Because he was a bloody brilliant guy who accomplished a lot in his lifetime, and those accomplishments affected a large group of people... and he's from an age where a ton of cool stuff was coming out of america.
Him being revered doesn't negate other brilliant people of his time, such as tesla, or marconi. Nor does it make him a good person... most people have no knowledge of his character, business tactics and other such bits of history.
He's revered in the same way that apache is pointed to as an example of open source being successful- to show the age-old spirt of american invention and capitalism... and that theoretically, one person can have a large impact.
i think hydrogen and electric is far better than petroleum, but hydrogen forces me to "fill up"
What do you think a battery does...? Unless it's solar, the electricity you're plugged into was generated somewhere (and probably not hydro-based). You're just filling up for hours instead of a few minutes.
Anyone know how much it cost fresh off the shipyard, and what the retrofits cost... or just how much you could get for melting the whole thing down and recycling it?
Just kind of curious. I mean when you add in the operating costs over its life, the original cost, and the cost of the retrofits... damn. Kinda puts it into perspective. Kinda cool to think my mac has a better resale value than an aircraft carrier...
Re:THAT'S considered an acceptible release bug???
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Mozilla 1.4 RC1
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ATI Rage (Mach64) is around 8 years old (iirc), expecting ATI to even still make bug fixes for such an old card is a little much. I have never seen graphical problems with any of the Radeon series which itself is around 3-4 years old now.
Well, that's all fine and good. Except that Apple only recently moved the iBook line to the mobile radeon's and used utter crap before that. Hell, the powerbooks only got mobile 16meg radeon's 2 years ago with the 667 and 550MHz models.
So many of the posters here are missing the best reasons to use Java today. Java is highly pragmatic. It's a good, broad set of tools that's widely understood and supported, and often improved.
Ah, well I write for java on the mac... which means due to Apple's timelines for java releases I won't have to worry about looking into 1.5 until 2006 at the earliest... and that'll probably be a developer preview.
I hear this a lot. Not intending to troll, but what is so innovative about Safari? The last time I saw something really new in browsers was Opera 7's 'Fast Forward' to match the likely next link (or work for image galleries), before that maybe Opera's 'Find in page' or Mozillas 'Type ahead find'. What is so innovative in Safari? From what I've seen so far, it doesn't add anything new that other browsers lack.
You kind of have to put the whole "innovative" thing into context... it's very innovative... for the mac. IE5 for classic macOS wasn't a bad browser when it was first released, and arguably was very pretty and had some neat features compared to the PC side. But develope had pretty much stopped, and it used the tasmin engine which wasn't really standards compliant.
Then OSX came around, and the carbon port of IE really, really suffered. Bloated, and very prone to crashing. Not to mention extremely slow. Omniweb was touted as the browser de jour for a long time, for the most part just because it had really pretty text... the engine itself was very slow and very non-standards compliant, not supporting most CSS. Mozilla was taking awhile "to get there" and was a pretty heavy app for machines that were already slogging under the new weight of OSX. There were a few others, such as iCab, Opera, etc that all had some nice features but either had terrible standards support, were slow as hell, or crashing left and right.
Then Chimera Camino came along, which took the rendering engine of Mozilla (similar to pheonix, but without the Mozilla GUI) and tied it to a cocoa/carbon front end. Instant hit, grew a lot and for awhile saw tremendous progress from 0.1-0.6... then stagnated. Part of this seemed to be due to Safari coming out, but the other side seemed to involve the fact that they'd been working off an old fork of the mozilla trunk and were facing a lot of grunt work to merge the newest stuff in... not fun, and a lot of the work stagnated. But at the very least you had a decently fast, standards-compliant browser that wasn't buggy as all get out. Sure it wasn't completely polished as far as different formats/plugins went, but it was a whole lot better than the alternatives.
Everyone thought Apple was going to go with Chimera- which was ok, as chimera was standards compliant and pretty fast. The big problem with Chimera was bloat- while the app itself wasn't bloated, the rendering engine (gecko) is huge in terms of resources... there are reasons for it... but you can't get around it. Chimera uses a lot of memory and the app is pretty big. It was considered to be a given that gecko would be used for whatever Apple was working on.
Then Apple zigged and chose KHTML, and has shown that while it's not perfect and could use a lot of work it's very very good, small, and fast. So on the Apple side of the camp, they have browser while not perfectly standards compliant isn't prone to crashing, is fast, and has a mac-like interface (well, compared to moz... the brushed metal thing is a whole different story). The snapback feature is about the only "innovative" feature in there... most of the innovation it gets tagged with is just due to the fact that the mac had been without something others take for granted for years.
By the year she died, she was getting about 5 spams a day on that AOL address while still none on the small ISP address. There's no telling how the spammers got it. She wanted to blame AOL. I wasn't so sure about that.
Heh, it probably was AOL. Check the court transcribes of a recent slashdot story (i, spammer) and you'll hear the spammer claim that AOL sold him their customer list... to which the AOL rep basically said "Oh, well they could have opted out...".
Tech workers should have unionized against this type of abuse ages ago.
And yet, what stupidity and abuses would joining a union open oneself up to? Fighting to get that person who can barely do HTML over into the Java developer position like the teachers unions do?
For example, Apple flooded the school systems 15 years ago with pretty good little systems. They were used to teach typing, accounting, and basic computer skills... What did all that effort earn Apple?
It got them a whole hell of a lot... but it's a bit ethereal to put into hard numbers. Ie, you could say the same thing about Java: "What did Java get out of having it being picked up and taught at the university level so heavily?". Well, Java got a ton of kids coming out of school knowing Java is even around. What would Linux get out of having IBM subsidize $2billion in computer purchases for schools as long as they ran Linux?
Back when Apple would heavily subsidize school purchases for Mac's (Apples margins at the time were huge, like 50%+) it at least gave kids the opportunity to use something else besides a PC... and just perhaps decide they grokked it and really wanted one at home. I know for teachers it was a big deal- you can look at a lot of K-12 schools and if they're heavily mac-based, the teachers will often have macs at home. I'd have to imagine Apple would be selling more Macs to households in those schools also, as well I've seen it.
In my own situation, we never had a Mac at home until I really got exposed to them in high school... we had an ancient IBM PC, then a Tandy, then a 386... then I got into Macs by working in the science labs and school newspaper. After that, we ended up just buying Macs at home... for my own personal machines I've spent over $25k+ on Apple hardware, the family computer back at home is an iMac... dad uses an iBook, etc. Without being exposed to them in school, I wouldn't have been exposed period.
I still see a lot of the same, but less now with Apple's hardware as their software... Ie, I'm pseudo-mentoring a high school kid as a favor who is really getting into using OSX at school, whereas at home he's only been exposed to Windows... this week we're going to be messing with Apache on an OSX box at his school to create a rendevous-enabled intranet for the science lab. But it's hard to put into hard numbers. But I know when I see a high school kid using iMovie and Final Cut Pro at the high school level it shapes their opinions of Macs for the future, and their awareness.
Of course the downside is when schools have 15 year old media labs using incredibly ancient MacintoshSE's with 9" black and white screens and THAT is their only real exposure to Macs. 9 times out of 10 when I find a real mac hater they'll say "I hate macs! They're slow, they run in grayscale, i can only use one app well at once" and I know their school had ancient word processing labs and they've never seen something like OSX. Of course when they do, they don't change their opinion about them being slow but it's a start...
I think this the unfortunate dark side to the transition that Apple _had_ to make. At some point Apple realized they had the Lexus of the computing world, and that was what was going to sell the product. Unfortunately, their VARs were not all up to the task of selling and supporting the pricey machines. In response, Apple decided they had to bring the dealers up --- and the only way they could do it is to own the dealerships too.
I don't think I buy that analogy anymore- only in the sense that Apple doesn't make upscale x86 hardware (gasoline-burning car) but rather something very different (akin to a hydrogen burning car). If the VAR's aren't selling hydrogen burning cars, they're going to have to make a living selling something... and chances are it will be gasoline burning cars.
This absolutely killed them in the educational sector- Apple got rid of all the people selling Apple stuff to schools, and decided to do it themselves (sure it brings stuff up to snuff, but it also helps the balance sheet as more of the margin stays with Apple). Those VAR's didn't disappear for the most part, but rather started selling x86 machines to schools for competitors. Educational marketshare went from a very slow gradual decline to an all-out slaughter of Apple share.
It's not the whole story (there are a lot of pro-x86+wintel dynamics going on in that market... such as cost...) but it's part of it, as Apple admitted.
I hope Apple gets its Windows version of iTunes quickly. Microsoft has a habit of making mediocre software available quickly, taking advantage of its large installed base, eliminating competition, then ceasing improvement.
I haven't gotten the impression that Apple's big problem with rolling out the service to windows users is anything technical- while iTunes is based on carbon just simply rewriting the whole thing for the windows platform with a mac-ish look and feel shouldn't take more than a few months if they throw enough resources at it.
The big hurdle (and why the itunes store is such a big deal) is with the licensing- getting all the disparate record companies to actually sign on board... and one of the big ways they were able to do that was with the fact that macs have very low marketshare... hence it minimizes their risk and is a nice "toe in the water". The rest of it isn't "that big of a deal", ie it could be accomplished with anyone willing to plunk down the millions for the infrastructure... but getting all those guys to sign on board can't have been easy.
What would really worry me is if for some reason they aren't able to negotiate good, broad releases of the catalogs from the record companies for the PC version due to cannibalization fears... there must be some HUGE talks going on between Apple, the record companies, distribution companies fighting to make it not happen, POS retailers (ie, tower records and the like can't be happy)... I'd love to be a fly on the wall.
My problem with their complaint is they're only putting forward one possible explanation for their failure. The Apple Stores are a stunning example of what to do right in a store. Computerware in the last few years have been run by a dodgy unhelpful group of people not interested in customer service, or bringing people into their store.
Admittedly I don't have personal experience with them, but being an Apple VAR (or selling their products in general) right now is a pretty bad experience all around. You hear about Apple's amazing 25-30% margins, but Apple's the only one who gets them... and then when they push all traffic towards the online store it was bad for local mac dealers, with the advent of the Apple Store it's even worse especially when Apple is going to be operating them at a loss for awhile.
See this post (6th point down) for more information.
Actually, I am seeing a number of folks either 1) migrate to or 2) seriously consider Apple's Xserve for purposes sort of in-between. The Xserve runs UNIX, it is absurdly easy to manage, they are cheap, and give pretty good performance especially when code is optimized for Altivec.
I've been on the lookout for this (and possibly webobjects uptake) and just haven't seen it... where I have seen xserve adoption has been in certain areas where macs would have been the preferred platform (ie, mac clients) but for many reasons they had to go with a higher-end unix or NT server as apple just didn't have much to offer for that market. There was a small market for people who wanted to use Apple servers but they just didn't meet their needs- so Apple saw a big spike in sales for them when they were released. Heck, some of these people use OS9 with webstar... I'll be more impressed if they can actually grow unit shipments quarter after quarter.
I mean... for 99% of the server tasks out there where are you going to see massive improvements due to altivec? You don't see apache getting big gains from using SSE on x86. Much more important to the xserve's large performance increase over past apple offerings was the new DDR bus, and the just as important new architecture with some mondo bridge chips for cutting the processors out of the equation as much as possible via DMA requests. This is because the bandwidth to the processor is very limited with the current machines in general, and in a dual config they have to share it... cutting them out of the process helped a lot.
That's why you hardly saw any improvement with the new DDR machines for things like photoshop over the past towers, as bandwidth but for server related tasks it helps sooo much.
Add to that the power consumption (or rather lack thereof), and for large numbers of servers, the Xserve becomes even more attractive in terms of lower electricity and cooling costs.
I'd be interested in knowing just what thermal savings there actually are in using an xserve over a competing x86/sparc 1U server. I've used them, and they are NOT cool running machines... they're very hot, and extremely noisy as a quick google will show.
People always think that the PPC is so much cooler than x86, and in general it is... but we aren't talking about 1/4 of the thermals here. Crack open a new P4 or AMD box and there is some big heatsink stuff going on there... kinda funny. Crack open a G4 quicksilver where Apple has been having to essentially overclock the processor and they're ungodly big also, and run really, really hot with huge fans that have made their customers pretty peeved. Just look at these pictures to get an idea of just how big the heatsinks are in new mac towers... and realize that the fans are very, very loud.
So we know that the current G4's are hot as hell, as are the pentiums and amd processors. Apple uses some monster chipsets as well, and it isn't as though apple uses different disk drives or memory... so where are the big thermal savings with the xserve? Companies make custom enclosures like this and this just to make them run cooler and quieter... I doubt people would spend the money on them if there simply wasn't a problem.
Now if you were talking about something like this... gotcha. But they're a whole different ball of wax.
Don't get me wrong- the xserve is cool, and a lot of the points you make about it are valid... as are things like this (largest xserve cluster i know of). But it isn't a miracle worker and it isn't a cool and quiet server.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I can only think the reason they've gone to slashdot is that they're not paying for this. In which case, they are asking for serious problems as schools should not screw with Apple Legal.
I doubt it's fair to just jump to the conclusion that they're using illegal installations... if you search around, you'll find that getting "official" advice or help from Apple can be pretty difficult at times. IE, even the maine laptop deal (one of the biggest educational deals in Apple's history and made a big splash) had those who were working on the project who called Apple's tech support and service for rolling everything out "inadequate".
I know I used to volunteer at a high school awhile back and it was pretty rough sometimes getting basic help from Apple... they don't have that big of a "services" team either for enterprise or educational customers. In the PC world these gaps are often filled via VAR's (value added resellers) but Apple has cut a lot of them out.
Sure, going gangbusters would be better. But in the current economic climate, Apple is making the most out of the hand they've been dealt. In fact, I don't think it could be handled better.
As a shareholder there are some things I would have liked to have seen done better... and they can pretty much be boiled down to these things:
Avoiding the incredibly silly education channel fiasco's that occurred and seriously hurt Apple in that market and is now threatening so many of their dealer relationships. It was insane then and it isn't good now.
One of the things that really hurt Apple with analysts was that they promised that no matter what they weren't going to hurt their margins: then they started doing it creepingly, which to Wall Street made it seem as though they were feeling some desperation in their core markets. The.Mac fiasco didn't help any... gave the impression of a company desperate to squeeze out a tiny bit of revenue wherever it could. That hurt the stock, causing a bunch of funds to bail.
Apple hasn't really made any marketshare gains whatsoever over the last while- they've pretty much just held steady. I would have much preferred to have seen Apple SLASH margins to make it look like an intentional shift to grow marketshare. We're in a recession, and Apple raised prices on its core cash cow, the iMac. To top it off, it bundled it's release... generating a huge amount of buzz, not being able to ship and the buzz had faded... It smacks of the old "if we build it, they will come" syndrome of the past. Consumers don't want eMacs, and the iMac's *still* range from $1300-$2400 which is considered to be the high end of PC lines. Can't get speeds up? That's fine: charge less, and while people will gripe that it isn't as fast as they want they might actually buy a tower instead of waiting for a fabled processor.
Keep the product lines under better control: it's getting as bad as the Spindler days, when they released a model to try to fit every market niche they could think of to try to generate more revenue. It just creates customer confusion and hassle. There are 5 different models of portables alone (with a bunch of configs of each), and they all overlap WAY too much, to the point where they're cannablizing each other's sales. Simplify it, drop models.
Improve quality across the board. It's really suffered, both in hardware and in software. Those windtunnel quicksilvers shouldn't be that loud- Apple is just using some damn cheap components across the board. They should be frugal, but also using damn good stuff. Not the cheapest fan they can find that whines like a girl raised in a tower.
Get more people selling their stuff! The push to the online store and the local Apple stores is fine and good for the short term, as it means Apple can mask some of the margin cutting as they don't have to share it with VARS and such. Here's the problem though: if someone isn't selling your stuff, you can damn well be sure they're going to be selling someone elses. Put a bunch of mac-sales guys out of business, and they'll just sell PC's. If you were a corporate VAR, what would you rather sell your customer... an xServe from apple where you make a little money off the transaction, or an x86 box where YOU are the support contract (check out what those cost, btw).
Stop nickel and diming the customers trying to squeeze out revenue..Mac? What they make from it doesn't offset the customer goodwill they erased, and it just isn't much money. Use it to grow the platform. They don't make much from 10.2 sales either- yes, it's millions, but it's short term gain for long term cost. If 10.2 was a free update during a recession, the user base of 10.2 would be thens of thousands more than it is... giving developers a better reason to focus on integrating the cool tech in it. Same with 10.3... Apple will make some millions, but at the expense of adoption rate. Apple needs adoption rate.
Apple constantly is putting out OS upgrades, and MS has one big release every so often. Microsoft says it will have a whole lot of things, and then Mac will already have released them and they will be done better.
Constantly releasing upgrades is not always a positive... if Apple had the userbase, VARS and agreements MS had to deal with, it wouldn't be in a position to release upgrades as often as it has been. There are trade-offs to both approaches. MS, by only releasing large OS upgrades with new tech every 3-5 years is able to build large user bases of those OS's.
Ie, Apple doesn't even have its entire base switched over to OSX, and by having all the new tech come out every year it can make it pretty difficult to have a stable user base built up for developers to target... IE, if 10.2 was out for two years instead of 1, you'd see a lot more adoption of the technology Apple has in it.
You can see the same phenomenon in the PC world with things like compilers and video cards: very few games use all the latest and greatest features of the video cards because they just change too much. If NVIDIA only updated its line of cards once every two years it'd be a whole different story...
So you might end up with a case of Apple getting all the flashy press with every OS release, but MS having the last laugh due to the advantages of their approach.
No it's not. If it was 3D I could move my orientation around 3 axis, as in Quake. Doom wasn't 3D, even though it could give the impression of depth.
The frontmost app's windows are closer to you than all the other windows. All the background windows are stacked on each other and everything casts a shadow of the right depth.
The front-most window has a slightly deeper shadow, true. But I'm just having a really hard time believing that all OS's have been needing are drop shadows in place of thicker bars.
The key is that it's not a trick.
Of course it is. That's like saying anti-aliased text isn't tricking your mind into thinking the text is smooth, or that TV's updating faster than your eye can see aren't tricking it. Just about everything you see on a computer is using tricks to give an impression. If you can honestly tell me that the drop shadow under the menu bar isn't there to give an illusion of depth just as a drop shadow on my company's logo on my webpage isn't made to do the same thing, then well you have bigger fish to fry. I mean you don't think iTunes is really made out of metal, do you? Or that when you minimize a window, that the genie effect is a real 3D window being transformed?
It's not a mock up made by an artist in Photoshop, or a black line drawn along the bottom and right side of a window as a faux-shadow.
Que? I can't imagine anyone thinking that all the screenshots they've seen of OSX are photoshop mockups... As for the drop-shadow versus the thicker bar to denote some depth... the drop shadow is of course going to be more natural at conveying it, but it doesn't mean it will be always be as successful. A good case can be made against OSX that without those window bars (and just the drop shadows) the UI has a tendancy to "blur together" rather than have distinctive windows.
The interface is drawn using OpenGL and the huge NVIDIA or ATI graphics processor in every Mac.
*shakes head* No it's not. The interface is drawn by the window manager, and then it hands the views to the hardware (if it is AGP2x, and has 16megs of video ram... this covers current mac models but not even the original 500MHz and 550MHz tiBooks and iBooks) and the hardware then composites those views together. Those drop-shadows you're so hot on are drawn in software, but with QE hardware is able to composite that drop shadow over the other views. When you minimize a window with the genie-effect, the window manager has to calculate how each frame of the animation will look, and then has to generate that view- QE just slaps that overtop the other windows saving CPU time.
Understand that you are not seeing an OS being generated in 3D but presented in a 2D metaphor- you're seeing openGL composite 2D windows as views. That's it.
The shadows and textures are done in real-time.
Wait a minute... so the crutch is that in order for windows to have a "3D interface" and all the goodness you think it entails, it has to have shadows around the windows that are generated in real-time? Look here... Drop-shadowy alpha-blended windows goodness. The only difference between it and OSX is that OSX is able to offload the compositing of its shadows to the GPU.
It's not 3D like zooming around in a video game; it's 3D like a trophy case.
Kinda like, "He's not deaf, she just can't hear"? One nonsensical statement deserves another...
It's tall and wide and deep and it has objects in it. It's not infinitely deep; it's only a few inches deep. So your display may be 14" wide and 10" tall and 3" deep. You end up thinking of your desktop as a glass box. If you could reach in you would expect your hand to find the Dock right up against the glass, and the desktop a ways back from that.
Um, perhaps if there were more variations in the sizes of the drop shadows... but I'm not seeing
With OSX you don't lose CPU cycles for all the extra animation. Quartz off loads the Open GL and most vector processes to your video card. This frees up your CPU for real tasks.
No it doesn't- you haven't read the docs on what Quartz Extreme actually does... There are a few processes Quartz has to use to get stuff onto the screen, one of which is compositing. The compositing stage is where OSX takes the generated windows from the window manager process and slaps them together. That is all that QE accelerates.
In other words, when you control-click on a menu item on a non-QE machine it has to generate and draw the view (window) along which includes having to calculate the drop shadow, icons, etc. Then the window manager has to composite it over whatever it behind it and generate what you should be seeing (ie, if there is a blue window behind it the menu will be tinted blue as it's slightly transparent).
On a QE-enabled machine, the window manager is able to offload the last part of the process to the video card: compositing. This is still a huge boon, especially in certain circumstances, such as having a transparent terminal window running top will see a speedup, but you STILL have a big hit of overhead due to all the windows having to be drawn as they are in quartz (ie, a ton of stuff still has to be done in software to generate all the pretty stuff).
The 970 if not used by Apple has had some very strange design decisions. This is the first chip that IBM has made that has the Altivec/VMX implemented. Maybe they want it for linux. But common sense tells us that it's more likely that Apple has indeed requested that feature be implemented because they rely heavily on it in their OS. Having encouraged everyone to use the instructions has kinda locked them into useing them.
While Apple will probably be a customer, the big kicker for IBM is their own server/workstation lines for which the 970 is going to be a big deal but no one really comments on much. Right now the real server growth is being seen in the low and mid-range, and while IBM has the high end covered with the Power4 they still use PPC 604e's and Power3's in their low to midrange servers... where the most growth is.
Besides Apple, being able to use the PPC970 instead of 400MHz 604e's and 450MHz Power3's in that market (we're talking 1-8 processor $3k-$150+k servers) will help them streamline and lower costs to compete against the tide of intel xeon's and such. Same for the workstation market: IBM is charging up to $15k for 375MHz PPC 604e-based workstations, and up to $40k for a dually 450MHz Power3 workstation. You can see where the SIMD engine of the 970 could be very helpful for their workstation market, as well as the lower costs and higher performance when having to deal with the x86 tide.
While Apple will probably use it in some form, I get a little worried that Apple fans might be really setting themselves up again for disappointment... I keep hearing that Apple can finally dump motorola and put themselves back on the speed map and I'm just not sure how realistic it is.
Some of the things that concern me are:
The assumption that the 970 will have enough initial volume and be priced in such a way that Apple can REALLY incorporate it across their main product lines. Right now a basic dual 1.4GHz machine is ~$3k without adding in any extras such as RAM/etc. The towers aren't selling well for a lot of reasons, and while the same machine with dual 1.6GHz+ 970's might have double the performance and hold their own very well against competing X86 systems... if the machine costs $5-7k in a recession when 3.xGHz P4's cost half the price might not change much. No one seems to have an idea of what the thing will cost in volume, and that's a big gotcha.
Even if you assume that the PPC970 ends up being very moderately priced, it doesn't end the problems with the G4 and the fact that something has to improve there... if for nothing else than that the PPC970 isn't a portable processor and isn't intended for portables... I simply can't wrap my head around somehow getting a cut-down Power4 processor into a 1" thick laptop. So the PPC970 probably isn't going into the portable range, but rather the G4.
Apple had some breathing room with their portable line, but love it or hate it the centrino chipsets just kick ass and allow for much smaller x86 laptop designs... so Apple has to improve the portable lines speed. Apple's shown they're able to get the G4 up to 1.42GHz by overclocking it and running it very very hot with huge heat sinks and noisy enclosures... so they can bump the tibook's up to 1.42GHz over the next while which gives them some room... but can they? If you look inside one of those quicksilvers and see the CPU setup... just no way... and I've heard no talk of a PPC970-lite for portables... so something has to happen.
I just don't want to see the mac community set themselves up for disappointment again... I wouldn't be surprised to see one tower config with a PPC970 plus an xServe config, and it taking years before the PPC970+ even begins to work its way down into the rest of Apple's lines.
This is actually an important development, considering that OS X has a BSD core. MS is developing products that will interface with that operating system. Maybe this could be a step in the direction of developing applications for the OSS community. Mod this down as a troll if you'd like, but despite the heavy anti-MS rhetoric here on slashdot, MS does employ some of the best coders around. Having such a heavy player develop applications for free OS's could only help them become more accepted and mainstream.
MS might be thinking about developing for open-source, but releasing MSN for OSX isn't a hint of things to come. It's a common misperception that OSX=freebsd. OSX is based on Darwin, and Darwin is essentially Mach running a freeBSD layer for filesystem, threading, etc- along with quartz for GUI and carbon and cocoa for API's.
The big hitch is carbon and cocoa- neither API's exist on linux, although there is an open source group trying to make one for x86. The code is built on those API's... so without those API's, you don't have much.
IE, if the mac didn't have a ported xwindows environment, they're not going to be able to run stuff written with xwindows API's. They could run apache... but not the xwindows apps. Linux couldn't run Cocoa or Carbon apps as they don't have the Cocoa and Carbon API's and I doubt they'll see them any time soon.
That 20" CRT you just bought isn't 20", it's 19.2" inches of viewable area. A 333 MHZ FSB isn't 333 MHZ, it's 332-point-something mhz, and even then it isn't really 333 MHZ because it's really like 166 mhz and doubled because DDR memory allows you to read and write on the high and low side of the clock.
lmfao. Something that cracks me up is my "mark of the beast" powerbook- it's marketed as 667MHz, but if you check (even from the command line system profile) it's really 666MHz... I could understand it in this instance, but it does make me look at it shiftily whenever it acts up.
In the US alone, or, more exactly, in the U.S. only. (well, it happened in Europe. Once.) The problem is NOT Quake, Doom, violent video games, or even Marilyn Manson. Consider this: ONLY in the U.S. are guns so easily available. If there is a problem here, I'd argue that it is NOT John Carmack; the problem here is N.R.A., and the fact that anybody out there can arm himself/herself to its teeth.
The fact that anyone can arm themselves isn't the problem- it's the fact that not everybody is armed. When you heavily regulate who gets to have a gun, all you do is setup a situation where only law enforcement and criminals have a gun. Johnny-crackhead isn't buying his guns at Walmart, and he isn't going through a background check.
Your post assumes that if everyone has a knife, they're going to stab everyone... Gun ownership per capita is much less than the days of future past, when we were much more decentralized and every house had a gun. If you took away every gun right now from everyone, all that would mean is that stabbing deaths would go up 1000%, which points to a societal issue, not an issue of means.
Maybe there is something inherent in the American social makeup that makes us all want to shoot each other as soon as look at them. But if that was true, I'd have to imagine the french would have negative population growth for the past few decades...
(C) The other option is to just crack those 128 bit instructions down, just like everything else. But if you're gonna make the chip bigger and uglier to do this, why not just add altivec? The only argument I can think of is that this would get rid of the altivec's extra long pipeline and possibly allow lower clocks/operation for some things.
Apple (and most other people benefitting from altievec aren't exactly using it for 128bit or 64bit instructions most of the time... more as an SIMD engine (simple instruction, multiple data). Altivec doesn't have double precision I don't believe (you can hack around it but its often not worth it) so it often isn't suited for a lot of high-precision instructions... but the dual FPU's of the 970 would be, lord.
In other words, if you have a Photoshop document with 10,000 pixels and wanted to run a fairly simple single precision instruction on all of those pixels (ie, a filter) a G3 would take the same instruction and apply it to each pixel. If you had a G4, and the code was made to use altivec, Altivec could take its 128bit engine, and assuming each pixel was 8bits worth of data could run 16 pixels through the engine at once and output the answer. Obviously in most cases (due to architecture, data needs, etc) it most often isn't going to be 16x faster, or even 2x faster...
So a case could be made that if you can do the above instruction in 30 seconds on a 1GHz G3, and 15 seconds on a 1GHz G4, having a 2GHz G3 would run it just as fast as the G4 but would run EVERYTHING else that altivec can't be used for or isn't appropriate for or people just haven't taken the time to code for twice as fast too.
That's always been the old IBM argument- that adding altivec added complexity to the design helping to keep it from scaling, and they would have rather either used the space for other things (cache, more units, etc) or decreased the die size altogether allowing for cheaper and faster chips.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is the name Thomas Edison so revered?
Because he was a bloody brilliant guy who accomplished a lot in his lifetime, and those accomplishments affected a large group of people... and he's from an age where a ton of cool stuff was coming out of america.
Him being revered doesn't negate other brilliant people of his time, such as tesla, or marconi. Nor does it make him a good person... most people have no knowledge of his character, business tactics and other such bits of history.
He's revered in the same way that apache is pointed to as an example of open source being successful- to show the age-old spirt of american invention and capitalism... and that theoretically, one person can have a large impact.
also here... fast connection, should hold up. Enjoy.
Mirror: Waste-source [asiala.info] Please mirror it.
Mirrored here.
i think hydrogen and electric is far better than petroleum, but hydrogen forces me to "fill up"
What do you think a battery does...? Unless it's solar, the electricity you're plugged into was generated somewhere (and probably not hydro-based). You're just filling up for hours instead of a few minutes.
Anyone know how much it cost fresh off the shipyard, and what the retrofits cost... or just how much you could get for melting the whole thing down and recycling it?
Just kind of curious. I mean when you add in the operating costs over its life, the original cost, and the cost of the retrofits... damn. Kinda puts it into perspective. Kinda cool to think my mac has a better resale value than an aircraft carrier...
ATI Rage (Mach64) is around 8 years old (iirc), expecting ATI to even still make bug fixes for such an old card is a little much. I have never seen graphical problems with any of the Radeon series which itself is around 3-4 years old now.
Well, that's all fine and good. Except that Apple only recently moved the iBook line to the mobile radeon's and used utter crap before that. Hell, the powerbooks only got mobile 16meg radeon's 2 years ago with the 667 and 550MHz models.
So many of the posters here are missing the best reasons to use Java today. Java is highly pragmatic. It's a good, broad set of tools that's widely understood and supported, and often improved. Ah, well I write for java on the mac... which means due to Apple's timelines for java releases I won't have to worry about looking into 1.5 until 2006 at the earliest... and that'll probably be a developer preview.
I hear this a lot. Not intending to troll, but what is so innovative about Safari? The last time I saw something really new in browsers was Opera 7's 'Fast Forward' to match the likely next link (or work for image galleries), before that maybe Opera's 'Find in page' or Mozillas 'Type ahead find'. What is so innovative in Safari? From what I've seen so far, it doesn't add anything new that other browsers lack.
You kind of have to put the whole "innovative" thing into context... it's very innovative... for the mac. IE5 for classic macOS wasn't a bad browser when it was first released, and arguably was very pretty and had some neat features compared to the PC side. But develope had pretty much stopped, and it used the tasmin engine which wasn't really standards compliant.
Then OSX came around, and the carbon port of IE really, really suffered. Bloated, and very prone to crashing. Not to mention extremely slow. Omniweb was touted as the browser de jour for a long time, for the most part just because it had really pretty text... the engine itself was very slow and very non-standards compliant, not supporting most CSS. Mozilla was taking awhile "to get there" and was a pretty heavy app for machines that were already slogging under the new weight of OSX. There were a few others, such as iCab, Opera, etc that all had some nice features but either had terrible standards support, were slow as hell, or crashing left and right.
Then Chimera Camino came along, which took the rendering engine of Mozilla (similar to pheonix, but without the Mozilla GUI) and tied it to a cocoa/carbon front end. Instant hit, grew a lot and for awhile saw tremendous progress from 0.1-0.6... then stagnated. Part of this seemed to be due to Safari coming out, but the other side seemed to involve the fact that they'd been working off an old fork of the mozilla trunk and were facing a lot of grunt work to merge the newest stuff in... not fun, and a lot of the work stagnated. But at the very least you had a decently fast, standards-compliant browser that wasn't buggy as all get out. Sure it wasn't completely polished as far as different formats/plugins went, but it was a whole lot better than the alternatives.
Everyone thought Apple was going to go with Chimera- which was ok, as chimera was standards compliant and pretty fast. The big problem with Chimera was bloat- while the app itself wasn't bloated, the rendering engine (gecko) is huge in terms of resources... there are reasons for it... but you can't get around it. Chimera uses a lot of memory and the app is pretty big. It was considered to be a given that gecko would be used for whatever Apple was working on.
Then Apple zigged and chose KHTML, and has shown that while it's not perfect and could use a lot of work it's very very good, small, and fast. So on the Apple side of the camp, they have browser while not perfectly standards compliant isn't prone to crashing, is fast, and has a mac-like interface (well, compared to moz... the brushed metal thing is a whole different story). The snapback feature is about the only "innovative" feature in there... most of the innovation it gets tagged with is just due to the fact that the mac had been without something others take for granted for years.
By the year she died, she was getting about 5 spams a day on that AOL address while still none on the small ISP address. There's no telling how the spammers got it. She wanted to blame AOL. I wasn't so sure about that.
Heh, it probably was AOL. Check the court transcribes of a recent slashdot story (i, spammer) and you'll hear the spammer claim that AOL sold him their customer list... to which the AOL rep basically said "Oh, well they could have opted out...".
Tech workers should have unionized against this type of abuse ages ago.
And yet, what stupidity and abuses would joining a union open oneself up to? Fighting to get that person who can barely do HTML over into the Java developer position like the teachers unions do?
For example, Apple flooded the school systems 15 years ago with pretty good little systems. They were used to teach typing, accounting, and basic computer skills... What did all that effort earn Apple?
It got them a whole hell of a lot... but it's a bit ethereal to put into hard numbers. Ie, you could say the same thing about Java: "What did Java get out of having it being picked up and taught at the university level so heavily?". Well, Java got a ton of kids coming out of school knowing Java is even around. What would Linux get out of having IBM subsidize $2billion in computer purchases for schools as long as they ran Linux?
Back when Apple would heavily subsidize school purchases for Mac's (Apples margins at the time were huge, like 50%+) it at least gave kids the opportunity to use something else besides a PC... and just perhaps decide they grokked it and really wanted one at home. I know for teachers it was a big deal- you can look at a lot of K-12 schools and if they're heavily mac-based, the teachers will often have macs at home. I'd have to imagine Apple would be selling more Macs to households in those schools also, as well I've seen it.
In my own situation, we never had a Mac at home until I really got exposed to them in high school... we had an ancient IBM PC, then a Tandy, then a 386... then I got into Macs by working in the science labs and school newspaper. After that, we ended up just buying Macs at home... for my own personal machines I've spent over $25k+ on Apple hardware, the family computer back at home is an iMac... dad uses an iBook, etc. Without being exposed to them in school, I wouldn't have been exposed period.
I still see a lot of the same, but less now with Apple's hardware as their software... Ie, I'm pseudo-mentoring a high school kid as a favor who is really getting into using OSX at school, whereas at home he's only been exposed to Windows... this week we're going to be messing with Apache on an OSX box at his school to create a rendevous-enabled intranet for the science lab. But it's hard to put into hard numbers. But I know when I see a high school kid using iMovie and Final Cut Pro at the high school level it shapes their opinions of Macs for the future, and their awareness.
Of course the downside is when schools have 15 year old media labs using incredibly ancient MacintoshSE's with 9" black and white screens and THAT is their only real exposure to Macs. 9 times out of 10 when I find a real mac hater they'll say "I hate macs! They're slow, they run in grayscale, i can only use one app well at once" and I know their school had ancient word processing labs and they've never seen something like OSX. Of course when they do, they don't change their opinion about them being slow but it's a start...
I think this the unfortunate dark side to the transition that Apple _had_ to make. At some point Apple realized they had the Lexus of the computing world, and that was what was going to sell the product. Unfortunately, their VARs were not all up to the task of selling and supporting the pricey machines. In response, Apple decided they had to bring the dealers up --- and the only way they could do it is to own the dealerships too.
I don't think I buy that analogy anymore- only in the sense that Apple doesn't make upscale x86 hardware (gasoline-burning car) but rather something very different (akin to a hydrogen burning car). If the VAR's aren't selling hydrogen burning cars, they're going to have to make a living selling something... and chances are it will be gasoline burning cars.
This absolutely killed them in the educational sector- Apple got rid of all the people selling Apple stuff to schools, and decided to do it themselves (sure it brings stuff up to snuff, but it also helps the balance sheet as more of the margin stays with Apple). Those VAR's didn't disappear for the most part, but rather started selling x86 machines to schools for competitors. Educational marketshare went from a very slow gradual decline to an all-out slaughter of Apple share.
It's not the whole story (there are a lot of pro-x86+wintel dynamics going on in that market... such as cost...) but it's part of it, as Apple admitted.
I hope Apple gets its Windows version of iTunes quickly. Microsoft has a habit of making mediocre software available quickly, taking advantage of its large installed base, eliminating competition, then ceasing improvement.
I haven't gotten the impression that Apple's big problem with rolling out the service to windows users is anything technical- while iTunes is based on carbon just simply rewriting the whole thing for the windows platform with a mac-ish look and feel shouldn't take more than a few months if they throw enough resources at it.
The big hurdle (and why the itunes store is such a big deal) is with the licensing- getting all the disparate record companies to actually sign on board... and one of the big ways they were able to do that was with the fact that macs have very low marketshare... hence it minimizes their risk and is a nice "toe in the water". The rest of it isn't "that big of a deal", ie it could be accomplished with anyone willing to plunk down the millions for the infrastructure... but getting all those guys to sign on board can't have been easy.
What would really worry me is if for some reason they aren't able to negotiate good, broad releases of the catalogs from the record companies for the PC version due to cannibalization fears... there must be some HUGE talks going on between Apple, the record companies, distribution companies fighting to make it not happen, POS retailers (ie, tower records and the like can't be happy)... I'd love to be a fly on the wall.
My problem with their complaint is they're only putting forward one possible explanation for their failure. The Apple Stores are a stunning example of what to do right in a store. Computerware in the last few years have been run by a dodgy unhelpful group of people not interested in customer service, or bringing people into their store.
Admittedly I don't have personal experience with them, but being an Apple VAR (or selling their products in general) right now is a pretty bad experience all around. You hear about Apple's amazing 25-30% margins, but Apple's the only one who gets them... and then when they push all traffic towards the online store it was bad for local mac dealers, with the advent of the Apple Store it's even worse especially when Apple is going to be operating them at a loss for awhile.
See this post (6th point down) for more information.
Actually, I am seeing a number of folks either 1) migrate to or 2) seriously consider Apple's Xserve for purposes sort of in-between. The Xserve runs UNIX, it is absurdly easy to manage, they are cheap, and give pretty good performance especially when code is optimized for Altivec.
I've been on the lookout for this (and possibly webobjects uptake) and just haven't seen it... where I have seen xserve adoption has been in certain areas where macs would have been the preferred platform (ie, mac clients) but for many reasons they had to go with a higher-end unix or NT server as apple just didn't have much to offer for that market. There was a small market for people who wanted to use Apple servers but they just didn't meet their needs- so Apple saw a big spike in sales for them when they were released. Heck, some of these people use OS9 with webstar... I'll be more impressed if they can actually grow unit shipments quarter after quarter.
I mean... for 99% of the server tasks out there where are you going to see massive improvements due to altivec? You don't see apache getting big gains from using SSE on x86. Much more important to the xserve's large performance increase over past apple offerings was the new DDR bus, and the just as important new architecture with some mondo bridge chips for cutting the processors out of the equation as much as possible via DMA requests. This is because the bandwidth to the processor is very limited with the current machines in general, and in a dual config they have to share it... cutting them out of the process helped a lot.
That's why you hardly saw any improvement with the new DDR machines for things like photoshop over the past towers, as bandwidth but for server related tasks it helps sooo much.
Add to that the power consumption (or rather lack thereof), and for large numbers of servers, the Xserve becomes even more attractive in terms of lower electricity and cooling costs.
I'd be interested in knowing just what thermal savings there actually are in using an xserve over a competing x86/sparc 1U server. I've used them, and they are NOT cool running machines... they're very hot, and extremely noisy as a quick google will show.
People always think that the PPC is so much cooler than x86, and in general it is... but we aren't talking about 1/4 of the thermals here. Crack open a new P4 or AMD box and there is some big heatsink stuff going on there... kinda funny. Crack open a G4 quicksilver where Apple has been having to essentially overclock the processor and they're ungodly big also, and run really, really hot with huge fans that have made their customers pretty peeved. Just look at these pictures to get an idea of just how big the heatsinks are in new mac towers... and realize that the fans are very, very loud.
So we know that the current G4's are hot as hell, as are the pentiums and amd processors. Apple uses some monster chipsets as well, and it isn't as though apple uses different disk drives or memory... so where are the big thermal savings with the xserve? Companies make custom enclosures like this and this just to make them run cooler and quieter... I doubt people would spend the money on them if there simply wasn't a problem.
Now if you were talking about something like this... gotcha. But they're a whole different ball of wax.
Don't get me wrong- the xserve is cool, and a lot of the points you make about it are valid... as are things like this (largest xserve cluster i know of). But it isn't a miracle worker and it isn't a cool and quiet server.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I can only think the reason they've gone to slashdot is that they're not paying for this. In which case, they are asking for serious problems as schools should not screw with Apple Legal.
I doubt it's fair to just jump to the conclusion that they're using illegal installations... if you search around, you'll find that getting "official" advice or help from Apple can be pretty difficult at times. IE, even the maine laptop deal (one of the biggest educational deals in Apple's history and made a big splash) had those who were working on the project who called Apple's tech support and service for rolling everything out "inadequate".
I know I used to volunteer at a high school awhile back and it was pretty rough sometimes getting basic help from Apple... they don't have that big of a "services" team either for enterprise or educational customers. In the PC world these gaps are often filled via VAR's (value added resellers) but Apple has cut a lot of them out.
As a shareholder there are some things I would have liked to have seen done better... and they can pretty much be boiled down to these things:
Apple constantly is putting out OS upgrades, and MS has one big release every so often. Microsoft says it will have a whole lot of things, and then Mac will already have released them and they will be done better.
Constantly releasing upgrades is not always a positive... if Apple had the userbase, VARS and agreements MS had to deal with, it wouldn't be in a position to release upgrades as often as it has been. There are trade-offs to both approaches. MS, by only releasing large OS upgrades with new tech every 3-5 years is able to build large user bases of those OS's.
Ie, Apple doesn't even have its entire base switched over to OSX, and by having all the new tech come out every year it can make it pretty difficult to have a stable user base built up for developers to target... IE, if 10.2 was out for two years instead of 1, you'd see a lot more adoption of the technology Apple has in it.
You can see the same phenomenon in the PC world with things like compilers and video cards: very few games use all the latest and greatest features of the video cards because they just change too much. If NVIDIA only updated its line of cards once every two years it'd be a whole different story...
So you might end up with a case of Apple getting all the flashy press with every OS release, but MS having the last laugh due to the advantages of their approach.
Mac OS X is 3D.
No it's not. If it was 3D I could move my orientation around 3 axis, as in Quake. Doom wasn't 3D, even though it could give the impression of depth.
The frontmost app's windows are closer to you than all the other windows. All the background windows are stacked on each other and everything casts a shadow of the right depth.
The front-most window has a slightly deeper shadow, true. But I'm just having a really hard time believing that all OS's have been needing are drop shadows in place of thicker bars.
The key is that it's not a trick.
Of course it is. That's like saying anti-aliased text isn't tricking your mind into thinking the text is smooth, or that TV's updating faster than your eye can see aren't tricking it. Just about everything you see on a computer is using tricks to give an impression. If you can honestly tell me that the drop shadow under the menu bar isn't there to give an illusion of depth just as a drop shadow on my company's logo on my webpage isn't made to do the same thing, then well you have bigger fish to fry. I mean you don't think iTunes is really made out of metal, do you? Or that when you minimize a window, that the genie effect is a real 3D window being transformed?
It's not a mock up made by an artist in Photoshop, or a black line drawn along the bottom and right side of a window as a faux-shadow.
Que? I can't imagine anyone thinking that all the screenshots they've seen of OSX are photoshop mockups... As for the drop-shadow versus the thicker bar to denote some depth... the drop shadow is of course going to be more natural at conveying it, but it doesn't mean it will be always be as successful. A good case can be made against OSX that without those window bars (and just the drop shadows) the UI has a tendancy to "blur together" rather than have distinctive windows.
The interface is drawn using OpenGL and the huge NVIDIA or ATI graphics processor in every Mac.
*shakes head* No it's not. The interface is drawn by the window manager, and then it hands the views to the hardware (if it is AGP2x, and has 16megs of video ram... this covers current mac models but not even the original 500MHz and 550MHz tiBooks and iBooks) and the hardware then composites those views together. Those drop-shadows you're so hot on are drawn in software, but with QE hardware is able to composite that drop shadow over the other views. When you minimize a window with the genie-effect, the window manager has to calculate how each frame of the animation will look, and then has to generate that view- QE just slaps that overtop the other windows saving CPU time.
Understand that you are not seeing an OS being generated in 3D but presented in a 2D metaphor- you're seeing openGL composite 2D windows as views. That's it.
The shadows and textures are done in real-time.
Wait a minute... so the crutch is that in order for windows to have a "3D interface" and all the goodness you think it entails, it has to have shadows around the windows that are generated in real-time? Look here... Drop-shadowy alpha-blended windows goodness. The only difference between it and OSX is that OSX is able to offload the compositing of its shadows to the GPU.
It's not 3D like zooming around in a video game; it's 3D like a trophy case.
Kinda like, "He's not deaf, she just can't hear"? One nonsensical statement deserves another...
It's tall and wide and deep and it has objects in it. It's not infinitely deep; it's only a few inches deep. So your display may be 14" wide and 10" tall and 3" deep. You end up thinking of your desktop as a glass box. If you could reach in you would expect your hand to find the Dock right up against the glass, and the desktop a ways back from that.
Um, perhaps if there were more variations in the sizes of the drop shadows... but I'm not seeing
With OSX you don't lose CPU cycles for all the extra animation. Quartz off loads the Open GL and most vector processes to your video card. This frees up your CPU for real tasks.
No it doesn't- you haven't read the docs on what Quartz Extreme actually does... There are a few processes Quartz has to use to get stuff onto the screen, one of which is compositing. The compositing stage is where OSX takes the generated windows from the window manager process and slaps them together. That is all that QE accelerates.
In other words, when you control-click on a menu item on a non-QE machine it has to generate and draw the view (window) along which includes having to calculate the drop shadow, icons, etc. Then the window manager has to composite it over whatever it behind it and generate what you should be seeing (ie, if there is a blue window behind it the menu will be tinted blue as it's slightly transparent).
On a QE-enabled machine, the window manager is able to offload the last part of the process to the video card: compositing. This is still a huge boon, especially in certain circumstances, such as having a transparent terminal window running top will see a speedup, but you STILL have a big hit of overhead due to all the windows having to be drawn as they are in quartz (ie, a ton of stuff still has to be done in software to generate all the pretty stuff).
The 970 if not used by Apple has had some very strange design decisions. This is the first chip that IBM has made that has the Altivec/VMX implemented. Maybe they want it for linux. But common sense tells us that it's more likely that Apple has indeed requested that feature be implemented because they rely heavily on it in their OS. Having encouraged everyone to use the instructions has kinda locked them into useing them.
While Apple will probably be a customer, the big kicker for IBM is their own server/workstation lines for which the 970 is going to be a big deal but no one really comments on much. Right now the real server growth is being seen in the low and mid-range, and while IBM has the high end covered with the Power4 they still use PPC 604e's and Power3's in their low to midrange servers... where the most growth is.
Besides Apple, being able to use the PPC970 instead of 400MHz 604e's and 450MHz Power3's in that market (we're talking 1-8 processor $3k-$150+k servers) will help them streamline and lower costs to compete against the tide of intel xeon's and such. Same for the workstation market: IBM is charging up to $15k for 375MHz PPC 604e-based workstations, and up to $40k for a dually 450MHz Power3 workstation. You can see where the SIMD engine of the 970 could be very helpful for their workstation market, as well as the lower costs and higher performance when having to deal with the x86 tide.
While Apple will probably use it in some form, I get a little worried that Apple fans might be really setting themselves up again for disappointment... I keep hearing that Apple can finally dump motorola and put themselves back on the speed map and I'm just not sure how realistic it is.
Some of the things that concern me are:
The assumption that the 970 will have enough initial volume and be priced in such a way that Apple can REALLY incorporate it across their main product lines. Right now a basic dual 1.4GHz machine is ~$3k without adding in any extras such as RAM/etc. The towers aren't selling well for a lot of reasons, and while the same machine with dual 1.6GHz+ 970's might have double the performance and hold their own very well against competing X86 systems... if the machine costs $5-7k in a recession when 3.xGHz P4's cost half the price might not change much. No one seems to have an idea of what the thing will cost in volume, and that's a big gotcha.
Even if you assume that the PPC970 ends up being very moderately priced, it doesn't end the problems with the G4 and the fact that something has to improve there... if for nothing else than that the PPC970 isn't a portable processor and isn't intended for portables... I simply can't wrap my head around somehow getting a cut-down Power4 processor into a 1" thick laptop. So the PPC970 probably isn't going into the portable range, but rather the G4.
Apple had some breathing room with their portable line, but love it or hate it the centrino chipsets just kick ass and allow for much smaller x86 laptop designs... so Apple has to improve the portable lines speed. Apple's shown they're able to get the G4 up to 1.42GHz by overclocking it and running it very very hot with huge heat sinks and noisy enclosures... so they can bump the tibook's up to 1.42GHz over the next while which gives them some room... but can they? If you look inside one of those quicksilvers and see the CPU setup... just no way... and I've heard no talk of a PPC970-lite for portables... so something has to happen.
I just don't want to see the mac community set themselves up for disappointment again... I wouldn't be surprised to see one tower config with a PPC970 plus an xServe config, and it taking years before the PPC970+ even begins to work its way down into the rest of Apple's lines.
This is actually an important development, considering that OS X has a BSD core. MS is developing products that will interface with that operating system. Maybe this could be a step in the direction of developing applications for the OSS community. Mod this down as a troll if you'd like, but despite the heavy anti-MS rhetoric here on slashdot, MS does employ some of the best coders around. Having such a heavy player develop applications for free OS's could only help them become more accepted and mainstream.
MS might be thinking about developing for open-source, but releasing MSN for OSX isn't a hint of things to come. It's a common misperception that OSX=freebsd. OSX is based on Darwin, and Darwin is essentially Mach running a freeBSD layer for filesystem, threading, etc- along with quartz for GUI and carbon and cocoa for API's.
The big hitch is carbon and cocoa- neither API's exist on linux, although there is an open source group trying to make one for x86. The code is built on those API's... so without those API's, you don't have much.
IE, if the mac didn't have a ported xwindows environment, they're not going to be able to run stuff written with xwindows API's. They could run apache... but not the xwindows apps. Linux couldn't run Cocoa or Carbon apps as they don't have the Cocoa and Carbon API's and I doubt they'll see them any time soon.
Michael Bryan Bell
That 20" CRT you just bought isn't 20", it's 19.2" inches of viewable area. A 333 MHZ FSB isn't 333 MHZ, it's 332-point-something mhz, and even then it isn't really 333 MHZ because it's really like 166 mhz and doubled because DDR memory allows you to read and write on the high and low side of the clock.
lmfao. Something that cracks me up is my "mark of the beast" powerbook- it's marketed as 667MHz, but if you check (even from the command line system profile) it's really 666MHz... I could understand it in this instance, but it does make me look at it shiftily whenever it acts up.
drunkenbatman
In the US alone, or, more exactly, in the U.S. only. (well, it happened in Europe. Once.) The problem is NOT Quake, Doom, violent video games, or even Marilyn Manson. Consider this: ONLY in the U.S. are guns so easily available. If there is a problem here, I'd argue that it is NOT John Carmack; the problem here is N.R.A., and the fact that anybody out there can arm himself/herself to its teeth.
The fact that anyone can arm themselves isn't the problem- it's the fact that not everybody is armed. When you heavily regulate who gets to have a gun, all you do is setup a situation where only law enforcement and criminals have a gun. Johnny-crackhead isn't buying his guns at Walmart, and he isn't going through a background check.
Your post assumes that if everyone has a knife, they're going to stab everyone... Gun ownership per capita is much less than the days of future past, when we were much more decentralized and every house had a gun. If you took away every gun right now from everyone, all that would mean is that stabbing deaths would go up 1000%, which points to a societal issue, not an issue of means.
Maybe there is something inherent in the American social makeup that makes us all want to shoot each other as soon as look at them. But if that was true, I'd have to imagine the french would have negative population growth for the past few decades...
drunkenbatman
(C) The other option is to just crack those 128 bit instructions down, just like everything else. But if you're gonna make the chip bigger and uglier to do this, why not just add altivec? The only argument I can think of is that this would get rid of the altivec's extra long pipeline and possibly allow lower clocks/operation for some things.
Apple (and most other people benefitting from altievec aren't exactly using it for 128bit or 64bit instructions most of the time... more as an SIMD engine (simple instruction, multiple data). Altivec doesn't have double precision I don't believe (you can hack around it but its often not worth it) so it often isn't suited for a lot of high-precision instructions... but the dual FPU's of the 970 would be, lord.
In other words, if you have a Photoshop document with 10,000 pixels and wanted to run a fairly simple single precision instruction on all of those pixels (ie, a filter) a G3 would take the same instruction and apply it to each pixel. If you had a G4, and the code was made to use altivec, Altivec could take its 128bit engine, and assuming each pixel was 8bits worth of data could run 16 pixels through the engine at once and output the answer. Obviously in most cases (due to architecture, data needs, etc) it most often isn't going to be 16x faster, or even 2x faster...
So a case could be made that if you can do the above instruction in 30 seconds on a 1GHz G3, and 15 seconds on a 1GHz G4, having a 2GHz G3 would run it just as fast as the G4 but would run EVERYTHING else that altivec can't be used for or isn't appropriate for or people just haven't taken the time to code for twice as fast too.
That's always been the old IBM argument- that adding altivec added complexity to the design helping to keep it from scaling, and they would have rather either used the space for other things (cache, more units, etc) or decreased the die size altogether allowing for cheaper and faster chips.
drunkenbatman