I'm assuming that you're not trolling or posting flamebait. (You might have been trying to get a funny moderation, but I don't find your post that funny, personally.)
According to the press release, the Au1100 processor is based on the MIPS processor architecture, which is used in many embedded applications and devices. Most MIPS chips are very power miserly, and hence, don't generate a lot of heat. Bottom line, I doubt this device will function as a space heater, as you suggest.
IANAL either, but I just wanted to speak to one of your points:
If I sell you my car, and then realize a few days later that I left my spool of Ethernet cable -- which I didn't intend to be part of the sale -- in the trunk, it's still my cable and I ought to get it back.
I don't know about the laws governing the sale of motor vehicles, but when you're selling a house, anything attached to the walls or otherwise mounted to the frame of the house is automatically considered part of the sale, unless the seller and the buyer specifically agree otherwise. For instance, if an alarm system was installed in the house, the seller can't remove the alarm system prior to selling the house; in fact, they can be compelled to reinstall it if they do remove the alarm system.
In the case of leaving property accidentally in the attic, once the seller vacates the house and the buyer closes, they own whatever was left in the house by the seller. The seller can say that they forgot to take a box of family heirlooms, but the buyer is not necessarily obligated to return that box to the seller.
So your analogy of leaving a spool of ethernet cable in the trunk of a car that you hypothetically sold to someone is flawed. I'm pretty sure you can't compel the buyer of the car to return the spool of ethernet cable. Again, there may be laws specific to the sale of motor vehicles that state differently, and indeed there are local laws in various states and counties in the U.S. alone which make all kind of exemptions for situations like this, but in general I don't think the law is too sympathetic.
Someone mentioned that there's some old legal precedent involving the sale of a pregnant cow, and that a lawsuit was filed by the seller when he realized that the buyer got two cows (the cow being sold, and the calf which was born after the sale) for the price of one. Not sure if that applies either, but it's worth considering.
My bad, I just realized I confused this post with this one. I was relying on my memory of which post was the parent of my comments, and since I commented on both (which were, in content, very similar), the two parents sort of merged in my mind.
But I still think this post qualifies as flamebait, or perhaps a troll.
In addition to clarifying my comments elsewhere, I would like to add one point in my defense:
Your parent was no flamebait at all.
On the contrary, the parent post contained factual inaccuracies and outright errors (which, if I were feeling less charitable, I'd call "lies"), and was written with an obvious anti-Apple bias. Therefore, I stand by my claim that the parent post to which I was referring was, in fact, flamebait. The fact that you pointed out that I didn't correctly qualify my statement that "everyone else does it" (meaning charging for major OS releases) does not in any way negate my other arguments.
And just FYI, I use Gentoo on my PC, along with Windows 2000, so I'm hardly ignorant of truly free operating systems -- but then, a perceptive person would have realized that I was really talking about operating systems where there is no mechanism to obtain a free copy in the first place.
OK, so I didn't qualify my statement to limit its scope to operating systems that are sold commercially and not made available for free download. So sue me.
And in the case of Debian, Gentoo, or FreeBSD, they don't mandatorily charge you to get copies of the product in the first place, therefore they won't charge you for upgrades. Of course, you could always pay for a nicely packaged copy of one of these distributions, but you're not forced to go that route.
Leave it to a Slashdot geek to nit pick the language while cheerfully ignoring the actual intent of what's being said.
Perhaps if I'd qualified my statement to limit it to vendors who sell their operating systems in the first place (and who don't allow people to download ISO images for free), I would have been safe.
Every six months? Try every year or more. There is no way Apple is releasing a major update to OS X every six months. History alone does not bear this out. With the exception of the move from 10.0 to 10.1, it's been approximately one full year between major OS releases (and when I say releases, I mean "available for purchase in a store") from Apple. The difference between Mac OS X 10.1 and 10.2 (Jaguar) is greater than the difference between Windows 2000 and Windows XP, two major releases of Microsoft's flagship OS which you have to pay significantly more money than $129 for unless you get your hands on an OEM copy.
Of course Apple is going to encourage you to buy the major releases by making some features exclusive to the new major release. But they still provide bug fixes and software updates for free which are targeted at older OS releases. (In the case of iChat AV, they're planning on charging users who refuse to upgrade to 10.3/Panther for the final version of iChat AV; this is an incentive to pay for the Panther upgrade, since the final iChat AV will come standard with Panther. But at least people who want to stick with Jaguar can do so and still use the latest IM/videoconferencing software.)
Furthermore, minor point releases from Apple are still free, and will remain so for some time to come. (They're up to 10.2.6 for OS X right now.) Minor point releases are for things like repairing broken features, enabling features that were hidden in earlier releases, and primarily, introducing bug fixes.
What about Red Hat? Define "decent" access? Their code is predominantly GPL, which means they're required to release the source for their contributions. I've never had a problem downloading RPMs manually to get crucial updates, back when I ran Red Hat. And if that fails, you can always bypass Red Hat and get updates directly from the creators of the software packages that aren't unique to Red Hat. (Which is what most of Red Hat Linux is anyway, other people's stuff re-bundled with some value added.) If you're a real cheapskate, you can go download the latest tarball of the kernel source or whatever application you need and compile it yourself, assuming every other means at your disposal fails you. That's the beauty of Linux.
Basically, your entire argument skews actual facts to attempt to make Microsoft look like the last holdout in an industry-wide move to charge for bug fixes and updates. I don't see that this argument holds any water.
Mr. Gates said the company was considering the possibility of charging for some of its software updates that are now made available free over the Internet.
Granted, the word "bugfixes" is not used. However, we all know that Microsoft typically does not refer to bug fixes as bug fixes. They call them "updates" or "Service Packs" or something similar, but never "bug fixes."
However, if you read the description of what these updates are (by reading the descriptions when you point your browser at the Windows Update site, which are provided before you actually install the updates), you would see that most of what they are is a bunch of bug fixes with perhaps a few minor feature upgrades thrown in.
Am I the only person who remembers that Windows 2000 shipped with tens of thousands of known bugs? I'm tired of the attitude some people have that it's OK to ship buggy software as long as there are no show stopper bugs. Because the definition of a "show stopper" can be subjective, and bugs that aren't show stoppers can still be highly aggravating and productivity-sapping.
So let's see. What software does Microsoft give away for free? Microsoft Money and Internet Explorer, sure, but what else? DirectX (an API that most game developers rely on heavily), the.Net runtime framework, service packs, and security updates, primarily. Which of these "updates" is Microsoft going to charge for, and which will be free? I suspect that security updates will be free, but everything else is a toss-up at this point.
The article talks about how, due to Longhorn's delay (availability in 2005 or later), "important features and updates to Windows XP would be added" prior to Longhorn's release. Clearly, Microsoft needs a revenue generator prior to 2005 in the OS space. Assuming sales for new OS licenses are going to be flat or in decline during the next year, it seems like they have little choice. About half their revenue comes from OS software. (The other half comes from Office, mainly.)
I mean, I suppose Microsoft could just suck it up for a year or two, but investors and industry pundits wouldn't take that very well, hence my statement that they have little choice in their course of action.
Each time a major OS release comes out of Apple, they charge for it, yes. So does everyone else. Microsoft does it. SuSE does it. Don't let the version numbering for Mac OS X fool ya, 10.2 was a major upgrade over 10.1, which was a major upgrade compared to 10.0.
However, Apple doesn't charge for minor point releases. They're up to 10.2.6 right now in OS X, so you can see there have been several point releases since 10.2 was released, plus a smattering of security updates and individual application updates. Those are all free.
If Microsoft really does start charging for service packs, as the parent article for this thread suggests, their customers are going to revolt. From the Microsoft standpoint, they need a new revenue stream, and they want a way to subsidize the ongoing effort of improving products already in the market (like Windows 2000 Professional, since many users refuse to upgrade to XP).
I'm willing to pay for a major new OS release once every year or two, if the new features are compelling enough and my hardware can support it. But I'm not willing to pay for the vendor's bug-fixing efforts and minor feature fixes/additions.
I think you mean EBN, not EBM -- stands for Emergency Broadcast Network.
EBN does some really cool music/video work. It's very clever, if not brilliant. I really enjoyed their cover of "We Will Rock You" done using video clips of George Bush (Sr.) and Bill Clinton, including the infamous clip of Clinton playing sax on a late night talk show. (There were other clips too, especially ones from old military propaganda films.)
I thought it was both slick and funny how they used a clip of Harrison Ford screaming "Get down!" from one of the Tom Clancey movies he did. (Patriot Games? I forget.)
Portage blows away configuration files every chance it gets!
This is absolutely untrue, and flamebait to boot.
Portage's default behavior is to write updated config files to a dotfile which the user then has to either replace the corresponding config file with, or merge into the config file. There's even a script in Gentoo called etc-update to assist with this task.
You can turn off the protection of config files, or change which directories are considered "protected." If you turn this behavior off, you do so at your own peril.
No, you only need special firmware on the card if you want the computer's firmware to be able to talk to the card. Modern OSes use the firmware for very little, or they don't use it at all. For example, on a PC, you can disable a hard drive in the BIOS, but Linux will still be able to access it (assuming it's not your boot drive). Linux accesses the drive controller directly; it doesn't use the BIOS.
Agree 100%. Just to amplify, the original BeBox (the first platform you could purchase that ran BeOS) was a PowerPC based system -- it had dual 603 processors, and later dual 603e processors, tied together with a bit of hardware hackery -- that could use commodity PCI cards targeted at the x86 world. It even supported some ISA cards, mainly so you could use an ISA NIC.
Clearly, the lack of PPC-specific firmware in these cards was not an impediment to using them on a PPC hardware platform.
And yes, I owned a BeBox and used various cheap (i.e., intended for the x86 market) PCI cards to populate the system.
I should also note that there are some cards which are designed to work in both Apple's PowerMac systems and in x86 boxen. They're usually advertised as such on the box. Third party FireWire cards and USB 2.0 cards are commonly made this way.
I must agree with this, which might be a surprise to some BSD die-hards. Portage is mainly what wooed me to Gentoo over other distributions of Linux (even Sorceror).
It would be really cool to see the power and simplicity of portage brought to the BSD world. This would have two beneficial effects:
Making BSD even easier to set up and install software for.
The BSD community would contribute back a lot of improvements and ideas to Portage, making Portage even better in the long run.
I love BSD -- it's why I run Mac OS X primarily at home -- so don't misread me. But if someone's looking at a new package management system for BSD, Portage is a good choice IMHO.
...that Bleem! wasn't the only commercial emulator for the PlayStation out there. (And Bleem! existed for platforms other than the Dreamcast, too. As another poster noted, Bleem! was available first as a software package for the PC, and worked quite well.)
The other commercial emulator besides Bleem! was none other than Connectix's excellent Virtual Game Station, which was cross platform. Virtual Game Station was first demonstrated and sold on the Power Macintosh, then ported to Windows. Sony had more success hassling Connectix legally (many speculated that Bleem! did a better job doing a clean room reverse engineering job on the PlayStation), but ultimately what killed VGS was Sony settling out of court with Connectix. Part of the settlement was that Sony got the rights to VGS, and Connectix stopped selling the product themselves.
Sony made vague rumblings about updating VGS and bringing a better version to market, but really all they were interested in doing was sitting on it.
Sony did everything they could to kill PlayStation emulation, but all they succeeded in doing was driving the emulator writers underground and promoting OpenSource solutions; the proprietary commercial offerings from Bleem! and Connectix were squashed through legal pressure and back room deals.
Is anyone else suspicious of Sony now trying to hire emulator writers? I wonder if this is a honeypot to entrap emulator coders and rake them over the coals (legally speaking)?
I agree with everything devphil has to say about TeX and LaTeX. To amplify, I just want to make a comment about the power of TeX and LaTeX, based on my experiences.
Background: I attended MIT as an undergrad from 1988 to 1992. MIT initially endorsed the Scribe typesetting system, but Scribe had problems. For one thing, it didn't do a very good job of typesetting; things like ligatures had to be embedded manually, which turned otherwise readable source into illegible code. Scribe also was proprietary -- when MIT migrated from VAXen and IBM PC-RT's to more modern machines like VAXStation's and DECstations, and the IBM RS6000, they found that Scribe had to be re-licensed for each new hardware platform deployed on campus. Those who stuck with Scribe had difficulties with things like inserting complex equations into Scribe documents. (Scribe got things like radicals in the denominator of large fractions wrong, by doing asinine things like turning the radical symbol upside-down.)
By comparison, LaTeX was almost as easy to use as Scribe, did things like ligatures automagically, was much better with formatting equations than Scribe ever hoped to be (owing to the underlying TeX engine), and was free.
MIT started migrating the student body to LaTeX about mid-way through my undergraduate career, and I was an early convert who helped others get on board. The only complaint I ever had about LaTeX was the support for embedding vector and raster graphics inside of documents; basically, this was a kludge which depended a lot on what format the source graphics were in, and what output device you were using. (The best combination I found was using Encapsulated PostScript, or EPS, for charts and graphs, and printing to a genuine PostScript printer.)
After I got LaTeX figured out, I got curious about TeX itself. A fellow student got to attend a convention based on his work with TeX. Contrary to what some trolls would suggest, TeX is a powerful macro language. How powerful? My fellow student wrote a BASIC interpreter in TeX as his project to attend the convention I just mentioned. TeX is essentially a Turing-complete language in its own right, according to what I was told at the time.
TeX and LaTeX have been used to create documents of book length with the same facility as short one-page articles. They make maintaining documents almost as easy as maintaining code. They produce absolutely gorgeous output. And they're free, a gift from Donald Knuth to us.
Whenever I look at so-called word processing programs like MS Word (which still doesn't do ligatures automatically, AFAIK), I'm amazed at how much core functionality these programs lack. Rather than spending time and effort on animating a paper clip, Microsoft should spend time and effort making their software at least as good as the impeccable and free LaTeX software. But that would first require a deep understanding of typesetting as an art and science, something most companies don't care about.
As if Windows XP isn't already a ripoff of other modern OSes?
I mean, seriously, Microsoft rips off every other company that has an original idea (Apple, Xerox, Palm), and usually gets their ripoff wrong in the first few iterations, but through attrition they manage to be the last guy standing...
That there's a Linux variant that is designed for Tablet PC use is wonderful. There are vertical markets where Tablets make sense, and the cost benefits of Linux on Tablets means they can be sold cheaper. Maybe Tablets will percolate into common use? Most companies would rather not have to pay the Microsoft tax on every unit sold, and most consumers don't like having that tax passed on to them.
Speaking from personal experience, Google's sloppy handling of meta-tags (which can tell web spiders/crawlers to "go away" and not index a given site) is a long standing issue which won't go away overnight. On LiveJournal, an individual user is allowed to select a check-box on their settings page which determines whether search engines may index that user's journal or not. I've got my journal set up to disallow indexing.
Theoretically, Google should not turn up search results from my journal.
However, the reality is, people have sometimes been able to find entries in my journal using Google. This got me in hot water a while back, because I had a public journal entry pertaining to my use of a wireless access point installed on the network of a certain company... That was how I got traced.
Without commenting on the ethics or morality of what I did, or whether I deserved the fallout that came after, I'd like to point out that none of this would have happened if Google had respected the meta-tags on my journal, which expressly forbade indexing.
So the only way for Google to honor the wishes of the New York Times is to give the NYT preferential treatment -- and even then, a few articles might slip through the cracks. I used to think that web caching and indexing sites regardless of the wishes of the site owner was no big deal. Now, I'm not sure where I stand.
I checked out the web site describing this patent, and it seems the author is pretty fixated on natural language processing as a path to AI, even though anyone who's studied the field can tell you that language processing is only a fraction of what "real" AI is all about.
I quote:
The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) has been predicted in theory since virtually the dawning of the Computer Age. As its name implies, this term refers to the artificial simulation of language using a computer.
Um, what? So anything not associated with language has nothing to do with intelligence? I guess visual perception and pattern recognition must not count for much, just to list one thing I "thought" was a hallmark of intelligence.
According to the PDF you cite, only the dual processor configuration has a 600 Watt supply; the single processor G5 machines have a 450 Watt supply.
Most high-end x86 system builders tend to put 400 or 450 Watt power supplies in their single processor machines, so this is not unreasonable.
Don't forget also that the AGP Pro slot of the PowerMac G5 system guarantees almost 80 Watts for use by the video card alone; this means that high end workstation class video cards can be powered directly from the slot. The ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, a build-to-order option, can probably run without connecting a spare power cable to its Molex connector; in fact, I'll bet the Apple OEM version of the 9800 Pro doesn't even have the Molex connector soldered to it, since the AGP Pro slot should provide enough power to run the card.
Check your facts, please; G5 IS low power
on
Analysis: x86 Vs PPC
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· Score: 4, Informative
Each g5 dissipates a whopping 97 watts
No, two G5 (PowerPC 970) processors together dissipate 97 Watts. Each individual processor dissipates about half that.
Don't believe me? Check out this chart on ArsTechnica. (The heading for the chart reads "Preliminaries: die size, power consumption, and clock speed.") A single 1.8 GHz PowerPC 970 dissipates 42 Watts. So a single 2.0 GHz PowerPC 970 dissipates a little more than that; therefore, it's reasonable that two of them would dissipate somewhere between 90 and 100 Watts, total.
The EE Times article you cited is highly inaccurate. They only look at the total number of fans in the G5 machine, and forget the fact that these are low-RPM fans and are software controlled per-zone to regulate temperature. Low RPM means less volume of air moved per unit time. So the design tradeoff that was made, clearly, is to have more fans running slower in order to keep noise levels down and to target cooling for each zone appropriately.
This is why it's a good idea to check multiple sources for your facts. Then again, if your goal was to present a very distorted version of reality to fit your goal of painting the G5 as a power hungry monster, you would very carefully choose your source of information so that it seems to support your assertion.
Any drug? That seems like a ridiculous overstatement to me.
The discussion at hand was about drugs that can impair one's perception or motor skills, or reasoning ability. But since you bring it up, even caffeine (note the spelling) can cause someone to become more aggressive, more irritable, etc., in a driving situation. Steroids taken by asthmatics are not without undesirable side effects, though the general consensus is that the majority of these drugs have side effects that are tolerable for the purpose of driving a motor vehicle.
Since every person is an individual, and every individual reacts differently to different drugs, the ultimate yardstick in determining whether one should drive or not is how a given drug affects a given person. I've met people before who became psychotic after eating chocolate. (Talk about bizarre body chemistry...) The point is, there's no such thing as a drug without side effects -- and many drugs are sold without much regulation, so it's incumbent upon the consumer of such drugs to know their bodies, know what their limits are, and to act sensibly. If you can drive while taking ventolin, great. Maybe someone else is impaired when they take this drug, even though the drug "shouldn't" affect motor skills or reasoning or perception.
I give you an A for effort with your nit-picking, but you should have looked at the context of what was being discussed and known what it is that I meant.
I had to laugh at Bill Gates' touting of Microsoft "pushing" new technologies. Here's a quote that amused me greatly:
Who has the guts and the willingness to do risk-taking to get ink into the standard user interface?
Uh, let's see... Apple? Apple's done this twice, once with the Newton's OS, and once with Mac OS X, which ships standard now with handwriting recognition. Microsoft didn't take any risks on this one, and they're sure not a trailblazer...
Your right to smoke pot extends so far as it doesn't interfere with my rights.
So far, so good. My right to do anything doesn't give me the right to trample on your rights.
And I certainly have a right not to have my life shortened by your filthy habit via second-hand smoke.
Ahhh, here we go, the second hand smoke gambit. This has worked to curtail the freedoms of tobacco smokers, to the point that in many areas, it's pretty much illegal to smoke tobacco anywhere but in your own home. That's not to say that I think second hand smoke is harmless -- I am of the opinion that it can cause real harm. But I think this carping about second hand smoke has gotten out of hand.
Once you are willing to sign the equivalent of a contract stating that you WILL NOT leave the confines of your own home until the effects have worn off, THEN we can talk about legalizing its use. That goes for any drug that, when taken in sufficient quantity, impairs mental ability.
We already have such a contract. It's a social contract enforced through laws which prohibit driving under the influence of any drug (even over-the-counter drugs you pick up at your local pharmacy or grocery store). People who do any drug, legal or not, and then get behind the wheel of a car, are criminals. So why criminalize the substance when it's the behavioral problem that is the issue?
Prohibitions don't work -- history has shown this. Both pot smoking and file sharing will become decriminalized soon, if not made fully legal, because public opinion is swinging in that direction. It might take another decade or two, but the change will happen.
I'm sure someone will mod this as redundant, but I might as well point out...
3DMark2003 added unfair optimizations to their program to make the nvidia card seem better than ATi's
Actually, FutureMark didn't skew their benchmarks to make nVidia cards look better; rather, nVidia tweaked their drivers to "cheat" in certain tests on 3DMark 2003. This is why FutureMark released a patch to bring 3DMark 2003 to version 330 -- the patch disables the video driver cheats that nVidia put in.
There are many nVidia expatriates who have expressed disgust over nVidia's corporate policies, and what management tells the rank-and-file driver programmers to concentrate their efforts on.
I finally got my Radeon 9600 Pro working with XFree86 after a week of effort. The 2.9.12 version of the binary drivers, which works with XFree86 4.3.0, is in the Gentoo portage tree now; just emerge ati-drivers to get the new drivers. You'll also need to go into your kernel sources and make sure you compile/dev/agpgart support as a module, and turn off DRM support in the kernel, since the drivers and the XFree86 code want to "do it themselves."
Once I made those changes to my kernel, everything was working well, although the card doesn't want to run higher than 1024x768 with my NEC XV17 monitor.
So, at least for Gentoo users, there seems to be a workable solution for the latest ATI cards. I'm very pleased with the performance. I've noticed some video corruption when playing certain DVD or DiVX videos in mplayer, but nothing worth getting excited about.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm assuming that you're not trolling or posting flamebait. (You might have been trying to get a funny moderation, but I don't find your post that funny, personally.)
According to the press release, the Au1100 processor is based on the MIPS processor architecture, which is used in many embedded applications and devices. Most MIPS chips are very power miserly, and hence, don't generate a lot of heat. Bottom line, I doubt this device will function as a space heater, as you suggest.
In the case of leaving property accidentally in the attic, once the seller vacates the house and the buyer closes, they own whatever was left in the house by the seller. The seller can say that they forgot to take a box of family heirlooms, but the buyer is not necessarily obligated to return that box to the seller.
So your analogy of leaving a spool of ethernet cable in the trunk of a car that you hypothetically sold to someone is flawed. I'm pretty sure you can't compel the buyer of the car to return the spool of ethernet cable. Again, there may be laws specific to the sale of motor vehicles that state differently, and indeed there are local laws in various states and counties in the U.S. alone which make all kind of exemptions for situations like this, but in general I don't think the law is too sympathetic.
Someone mentioned that there's some old legal precedent involving the sale of a pregnant cow, and that a lawsuit was filed by the seller when he realized that the buyer got two cows (the cow being sold, and the calf which was born after the sale) for the price of one. Not sure if that applies either, but it's worth considering.
My bad, I just realized I confused this post with this one. I was relying on my memory of which post was the parent of my comments, and since I commented on both (which were, in content, very similar), the two parents sort of merged in my mind.
But I still think this post qualifies as flamebait, or perhaps a troll.
On the contrary, the parent post contained factual inaccuracies and outright errors (which, if I were feeling less charitable, I'd call "lies"), and was written with an obvious anti-Apple bias. Therefore, I stand by my claim that the parent post to which I was referring was, in fact, flamebait. The fact that you pointed out that I didn't correctly qualify my statement that "everyone else does it" (meaning charging for major OS releases) does not in any way negate my other arguments.
And just FYI, I use Gentoo on my PC, along with Windows 2000, so I'm hardly ignorant of truly free operating systems -- but then, a perceptive person would have realized that I was really talking about operating systems where there is no mechanism to obtain a free copy in the first place.
OK, so I didn't qualify my statement to limit its scope to operating systems that are sold commercially and not made available for free download. So sue me.
And in the case of Debian, Gentoo, or FreeBSD, they don't mandatorily charge you to get copies of the product in the first place, therefore they won't charge you for upgrades. Of course, you could always pay for a nicely packaged copy of one of these distributions, but you're not forced to go that route.
Leave it to a Slashdot geek to nit pick the language while cheerfully ignoring the actual intent of what's being said.
Perhaps if I'd qualified my statement to limit it to vendors who sell their operating systems in the first place (and who don't allow people to download ISO images for free), I would have been safe.
Every six months? Try every year or more. There is no way Apple is releasing a major update to OS X every six months. History alone does not bear this out. With the exception of the move from 10.0 to 10.1, it's been approximately one full year between major OS releases (and when I say releases, I mean "available for purchase in a store") from Apple. The difference between Mac OS X 10.1 and 10.2 (Jaguar) is greater than the difference between Windows 2000 and Windows XP, two major releases of Microsoft's flagship OS which you have to pay significantly more money than $129 for unless you get your hands on an OEM copy.
Of course Apple is going to encourage you to buy the major releases by making some features exclusive to the new major release. But they still provide bug fixes and software updates for free which are targeted at older OS releases. (In the case of iChat AV, they're planning on charging users who refuse to upgrade to 10.3/Panther for the final version of iChat AV; this is an incentive to pay for the Panther upgrade, since the final iChat AV will come standard with Panther. But at least people who want to stick with Jaguar can do so and still use the latest IM/videoconferencing software.)
Furthermore, minor point releases from Apple are still free, and will remain so for some time to come. (They're up to 10.2.6 for OS X right now.) Minor point releases are for things like repairing broken features, enabling features that were hidden in earlier releases, and primarily, introducing bug fixes.
What about Red Hat? Define "decent" access? Their code is predominantly GPL, which means they're required to release the source for their contributions. I've never had a problem downloading RPMs manually to get crucial updates, back when I ran Red Hat. And if that fails, you can always bypass Red Hat and get updates directly from the creators of the software packages that aren't unique to Red Hat. (Which is what most of Red Hat Linux is anyway, other people's stuff re-bundled with some value added.) If you're a real cheapskate, you can go download the latest tarball of the kernel source or whatever application you need and compile it yourself, assuming every other means at your disposal fails you. That's the beauty of Linux.
Basically, your entire argument skews actual facts to attempt to make Microsoft look like the last holdout in an industry-wide move to charge for bug fixes and updates. I don't see that this argument holds any water.
Granted, the word "bugfixes" is not used. However, we all know that Microsoft typically does not refer to bug fixes as bug fixes. They call them "updates" or "Service Packs" or something similar, but never "bug fixes."
However, if you read the description of what these updates are (by reading the descriptions when you point your browser at the Windows Update site, which are provided before you actually install the updates), you would see that most of what they are is a bunch of bug fixes with perhaps a few minor feature upgrades thrown in.
Am I the only person who remembers that Windows 2000 shipped with tens of thousands of known bugs? I'm tired of the attitude some people have that it's OK to ship buggy software as long as there are no show stopper bugs. Because the definition of a "show stopper" can be subjective, and bugs that aren't show stoppers can still be highly aggravating and productivity-sapping.
So let's see. What software does Microsoft give away for free? Microsoft Money and Internet Explorer, sure, but what else? DirectX (an API that most game developers rely on heavily), the
The article talks about how, due to Longhorn's delay (availability in 2005 or later), "important features and updates to Windows XP would be added" prior to Longhorn's release. Clearly, Microsoft needs a revenue generator prior to 2005 in the OS space. Assuming sales for new OS licenses are going to be flat or in decline during the next year, it seems like they have little choice. About half their revenue comes from OS software. (The other half comes from Office, mainly.)
I mean, I suppose Microsoft could just suck it up for a year or two, but investors and industry pundits wouldn't take that very well, hence my statement that they have little choice in their course of action.
Nice flamebait.
Each time a major OS release comes out of Apple, they charge for it, yes. So does everyone else. Microsoft does it. SuSE does it. Don't let the version numbering for Mac OS X fool ya, 10.2 was a major upgrade over 10.1, which was a major upgrade compared to 10.0.
However, Apple doesn't charge for minor point releases. They're up to 10.2.6 right now in OS X, so you can see there have been several point releases since 10.2 was released, plus a smattering of security updates and individual application updates. Those are all free.
If Microsoft really does start charging for service packs, as the parent article for this thread suggests, their customers are going to revolt. From the Microsoft standpoint, they need a new revenue stream, and they want a way to subsidize the ongoing effort of improving products already in the market (like Windows 2000 Professional, since many users refuse to upgrade to XP).
I'm willing to pay for a major new OS release once every year or two, if the new features are compelling enough and my hardware can support it. But I'm not willing to pay for the vendor's bug-fixing efforts and minor feature fixes/additions.
I think you mean EBN, not EBM -- stands for Emergency Broadcast Network.
EBN does some really cool music/video work. It's very clever, if not brilliant. I really enjoyed their cover of "We Will Rock You" done using video clips of George Bush (Sr.) and Bill Clinton, including the infamous clip of Clinton playing sax on a late night talk show. (There were other clips too, especially ones from old military propaganda films.)
I thought it was both slick and funny how they used a clip of Harrison Ford screaming "Get down!" from one of the Tom Clancey movies he did. (Patriot Games? I forget.)
This is absolutely untrue, and flamebait to boot.
Portage's default behavior is to write updated config files to a dotfile which the user then has to either replace the corresponding config file with, or merge into the config file. There's even a script in Gentoo called etc-update to assist with this task.
You can turn off the protection of config files, or change which directories are considered "protected." If you turn this behavior off, you do so at your own peril.
Agree 100%. Just to amplify, the original BeBox (the first platform you could purchase that ran BeOS) was a PowerPC based system -- it had dual 603 processors, and later dual 603e processors, tied together with a bit of hardware hackery -- that could use commodity PCI cards targeted at the x86 world. It even supported some ISA cards, mainly so you could use an ISA NIC.
Clearly, the lack of PPC-specific firmware in these cards was not an impediment to using them on a PPC hardware platform.
And yes, I owned a BeBox and used various cheap (i.e., intended for the x86 market) PCI cards to populate the system.
I should also note that there are some cards which are designed to work in both Apple's PowerMac systems and in x86 boxen. They're usually advertised as such on the box. Third party FireWire cards and USB 2.0 cards are commonly made this way.
It would be really cool to see the power and simplicity of portage brought to the BSD world. This would have two beneficial effects:
I love BSD -- it's why I run Mac OS X primarily at home -- so don't misread me. But if someone's looking at a new package management system for BSD, Portage is a good choice IMHO.
...that Bleem! wasn't the only commercial emulator for the PlayStation out there. (And Bleem! existed for platforms other than the Dreamcast, too. As another poster noted, Bleem! was available first as a software package for the PC, and worked quite well.)
The other commercial emulator besides Bleem! was none other than Connectix's excellent Virtual Game Station, which was cross platform. Virtual Game Station was first demonstrated and sold on the Power Macintosh, then ported to Windows. Sony had more success hassling Connectix legally (many speculated that Bleem! did a better job doing a clean room reverse engineering job on the PlayStation), but ultimately what killed VGS was Sony settling out of court with Connectix. Part of the settlement was that Sony got the rights to VGS, and Connectix stopped selling the product themselves.
Sony made vague rumblings about updating VGS and bringing a better version to market, but really all they were interested in doing was sitting on it.
Sony did everything they could to kill PlayStation emulation, but all they succeeded in doing was driving the emulator writers underground and promoting OpenSource solutions; the proprietary commercial offerings from Bleem! and Connectix were squashed through legal pressure and back room deals.
Is anyone else suspicious of Sony now trying to hire emulator writers? I wonder if this is a honeypot to entrap emulator coders and rake them over the coals (legally speaking)?
I agree with everything devphil has to say about TeX and LaTeX. To amplify, I just want to make a comment about the power of TeX and LaTeX, based on my experiences.
Background: I attended MIT as an undergrad from 1988 to 1992. MIT initially endorsed the Scribe typesetting system, but Scribe had problems. For one thing, it didn't do a very good job of typesetting; things like ligatures had to be embedded manually, which turned otherwise readable source into illegible code. Scribe also was proprietary -- when MIT migrated from VAXen and IBM PC-RT's to more modern machines like VAXStation's and DECstations, and the IBM RS6000, they found that Scribe had to be re-licensed for each new hardware platform deployed on campus. Those who stuck with Scribe had difficulties with things like inserting complex equations into Scribe documents. (Scribe got things like radicals in the denominator of large fractions wrong, by doing asinine things like turning the radical symbol upside-down.)
By comparison, LaTeX was almost as easy to use as Scribe, did things like ligatures automagically, was much better with formatting equations than Scribe ever hoped to be (owing to the underlying TeX engine), and was free.
MIT started migrating the student body to LaTeX about mid-way through my undergraduate career, and I was an early convert who helped others get on board. The only complaint I ever had about LaTeX was the support for embedding vector and raster graphics inside of documents; basically, this was a kludge which depended a lot on what format the source graphics were in, and what output device you were using. (The best combination I found was using Encapsulated PostScript, or EPS, for charts and graphs, and printing to a genuine PostScript printer.)
After I got LaTeX figured out, I got curious about TeX itself. A fellow student got to attend a convention based on his work with TeX. Contrary to what some trolls would suggest, TeX is a powerful macro language. How powerful? My fellow student wrote a BASIC interpreter in TeX as his project to attend the convention I just mentioned. TeX is essentially a Turing-complete language in its own right, according to what I was told at the time.
TeX and LaTeX have been used to create documents of book length with the same facility as short one-page articles. They make maintaining documents almost as easy as maintaining code. They produce absolutely gorgeous output. And they're free, a gift from Donald Knuth to us.
Whenever I look at so-called word processing programs like MS Word (which still doesn't do ligatures automatically, AFAIK), I'm amazed at how much core functionality these programs lack. Rather than spending time and effort on animating a paper clip, Microsoft should spend time and effort making their software at least as good as the impeccable and free LaTeX software. But that would first require a deep understanding of typesetting as an art and science, something most companies don't care about.
As if Windows XP isn't already a ripoff of other modern OSes?
I mean, seriously, Microsoft rips off every other company that has an original idea (Apple, Xerox, Palm), and usually gets their ripoff wrong in the first few iterations, but through attrition they manage to be the last guy standing...
That there's a Linux variant that is designed for Tablet PC use is wonderful. There are vertical markets where Tablets make sense, and the cost benefits of Linux on Tablets means they can be sold cheaper. Maybe Tablets will percolate into common use? Most companies would rather not have to pay the Microsoft tax on every unit sold, and most consumers don't like having that tax passed on to them.
Speaking from personal experience, Google's sloppy handling of meta-tags (which can tell web spiders/crawlers to "go away" and not index a given site) is a long standing issue which won't go away overnight. On LiveJournal, an individual user is allowed to select a check-box on their settings page which determines whether search engines may index that user's journal or not. I've got my journal set up to disallow indexing.
Theoretically, Google should not turn up search results from my journal.
However, the reality is, people have sometimes been able to find entries in my journal using Google. This got me in hot water a while back, because I had a public journal entry pertaining to my use of a wireless access point installed on the network of a certain company... That was how I got traced.
Without commenting on the ethics or morality of what I did, or whether I deserved the fallout that came after, I'd like to point out that none of this would have happened if Google had respected the meta-tags on my journal, which expressly forbade indexing.
So the only way for Google to honor the wishes of the New York Times is to give the NYT preferential treatment -- and even then, a few articles might slip through the cracks. I used to think that web caching and indexing sites regardless of the wishes of the site owner was no big deal. Now, I'm not sure where I stand.
I quote:Um, what? So anything not associated with language has nothing to do with intelligence? I guess visual perception and pattern recognition must not count for much, just to list one thing I "thought" was a hallmark of intelligence.
According to the PDF you cite, only the dual processor configuration has a 600 Watt supply; the single processor G5 machines have a 450 Watt supply.
Most high-end x86 system builders tend to put 400 or 450 Watt power supplies in their single processor machines, so this is not unreasonable.
Don't forget also that the AGP Pro slot of the PowerMac G5 system guarantees almost 80 Watts for use by the video card alone; this means that high end workstation class video cards can be powered directly from the slot. The ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, a build-to-order option, can probably run without connecting a spare power cable to its Molex connector; in fact, I'll bet the Apple OEM version of the 9800 Pro doesn't even have the Molex connector soldered to it, since the AGP Pro slot should provide enough power to run the card.
No, two G5 (PowerPC 970) processors together dissipate 97 Watts. Each individual processor dissipates about half that.
Don't believe me? Check out this chart on ArsTechnica. (The heading for the chart reads "Preliminaries: die size, power consumption, and clock speed.") A single 1.8 GHz PowerPC 970 dissipates 42 Watts. So a single 2.0 GHz PowerPC 970 dissipates a little more than that; therefore, it's reasonable that two of them would dissipate somewhere between 90 and 100 Watts, total.
The EE Times article you cited is highly inaccurate. They only look at the total number of fans in the G5 machine, and forget the fact that these are low-RPM fans and are software controlled per-zone to regulate temperature. Low RPM means less volume of air moved per unit time. So the design tradeoff that was made, clearly, is to have more fans running slower in order to keep noise levels down and to target cooling for each zone appropriately.
This is why it's a good idea to check multiple sources for your facts. Then again, if your goal was to present a very distorted version of reality to fit your goal of painting the G5 as a power hungry monster, you would very carefully choose your source of information so that it seems to support your assertion.
The discussion at hand was about drugs that can impair one's perception or motor skills, or reasoning ability. But since you bring it up, even caffeine (note the spelling) can cause someone to become more aggressive, more irritable, etc., in a driving situation. Steroids taken by asthmatics are not without undesirable side effects, though the general consensus is that the majority of these drugs have side effects that are tolerable for the purpose of driving a motor vehicle.
Since every person is an individual, and every individual reacts differently to different drugs, the ultimate yardstick in determining whether one should drive or not is how a given drug affects a given person. I've met people before who became psychotic after eating chocolate. (Talk about bizarre body chemistry...) The point is, there's no such thing as a drug without side effects -- and many drugs are sold without much regulation, so it's incumbent upon the consumer of such drugs to know their bodies, know what their limits are, and to act sensibly. If you can drive while taking ventolin, great. Maybe someone else is impaired when they take this drug, even though the drug "shouldn't" affect motor skills or reasoning or perception.
I give you an A for effort with your nit-picking, but you should have looked at the context of what was being discussed and known what it is that I meant.
Uh, let's see... Apple? Apple's done this twice, once with the Newton's OS, and once with Mac OS X, which ships standard now with handwriting recognition. Microsoft didn't take any risks on this one, and they're sure not a trailblazer...
So far, so good. My right to do anything doesn't give me the right to trample on your rights.
Ahhh, here we go, the second hand smoke gambit. This has worked to curtail the freedoms of tobacco smokers, to the point that in many areas, it's pretty much illegal to smoke tobacco anywhere but in your own home. That's not to say that I think second hand smoke is harmless -- I am of the opinion that it can cause real harm. But I think this carping about second hand smoke has gotten out of hand.
We already have such a contract. It's a social contract enforced through laws which prohibit driving under the influence of any drug (even over-the-counter drugs you pick up at your local pharmacy or grocery store). People who do any drug, legal or not, and then get behind the wheel of a car, are criminals. So why criminalize the substance when it's the behavioral problem that is the issue?
Prohibitions don't work -- history has shown this. Both pot smoking and file sharing will become decriminalized soon, if not made fully legal, because public opinion is swinging in that direction. It might take another decade or two, but the change will happen.
Actually, FutureMark didn't skew their benchmarks to make nVidia cards look better; rather, nVidia tweaked their drivers to "cheat" in certain tests on 3DMark 2003. This is why FutureMark released a patch to bring 3DMark 2003 to version 330 -- the patch disables the video driver cheats that nVidia put in.
There are many nVidia expatriates who have expressed disgust over nVidia's corporate policies, and what management tells the rank-and-file driver programmers to concentrate their efforts on.
I finally got my Radeon 9600 Pro working with XFree86 after a week of effort. The 2.9.12 version of the binary drivers, which works with XFree86 4.3.0, is in the Gentoo portage tree now; just emerge ati-drivers to get the new drivers. You'll also need to go into your kernel sources and make sure you compile /dev/agpgart support as a module, and turn off DRM support in the kernel, since the drivers and the XFree86 code want to "do it themselves."
Once I made those changes to my kernel, everything was working well, although the card doesn't want to run higher than 1024x768 with my NEC XV17 monitor.
So, at least for Gentoo users, there seems to be a workable solution for the latest ATI cards. I'm very pleased with the performance. I've noticed some video corruption when playing certain DVD or DiVX videos in mplayer, but nothing worth getting excited about.