Re:History of Rambus...
on
Intel Roadmap
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· Score: 1
Great review, though it leaves me confused on one point. If the PSX2 is using RDRAM, which it does according to the earlier article on the "Emotion Engine" at Ars Technica, then just how much of the PSX2's cost is RDRAM? Are they getting it for a LOT cheaper than your average consumer, and if so would this not be a problem for the much touted vaporware that is the X-Box?
Hmmmm... Personally, the more I see of RDRAM, the more I want to see it die, but if Intel is really forcing it down everyone's throats, then I don't see us having any relief any time soon from crappy defacto desktop standard.
Windows, x86, USB(2), and now RDRAM. Blech. It seems that it's crap that floats to the top instead of cream.
Go looking for the Final Fantasy 10 preview clips that have been posted around the web. The main character, when running around, is rendered on par with the FMV from Final Fantasy 8. It's truly amazing to see. I just wish they had shown the crowd a summoning spell or two for the demo instead of the semi-lame on-line strategy guide feature that they showed 3 times during the clip.
While I'm not a Wintel person, I'd have to agree with the assertion that gaming has driven a large part of the industry. Most of the most computationally intensive pieces of software out there in the mass market are games. Would people like NVidia and 3dfx being pushing SGI to refocus their strategy away from graphics if it wasn't for fanatic gamers trying to constantly push the bleeding edge?
The technology in the Playstation is fantastic. You should see the Final Fantasy 10 movie clips if you haven't. The character running around looks exactly like the FMV from Final Fantasy 8. I can't wait to see what games will be like if developers actually use the "Emotion Engine" for what the press conferences said it was intended for -- to advance the use of AI in games.
You seem real attached to this perpetual motion machine argument.
Perhaps you should take a look at the Wired article others have been posting links to before being so closed-minded about this area of research. Perpetual motion has been proven impossible (unless some of the free energy guys are right, but I just don't see it as happening). However, our understanding of gravity is as primitive as our understanding of electromagnetism was 100 years ago. Is gravity caused by a heretofore undiscovered particle? Is it a fundamental property of space? Is it a truly instantaneous effect, or does it take time to travel between affected objects? We don't truly know. We can't honestly know yet if gravity can be manipulated unlike perpetual motion because we don't know what it is and what generates it.
I suppose, however, that you will ignore these arguments like the others about side discoveries and tools used before we understood them and respond with another perpetual motion line, or not at all.
So you're basically ignoring the fact that we don't fully understand the "why" of gravity as well as we understood the quantum effects behind a transistor. The fact that we don't have a good solid understanding of gravity's origin shows that there is room for new discoveries.
There is irony in your statements that any scientist would demand a lot of reproducability followed immediately by the assertion, "Doing anything other than maybe trying to reproduce it once is not a 'good investment.'" Progress cannot be had without experimentation. Did the Michelson-Morley experiment not merit more than one repetition because it flew in the face of the wisdom of the time? By your logic, the Tesla coil was a waste of money since numberous scientists didn't have the theory down before it was first invented like the transistor.
Experiments into "anti-gravity" and levitation were the source of early ion drives and mag-lev propulsion. The research is not without merit just because a "negative" gravity force probably does not exist.
The point I was trying to make is that many useful tools have come to be discovered/invented and used without knowledge of the fundamental truths behind how they work. (See my earlier examples.) The only way to find out if something useful can come from this field is to spend money to research it. As said earlier, maybe we'll find proof that it is nothing but nonsense. That too was worth the investment.
Another thing is that I haven't seen anything that says they are only interested in "anti-gravity", but are looking into propellantless propulsion. They might find something else useful. This is all about finding proof and, for the purposes of creating a machine, finding reproducability. You can't build anything useful if you can't reproduce your results. Attempting to cut off funding and deride all such related research because it isn't in vogue right now is tantamount to calling Gallileo before the Inquisition.
Besides, I've seen enough articles on areas of pure theory that seem far more crackpot and unprovable than the bumbling experimentation of the free energy guys. At least they're more geared towards trying to produce a result rather than intellectual self-gratification and modern mysticism. Even so, the theory guys are still working towards the advancement of our understanding of the universe, and I support their funding as well.
We didn't really understand how the Tesla coil worked for ages after it was invented. Consider that we just figured out why cold pizza tastes good yesterday.
Sometimes you observe an effect and figure out how to exploit it before you understand what causes it. Many basic tools such as magnets and batteries were used long before we understood the fundamentals of how they worked. Quantum mechanics showed us over 50 years ago just how little we had understood about electro-magnetic and nuclear science beforehand, yet we had been using electrical devices like the radio before then.
To this day, we don't truly understand what makes gravity and space-time work the way they do. I've seen a good number of theories for the fundamental basis of gravity, and I'm sure I'll see more before we finally figure it out. While true "anti-gravity" may never come out of the work that these people are doing, we may actually develop new propulsion systems that use unconventional methods. That's what this is about, after all. Many are the theories that the staunchly conservative among science have defended against inquiry into their fundamental truth. The ether, the indivisibility of the atom, the animistic difference between organic and inorganic matter, Newtonian physics, and others are all examples of where the scientists of the day were CERTAIN was right and shouldn't be challenged. Persecution of those who challenge the current view of the world is not limited to the Church or the unscientific.
On the other hand, the are many examples of crackpot failed science that much money was wasted on. Let's hope something useful comes out of these guys. Even if nothing material does, their research can be valuable in proving these fields to be futile. That too is worth the funding.
I'm just surprised that in the publish or perish world of universities that a professor was able to do a research project like this. It seems kind of like an excuse to get the college to expense out delivery food.
It always has been a mystery to me why french fries taste so bad after being kept in the 'fridge overnight. I guess one more mystery of the universe that had long plauged mankind can now be considered solved. Thank God for the March of Progress.
Darwin is the BSD layer being used under Mac OS X. You can find out more about Darwin here.
Mac OS X on Intel is financial suicide. Sales of the Mac OS are NOT Apple's main source of revenue. In fact, they don't really make that much profit off of it at all. Their main money maker is hardware. Similarly, Microsoft makes most of their money off of Office and their server products.
While Apple could potentially gain a significant chunk of marketshare for moving to Intel, they would cannibalize 90% of their revenue in doing so. They'd have to capture a significant majority of the market to recover the loss. Due to the network effect and an even more severe lack of Intel Mac apps than PPC Mac apps, it would be a serious bomb in the market. As another person said, Apple should order their corporate coffin after making that move.
You should do a little research before insinuating that someone else is a bad programmer next time. The vector datatypes being talked of here are VERY different from the STL vector template class. These are datatypes that represent the fundamental 128-bit data in the Altivec instruction set, much like double typically means a IEEE 64-bit floating point number.
Altivec adds the following data types to to C/C++:
vector unsigned char
vector signed char
vector bool char
vector unsigned short -- a.k.a. vector unsigned short int
vector signed short -- a.k.a vector signed short int
vector bool short -- a.k.a vector bool short int
vector unsigned int -- a.k.a vector unsigned long or a.k.a vector unsigned long int
vector signed int -- a.k.a vector signed long or vector signed long int
vector bool int -- a.k.a vector bool long or vector bool long int
vector float -- 4 single-precision floats
vector pixel -- 8 1/5/5/5 bit pixel elements (for graphics)
The elements of the bool types can only be all zeros or all ones. These vectors are usually used as masks or selectors in certain Altivec calls. The pixel type is for representing 16-bit color pixels and handles overflow within the 1/5/5/5 portions of the pixel.
This can all be found on pg 21-22 of the Altivec Technology Programming Interface Manual, which can be found on Motorola's site here.
If I remember what I read a year or so ago, the compilers and libraries recognize C calls that look a lot like the assembler calls. In effect, you can call the assembly instructions like C functions. I believe there are also some libraries to do certain common vector tasks purely in Altivec. There are also additional data types to cover the different kinds of Altivec vectors (16 8-bit, 8 16-bit, 4 32-bit integer vectors and 4 32-bit FP vectors). At least, that's what I remember of the modifications done to Apple's exceptional MrC optimizing PPC compiler.
I'm not sure that any of the kernel is enhanced, unless they've found a way to have the compiler optimize to parallelize some of the code, but this has been shown in the past to be a monstrously difficult task to accomplish, and is usually is only applicable on small sections of the code.
This has been gone over before. The reason they won't do it is because they are afraid of being sued for the inclusion of copyrighted, patented, or trademarked material into Darwin without the ability to pull it.
Take the DeCSS thing. If Apple had been the originators of code that had had DeCSS tacked in, without the ability to perform fire control and remove the offending code without possibility of someone having said code with Apple's permission (as given in the GPL), then Apple could be sued for their open sourced code. Linux, as a system with more decentralized ownership over the code is a much harder to hit target than a large money-rich corporation like Apple. The potential legal losses outweigh the benefits. This way, they get much of the benefit of an open source model without the risk of being burned.
Citizens in US apparently consider US = American... hellooo...
Well, yeah. What are supposed to call ourselves, Statesians? Unionists? (Oh yeah, try to get THAT one to go off in the ex-Confederate South) USies? Between-Cananda-and-Mexico-dwellers? Obnoxious? (Oh wait, that's what everyone else calls us.) Ummm... We could try pronouncing the Spanish E.E.U.U. for "eeewwwww".
Seriously, though, that whole "you think you're the only Americans?" business is a pet peeve of mine. We call ourselves Americans because we don't have a better name for ourselves. Since it is a name for the group of people that compose the dwellers of the U.S.A., and that is the group that we most commonly associate that name with, then, yes, we by default do assume that "Americans" just means us.
You have a point though about everyone stereotyping Europe for the actions of a country or two (especially when we have the facts wrong about that country in question). After all, what do you call an obnoxious person who insists on only speaking one language? I mean, we can't blame you all for the French. <grin>
Re:Steve Wozniak has the world's biggest ego
on
Rack An iMac
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· Score: 1
Do it yourself.
Guess what -- Cobalt Raq 3's are x86 based
on
Rack An iMac
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· Score: 1
That' right -- like a PC. I guess non-Mac people just assume that Mac people don't know what they are talking about with no justification.
On the other hand it could've been a simple mistake. I thought that the Raq 2's were x86 based as well, but the spec sheet for them talks about a "64-bit processor," probably the MIPS you mentioned....Not that a rack-mounted machine really counts a a PC under any stretch of the term "personal computer." The Raq 3's may have not been out when the guy first did this. I remember reading about someone making a 1 unit rack-mount out of a revison 1 iMac a long time ago, though I think it was on one of the Mac news sites and not Slashdot.
heh heh heh, I wonder if there is a market for such a service outside of Japan?
Lord, I hope not. If I have to hear just one more pager playing Pachelbel's Cannon I'm going to scream.
Could you imagine going to a mall filled with teeny-boppers with all their cell phones tuned the the latest boy/girl band of the minute? The sheer horror of it is hinted at in the article by the mention of the most popular song being that godawful thing from "Titanic." Over and over again no matter where you go. AAAAAA!!!!!!
By the way, did anyone else get the pun in DoCoMo? ("doko mo" == Japanese for "everywhere")
There are newsgroups for this. Look up the comp.sys.mac.* hierarchy and stop abusing this public forum. You're making the rest of us Mac users look bad. If you don't have a news server and news client to browse with, use DejaNews and similar web sites.
That's how it used to be. AMD and Intel have caught up now. Read the Ars Technica article comparing a G4 to an Athlon. While PPC has a vastly superior SIMD archetecture, the x86 family has been catching up on integer and FP performance. Nowdays, an Athlon at the same clock speed slightly outperforms a G4 for the common integer and FP ops that your system spends more than 80-90% of its time doing, but Athlons are soon to be out in 1 GHz models while PPC 7400s are still languishing at 500 MHz.
I mean, this SUCKS. IBM had the first demo silicon at 1.1 GHz almost 2 years ago now. We were promised 1 GHz chips with multiple processors on the core by the AIM consordium's projections 2 years ago by 2000. For servers, they seem to have only slipped 3-6 months, but us desktop PPC users are stuck with x86 envy.
x86 envy! Of all the *#@! archetecures out there, it has to be one of the most arcane, messed up designs that is beating the pants off of everyone. I mean, all the addressing modes, the stack-based FPU, variable-length instructions, and MMX/3DNow/SSE! Have you ever downloaded volume 2 of the "Intel Architecure Software Developer's Manual", the instruction set reference? It's 854 pages! How can companies with so much baggage to work with beat everyone else to the punch on 1 GHz?
Gah. It's bad enough to realize that we'll probably never see the end of that hideous kludge of a design, much less that it's because it's beating the pants off of cleaner designs due to production problems. Makes me nauseous...
I mean come on, this is getting about as cliche as saying, "Let's see them make a Beowulf cluster out of them!"
Can we not just admire the wonderful size of the drive without resorting to the same ol', same ol' cheese factor of X hours of MP3s. You know what? I don't honestly think I could find 1500 hours of MP3s that I all like. Hell, I'm surprised when the 15k RPM drives came out there wasn't a post about how fast you could copy your MP3s. Let's get a more useful benchmark.
Re:Compatible with X windows
on
MacOS X DP3
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· Score: 1
Oh, no. It's a Good Thing. MacOS X's display system is a generation beyond Quickdraw. There was an article on Ars Technica that summed it up nicely that you should check out if you're interested. The only thing missing from the Quartz graphics system (which may be possible to add later) is the network protocol aspects of NeXT's DPS system. (Meaning you can't currently export apps to another display.)
X is really a primitive graphics system. The only reason to continue with it is its networked capabilities and for backwards compatibility with older UNIX applications. The Mac and Windows graphics APIs kick X in the teeth both by itself and combined with Motif/GTK. Trust me on this.
If you'd have actually READ the article before trolling, you'd know that it was talking about how Quartz is a "3rd generation" graphics system -- one with actual knowledge of all the objects on the screen after they've been drawn -- and all the wonderful things that you can do with that. This is why Display PS was so damn cool back then and why Quartz's Display PDF will be even cooler. There is a lot of neat functionality that Quartz allows, and I'm sure we'll see a lot of interesting tricks as developers start to figure out how to exploit the technology. The Quartz model of graphics holds far more power and flexibility than X11, Windows, and the old Quickdraw model.
On the other hand, I'm curious just how games and other things that need direct screen access with intermix with such a graphics model.
Slashdot Mirror
Great review, though it leaves me confused on one point. If the PSX2 is using RDRAM, which it does according to the earlier article on the "Emotion Engine" at Ars Technica, then just how much of the PSX2's cost is RDRAM? Are they getting it for a LOT cheaper than your average consumer, and if so would this not be a problem for the much touted vaporware that is the X-Box?
Hmmmm... Personally, the more I see of RDRAM, the more I want to see it die, but if Intel is really forcing it down everyone's throats, then I don't see us having any relief any time soon from crappy defacto desktop standard.
Windows, x86, USB(2), and now RDRAM. Blech. It seems that it's crap that floats to the top instead of cream.
Go looking for the Final Fantasy 10 preview clips that have been posted around the web. The main character, when running around, is rendered on par with the FMV from Final Fantasy 8. It's truly amazing to see. I just wish they had shown the crowd a summoning spell or two for the demo instead of the semi-lame on-line strategy guide feature that they showed 3 times during the clip.
By the way, love the Dragon's Lair joke. <grin>
While I'm not a Wintel person, I'd have to agree with the assertion that gaming has driven a large part of the industry. Most of the most computationally intensive pieces of software out there in the mass market are games. Would people like NVidia and 3dfx being pushing SGI to refocus their strategy away from graphics if it wasn't for fanatic gamers trying to constantly push the bleeding edge?
The technology in the Playstation is fantastic. You should see the Final Fantasy 10 movie clips if you haven't. The character running around looks exactly like the FMV from Final Fantasy 8. I can't wait to see what games will be like if developers actually use the "Emotion Engine" for what the press conferences said it was intended for -- to advance the use of AI in games.
You seem real attached to this perpetual motion machine argument.
Perhaps you should take a look at the Wired article others have been posting links to before being so closed-minded about this area of research. Perpetual motion has been proven impossible (unless some of the free energy guys are right, but I just don't see it as happening). However, our understanding of gravity is as primitive as our understanding of electromagnetism was 100 years ago. Is gravity caused by a heretofore undiscovered particle? Is it a fundamental property of space? Is it a truly instantaneous effect, or does it take time to travel between affected objects? We don't truly know. We can't honestly know yet if gravity can be manipulated unlike perpetual motion because we don't know what it is and what generates it.
I suppose, however, that you will ignore these arguments like the others about side discoveries and tools used before we understood them and respond with another perpetual motion line, or not at all.
So you're basically ignoring the fact that we don't fully understand the "why" of gravity as well as we understood the quantum effects behind a transistor. The fact that we don't have a good solid understanding of gravity's origin shows that there is room for new discoveries.
There is irony in your statements that any scientist would demand a lot of reproducability followed immediately by the assertion, "Doing anything other than maybe trying to reproduce it once is not a 'good investment.'" Progress cannot be had without experimentation. Did the Michelson-Morley experiment not merit more than one repetition because it flew in the face of the wisdom of the time? By your logic, the Tesla coil was a waste of money since numberous scientists didn't have the theory down before it was first invented like the transistor.
Experiments into "anti-gravity" and levitation were the source of early ion drives and mag-lev propulsion. The research is not without merit just because a "negative" gravity force probably does not exist.
The point I was trying to make is that many useful tools have come to be discovered/invented and used without knowledge of the fundamental truths behind how they work. (See my earlier examples.) The only way to find out if something useful can come from this field is to spend money to research it. As said earlier, maybe we'll find proof that it is nothing but nonsense. That too was worth the investment.
Another thing is that I haven't seen anything that says they are only interested in "anti-gravity", but are looking into propellantless propulsion. They might find something else useful. This is all about finding proof and, for the purposes of creating a machine, finding reproducability. You can't build anything useful if you can't reproduce your results. Attempting to cut off funding and deride all such related research because it isn't in vogue right now is tantamount to calling Gallileo before the Inquisition.
Besides, I've seen enough articles on areas of pure theory that seem far more crackpot and unprovable than the bumbling experimentation of the free energy guys. At least they're more geared towards trying to produce a result rather than intellectual self-gratification and modern mysticism. Even so, the theory guys are still working towards the advancement of our understanding of the universe, and I support their funding as well.
We didn't really understand how the Tesla coil worked for ages after it was invented. Consider that we just figured out why cold pizza tastes good yesterday.
Sometimes you observe an effect and figure out how to exploit it before you understand what causes it. Many basic tools such as magnets and batteries were used long before we understood the fundamentals of how they worked. Quantum mechanics showed us over 50 years ago just how little we had understood about electro-magnetic and nuclear science beforehand, yet we had been using electrical devices like the radio before then.
To this day, we don't truly understand what makes gravity and space-time work the way they do. I've seen a good number of theories for the fundamental basis of gravity, and I'm sure I'll see more before we finally figure it out. While true "anti-gravity" may never come out of the work that these people are doing, we may actually develop new propulsion systems that use unconventional methods. That's what this is about, after all.
Many are the theories that the staunchly conservative among science have defended against inquiry into their fundamental truth. The ether, the indivisibility of the atom, the animistic difference between organic and inorganic matter, Newtonian physics, and others are all examples of where the scientists of the day were CERTAIN was right and shouldn't be challenged. Persecution of those who challenge the current view of the world is not limited to the Church or the unscientific.
On the other hand, the are many examples of crackpot failed science that much money was wasted on. Let's hope something useful comes out of these guys. Even if nothing material does, their research can be valuable in proving these fields to be futile. That too is worth the funding.
I'm just surprised that in the publish or perish world of universities that a professor was able to do a research project like this. It seems kind of like an excuse to get the college to expense out delivery food.
It always has been a mystery to me why french fries taste so bad after being kept in the 'fridge overnight. I guess one more mystery of the universe that had long plauged mankind can now be considered solved. Thank God for the March of Progress.
Darwin is the BSD layer being used under Mac OS X. You can find out more about Darwin here.
Mac OS X on Intel is financial suicide. Sales of the Mac OS are NOT Apple's main source of revenue. In fact, they don't really make that much profit off of it at all. Their main money maker is hardware. Similarly, Microsoft makes most of their money off of Office and their server products.
While Apple could potentially gain a significant chunk of marketshare for moving to Intel, they would cannibalize 90% of their revenue in doing so. They'd have to capture a significant majority of the market to recover the loss. Due to the network effect and an even more severe lack of Intel Mac apps than PPC Mac apps, it would be a serious bomb in the market. As another person said, Apple should order their corporate coffin after making that move.
You should do a little research before insinuating that someone else is a bad programmer next time. The vector datatypes being talked of here are VERY different from the STL vector template class. These are datatypes that represent the fundamental 128-bit data in the Altivec instruction set, much like double typically means a IEEE 64-bit floating point number.
Altivec adds the following data types to to C/C++:
vector unsigned char
vector signed char
vector bool char
vector unsigned short -- a.k.a. vector unsigned short int
vector signed short -- a.k.a vector signed short int
vector bool short -- a.k.a vector bool short int
vector unsigned int -- a.k.a vector unsigned long or a.k.a vector unsigned long int
vector signed int -- a.k.a vector signed long or vector signed long int
vector bool int -- a.k.a vector bool long or vector bool long int
vector float -- 4 single-precision floats
vector pixel -- 8 1/5/5/5 bit pixel elements (for graphics)
The elements of the bool types can only be all zeros or all ones. These vectors are usually used as masks or selectors in certain Altivec calls. The pixel type is for representing 16-bit color pixels and handles overflow within the 1/5/5/5 portions of the pixel.
This can all be found on pg 21-22 of the Altivec Technology Programming Interface Manual, which can be found on Motorola's site here.
If I remember what I read a year or so ago, the compilers and libraries recognize C calls that look a lot like the assembler calls. In effect, you can call the assembly instructions like C functions. I believe there are also some libraries to do certain common vector tasks purely in Altivec. There are also additional data types to cover the different kinds of Altivec vectors (16 8-bit, 8 16-bit, 4 32-bit integer vectors and 4 32-bit FP vectors). At least, that's what I remember of the modifications done to Apple's exceptional MrC optimizing PPC compiler.
I'm not sure that any of the kernel is enhanced, unless they've found a way to have the compiler optimize to parallelize some of the code, but this has been shown in the past to be a monstrously difficult task to accomplish, and is usually is only applicable on small sections of the code.
This has been gone over before. The reason they won't do it is because they are afraid of being sued for the inclusion of copyrighted, patented, or trademarked material into Darwin without the ability to pull it.
Take the DeCSS thing. If Apple had been the originators of code that had had DeCSS tacked in, without the ability to perform fire control and remove the offending code without possibility of someone having said code with Apple's permission (as given in the GPL), then Apple could be sued for their open sourced code. Linux, as a system with more decentralized ownership over the code is a much harder to hit target than a large money-rich corporation like Apple. The potential legal losses outweigh the benefits. This way, they get much of the benefit of an open source model without the risk of being burned.
That is, certain PPC Linux apps with Altivec perform 1000% times faster than without Altivec.
What did you think they were talking about?
Citizens in US apparently consider US = American... hellooo...
Well, yeah. What are supposed to call ourselves, Statesians? Unionists? (Oh yeah, try to get THAT one to go off in the ex-Confederate South) USies? Between-Cananda-and-Mexico-dwellers? Obnoxious? (Oh wait, that's what everyone else calls us.) Ummm... We could try pronouncing the Spanish E.E.U.U. for "eeewwwww".
Seriously, though, that whole "you think you're the only Americans?" business is a pet peeve of mine. We call ourselves Americans because we don't have a better name for ourselves. Since it is a name for the group of people that compose the dwellers of the U.S.A., and that is the group that we most commonly associate that name with, then, yes, we by default do assume that "Americans" just means us.
You have a point though about everyone stereotyping Europe for the actions of a country or two (especially when we have the facts wrong about that country in question). After all, what do you call an obnoxious person who insists on only speaking one language? I mean, we can't blame you all for the French. <grin>
Do it yourself.
That' right -- like a PC. I guess non-Mac people just assume that Mac people don't know what they are talking about with no justification.
...Not that a rack-mounted machine really counts a a PC under any stretch of the term "personal computer." The Raq 3's may have not been out when the guy first did this. I remember reading about someone making a 1 unit rack-mount out of a revison 1 iMac a long time ago, though I think it was on one of the Mac news sites and not Slashdot.
Read the spec sheet if you don't believe me.
On the other hand it could've been a simple mistake. I thought that the Raq 2's were x86 based as well, but the spec sheet for them talks about a "64-bit processor," probably the MIPS you mentioned.
...there are warez sites for people who can read? How do explain the spelling? What'll they think of next?
...and Microsoft owns FASA, creators of the Batteltech and Shadowrun series of RPGs. So, yes, nothing is sacred.
heh heh heh, I wonder if there is a market for such a service outside of Japan?
Lord, I hope not. If I have to hear just one more pager playing Pachelbel's Cannon I'm going to scream.
Could you imagine going to a mall filled with teeny-boppers with all their cell phones tuned the the latest boy/girl band of the minute? The sheer horror of it is hinted at in the article by the mention of the most popular song being that godawful thing from "Titanic." Over and over again no matter where you go. AAAAAA!!!!!!
By the way, did anyone else get the pun in DoCoMo? ("doko mo" == Japanese for "everywhere")
...than having to constantly deal with assholes like yourself day in and day out. Oh, I suppose I could BE one of those assholes.
Get a life and move on.
There are newsgroups for this. Look up the comp.sys.mac.* hierarchy and stop abusing this public forum. You're making the rest of us Mac users look bad. If you don't have a news server and news client to browse with, use DejaNews and similar web sites.
That's how it used to be. AMD and Intel have caught up now. Read the Ars Technica article comparing a G4 to an Athlon. While PPC has a vastly superior SIMD archetecture, the x86 family has been catching up on integer and FP performance. Nowdays, an Athlon at the same clock speed slightly outperforms a G4 for the common integer and FP ops that your system spends more than 80-90% of its time doing, but Athlons are soon to be out in 1 GHz models while PPC 7400s are still languishing at 500 MHz.
I mean, this SUCKS. IBM had the first demo silicon at 1.1 GHz almost 2 years ago now. We were promised 1 GHz chips with multiple processors on the core by the AIM consordium's projections 2 years ago by 2000. For servers, they seem to have only slipped 3-6 months, but us desktop PPC users are stuck with x86 envy.
x86 envy! Of all the *#@! archetecures out there, it has to be one of the most arcane, messed up designs that is beating the pants off of everyone. I mean, all the addressing modes, the stack-based FPU, variable-length instructions, and MMX/3DNow/SSE! Have you ever downloaded volume 2 of the "Intel Architecure Software Developer's Manual", the instruction set reference? It's 854 pages! How can companies with so much baggage to work with beat everyone else to the punch on 1 GHz?
Gah. It's bad enough to realize that we'll probably never see the end of that hideous kludge of a design, much less that it's because it's beating the pants off of cleaner designs due to production problems. Makes me nauseous...
For that matter where's our 1 GHz+ Alphas?
I mean come on, this is getting about as cliche as saying, "Let's see them make a Beowulf cluster out of them!"
Can we not just admire the wonderful size of the drive without resorting to the same ol', same ol' cheese factor of X hours of MP3s. You know what? I don't honestly think I could find 1500 hours of MP3s that I all like. Hell, I'm surprised when the 15k RPM drives came out there wasn't a post about how fast you could copy your MP3s. Let's get a more useful benchmark.
Oh, no. It's a Good Thing. MacOS X's display system is a generation beyond Quickdraw. There was an article on Ars Technica that summed it up nicely that you should check out if you're interested. The only thing missing from the Quartz graphics system (which may be possible to add later) is the network protocol aspects of NeXT's DPS system. (Meaning you can't currently export apps to another display.)
X is really a primitive graphics system. The only reason to continue with it is its networked capabilities and for backwards compatibility with older UNIX applications. The Mac and Windows graphics APIs kick X in the teeth both by itself and combined with Motif/GTK. Trust me on this.
If you'd have actually READ the article before trolling, you'd know that it was talking about how Quartz is a "3rd generation" graphics system -- one with actual knowledge of all the objects on the screen after they've been drawn -- and all the wonderful things that you can do with that. This is why Display PS was so damn cool back then and why Quartz's Display PDF will be even cooler. There is a lot of neat functionality that Quartz allows, and I'm sure we'll see a lot of interesting tricks as developers start to figure out how to exploit the technology. The Quartz model of graphics holds far more power and flexibility than X11, Windows, and the old Quickdraw model.
On the other hand, I'm curious just how games and other things that need direct screen access with intermix with such a graphics model.