someone answer me the question, what exactly do you BUY for $1300 thats actually worth it?? what can you POSSIBLY do that you CANNOT do on a regular PC for $1300 ??
iPhoto, GarageBand, Keynote, iMovie, iDVD for starters...
But, because Apple is so retarded regarding video adapters (why stay with ATI if you're not ready to go to PCIe, dumbass Steve? NVidia is the only corp building decent AGP stuff anymore, sub in 6600GT/6800/6800GT for all that outdated ATI garbage for fucks sake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), I am probably doing a handbuild for my next system. I can handbuild a hawt 2x6600gt GV-3D1 system _with_ 16ms 20.1" 1600x1200 LCD for less than just a 2.7ghz Powermac with crap video...
... The stuff that should have been built-in in the first edition (wifi,bluetooth) are now built-in, and the base memory isn't a joke.
The video chipset is still a bit jokey, but this whips the Powermac refresh like the family pig.
Still, I'm pretty sure I'm building a new box by hand this time 'round, I don't feel like waiting another year for Apple to get its PCIe act together...
Oh, ok, thanks. That's not automatic in my book though. That's as manual as it gets.
Not if the process parses all the files and builds a dependency web. A programmer should only have to put their programs parent and child dependencies in, and not have to worry about any other process' parents or children. This information should be atomic and consistently formatted, which would be a big win over the kludgy way that information exists today (in Linux as SXXprocname for example).
When was the last time you had to do this to modify production system scripts?
The only shell cmd I run on system scripts routinely is ?grep. Or, if I have to trace a boot path I vi the file and / my way thru it. If I have to do keyword substitution, doing it in vi is much easier IMHO.
Naah, this system is intriguing, and would be more so if you could stage boots so you could load XML boot configuration over the (secure;) network.
One of the key things to a good system is to make easy, common things fast and easy. The minimal overhead for any program that modifies an XML file is way, way, way to large to want to use it as the standard system format.
Modifying system start scripts should not be common. And I think the consistency you can get from a single format trumps having to memorize a whole bunch of different machine-unreadable formats, particularly on modern machines. Hell, a PocketPC at this point can parse XML suitably quickly, let alone a unix box from the last 6 years...
That mac gaming jibe isn't even that funny anymore. However, feel free to keep ragging on Apple's crap video choices. I'm a mac fan and I _love_ venting about it. Apple crap video is the one thing keeping me from recommending OS X to anyone but grandmas.
As for the choice of the base graphics card, the 9600 or 9650 is a perfectly reasonable choice. The primary driving force behind high end graphics cards in the PC world are 3D games. PowerMac G5 is obviously not the best 3D game platform. Most people buy PowerMacs to use in professional applications.
No, most people buy x86 boxes for web browsing, email, taxes, home stuff, office tasks... and gaming. Somewhere north of 90% at last count, mostly running Windows:/..
Many pro applications do not require super-duper 3D performance. For those who are planning to do serious 3D work, the 6800 Ultra upgrade is the reasonable choice.
Gamers who want to switch to Mac OS X can't do so, because Apple graphics options are either suck or ripoff. You want switchers? Build a Powermac that can match even a moderate athlon64 box with a 6600gt board in Doom3. If you want to keep milking the faithful, keep putting out crap graphics options.
Hell, make it BTO. Standardize on a 'laptop' gaming slot system (like NV's MXM for example) and roll it out across everything (mini, iMac, eMac, iBook, PB) so you can offer BTO graphics across the board.
There is no reason to burden all customers with an expensive (and potentially loud) graphics card
What's the problem with offering decent cards in BTO? Preferably without a ripoff premium. The drivers are already written anyway...
The CPU speeds are sad enough, but the crappy video cards are the crap icing on the crap cake.
Why oh why oh why oh why is Apple persisting in using ATI last-gen stuff? ATI is leaving AGP for PCIe, all their stuff is PCIe with only some using AGP bridges, they've ragged on NVidia because NV launched its 6800s in AGP native. NV still supports AGP pretty well with its current gen. Where's the 6800gt, 6800, 6600gt BTO options for Powermac? Why is the 5200 still used instead of even the weak 6200?
When will Apple get its tongue out of ATI's cornhole and read the spec sheets? Which X-series ATI cards besides the X8x0s are AGP?
Also, their flat panels are overpriced. Dell is pwning them, especially with that sw33t 2405, though I'm still holding out for a samsung 1080p DLP...
... The Daleks don't turn out to be hot chicks..;)
Re:How about doing something actually useful ?
on
Next Generation X11
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· Score: 1
How about implementing dynamic X server reconfiguration to allow connecting and disconnecting external monitors to laptops on the fly? How about using different resolutions on these monitors?
Apple understands the importance of the human interface and it shows. What can be done to get open source projects to give more consideration to interface design?
Pick a good team of UI folks and let them block releases for usability issues?
I keep looking for a 3d-accelerated desktop. I could get what I want from Mac, but quite frankly, I can't afford to buy one. Otherwise, I probably would buy one for my next computer.
$574 is unaffordable? The mini has a 32MB graphics adapter that is Quartz Extreme capable.
Swap out the slow-ass HDD and you've got a solid little 'puter. G4 =~ Pentium M...
Color me stunned. AFAICR I haven't seen an OS that had set(u|g)id scripting in like 12 years.. Even AIX 3.2.5 had it disabled, and I don't recall it being in any opensource shell interpreter in at least 5 years..
I'd be interested to know which OSes actually support this? It's highly dangerous..
Here in New York, driving an obnoxiously loud Harley down the street is risking your life, because pedestrians, residents, and everyone else can barely restrain themselves from hauling you off the bike and bludgeoning you to death with your own mufflers.
Ha ha ha!
Your average Harley neanderthal could eat your average NYC hipster pantywaist for breakfast as a side dish, and crap him out by lunch.
I should have also mentioned the early benchmarks which show massive increases in CPU speed for G4's, healthy increases in memory speed for G5's, and no performance hit at all on G3's. In fact, even G3's will see massive increases in UI speed, as will all Mac OS X users when upgrading to Tiger.
One could be snarky and reflect that OS X is finally catching up to OS 9 in terms of interface speed.
One could then rebut that OS X is doing a whole lot more work (DisplayPDF, alpha blending, etc) and is a lot more stable and featureful in the bargain.
... Tiger is _not_ a trivial release. There's so much stuff in there (updated CoreVideo, CoreImage, CoreData frameworks) that from a developer point of view it's somewhat of a revelation. Mr. Thurrott also doesn't really go in depth when it comes to the integration of apps like iSync, iCal, Address Book. A Mac-only workgroup can pretty much do everything you would need Exchange for out of the box, with only a single WebDAV/IMAP server, perfect for small Mac/Linux shops.
I have a feeling that we'll start to see plenty of Tiger-only apps that rely on the new frameworks and APIs.
I like Apple staying with AGP 8x. The current cards do not even begin to tax the 8x slot...and we want to change to a whole different video slot?
Hopefully I'm not the only one who finds the PCI Express debacle absurd.
To quote my own post in reply:
The sad irony is that the Mac market stands to gain more from the bidirectional nature of PCIe (just imagine integrated GPU acceleration within the coreimage and corevideo libs for rendering effects for stuff like film/tv CGI, photoshop, etc..) than Windows boxes
PCIe is superior because it's bidirectional. Bidirectionality is not needed for gaming or general display purposes, but would be necessary to harness GPUs for rendering purposes. Rendering visual media in various forms happens to be Apple's core market for Powermacs.
In theory, you could do render-like computation (like, say, fluid dynamics or some other scientific stuff) in GPU as well, but the big winners at this point would be all those FCP, Shake, Photoshop et al. power users who could offload renders to GPU then have the results copied back.
I'm personally curious what companies think we're going to be using PCI-X and PCI-E for.
Ignoring PCI-X, PCIe would be a wonderful thing for you if you ran any kind of graphic rendering, such as Photoshop or Final Cut. Because PCIe is bidirectional, you could integrate support for GPUs as accelerators into CoreVideo and CoreImage. In theory you could also take advantage of 'spare' GPUs as accelerators for non-video functionality (like audio or computation) but given the vector capabilities of the G4/G5 CPUs that probably wouldn't be necessary.
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For iMac resolutions it should be adequate, though I don't know offhand how far you can set WoW's terrain distance.
Still, for anything short of Doom3, it should probably be adequate. OpenTTD runs like shit thru a goose on my 667 PBG4!
someone answer me the question, what exactly do you BUY for $1300 thats actually worth it?? what can you POSSIBLY do that you CANNOT do on a regular PC for $1300 ??
iPhoto, GarageBand, Keynote, iMovie, iDVD for starters...
But, because Apple is so retarded regarding video adapters (why stay with ATI if you're not ready to go to PCIe, dumbass Steve? NVidia is the only corp building decent AGP stuff anymore, sub in 6600GT/6800/6800GT for all that outdated ATI garbage for fucks sake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), I am probably doing a handbuild for my next system. I can handbuild a hawt 2x6600gt GV-3D1 system _with_ 16ms 20.1" 1600x1200 LCD for less than just a 2.7ghz Powermac with crap video...
... The stuff that should have been built-in in the first edition (wifi,bluetooth) are now built-in, and the base memory isn't a joke.
The video chipset is still a bit jokey, but this whips the Powermac refresh like the family pig.
Still, I'm pretty sure I'm building a new box by hand this time 'round, I don't feel like waiting another year for Apple to get its PCIe act together...
Oh, ok, thanks. That's not automatic in my book though. That's as manual as it gets.
Not if the process parses all the files and builds a dependency web. A programmer should only have to put their programs parent and child dependencies in, and not have to worry about any other process' parents or children. This information should be atomic and consistently formatted, which would be a big win over the kludgy way that information exists today (in Linux as SXXprocname for example).
You can't easily cut/sed/etc. xml files.
;) network.
When was the last time you had to do this to modify production system scripts?
The only shell cmd I run on system scripts routinely is ?grep. Or, if I have to trace a boot path I vi the file and / my way thru it. If I have to do keyword substitution, doing it in vi is much easier IMHO.
Naah, this system is intriguing, and would be more so if you could stage boots so you could load XML boot configuration over the (secure
One of the key things to a good system is to make easy, common things fast and easy. The minimal overhead for any program that modifies an XML file is way, way, way to large to want to use it as the standard system format.
Modifying system start scripts should not be common. And I think the consistency you can get from a single format trumps having to memorize a whole bunch of different machine-unreadable formats, particularly on modern machines. Hell, a PocketPC at this point can parse XML suitably quickly, let alone a unix box from the last 6 years...
Because of Einstein's insight into the conversion of mass and energy, we now understand how distant Sun's illuminate the cosmos
Is this a print publication? Because the editor must be an illiterate moron..
Also, the capitalized 'Sun' refers to the star at the center of our solar system. Stars in general may be referred to as 'suns'.
... BillG might have had a revolver taped behind the tank!
Watch (or at least listen to) the whole end credit sequence.
Trust me.
Umm....
No?
BZZT! Bad troll, no cookie!
There's plenty of games in OSX, even newer ones like WoW. There's just no great GPUs because Apple is retarded when it comes to GPUs.
What, like Doom3, WoW, UT2004, Halo, Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, KOTOR.........
That mac gaming jibe isn't even that funny anymore. However, feel free to keep ragging on Apple's crap video choices. I'm a mac fan and I _love_ venting about it. Apple crap video is the one thing keeping me from recommending OS X to anyone but grandmas.
As for the choice of the base graphics card, the 9600 or 9650 is a perfectly reasonable choice. The primary driving force behind high end graphics cards in the PC world are 3D games. PowerMac G5 is obviously not the best 3D game platform. Most people buy PowerMacs to use in professional applications.
:/..
No, most people buy x86 boxes for web browsing, email, taxes, home stuff, office tasks... and gaming. Somewhere north of 90% at last count, mostly running Windows
Many pro applications do not require super-duper 3D performance. For those who are planning to do serious 3D work, the 6800 Ultra upgrade is the reasonable choice.
Gamers who want to switch to Mac OS X can't do so, because Apple graphics options are either suck or ripoff. You want switchers? Build a Powermac that can match even a moderate athlon64 box with a 6600gt board in Doom3. If you want to keep milking the faithful, keep putting out crap graphics options.
Hell, make it BTO. Standardize on a 'laptop' gaming slot system (like NV's MXM for example) and roll it out across everything (mini, iMac, eMac, iBook, PB) so you can offer BTO graphics across the board.
There is no reason to burden all customers with an expensive (and potentially loud) graphics card
What's the problem with offering decent cards in BTO? Preferably without a ripoff premium. The drivers are already written anyway...
The CPU speeds are sad enough, but the crappy video cards are the crap icing on the crap cake.
Why oh why oh why oh why is Apple persisting in using ATI last-gen stuff? ATI is leaving AGP for PCIe, all their stuff is PCIe with only some using AGP bridges, they've ragged on NVidia because NV launched its 6800s in AGP native. NV still supports AGP pretty well with its current gen. Where's the 6800gt, 6800, 6600gt BTO options for Powermac? Why is the 5200 still used instead of even the weak 6200?
When will Apple get its tongue out of ATI's cornhole and read the spec sheets? Which X-series ATI cards besides the X8x0s are AGP?
Also, their flat panels are overpriced. Dell is pwning them, especially with that sw33t 2405, though I'm still holding out for a samsung 1080p DLP...
... The Daleks don't turn out to be hot chicks.. ;)
How about implementing dynamic X server reconfiguration to allow connecting and disconnecting external monitors to laptops on the fly? How about using different resolutions on these monitors?
How about GL accelerated xinerama?
Apple understands the importance of the human interface and it shows. What can be done to get open source projects to give more consideration to interface design?
Pick a good team of UI folks and let them block releases for usability issues?
I keep looking for a 3d-accelerated desktop. I could get what I want from Mac, but quite frankly, I can't afford to buy one. Otherwise, I probably would buy one for my next computer.
$574 is unaffordable? The mini has a 32MB graphics adapter that is Quartz Extreme capable.
Swap out the slow-ass HDD and you've got a solid little 'puter. G4 =~ Pentium M...
Color me stunned. AFAICR I haven't seen an OS that had set(u|g)id scripting in like 12 years.. Even AIX 3.2.5 had it disabled, and I don't recall it being in any opensource shell interpreter in at least 5 years..
I'd be interested to know which OSes actually support this? It's highly dangerous..
Vanishing breed, thanks to all the taxes and Port Newark...
Besides, a dock worker can probably find parking for a bike. A cappucino-sipping metrosexual information designer? Probably not.
Here in New York, driving an obnoxiously loud Harley down the street is risking your life, because pedestrians, residents, and everyone else can barely restrain themselves from hauling you off the bike and bludgeoning you to death with your own mufflers.
/BMW with Ti pipes.. VROOM!
Ha ha ha!
Your average Harley neanderthal could eat your average NYC hipster pantywaist for breakfast as a side dish, and crap him out by lunch.
Rebates are an excellent example. The suckers buy the product and don't mail in the rebate, we mail in the rebate and save money.
;)
Not if you shop at CompUSA.. But then again, who does?
(The smarties buy their stuff at Newegg and build it themselves.. Or buy Macs
I should have also mentioned the early benchmarks which show massive increases in CPU speed for G4's, healthy increases in memory speed for G5's, and no performance hit at all on G3's. In fact, even G3's will see massive increases in UI speed, as will all Mac OS X users when upgrading to Tiger.
One could be snarky and reflect that OS X is finally catching up to OS 9 in terms of interface speed.
One could then rebut that OS X is doing a whole lot more work (DisplayPDF, alpha blending, etc) and is a lot more stable and featureful in the bargain.
Pick a side.. FIGHT!
... Tiger is _not_ a trivial release. There's so much stuff in there (updated CoreVideo, CoreImage, CoreData frameworks) that from a developer point of view it's somewhat of a revelation. Mr. Thurrott also doesn't really go in depth when it comes to the integration of apps like iSync, iCal, Address Book. A Mac-only workgroup can pretty much do everything you would need Exchange for out of the box, with only a single WebDAV/IMAP server, perfect for small Mac/Linux shops.
I have a feeling that we'll start to see plenty of Tiger-only apps that rely on the new frameworks and APIs.
I like Apple staying with AGP 8x. The current cards do not even begin to tax the 8x slot...and we want to change to a whole different video slot?
Hopefully I'm not the only one who finds the PCI Express debacle absurd.
To quote my own post in reply:
The sad irony is that the Mac market stands to gain more from the bidirectional nature of PCIe (just imagine integrated GPU acceleration within the coreimage and corevideo libs for rendering effects for stuff like film/tv CGI, photoshop, etc..) than Windows boxes
PCIe is superior because it's bidirectional. Bidirectionality is not needed for gaming or general display purposes, but would be necessary to harness GPUs for rendering purposes. Rendering visual media in various forms happens to be Apple's core market for Powermacs.
In theory, you could do render-like computation (like, say, fluid dynamics or some other scientific stuff) in GPU as well, but the big winners at this point would be all those FCP, Shake, Photoshop et al. power users who could offload renders to GPU then have the results copied back.
I'm personally curious what companies think we're going to be using PCI-X and PCI-E for.
Ignoring PCI-X, PCIe would be a wonderful thing for you if you ran any kind of graphic rendering, such as Photoshop or Final Cut. Because PCIe is bidirectional, you could integrate support for GPUs as accelerators into CoreVideo and CoreImage. In theory you could also take advantage of 'spare' GPUs as accelerators for non-video functionality (like audio or computation) but given the vector capabilities of the G4/G5 CPUs that probably wouldn't be necessary.
Very funny, though you forgot to include the adjectives 'Beleagured' and 'Doomed'...