You will now explain what incentive companies have to create and release useful code and data if they can't sell it, and why it's fair that companies shouldn't be entitled to a return on their investment.
This is not always the case. I have real, actual images on my web site that get larger when converted to PNG. Your test, a smooth gradient, is exactly the sort of thing that GIF is very weak on.
And duplicating test, I find that Photoshop can produce an RGB JPEG with no noticeable artifacts that is 2.5K smaller than your RGB PNG[1].
Add in the problems that many browsers have with PNG images, and it doesn't start to look so attractive.
[1] If anyone wants to duplicate this with the GIMP, don't bother. It, unfortunately, has rather bad JPEG compression.
What people are missing with regard to G4 orders is that Apple is raising prices to lower demand for the high-end machines. There simply are not enough G4 chips available. Apple can either sell every machine that they can made for a lower price, and end up with a huge order backlog (and customers getting angry having to wait months for a computer), and ship fewer units, or sell every machine they can make for a higher price (and have customers getting angry having to pay more), and make more money, and have less of an order backlog to deal with, and grow the platform.
Customers get angry either way. Apple makes more money and ships more units the second way, both of which benefit the Mac platform. Which would you do?
Don't be too sure Apple wouldn't do it. Apple has been very interested in the network computer idea. The iMac, in fact, is thought to be a repackaged failed network computer design. It even identifies itself on the network when searching for a netboot server as "MacNC". Also, Oracle is very interested in network computers, and Elison(sp?) is not only on Apple's BoD, but is known to be good friends with Jobs. It isn't all that difficult to imagine a joint Apple/Oracle network computer project.
So if MS does move into this market, there might well be competition. Not just from (possibly) Apple, but from set top boxes, things like the iToaster, and Sun's Java computers.
Apple has had IBM and Motorola up until this point. The problem is IBM still isn't making G4 chips, so until/unless AMD goes online with this the the chip is single source.
Re the compiler issue: egcs is the compiler Apple is using for Mac OS X, so that should take care of the optimization issues. It's clearly in Apple's interest that it's as fast as possible.
I'm in Manhattan, and ADSL has just become available in my area (placed an order today). Cable is still at least a year away in this area. It's amazing how long things are taking around here, especially considering that this area is almost certainly the prefect market for this stuff: middle-class and rich people all densely packed together so they'll be in range of the local exchange. Of course any amount of bandwidth you could ever dream of has been available here for years, but only at business prices.
It always amazes me how fanatical most Apple fans are.
As a non-fanatical Apple fan, I'd just like to state that I'm not in the minority by any means. The fanatics just generate more noise. This is true of almost anything.
This isn't true on recent machines. Some of the older machines (including my old Mac clone) didn't have a video driver in OF, so you'd have to type blind or hook up a terminal to a serial port, but the firmware in my B&W G3 doesn't have any problems with screen display.
That isn't typical. I've got a G3/400 that crashes about once every two weeks. I don't run it 24/7 though; it's in my bedroom and the 3 hard drives I've got in make it hard to sleep while it's on .
This kind of instability would suck for Linux or any other Unix, but from my experience it beats Win 98, which is funny, since Win 98 has protected memory and Mac OS doesn't.
Fortunatly Mac OS X should have the stability that comes standard with Unix OSes. And it might ship as soon as January. Until then I'll continue to dual boot Linux PPC, which is very nice on this machine.
As I see it, Apple doesn't sell just computers. It's the entire package, hardware, OS, and support. It's sold as one product, and has been since the beginning. Sure, you can run other OSes on a Mac, but that that isn't why people buy 'em. (I must say a G3 makes a rather mean Linux box, but I'd still buy x86 hardware if that were my primary concern.)
This is why it bugs me when people complain about the Mac being closed. It's true, it is, but it's not because of greed, it's because Apple trying to sell something different from what the typical PC clone maker is. You might not like what Apple is trying to sell, and that's fine as well.
That deserves to get moderated as flamebait. Apple's stock broke 80 today. It was at 12 a couple of years ago. Apple is a Fortune 500 company. Apple is growing at twice the speed of the industry as a whole. Out of all the companies in the _world_, Apple is number 10 for brandname recognition. It's one of the few companies that's known well enough to effectively advertise using only its logo. Mac sales are booming, QuickTime is a hit, Mac OS X is on target for an early '00 release, Mac OS 9 is shipping next month, right on schedule. Two million iMacs were sold this last year. There are already 160,000 iBook preorders.
Apple is innovating again. A month after Apple demos a wireless technology Compaq and Dell start babbling about how wireless is the future. Apple is selling the largest TFT display you can buy. Suddenly PCs are mysteriously showing up in colors.
You might not like Apple or any Apple products. You might hate them all. Apple has pulled some really irritating crap lately, this is certainly true. But Apple is not going away any time soon.
And if you like the PPC, you better be glad about that. Apple is the only thing keeping the PPC alive in the PC market. IBM just wants to make high-end chips for its servers, and Motorola just wants to make embedded stuff. Unless Linux on PPC suddenly becomes much more popular, if the Mac dies the PPC will become irrelevant in personal computer industry.
You do realize that by the time the G5 ships Mac OS X will have been out for at least a year an a half? You might want to go read up on OS X and them come back and let us know what your specific objections are to a Mach 3 based real-time OS with a full BSD 4.4 layer, a graphics engine more powerful than anything ever seen before, most of the APIs of NeXTStep, and ease of use better than the current Mac OS.
Yes, the current Mac OS sucks, but Apple knows this, and it has less than a year (and possibly as little as 3 months) to live.
And how soon are we going to see Merced in desktops and laptops (haha) at a personal computer price point? Comparing the G4 to Merced isn't fair until that happens. There are already 64 bit implementations of the PPC architecture, and have been for many years. Try looking at the POWER series.
I'm amazed that (at least as of the time I last hit reload) nobody has mentioned the thing that will really make space profitable. It isn't advertising and tourism. It's manufacturing and mining. There things that just can't be made on Earth that can be made in free fall (in Earth orbit). The problem with making stuff in Earth orbit is getting raw materials up the gravity well. If you make things in lunar orbit, and get raw materials from the moon, it gets around most of this problem. There are some other advantages to making some things in space/on the moon. You get all the vacuum you want, and near-absolute-zero temperatures. Vacuum and very low temperatures are expensive to maintain on Earth. And lastly, there's no environment to damage. You can dump all the toxic waste to want, and it can't hurt anyone.
You really would need to cache stuff. You'd have at least a 6 second ping. Don't even bother with Quake. IRC would likely suck too. Still, the Moon is not as bad as Mars where's you'd either get nothing at all (when Mars was on the other side of the Sun), or > 40 minute pings.
It also comes in "graphite", which is the color of the new G4 machines. And on the main of the page company's site it says "Say hello to Visor". "Say hello to iMac" was a popular phrase with Apple when the iMac was introduced, and is a reference to "Say hello to Macintosh" when the first Mac was introduced.
OK, so they're not so original. But that's fine with me; it means I can get one that'll match my G3:-)
Looking for evidence of microevolution (something that has been observed) and the Big Bang requires no faith in the non-existence of a god, as even if both are true they do not preclude the existence of a god in any way.
There is, in fact, no way to prove the non-existence of god.
It should bother you. Biological stuff mutates. That kill switch of yours might not hang around in all individuals past a bunch of generations. So what happens when you hit it? The individuals with the switch die, leaving those without it to fill the now mostly empty niche.
What the people who go on about genetically altered corn seem to overlook is the damage conventional pesticides do to the environment. Genetically altered crops do away with most of the need for those.
Sure. If you assume that something has to be at least as complex as a bacterium to reproduce. This isn't the case at all however. See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-abiogenesis.ht ml. Once you have something that can reproduce (with variation), evolution deals with the rest.
Note that abiogenesis and evolution are separate issues, and it's possible to believe in the latter without believing in the former.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as with GIF vs. JPEG, which is smaller usually depends on the specific image.
--
You will now explain what incentive companies have to create and release useful code and data if they can't sell it, and why it's fair that companies shouldn't be entitled to a return on their investment.
--
This is not always the case. I have real, actual images on my web site that get larger when converted to PNG. Your test, a smooth gradient, is exactly the sort of thing that GIF is very weak on.
And duplicating test, I find that Photoshop can produce an RGB JPEG with no noticeable artifacts that is 2.5K smaller than your RGB PNG[1].
Add in the problems that many browsers have with PNG images, and it doesn't start to look so attractive.
[1] If anyone wants to duplicate this with the GIMP, don't bother. It, unfortunately, has rather bad JPEG compression.
--
Yup. And speaking of the Mac, someone needs to do a Sherlock plug-in for this. No more cheesy Encyclopedia.com searches for me!
--
What people are missing with regard to G4 orders is that Apple is raising prices to lower demand for the high-end machines. There simply are not enough G4 chips available. Apple can either sell every machine that they can made for a lower price, and end up with a huge order backlog (and customers getting angry having to wait months for a computer), and ship fewer units, or sell every machine they can make for a higher price (and have customers getting angry having to pay more), and make more money, and have less of an order backlog to deal with, and grow the platform.
Customers get angry either way. Apple makes more money and ships more units the second way, both of which benefit the Mac platform. Which would you do?
--
ZDNet reporting at its best I see. MacNN reports that Apple will cancel no orders from the Apple store, but only orders from resellers.
--
Don't be too sure Apple wouldn't do it. Apple has been very interested in the network computer idea. The iMac, in fact, is thought to be a repackaged failed network computer design. It even identifies itself on the network when searching for a netboot server as "MacNC". Also, Oracle is very interested in network computers, and Elison(sp?) is not only on Apple's BoD, but is known to be good friends with Jobs. It isn't all that difficult to imagine a joint Apple/Oracle network computer project.
So if MS does move into this market, there might well be competition. Not just from (possibly) Apple, but from set top boxes, things like the iToaster, and Sun's Java computers.
--
Apple has had IBM and Motorola up until this point. The problem is IBM still isn't making G4 chips, so until/unless AMD goes online with this the the chip is single source.
Re the compiler issue: egcs is the compiler Apple is using for Mac OS X, so that should take care of the optimization issues. It's clearly in Apple's interest that it's as fast as possible.
--
I'm in Manhattan, and ADSL has just become available in my area (placed an order today). Cable is still at least a year away in this area. It's amazing how long things are taking around here, especially considering that this area is almost certainly the prefect market for this stuff: middle-class and rich people all densely packed together so they'll be in range of the local exchange. Of course any amount of bandwidth you could ever dream of has been available here for years, but only at business prices.
--
It always amazes me how fanatical most Apple fans are.
As a non-fanatical Apple fan, I'd just like to state that I'm not in the minority by any means. The fanatics just generate more noise. This is true of almost anything.
--
This isn't true on recent machines. Some of the older machines (including my old Mac clone) didn't have a video driver in OF, so you'd have to type blind or hook up a terminal to a serial port, but the firmware in my B&W G3 doesn't have any problems with screen display.
--
That isn't typical. I've got a G3/400 that crashes about once every two weeks. I don't run it 24/7 though; it's in my bedroom and the 3 hard drives I've got in make it hard to sleep while it's on .
This kind of instability would suck for Linux or any other Unix, but from my experience it beats Win 98, which is funny, since Win 98 has protected memory and Mac OS doesn't.
Fortunatly Mac OS X should have the stability that comes standard with Unix OSes. And it might ship as soon as January. Until then I'll continue to dual boot Linux PPC, which is very nice on this machine.
--
As I see it, Apple doesn't sell just computers. It's the entire package, hardware, OS, and support. It's sold as one product, and has been since the beginning. Sure, you can run other OSes on a Mac, but that that isn't why people buy 'em. (I must say a G3 makes a rather mean Linux box, but I'd still buy x86 hardware if that were my primary concern.)
This is why it bugs me when people complain about the Mac being closed. It's true, it is, but it's not because of greed, it's because Apple trying to sell something different from what the typical PC clone maker is. You might not like what Apple is trying to sell, and that's fine as well.
--
That deserves to get moderated as flamebait. Apple's stock broke 80 today. It was at 12 a couple of years ago. Apple is a Fortune 500 company. Apple is growing at twice the speed of the industry as a whole. Out of all the companies in the _world_, Apple is number 10 for brandname recognition. It's one of the few companies that's known well enough to effectively advertise using only its logo. Mac sales are booming, QuickTime is a hit, Mac OS X is on target for an early '00 release, Mac OS 9 is shipping next month, right on schedule. Two million iMacs were sold this last year. There are already 160,000 iBook preorders.
Apple is innovating again. A month after Apple demos a wireless technology Compaq and Dell start babbling about how wireless is the future. Apple is selling the largest TFT display you can buy. Suddenly PCs are mysteriously showing up in colors.
You might not like Apple or any Apple products. You might hate them all. Apple has pulled some really irritating crap lately, this is certainly true. But Apple is not going away any time soon.
And if you like the PPC, you better be glad about that. Apple is the only thing keeping the PPC alive in the PC market. IBM just wants to make high-end chips for its servers, and Motorola just wants to make embedded stuff. Unless Linux on PPC suddenly becomes much more popular, if the Mac dies the PPC will become irrelevant in personal computer industry.
--
You do realize that by the time the G5 ships Mac OS X will have been out for at least a year an a half? You might want to go read up on OS X and them come back and let us know what your specific objections are to a Mach 3 based real-time OS with a full BSD 4.4 layer, a graphics engine more powerful than anything ever seen before, most of the APIs of NeXTStep, and ease of use better than the current Mac OS.
Yes, the current Mac OS sucks, but Apple knows this, and it has less than a year (and possibly as little as 3 months) to live.
--
And how soon are we going to see Merced in desktops and laptops (haha) at a personal computer price point? Comparing the G4 to Merced isn't fair until that happens. There are already 64 bit implementations of the PPC architecture, and have been for many years. Try looking at the POWER series.
--
I'm amazed that (at least as of the time I last hit reload) nobody has mentioned the thing that will really make space profitable. It isn't advertising and tourism. It's manufacturing and mining. There things that just can't be made on Earth that can be made in free fall (in Earth orbit). The problem with making stuff in Earth orbit is getting raw materials up the gravity well. If you make things in lunar orbit, and get raw materials from the moon, it gets around most of this problem. There are some other advantages to making some things in space/on the moon. You get all the vacuum you want, and near-absolute-zero temperatures. Vacuum and very low temperatures are expensive to maintain on Earth. And lastly, there's no environment to damage. You can dump all the toxic waste to want, and it can't hurt anyone.
--
Well, they did that on Apollo 13, and they made it back all right... :-)
--
You really would need to cache stuff. You'd have at least a 6 second ping. Don't even bother with Quake. IRC would likely suck too. Still, the Moon is not as bad as Mars where's you'd either get nothing at all (when Mars was on the other side of the Sun), or > 40 minute pings.
We need faster than light comunication damnit!
--
I don't think that's a realistic option for any company that's publicly traded, unless they feel like a shareholder's lawsuit.
--
It also comes in "graphite", which is the color of the new G4 machines. And on the main of the page company's site it says "Say hello to Visor". "Say hello to iMac" was a popular phrase with Apple when the iMac was introduced, and is a reference to "Say hello to Macintosh" when the first Mac was introduced.
:-)
OK, so they're not so original. But that's fine with me; it means I can get one that'll match my G3
--
Looking for evidence of microevolution (something that has been observed) and the Big Bang requires no faith in the non-existence of a god, as even if both are true they do not preclude the existence of a god in any way.
There is, in fact, no way to prove the non-existence of god.
--
It should bother you. Biological stuff mutates. That kill switch of yours might not hang around in all individuals past a bunch of generations. So what happens when you hit it? The individuals with the switch die, leaving those without it to fill the now mostly empty niche.
--
What the people who go on about genetically altered corn seem to overlook is the damage conventional pesticides do to the environment. Genetically altered crops do away with most of the need for those.
--
Sure. If you assume that something has to be at least as complex as a bacterium to reproduce. This isn't the case at all however. See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-abiogenesis.ht ml. Once you have something that can reproduce (with variation), evolution deals with the rest.
Note that abiogenesis and evolution are separate issues, and it's possible to believe in the latter without believing in the former.
--