Well this is sort of a catch 22 isn't it? How as a sound card manufacturer do I write and test a driver for SAP if I have to get them signed to install them? In order to get them signed they have to be at least beta quality?
Well I guess they will just have to ship a development OS without the signature protection. From that it becomes a 5 minute job for someone to figure out what the OS differences are and post a patch complete with bootable floppy if needed to hack an OS to allow it to install non signed drivers. Then its just a matter of installing any old crap you want.
< RANT >
This is why the content protected HD's are a pain. You can't just boot to linux and hack up the OS if its content protected now can you? So your os keeps you from installing drivers, your HD keeps you from changing your OS, your soundcard chooses what its going to allow to play.
Nice hu? Sort of like your automobile telling the inspection station about your 'repair' record what kind of gas you have been using, how many miles you have driven, the max speed your car has achieved, how much Nx's and CO2's you have been dumping etc. How about your nice new digital cell phone with its always on heartbeat, and the triangulation system put in place to help save lives when people call 911 on their cell phones tracking your every move 24 hours a day. The credit card company which knows what you have been buying, where you have been buying it and how much you spend. Your employer (and the FBI) tracking every piece of mail you send and to who. The nice security cameras which capture every time you pick your nose.
</RANT >
Wow I could go on...:> But I'm sure you all have already heard this.
This will probably give you an incredible sound quality since the drivers are usually rated as 8 ohms impedance which is really a nice way of dumbing down the fact that the drivers are really just big nasty non linear inductors. If you replace them with a nice resistor (and they don't try to detect such things) you should get amazingly undistorted sound from which to sample from. Then all you need is a really nice A/D converter and you will get something close enough to the original that is completely indistinguishable.
Now all you have to do is remove the watermark so the poor souls, who aren't as smart as you, can play it on their SDMI compliant HW.
The only 'server' machines (and I'm not talking apple vaporware) that are PPC based (POWER really) are the pseries (RS6k) and Iseries (AS/400) boxes from IBM. Don't really (per processor) perform any better than a PC server when it comes to CPU bound tasks (IO is another matter) and cost a whole lot more. The point is that these P series boxes are power hogs. I can't find the power ratings on these things anymore but let me assure you its not miniscule like the Motorola PPC's which are designed for embedded systems work that apple uses in the Macs.
When it comes to performance I am of course talking about industry wide benchmarks designed to measure real world performance between different platforms. You may have guessed I'm talking about SPEC, TPxx etc. Look at the spec suite before you say anymore, GCC, perl etc. Apple doesn't publish these numbers for the Mac because the OS doesn't support some things needed for SPEC (or so the common rumor is) which means that the OS probably isn't the kind of industrial strength OS you need running your server. Mac's aren't server boxes anyway, server boxes have features like ECC RAM, Hot plug PCI, Hot plug raid, redundant power supplies, Support for many gigs of RAM, OS's that have QOS metrics, and many other features. I will be very interrested to see SPEC and TPCC results from Apple's OS X.
Star control, I'm glad I'm not the only one who disliked the third version. The second one was really nice and easy to play. I don't like games that have control systems that I don't ever feel like I can get fully proficient at because I don't have enough hands. This was the descent vs doom mentality too. I thoroughly enjoyed having 1 mouse and one hand allow me to make all the possible moves. With Descent I felt like I needed foot pedals to get the thing to roll, dive and slide sideways. I'm deathly afraid that War Craft three will have a control system more like Myth than WC2. I didn't like the myth controls because making a fighter group do the right thing always seemed to take 5 clicks and 2 key presses.
"MIPS - never heard of power management. Server lines of PPC derived (u)Sparc - same. "
Old, RS6k's had power management but it was a real nightmare and no one used it anyway (for reasons others have cited). I think it still exists in newer versions of the OS but is basically impossible to get working.
As far as hardwired cooling. The newer RS6k's do have hardware power management for cooling. I think there are a number of things that are done, the most obvious is the fans are often dual speed and when it gets a little toasty your server sounds like its spinning up the turbines and getting ready to take off. I suspect that there are a lot of hidden power features on lots of machines. The new Intel x86's have duty cycle throttling that is set by the BIOS to cycle the internal clock rate (yes even on the desktop processors) if the CPU goes over a certain temperature. Check out the latest PIII or PIV manuals, this is completely transparent to the OS.
OWL died because when MS released NT it took borland forever to get it working. MFC was there and people chose it even though it was hugely buggy at the time (wow I could tell you some horror stories, before numega apparently fixed a bunch of the bugs with testing versions of bounds checker), and MFC was just a huge mess written by a bunch of people who didn't understand OO methodology. The old borland ads with OWL being this pretty bridge in comparison to the messy bridge that was MFC were right on target. I tend to think though that the VCL is OWL version 2. Its more correct, even cleaner and continues to make MFC look like the mess that it is. Christ VC++ is in my opinion equal to Borland C++ 3.1. Borland didn't have the marketing to consider that just because they shipped a graphical resource editor that it was anything like visual programming though.
Try some of the old NIN. Its just terrible! It doesn't seem to get much better with bitrate either unlike classical or jazz. Part of it is that I'm used to NIN off of CD into a pair of Sennheisers, plugging them into the Puter and listening to MP3s is just messy if I'm already familiar with the music. On the other hand if I've never heard the music before I don't mind the MP3's at 128 unless its really obvious.
I started drinking cherry coke again after discovering that the 1 in 7 chance of winning a bottle of coca cola seems to be more like 5 out of 7 with cherry coke. I've won a whopping 8 in a row. I'm a sucker for mostly free things.
This is more for the future than anything, before they disable the non HDTV content they will have to be sure that the majority of their viewers have capable HDTV's, which you can be assured won't happen until walmart is selling a $189.86 25" HDTV. Till then most of the broadcasts will have NTSC signals too. I personally don't really care anymore. I have decided that TV is BAD because its a huge waste of time. When was the last time you actually saw something on TV and were a better person for seeing it? I used to watch a lot of discovery, TLC, History channel. But now I think i've seen all their programs and its just reruns or stupid real life ER, forensics or other crap shows that they are producing now. Frankly the only reason I watch TV is because I don't want to go to bed and I don't have a light (computer manuals are the exact thing I would be trying to get away from, while pure fiction is just as bad as TV sometimes) enough book to read. If there is less and less available on TV then I will be less likely to watch it. I don't even have the history channel anymore because it requires a digital converter which I refuse to get. I may actually get one of those though as soon as I get my hands on a LM1881 which is the last part of a small electronics puzzle i'm working on (if you know what I mean:> ).
Since as everyone agrees sound quality is dependent on the listener I have a couple of important points to make.
First bring your own CD's if you are buying a system to listen to music on, Movies if your buying a home theater or both if you want a system to do both. Bring only CD's you have heard 20 times and are intimately familiar with. This sort of makes your existing system your a reference point. When you are listening to your music on a new set of speakers you will notice things about the music rather than the music. Bring your existing speakers into the store to compare in the same room as the new ones. The other choice is to pick a store that will let you try a pair of speakers before you buy.
Secondly bring a dB meter. There have been a number of studies that have proven sound volume affects peoples perceptions of music reproduction quality more than any other variable. Set all the speakers so they are on equal volume footings, that way you won't pick the speaker that is just louder at a given setting on the amp the store is using.
Third remember that its not going to sound the same when you get it home. Try to identify how your room affects the sound and buy a system that corrects for these issues. Also try to make your own decisions about a brand or model rather than listening to some wanna be audiophile who probably could not pick his system in a blind test when its compared to 5 others. Don't think that price has anything to do with sound quality
I have a diffrent one. Of course there are some issues with play lists and artist titles.. but I don't really care I put the disk in and press play. Then sit around for 10 or 12 hours. The one I have works pretty well even when I'm mountain biking (it is pretty resiliant to shock) but it chewes through AA batteries. It doesn't even play a single 12 hour disk on a new pair of batteries.
Hey, damn I had almost forgotten about OO][ I remember running it in a little program I had written that detected when I went to fight and automatically hit space at the right time for me. I also remember that there was a lag between when you hit space and it registered it which varied depending on which level you were fighting on. Of course my little program compensated for that and I had a 100% hit rate which meant I could wander down pretty deep before I had to worry about getting killed with a new character. A decent character could wander all the way to the bottom without to much of a problem.
Having actually purchased a 286... I can actually remember the whole 286 -vs- 386 argument.. I remember my 286-16 kicking the pants off of a 386DX-16 running a couple of games. The 386 tended to have IN/OUT instructions that were nearly twice as slow (IN took 286 5 cycles and the 386 12 cycles) which caused anything that was doing heavy PIO to run much slower.
There were a number of other things that ran faster too.. Eventually though the 386 scaled to 40mhz (thanks AMD) while the 286 stalled out at 20mhz. This was more than enough clock rate to make the 386 faster at everything.
No it won't. That's the beauty of the protocol, and my whole point!
You continue to miss the other point that is being made! I could care less about the relative efficiencies and portability of X against VNC/Citrix/etc.. What I care about is the common path, which is a frame buffer tightly coupled to a bus close to the CPU. Penalizing that path is generally wrong. No matter what you do there will most likely be an order of magnitude, or more, speed difference between a tightly coupled video subsystem used for high performance graphical applications and your network connected video display!
I understand you claim that there are faster access methods. These faster access methods are inappropriate for photo manipulation programs (which require proper color correction) DP programs which require accurate scaling and font rendering. The list goes on, quake isn't the only high performance video related application and frankly X sucks for anything but what it was designed for, which is providing network display connectivity for a basic GUI. Even there it falls short because of its low level view of how graphics subsystems behave. Having to fight a war to get proper antialiased fonts in a heterogeneous network environment is nearly impossible with X even though it was designed for such an environment.
For those that need remote displays, LET THEM USE VNC.
Huh? What if I have an incredibly fast framebuffer on my SGI, and an incredibly powerful I/O and CPU set on my e4500? VNC doesn't help me much there.
I fail to see the point.. Your network connection will be the bottleneck. The point that I think is being made is that in 90% (or some very large percentage) of the cases people run their applications on a machine with a directly coupled video subsystem. Penalizing these people by adding an abstraction layer that slows them down to allow people with even slower video systems (over then network) is pointless. Its especially pointless when there are alternatives like VNC which allows people to remotely access a graphical system.
I was intending to do something like this, but since its already done I will just add a couple of things...
A wide range of system configurations, changeable without system or user program reorganization. Windows: Only three reboots to install a sound card! Linux: Exchange anything but the kernel without rebooting Microkernels: 8-D
Well I take this to mean 'hot plug' (since dorking with the system/modules is 'system reorganization') which as far as I'm aware linux doesn't support but Win 2k if your HW supports it, AIX, and Solaris do.
Hierarchical structures of information for system administration and decentralization of user activities. Not entirely sure what they mean by this... I think they mean NDS, Active Directory (which is basically LDAP with a bunch of support) and of course LDAP if you are willing to spend the time to get it to support all the cool stuff NDS does .
You are not the only one.. I have floppies from 10 years ago that still work perfectly. When I was in HS i remember carrying them around in my back pocket, opening the window and wiping off the dirt and using them. I also remember my little magic trick, if the floppy isn't working take it out of the drive hold it by a corner and violently slam it against your leg 30 or 40 times in quick succession. This little trick saved me a bunch of times. It actually seemed to work about 90% of the time. I even had friends doing it against their better judgment. As another reader pointed out making sure VERIFY=ON (or the equivalent) assures that your data actually gets to the floppy drive. This is probably most of the problem with modern 'floppies' the data isn't actually making it to the floppy since the OS isn't defaulting to verifying the writes and retrying them if they fail (or marking the sectors bad).
Those aren't "PPC" they are 64-bit POWER processors that are mostly binary compatable with the PPC's that motorola ships as embedded processors that Apple sticks in desktop boxes. Yah, those RS64 III's are nasty processors but as you pointed out the cache still isn't on die. They also consume 5 to 6 times the amount of power that the G4 does. By the time you have added 8 megs of fast SRAM power consumption to the total you are well into the range of your average high end processor.
Accually, you people need to get your facts straight. IBM PPC Roadmap, the IBM PPC Page and Motorola PPC tech doc's. As far as I can tell all the currently available PPC's are using "On Die Tags" Off die SRAM! If you want to talk about future tech thats another story.. The truth of the matter is ALL competitive RISC or otherwise (have you looked at the power consumption of the Alpha? How about the POWER4?) processors are power hogs. The PPC systems that Apple ships are _NOT_ competitive with what is considered a state of the art workstation. Motorola make wonderfull embedded processors.
Comparing modern X86 desktop power consumption to Motorola's PPC offerings is just lame. If your concerned about power look at the laptop processors or some of the embedded x86 designs.
Actually, as soon as you get out of the dark ages of CLI's and try to run a real application like a desktop publishing system, graphics manipulation program, DVD playback, web browser, etc linux begins to look pretty shabby because of the extra overhead incurred by X11. I will take a faster machine any day of the week.
I'm not sure which processor your referring to.. I remember the SPARC coming out at something like 33mhz when the fastest 386 your could buy was 20mhz. I remember being shocked at the clock differences between the Alpha and the 486.. I wish I could quickly find clock rate graph for the R2000, SPARC, etc and the year they were released.
My understanding of RISC has always been lower CPI, higher clock at the cost of higher instruction counts. 'Deep' (and wide) pipelines had the advantage of both increasing the clock rate and lowering the CPI but at the cost of requiring more instructions to do similar actions. I don't really remember the RISC camp loosing on the clock rate war until the early '90s when the Pentium came out.
Actually, due to some architecture issues (read the last few months of comp.arch) with the 68K series it is doubtful that Motorola could have scaled the 68k the way Intel has the x86. From what I understand it has to do with the 68K having to many indirect addressing modes that depend on the value of a memory fetch to find the real data. This problem complicates the pipeline by forcing multiple dependent load stages.
I agree though that apple may have screwed up going to the PPC but any apple customer should have been aware that apple has a track record of dumping there existing base of users as soon as a great new technology comes along.
Its sort of interesting to note though that Transmeta is actually swinging the 'CISC' is better than 'RISC' argument around again. Even though every one claims that the P6 is a 'RISC' arch its really not true in the real sense of the word. Original CISC machines had 'translation' units that translated the ISA to an internal micro-OP execution engine. This is actually what is happening on nearly all processors now. Most of the 'RISC' processors acquired a number of 'CISC'y like instructions in the mid '90s which are turning out to be incredibly difficult to completely implement with hardwired SI and still maintain high clock rates. So instead they break these instructions up into more basic operations and feed them though the pipelines. Originally 'RISC' was designed to do LESS work per cycle and but have a higher clock rate and therefore get more work done.
I came up with the idea the other day that people who have a +2 bonus should loose a point or two every time they use the bonus.. Either that or +2 posts that get moderated down cause 5 to 10 points of karma loss. I would be happy with a button on my user profile to nullify the affects of that +2 bonus. I only want to read comments that have been moderated up not large amounts of crap posted by people with higher default posting levels.
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Well this is sort of a catch 22 isn't it? How as a sound card manufacturer do I write and test a driver for SAP if I have to get them signed to install them? In order to get them signed they have to be at least beta quality?
/RANT >
:> But I'm sure you all have already heard this.
Well I guess they will just have to ship a development OS without the signature protection. From that it becomes a 5 minute job for someone to figure out what the OS differences are and post a patch complete with bootable floppy if needed to hack an OS to allow it to install non signed drivers. Then its just a matter of installing any old crap you want.
< RANT >
This is why the content protected HD's are a pain. You can't just boot to linux and hack up the OS if its content protected now can you? So your os keeps you from installing drivers, your HD keeps you from changing your OS, your soundcard chooses what its going to allow to play.
Nice hu? Sort of like your automobile telling the inspection station about your 'repair' record what kind of gas you have been using, how many miles you have driven, the max speed your car has achieved, how much Nx's and CO2's you have been dumping etc. How about your nice new digital cell phone with its always on heartbeat, and the triangulation system put in place to help save lives when people call 911 on their cell phones tracking your every move 24 hours a day. The credit card company which knows what you have been buying, where you have been buying it and how much you spend. Your employer (and the FBI) tracking every piece of mail you send and to who. The nice security cameras which capture every time you pick your nose.
<
Wow I could go on...
This will probably give you an incredible sound quality since the drivers are usually rated as 8 ohms impedance which is really a nice way of dumbing down the fact that the drivers are really just big nasty non linear inductors. If you replace them with a nice resistor (and they don't try to detect such things) you should get amazingly undistorted sound from which to sample from. Then all you need is a really nice A/D converter and you will get something close enough to the original that is completely indistinguishable.
Now all you have to do is remove the watermark so the poor souls, who aren't as smart as you, can play it on their SDMI compliant HW.
The only 'server' machines (and I'm not talking apple vaporware) that are PPC based (POWER really) are the pseries (RS6k) and Iseries (AS/400) boxes from IBM. Don't really (per processor) perform any better than a PC server when it comes to CPU bound tasks (IO is another matter) and cost a whole lot more. The point is that these P series boxes are power hogs. I can't find the power ratings on these things anymore but let me assure you its not miniscule like the Motorola PPC's which are designed for embedded systems work that apple uses in the Macs.
When it comes to performance I am of course talking about industry wide benchmarks designed to measure real world performance between different platforms. You may have guessed I'm talking about SPEC, TPxx etc. Look at the spec suite before you say anymore, GCC, perl etc. Apple doesn't publish these numbers for the Mac because the OS doesn't support some things needed for SPEC (or so the common rumor is) which means that the OS probably isn't the kind of industrial strength OS you need running your server. Mac's aren't server boxes anyway, server boxes have features like ECC RAM, Hot plug PCI, Hot plug raid, redundant power supplies, Support for many gigs of RAM, OS's that have QOS metrics, and many other features. I will be very interrested to see SPEC and TPCC results from Apple's OS X.
Star control, I'm glad I'm not the only one who disliked the third version. The second one was really nice and easy to play. I don't like games that have control systems that I don't ever feel like I can get fully proficient at because I don't have enough hands. This was the descent vs doom mentality too. I thoroughly enjoyed having 1 mouse and one hand allow me to make all the possible moves. With Descent I felt like I needed foot pedals to get the thing to roll, dive and slide sideways. I'm deathly afraid that War Craft three will have a control system more like Myth than WC2. I didn't like the myth controls because making a fighter group do the right thing always seemed to take 5 clicks and 2 key presses.
Old, RS6k's had power management but it was a real nightmare and no one used it anyway (for reasons others have cited). I think it still exists in newer versions of the OS but is basically impossible to get working.
As far as hardwired cooling. The newer RS6k's do have hardware power management for cooling. I think there are a number of things that are done, the most obvious is the fans are often dual speed and when it gets a little toasty your server sounds like its spinning up the turbines and getting ready to take off. I suspect that there are a lot of hidden power features on lots of machines. The new Intel x86's have duty cycle throttling that is set by the BIOS to cycle the internal clock rate (yes even on the desktop processors) if the CPU goes over a certain temperature. Check out the latest PIII or PIV manuals, this is completely transparent to the OS.
OWL died because when MS released NT it took borland forever to get it working. MFC was there and people chose it even though it was hugely buggy at the time (wow I could tell you some horror stories, before numega apparently fixed a bunch of the bugs with testing versions of bounds checker), and MFC was just a huge mess written by a bunch of people who didn't understand OO methodology. The old borland ads with OWL being this pretty bridge in comparison to the messy bridge that was MFC were right on target. I tend to think though that the VCL is OWL version 2. Its more correct, even cleaner and continues to make MFC look like the mess that it is. Christ VC++ is in my opinion equal to Borland C++ 3.1. Borland didn't have the marketing to consider that just because they shipped a graphical resource editor that it was anything like visual programming though.
TurboVision I think, man was it a pain to program though.
Try some of the old NIN. Its just terrible! It doesn't seem to get much better with bitrate either unlike classical or jazz. Part of it is that I'm used to NIN off of CD into a pair of Sennheisers, plugging them into the Puter and listening to MP3s is just messy if I'm already familiar with the music. On the other hand if I've never heard the music before I don't mind the MP3's at 128 unless its really obvious.
I started drinking cherry coke again after discovering that the 1 in 7 chance of winning a bottle of coca cola seems to be more like 5 out of 7 with cherry coke. I've won a whopping 8 in a row. I'm a sucker for mostly free things.
This is more for the future than anything, before they disable the non HDTV content they will have to be sure that the majority of their viewers have capable HDTV's, which you can be assured won't happen until walmart is selling a $189.86 25" HDTV. Till then most of the broadcasts will have NTSC signals too. I personally don't really care anymore. I have decided that TV is BAD because its a huge waste of time. When was the last time you actually saw something on TV and were a better person for seeing it? I used to watch a lot of discovery, TLC, History channel. But now I think i've seen all their programs and its just reruns or stupid real life ER, forensics or other crap shows that they are producing now. Frankly the only reason I watch TV is because I don't want to go to bed and I don't have a light (computer manuals are the exact thing I would be trying to get away from, while pure fiction is just as bad as TV sometimes) enough book to read. If there is less and less available on TV then I will be less likely to watch it. I don't even have the history channel anymore because it requires a digital converter which I refuse to get. I may actually get one of those though as soon as I get my hands on a LM1881 which is the last part of a small electronics puzzle i'm working on (if you know what I mean :> ).
Since as everyone agrees sound quality is dependent on the listener I have a couple of important points to make.
First bring your own CD's if you are buying a system to listen to music on, Movies if your buying a home theater or both if you want a system to do both. Bring only CD's you have heard 20 times and are intimately familiar with. This sort of makes your existing system your a reference point. When you are listening to your music on a new set of speakers you will notice things about the music rather than the music. Bring your existing speakers into the store to compare in the same room as the new ones. The other choice is to pick a store that will let you try a pair of speakers before you buy.
Secondly bring a dB meter. There have been a number of studies that have proven sound volume affects peoples perceptions of music reproduction quality more than any other variable. Set all the speakers so they are on equal volume footings, that way you won't pick the speaker that is just louder at a given setting on the amp the store is using.
Third remember that its not going to sound the same when you get it home. Try to identify how your room affects the sound and buy a system that corrects for these issues. Also try to make your own decisions about a brand or model rather than listening to some wanna be audiophile who probably could not pick his system in a blind test when its compared to 5 others. Don't think that price has anything to do with sound quality
Check out CD MP3 player
I have a diffrent one. Of course there are some issues with play lists and artist titles.. but I don't really care I put the disk in and press play. Then sit around for 10 or 12 hours. The one I have works pretty well even when I'm mountain biking (it is pretty resiliant to shock) but it chewes through AA batteries. It doesn't even play a single 12 hour disk on a new pair of batteries.
Hey, damn I had almost forgotten about OO][ I remember running it in a little program I had written that detected when I went to fight and automatically hit space at the right time for me. I also remember that there was a lag between when you hit space and it registered it which varied depending on which level you were fighting on. Of course my little program compensated for that and I had a 100% hit rate which meant I could wander down pretty deep before I had to worry about getting killed with a new character. A decent character could wander all the way to the bottom without to much of a problem.
Having actually purchased a 286... I can actually remember the whole 286 -vs- 386 argument.. I remember my 286-16 kicking the pants off of a 386DX-16 running a couple of games. The 386 tended to have IN/OUT instructions that were nearly twice as slow (IN took 286 5 cycles and the 386 12 cycles) which caused anything that was doing heavy PIO to run much slower.
There were a number of other things that ran faster too.. Eventually though the 386 scaled to 40mhz (thanks AMD) while the 286 stalled out at 20mhz. This was more than enough clock rate to make the 386 faster at everything.
No it won't. That's the beauty of the protocol, and my whole point!
You continue to miss the other point that is being made! I could care less about the relative efficiencies and portability of X against VNC/Citrix/etc.. What I care about is the common path, which is a frame buffer tightly coupled to a bus close to the CPU. Penalizing that path is generally wrong. No matter what you do there will most likely be an order of magnitude, or more, speed difference between a tightly coupled video subsystem used for high performance graphical applications and your network connected video display!
I understand you claim that there are faster access methods. These faster access methods are inappropriate for photo manipulation programs (which require proper color correction) DP programs which require accurate scaling and font rendering. The list goes on, quake isn't the only high performance video related application and frankly X sucks for anything but what it was designed for, which is providing network display connectivity for a basic GUI. Even there it falls short because of its low level view of how graphics subsystems behave. Having to fight a war to get proper antialiased fonts in a heterogeneous network environment is nearly impossible with X even though it was designed for such an environment.
For those that need remote displays, LET THEM USE VNC.
Huh? What if I have an incredibly fast framebuffer on my SGI, and an incredibly powerful I/O and CPU set on my e4500? VNC doesn't help me much there.
I fail to see the point.. Your network connection will be the bottleneck. The point that I think is being made is that in 90% (or some very large percentage) of the cases people run their applications on a machine with a directly coupled video subsystem. Penalizing these people by adding an abstraction layer that slows them down to allow people with even slower video systems (over then network) is pointless. Its especially pointless when there are alternatives like VNC which allows people to remotely access a graphical system.
I was intending to do something like this, but since its already done I will just add a couple of things...
A wide range of system configurations, changeable without system or user program reorganization. Windows: Only three reboots to install a sound card! Linux: Exchange anything but the kernel without rebooting Microkernels: 8-D
Well I take this to mean 'hot plug' (since dorking with the system/modules is 'system reorganization') which as far as I'm aware linux doesn't support but Win 2k if your HW supports it, AIX, and Solaris do.
Hierarchical structures of information for system administration and decentralization of user activities. Not entirely sure what they mean by this...
I think they mean NDS, Active Directory (which is basically LDAP with a bunch of support) and of course LDAP if you are willing to spend the time to get it to support all the cool stuff NDS does .
You are not the only one.. I have floppies from 10 years ago that still work perfectly. When I was in HS i remember carrying them around in my back pocket, opening the window and wiping off the dirt and using them. I also remember my little magic trick, if the floppy isn't working take it out of the drive hold it by a corner and violently slam it against your leg 30 or 40 times in quick succession. This little trick saved me a bunch of times. It actually seemed to work about 90% of the time. I even had friends doing it against their better judgment. As another reader pointed out making sure VERIFY=ON (or the equivalent) assures that your data actually gets to the floppy drive. This is probably most of the problem with modern 'floppies' the data isn't actually making it to the floppy since the OS isn't defaulting to verifying the writes and retrying them if they fail (or marking the sectors bad).
Those aren't "PPC" they are 64-bit POWER processors that are mostly binary compatable with the PPC's that motorola ships as embedded processors that Apple sticks in desktop boxes. Yah, those RS64 III's are nasty processors but as you pointed out the cache still isn't on die. They also consume 5 to 6 times the amount of power that the G4 does. By the time you have added 8 megs of fast SRAM power consumption to the total you are well into the range of your average high end processor.
Accually, you people need to get your facts straight. IBM PPC Roadmap, the IBM PPC Page and Motorola PPC tech doc's. As far as I can tell all the currently available PPC's are using "On Die Tags" Off die SRAM! If you want to talk about future tech thats another story.. The truth of the matter is ALL competitive RISC or otherwise (have you looked at the power consumption of the Alpha? How about the POWER4?) processors are power hogs. The PPC systems that Apple ships are _NOT_ competitive with what is considered a state of the art workstation. Motorola make wonderfull embedded processors.
Comparing modern X86 desktop power consumption to Motorola's PPC offerings is just lame. If your concerned about power look at the laptop processors or some of the embedded x86 designs.
Actually, as soon as you get out of the dark ages of CLI's and try to run a real application like a desktop publishing system, graphics manipulation program, DVD playback, web browser, etc linux begins to look pretty shabby because of the extra overhead incurred by X11. I will take a faster machine any day of the week.
I'm not sure which processor your referring to.. I remember the SPARC coming out at something like 33mhz when the fastest 386 your could buy was 20mhz. I remember being shocked at the clock differences between the Alpha and the 486.. I wish I could quickly find clock rate graph for the R2000, SPARC, etc and the year they were released.
My understanding of RISC has always been lower CPI, higher clock at the cost of higher instruction counts. 'Deep' (and wide) pipelines had the advantage of both increasing the clock rate and lowering the CPI but at the cost of requiring more instructions to do similar actions. I don't really remember the RISC camp loosing on the clock rate war until the early '90s when the Pentium came out.
Actually, due to some architecture issues (read the last few months of comp.arch) with the 68K series it is doubtful that Motorola could have scaled the 68k the way Intel has the x86. From what I understand it has to do with the 68K having to many indirect addressing modes that depend on the value of a memory fetch to find the real data. This problem complicates the pipeline by forcing multiple dependent load stages.
I agree though that apple may have screwed up going to the PPC but any apple customer should have been aware that apple has a track record of dumping there existing base of users as soon as a great new technology comes along.
Its sort of interesting to note though that Transmeta is actually swinging the 'CISC' is better than 'RISC' argument around again. Even though every one claims that the P6 is a 'RISC' arch its really not true in the real sense of the word. Original CISC machines had 'translation' units that translated the ISA to an internal micro-OP execution engine. This is actually what is happening on nearly all processors now. Most of the 'RISC' processors acquired a number of 'CISC'y like instructions in the mid '90s which are turning out to be incredibly difficult to completely implement with hardwired SI and still maintain high clock rates. So instead they break these instructions up into more basic operations and feed them though the pipelines. Originally 'RISC' was designed to do LESS work per cycle and but have a higher clock rate and therefore get more work done.
I came up with the idea the other day that people who have a +2 bonus should loose a point or two every time they use the bonus.. Either that or +2 posts that get moderated down cause 5 to 10 points of karma loss.
I would be happy with a button on my user profile to nullify the affects of that +2 bonus. I only want to read comments that have been moderated up not large amounts of crap posted by people with higher default posting levels.