience generally comes from either the Mac or Windows world, neither of which has focus follows mouse (actually, you can turn it on in Windows through a registry hack, same goes for tab-completion on the command line). The intended audience of this feature would be UNIX converts, but because of the menu bar deal, they'd be just as annoyed as Mac users. That's why I doubt we'll ever see this in the Mac OS, even as an option.
Now, on my FreeBSD boxes I tend to use focus follows mouse with sloppy focus, and I like it, but it just doesn't work under the Mac OS metaphor, not that I mind.
[...] the Asteroid story was leaked by NASA who want a bigger budget
While it's possible that NASA would enjoy having a bigger budget, you would have found -- if you had read the article -- that the story was leaked by British astronomers through British newspapers. Only later did it appear in the American news.
The only connection NASA has to this whole story is the linked article titled "NASA Scientists Call British Media's Asteroid Hype Unethical Rubbish".
Since QT5, the stupid thumbwheel knob has been gone. Same with the pullout tray that nobody knew about because it was so unintuitive. It's definitely less clunky than Windows Media Player. The brushed metal is still there, but if you can ignore that, it's perfectly fine. The Windows version doesn't have the stupid floating menubar anymore either (again, as of 5). QT4 had a horrific user interface. QT5 is better and QT6 isn't much of a change from QT5.
2001-08-12 would conform to the ISO date form. YYYY-MM-DD. There's no ambiguity if you put the year first, since the ISO form is the only form of which I know that begins with the year. The Americans use MM-DD-YYYY and everyone else uses DD-MM-YYYY (assuming western date system) or the ISO format.
Actually, a square cover whose edges are each 2^0.5 feet long will fit the hole (assuming there's a lip) and not fall in, though it won't necessarily cover the whole hole -- that wasn't a precondition though since the statement was that a round cover was the only shape that won't fall in. This is undeniably cheaper than a circular cover, but I suppose there's always the annoyance of public safety.
Is the the MacOSX equivalent of OpenSSL?
No. This is an extensible architecture that allows you to add modules for a ton of algorithms. Think of it more as a pluggable architecture something like Java's JCE.
I'd assumed that OpenSSL would work on MacOSX, given all the spiel about it being Unix based.
Mac OS X ships with TCPWrappers, OpenSSL and OpenSSH installed by default since version 10.0.1. There's a GUI interface available in the System Preferences panel to turn it on and off (if you're an administrator - ie. are in the wheel group).
cocoa programs are probably harder.
... Unless you use GNUStep, in which case it's a breeze. Since the GNU version of Interface Builder isn't yet decent, there are tools available to port your MacOS X NIBs to gmodel files and your makefiles to GNUStep makefiles.
You can see out the current state of GNUStep on their progress page. As of April, the GNUStep base is finished. 1.0. Complete. The GUI's pretty damn fine too.
You're right about Carbon apps though. Unless someone ports Carbon to unices other than Mac OS X, it's not going to happen. And I can tell you right now, it's not going to happen. Your best bet for portable apps is Cocoa/GNUStep, which works amazingly well.
Ok. This is off-topic, so I'll make it fast.
Apple did not steal their GUI from Xerox. This is one of the biggest perpetuated myths of all computing history. They were given a tour of the PARC facility, approved by Xerox, and licenced some of their technologies in exchange for a load of Apple stock.
Here's a link documenting the whole sordid affair.
The original Lisa UI was far superior in almost every way to the Xerox GUI; the underlying principles (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) were available on the Xerox UI but Lisa development was approved and began more than three months before the visit to Xerox. The Xerox brass weren't interested in the work being done there, and Apple jumped at the chance to licence it. Xerox disbanded their project and many of the developers (eg. Larry Tessler, Alan Kay, Jef Raskin) fled to Apple.
Xerox lost their lawsuit accusing Apple of infringing on their intellectual property. In fact, most of the stuff that Apple "stole" (such as the concept of a graphical interface and the mouse) were demonstrated by Douglas Englebart in the 1960s.
In any case, this isn't meant to undermine the work that Xerox did. They came up with some revolutionary ideas -- bitmapped displays, overlapping windows, cursors that reflect the current status of the machine -- but it was Apple that took these ideas, expanded on them, and came up with a truly useful and finished product.
Steve Jobs even admits that their core concepts came from Xerox. Here's what he said about their tour:
Interesting that the next company he founded, NeXT, was a huge pusher in the development of Objective-C, which has many Smalltalk-like features. And guess where Smalltalk originated. Xerox PARC has always been on the bleeding edge. Some of the most fantastic ideas in computing originated there, but generally, those ideas were improved upond and commercialised elsewhere. It's too bad PARC is finally being disbanded.
I can think of at least 30 BBSs that ran in Victoria in the early 90s that aren't listed.
Absolutely! In fact, most of the longtimers weren't listed at all. Most notably missing were Camelot, Forbidden Night Castle (and the Torture Chamber... ummm, not that I ever visited it or anything), Tommy's Holiday Camp and the two biggest commercial BBSs in town, FarWest and Big Blue & Cousins.
What end's up missing is the money owed to the owners of the content that is being broadcast.
This is ridiculous. Canada is a foreign nation with its own laws; US law does not apply. What they are doing appears to be entirely legal in Canada -- it is not theft. If US broadcasters don't want Canadian broadcasters to pick up their stuff an rebroadcast it, then they should ensure that their signals don't cross the border and use up part of the Canadian broadcast spectrum.
Let's say I own a house with an apple tree. I'm lazy and the edge of it grows over my neighbour's fence into his yard. It's his yard -- if some of the apples fall into it, they're his. If I don't want him to have them, then I shouldn't have let my bloody tree grow into his yard. That's not theft, that's stupidity on my part. If he goes off and sells his apples, good for him. My tree is using up space in his yard, it might be inconvenient to him. If anyone's doing something wrong it's me.
Canadian broadcasters in border regions are similarly limited in the frequencies they can use because alot of the spectrum is being used up by US broadcasts. There are almost 10 Americans for every 1 Canadian, and there are comparatively more broadcasts than that.
Note: the article does say that JumpTV's says its technology will ensure that most of its transmissions will remain within Canada. My assumption is that since the big issue is re-broadcast into the US, they mean that it won't allow rebroadcast into the US. If what they are doing is indeed found to be legal in Canada, which it appears it may be, then they should be allowed to rebroadcast to any other nation whose laws similarly allow this sort of thing. I hope they do this. Either way, blame your own legal system, not Canada's.
As a final note, I don't watch TV, and haven't for more than a decade, so this isn't really of any particular interest to me, except from a legal standpoint. I don't believe Canada should have to comply with US law even when its own laws permit certain operations.
However, the fact that the company has to put in place regional barriers means that this is a Bad Thing.
I'm sorry, but the problem here is that what they're doing isn't legal in the US. From the article, it appears that basically everyone except those in the US will be allowed to watch. This makes sense, what they're doing isn't allowed by US laws, and they're trying to avoid some lawsuits by not "broadcasting" there. If the US legal system allowed this sort of thing, there wouldn't be any need for this regional barrier.
You can't blame a Canadian company for problems with the laws of your own country. The blame for the regional barrier falls squarely on the American legal system. It's not JumpTV's fault whatsoever.
Fix the problem at it's root: the laws of the US; don't try to impose your laws on sovereign nations. This has no similarities to DVD regional encoding whatsoever.
HOLY SHIT!!! There is NO WAY that stops carpal tunnel syndrome if you're an EMACS user!!!
Actually, you're quite wrong. Speaking as a computer engineer (hardware, not software), you are quite right that RISC chips have fewer and simpler instructions. That means that you typically have to execute more instructions to do something than you would on a CISC chip. While a CISC chip might have a divide opcode, your typical RISC chip probably doesn't.
However, you are completely wrong that a RISC chip does less per clock cycle. Given a Pentium and a PowerPC at the same clock speed, the PowerPC will average far more instructions per clock cycle (not that you can execute an instruction in one clock cycle to begin with, a typical instruction cycle on any chip lasts several clock cycles, but we're talking the average work done per clock cycle). Why is it that the RISC chip can do more? Well, since there are far fewer instructions and they are much more basic, you can (and do) execute several instructions in parallel. Now, you can't always do this because one instruction might be a branch, and you can't necessarily know which way you will branch before you get to the branch test instruction, but in general you can execute several instructions in parallel. Of course, there are clever ways of solving the branch problem too, such as guessing which one is going to happen, and evaluating those instructions, then discarding the results if you're wrong. In any case, each clock cycle does effectively achieve more on a PowerPC chip than on an intel chip.
Now, at current clock speeds, you've got the PowerPC in the sub-GHz range and the P4 midway between 1 and 2 GHz range, your P4 is going to beat your PowerPC anyway.
As for the P3 and P4 being more RISC-like than the G4, you nearly made me spew chocolate milk out my nose. Get a good book on computer engineering and learn a bare minimum about the subject. Please, if you're going to make totally uninform\ed comments put [troll] in the subject.
MacOS X should go along with the rest of the 32-bit Unices, while the standard MacOS goes at 6:28:15 am on February 6, 2040.
Wait till the down with MacOS X crowd (ie. the ridiculous press) hears about that one.
Apple's statement is here.
at least with Classic
/usr/include/time.h:
/usr/include/ppc/ansi.h:
/* time() */
MacOS X too; it's BSD after all.
From
typedef _BSD_TIME_T_ time_t;
And from
#define _BSD_TIME_T_ long
A long on MacOS X is 32 bits.
They will care if they happen to have been silly enough to store the timestamp as 32 bits in a binary file and time_t changes to 64 bits.
I wouldn't underestimate the number of people who did this considering the number of people who were storing years as two digits.
On a more humorous note, it's amusing to see that a lot of mail list archives on the web display dates like this:
April 5, 19100
Their open source web page is actually at:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/
Sorry about that.