It's was really the promise of native software. There weren't a lot of software available when the PowerPC first came out, but everyone knew that it was coming, so if you were going to buy a Mac you wanted to be using for more than a year or so, you bought PowerPC, and waited for the apps to come. There was a PowerPC plug in for PhotoShop 2.5 out very eaerly, and Pathways into Darkness (Bungie's pre-Marathon shooter).
Still, a lot of people bought '04 systems for a while. PowerPC really won when the PCI PowerMacs came out, which were 120 MHz minimum, did more per cycle, and had a much better 68K emulator. At that point, a PowerPC was many times faster than the fastest 68040 machine ever build, and no one looked back.
For the first few years of PowerPC, Mac users had the unusual experience of having their systems get FASTER with every OS and application update.
Also, the 40 MHz 040 chips were actually 80 MHz internally with a 40 MHz bus. Kind of like a 486DX2-80.
Larry Niven's "A Gift from Earth" posits a variation of it. The ship contained a small, multi-generational crew, and a much larger number of cyro-frozen colonists.
When the ship finally gets to the (unexpectly sucky) planet, the crew decides they've gotten the short end of the stick, and decide to rule the planet with the colonists are their vassels. So they thaw them out one by one, tell them what the new order is, and chuck them off that habital plateaus which are the only places to live on the planet.
The book takes place after several generations of this, and also involves psychic powers, a revolutionary movement, sleep inducers, organ cloning, what it's like to live on a planet with a tiny habitable area, and a bunch of other cool stuff. And what happens when you light up a colony ship's fusion drive on a planetary surface. About my favorite book ever from when I was 11.
Works great as an anti-apartied metaphor, although I didn't pick up on that parallel at the time. It was an evocative expression of the horrors in living in a totalitarian state, and of running one. Much more politically sensible than most of Niven's later collaborations with Pournelle.
It's one of the early entries the Known Space series. 100% Kzin free, as I remember.
A lot of folks seem to think that MPEG-4 is a video codec, which is a relatively small part of the overall technology.
This document is a good overview of what MPEG-4 is and what it's for
We haven't seen public demonstrations of many of the more exotic technologies in here yet, like the facial and 3D animation, text to speech, digital film projection, two-way real-time voice and videoconferencing, etcetera, but all those are part of MPEG-4. As is interactivity and wavelet still image compression.
Overall, we're talking about something riviling the complexity and importance of the Linux Standard Base.
Well, if you want to link about it in terms of scacity, there is definitely a scarcity of good, specified, interoperable digital media technologies.
Lots of people have spent YEARS and MILLIONS in making MPEG-4 happen - they started the process in 1993. And it took so long because it's really hard to do - well more than a thousand person-years by this point. It's a delusion to think things like Ogg Tarkin, which don't even exist yet and aren't trying to do even 5% of what MPEG-4 is aimed at, are an alternative technology.
The only viable alternative for what MPEG-4 is meant to do is Windows Media, which offers superior compression efficiency, but isn't an ISO standard. That's where the battle is going to be.
People will use MPEG-4 because it offers massively improved compression efficiency over MPEG-2. This means you're able to get a lot more bang for the bit when bandwidth is a constraint (which is almost always is for video). Eventually, digital cable and satellite operators will adopt MPEG-4 since they'll be able to get several times more channels, and hence dramatically improve revenue, over their current infrastructure.
MPEG-4 also offers a lot of rich media and interactivity features.
Sorry, this is pretty much entirely wrong when it comes to the real world of MPEG-4.
The critical issue for any MPEG-4 technology is interoperability, which means that any compliant device/program can play any compliant content that matches the same Profile@Level. For example, the ISMA Profile 1 (targeting personal computer playback) uses Advanced Simple Level 3 for video and High Quality Audio Level 2 for audio. In turn, this means a maximum resolution of 99 16x16 blocks (typically 352x288) and a bunch of other stuff.
The content itself needs to live in a MPEG-4 file, or a MPEG-4 bitstream.
None of the "MPEG-4" titled solutions from the open source community meet these requirements. They adopt much of the Simple Visual Profile for a video codec, but don't handle the audio codecs, the file format, or the streaming format. While they get some value from the ideas in MPEG-4 video, they aren't MPEG-4 in any meaningful, real-world way. They don't work with the published ISO standard.
The actual ISMA derived solutions use the Advanced Simple codec, which offers much better compression efficiency, in the ballpark of Windows Media, RealVideo, and QuickTime with typical web uses (e.g. 320x240 @ 250 Kbps).
Indeed. Cable companies are going to like the 500 channels of HD a lot more than the idea of upping end-user bandwidth. Since those HD channels are broadcast to all the users on the cable connection, they only have to ingest the bandwidth once, and distribute it to many.
In software? I doubt it. My 33 MHz NeXTStation Color Turbo can't do high bitrate MP3 decodes, even when using the onboard DSP. The Apple II has a couple magnitudes less horsepower than that 68040 + DSP system.
Still, I have to appreciate the persevernce of the folks who are still hand-opimizing code for those 10-year old beautiful black boxes.
I rip all my files at 320, normal stereo, no filtering. Why? So I can reencode them to other, future formats with a reduced change of significant loss. I recompress to VBR (~150Kbps) for my laptop for listening to when I'm on the road. In five years, I'll probably be ripping to MPEG-4 TwinVQ for my mobile music, and will be able to carry around my whole collection on a few % of a laptop.
Wouldn't 256 work just as well? Probably. But Buying a second drive is a lot cheaper than worrying about having to rip 800 discs again because they were ALMOST good enough.
While this is a large scale project, it's far from impossible.
First, it's important to convert the video to a good lossy interframe codec. If I had to do this project today, and wasn't concerned by free software issues, I'd build something like this
Athlon XP SP machine
Osprey 500 card
Windows Media Encoder
The 500 card will go from the composite input of the security cameras, and do a hardware conversion to 640x480 progressive YUV 4:2:0, which is the native input mode of Windows Media. The Windows Media encoder will then have enough extra CPU power on on the SP XP machine to do a 640x480 29.97 fps encode in real time. For archival quality, you'll need something less than 1 Mbps (125 KBytes/sec) to store. You could set them up to use a qulaity-based instead of a datarate based encoding mode, so the data rate usage would drop enormously when nothing is going on.
This is the stream you'd transmit to the storage facility, which would then have to store 1 Gbps at peak (or 125 MBytes/sec). However, real-world needs would be substantially less than that, since most of the cameras aren't showing anything most of the time (although they'll probably have peaks at similar times, like rush hour).
125 MBytes/sec is way to much for a single mechanism, but it's certainly in the realm of some real-world applications. Among other things, it's very easy to parallelize this.
For those concerned about putting long-term archival data to a Microsoft propritary format, there are some other options. Today, MPEG-2 is likely to be the best bet, although it's require peak data rates more like 3 Mbps to achieve the same quality. Typically the hardware will cost more as well.
Within six months or so, MPEG-4 should be a viable option, which combines quality in the ballpark of WMV8 with the openess of an ISO standard.
It sounds like what people are suggesting is pretty much what the Close Combat series of 2D, top down, real time WWII games has offered since version 2.
I've been playing the fifth in the series lately (Invasion Normandy, about, natch, D-Day and the rest of that campaign), so let me breifly describe how that works. The strategic element is a map of Normandy, where you can give move orders to your groups of troops. Certain areas of the map include supply depots, and your troops need to be connected by a road to a supply depot to fight effectively, and cutting off your opponent from supply is an important strategy.
While you (realistically) don't build anything, you do have a force pool of units that you distribute between the various groups fighting, before the battle. So if in a given operation, you only have one tank, but three battles, you have to carefully decide where to deploy it. At the strategic level, you also decide where to give air, artillery, and shore bombardment support. This strategic element is essentially turn based, and doesn't take up much of the total time.
Most of game time is taken up by individual real-time battles. For the UI, you give a series of commands like "Move Here, attack there, wait in ambush" to squads (like a rifle team, a tank, or sniper). Unless it's a one person unit, you can't give commands to individuals. Each person has it's own AI, so they can go catatonic under pressure, drop behind the rest of the group from exhaustion.
The whole mindset is extremely different from classic *Craft style RTS games. Since you have a limited number of soldiers and armor, you just can't throw them into battle as cannon fodder. The soldiers you keep alive in one battle are the soliders that will fight your next. You also can't rush positions - unless they have very high morale, a single team just flat out won't rush a machine gun nest. You need to supply covering fire from other units, preferably from multiple angles to make it hard for the MG to find cover. They you might lay in some smoke grenades to provide cover, and then have a third team rush the MG.
Also, people get tired. If you have a unit run across a third of the map, they'll be fatigued. Run them farther, and they'll be exhaused, losing even more effectiveness. And they can run out of ammo. And if their sargent is killed, they can run away and cower in the rear, not responding to orders.
The interesting thing is the unit and individual AI is the same for both sides. If you're playing the computer, you're really playing an opposing AI which is giving its own orders to its own semi-reliable units.
Anyway, it's an extremely playable, addictive, and tense alternative to traditional RTS games. And catch this - you lose battles all the time. And losing doesn't mean you fiight it over, it means you just lost that map, and have to fight for it back. Much more tense than having to play the same map over and over until you get it right.
These questions really gets down to how the music is going to be used. I have two ways I listen to music - at home, and on the road.
First a little background on where I'm coming from. I listen to music through Paradigm Active 20 studio monitors, which are professional studio speakers with internal amplifiers, or through medium/high end Sony MDR-V900 headphones. I'm also a video professional, so I've very attuned to quality (I don't watch movies on VHS, for example, as the poor quality is too distracting). I'm not quite so fussy about audio, but am still pretty fussy.
At home, I have all my music on an old PowerMac G4 400 I had lying around, which I also use to rip with. I use Maxtor 75 GB external FireWire drives, which are pretty much infinitely daisy-chainable to expand storage, so the only real issue in data rate is balancing quality per cost .
On the road, I listen to music via iTunes on my PowerBook G4. Quality is less important than storage effeciency, since I have a limited amount of space I want to spend on my hard drive for audio (2GB is my budget - I need a lot of room for video files). Also, I'm pretty much only listening the the music while I'm writing. I've found a 128 Kbps with an average data rate around 155 to be good enough that I'm not actively distracted by poor audio quality, although I can hear artifacts if I pay attention. However, I continually add and remove audio from my local storage
I did a bunch of encode tests, and spent quite a while figuring out the best way to go. I found audio sounded "good enough" for high end listening at 192 Kbps MP3. However, given the amount of labor of encoding all my CD's (34 days worth of music so far), I really, really wanted to make sure I wouldn't EVER have to go back to the original discs again. I assume I'm going to be recompressing from these files to new audio codecs for at least a decade to come, so I want the quality to be not only transparent for listening, but not to have a minimum of sub-audible compression artifacts that would make later recompression more difficult. Because of this, I encoded everything at 320 Normal (not joint) stereo, with no filtering. 256 might have worked, but it was worth spending a little more on storage in order to not have to worry about having to rip all those CD's again. Even assuming your time is only worth minimum wage, it's way cheaper to buy more storage and spend less time fussing. Still, it's a little irritating to know all those bonus tracks with 10 minutes of silence in them are still eating up 40 K per second.
For my laptop music, I encode at 128 max VBR, joint stereo, with a 10 Hz filter. These files sound just fine. I reencode all of these from my master array of music as needed. In the future, I'm sure I'll migrate to other audio codecs for this as the technology improves, allowing me to get more music on the laptop, the car stereo, or whatever I wind up doing with the stuff.
Had the same screen problem with mine. I orignally thought it was scratches, but the helpful folks at Apple tech support said it was grease from my fingers on the edges of the keys. A decent LCD screen cleaner got them all of without a problem.
My biggest problem is with the rubber feet that fall off. Without the feet, air doesn't pass under it as well, and it can get quite hot. Apple sent me two sets of replacement ones for free, just for the asking, though.
The first run of batteries were missing a rubber gasket, which lead to the falling out problem. Got a free swap-out on that.
Other than those three problems, it's been a great machine. And it's amazing how non-embittering it is to have minor problems like these when the company admits to the issues, apologizes, and overnights a fix.
Slashdot Mirror
It's was really the promise of native software. There weren't a lot of software available when the PowerPC first came out, but everyone knew that it was coming, so if you were going to buy a Mac you wanted to be using for more than a year or so, you bought PowerPC, and waited for the apps to come. There was a PowerPC plug in for PhotoShop 2.5 out very eaerly, and Pathways into Darkness (Bungie's pre-Marathon shooter).
Still, a lot of people bought '04 systems for a while. PowerPC really won when the PCI PowerMacs came out, which were 120 MHz minimum, did more per cycle, and had a much better 68K emulator. At that point, a PowerPC was many times faster than the fastest 68040 machine ever build, and no one looked back.
For the first few years of PowerPC, Mac users had the unusual experience of having their systems get FASTER with every OS and application update.
Also, the 40 MHz 040 chips were actually 80 MHz internally with a 40 MHz bus. Kind of like a 486DX2-80.
Larry Niven's "A Gift from Earth" posits a variation of it. The ship contained a small, multi-generational crew, and a much larger number of cyro-frozen colonists.
When the ship finally gets to the (unexpectly sucky) planet, the crew decides they've gotten the short end of the stick, and decide to rule the planet with the colonists are their vassels. So they thaw them out one by one, tell them what the new order is, and chuck them off that habital plateaus which are the only places to live on the planet.
The book takes place after several generations of this, and also involves psychic powers, a revolutionary movement, sleep inducers, organ cloning, what it's like to live on a planet with a tiny habitable area, and a bunch of other cool stuff. And what happens when you light up a colony ship's fusion drive on a planetary surface. About my favorite book ever from when I was 11.
Works great as an anti-apartied metaphor, although I didn't pick up on that parallel at the time. It was an evocative expression of the horrors in living in a totalitarian state, and of running one. Much more politically sensible than most of Niven's later collaborations with Pournelle.
It's one of the early entries the Known Space series. 100% Kzin free, as I remember.
A lot of folks seem to think that MPEG-4 is a video codec, which is a relatively small part of the overall technology.
This document is a good overview of what MPEG-4 is and what it's for
We haven't seen public demonstrations of many of the more exotic technologies in here yet, like the facial and 3D animation, text to speech, digital film projection, two-way real-time voice and videoconferencing, etcetera, but all those are part of MPEG-4. As is interactivity and wavelet still image compression.
Overall, we're talking about something riviling the complexity and importance of the Linux Standard Base.
Well, if you want to link about it in terms of scacity, there is definitely a scarcity of good, specified, interoperable digital media technologies.
Lots of people have spent YEARS and MILLIONS in making MPEG-4 happen - they started the process in 1993. And it took so long because it's really hard to do - well more than a thousand person-years by this point. It's a delusion to think things like Ogg Tarkin, which don't even exist yet and aren't trying to do even 5% of what MPEG-4 is aimed at, are an alternative technology.
The only viable alternative for what MPEG-4 is meant to do is Windows Media, which offers superior compression efficiency, but isn't an ISO standard. That's where the battle is going to be.
People will use MPEG-4 because it offers massively improved compression efficiency over MPEG-2. This means you're able to get a lot more bang for the bit when bandwidth is a constraint (which is almost always is for video). Eventually, digital cable and satellite operators will adopt MPEG-4 since they'll be able to get several times more channels, and hence dramatically improve revenue, over their current infrastructure.
MPEG-4 also offers a lot of rich media and interactivity features.
Sorry, this is pretty much entirely wrong when it comes to the real world of MPEG-4.
The critical issue for any MPEG-4 technology is interoperability, which means that any compliant device/program can play any compliant content that matches the same Profile@Level. For example, the ISMA Profile 1 (targeting personal computer playback) uses Advanced Simple Level 3 for video and High Quality Audio Level 2 for audio. In turn, this means a maximum resolution of 99 16x16 blocks (typically 352x288) and a bunch of other stuff.
The content itself needs to live in a MPEG-4 file, or a MPEG-4 bitstream.
None of the "MPEG-4" titled solutions from the open source community meet these requirements. They adopt much of the Simple Visual Profile for a video codec, but don't handle the audio codecs, the file format, or the streaming format. While they get some value from the ideas in MPEG-4 video, they aren't MPEG-4 in any meaningful, real-world way. They don't work with the published ISO standard.
The actual ISMA derived solutions use the Advanced Simple codec, which offers much better compression efficiency, in the ballpark of Windows Media, RealVideo, and QuickTime with typical web uses (e.g. 320x240 @ 250 Kbps).
Indeed. Cable companies are going to like the 500 channels of HD a lot more than the idea of upping end-user bandwidth. Since those HD channels are broadcast to all the users on the cable connection, they only have to ingest the bandwidth once, and distribute it to many.
In software? I doubt it. My 33 MHz NeXTStation Color Turbo can't do high bitrate MP3 decodes, even when using the onboard DSP. The Apple II has a couple magnitudes less horsepower than that 68040 + DSP system.
Still, I have to appreciate the persevernce of the folks who are still hand-opimizing code for those 10-year old beautiful black boxes.
I rip all my files at 320, normal stereo, no filtering. Why? So I can reencode them to other, future formats with a reduced change of significant loss. I recompress to VBR (~150Kbps) for my laptop for listening to when I'm on the road. In five years, I'll probably be ripping to MPEG-4 TwinVQ for my mobile music, and will be able to carry around my whole collection on a few % of a laptop.
Wouldn't 256 work just as well? Probably. But Buying a second drive is a lot cheaper than worrying about having to rip 800 discs again because they were ALMOST good enough.
While this is a large scale project, it's far from impossible.
First, it's important to convert the video to a good lossy interframe codec. If I had to do this project today, and wasn't concerned by free software issues, I'd build something like this
Athlon XP SP machine
Osprey 500 card
Windows Media Encoder
The 500 card will go from the composite input of the security cameras, and do a hardware conversion to 640x480 progressive YUV 4:2:0, which is the native input mode of Windows Media. The Windows Media encoder will then have enough extra CPU power on on the SP XP machine to do a 640x480 29.97 fps encode in real time. For archival quality, you'll need something less than 1 Mbps (125 KBytes/sec) to store. You could set them up to use a qulaity-based instead of a datarate based encoding mode, so the data rate usage would drop enormously when nothing is going on.
This is the stream you'd transmit to the storage facility, which would then have to store 1 Gbps at peak (or 125 MBytes/sec). However, real-world needs would be substantially less than that, since most of the cameras aren't showing anything most of the time (although they'll probably have peaks at similar times, like rush hour).
125 MBytes/sec is way to much for a single mechanism, but it's certainly in the realm of some real-world applications. Among other things, it's very easy to parallelize this.
For those concerned about putting long-term archival data to a Microsoft propritary format, there are some other options. Today, MPEG-2 is likely to be the best bet, although it's require peak data rates more like 3 Mbps to achieve the same quality. Typically the hardware will cost more as well.
Within six months or so, MPEG-4 should be a viable option, which combines quality in the ballpark of WMV8 with the openess of an ISO standard.
It sounds like what people are suggesting is pretty much what the Close Combat series of 2D, top down, real time WWII games has offered since version 2.
I've been playing the fifth in the series lately (Invasion Normandy, about, natch, D-Day and the rest of that campaign), so let me breifly describe how that works. The strategic element is a map of Normandy, where you can give move orders to your groups of troops. Certain areas of the map include supply depots, and your troops need to be connected by a road to a supply depot to fight effectively, and cutting off your opponent from supply is an important strategy.
While you (realistically) don't build anything, you do have a force pool of units that you distribute between the various groups fighting, before the battle. So if in a given operation, you only have one tank, but three battles, you have to carefully decide where to deploy it. At the strategic level, you also decide where to give air, artillery, and shore bombardment support. This strategic element is essentially turn based, and doesn't take up much of the total time.
Most of game time is taken up by individual real-time battles. For the UI, you give a series of commands like "Move Here, attack there, wait in ambush" to squads (like a rifle team, a tank, or sniper). Unless it's a one person unit, you can't give commands to individuals. Each person has it's own AI, so they can go catatonic under pressure, drop behind the rest of the group from exhaustion.
The whole mindset is extremely different from classic *Craft style RTS games. Since you have a limited number of soldiers and armor, you just can't throw them into battle as cannon fodder. The soldiers you keep alive in one battle are the soliders that will fight your next. You also can't rush positions - unless they have very high morale, a single team just flat out won't rush a machine gun nest. You need to supply covering fire from other units, preferably from multiple angles to make it hard for the MG to find cover. They you might lay in some smoke grenades to provide cover, and then have a third team rush the MG.
Also, people get tired. If you have a unit run across a third of the map, they'll be fatigued. Run them farther, and they'll be exhaused, losing even more effectiveness. And they can run out of ammo. And if their sargent is killed, they can run away and cower in the rear, not responding to orders.
The interesting thing is the unit and individual AI is the same for both sides. If you're playing the computer, you're really playing an opposing AI which is giving its own orders to its own semi-reliable units.
Anyway, it's an extremely playable, addictive, and tense alternative to traditional RTS games. And catch this - you lose battles all the time. And losing doesn't mean you fiight it over, it means you just lost that map, and have to fight for it back. Much more tense than having to play the same map over and over until you get it right.
These questions really gets down to how the music is going to be used. I have two ways I listen to music - at home, and on the road.
First a little background on where I'm coming from. I listen to music through Paradigm Active 20 studio monitors, which are professional studio speakers with internal amplifiers, or through medium/high end Sony MDR-V900 headphones. I'm also a video professional, so I've very attuned to quality (I don't watch movies on VHS, for example, as the poor quality is too distracting). I'm not quite so fussy about audio, but am still pretty fussy.
At home, I have all my music on an old PowerMac G4 400 I had lying around, which I also use to rip with. I use Maxtor 75 GB external FireWire drives, which are pretty much infinitely daisy-chainable to expand storage, so the only real issue in data rate is balancing quality per cost .
On the road, I listen to music via iTunes on my PowerBook G4. Quality is less important than storage effeciency, since I have a limited amount of space I want to spend on my hard drive for audio (2GB is my budget - I need a lot of room for video files). Also, I'm pretty much only listening the the music while I'm writing. I've found a 128 Kbps with an average data rate around 155 to be good enough that I'm not actively distracted by poor audio quality, although I can hear artifacts if I pay attention. However, I continually add and remove audio from my local storage
I did a bunch of encode tests, and spent quite a while figuring out the best way to go. I found audio sounded "good enough" for high end listening at 192 Kbps MP3. However, given the amount of labor of encoding all my CD's (34 days worth of music so far), I really, really wanted to make sure I wouldn't EVER have to go back to the original discs again. I assume I'm going to be recompressing from these files to new audio codecs for at least a decade to come, so I want the quality to be not only transparent for listening, but not to have a minimum of sub-audible compression artifacts that would make later recompression more difficult. Because of this, I encoded everything at 320 Normal (not joint) stereo, with no filtering. 256 might have worked, but it was worth spending a little more on storage in order to not have to worry about having to rip all those CD's again. Even assuming your time is only worth minimum wage, it's way cheaper to buy more storage and spend less time fussing. Still, it's a little irritating to know all those bonus tracks with 10 minutes of silence in them are still eating up 40 K per second.
For my laptop music, I encode at 128 max VBR, joint stereo, with a 10 Hz filter. These files sound just fine. I reencode all of these from my master array of music as needed. In the future, I'm sure I'll migrate to other audio codecs for this as the technology improves, allowing me to get more music on the laptop, the car stereo, or whatever I wind up doing with the stuff.
-Ben Waggoner
OS X 10.1 (or is that X.1?) is out in "September."
Had the same screen problem with mine. I orignally thought it was scratches, but the helpful folks at Apple tech support said it was grease from my fingers on the edges of the keys. A decent LCD screen cleaner got them all of without a problem.
My biggest problem is with the rubber feet that fall off. Without the feet, air doesn't pass under it as well, and it can get quite hot. Apple sent me two sets of replacement ones for free, just for the asking, though.
The first run of batteries were missing a rubber gasket, which lead to the falling out problem. Got a free swap-out on that.
Other than those three problems, it's been a great machine. And it's amazing how non-embittering it is to have minor problems like these when the company admits to the issues, apologizes, and overnights a fix.