On the other hand, how important 64-bit computing will be for the PC market remains to be seen.
I keep seeing this statement, and I can never quite understand what people mean. Don't you think that people are eventually going to routinely want more than 4GB of RAM? Do you expect the march of progress in computing to stop? Do you really expect that programmers will stop finding ways to use up more and more RAM and processing time?
To be pendantic you should also note that they are 'imminent owners of the slowest 64-bit Personal Computer in the World', with the understanding that it is the only 64-bit Personal Computer in the World (at least until the AMD chips start showing up on PC's.)
It remains to be seen if the AMD chips will outperform the PPC970. AFAIK, the Athelon 64 will top out at 1.8GHz, and there is no guarantee that it will beat out the PPC970 at 2GHz. It may not even beat the current P4s at that speed. The proof will be when the systems get into our grubby little hands and we can test them ourselves.
Actually, I just watched the video again. He actually said:
We wanted to find a test that used 6GB of memory, but we couldn't find one that didn't destroy the Xeon. It would have been thrashing about for a week.
Then on top of that, they said that they'll be at 3GHz in a year. That's a 50% speed increase in 12 months. Notice something? That's slower than Moore's law. So, what this amounts to is "we're slower than x86, and over the next year that gap will widen".
That is the silliest thing I've heard in a while. What, Moore's Law says doubling every 18 months, right? Keep in mind that is an exponential growth curve. So after 3 years, you will have 4x the performance. So for Apple to keep up with Moore's law (which has been degrading anyway, I think today people say 24 months), Apple would have to introduce 3.2Ghz machines next year. Now, don'tcha think Steve Jobs would have sounded a little funny saying "3.2 GHz in one year"? I think that is unnecessarily precise. Plus it gives him a chance to underpromise and overdeliver. If he is willing to make that prediction, that has to be the lowest possible speed they can envision in 12 months. Maybe they're expecting 3.5GHz or even 4 GHz in a year, but to say that would actually cut into sales.
Also, remember that IBM said the PPC 970 chip would top out at 1.8 GHz initally? Looks like they surpassed that.
Oh, yeah. Steve probably said "hey, vendors, come on over and do a little demo. Yeah, it'll be a duel, but don't worry about recompiling for the G5 (which is supposed to be trivial). We'll just see what happens."
Look -- they spent every last minute they could optimizing the builds they used for the demo - don't doubt it for a minute. On the other hand, every last minute probably wasn't all that long, and the demos did kick ass.
Actually, my favorite was the Mathematica guy who commented (IIRC) "We tried to come up with an example to show how being able to use more than 4GB of memory was helpful, but we couldn't come up with an example that didn't crash the Xeon"
Basically, this means that any GPL (or GPL compatible) KDE app can now be compiled for MacOS X and use native widgets. When Apple decided to use KHTML and KJS to build Safari, they develped their own adapter library called kwq (pronoucned "quack") to stand in for Qt so they wouldn't have to license the commertial version of Qt.
So now something like KOffice should be able to be recompiled into a "native" MacOS X application. No more need to run X11.
Does anybody have a precompiled binary of Konq available for download? I'd be interested to see how it compares to Safari.
By the way, are there any Konq users out there who could comment on the effect of Apple working on KHTML and KJS has had on their browser over the last 6 months or so? Has Apple contributed big improvements, or has it been more incremental?
Are there DDR400 DIMMS in 2GB available yet? I've poked around and I can't even find 1GB DIMMS in DDR400, so I'm not sure where Apple is getting them from.
The slots may well support 2GB DIMMS, Apple has been known to do that. The 12" Powerbook supports a 1GB DIMM in its one slot, but nobody has made one that fits yet. I think the limitation here comes in that the machine has 8 slots and the largest readily available DIMMS in DDR400 (aka PC3200) are 1GB.
If I'm wrong, please enlighten me
Re:Ugh! Another $129 x 2 Machines!
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
Uh, dude.....
Apple offers a $199 "family pack" for up to 5 macs in the same household. There, I just saved you $60
If you had actually succeeded in hacking Apple, would you limit yourself to changing one graphic (it was an image with text) in the PowerMac section of the Apple store? Would you fill it with impressive but plausible specs? Most crackers would have changed the specs to something absurd, like quad 3GHz or something.
The other thing (to my mind) is that if Apple had gotten cracked, they would have taken the store offline for a longer period of time while they figured out how it was done and how to prevent it from happening again. As bad as it would be for Apple to admit to having been cracked, it would be even worse for them to leave an open vulnerability.
It was either a slip-up or a deliberate leak. My money is on slip-up. If Apple is preparing to announce new machines on Monday, then they've got to be working on new websites by now and someone just goofed and saved a graphic to the wrong location. Once somebody found it, the cat was out of the bag.
By the way, the San Jose Mercury News is now reporting that IBM has scheduled analyst briefings about the PPC 970 for Monday after Steve Job's keynote.
The space shuttle was actually conceived in the 60's, I think and built in the 70s. The first flights were in the early 80s.
By the way, the space shuttles have been updated quite a bit over the years. I believe each shuttle has undergone one or two complete rebuilds in their lives. All the old CRT displays were replaced with LCD models, etc. Now, the thermal protection technology hasn't been improved much, if at all, but when Columbia was lost, it was a much different shuttle than the Columbia that was first launched in the 80s. It was the same airframe, most of the rest of it had been replaced.
MacOS X doesn't use a Mach kernel. It uses Mach code in its kernel, especially for the back end. The front end of the kernel has a bunch of BSD stuff in the same memory space as the Mach stuff. It is really a hybrid kernel.
Those windmills are only silent from a distance. They actually are quite noisy up close (IIRC). So that noise would be transmitted down to the water and our and totally fuck up any echo location.
Windmills also tend to kill birds. They are not entirely benign.
Pretty much, yes. Except that I think sand is crystalline and they add some stuff (soda, lime, etc) to make it melt easier. Anything ceramic (and that includes glass), is basically a synthetic rock. Why would you want it to degrade? What is glass poisoning? Anyway, glass is recycled a lot easier than plastic, and recycling is preferable to decay. Just sort it by color and melt it down.
Actually I think aluminum takes longer to decay than glass does because aluminum forms a protective oxide on the surface that is not as water sensitive as silica (glass) is. Even so, aluminum is great because it is actually profitable to recycle aluminum since it costs a lot less to melt down old aluminum than it does to refine new aluminum from bauxite.
The other point is that neither aluminum nor glass produces anything toxic as they degrade. Many plastics release nasty toxic compounds as they degrade and so you don't really want them to break down.
I find it hard to know what to believe here. It seems a lock that Apple will introduce PPC970 based Macs at WWDC, but the question as to when they will be availble for shipment is something that is probably only known to his Steveness.
As far as a PPC970 based Powerbook goes. I doubt it. The peak energy consumption is low enough, but I don't think it has any powersave features built in. The increased complexity of a whole new chip in a laptop...seems dubious.
However, There is one thing that makes me think a Powerbook G5 might be released: Apple has not updated the 15" Powerbook since November, not even to bring it up to feature parity with the 12" and 17" models (Bluetooth, FW800, and DDR memory, Aluminum enclosure). It does make me think that maybe Apple has been waiting for the next major uprade to update the 15" models and switching to the PPC970 would certainly qualify.
Graffitti for Palm lets me do about 15 wpm and that's after 3 years of practice.
There are other options out there. One is the fitaly keyboard, which is supposed to be optimized for use with a stylus. They claim you can get 50 wpm. I've never tried it, but it certainly looks easier than Graffitti to me. Anybody out there tried it?
I believe that Apple's long discarded "Copland" next generation OS had a kernel that was called NuKernel. Some of that code was probably merged into the OS X kernel, hence xnu. Remember that Apple used to sell Macs with NuBus expasion slots.
Roberto made one common mistake in his writeup on Darwin. Darwin does not use a pure Mach kernel. It uses a kernel called xnu. Xnu is a hybrid kernel containing Mach message passing code, but also a lot of BSD stuff. Xnu isn't quite monolithic, but it isn't a microkernel either. The BSD stuff was added into the kernel space to improve performance over pure Mach.
I had to have my iBook(2001) serviced because it was having this wierd problem where the Airport reception was dependant on the angle of the screen hinge. I had already figured out that it was probably a pinched wire in the hinge, so I took it to the Genius Bar at my local Apple store. I showed them the problem, they decided that it needed to go to the repair depot to be fixed. They warned me it might take up to two weeks.
I left it with them on a Saturday. They packed it and shipped it out on Monday, on Tuesday it got to the repair depot, they replaced the antenna wire and shipped back out the same day. I had it back in my grubby little hands on Wednesday morning. They even gave me a tracking number to follow the progress of my repair. I was very impressed.
They did, however, decide that I had a "software fault" as well, so they reformatted my hard drive and I had to restore from a backup. They warned me that might happen, though, so it wasn't a big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
KDevelop is available through Fink. You'll have to run X11 for that version, though.
I keep seeing this statement, and I can never quite understand what people mean. Don't you think that people are eventually going to routinely want more than 4GB of RAM? Do you expect the march of progress in computing to stop? Do you really expect that programmers will stop finding ways to use up more and more RAM and processing time?
It remains to be seen if the AMD chips will outperform the PPC970. AFAIK, the Athelon 64 will top out at 1.8GHz, and there is no guarantee that it will beat out the PPC970 at 2GHz. It may not even beat the current P4s at that speed. The proof will be when the systems get into our grubby little hands and we can test them ourselves.
Well, a new /. article came up about this, but I'll post the answer here.
Actually, I just watched the video again. He actually said:
That is the silliest thing I've heard in a while. What, Moore's Law says doubling every 18 months, right? Keep in mind that is an exponential growth curve. So after 3 years, you will have 4x the performance. So for Apple to keep up with Moore's law (which has been degrading anyway, I think today people say 24 months), Apple would have to introduce 3.2Ghz machines next year. Now, don'tcha think Steve Jobs would have sounded a little funny saying "3.2 GHz in one year"? I think that is unnecessarily precise. Plus it gives him a chance to underpromise and overdeliver. If he is willing to make that prediction, that has to be the lowest possible speed they can envision in 12 months. Maybe they're expecting 3.5GHz or even 4 GHz in a year, but to say that would actually cut into sales.
Also, remember that IBM said the PPC 970 chip would top out at 1.8 GHz initally? Looks like they surpassed that.
Actually, my favorite was the Mathematica guy who commented (IIRC) "We tried to come up with an example to show how being able to use more than 4GB of memory was helpful, but we couldn't come up with an example that didn't crash the Xeon"
Basically, this means that any GPL (or GPL compatible) KDE app can now be compiled for MacOS X and use native widgets. When Apple decided to use KHTML and KJS to build Safari, they develped their own adapter library called kwq (pronoucned "quack") to stand in for Qt so they wouldn't have to license the commertial version of Qt.
So now something like KOffice should be able to be recompiled into a "native" MacOS X application. No more need to run X11.
Does anybody have a precompiled binary of Konq available for download? I'd be interested to see how it compares to Safari.
By the way, are there any Konq users out there who could comment on the effect of Apple working on KHTML and KJS has had on their browser over the last 6 months or so? Has Apple contributed big improvements, or has it been more incremental?
Are there DDR400 DIMMS in 2GB available yet? I've poked around and I can't even find 1GB DIMMS in DDR400, so I'm not sure where Apple is getting them from.
The slots may well support 2GB DIMMS, Apple has been known to do that. The 12" Powerbook supports a 1GB DIMM in its one slot, but nobody has made one that fits yet. I think the limitation here comes in that the machine has 8 slots and the largest readily available DIMMS in DDR400 (aka PC3200) are 1GB.
If I'm wrong, please enlighten me
Uh, dude.....
Apple offers a $199 "family pack" for up to 5 macs in the same household. There, I just saved you $60
Don't hold your breath. Apple has no interest in making it easy to hack the iPod. The support headaches would be a nightmare.
Two reasons, really.
If you had actually succeeded in hacking Apple, would you limit yourself to changing one graphic (it was an image with text) in the PowerMac section of the Apple store? Would you fill it with impressive but plausible specs? Most crackers would have changed the specs to something absurd, like quad 3GHz or something.
The other thing (to my mind) is that if Apple had gotten cracked, they would have taken the store offline for a longer period of time while they figured out how it was done and how to prevent it from happening again. As bad as it would be for Apple to admit to having been cracked, it would be even worse for them to leave an open vulnerability.
It was either a slip-up or a deliberate leak. My money is on slip-up. If Apple is preparing to announce new machines on Monday, then they've got to be working on new websites by now and someone just goofed and saved a graphic to the wrong location. Once somebody found it, the cat was out of the bag.
By the way, the San Jose Mercury News is now reporting that IBM has scheduled analyst briefings about the PPC 970 for Monday after Steve Job's keynote.
The space shuttle was actually conceived in the 60's, I think and built in the 70s. The first flights were in the early 80s.
By the way, the space shuttles have been updated quite a bit over the years. I believe each shuttle has undergone one or two complete rebuilds in their lives. All the old CRT displays were replaced with LCD models, etc. Now, the thermal protection technology hasn't been improved much, if at all, but when Columbia was lost, it was a much different shuttle than the Columbia that was first launched in the 80s. It was the same airframe, most of the rest of it had been replaced.
MacOS X doesn't use a Mach kernel. It uses Mach code in its kernel, especially for the back end. The front end of the kernel has a bunch of BSD stuff in the same memory space as the Mach stuff. It is really a hybrid kernel.
The actual MacOS X kernel is called xnu.
Those windmills are only silent from a distance. They actually are quite noisy up close (IIRC). So that noise would be transmitted down to the water and our and totally fuck up any echo location.
Windmills also tend to kill birds. They are not entirely benign.
Disclamer: IAAMS (I Am A Materials Scientist)
Pretty much, yes. Except that I think sand is crystalline and they add some stuff (soda, lime, etc) to make it melt easier. Anything ceramic (and that includes glass), is basically a synthetic rock. Why would you want it to degrade? What is glass poisoning? Anyway, glass is recycled a lot easier than plastic, and recycling is preferable to decay. Just sort it by color and melt it down.
Actually I think aluminum takes longer to decay than glass does because aluminum forms a protective oxide on the surface that is not as water sensitive as silica (glass) is. Even so, aluminum is great because it is actually profitable to recycle aluminum since it costs a lot less to melt down old aluminum than it does to refine new aluminum from bauxite.
The other point is that neither aluminum nor glass produces anything toxic as they degrade. Many plastics release nasty toxic compounds as they degrade and so you don't really want them to break down.
Apple is a member of the HyperTransport Consortium. They have a hand in the development of the technology.
You could make the same argument for Singapore.
I find it hard to know what to believe here. It seems a lock that Apple will introduce PPC970 based Macs at WWDC, but the question as to when they will be availble for shipment is something that is probably only known to his Steveness.
As far as a PPC970 based Powerbook goes. I doubt it. The peak energy consumption is low enough, but I don't think it has any powersave features built in. The increased complexity of a whole new chip in a laptop...seems dubious.
However, There is one thing that makes me think a Powerbook G5 might be released: Apple has not updated the 15" Powerbook since November, not even to bring it up to feature parity with the 12" and 17" models (Bluetooth, FW800, and DDR memory, Aluminum enclosure). It does make me think that maybe Apple has been waiting for the next major uprade to update the 15" models and switching to the PPC970 would certainly qualify.
There are other options out there. One is the fitaly keyboard, which is supposed to be optimized for use with a stylus. They claim you can get 50 wpm. I've never tried it, but it certainly looks easier than Graffitti to me. Anybody out there tried it?
I believe that Apple's long discarded "Copland" next generation OS had a kernel that was called NuKernel. Some of that code was probably merged into the OS X kernel, hence xnu. Remember that Apple used to sell Macs with NuBus expasion slots.
Roberto made one common mistake in his writeup on Darwin. Darwin does not use a pure Mach kernel. It uses a kernel called xnu. Xnu is a hybrid kernel containing Mach message passing code, but also a lot of BSD stuff. Xnu isn't quite monolithic, but it isn't a microkernel either. The BSD stuff was added into the kernel space to improve performance over pure Mach.
Well, with the advent of gecko tape that last part may now be possible!
I had to have my iBook(2001) serviced because it was having this wierd problem where the Airport reception was dependant on the angle of the screen hinge. I had already figured out that it was probably a pinched wire in the hinge, so I took it to the Genius Bar at my local Apple store. I showed them the problem, they decided that it needed to go to the repair depot to be fixed. They warned me it might take up to two weeks.
I left it with them on a Saturday. They packed it and shipped it out on Monday, on Tuesday it got to the repair depot, they replaced the antenna wire and shipped back out the same day. I had it back in my grubby little hands on Wednesday morning. They even gave me a tracking number to follow the progress of my repair. I was very impressed.
They did, however, decide that I had a "software fault" as well, so they reformatted my hard drive and I had to restore from a backup. They warned me that might happen, though, so it wasn't a big deal.
Actually Apple is already there.