mod this comment up. Its THE obvious point that has been missing from this discussion. The very point that I intended to make myself in this thread. (i do agree with the GPS idea as well though).
The particle physicists say there are only very, very small chances that these singularities could be dangerous. Of course, IIRC, not all physicists believe that small black holes evaporate. Some cosmologists argue that the "missing" dark matter needed to account for the universe's decelerating expansion will be found in many, many mini black holes, so they have found ways to explain how black holes might stick around.
(alos, if little harmless singularities are popping up all the time in our atmosphere due to cosmic rays, then how come those neutrino detector counts are always coming up short?)
It works, and the proof is that that kind of thing has been done before. the New York State lottery (and other lotttos, i'm sure) are required to contribute a significant portion of their profit to the education system.
Of course, what no one talks about is the fact that for every dollar that the lotto contributes to education, the state government removes a dollar from their contribution to education. Net gain = nothing, zero, nada, zip, nihil
Re:Deja Vu all over again
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 1
I heartily agree with you about the protocol idea. For the past few days I have been churning this Micro$oft monopoly thing around in my head and trying to compare it to things like last century's alternating current versus direct current battles.
If the protocol for data transmission is the same, then there shouldn't be any significant problems. (this is why AC/DC was a problem, and why TCP/IP is not a problem). So, if Micro$oft was forced to reveal their file formats, for example, then any competitor could make a compatible software package. Micro$oft would surely be many, many years ahead in the app development ddepartment, thanks to their vast resources, but they would not be unfairly preventing competition.
Afterwards, of course, those pesky issues of Micor$oft releasing buggy and insecure software could then be dealt with on a class action lawsuit by class action lawsuit basis;)
Biologically occurring chemical designs are REALLY very good at what they do. So efficient, that we might be tempted to flat out state that even clever mechanically engineered designs will never approach them. But we should keep in mind that in the "design space" that biological evolution works in not every possible idea is tried or tested. Its just that there is the potential for any combination to be explored.
Human (or machine) created designs can come up with "new" ways to do things. Some of those designs might be more efficient in certain applications than biological designs. A simple example might be the wheel. The last time I checked no macroscopic organisms on this planet where using wheels to get around. On flat surfaces (deserts/ice/savannas/etc.) wheels are more efficient than legs. It is not that evolution couldn't "invent" wheels, it either hasn't successfully happened before, or the design was discarded in favor of the more functionally flexible limbs we do posses. Check out the GOLEM project for more ideas.
I do not think that biological designs have the end all say on nanotechnological possibilities. But the science of biology currently has far more small scale tools and vastly greater experience (nature's experience, that is) at its disposal for the development of useful nanotechnology.
Apple IS now walking a little nearer to the Free software path than it used to. And it is not just because they were/are losing support. The Macintosh OS was in dire need a serious overhaul, as it was not designed with multitasking, networking or 3-D graphics as priorities.
Sure Apple's decision to go with NeXT's BSD kernel was motivated in part by software user base and development (read: financial) concerns, but it was also because it was the closest option to doing the ideal/right thing. "Think Different" is not just Apple's marketing slogan, but something of a company philosophy. If the underground is doing Free software and Open Source, and Micro$oft is steering clear of it, then Apple will do what it can to get that bit of market (quantity) mind (quality) share.
Free software isn't quite ready for the primetime. Hopefully it will be someday. When it does approach user friendliness, then I would expect that Apple will be one of the first mainstream vendors to fully commit to it. After all, they are a hardware company, not a software one (hahaha, that's a whole argument in itself), so the Free software model shouldn't hurt them financially. In the meantime, Apple is doing there best to give people a taste of what it is like.
Well, I think that now is also a fairly important time for Apple, -maybe even more so than the 80's- for personal computer development.
I'm not trying to draw fire here, but Linux is just not ready for consumption by the general public. Some of it the difficulty is because of drivers (which will be quickly cleared up as soon as manufactures stop making new hardware;), but most of the real problems come from not having a monolithic type of effort towards a unified and consistent interface (ie: You can install Red Hat ten times and never see the same set of options twice).
Apple is shaping the future by permitting -albeit slowly- the "freedoom" that GNU users enjoy to permeate its way into the mainstream. And I'm not just talking about OS X being built on a BSD kernel. Maybe Apple's "open" source license isn't perfect, but it is a heck of a lot more free than Micro$oft's efforts. Also, IMHO, Apple has been far more lenient than most of the other mainstream computer manufacturers when it comes to proposing and enforcing copy protection schemes.
These things lead me to state that Apple is contributing much more to the future of computers than fine industrial design and intuitive interfaces.
IANAAP (I am not an astrophysicist), so I am asking you brainiacs to tell me if these findings will help smooth out the kinks in the cosmic inflation model of early universe expansion. I never liked the idea of arbitrary expansion phase (although for some very strange reason my intuition is not so violently opposed to physical constants not being, er, constant). I know they may not be directly related, but can this idea explain the observations that we currently explain with an expansion phase?
I saw this one coming a mile off. No matter what kind of Moore's law breaking processors Aki and the Deep Eyes Squad might have been using in the future, there is no way the current Palm OS could have ever scaled up to such a nice holographic GUI without some serious help.
I hope the first thing they did was patent the very idea of using genetic algorithms to search for new patentable algorithms.
If so, then they are definitely going to be rolling in dough soon...
For about the last 8-10 months Apple has had a "50% RAM upgrade" promotion. Its still much more expensive ($200 rather than $400 for the upgrade you specified) than buying the RAM yourself, but not nearly as bad as you are making it out to be...
Motorola's G4's were stuck at 500 Mhz for a year. They are now be two or three fabrication generations "behind" the game. That truly does suck, and there is not much that can be done about it. Without that stagnation ("I'm looking in your direction, Motorola..."), G4's might easily have been running well over a Ghz by now.
So as things stand in the real world, I really don't expect them to have the raw horsepower of the current x86 offerings. But they do perform well enough for the kinds of things that are important to most everyday use (ie: multimedia manipulation/encoding/decoding, laptop battery life).
I would love to have 120 fps, but do I need more than 40 or so?
Re:IMPORTANT: CORRECTED REPLY
on
Mac Rants
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· Score: 1
But now-a-days the Photoshop versions are released simultaneously for PC and Mac. After all these years of development (and all the waxing power of Wintel), pshop is not any more optimized for the mac platform than for the PC.
That is a good list of apps to use, but I would say that besides photoshop, only illustrator would be widely used or recognized by a majority of users. I cannot recall seeing any illustrator benchmarks, but I would imagine that the G4 does well enough for itself when manipulating the vectors. And powerpc chips have always had a good showing in the Seti@home arena as well. Check out the average CPU time per work unit.
Those little Internet Applicances can surf the web pretty quickly, and they don't have even 500 MHz to play with. I think operating system overhead is a far bigger problem (one that plagues both Windows and Mac OS users)
I am fully aware that the Athlon can hold its own against the Pentium. My Athlon/Pentium comment was merely meant to show that there is some level of hypocrisy in the CPU wars...
I'll admit 3-D games come in a close second for potential for "fair" benchmarking, but have a few problems:
a) they are games, rather than productivity (ie: financially justifiable) applications
b) a very limiting factor in frame rate is the video card, rather than the CPU or the motherboard bus/cache.
c) multi-platform video games are usually released first for the larger PC market, and therefore invariably have better and more thorough PC driver support for all those fancy 3-D video cards.
Re:Apple shouldn't bother attacking the 'MHz gap'
on
Mac Rants
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure that they should be attacking the "MHz myth" either, but at least they don't seem to be targeting the propaganda at consumer/education users, but at the pro users, who would have more time at stake with regards to CPU power...
Re:benchmarking
on
Mac Rants
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Although I believe the bake-offs are honest, I don't claim that the G4 is always as fast as the big boys, just that it is NOT as slow as its Mhz would otherwise suggest. I am quite sure, however, that it is a more efficient and flexible chip design. I would not ever want a laptop with any non-RISC kind of processor in it.
While iMacs cannot be upgraded (in the standard ways), I would say that Apple pro towers with their side opening doors, 4 full-length PCI slots plus AGP 4X, plus the fact that most drives and cards are mac compatible (often without driver voodoo hell), make upgrading even easier than on a PC equivalent.
Yes, you can build a very suitable PC for less than a grand. I don't think you would find it that easy to build one that really compared to an Apple G4 tower (think about the firewire, 1.5 Gb RAM support, Gigabit ethernet, DVD burning options, etc.).
Yup, the high end Apple machines tend to have high-end price margins on them. The same goes for Dell, Sony, HP, Compaq, IBM, or any other brand name manufacture you can think of.
benchmarking
on
Mac Rants
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· Score: 5, Insightful
While it is true that most G4 to pentium bake-offs are done running photoshop filters, I don't think it is a particularly unfair test. After all, Photoshop really is the only standard application in existance that: a) has the same version and capabilities for both the PC and the Mac, and: b) can actually tax a current machine's processor.
Other eligible apps (ie: Office) fail on both these counts.
Dismissing "Multimedia" apps out of hand is naive. Almost all the CPU intensive work done today is digital video and audio, two tasks that the G4 design permits it to do rather well. There is hardly difference between using a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 and a 500 Mhz Pentium 3 when surfing the web or typing a paper in Word.
Take a look at what Apple has to offer. Price/performance comparisons pit their laptops (and desktops) ahead of Dell's offerings.
Each machine ships with OS X, with Firewire/IEEE1394, USB, Airport/Wi-Fi, and PCMCIA all working fine on a BSD kernel known as Darwin.
(I might be new at this *NIX thing, but I just got the GIMP running in a rootless Xfree86 window server last night!)
As an added bonus, Apple laptop's are far more energy efficient (ie: longer battery life, no fan noise).
Re:Random bits that are in Pi somewhere
on
Share The Pi!
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· Score: 1
I don't see what all the hubbub is about. For as far back as I can remember, e has always been part of pie. Apple pie has two instances of e!
There is still a big component missing from even this form of text-to-speech synthesis, and that is the fact that the program still doesn't know how to inflect and stress the reading to make it sound natural. Sure the sound of individual words might bear an uncanny resemblance to a famous human voice, but any decent sounding sentences still have to be told which words to stress by a human interpreter...
Cooler, lower power chips made by IBM, eh? I happen to be particularily fond of the IBM G3 PowerPC chip that resides in my Powerbook. No fan, up 4 realistic hours of battery life, and it can play DVDs on the train.
Slashdot Mirror
According to my mom, the reason that my brothers and I were allowed G.I. Joes was precisely because they WERE dolls.
"1609, Henry Hudson discovers Manhattan island"
Are you implying that the Dutch want to take back New Amsterdam ?!?!?
mod this comment up. Its THE obvious point that has been missing from this discussion. The very point that I intended to make myself in this thread. (i do agree with the GPS idea as well though).
The particle physicists say there are only very, very small chances that these singularities could be dangerous. Of course, IIRC, not all physicists believe that small black holes evaporate. Some cosmologists argue that the "missing" dark matter needed to account for the universe's decelerating expansion will be found in many, many mini black holes, so they have found ways to explain how black holes might stick around.
(alos, if little harmless singularities are popping up all the time in our atmosphere due to cosmic rays, then how come those neutrino detector counts are always coming up short?)
It works, and the proof is that that kind of thing has been done before. the New York State lottery (and other lotttos, i'm sure) are required to contribute a significant portion of their profit to the education system.
Of course, what no one talks about is the fact that for every dollar that the lotto contributes to education, the state government removes a dollar from their contribution to education. Net gain = nothing, zero, nada, zip, nihil
I heartily agree with you about the protocol idea. For the past few days I have been churning this Micro$oft monopoly thing around in my head and trying to compare it to things like last century's alternating current versus direct current battles.
;)
If the protocol for data transmission is the same, then there shouldn't be any significant problems. (this is why AC/DC was a problem, and why TCP/IP is not a problem). So, if Micro$oft was forced to reveal their file formats, for example, then any competitor could make a compatible software package. Micro$oft would surely be many, many years ahead in the app development ddepartment, thanks to their vast resources, but they would not be unfairly preventing competition.
Afterwards, of course, those pesky issues of Micor$oft releasing buggy and insecure software could then be dealt with on a class action lawsuit by class action lawsuit basis
Biologically occurring chemical designs are REALLY very good at what they do. So efficient, that we might be tempted to flat out state that even clever mechanically engineered designs will never approach them. But we should keep in mind that in the "design space" that biological evolution works in not every possible idea is tried or tested. Its just that there is the potential for any combination to be explored.
Human (or machine) created designs can come up with "new" ways to do things. Some of those designs might be more efficient in certain applications than biological designs. A simple example might be the wheel. The last time I checked no macroscopic organisms on this planet where using wheels to get around. On flat surfaces (deserts/ice/savannas/etc.) wheels are more efficient than legs. It is not that evolution couldn't "invent" wheels, it either hasn't successfully happened before, or the design was discarded in favor of the more functionally flexible limbs we do posses. Check out the GOLEM project for more ideas.
I do not think that biological designs have the end all say on nanotechnological possibilities. But the science of biology currently has far more small scale tools and vastly greater experience (nature's experience, that is) at its disposal for the development of useful nanotechnology.
some games are trying harder than others to simulate economic systems.
/. is auctioning off oour sigs on eBay as we speak!
Check out Shadowbane's economics.
maybe
Apple IS now walking a little nearer to the Free software path than it used to. And it is not just because they were/are losing support. The Macintosh OS was in dire need a serious overhaul, as it was not designed with multitasking, networking or 3-D graphics as priorities.
Sure Apple's decision to go with NeXT's BSD kernel was motivated in part by software user base and development (read: financial) concerns, but it was also because it was the closest option to doing the ideal/right thing. "Think Different" is not just Apple's marketing slogan, but something of a company philosophy. If the underground is doing Free software and Open Source, and Micro$oft is steering clear of it, then Apple will do what it can to get that bit of market (quantity) mind (quality) share.
Free software isn't quite ready for the primetime. Hopefully it will be someday. When it does approach user friendliness, then I would expect that Apple will be one of the first mainstream vendors to fully commit to it. After all, they are a hardware company, not a software one (hahaha, that's a whole argument in itself), so the Free software model shouldn't hurt them financially. In the meantime, Apple is doing there best to give people a taste of what it is like.
Well, I think that now is also a fairly important time for Apple, -maybe even more so than the 80's- for personal computer development.
;), but most of the real problems come from not having a monolithic type of effort towards a unified and consistent interface (ie: You can install Red Hat ten times and never see the same set of options twice).
I'm not trying to draw fire here, but Linux is just not ready for consumption by the general public. Some of it the difficulty is because of drivers (which will be quickly cleared up as soon as manufactures stop making new hardware
Apple is shaping the future by permitting -albeit slowly- the "freedoom" that GNU users enjoy to permeate its way into the mainstream. And I'm not just talking about OS X being built on a BSD kernel. Maybe Apple's "open" source license isn't perfect, but it is a heck of a lot more free than Micro$oft's efforts. Also, IMHO, Apple has been far more lenient than most of the other mainstream computer manufacturers when it comes to proposing and enforcing copy protection schemes.
These things lead me to state that Apple is contributing much more to the future of computers than fine industrial design and intuitive interfaces.
IANAAP (I am not an astrophysicist), so I am asking you brainiacs to tell me if these findings will help smooth out the kinks in the cosmic inflation model of early universe expansion. I never liked the idea of arbitrary expansion phase (although for some very strange reason my intuition is not so violently opposed to physical constants not being, er, constant). I know they may not be directly related, but can this idea explain the observations that we currently explain with an expansion phase?
I saw this one coming a mile off. No matter what kind of Moore's law breaking processors Aki and the Deep Eyes Squad might have been using in the future, there is no way the current Palm OS could have ever scaled up to such a nice holographic GUI without some serious help.
I hope the first thing they did was patent the very idea of using genetic algorithms to search for new patentable algorithms.
If so, then they are definitely going to be rolling in dough soon...
For about the last 8-10 months Apple has had a "50% RAM upgrade" promotion. Its still much more expensive ($200 rather than $400 for the upgrade you specified) than buying the RAM yourself, but not nearly as bad as you are making it out to be...
Motorola's G4's were stuck at 500 Mhz for a year. They are now be two or three fabrication generations "behind" the game. That truly does suck, and there is not much that can be done about it. Without that stagnation ("I'm looking in your direction, Motorola..."), G4's might easily have been running well over a Ghz by now.
So as things stand in the real world, I really don't expect them to have the raw horsepower of the current x86 offerings. But they do perform well enough for the kinds of things that are important to most everyday use (ie: multimedia manipulation/encoding/decoding, laptop battery life).
I would love to have 120 fps, but do I need more than 40 or so?
But now-a-days the Photoshop versions are released simultaneously for PC and Mac. After all these years of development (and all the waxing power of Wintel), pshop is not any more optimized for the mac platform than for the PC.
That is a good list of apps to use, but I would say that besides photoshop, only illustrator would be widely used or recognized by a majority of users. I cannot recall seeing any illustrator benchmarks, but I would imagine that the G4 does well enough for itself when manipulating the vectors. And powerpc chips have always had a good showing in the Seti@home arena as well. Check out the average CPU time per work unit.
As far as the 6 filter pshop bake-off went, it was done by TechTV, and the Pentium 4 and G4 each "won" an equal number of filter tests.
Those little Internet Applicances can surf the web pretty quickly, and they don't have even 500 MHz to play with. I think operating system overhead is a far bigger problem (one that plagues both Windows and Mac OS users)
I am fully aware that the Athlon can hold its own against the Pentium. My Athlon/Pentium comment was merely meant to show that there is some level of hypocrisy in the CPU wars...
I'll admit 3-D games come in a close second for potential for "fair" benchmarking, but have a few problems:
a) they are games, rather than productivity (ie: financially justifiable) applications
b) a very limiting factor in frame rate is the video card, rather than the CPU or the motherboard bus/cache.
c) multi-platform video games are usually released first for the larger PC market, and therefore invariably have better and more thorough PC driver support for all those fancy 3-D video cards.
I'm not sure that they should be attacking the "MHz myth" either, but at least they don't seem to be targeting the propaganda at consumer/education users, but at the pro users, who would have more time at stake with regards to CPU power...
Although I believe the bake-offs are honest, I don't claim that the G4 is always as fast as the big boys, just that it is NOT as slow as its Mhz would otherwise suggest. I am quite sure, however, that it is a more efficient and flexible chip design. I would not ever want a laptop with any non-RISC kind of processor in it.
While iMacs cannot be upgraded (in the standard ways), I would say that Apple pro towers with their side opening doors, 4 full-length PCI slots plus AGP 4X, plus the fact that most drives and cards are mac compatible (often without driver voodoo hell), make upgrading even easier than on a PC equivalent.
Yes, you can build a very suitable PC for less than a grand. I don't think you would find it that easy to build one that really compared to an Apple G4 tower (think about the firewire, 1.5 Gb RAM support, Gigabit ethernet, DVD burning options, etc.).
Yup, the high end Apple machines tend to have high-end price margins on them. The same goes for Dell, Sony, HP, Compaq, IBM, or any other brand name manufacture you can think of.
While it is true that most G4 to pentium bake-offs are done running photoshop filters, I don't think it is a particularly unfair test. After all, Photoshop really is the only standard application in existance that:
a) has the same version and capabilities for both the PC and the Mac, and:
b) can actually tax a current machine's processor.
Other eligible apps (ie: Office) fail on both these counts.
Dismissing "Multimedia" apps out of hand is naive. Almost all the CPU intensive work done today is digital video and audio, two tasks that the G4 design permits it to do rather well. There is hardly difference between using a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 and a 500 Mhz Pentium 3 when surfing the web or typing a paper in Word.
Check out the ArsTechnica take on G4e design compared to the Pentium 4.
btw: How come I don't see many touting that the 1.2 Ghz Athlon is some how lacking in ability when compared to the 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4?
Take a look at what Apple has to offer. Price/performance comparisons pit their laptops (and desktops) ahead of Dell's offerings.
Each machine ships with OS X, with Firewire/IEEE1394, USB, Airport/Wi-Fi, and PCMCIA all working fine on a BSD kernel known as Darwin.
(I might be new at this *NIX thing, but I just got the GIMP running in a rootless Xfree86 window server last night!)
As an added bonus, Apple laptop's are far more energy efficient (ie: longer battery life, no fan noise).
I don't see what all the hubbub is about. For as far back as I can remember, e has always been part of pie. Apple pie has two instances of e!
There is still a big component missing from even this form of text-to-speech synthesis, and that is the fact that the program still doesn't know how to inflect and stress the reading to make it sound natural. Sure the sound of individual words might bear an uncanny resemblance to a famous human voice, but any decent sounding sentences still have to be told which words to stress by a human interpreter...
Cooler, lower power chips made by IBM, eh? I happen to be particularily fond of the IBM G3 PowerPC chip that resides in my Powerbook. No fan, up 4 realistic hours of battery life, and it can play DVDs on the train.