C++ has a very simple philosophy, you don't pay for what you don't use.
My ass. The whole point of object oriented programming is abstraction and encapsulation. Try working with two different C++ systems at once. Say, anything and OmniORB. One library might use RTTI, while another might be working on a KISS base class. Another library may be throwing all kind of exception shit. One library may be using std::except, the other might be throwing ints. Or worse, the library implementor may have not read the 3 lb. "The C++ Programming Language" (try fitting that in a PDF), and is using catch (...) {throw runtime_except()} instead of just 'throw', obliterating any exceptions that you're trying to throw through it.
Hm. I've just gone off an a exception rant there. Let's get back to OmniORB. What if you need to inherit from two classes to get some functionality of both? What if they didn't inherit 'public virtual' from their super class? What if the people writing those classes doesn't know shit about virtual inheritance? What are the odds that someone does?
What if someone's code uses 'new' to allocate everything, and other code uses STL and puts everything on the stack, using copy constructors for everything, and enjoys using exceptions and the fact that stack-based objects get deallocated for free? How are you going to handle memory management? I'd love to take a quote from "The C++ Programming Language," but it's 1000 pages long and I don't think I can find it. Basically, they punt on memory management, saying "It's a complex job and there are many ways to do it, so the problem is left as an exercise to the reader. Overload new."
With C++, eventually you're going to pay for everything.
You've also clearly never done serious programming with the Standard Template Library, where the algorithms are written so generically--and so consistently across different data types--that they can be plugged together in an almost limitless number of configurations.
Yes, 'clearly.' That always wins an argument.
STL is a cute idea, but an abomination. I had the task of a subset of the STL. I still have nightmares about it. I know more about C++ than any man should.
Um, I'd rather have 1 GB of AAC over 1 GB of MP3 any day. If you want to listen to anything remotely intricate on MP3 you really have to crank up the bitrate, to at least 230. For MP3s, I'd usually keep it at 320, just to be safe (because when you can tell the difference, in your favourite song, it really pisses you off).
With AAC I'd top out at 192 (sometimes I need to go higher, but low bitrates with AAC aren't as brutally ugly as they are with MP3). 128 can be very good for simple stuff, but it's very much hit and miss at 128.
And it's not like I'm going to rip all my high-bitrate MP3 music again to use a crappy MP3 bitrate.
And what about software? Is there anything that can smartly choose a subset of your library for the thing, whilst saving disk space for your own use like iTunes' iPod Shuffle support does?
It's Apple's responsibility to provide drivers for OEM parts. If you buy a card from ATi you get your driver updates from ATI's site. nVidia doesn't make Mac hardware, Apple builds those boards.
As a Mac user, I'm annoyed that I have to "Option-Click", "Control-Click" and "Command-Click" --- i.e. make motions which require two hands, when a simple 3-button mouse would let me do all of these quickly and easily. How are these key-click combinations "more user-friendly" than single clicks on a multi-button mouse?
Really, a Mac is used best with two hands. Your left hand controls the left side of the keyboard, and the right hand (duh) controls the mouse. The left hand can cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, find, find again, save, close windows, quit applications, select all, cycle through windows, cycle through applications, and while cycling through applications (Command tab, command still held down), quit applications (hit Q while an app is highlighted, with the command key still down). By holding down the option key and dragging the mouse, you can copy just about anything. Shift-clicking modifies selections. Control clicking brings up contextual menus.
Really, this unity of the Mac interface is much more functional than Windows most of the time.
Not everyone cares for a two-button mouse. 90% of people don't use contextual menus. I find that using a scroll wheel makes my finger tired -- I can option-click in the scroll bar to jump to the part of the document I want (but if the scroll wheel is there, I tend to use it... much to the dismay of my finger).
I have a two button Microsoft mouse at work and a one button mouse at home. I'm fine using either one; I don't care to use a two button mouse at home; I don't think it's better.
Re:How many people care about Mac gaming anymore?
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Well, my original questions were,
What games do you play? (I don't care what top 10 games are available)
What other PC games do you want to play?
How much money did you spend on graphics hardware, excluding whatever came with your Mac? (Unless you buy Macs often)
I'm just trying to measure this stuff.
Re:How many people care about Mac gaming anymore?
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ok, what graphics hardware do you have?
How many people care about Mac gaming anymore?
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Seriously, I'm asking:P
When OpenGL came to the Mac and Quake 3 was a near-simultaneous cross-platform release, and then with Halo right around the corner, Mac gaming was very exciting. Deus Ex, Alice, Unreal, and other games were hits on the Mac near there PC releases.
But it seems to have become incredibly boring over the last couple of years, or maybe it's just that I don't pay attention anymore. It's also not easy to get good video cards for the Mac at a reasonable price. I wanted to get a new graphics card and buy Halo, but then I realized it's way easier and way cheaper to get an Xbox with the game.
Once I got a Gamecube I've just ignored Mac gaming. Wave Race, Super Monkey Ball, Metroid, F-Zero, Zelda, Soul Calibur, Tales of Symphonia... all these games rock. Even my Dreamcast gets more of a workout. Heck, my N64 gets more of a workout than my Mac (Excitebike 64 woot).
What are your favorite Mac games? What PC games do you wish you could play? What graphics hardware do you have?
Seriously, there's got to be decent backup software for Windows, especially considering how many corporate environments it's used in. It's a pretty common and critical piece of software.
On the Mac there's Retrospect among others. Toast will also do incremental backups to CD. Also, it's not hard to do a search for all documents modified after some date and back them up if you really want to do it that way. On the Mac, it'd be pretty easy to encapsulate in an AppleScript, although I realize it's not everyone's cup of tea.
Hey, you could also use a combination of the Unix find command combined with ditto, pax & bzip2.
Like I said, it's a cost to performance issue. It's gets to a point where it's not useful to be too big. 35mm size isn't a holy grail, it's just something that people can relate to. Those costs are relevant to professionals; lens sizes and weight matter.
you're forgetting something basic here - larger sensors, even at the same pixel count, collect more light
Not really. The consumer-grade 8 MP cameras (and the 5 MP before them) use sensors are less than the size of a fingernail. They suck. In fact, the 8 MP sensors are the same size of the 5 MP sensors manufacturers were using before (they're made by Sony).
But once you get to the size of Nikon's 27mm (width), the cost/performance ratio between that and a "full size" 35mm sensor are more favourable.
Really, the reason why film is 35mm is because you can only fit so much grain per cubic centimetre (200 ISO has chunkier grain than 100 ISO, and is thus more sensitive to light). When it comes to electronics, every extra cubic centimetre increases costs greatly. Larger sensors also need larger, heavier lenses. Nikon's standardized on their DX format, which is like 35mm with a 1.5 field-of-view crop (18mm DX lens == 24mm lens).
This guy has a good rundown about sensor sizes. (IMO, the guy has strong opinions/biases. As always, make your own judgements when reading stuff on the web).
He also points out something obvious that most people don't think about. You need to quadruple the megapixel value in order to get double the image size. A megapixel is 1000 wide by 1000 tall; the megapixel measurement is an exponential (square) function.
Can I buy a portable player that isn't an iPod that can play the DRM'd iTunes AAC files?
No?
Eh? Apple has a music store called iTMS and they have a music player called the iPod. They only work with each other. They both happen to be really popular. Good for Apple.
It's silly to accuse someone of being a monopoly in an emerging market; the iTMS isn't even 2 years old yet (IIRC it hasn't been on Windows for even a year). There's still plenty of room for other music players (say, everyone who's doing WMA) and other music stores.
Tip for other companies. (a) make music players that don't suck/that people want to buy (not too hard). (b) make music stores that don't suck. I'm sure if today's music industry was in control pre-vinyl, we'd never have CDs today, and you'd rent your music over the radio (by paying a radio-ownership tax or something). They'd NEVER have come up with something as liberal as the iTMS (a vision from a non-music-industry-cartel company), and unless they do, they'll never win customers from iTMS.
So all I'm pointing out is that there's a meaningful difference between a Vector and a vector
That's besides the point isn't it?:P When you work with vectors (graphics), you have a stream of data arranged such that, xyzxyzxyzxyz... or argbargbargbargb.... Each element in the vector (stream) is independent of the other elements, but they can all be grouped in the same set of operations. And if you really want to have fun you can do permutes (fantastic for byteswapping large chunks of data, say if you're trying to mirror a pixmap), rotates (in the bitwise sense), and other funky stuff.
So yes, I understand the difference between the vector lingo. But they still compliment each other perfectly.
Or maybe you misunderstood when I said Quartz and Altivec. Quartz is implemented with Altivec, so when it draws bezier paths, text glyphs (ATSUI), and compositing (not screen-level compositing, which would be done in the GPU if available), it's implemented in AltiVec. My point was that there's no point of Apple using a GPU for vector processing/Quartz's implementation when the G5's vector processors are right there.
Aqua may use all sorts of vector operations, but a GPU is *defined* by vector operations
Doing vector processing in the GPU is pretty useless. The reason why compositing works so well is that you send the data to the video card for work, and then shoot it off to the display. With vector graphics, you do the work in the CPU, and then you continue to work on the data result. It'd be a waste to send it over the bus to the GPU, and then take all that data back into the processor to do more work (AGP may only be optimized one-way too).
I don't think MS is using the GPU for vector processing, most likely using SSE. It doesn't make sense. They're probably doing other work with it that it's best suited for.
"Vector processors" do not accelerate the same kind of vectors that are involved in "vector graphics."
Actually they do. I'm doing a lot of this work right now (still working on it damnit). Tons of matrix multiplication (multiplying the spline matrix by the geometry matrix, and then the parameter matrix), parameter modification (translating the sample values into the desired domain), etc. Vector processors are perfectly suited for vector graphics.
Aqua is also bitmap based. Despite what many have said, OS X icons are just bitmaps, as are the buttons and other controls. That means that they don't scale very well - just like the widgets in Windows XP.
Yes, Aqua is one mega-gigantic compositing engine. The power of that shouldn't be underestimated, but I'd expect Longhorn to be able to do that fine. However, Quartz 2D is also a complete vector rasterizing engine, implemented (I assume, it'd be stupid if not) in AltiVec. Why use a GPU when you have multiple vector processors on a G5? (With oodles of L2 and L3 cache to eat on). FYI, writing vector graphics code with AltiVec is very yummy. If you look at the Quartz 2D API, there are no direct compositing functions; it's all vector-graphics. You can take pixmaps and composite them together (using the 'over' operator). Although I guess when they added support for the PDF transparent imaging model (part of PDF 1.4/OS X 10.3), they added support for transfer modes of vector graphics/pixmaps; I haven't looked into that.
As for icons, it's a heck of a lot easier to 'paint' an icon with pixels than to define a drawing with shapes and gradients. Also, Tiger is going to support 256x256 icons (!). IRIX's window manager (forgot the name) had vector icons. No biggie:P
With Longhorn, everything is vectorized. You'll be able to adjust the DPI of your display and all of the controls will automatically update to match it.
Tiger supports a resolution-independent user interface. With Cocoa based on the PDF imaging model, where every coordinate is represented with floats (including mouse position, which kicks in when you have a graphics tablet), it's very easy to scale everything (and rotate! NSView supports arbitrary rotation of views, and all further drawing in the view will be rotated as well).
It doesn't seem that the Tiger release notes are online yet... perhaps I should shut up.
It would seem you do have something against the GPL, spreading all of these lies..
I'm not lying, and you've misunderstood my post. I said that the FSF is a movement (it is) and when you choose to transfer rights to the FSF (I never implied that it was mandatory--in fact, I picked my words intentionally indicating that GPL-covered works belong to the copyright holders), that software becomes property of the FSF, for them to use as they see fit.
Seriously, why should they? Most people don't realize what the GPL really is (specifically when you assign copyrights to the FSF). FSF is a software company, and all the software that has the GPL license - with copyrights transferred - belongs to that company. Others may use the GPL code so long as the derivative works still belong to the FSF (actually, it only truly belongs to the FSF if the copyrights of the derivative/new works are assigned back again). No one else can use the FSF's work without the FSF's permission, just like any other proprietary software.
If PHP wants to keep their software free under their terms... what's wrong with that? It's their software.
There was a slashdot post that I didn't get into (read article or comments) that I think was about Malaysia going open source. The person who submitted the article added, "Another victory for open source!" Seriously, f-off. There's no such thing as a victory for open source. Open source is not a movement, it's a matter of fact. The FSF + GPL is a movement, so you can call things a win for the GPL product's copyright's owners, and for the GPL in general.
I have nothing against the GPL or the FSF. Yay Linux, Yay GCC, Yay emacs (ducks). But coercing others to adopt it is wrong.
G5s are based on the IBM 64-bit POWER architecture. Which doesn't support little endian. So that's why the G5s don't support it. But the 32-bit PPC chips that IBM and Motorola shared do.
The entire PPC line is based on the Power chips. PPC was always designed to do 64-bit, such as the PowerPC 620. Besides, dual endian is part of the PPC spec.
In Little-Endian mode, the three lowest-order bits of the effective address are exclusive-ORed with a three bit value selected by the length of the operand. This is not quite the same as being truly little-endian, and can cause problems when communicating with external devices.
In theory the byte order of the processor can be switched at run-time to support both Big- and Little-Endian programs simultaneously, and in fact it is possible to run a program in one mode and exception handlers (i.e. the operating system) in another. Practically speaking this would be difficult due to the interaction with external devices which have their own byte ordering.
An interesting side-effect of this implementation is that a program can store a 64-bit value (the longest operand format) to an address A while in one endian mode, switch modes, and when the value is read back from A it will be identical, even though ostensibly the processor is now in the opposite byte-order mode.
Most high-end car audio systems have their own system for linking digital devices. Clarion has CeNET, which allows, for example, you to hook up a CD changer and browse the CDs in it, right from the main Clarion deck.
It should be easy for a company to make an iPod CeNET adapter that lets you browse your collection while showing track and album names too (the Clarion stuff supports that).
The biggest problem is that every car audio company (like Pioneer and Eclipse) have their own proprietary network system, which makes it a bit of a bummer to make devices for each system. For example, to make one for Clarion's CeNET, a company has to consider the market share of iPod owners who have Clarion systems who have CeNET compatible systems that want to hook up their iPod. And they have to consider that for each brand of car stereos.
Actually, any PowerPC chip can run in big-endian or little-endian. The reason is, back in the PReP days (then CHRP), PPC was supposed to be The Chip to use for All Operating Systems, as AIX, Solaris, NT, Apple's Copland, and most importantly, Taligent, were supposed to be able to run all on one computer (one box). Ah, those were the days. Computing was expected to have a very different future.
Pre-G5, PPC chips had instructions to convert between big and little endian data or something, or maybe address different endian data. This is why Virtual PC for G5s doesn't exist yet; G5s are missing endian-related instructions that are used by current versions of VPC.
As someone else mentioned, the Word 5.1 people are talking about is the Mac version.
However, Word 4.0 for the Mac was way better than Word 5; the problem was that it as attached to technology that was not modern enough. It was designed for System 6 (OS releases were called System [1-7.5]) and it wasn't ready for Truetype (my biggest gripe). It limited fonts to 127 point size.
The thing that made it so great though is that it fit on one freaking floppy! I think it used ~300 K of RAM. You could fit Word 4 and the System 6 OS on one floppy and boot from it (800K floppies I think, not 1.4 MB "HD" floppies. Macs didn't have 720K floppies). You could then keep the floppy ejected, and put in the floppy that you save your documents on. Accordingly, the software ran freaking fast. There was another floppy but I can't remember what it had; it was probably the spelling dictionary. Someone else mentioned the speed of WriteNow. WriteNow was written entirely in Motorola 68k assembly language. They got screwed on the move to PPC. I used to laugh at idiots who advocated writing Palm entirely programs in 68k asm, and I was right:) Computers only get faster...
It did everything I needed Word 5 to do (which is a LOT), and it had a much stronger document formatting model; before Microsoft hacked things like Text Boxes onto the design. It was a lean, mean, long-document writing machine. It didn't include a shit-load of shitty clip-art, a shitty graphics editor, etc. I'm sure Word 5 can do this, but Word 4 also let you include raw Postscript code in your documents to send to the printer. The manual (software came with excellent manuals back then) demonstrated what you could do with Postscript. Macs + Desktop Publishing + Networking + Postscript Printers were standard fare in those days. Speaking of the manual, it was written entirely and formatted (page design, including sidebar captions and diagrams, table of contents, and an index too I think) using Word 4. Word isn't meant to do a project that large anymore. Word 4 would actually keep only parts of the document you were working on in memory, so you could use it on a machine with 512k of RAM. It was the anti-thesis of bloatware. That's why I liked Microsoft back then; it was well engineered software.
When Word 5 came out, it came in about 10 floppies I think, with an installer that extracted it from compressed files. It also had toolbars that took up precious screen space, when a lot of Macs were 512x384 (that's the resolution of my first Mac LC; I think the normal 9" Macs' resolution was a bit shorter). Someone sent a joke screenshot to Macworld that was a mock-up of Word 10, to be released in 2000 or so (IIRC). It was to be installed from 100 floppies and all the toolbars took up 75% of the screen space. The sad part is, Word 6 (which came on a CD) did just that!
I remember some industry pundits (and some not-so pundits but just informed people) saying that MS developed their GUI-writing expertise on the Mac, and then used that to bring full-featured applications to Windows when it was ready. For example, Microsoft Excel 1.0 was created for the Mac (~1986). I don't know when the first Windows version came out, but it would have been some time later.
I also used Word 5 for DOS on a 286 before I got a Mac. It was very, very nice, for a text-based interface. But I was blown away when I bought a Mac and Word 4 for it. I actually bought Word 4 back then (MS wasn't as obviously evil as they are now; I actually liked them back then and the great software of theirs that I had the chance to use, like Word), and it was worth every penny. I got pissed when Word 5 was released 6 months later that addressed the pains I had using Word 4 on System 7, so I thought I'd hold out for Word 6. What a mistake that was:P
MS actually sold a downgrade for Word 6 customers. You could buy the POS Word 6, and pay more to downgrade to Word 5. I'm not making this up.
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C++ has a very simple philosophy, you don't pay for what you don't use.
My ass. The whole point of object oriented programming is abstraction and encapsulation. Try working with two different C++ systems at once. Say, anything and OmniORB. One library might use RTTI, while another might be working on a KISS base class. Another library may be throwing all kind of exception shit. One library may be using std::except, the other might be throwing ints. Or worse, the library implementor may have not read the 3 lb. "The C++ Programming Language" (try fitting that in a PDF), and is using catch (...) {throw runtime_except()} instead of just 'throw', obliterating any exceptions that you're trying to throw through it.
Hm. I've just gone off an a exception rant there. Let's get back to OmniORB. What if you need to inherit from two classes to get some functionality of both? What if they didn't inherit 'public virtual' from their super class? What if the people writing those classes doesn't know shit about virtual inheritance? What are the odds that someone does?
What if someone's code uses 'new' to allocate everything, and other code uses STL and puts everything on the stack, using copy constructors for everything, and enjoys using exceptions and the fact that stack-based objects get deallocated for free? How are you going to handle memory management? I'd love to take a quote from "The C++ Programming Language," but it's 1000 pages long and I don't think I can find it. Basically, they punt on memory management, saying "It's a complex job and there are many ways to do it, so the problem is left as an exercise to the reader. Overload new."
With C++, eventually you're going to pay for everything.
You've also clearly never done serious programming with the Standard Template Library, where the algorithms are written so generically--and so consistently across different data types--that they can be plugged together in an almost limitless number of configurations.
Yes, 'clearly.' That always wins an argument.
STL is a cute idea, but an abomination. I had the task of a subset of the STL. I still have nightmares about it. I know more about C++ than any man should.
Um, I'd rather have 1 GB of AAC over 1 GB of MP3 any day. If you want to listen to anything remotely intricate on MP3 you really have to crank up the bitrate, to at least 230. For MP3s, I'd usually keep it at 320, just to be safe (because when you can tell the difference, in your favourite song, it really pisses you off).
With AAC I'd top out at 192 (sometimes I need to go higher, but low bitrates with AAC aren't as brutally ugly as they are with MP3). 128 can be very good for simple stuff, but it's very much hit and miss at 128.
And it's not like I'm going to rip all my high-bitrate MP3 music again to use a crappy MP3 bitrate.
And what about software? Is there anything that can smartly choose a subset of your library for the thing, whilst saving disk space for your own use like iTunes' iPod Shuffle support does?
It's Apple's responsibility to provide drivers for OEM parts. If you buy a card from ATi you get your driver updates from ATI's site. nVidia doesn't make Mac hardware, Apple builds those boards.
And the next thing he did was try to by Palm from 3com, but they said it was not up for sale.
As a Mac user, I'm annoyed that I have to "Option-Click", "Control-Click" and "Command-Click" --- i.e. make motions which require two hands, when a simple 3-button mouse would let me do all of these quickly and easily. How are these key-click combinations "more user-friendly" than single clicks on a multi-button mouse?
Really, a Mac is used best with two hands. Your left hand controls the left side of the keyboard, and the right hand (duh) controls the mouse. The left hand can cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, find, find again, save, close windows, quit applications, select all, cycle through windows, cycle through applications, and while cycling through applications (Command tab, command still held down), quit applications (hit Q while an app is highlighted, with the command key still down). By holding down the option key and dragging the mouse, you can copy just about anything. Shift-clicking modifies selections. Control clicking brings up contextual menus.
Really, this unity of the Mac interface is much more functional than Windows most of the time.
Not everyone cares for a two-button mouse. 90% of people don't use contextual menus. I find that using a scroll wheel makes my finger tired -- I can option-click in the scroll bar to jump to the part of the document I want (but if the scroll wheel is there, I tend to use it... much to the dismay of my finger).
I have a two button Microsoft mouse at work and a one button mouse at home. I'm fine using either one; I don't care to use a two button mouse at home; I don't think it's better.
Well, my original questions were,
What games do you play? (I don't care what top 10 games are available)
What other PC games do you want to play?
How much money did you spend on graphics hardware, excluding whatever came with your Mac? (Unless you buy Macs often)
I'm just trying to measure this stuff.
ok, what graphics hardware do you have?
Seriously, I'm asking :P
When OpenGL came to the Mac and Quake 3 was a near-simultaneous cross-platform release, and then with Halo right around the corner, Mac gaming was very exciting. Deus Ex, Alice, Unreal, and other games were hits on the Mac near there PC releases.
But it seems to have become incredibly boring over the last couple of years, or maybe it's just that I don't pay attention anymore. It's also not easy to get good video cards for the Mac at a reasonable price. I wanted to get a new graphics card and buy Halo, but then I realized it's way easier and way cheaper to get an Xbox with the game.
Once I got a Gamecube I've just ignored Mac gaming. Wave Race, Super Monkey Ball, Metroid, F-Zero, Zelda, Soul Calibur, Tales of Symphonia... all these games rock. Even my Dreamcast gets more of a workout. Heck, my N64 gets more of a workout than my Mac (Excitebike 64 woot).
What are your favorite Mac games? What PC games do you wish you could play? What graphics hardware do you have?
Seriously, there's got to be decent backup software for Windows, especially considering how many corporate environments it's used in. It's a pretty common and critical piece of software.
On the Mac there's Retrospect among others. Toast will also do incremental backups to CD. Also, it's not hard to do a search for all documents modified after some date and back them up if you really want to do it that way. On the Mac, it'd be pretty easy to encapsulate in an AppleScript, although I realize it's not everyone's cup of tea.
Hey, you could also use a combination of the Unix find command combined with ditto, pax & bzip2.
Like I said, it's a cost to performance issue. It's gets to a point where it's not useful to be too big. 35mm size isn't a holy grail, it's just something that people can relate to. Those costs are relevant to professionals; lens sizes and weight matter.
you're forgetting something basic here - larger sensors, even at the same pixel count, collect more light
Not really. The consumer-grade 8 MP cameras (and the 5 MP before them) use sensors are less than the size of a fingernail. They suck. In fact, the 8 MP sensors are the same size of the 5 MP sensors manufacturers were using before (they're made by Sony).
But once you get to the size of Nikon's 27mm (width), the cost/performance ratio between that and a "full size" 35mm sensor are more favourable.
Really, the reason why film is 35mm is because you can only fit so much grain per cubic centimetre (200 ISO has chunkier grain than 100 ISO, and is thus more sensitive to light). When it comes to electronics, every extra cubic centimetre increases costs greatly. Larger sensors also need larger, heavier lenses. Nikon's standardized on their DX format, which is like 35mm with a 1.5 field-of-view crop (18mm DX lens == 24mm lens).
This guy has a good rundown about sensor sizes. (IMO, the guy has strong opinions/biases. As always, make your own judgements when reading stuff on the web).
He also points out something obvious that most people don't think about. You need to quadruple the megapixel value in order to get double the image size. A megapixel is 1000 wide by 1000 tall; the megapixel measurement is an exponential (square) function.
Can I buy a portable player that isn't an iPod that can play the DRM'd iTunes AAC files?
No?
Eh? Apple has a music store called iTMS and they have a music player called the iPod. They only work with each other. They both happen to be really popular. Good for Apple.
It's silly to accuse someone of being a monopoly in an emerging market; the iTMS isn't even 2 years old yet (IIRC it hasn't been on Windows for even a year). There's still plenty of room for other music players (say, everyone who's doing WMA) and other music stores.
Tip for other companies. (a) make music players that don't suck/that people want to buy (not too hard). (b) make music stores that don't suck. I'm sure if today's music industry was in control pre-vinyl, we'd never have CDs today, and you'd rent your music over the radio (by paying a radio-ownership tax or something). They'd NEVER have come up with something as liberal as the iTMS (a vision from a non-music-industry-cartel company), and unless they do, they'll never win customers from iTMS.
So all I'm pointing out is that there's a meaningful difference between a Vector and a vector
That's besides the point isn't it? :P When you work with vectors (graphics), you have a stream of data arranged such that, xyzxyzxyzxyz... or argbargbargbargb.... Each element in the vector (stream) is independent of the other elements, but they can all be grouped in the same set of operations. And if you really want to have fun you can do permutes (fantastic for byteswapping large chunks of data, say if you're trying to mirror a pixmap), rotates (in the bitwise sense), and other funky stuff.
So yes, I understand the difference between the vector lingo. But they still compliment each other perfectly.
Or maybe you misunderstood when I said Quartz and Altivec. Quartz is implemented with Altivec, so when it draws bezier paths, text glyphs (ATSUI), and compositing (not screen-level compositing, which would be done in the GPU if available), it's implemented in AltiVec. My point was that there's no point of Apple using a GPU for vector processing/Quartz's implementation when the G5's vector processors are right there.
Aqua may use all sorts of vector operations, but a GPU is *defined* by vector operations
Doing vector processing in the GPU is pretty useless. The reason why compositing works so well is that you send the data to the video card for work, and then shoot it off to the display. With vector graphics, you do the work in the CPU, and then you continue to work on the data result. It'd be a waste to send it over the bus to the GPU, and then take all that data back into the processor to do more work (AGP may only be optimized one-way too).
I don't think MS is using the GPU for vector processing, most likely using SSE. It doesn't make sense. They're probably doing other work with it that it's best suited for.
"Vector processors" do not accelerate the same kind of vectors that are involved in "vector graphics."
Actually they do. I'm doing a lot of this work right now (still working on it damnit). Tons of matrix multiplication (multiplying the spline matrix by the geometry matrix, and then the parameter matrix), parameter modification (translating the sample values into the desired domain), etc. Vector processors are perfectly suited for vector graphics.
Aqua is also bitmap based. Despite what many have said, OS X icons are just bitmaps, as are the buttons and other controls. That means that they don't scale very well - just like the widgets in Windows XP.
Yes, Aqua is one mega-gigantic compositing engine. The power of that shouldn't be underestimated, but I'd expect Longhorn to be able to do that fine. However, Quartz 2D is also a complete vector rasterizing engine, implemented (I assume, it'd be stupid if not) in AltiVec. Why use a GPU when you have multiple vector processors on a G5? (With oodles of L2 and L3 cache to eat on). FYI, writing vector graphics code with AltiVec is very yummy. If you look at the Quartz 2D API, there are no direct compositing functions; it's all vector-graphics. You can take pixmaps and composite them together (using the 'over' operator). Although I guess when they added support for the PDF transparent imaging model (part of PDF 1.4/OS X 10.3), they added support for transfer modes of vector graphics/pixmaps; I haven't looked into that.
As for icons, it's a heck of a lot easier to 'paint' an icon with pixels than to define a drawing with shapes and gradients. Also, Tiger is going to support 256x256 icons (!). IRIX's window manager (forgot the name) had vector icons. No biggie :P
With Longhorn, everything is vectorized. You'll be able to adjust the DPI of your display and all of the controls will automatically update to match it.
Tiger supports a resolution-independent user interface. With Cocoa based on the PDF imaging model, where every coordinate is represented with floats (including mouse position, which kicks in when you have a graphics tablet), it's very easy to scale everything (and rotate! NSView supports arbitrary rotation of views, and all further drawing in the view will be rotated as well).
It doesn't seem that the Tiger release notes are online yet... perhaps I should shut up.
I never said that you have to assign copyrights to the FSF.
On a related note, check out my new sig.
It would seem you do have something against the GPL, spreading all of these lies..
I'm not lying, and you've misunderstood my post. I said that the FSF is a movement (it is) and when you choose to transfer rights to the FSF (I never implied that it was mandatory--in fact, I picked my words intentionally indicating that GPL-covered works belong to the copyright holders), that software becomes property of the FSF, for them to use as they see fit.
Seriously, why should they? Most people don't realize what the GPL really is (specifically when you assign copyrights to the FSF). FSF is a software company, and all the software that has the GPL license - with copyrights transferred - belongs to that company. Others may use the GPL code so long as the derivative works still belong to the FSF (actually, it only truly belongs to the FSF if the copyrights of the derivative/new works are assigned back again). No one else can use the FSF's work without the FSF's permission, just like any other proprietary software.
If PHP wants to keep their software free under their terms... what's wrong with that? It's their software.
There was a slashdot post that I didn't get into (read article or comments) that I think was about Malaysia going open source. The person who submitted the article added, "Another victory for open source!" Seriously, f-off. There's no such thing as a victory for open source. Open source is not a movement, it's a matter of fact. The FSF + GPL is a movement, so you can call things a win for the GPL product's copyright's owners, and for the GPL in general.
I have nothing against the GPL or the FSF. Yay Linux, Yay GCC, Yay emacs (ducks). But coercing others to adopt it is wrong.
G5s are based on the IBM 64-bit POWER architecture. Which doesn't support little endian. So that's why the G5s don't support it. But the 32-bit PPC chips that IBM and Motorola shared do.
The entire PPC line is based on the Power chips. PPC was always designed to do 64-bit, such as the PowerPC 620. Besides, dual endian is part of the PPC spec.
There's this wiki on the PowerPC which has this,
Most high-end car audio systems have their own system for linking digital devices. Clarion has CeNET, which allows, for example, you to hook up a CD changer and browse the CDs in it, right from the main Clarion deck.
:P
It should be easy for a company to make an iPod CeNET adapter that lets you browse your collection while showing track and album names too (the Clarion stuff supports that).
The biggest problem is that every car audio company (like Pioneer and Eclipse) have their own proprietary network system, which makes it a bit of a bummer to make devices for each system. For example, to make one for Clarion's CeNET, a company has to consider the market share of iPod owners who have Clarion systems who have CeNET compatible systems that want to hook up their iPod. And they have to consider that for each brand of car stereos.
But I still want one
They don't even share endianess
Actually, any PowerPC chip can run in big-endian or little-endian. The reason is, back in the PReP days (then CHRP), PPC was supposed to be The Chip to use for All Operating Systems, as AIX, Solaris, NT, Apple's Copland, and most importantly, Taligent, were supposed to be able to run all on one computer (one box). Ah, those were the days. Computing was expected to have a very different future.
Pre-G5, PPC chips had instructions to convert between big and little endian data or something, or maybe address different endian data. This is why Virtual PC for G5s doesn't exist yet; G5s are missing endian-related instructions that are used by current versions of VPC.
As someone else mentioned, the Word 5.1 people are talking about is the Mac version.
However, Word 4.0 for the Mac was way better than Word 5; the problem was that it as attached to technology that was not modern enough. It was designed for System 6 (OS releases were called System [1-7.5]) and it wasn't ready for Truetype (my biggest gripe). It limited fonts to 127 point size.
The thing that made it so great though is that it fit on one freaking floppy! I think it used ~300 K of RAM. You could fit Word 4 and the System 6 OS on one floppy and boot from it (800K floppies I think, not 1.4 MB "HD" floppies. Macs didn't have 720K floppies). You could then keep the floppy ejected, and put in the floppy that you save your documents on. Accordingly, the software ran freaking fast. There was another floppy but I can't remember what it had; it was probably the spelling dictionary. Someone else mentioned the speed of WriteNow. WriteNow was written entirely in Motorola 68k assembly language. They got screwed on the move to PPC. I used to laugh at idiots who advocated writing Palm entirely programs in 68k asm, and I was right :) Computers only get faster...
It did everything I needed Word 5 to do (which is a LOT), and it had a much stronger document formatting model; before Microsoft hacked things like Text Boxes onto the design. It was a lean, mean, long-document writing machine. It didn't include a shit-load of shitty clip-art, a shitty graphics editor, etc. I'm sure Word 5 can do this, but Word 4 also let you include raw Postscript code in your documents to send to the printer. The manual (software came with excellent manuals back then) demonstrated what you could do with Postscript. Macs + Desktop Publishing + Networking + Postscript Printers were standard fare in those days. Speaking of the manual, it was written entirely and formatted (page design, including sidebar captions and diagrams, table of contents, and an index too I think) using Word 4. Word isn't meant to do a project that large anymore. Word 4 would actually keep only parts of the document you were working on in memory, so you could use it on a machine with 512k of RAM. It was the anti-thesis of bloatware. That's why I liked Microsoft back then; it was well engineered software.
When Word 5 came out, it came in about 10 floppies I think, with an installer that extracted it from compressed files. It also had toolbars that took up precious screen space, when a lot of Macs were 512x384 (that's the resolution of my first Mac LC; I think the normal 9" Macs' resolution was a bit shorter). Someone sent a joke screenshot to Macworld that was a mock-up of Word 10, to be released in 2000 or so (IIRC). It was to be installed from 100 floppies and all the toolbars took up 75% of the screen space. The sad part is, Word 6 (which came on a CD) did just that!
I remember some industry pundits (and some not-so pundits but just informed people) saying that MS developed their GUI-writing expertise on the Mac, and then used that to bring full-featured applications to Windows when it was ready. For example, Microsoft Excel 1.0 was created for the Mac (~1986). I don't know when the first Windows version came out, but it would have been some time later.
I also used Word 5 for DOS on a 286 before I got a Mac. It was very, very nice, for a text-based interface. But I was blown away when I bought a Mac and Word 4 for it. I actually bought Word 4 back then (MS wasn't as obviously evil as they are now; I actually liked them back then and the great software of theirs that I had the chance to use, like Word), and it was worth every penny. I got pissed when Word 5 was released 6 months later that addressed the pains I had using Word 4 on System 7, so I thought I'd hold out for Word 6. What a mistake that was :P
MS actually sold a downgrade for Word 6 customers. You could buy the POS Word 6, and pay more to downgrade to Word 5. I'm not making this up.