Actually, I wish Apple or someone else would come up with a hack to allow you to bring the main menu to the mouse pointer, kinda like NextStep (which I believe used a 3 button mouse -- one was the primary, one was the context menu button, and one would pop the main menu up at your mouse pointer),
You don't have it quite right. There is also position to indicate what they do, and little "X" "+" and "-" symbols do appear when you hover the mouse over the buttons.
That said, it would be preferable if the symbols were on all the time for the color blind (having to hover the mouse over the buttons to figure out what they did is annoying), but it's not as totally hopeless as you implied.
I use ClearCase on Linux where I work and haven't had any major problems (except that no one here can quite figure out how to get the Linux automounter to work with ClearCase and I'm too lazy to try to figure it out myself).
That said, I'm no big fan of ClearCase. It seems needlessly complex and sluggish, has limited platform support (compared to CVS, which is what we used to use and would basically run on anything you could compile it on), and I think there's something just wrong about having a version control system have modules that run in kernel mode.
The Apple stealing from Xerox thing is a bit fuzzy as supposedly Apple did give Xerox a chunk of Apple stock for permission to visit PARC to begin with and get some ideas from the technology there. I don't know if this is true or not, and of course the case could be argued as to whether or not the amount of stock Apple may have given was as valueable as the tech they got from PARC.
I wouldn't call ClearCase "good." Better than SourceSafe from what I heard, but it is a pain in the ass in many ways. Yes, it scales, and yes, it gets the job done very nicely, but I'm not a big fan of *how* it gets the job done.
Ugh. No offense, but you must be some kind of masochist if you like ClearCase. I honestly do prefer CVS to it (even though it does have a few nice features) just because it's such a pain in the ass to use and install.
Macs come with USB. What's not standard about that?
Mac towers come with Gigabit ethernet standard. I don't see any PCs coming with that standard.
Just about all Macs come with CD-RWs standard. Don't need floppies, usually, if you have one of those. Half the PCs I've seen don't come with CD-RWs standard -- just CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs.
Macs come with Firewire standard. That's a pretty standard port as nearly every digital camcorder uses them.
PCs have more "legacy" hardware, that's true, but the Macs have at least as many of the newer standard ports as stadard equipment than most PCs.
XP/2k has no *nix basis at all. All its developers originally worked at DEC on VMS. It has a POSIX layer, but most people consider it a pretty bad impelmentation of POSIX, at best.
Eh, if you try hard enough you can take one thing and make it look like nearly anything else. I mean, it's like the old example of Nazi Germany not being that bad because "at least the trains ran on time."
That said, no the U.S. isn't a perfect country, not by a long shot, but it's no where near as bad as the Empire. Actually, I'd compare the U.S. more with the Old Republic, seeing as how both have a Senade that's too beaurocratic to get any real work done for the people.:)
RISC has nothing to do with the number of instructions on the CPU. It's a philosophy of CPU design where all the instructions are the same size, the architecture is load/store (no memory-to-memory instruction operands -- everything goes through the regsiters), you have a large number of general purpose registers, and (with the exception of really complicated things such as floating point, memory access, etc.), everything executes in the same number of clock cycles.
In the early days of RISC, these designs often involved having few instructions that the CISC processors of the days, hence the RISC nomenclature. However, as CPU requirements have become more complicated, more instructions were necessary. The instructions are still noticably simpler than those found in a CISC CPU, however, so the "R" in "RISC" could be said to stand for "Reduced complexity" instead of just "Reduced."
The PPC is still a RISC by the modern definition of the term. All the instructions are 32 bits in size, they all execute in the same number of clock cycles (with the aforemention exception of floating point), it's a fully load/store architecture, it has plenty of registers, and doesn't allow memory-to-memory instructions. Compare that with a CISC like the x86 where instruction sizes vary, you have a puny register set, many instructions can accept memory addresses instead of registers as operands, and instruction execution time also varies.
Motorola PPC dated technology? The x86 series is at least twice as old as the PPC and is nearly the end of its life (hence IA64 and all that). They only reason they keep it around was because they'd be afraid of pissing off all those that have been running x86 software for 20 years or so. Every generation of x86 has to deal with a whole load of garbage on it in order to deal with its dated technology and trying to bring it up to par with more modern designs. That's why you have disgusting design decisions like the ridiculous 20-stage pipeline in the P4. Granted, the Athlon is more elegantly designed, but it still has a longer pipe than the G4 (I think the G4 has a 7 stage pipe and the Athlon a 10 stage pipe, but I could be wrong here), all because of the overhead of dealing with x86 instructions. The longer pipe does allow for higher clock speeds, but there are other things, such as branch mispredict penalties and the like.
Is the 1.2 GHz Athlon faster than 800 MHz G4? Possibly. I wouldn't be surprised (400 MHz could be enough to make up any problems inherent with the instruction set architecture). Is it more advanced than the G4? Not by a long shot.
You forget that it's a 15" flat planet screen. Unlike CRTs, flat panel screen dimensions are given in terms of visible area, not tube size without paying attention to the plastic shell. A 15" flat panel would be more or less the size of a 17" CRT when it comes to real viewable area.
A 17" screen is certainly very respectable on an entry-level system.
You don't even have to buy Phillips electronics. Norelco, the electric shaver people, happens to be owned by Phillips as well. I'm sure they're not the only company Phillips owns.
No, they're criminal in that they're breaking a government law. However, they are a misdemeaner at worst (unless you killed someone, did a DUI, etc). A civil infraction would be something I could sue you over, such as failing to uphold your side of a contract, that there is no real government involvement in.
Granted, I am not a lawyer, but I always thought this is how it breaks down.
Re:PCs still cost much less (50%) if you ignore st
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New iMac Announced
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I would hardly call EMachines a good "brand name" though. EMachines is pretty much the Yugo of the PC market.
If you want to compare prices, you're better off with something like a Dell that charges a bit more because of their having a reputation as being a solid manufacturer.
They mentioned towards the end that the plating needed repolarizing -- I interpreted this as meaning that the plating isn't just a hunk of metal, but perhaps a hunk of charged metal, and perhaps whatever devices charges them is what failed.
Re:Hate to say, sounds like a dot-bomb strategy...
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HP Buys Compaq
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Compaq still does a lot of VMS development -- it's still a huge cashcow for them -- they've just ported it to the Alpha as OpenVMS.
We have one of their top of the line Alpha boxes running OpenVMS in our labs right now...
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Could you at least explain why to you it just wasn't Unix? Give some evidence to back up your assertion.
Actually, I wish Apple or someone else would come up with a hack to allow you to bring the main menu to the mouse pointer, kinda like NextStep (which I believe used a 3 button mouse -- one was the primary, one was the context menu button, and one would pop the main menu up at your mouse pointer),
You don't have it quite right. There is also position to indicate what they do, and little "X" "+" and "-" symbols do appear when you hover the mouse over the buttons.
That said, it would be preferable if the symbols were on all the time for the color blind (having to hover the mouse over the buttons to figure out what they did is annoying), but it's not as totally hopeless as you implied.
I use ClearCase on Linux where I work and haven't had any major problems (except that no one here can quite figure out how to get the Linux automounter to work with ClearCase and I'm too lazy to try to figure it out myself).
That said, I'm no big fan of ClearCase. It seems needlessly complex and sluggish, has limited platform support (compared to CVS, which is what we used to use and would basically run on anything you could compile it on), and I think there's something just wrong about having a version control system have modules that run in kernel mode.
The Apple stealing from Xerox thing is a bit fuzzy as supposedly Apple did give Xerox a chunk of Apple stock for permission to visit PARC to begin with and get some ideas from the technology there. I don't know if this is true or not, and of course the case could be argued as to whether or not the amount of stock Apple may have given was as valueable as the tech they got from PARC.
I wouldn't call ClearCase "good." Better than SourceSafe from what I heard, but it is a pain in the ass in many ways. Yes, it scales, and yes, it gets the job done very nicely, but I'm not a big fan of *how* it gets the job done.
Ugh. No offense, but you must be some kind of masochist if you like ClearCase. I honestly do prefer CVS to it (even though it does have a few nice features) just because it's such a pain in the ass to use and install.
Macs come with USB. What's not standard about that?
Mac towers come with Gigabit ethernet standard. I don't see any PCs coming with that standard.
Just about all Macs come with CD-RWs standard. Don't need floppies, usually, if you have one of those. Half the PCs I've seen don't come with CD-RWs standard -- just CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs.
Macs come with Firewire standard. That's a pretty standard port as nearly every digital camcorder uses them.
PCs have more "legacy" hardware, that's true, but the Macs have at least as many of the newer standard ports as stadard equipment than most PCs.
XP/2k has no *nix basis at all. All its developers originally worked at DEC on VMS. It has a POSIX layer, but most people consider it a pretty bad impelmentation of POSIX, at best.
Eh, if you try hard enough you can take one thing and make it look like nearly anything else. I mean, it's like the old example of Nazi Germany not being that bad because "at least the trains ran on time."
That said, no the U.S. isn't a perfect country, not by a long shot, but it's no where near as bad as the Empire. Actually, I'd compare the U.S. more with the Old Republic, seeing as how both have a Senade that's too beaurocratic to get any real work done for the people. :)
RISC has nothing to do with the number of instructions on the CPU. It's a philosophy of CPU design where all the instructions are the same size, the architecture is load/store (no memory-to-memory instruction operands -- everything goes through the regsiters), you have a large number of general purpose registers, and (with the exception of really complicated things such as floating point, memory access, etc.), everything executes in the same number of clock cycles.
In the early days of RISC, these designs often involved having few instructions that the CISC processors of the days, hence the RISC nomenclature. However, as CPU requirements have become more complicated, more instructions were necessary. The instructions are still noticably simpler than those found in a CISC CPU, however, so the "R" in "RISC" could be said to stand for "Reduced complexity" instead of just "Reduced."
The PPC is still a RISC by the modern definition of the term. All the instructions are 32 bits in size, they all execute in the same number of clock cycles (with the aforemention exception of floating point), it's a fully load/store architecture, it has plenty of registers, and doesn't allow memory-to-memory instructions. Compare that with a CISC like the x86 where instruction sizes vary, you have a puny register set, many instructions can accept memory addresses instead of registers as operands, and instruction execution time also varies.
Tell that to Compaq, who reverse-engineered the original IBM PC...
Ahh, but you forget one problem. A branch mispredict on the longer pipeline means more instructions need to be cancelled, causing massive slowdowns.
A shorter pipeline is better overall. The only reason to have a massively long pipeline is to jack up clock speeds.
As far as I'm concerned, once HP killed their calculator division, they no longer had any worthwhile products.
Motorola PPC dated technology? The x86 series is at least twice as old as the PPC and is nearly the end of its life (hence IA64 and all that). They only reason they keep it around was because they'd be afraid of pissing off all those that have been running x86 software for 20 years or so. Every generation of x86 has to deal with a whole load of garbage on it in order to deal with its dated technology and trying to bring it up to par with more modern designs. That's why you have disgusting design decisions like the ridiculous 20-stage pipeline in the P4. Granted, the Athlon is more elegantly designed, but it still has a longer pipe than the G4 (I think the G4 has a 7 stage pipe and the Athlon a 10 stage pipe, but I could be wrong here), all because of the overhead of dealing with x86 instructions. The longer pipe does allow for higher clock speeds, but there are other things, such as branch mispredict penalties and the like.
Is the 1.2 GHz Athlon faster than 800 MHz G4? Possibly. I wouldn't be surprised (400 MHz could be enough to make up any problems inherent with the instruction set architecture). Is it more advanced than the G4? Not by a long shot.
Amen to that... I got pretty fed up with his crap as well. Thanks go to the guy who pointed out there was a checkbox to filter his junk.
A 17" screen is certainly very respectable on an entry-level system.
You don't even have to buy Phillips electronics. Norelco, the electric shaver people, happens to be owned by Phillips as well. I'm sure they're not the only company Phillips owns.
No, they're criminal in that they're breaking a government law. However, they are a misdemeaner at worst (unless you killed someone, did a DUI, etc). A civil infraction would be something I could sue you over, such as failing to uphold your side of a contract, that there is no real government involvement in.
Granted, I am not a lawyer, but I always thought this is how it breaks down.
I would hardly call EMachines a good "brand name" though. EMachines is pretty much the Yugo of the PC market.
If you want to compare prices, you're better off with something like a Dell that charges a bit more because of their having a reputation as being a solid manufacturer.
Naaa, let O-Town stay around. Ashley Angel get spared the death penalty for having been a voice actor in the Lunar RPGs before joining a boy band. :P
Sorry, inside joke among Lunar fans...
It was also used by the Sega GameGear and Master System.
They mentioned towards the end that the plating needed repolarizing -- I interpreted this as meaning that the plating isn't just a hunk of metal, but perhaps a hunk of charged metal, and perhaps whatever devices charges them is what failed.
Compaq still does a lot of VMS development -- it's still a huge cashcow for them -- they've just ported it to the Alpha as OpenVMS.
We have one of their top of the line Alpha boxes running OpenVMS in our labs right now...
Perhaps, but it also turns out that "Atheos" means "without a god" in Greek, purely by accident.