Betting on the odds, the UI for StartOffice is going to suck, it will be a horrible Mac application, and Mac users are going to reject it as a result.
I can see how this makes sense from Sun's perspective -- create a multiplatform office environment to take back some control -- but I don't think they're very well equipped to tackle the Mac market. Sun is not exactly well-known for good UI or good Mac support (cough, cough, Java, cough).
Apple's consumer models already ship with AppleWorks, which is a capable application suite. The professionals generally buy MS Office, which is actually pretty good. Sun coming out with a half-assed, ugly, straight Unix port will mean a close zero adoption rate.
I wonder what would happen if they ported MacOS to IA-64, or produced a MacOS emulator for Linux.
The question should be, what conditions would have to be met for Mac OS to be ported to IA-64 or Linux. And the answer is, Steve Jobs would have to go insane.
What in the world would be the benefit of this, anyway? Lord knows that architecture has enough OSs running on it. The market is extremely crowded, and during the transition, Apple loses a lot of the value proposition of the single, focused, computer architecture design.
The only situation that might make sense, and perhaps this is what you were suggesting, is if Macs switched to IA-64 all at once. Although in that case, Apple loses AltiVec (aka Velocity Engine), and the stuff IBM is cooking up for the multi-core G5s (for want of a better name).
Unfortunately, Motorola has released screwed things up in terms of clock speed, but the PowerPC archicture overall is, IMHO, superior to what I've seen from intel.
I've found a MacOS runtime app for BeOS and linux PPC which can be found at SheepShaver.com. The linux version is in beta, and you should take it up with them to port it to linux x86. You can read all about it at their site.
Aside form the inherent performance problems from attempting to emulate a different processor, there is another issue. Each Mac by definition has a Mac OS license and a Mac ROM (though that is changing), which is why SheepShaver is okay. x86 has neither.
This is A Good Thing. If StarOffice runs on all common platforms, it could compete with Office (not likely, but possible) to be the file format of choice. Competition is another Good Thing.
Perhaps a more realistic and better goal is that with increased popularity of StarOffice the marketing/nontechnial people realize that it's not a safe assumption that everyone is using MS Office, and therefore everyone reverts to something a bit more flexible like XML/XSL.
Mozilla, while being a monster, could be wort sponsoring. Personally, I'd rather see a Gtk+ port of Konqueror, the KDE browser, or some funding of Mnemonic (anyone remember that effort?).
It sees silly to me at this point to invest in a Linux-only (or even Linux-centric browser). That's going to make it even harder for web developers/designers to support Linux. Mozilla is a much better bet. Plus an investment in Mozilla is an investment in portable multi-platform applications. The wacky ones like Konqueror or Mnemonic will almost certainly never find their way off of Linux. Both seem like a stop gap. History has tought us that browsers must be multiplatform to be useful.
Rather dissapointing that we're at a point where every week a new graphics card comes out with a proprietary chipset yet we can only run games on one chipset introduced 5 years ago that costs twice what most chipsets cost nowadays. 3DImage 975: $30 cheap. Voodoo 3: $73 obsolete.
I don't know about the Linux version, but the Mac version of Q3 has both generic and Voodoo-specific OpenGL support. In theory, OpenGL nullifies the chipset issue.
It's about the content, stupid Ultimately, the growth and popularity of your site is determined by the quality of its content, not its looks.
What a very Slashdot thing to say.
It's a balance. The information has to be accessible to people. That can only be done through good user interface. And note that sometimes the looks _are_ the content. It depends on the purpose of the site.
Test with Lynx and make sure it provides an adequate (though not wonderful) user experience, then it'll likely work for everyone else.
Oh no. Not Lynx. Help! Next you'll want to make sure the site works on mobile phones.:)
Engineers try to create very focussed products that solve specific needs well, marketing tries to broaden the product's appeal, overloading it with features that end up satisfying no-one. Start broadening your appeal only after you've created a solid user base.
I completely agree with this. Amazon followed this philosophy perfectly.
Platform The underlying platform is irrelevent, in both security and performance. You should strongly consider PERL for dynamic content, only because it is the most used
Good reasoning. Windows is also the most widely used, you should go with that as well. There are better options
I don't agree. Banner ads can be affective they are 1) relevant to the audience 2) placed so that they stand out. Slashdot actually does a good job of both, so I actually look at the ads on this stie.
You can't just throw any banner anywhere and expect instant success.
Regardless of the right or wrong of Yahoo's actions, it's good to know that there is a far less censored source of global discussions: usenet. Let's never forget that.
I looked at Perl, and was pretty much turned off. All those importated libraries/modules just to get basic web and database functionality. Needlessly complicated, IMHO. PHP has that stuff built in. (I can live without built in graphing:).
Plus, Perl is pretty slow. PHP is considerably more efficient in my experience (based on 3 Ultra2s running Apache 1.2x). Mod_perl is faster, but the memory requirements are large to say the least, and it's a pain to get working. To me, PHP is a much more readable and human language. Not so much random garbage.
You mean people actually want those? They're only ~1.54Mbps raw, folks. Compare this to ~52Mbps over cable (shared) or the ~6Mbps down/~1Mbps up rates of ADSL
Oh yes, great. As long as you're close enough to the CO to get high-speed DSL, otherwise, you're screwed.
I don't know why everything thinks DSL is this magical solution that just works everywhere. DSL is nice an all, if you're close enough to the Pac Bell central office. I can only get 144k, and my business partner gets a "whopping" 384k. By comparison, a T1 is essentially 1.5MB, guaranteed.
With cable, you don't get dedicated line, and static IPs seem pretty rare as well. Sure, you may get 6MB/sec in certain cases, but when your neighbor gets it cable access as well, that rate is going to be halved at peak hours, and then cut down again when the next person gets it, and so on.
I know one person that has 1.5MB DSL, but seems quite rare. You just have to be in the right place. He also only has 144k upstream. And before you say "I don't serve webpages," remember that Q3 packets go both down and upstream.
Think about it, look back five years ago and ask yourself what companies were running their mission critical systems on. It wasnt 486es or Pentiums (not until Pentium Pro was released), comapnies ran Sun, SGI, Alpha, but not many Pentiums. Now look anywhere, your favorite flavour Pentium is probably on some server in your office (but then again maybe it isn't).
I'm not really sure if it's Intel that deserves the credit for this shift. The fact that Intel-based machines weren't common as server had far less to do with the CPU than it did with the OS. About five years ago, you could run DOS or DOS. Now there is Linux, Solaris, BSD, NT, etc.
when you buy their products in suites priced higher than a real tool like AutoCAD or a SQL database server. Yes. AutoCAD is great for 2D graphics manipulation, and Oracle is great for web design. They are "real tools." - Scott ------ Scott Stevenson
The way the wording is arranged, it makes it sound like the 700mhz chips will be laptop-ready, but I would be surprised if that was relaly the case. Never is this explicitly stated. The Wired article, in fact, never says that.
The new chip will, not only be available for desktop machines, but notebooks as[ ]well; thanks to a new design which makes them cooler.
You're right, but I guess I'm still sorta in the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp.:) Also, no one said that 700mhz chips would be in laptops, just that they would be Pentium IIIs.
This topic deserves some intelligent conversation. I can't find any benchmarks on spec.org for PowerMacs (which is silly), but I'm going to make some educated guesses. I think these are fairly reasonable assessments, quite unlike all the "MAC SUX" stuff so far.
o A regular integer-centric application (Word, Excel, etc.) is likely to be faster on a Pentium 700 than it is on a PowerPC 450. It's generally accepted that a 450mhz G4 is comparable to a 550mhz, possibly 600mhz Pentium.
o An application optimized for the G4's Velocity Engine (AltiVec) is likely noticeably faster than an application optimized for a 700mhz Pentium. These would include Photoshop, Media 100, Media Cleaner Pro, and possibly SETI@Home.
o An unoptimized (on either side) floating point-centric application may be closer to a toss up.
o A pentium 700mhz likely runs significantly hotter and sucks down more enegry than a G4. While G4s consume a bit too much more at this point to be great for laptops, there's much better chance at them going mobile that the high-end pentiums anytime soon.
o Quake 3 will probably be quite a bit faster on a P3 700 than a G4/450 (based on Carmack's recent observations on the topic).
o Somebody who stares at xterms or MS Office all day probably isn't going to notice much difference one way or the other.
I don't know enough about Athlon, so I'll stay out of that.
maybe in a loop of adding integers, which is REAL uninteresting. lets try, oh, floating point math or something thats actually HARD.
Do you know anything about PPC 7400? If so you'd know that floating point operations is what it excels at.
Even in photoshop, the apple speed messiahs most favorite program to quote, a hellah high MHZ pentium STILL RUNS IT FASTER.
Tell it to John Warnock (Adobe CEO and Chairman): "Of all the machines we have seen, this is fastest machine that runs our applications." -- http://www.macnn.com/features/seyboldsf99/
Jackmott: I don't think you really understand how fast a G4-optimized program runs. Do all the trolls come out on the weekends or something?
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't we have our own 'Man of the year' thread here on Slashdot?
Because the winner is essentially obvious, and anything short of that would probably be viewed as ballot box stuffing.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Betting on the odds, the UI for StartOffice is going to suck, it will be a horrible Mac application, and Mac users are going to reject it as a result.
I can see how this makes sense from Sun's perspective -- create a multiplatform office environment to take back some control -- but I don't think they're very well equipped to tackle the Mac market. Sun is not exactly well-known for good UI or good Mac support (cough, cough, Java, cough).
Apple's consumer models already ship with AppleWorks, which is a capable application suite. The professionals generally buy MS Office, which is actually pretty good. Sun coming out with a half-assed, ugly, straight Unix port will mean a close zero adoption rate.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
I wonder what would happen if they ported MacOS to IA-64, or produced a MacOS emulator for Linux.
The question should be, what conditions would have to be met for Mac OS to be ported to IA-64 or Linux. And the answer is, Steve Jobs would have to go insane.
What in the world would be the benefit of this, anyway? Lord knows that architecture has enough OSs running on it. The market is extremely crowded, and during the transition, Apple loses a lot of the value proposition of the single, focused, computer architecture design.
The only situation that might make sense, and perhaps this is what you were suggesting, is if Macs switched to IA-64 all at once. Although in that case, Apple loses AltiVec (aka Velocity Engine), and the stuff IBM is cooking up for the multi-core G5s (for want of a better name).
Unfortunately, Motorola has released screwed things up in terms of clock speed, but the PowerPC archicture overall is, IMHO, superior to what I've seen from intel.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
I've found a MacOS runtime app for BeOS and linux PPC which can be found at SheepShaver.com. The linux version is in beta, and you should take it up with them to port it to linux x86. You can read all about it at their site.
Aside form the inherent performance problems from attempting to emulate a different processor, there is another issue. Each Mac by definition has a Mac OS license and a Mac ROM (though that is changing), which is why SheepShaver is okay. x86 has neither.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
"1.2M downloads so far...."
And Quake3DemoTest had over a million downloads within 3 days of release? Something's wrong here....
You can't kill anyone with productivity software. Not even the paperclip guy.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
This is A Good Thing. If StarOffice runs on all common platforms, it could compete with Office (not likely, but possible) to be the file format of choice. Competition is another Good Thing.
Perhaps a more realistic and better goal is that with increased popularity of StarOffice the marketing/nontechnial people realize that it's not a safe assumption that everyone is using MS Office, and therefore everyone reverts to something a bit more flexible like XML/XSL.
In essence, the file format battle dies.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Mozilla, while being a monster, could be wort sponsoring. Personally, I'd rather see a Gtk+ port of Konqueror, the KDE browser, or some funding of Mnemonic (anyone remember that effort?).
It sees silly to me at this point to invest in a Linux-only (or even Linux-centric browser). That's going to make it even harder for web developers/designers to support Linux. Mozilla is a much better bet. Plus an investment in Mozilla is an investment in portable multi-platform applications. The wacky ones like Konqueror or Mnemonic will almost certainly never find their way off of Linux. Both seem like a stop gap. History has tought us that browsers must be multiplatform to be useful.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Rather dissapointing that we're at a point where every week a new graphics card comes out with a proprietary chipset yet we can only run games on one chipset introduced 5 years ago that costs twice what most chipsets cost nowadays. 3DImage 975: $30 cheap. Voodoo 3: $73 obsolete.
I don't know about the Linux version, but the Mac version of Q3 has both generic and Voodoo-specific OpenGL support. In theory, OpenGL nullifies the chipset issue.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Anyway, Q3 is cool, but the FPS guys are gonna have to start coming out with really different stuff if they want to keep people coming.
:)
Okay, I'll get right on it, right after I play another hour or two of Q3.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
extend and leverage your logistics
migrate those binary products to use internet protocols
No hablo espanol.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
It's about the content, stupid Ultimately, the growth and popularity of your site is determined by the quality of its content, not its looks.
:)
What a very Slashdot thing to say.
It's a balance. The information has to be accessible to people. That can only be done through good user interface. And note that sometimes the looks _are_ the content. It depends on the purpose of the site.
Test with Lynx and make sure it provides an adequate (though not wonderful) user experience, then it'll likely work for everyone else.
Oh no. Not Lynx. Help! Next you'll want to make sure the site works on mobile phones.
Engineers try to create very focussed products that solve specific needs well, marketing tries to broaden the product's appeal, overloading it with features that end up satisfying no-one. Start broadening your appeal only after you've created a solid user base.
I completely agree with this. Amazon followed this philosophy perfectly.
Platform The underlying platform is irrelevent, in both security and performance. You should strongly consider PERL for dynamic content, only because it is the most used
Good reasoning. Windows is also the most widely used, you should go with that as well. There are better options
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
I don't agree. Banner ads can be affective they are 1) relevant to the audience 2) placed so that they stand out. Slashdot actually does a good job of both, so I actually look at the ads on this stie.
You can't just throw any banner anywhere and expect instant success.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Regardless of the right or wrong of Yahoo's actions, it's good to know that there is a far less censored source of global discussions: usenet. Let's never forget that.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
I looked at Perl, and was pretty much turned off. All those importated libraries/modules just to get basic web and database functionality. Needlessly complicated, IMHO. PHP has that stuff built in. (I can live without built in graphing :).
Plus, Perl is pretty slow. PHP is considerably more efficient in my experience (based on 3 Ultra2s running Apache 1.2x). Mod_perl is faster, but the memory requirements are large to say the least, and it's a pain to get working. To me, PHP is a much more readable and human language. Not so much random garbage.
I'm a PHP fanatic.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
You mean people actually want those? They're only ~1.54Mbps raw, folks. Compare this to ~52Mbps over cable (shared) or the ~6Mbps down/~1Mbps up rates of ADSL
Oh yes, great. As long as you're close enough to the CO to get high-speed DSL, otherwise, you're screwed.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
DSL tops out at between 1.1Mbps and 1.5Mbps, that is if you meet the loop qual and their aren't a shit load of bridge taps on the circuit.
I've heard of people getting DSL at 6Mbps. This seems to be a fairly recent advance, and you have to be quite close to the CO.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
I don't know why everything thinks DSL is this magical solution that just works everywhere. DSL is nice an all, if you're close enough to the Pac Bell central office. I can only get 144k, and my business partner gets a "whopping" 384k. By comparison, a T1 is essentially 1.5MB, guaranteed.
With cable, you don't get dedicated line, and static IPs seem pretty rare as well. Sure, you may get 6MB/sec in certain cases, but when your neighbor gets it cable access as well, that rate is going to be halved at peak hours, and then cut down again when the next person gets it, and so on.
I know one person that has 1.5MB DSL, but seems quite rare. You just have to be in the right place. He also only has 144k upstream. And before you say "I don't serve webpages," remember that Q3 packets go both down and upstream.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Think about it, look back five years ago and ask yourself what companies were running their mission critical systems on. It wasnt 486es or Pentiums (not until Pentium Pro was released), comapnies ran Sun, SGI, Alpha, but not many Pentiums. Now look anywhere, your favorite flavour Pentium is probably on some server in your office (but then again maybe it isn't).
I'm not really sure if it's Intel that deserves the credit for this shift. The fact that Intel-based machines weren't common as server had far less to do with the CPU than it did with the OS. About five years ago, you could run DOS or DOS. Now there is Linux, Solaris, BSD, NT, etc.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
If we're going to go that route, I believe SGI's chips are faster (MIPS?). What about IBM's Power3?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
when you buy their products in suites priced higher than a real tool like AutoCAD or a SQL database server. Yes. AutoCAD is great for 2D graphics manipulation, and Oracle is great for web design. They are "real tools." - Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
The way the wording is arranged, it makes it sound like the 700mhz chips will be laptop-ready, but I would be surprised if that was relaly the case. Never is this explicitly stated. The Wired article, in fact, never says that.
The Register suggests that the mobile PIIIs will be 450mhz and 500mhz, in an article that is ten days old.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
The new chip will, not only be available for desktop machines, but notebooks as[ ]well; thanks to a new design which makes them cooler.
You're right, but I guess I'm still sorta in the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp.
I'm willing to be proven wrong.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
This topic deserves some intelligent conversation. I can't find any benchmarks on spec.org for PowerMacs (which is silly), but I'm going to make some educated guesses. I think these are fairly reasonable assessments, quite unlike all the "MAC SUX" stuff so far.
o A regular integer-centric application (Word, Excel, etc.) is likely to be faster on a Pentium 700 than it is on a PowerPC 450. It's generally accepted that a 450mhz G4 is comparable to a 550mhz, possibly 600mhz Pentium.
o An application optimized for the G4's Velocity Engine (AltiVec) is likely noticeably faster than an application optimized for a 700mhz Pentium. These would include Photoshop, Media 100, Media Cleaner Pro, and possibly SETI@Home.
o An unoptimized (on either side) floating point-centric application may be closer to a toss up.
o A pentium 700mhz likely runs significantly hotter and sucks down more enegry than a G4. While G4s consume a bit too much more at this point to be great for laptops, there's much better chance at them going mobile that the high-end pentiums anytime soon.
o Quake 3 will probably be quite a bit faster on a P3 700 than a G4/450 (based on Carmack's recent observations on the topic).
o Somebody who stares at xterms or MS Office all day probably isn't going to notice much difference one way or the other.
I don't know enough about Athlon, so I'll stay out of that.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
maybe in a loop of adding integers, which is REAL uninteresting. lets try, oh, floating point math or something thats actually HARD.
Do you know anything about PPC 7400? If so you'd know that floating point operations is what it excels at.
Even in photoshop, the apple speed messiahs most favorite program to quote, a hellah high MHZ pentium STILL RUNS IT FASTER.
Tell it to John Warnock (Adobe CEO and Chairman): "Of all the machines we have seen, this is fastest machine that runs our applications." -- http://www.macnn.com/features/seyboldsf99/
Jackmott: I don't think you really understand how fast a G4-optimized program runs. Do all the trolls come out on the weekends or something?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
RS/6000 uses the Power chip architecture, which is a relative of, but not identical to PowerPC.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson