Ya' know, that's a REALLY funny idea, but there's something wrong with it. Would you pay the price of a rental plus the price of a DVD-R blank when the legit movie itself costs less? There's no way DVD-R media's going to come down in price for those reasons. It's not like it's expensive to manufacture now.
(BTW, I HATE America's disposable society. At least this isn't that horrendous disposable cell phone idea.)
I thought a good number of articles on this site pointed out that e-commerce isn't nearly 100% safe. Voting is not one of those matters that should be taken lightly when it comes to security, lest we return to the days of ballot stuffing and non-anonymous voting.
Hmmm... With that possible target for use, the mentioned low power consumtion, and the really neat trick of reconfigurable, and the article hints, adaptive microcode, you gotta wonder where the compromise is going to be. I wonder how they will compare to conventional embedded processors like the StrongARM and PPC for speed.
I feel a little worried by this speculation. I'd hoped that we would be seeing a new high-end server or workstation chip capable of handling code from multiple platforms. Oh, well. This is still pretty cool -- especially with the hinted adaptive abilities. I'll have the fastest PDA for running Tetris in no time!
>Plug and Play? The MacOS practically invented it. Hell, the phrase "Plug and Play" itself predates Windows.
>The taskbar? The MacOS did invent it.
>DirectX? Oh, you mean going straight through the memory protection to the hardware like we used to in the DOS day? Or do you mean 3D acceleration like Glide and OpenGL? Ooo, ooo! Let's not forget that they didn't actually develop the original code for this themselves.
>Um, Office? Um, you don't think application suites hadn't been done before, do you? Unless you mean the idea of cross-platform, cross-OS virii. Now THAT'S something no one else had done before.
Office has many compelling features, but it's dominance comes down mainly to bundling and other marketing tricks over merit. Microsoft is only posting requests for standards in markets they don't control. You don't see them posting up SMB as an open standard yet do you?
By the way, the MacOS DOES have support for themes in the Appearance Manager. The decision to not publicly distribute the themes that were made (and do actually work if you can find them) is unfortunately one of marketing. They didn't want to 'confuse' customers about the look and feel of the MacOS, according to a quote I remember from Steve Jobs.
As for being a threat to open standards, Apple has been very forthcoming with their APIs and the file formats used for their products, such as Quicktime. Oh, and let's not forget IEEE 1394 while we're at it. As for the Indeo codec, you are forgetting that like DirectDraw, it was orignally done by Intel. It is their decision to keep the codecs closed. Similarly, most of the new spiffy codecs for Quicktime (Sorenson, ClearVoice, and the like) are all made by third-party developers who make their money from the licensing fees from Apple and for selling software to compress movies using their codecs.
I don't suppose it's worth mentioning their contribution to open source to you either. Beyond the basics of Darwin, there is the networking game code that they've released. Apple is hardly as much of a threat to open standards as MS. They been a frequent player in open standards and as someone in the minority position have everything to gain from open standards, unlike Microsoft who can and often does create closed 'standards.'
Actually, NEXTSTEP originally ran on m68k. The later OPENSTEP, which Mac OS X is based on, was created when NeXT realized that while people in business thought their OS was cool, they didn't really want to pay the money for the hardware, so they ported it to Intel and SPARC. (Wasn't there one other? I can't remember now.)
Most of the nastiness of making the code portable was already done during the move to OPENSTEP. Most of what I've heard about the early days of Rhapsody was that the port to PPC was really easy -- almost all the trouble was in porting the Mach microkernel, which was designed with portability in mind.
As for the uglier code bit, let's not throw stones. We can't forget twm and fvwm no matter how hard we try. But I'm not really sure why I'm responding politely to a troll anyway...
Have you forgotten about the Human Genome Project? Even if pharmaceutical companies tried to keep what they had found about human genetics secret, it would eventually come out for public use. However, this way, the company can ensure that they are the only one to be able to use the knowledge they have found without licensing their patent (which they are under no obligation to do). We shouldn't forget just how long 17 or 29 years is in terms of scientific advancement nowdays.
Speaking of software, do you honestly think that people can't innovate and make money in software without patenting their ideas? There have been a good variety of unpatented ideas that have spread throughout the industry. You're using some of them -- TCP/IP, mark-up languages, mouse driven interfaces, etc. 5 years is more than enough to own a lockstep on a product in the computer industry; 17 years is a ludicrous amount of time to hold on a particular algorithm or, worse, on a generic idea like one-click shopping.
I disagree with your assertion that we will have the choice not to use them. In five or so years, it is easily conceivable that some businesses will only take digital signatures since, as you say, they are supposedly harder to forge than pen & paper signatures. I can see certain credit card companies, insurance companies, and e-commerce companies doing this.
You say that digital signatures are harder to forge, but we have all seen article after article on Slashdot talking about breaking crypto. How long until you digital signature is cracked? Someone can simply keep a bunch of signatures that they've snooped on file until such time as they can crack them and then use them freely. Remember, digital data can be perfectly copied without errors. Your signature may be "forged" perfectly without any evidence that it is not genuinely your signature. There will be no more court experts in forgery to save you.
What the President and consumer advocates object to, however, is not this whole issue about the signatures themselves. It's the provisions that certain kinds of notification which must currently be delivered to you in writing will be able to be delivered to you electronically. This means that some people will not be able to get that notification and are no longer protected by getting it in writing. This is what some parts of the industry want and what consumer advocates are all against.
There's a quick little sanity check I do on any of these articles when I hear about them. When businesses are all over a bill and consumer advocates are against it, it usually means that we're about to get screwed if it passes. Always find out why. Bills in Congress almost never involve just one thing. They always let a law that only certain special interests want ride on the back of a law everyone wants so get it passed since it wouldn't be passed normally. It's an attempt to get another law in favor of big business passed with a law that helps everybody.
Katz, you seem to be a victim of your own rhetoric.
This game is trying to reach an audience of Christians often neglected by the "mainstream" world, both Christian and non-Christian. Despite what many non-Christians many think, not all of us Christians are people who scream "the Internet is the Devil!" at the first accidental web search for "free JPEGs." However, this does not keep you, the man who decried schools everwhere for their stereotyping of geeks, goths, and other form of introverts, from stereotyping and lambasting Christians.
I haven't seen the game. To tell the truth, I'd probably find it a little cheesy and would prefer more mainstream games. However, it is an attempt to create a quote-unquote religious game that is not Yet Another Boring Moral Quiz. This is an attempt that should be looked upon favorably or brushed aside if it truly is a poor game, but is instead being bashed simply because the religion in question is Christianity.
Get this in all of your heads now -- we Christians are NOT the Borg. We are individuals, and some of us think a little differently from each other. Hell, if that weren't the case do you think we'd still have all our stupid little denominational squabbles? The seeming contradiction over the creation of a violent game after so much has been said about violence in the media being the root of all evil is because it wasn't the same person giving the two different messages!
This is not News for Nerds. This is another excuse to pigeonhole all Christians into one monolithic entity and call us fools for not agreeing with one another. Well, listen to your own message for once. Christians are people and have their own differing views -- and that's okay.
By the way, Katz.. Just because you've never felt like you been sent the touch of the divine doesn't mean you should be mocking people who do. If you really want to send a message that we should be open to other people's views, you should quit being so hypocritical about religious views. (Not that there'd have been a word about this on this sight if it was a Muslim or Wiccan game...)
With 500 Mhz G4s no where in sight, and as they said, SDRAM prices shooting up, that's really all they could do. If the current trend continued, by the time they had 500 Mhz G4s, they might be taking a loss on the machines.
I'm quite upset that my 500 Mhz order has not only been canceled, but is now completely unavailable, but I'm not going to cry havoc at Apple for it. They're in a bind right now, and I don't think they'd make such a customer-angering move without having thought it out first. (On the other hand, they did design that awful QT 4.0 interface...)
Apple does have a small role in the design of the PPC. Their main contribution to the project is in compiler writing. The MrC optimized-as-all-hell PPC C compiler had heavy Apple support, and Apple has been working with Motorola on Altivec from the early days when the idea of putting VMX (a proposed but never implemented SIMD archetecture for the POWER family) into the PPC design was discussed. They helped add the Altivec support to the MrC compiler.
As anyone who knows about chip design knows, the compiler writers are just as essential as the people who map out how the silicon's going to look. (Heck in the case of Merced, they're even more important, but I digress.) Altivec has been just as much Apple's baby as Motorola's. That's why there will be so much support for it in the MacOS in the future. It's no marketing gimmick like MMX was; Apple wanted it to be something they could USE everywhere they could.
The PPC family tends to run in the 10-20 W range (sometimes lower, sometimes higher). Comparing that to a 1000 W microwave oven would make me think that it would take a loooonnnng time to cook your eyes looking at it. Plus the chips and case try to shield against as much EM and radio interferance as they can usually. I doubt we'll have any worries soon.
I'm just wondering why no one who's burned their fingers on a hot Pentium has tried to sue Intel or their OEM yet. Seems just as reasonable as that crazy old McDonald's coffee lawsuit.
Check out Mac OS Rumors. The article for today (9/7) mentions that they are working on the firmware patch to the G3's mentioned on AppleInsider, but also that the decision to put it there in the first place was very controversial and was mainly intended to insure that 3rd-party processor upgrade makers didn't beat them to the market with a G4. Still not very nice, but not as ogre-like as forever baring G3 owners from upgrading. Plus the G4s themselves are easily processor upgradable for future SMP cards. It may not be as bad as AppleInsider makes it out to be. Plus, this is just an early prototype. The earlier Sawtooth prototypes also had the boot ROM on the processor daughtercard rather than the motherboard as it is currently.
Macs are quite well documented and use mostly standard parts to keep the prices down and encouraged 3rd part hardware developers to develop for the Mac platform. Look here next time so that your opinions will actually be informed ones.
The G4 chip has Altivec, the PPC platform's SIMD extensions. These are 128-bit (vs. the P3's 64-bit) vector math additions that have their own dedicated parallel units on the CPU (vs. MMX's need to turn off the FPU and use its registers). They are well supported in PPC C compilers (unlike MMX and SSE, which require nasty direct use of x86 assembler -- ). They will be extensively supported in the main OS for the machine and many of its applications (unlike MMX and SSE which are really only supported in a limited fashion in DirectX and a few games). In other words, this is one of the reasons Mac OS X will smoke the competition. Oh, and the better SMP support than the P3's hardcoded 4-way (which require serious hardware hacks to get around for the new 8-way machines) and the new, improved FPU don't hurt either.
The problem with PixelFusion and the other massively parallel computers like the FPGA based reprogrammable designs is that not all (or in fact most) computer problems can easily by computed in a parallel fashion.
This is a classic of computer science. Step B requires step A to finish. Step C requires step B to finish, and step D requires step A to finish. While steps B & D can be executed in parallel since they only require step A to be finished before being done, A-B-C MUST be executed in sequence. These designs, which are much slower at sequential computation than conventional computer designs would not handle these problems as well. This is why PixelFuzion's promises are not going to hold up well. Computer scientists have struggled with the problem of parallelization of code for decades with little radical progress.
The peak rate for this future 1600 MHz chip is only 6.4 gigaflops with its "new SIMD 3D instructions." The current 500 MHz G4 chip peaks at 4 gigaflops with single-precision Altivec SIMD operations. That means that this future Alpha only has a 8:5 gigaflop advantage over the current PPC rather than the 16:5 advantage you would expect from the higher chip clock rate alone, plus the higher memory bus clock rate than the PC-100 RAM that the PowerMac G4s use. If this is as good as it gets compared to now, then how will it compare to higher clocked PPCs also coming in the future?
While it'll beat the snot out any future x86 chips for awhile, it's a far sight from being worth porting away from PPC, which has a bright future ahead of it. Expect Apple to stick with the PPC. It is easily comparable in performance (though still edged out by Alpha on non-vectorized integer and FP operations), but it beats the heck out of Alpha on price, heat, and power consumption -- which is key for notebooks and low-end consumer machines. Also, the hassles of binary incompatibility makes it by far not worth the trouble.
Darwin is not meant to try to suck developers off of Linux and the other BSDen. It is meant so that Mac developers have a chance to look at the underlying parts of the system. It is meant for people who want to do 'unofficial' installs of MacOS X on older PowerMacs. It's meant to make the Mac community stronger and to allow people who use the Mac to have more freedom in how their system runs and more of a chance to fix things themselves.
It's not meant to be the replacement for Linux. It's not meant to be the replacement for all of BSD. It's just an opening of the underlying layers of a previously wholy proprietary system. It means no more secrets here.
Now for the cynical side: It means that Apple can freely use code from the other BSD variants and certain GPLed code. Since the source to it all is available on the FTP site, they won't be violating anything by not distributing it on the Consumer version install CD, if I recall the GPL correctly. Of course, they don't HAVE to give out the code to the BSD license derived software, but I think Apple/Next learned their lesson with Objective-C and gcc and would rather have good will than potential legal hassle on the GPLed components.
Plus, why not open up the BSD layer? It's all already out there anyway, and it can only help Apple to do it.
You know what? There's a reason why without ACs certain things wouldn't be said. It's the same reason that they're called Anonymous Cowards. If you're too afraid to have your name associated with an opinion, then you really shouldn't be saying it, and we most certainly shouldn't have to be seeing it when reading the posts of people who have the courage to put their name on an opinion.
That's my flame, and I'm sticking to it. The only reason I've ever posted AC was laziness, not because I wanted to use it as a shield for a controversial opinion. I note that you mention that we have to support our opinions with logical and useful arguments. Why shouldn't everybody be held to the same standard?
I mean, it's just BSD unless you also port the Carbon and Cocoa APIs and the interface to x86.
There's nothing in it for Apple. As people often forget, Apple is a hardware manufacturer. They get the money to fund OS development from hardware sales. Port the OS to x86, and suddenly no one's buying Apple hardware anymore. No more hardware, no more money for OS development. Do you see the downward spiral here?
Yes, all of these things were true and more. Objective-C is a joy to program in (now that I'm learning it finally), and the visual development environments were and still are in many ways light years ahead of their time.
However, OPENSTEP was very pricey. That was the main reason it didn't catch on. Plus, like most other things, it wasn't DOS/Windows and that was reason enough.
THey had an article about the POWER4 chips coming up soon, which ARE, despite plenty of misunderstanding, 64-bit PPCs like their POWER3 predecessors.
64-bitness in the PPC world is a bit hard to define anyway. The instruction set is designed to support 32-bit and 64-bit modes equally well. It's just a matter or whether or not the processor supports 32-bit or 64-bit memory access. I think that the current 64-bit chips still do 32-bit integer math. I know all of them use 64-bit FPs.
Plus, I don't know how much better an equally clocked Alpha is going to compare to that POWER4 beast -- especially if you factor in multiple cores and the 500 MHz memory bus. Sure, two cores against one's a little unfair, but I think it may still compete well against a dual Alpha system with the Alphas currently using a slower memory bus and without the direct core-to-core communication that the POWER4 will have.
(I like the line about HP trying to kill Intel with IA-64, though.t)
Well, yeah, when they're 2..
on
Quack!
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I mean, there's an age for that, and there's an age when that's just unsettling to a small child. It's the violence that's the main problem.
When I was 10 and under, I used to run around a LOT outside. Being hyperactive helped a lot on that, though. Seriously, I don't know a kid under 6 who can't find something to do for 5 hours outside unless they're like my little cousin who just doesn't like the outdoors at all.
BTW, surfing is at least a little interactive. TV is nothing more than sitting down and turning off your higher brain for 30 minutes at a time, unless your watching educational or news channels. (And there's only so much Crocodile Hunter you can watch...)
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Ya' know, that's a REALLY funny idea, but there's something wrong with it. Would you pay the price of a rental plus the price of a DVD-R blank when the legit movie itself costs less? There's no way DVD-R media's going to come down in price for those reasons. It's not like it's expensive to manufacture now.
(BTW, I HATE America's disposable society. At least this isn't that horrendous disposable cell phone idea.)
I thought a good number of articles on this site pointed out that e-commerce isn't nearly 100% safe. Voting is not one of those matters that should be taken lightly when it comes to security, lest we return to the days of ballot stuffing and non-anonymous voting.
Hmmm... With that possible target for use, the mentioned low power consumtion, and the really neat trick of reconfigurable, and the article hints, adaptive microcode, you gotta wonder where the compromise is going to be. I wonder how they will compare to conventional embedded processors like the StrongARM and PPC for speed.
I feel a little worried by this speculation. I'd hoped that we would be seeing a new high-end server or workstation chip capable of handling code from multiple platforms. Oh, well. This is still pretty cool -- especially with the hinted adaptive abilities. I'll have the fastest PDA for running Tetris in no time!
Ah, I see the light now. You're trolling for moderation points.
>Plug and Play?
The MacOS practically invented it. Hell, the phrase "Plug and Play" itself predates Windows.
>The taskbar?
The MacOS did invent it.
>DirectX?
Oh, you mean going straight through the memory protection to the hardware like we used to in the DOS day? Or do you mean 3D acceleration like Glide and OpenGL? Ooo, ooo! Let's not forget that they didn't actually develop the original code for this themselves.
>Um, Office?
Um, you don't think application suites hadn't been done before, do you? Unless you mean the idea of cross-platform, cross-OS virii. Now THAT'S something no one else had done before.
Office has many compelling features, but it's dominance comes down mainly to bundling and other marketing tricks over merit. Microsoft is only posting requests for standards in markets they don't control. You don't see them posting up SMB as an open standard yet do you?
By the way, the MacOS DOES have support for themes in the Appearance Manager. The decision to not publicly distribute the themes that were made (and do actually work if you can find them) is unfortunately one of marketing. They didn't want to 'confuse' customers about the look and feel of the MacOS, according to a quote I remember from Steve Jobs.
As for being a threat to open standards, Apple has been very forthcoming with their APIs and the file formats used for their products, such as Quicktime. Oh, and let's not forget IEEE 1394 while we're at it. As for the Indeo codec, you are forgetting that like DirectDraw, it was orignally done by Intel. It is their decision to keep the codecs closed. Similarly, most of the new spiffy codecs for Quicktime (Sorenson, ClearVoice, and the like) are all made by third-party developers who make their money from the licensing fees from Apple and for selling software to compress movies using their codecs.
I don't suppose it's worth mentioning their contribution to open source to you either. Beyond the basics of Darwin, there is the networking game code that they've released. Apple is hardly as much of a threat to open standards as MS. They been a frequent player in open standards and as someone in the minority position have everything to gain from open standards, unlike Microsoft who can and often does create closed 'standards.'
Actually, NEXTSTEP originally ran on m68k. The later OPENSTEP, which Mac OS X is based on, was created when NeXT realized that while people in business thought their OS was cool, they didn't really want to pay the money for the hardware, so they ported it to Intel and SPARC. (Wasn't there one other? I can't remember now.)
Most of the nastiness of making the code portable was already done during the move to OPENSTEP. Most of what I've heard about the early days of Rhapsody was that the port to PPC was really easy -- almost all the trouble was in porting the Mach microkernel, which was designed with portability in mind.
As for the uglier code bit, let's not throw stones. We can't forget twm and fvwm no matter how hard we try. But I'm not really sure why I'm responding politely to a troll anyway...
Have you forgotten about the Human Genome Project? Even if pharmaceutical companies tried to keep what they had found about human genetics secret, it would eventually come out for public use. However, this way, the company can ensure that they are the only one to be able to use the knowledge they have found without licensing their patent (which they are under no obligation to do). We shouldn't forget just how long 17 or 29 years is in terms of scientific advancement nowdays.
Speaking of software, do you honestly think that people can't innovate and make money in software without patenting their ideas? There have been a good variety of unpatented ideas that have spread throughout the industry. You're using some of them -- TCP/IP, mark-up languages, mouse driven interfaces, etc. 5 years is more than enough to own a lockstep on a product in the computer industry; 17 years is a ludicrous amount of time to hold on a particular algorithm or, worse, on a generic idea like one-click shopping.
I disagree with your assertion that we will have the choice not to use them. In five or so years, it is easily conceivable that some businesses will only take digital signatures since, as you say, they are supposedly harder to forge than pen & paper signatures. I can see certain credit card companies, insurance companies, and e-commerce companies doing this.
You say that digital signatures are harder to forge, but we have all seen article after article on Slashdot talking about breaking crypto. How long until you digital signature is cracked? Someone can simply keep a bunch of signatures that they've snooped on file until such time as they can crack them and then use them freely. Remember, digital data can be perfectly copied without errors. Your signature may be "forged" perfectly without any evidence that it is not genuinely your signature. There will be no more court experts in forgery to save you.
What the President and consumer advocates object to, however, is not this whole issue about the signatures themselves. It's the provisions that certain kinds of notification which must currently be delivered to you in writing will be able to be delivered to you electronically. This means that some people will not be able to get that notification and are no longer protected by getting it in writing. This is what some parts of the industry want and what consumer advocates are all against.
There's a quick little sanity check I do on any of these articles when I hear about them. When businesses are all over a bill and consumer advocates are against it, it usually means that we're about to get screwed if it passes. Always find out why. Bills in Congress almost never involve just one thing. They always let a law that only certain special interests want ride on the back of a law everyone wants so get it passed since it wouldn't be passed normally. It's an attempt to get another law in favor of big business passed with a law that helps everybody.
Katz, you seem to be a victim of your own rhetoric.
This game is trying to reach an audience of Christians often neglected by the "mainstream" world, both Christian and non-Christian. Despite what many non-Christians many think, not all of us Christians are people who scream "the Internet is the Devil!" at the first accidental web search for "free JPEGs." However, this does not keep you, the man who decried schools everwhere for their stereotyping of geeks, goths, and other form of introverts, from stereotyping and lambasting Christians.
I haven't seen the game. To tell the truth, I'd probably find it a little cheesy and would prefer more mainstream games. However, it is an attempt to create a quote-unquote religious game that is not Yet Another Boring Moral Quiz. This is an attempt that should be looked upon favorably or brushed aside if it truly is a poor game, but is instead being bashed simply because the religion in question is Christianity.
Get this in all of your heads now -- we Christians are NOT the Borg. We are individuals, and some of us think a little differently from each other. Hell, if that weren't the case do you think we'd still have all our stupid little denominational squabbles? The seeming contradiction over the creation of a violent game after so much has been said about violence in the media being the root of all evil is because it wasn't the same person giving the two different messages!
This is not News for Nerds. This is another excuse to pigeonhole all Christians into one monolithic entity and call us fools for not agreeing with one another. Well, listen to your own message for once. Christians are people and have their own differing views -- and that's okay.
By the way, Katz.. Just because you've never felt like you been sent the touch of the divine doesn't mean you should be mocking people who do. If you really want to send a message that we should be open to other people's views, you should quit being so hypocritical about religious views. (Not that there'd have been a word about this on this sight if it was a Muslim or Wiccan game...)
With 500 Mhz G4s no where in sight, and as they said, SDRAM prices shooting up, that's really all they could do. If the current trend continued, by the time they had 500 Mhz G4s, they might be taking a loss on the machines.
I'm quite upset that my 500 Mhz order has not only been canceled, but is now completely unavailable, but I'm not going to cry havoc at Apple for it. They're in a bind right now, and I don't think they'd make such a customer-angering move without having thought it out first. (On the other hand, they did design that awful QT 4.0 interface...)
AIM Consordium -- Apple, IBM, Motorola.
Apple does have a small role in the design of the PPC. Their main contribution to the project is in compiler writing. The MrC optimized-as-all-hell PPC C compiler had heavy Apple support, and Apple has been working with Motorola on Altivec from the early days when the idea of putting VMX (a proposed but never implemented SIMD archetecture for the POWER family) into the PPC design was discussed. They helped add the Altivec support to the MrC compiler.
As anyone who knows about chip design knows, the compiler writers are just as essential as the people who map out how the silicon's going to look. (Heck in the case of Merced, they're even more important, but I digress.) Altivec has been just as much Apple's baby as Motorola's. That's why there will be so much support for it in the MacOS in the future. It's no marketing gimmick like MMX was; Apple wanted it to be something they could USE everywhere they could.
Don't worry.
The PPC family tends to run in the 10-20 W range (sometimes lower, sometimes higher). Comparing that to a 1000 W microwave oven would make me think that it would take a loooonnnng time to cook your eyes looking at it. Plus the chips and case try to shield against as much EM and radio interferance as they can usually. I doubt we'll have any worries soon.
I'm just wondering why no one who's burned their fingers on a hot Pentium has tried to sue Intel or their OEM yet. Seems just as reasonable as that crazy old McDonald's coffee lawsuit.
I'm curious what software, hardware, drawing tools, etc. you use to make the series -- especially the episodes with animated effects.
Check out Mac OS Rumors. The article for today (9/7) mentions that they are working on the firmware patch to the G3's mentioned on AppleInsider, but also that the decision to put it there in the first place was very controversial and was mainly intended to insure that 3rd-party processor upgrade makers didn't beat them to the market with a G4. Still not very nice, but not as ogre-like as forever baring G3 owners from upgrading. Plus the G4s themselves are easily processor upgradable for future SMP cards. It may not be as bad as AppleInsider makes it out to be. Plus, this is just an early prototype. The earlier Sawtooth prototypes also had the boot ROM on the processor daughtercard rather than the motherboard as it is currently.
Macs are quite well documented and use mostly standard parts to keep the prices down and encouraged 3rd part hardware developers to develop for the Mac platform. Look here next time so that your opinions will actually be informed ones.
The G4 chip has Altivec, the PPC platform's SIMD extensions. These are 128-bit (vs. the P3's 64-bit) vector math additions that have their own dedicated parallel units on the CPU (vs. MMX's need to turn off the FPU and use its registers). They are well supported in PPC C compilers (unlike MMX and SSE, which require nasty direct use of x86 assembler -- ). They will be extensively supported in the main OS for the machine and many of its applications (unlike MMX and SSE which are really only supported in a limited fashion in DirectX and a few games). In other words, this is one of the reasons Mac OS X will smoke the competition. Oh, and the better SMP support than the P3's hardcoded 4-way (which require serious hardware hacks to get around for the new 8-way machines) and the new, improved FPU don't hurt either.
The problem with PixelFusion and the other massively parallel computers like the FPGA based reprogrammable designs is that not all (or in fact most) computer problems can easily by computed in a parallel fashion.
This is a classic of computer science. Step B requires step A to finish. Step C requires step B to finish, and step D requires step A to finish. While steps B & D can be executed in parallel since they only require step A to be finished before being done, A-B-C MUST be executed in sequence. These designs, which are much slower at sequential computation than conventional computer designs would not handle these problems as well. This is why PixelFuzion's promises are not going to hold up well. Computer scientists have struggled with the problem of parallelization of code for decades with little radical progress.
Why bother?
The peak rate for this future 1600 MHz chip is only 6.4 gigaflops with its "new SIMD 3D instructions." The current 500 MHz G4 chip peaks at 4 gigaflops with single-precision Altivec SIMD operations. That means that this future Alpha only has a 8:5 gigaflop advantage over the current PPC rather than the 16:5 advantage you would expect from the higher chip clock rate alone, plus the higher memory bus clock rate than the PC-100 RAM that the PowerMac G4s use. If this is as good as it gets compared to now, then how will it compare to higher clocked PPCs also coming in the future?
While it'll beat the snot out any future x86 chips for awhile, it's a far sight from being worth porting away from PPC, which has a bright future ahead of it. Expect Apple to stick with the PPC. It is easily comparable in performance (though still edged out by Alpha on non-vectorized integer and FP operations), but it beats the heck out of Alpha on price, heat, and power consumption -- which is key for notebooks and low-end consumer machines. Also, the hassles of binary incompatibility makes it by far not worth the trouble.
Darwin is not meant to try to suck developers off of Linux and the other BSDen. It is meant so that Mac developers have a chance to look at the underlying parts of the system. It is meant for people who want to do 'unofficial' installs of MacOS X on older PowerMacs. It's meant to make the Mac community stronger and to allow people who use the Mac to have more freedom in how their system runs and more of a chance to fix things themselves.
It's not meant to be the replacement for Linux. It's not meant to be the replacement for all of BSD. It's just an opening of the underlying layers of a previously wholy proprietary system. It means no more secrets here.
Now for the cynical side:
It means that Apple can freely use code from the other BSD variants and certain GPLed code. Since the source to it all is available on the FTP site, they won't be violating anything by not distributing it on the Consumer version install CD, if I recall the GPL correctly. Of course, they don't HAVE to give out the code to the BSD license derived software, but I think Apple/Next learned their lesson with Objective-C and gcc and would rather have good will than potential legal hassle on the GPLed components.
Plus, why not open up the BSD layer? It's all already out there anyway, and it can only help Apple to do it.
You know what? There's a reason why without ACs certain things wouldn't be said. It's the same reason that they're called Anonymous Cowards. If you're too afraid to have your name associated with an opinion, then you really shouldn't be saying it, and we most certainly shouldn't have to be seeing it when reading the posts of people who have the courage to put their name on an opinion.
That's my flame, and I'm sticking to it. The only reason I've ever posted AC was laziness, not because I wanted to use it as a shield for a controversial opinion. I note that you mention that we have to support our opinions with logical and useful arguments. Why shouldn't everybody be held to the same standard?
I mean, it's just BSD unless you also port the Carbon and Cocoa APIs and the interface to x86.
There's nothing in it for Apple. As people often forget, Apple is a hardware manufacturer. They get the money to fund OS development from hardware sales. Port the OS to x86, and suddenly no one's buying Apple hardware anymore. No more hardware, no more money for OS development. Do you see the downward spiral here?
Yes, all of these things were true and more. Objective-C is a joy to program in (now that I'm learning it finally), and the visual development environments were and still are in many ways light years ahead of their time.
However, OPENSTEP was very pricey. That was the main reason it didn't catch on. Plus, like most other things, it wasn't DOS/Windows and that was reason enough.
THey had an article about the POWER4 chips coming up soon, which ARE, despite plenty of misunderstanding, 64-bit PPCs like their POWER3 predecessors.
64-bitness in the PPC world is a bit hard to define anyway. The instruction set is designed to support 32-bit and 64-bit modes equally well. It's just a matter or whether or not the processor supports 32-bit or 64-bit memory access. I think that the current 64-bit chips still do 32-bit integer math. I know all of them use 64-bit FPs.
Plus, I don't know how much better an equally clocked Alpha is going to compare to that POWER4 beast -- especially if you factor in multiple cores and the 500 MHz memory bus. Sure, two cores against one's a little unfair, but I think it may still compete well against a dual Alpha system with the Alphas currently using a slower memory bus and without the direct core-to-core communication that the POWER4 will have.
(I like the line about HP trying to kill Intel with IA-64, though.t)
I mean, there's an age for that, and there's an age when that's just unsettling to a small child. It's the violence that's the main problem.
When I was 10 and under, I used to run around a LOT outside. Being hyperactive helped a lot on that, though. Seriously, I don't know a kid under 6 who can't find something to do for 5 hours outside unless they're like my little cousin who just doesn't like the outdoors at all.
BTW, surfing is at least a little interactive. TV is nothing more than sitting down and turning off your higher brain for 30 minutes at a time, unless your watching educational or news channels. (And there's only so much Crocodile Hunter you can watch...)