Evolution IS chance, it's just that the ones lucky enough to get the good changes breed more.
No. Evolution means improvement. The theory of evolution through natural selection (which is what most people mean when they say "evolution") says that species tend to improve naturally when those improvements increase their probability of reproducing successfully.
But it's not always clear if a certain change will improve a species chances of reproduction and / or survival.
And when a certain characteristic has little or no relevance in survival and reproduction, then it will stay or go based purely on chance.
The reason we are more sensitive to green is because there was something related to it that allowed our ancient ancestors to get laid more:)
And if you can find out what this was, your theory may be right. Personally I cannot. That's what I meant when I said that there's a certain tendency to use the theory of evolution through natural selection to "explain" things that do not fit its definition.
If this were not true, then there would be more people who were not more sensitive to it.
The reason why we are more sensitive to green is a natural consequence of two things: 1. green wavelengths are at the middle of our visible spectrum and 2. our photon receptors aren't 100% accurate, so they don't react to just one wavelength. The result is that the blue and yellow receptors are also partially sensitive to green, so there's an increase in green "resolution".
It's sort of the way single-CCD cameras work (two in each four pixels is green). This translates not only to better spatial resolution but also to better colour accuracy.
One of these likely advantages would be the ability to more easily distinguish between plants that would kill you, and those that are nutritious.
You can't distinguish between poisonous and edible plants based on colour. There are poisonous and edible plants of just about every colour and shade.
Most animals are colour-blind and are quite able to distinguish what they can eat from what they cannot. Smell (and experience) are much more important than colour.
In fact, it works the other way around. Since almost all insects can see colour, it plays a major role in plant reproduction and survival, because the plants with the most striking colours will attract more insects and therefore reproduce more.
Human vision could be improved by covering a slightly wider spectrum, but there's no "natural" incentive for that to happen, so it doesn't. Women won't magically fall in love with me and ask me to be the father of their children just because I can see ultra-violet light (er... will they?).
When something is good enough, it'll stay that way for a long time. Nature is lazy. Which makes me a naturist.:-)
I think his point was that we evolved this way because blue (and red) are less "important" than green in the natural world. Which might be the case, who knows? Personally I think a lot of things that can be "explained" by evolution are more likely the product of chance.
Things like earlobes, pubic hair, and the fact that Windows 2000 is actually quite stable.
As you can see, at 650 nm (pure red), the cones are almost blind. The brain combines this information with what it gets from the rods (luminance) and realises that there is some colour there. And since it has no blue, almost no green and only a little yellow, it's translated to "red".
TVs use RGB (red,green,blue) just as they could use CMY (cyan,magenta,yellow) or any other group of complementary colours (of which there is an infinite number - any three colours that are 120 apart in a spectrum wheel will do). It has nothing to do with the actual wavelengths that the receptors in our eyes are tuned to.
You may also want to read some more about how TV colour signals are encoded (messy but interesting) and why current standards are as they are. Do a quick search on the internet and I'm sure you'll find plenty of pages about it.
[...] but when you want to have a nice background, top is plain blue (#0000ff) and botton is black (#000000), then there are only 254 levels between those. And I can clearly see those lines where the blue color value changes.
Actually, you should make that black to blue to white. And while you'll manage to distinguish the colours at the centre of the scale (near "pure" blue), I doubt you'll be able to distinguish the colours at the top and bottom (near white and black).
The limitations of 24-bit colour can also be dealt with with dithering. Most high-end animation programs render internally at 48 / 64 bits per pixel (16 bits per component) and then dither the image when they convert it to 24-bpp (8-bpc). This would result in a much smoother transition from black to blue (and then to white), with no visible banding.
Most modern graphics cards already do real-time dithering, but only in 16-bit modes (which still work internally at 24 / 32).
We can see wavelengths ranging from red to blue (well, it's more from magenta to magenta, actually, but you know what I mean). Green happens to be at the middle of that range (aprox. 535 nm), so naturally we have better colour accuracy in those wavelengths.
For all I know, some food may have lovely ultra-violet or infra-red shades mixed with their yellow or green, but we just can't see them (some animals can). In fact, if we could "see" much longer wavelengths, we'd have heat vision. Cool but probably a bit confusing.
It's also interesting that, while our eyes have receptors that are sensitive to YGBL (Yellow, Green, Blue and Luminance), we tend to think in HLS (hue, luminance and saturation).
Our brain "constructs" the red parts of the image from the other signals. If our eyes see something that has high luminance, some yellow, very little green and no blue, we perceive it as red (note that here when I say "yellow" I mean "something that is detected by our 'yellow' receivers", not pure yellow).
This is actually similar to the way TV signals are transmitted (a black-and-white signal plus two "difference" colours signals, so it's compatible with both B&W and colour TVs).
And, of course, not everyone's eyes are calibrated the same, so what is brownish green to one person can be greenish brown to another, and so on.
The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colours. But it's more sensitive to some frequencies than others, so sometimes 24 bits (16 million colours) may not be enough.
For example, most people can distinguish between two very similar 24-bit medium greens but not between three or four similar 24-bit dark blues.
That said, no monitor can accurately represent 16 million colours, let alone several billions. Even if they could, the dynamic range of monitors is very limited compared to the range our eyes can see (ie, monitors have very limited brightness compared to the normal sunlit world), so most of those colours would be wasted.
Higher colour precision is good because it minimises round-off errors, but this applies mainly to internal calculations (some operations are done directly on the final framebuffer, but very few). For display, 24 bits (and a good monitor) are more than enough.
This isn't the only disc that gets stuck in Macs. Here's an article from Apple that mentions two other discs and also the solution. Click here to read the article.
Still, it's pretty silly that they forgot to include a manual eject button; if the power supply dies, for example, your disc is stuck until the computer is repaired.
A render farm is simply a bunch of computers connected through a LAN that each render a different frame (or part of a frame) of a large animation. It's an old concept and is no way way related to Firewire / IEEE-1394. All high-end animation software (and some low-end as well) can be setup to render over a network, regardless of the platform (PC, Mac, SGI, etc.). Naturally, these computers don't need much besides fast CPUs and a network connection.
Check your prices on Macs. The "Macs are too expensive" argument is a lie.
I have. Before buying my DVD authoring system I actually considered buying a Mac. It turned out that, for the price of a Dual G4, I was able to buy a system that is 50% faster, has more memory and disk space, does real-time video effects and is easier to upgrade. I may not like Apple's business tactics (just as I don't like Microsoft's), but I also don't like to throw money away. If the Mac was cheaper (or better for the same price), I would have bought one.
Plus, as your argument goes, why doesn't Microsoft make Windows for PPC? Surely, if they did, there would be some market for PPC clones.
Microsoft does not sell PCs. They sell software, period. Apple sells both the hardware and the software, and forces you to buy one if you want the other. On top of that, they have a deal with Motorola to make sure that no-one else can get PPC processors that are faster (or even the same speed) as the ones used in Macs.
I know you'd love to see OSX on the x86, but that would kill any chance of having OSX around thereafter, which makes complaining about it pointless.
Why? If OS X is so obviously superior to Windows, surely some people (maybe not most, but enough) would switch from Windows to "OS X86". Overall, the number of OS X users could only increase if it ran on x86 (or x86-64) platforms.
Apple does not have a monopoly on 3d rendering software, so shake isn't even an issue.
Actually Shake is a compositing program, not a 3D renderer.
And Shake is precisely the issue. Because Apple is deliberately killing all other versions of Shake (that a lot of people use) to force those people to buy their hardware. Shake does not "run better" on Macs. Apple isn't going to "improve" Shake. Shake will continue to be made by the same programmers, who had developed it for x86 platforms (Windows, Linux) and developed it well. And I really don't understand how this can make Mac users feel happy. A new version that runs much faster on Macs, yes, that would be a good thing. But why so much cheering because Apple is destroying something that already existed, and that several people depended on...?
Microsoft is free to produce Windows for PPC
Why should they? PPC is slower and more expensive than x86. Running Windows on PPC would only interest professional masochists. At least Macs have a decent operating system. Couple that with decent hardware and mentally sane prices and you have a great system, that can take on Microsoft on the desktop market. Microsoft is already running on the fastest, cheapest hardware. If there's an area that PC users need to improve, it's the OS. And if there's an area that Mac users need to improve, it's the hardware.
You know what I think? I think Microsoft is using Apple to improve its own image. They can say: "see, there's an alternative to Windows, there's competition. And it's more expensive and slower, and they try to kill their competitors just like we do, so we are the good guys!"
I'm sorry, how is this insightful? Because it bashes Miscrosoft? Halo hadn't even been released for the Mac (or any other platform). Microsoft didn't kill it, they simply released the X-Box version first to give it some leverage against Nintendo and Sony in the console market.
Of course there will be Windows and Mac versions of Halo. Microsoft likes money too much not to make them (and they have an investment in Windows and Apple too, remember?).
And Shake isn't a game. Large studios depend on it. And most of all they depend on its speed. Even the fastest PowerMac can't compete with a quad Xeon (Dual G4s barely manage to edge out a single-CPU Athlon, and are crushed by the much cheaper Athlon MPs). If Apple kills Shake on the fastest platforms, it kills Shake completely. Studios have deadlines to meet and they certainly aren't going to meet them if they're forced to use Macs for their render nodes. It's not a matter of price or even bang for the buck. It's a matter of bang, period.
I work in animation and post-production and I know what I'm talking about. Half the artists don't even know which OS they are running, and the other half doesn't care. They just want the thing to render as fast as possible. And if you don't believe me (it seems that I'm a troll for not applauding Apple's scorched earth tactics), check out this post.
Did it occur to you that Apple might not want to make $$$ they may be happy with $? [...]
So what need do they have to buy other companies simply to kill their products, and eliminate the competition?
Sorry but I can't understand what's so good about Apple killing Shake on the PC (it'll start with Windows but other versions will follow).
It it because it "hurts" Microsoft? Does that make it a good thing? In fact it doesn't hurt Microsoft at all. High-end workstations are small business for the OS maker (Microsoft makes about the same money off a high-end workstation as it makes off a home PC). The only people this will hurt is Shake's users. They'll be forced to switch to a different, more expensive, less versatile platform, just to keep using the same program. So they lose.
And a lot of them won't switch (because they rely on other programs, that don't exist for the Mac), so they'll just stop using Shake and move to Combustion or Digital Fusion or some competing product that still runs on Windows. So Shake loses, too.
Besides, since they only make $, Apple doesn't get viewed with the same resentment that M$ does.
I think you have a point, there. Most people dislike Microsoft not because they are dishonest but because they are successful. For me it's not the amount of money that counts, or who is making it. It's how they make it.
VPC is an emulator, it doesn't do anythign to the hardware.
Quoting Connectix: "The PowerPC has a special mode which allows it to simulate little endian mode (the native mode of Intel-compatible processors). On PowerPC processors prior to the G3, however, this mode came at a high performance cost when the data in memory was misaligned. The G3 and G4 processors removed these performance bottlenecks, allowing Connectix engineers to take advantage of this feature."
So as you can see it does do something to the hardware. And, according to Connectix, there is no performance hit by using little-endian bytes on the G3 / G4. Doesn't mean Apple should change the system, but it shows they could if they wanted to.
And yes PCI did exist on the PC when apple adopted it, but when Apple went PCI, PCs wer still using ISA.
Er... I'm sorry? So did it exist on PCs or not? It doesn't seem very relevant that some motherboards still came with ISA slots (or EISA, or MCA, or VLB for that that matter). The standard existed. When Apple decided to adopt it they knew it would not be compatible with PCI cards designed for PCs. Which is fine; they don't have to make things the same way others do. But somehow they keep forgetting to mention this difference in their specifications (and a lot of people assume they can simply stick any PCI card in a Mac and it'll work).
Porsche does control the production of Porsche cars, just as Apple controls the production of Mac computers and Microsoft controls the development of the MS Windows operating system. And, in a broad sense, you can call those situations 'monopolies'. But that's not the point.
The point is using their position in the market (and their customer's dependency on them) to impose unfair restrictions on their competitors and clients. I didn't say it was illegal (though, in some cases, it might be), I just said that there's no fundamental difference between the way Apple behaves and the way Microsoft behaves. The only difference is the scale.
And if, with PCs, you can still pick the hardware you want (despite Microsoft's control of the OS and software market), with Macs you are bound not only to Apple's OS (and software), but also to their hardware.
How many people will spend money on a new graphics card after being forced to pay for the card that came on their iMac? How many people will buy other editing programs after being forced to pay for Apple's Final Cut Pro? Apple is using its position as sole supplier of Mac OS systems to force people to pay for their software (even if later they decide not to use it, or to buy a competing program), while at the same time putting competitors at a disadvantage.
It's probably not illegal, but personally I don't like it, regardless of who does it (Microsoft, Apple, or any other company or individual).
Hm... isn't OS X a complete rewrite anyway...? Doesn't Virtual PC set the CPU to use x86 bit order? And didn't PCI exist on the PC when Apple decided to adopt it?
These decisions aren't arbitrary (most, anyway). The 'formats' business is big business. Just ask Sony why they make 5 new types of plugs each year, and why their 'standards' are often incompatible with the industry standard (SDI vs. QSDI, for example).
You say that as if Microsoft had any obligation to port software to Linux. Microsoft cares only about money. If they can profit from Linux versions, they'll make them. The two reasons why they don't are simple: a) the user base (and thus the market share) still isn't attractive enough and b) they've been telling everyone what a terrible thing the GPL and OSS are, so now they can't start developing for a GPL'd, open-source OS without losing face.
you have to remember that if you wanted to, you could manufacture your own PPC motherboard and generic box and throw Linux on it. There just isn't a market for these things so no one is doing it. On x86 on the other hand, we've got every single OEM being forced to put Windows on every single PC, or face being priced out of the business by Microsoft.
Hm... slightly confusing. First, Windows does not come on every single PC; you can buy PCs without any software, or with Linux (at least where I live you can). Even if it did you could always build your own system (which is easy to do with a PC, and lots of people do just that), and pick your own OS. Macs, on the other hand, always come with Mac OS and, as you said, it's not viable to build a PPC system from scratch.
So the way I see it, hardware-wise, Apple has a much bigger influence over their platform than Microsoft does (although MS also has a big influence over Apple, so in the end they play for both teams).
Microsoft can't keep saying GPL spells doom for the industry while at the same time profiting from software written for a GPL'd OS.
I wouldn't be (too) surprised to see Microsoft porting some software for FreeBSD, for example, if the user base gets a bit larger (if only to claim that there are alternatives to Windows, etc., etc.). In fact, I'm pretty sure they even have Linux ports of some of their programs hidden in some basement just in case they feel the (commercial) benefits suddenly outweigh the (moral) damage.
Unlike Intel, Microsoft doesn't suffer from the NIH (not invented here) syndrome. They don't care about anything half as much as they care about making money. And if there's money to be made somewhere, they'll go there to make it. They can't do it now because of the legal mess they're into and the strategy they're adopting, but if Linux ever manages to grab a relevant market share, do you have any doubt that MS will start selling Linux software? Or even selling Linux itself (bundled with their software, of course). I can see it now... the Red Mond distro, with Ballmux the monkey instead of Tux penguin...;-)
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Evolution IS chance, it's just that the ones lucky enough to get the good changes breed more.
:)
:-)
No. Evolution means improvement. The theory of evolution through natural selection (which is what most people mean when they say "evolution") says that species tend to improve naturally when those improvements increase their probability of reproducing successfully.
But it's not always clear if a certain change will improve a species chances of reproduction and / or survival.
And when a certain characteristic has little or no relevance in survival and reproduction, then it will stay or go based purely on chance.
The reason we are more sensitive to green is because there was something related to it that allowed our ancient ancestors to get laid more
And if you can find out what this was, your theory may be right. Personally I cannot. That's what I meant when I said that there's a certain tendency to use the theory of evolution through natural selection to "explain" things that do not fit its definition.
If this were not true, then there would be more people who were not more sensitive to it.
The reason why we are more sensitive to green is a natural consequence of two things: 1. green wavelengths are at the middle of our visible spectrum and 2. our photon receptors aren't 100% accurate, so they don't react to just one wavelength. The result is that the blue and yellow receptors are also partially sensitive to green, so there's an increase in green "resolution".
It's sort of the way single-CCD cameras work (two in each four pixels is green). This translates not only to better spatial resolution but also to better colour accuracy.
One of these likely advantages would be the ability to more easily distinguish between plants that would kill you, and those that are nutritious.
You can't distinguish between poisonous and edible plants based on colour. There are poisonous and edible plants of just about every colour and shade.
Most animals are colour-blind and are quite able to distinguish what they can eat from what they cannot. Smell (and experience) are much more important than colour.
In fact, it works the other way around. Since almost all insects can see colour, it plays a major role in plant reproduction and survival, because the plants with the most striking colours will attract more insects and therefore reproduce more.
Human vision could be improved by covering a slightly wider spectrum, but there's no "natural" incentive for that to happen, so it doesn't. Women won't magically fall in love with me and ask me to be the father of their children just because I can see ultra-violet light (er... will they?).
When something is good enough, it'll stay that way for a long time. Nature is lazy. Which makes me a naturist.
RMN
~~~
I think his point was that we evolved this way because blue (and red) are less "important" than green in the natural world. Which might be the case, who knows? Personally I think a lot of things that can be "explained" by evolution are more likely the product of chance.
Things like earlobes, pubic hair, and the fact that Windows 2000 is actually quite stable.
RMN
~~~
In fact, since our eyes are only truly sensitive to 3 colours, even CGA was excessive. ;-)
RMN
~~~
Nope. Cones are sensitive to red, green and blue (hence the use of RGB in TVs). [...] Luminance really isn't that important.
I recommend reading a bit more on the subject before making such definitive statements. You can start with this:
Spectral sensitivity of the human eye
As you can see, at 650 nm (pure red), the cones are almost blind. The brain combines this information with what it gets from the rods (luminance) and realises that there is some colour there. And since it has no blue, almost no green and only a little yellow, it's translated to "red".
TVs use RGB (red,green,blue) just as they could use CMY (cyan,magenta,yellow) or any other group of complementary colours (of which there is an infinite number - any three colours that are 120 apart in a spectrum wheel will do). It has nothing to do with the actual wavelengths that the receptors in our eyes are tuned to.
You may also want to read some more about how TV colour signals are encoded (messy but interesting) and why current standards are as they are. Do a quick search on the internet and I'm sure you'll find plenty of pages about it.
RMN
~~~
[...] but when you want to have a nice background, top is plain blue (#0000ff) and botton is black (#000000), then there are only 254 levels between those. And I can clearly see those lines where the blue color value changes.
Actually, you should make that black to blue to white. And while you'll manage to distinguish the colours at the centre of the scale (near "pure" blue), I doubt you'll be able to distinguish the colours at the top and bottom (near white and black).
The limitations of 24-bit colour can also be dealt with with dithering. Most high-end animation programs render internally at 48 / 64 bits per pixel (16 bits per component) and then dither the image when they convert it to 24-bpp (8-bpc). This would result in a much smoother transition from black to blue (and then to white), with no visible banding.
Most modern graphics cards already do real-time dithering, but only in 16-bit modes (which still work internally at 24 / 32).
RMN
~~~
We can see wavelengths ranging from red to blue (well, it's more from magenta to magenta, actually, but you know what I mean). Green happens to be at the middle of that range (aprox. 535 nm), so naturally we have better colour accuracy in those wavelengths.
For all I know, some food may have lovely ultra-violet or infra-red shades mixed with their yellow or green, but we just can't see them (some animals can). In fact, if we could "see" much longer wavelengths, we'd have heat vision. Cool but probably a bit confusing.
It's also interesting that, while our eyes have receptors that are sensitive to YGBL (Yellow, Green, Blue and Luminance), we tend to think in HLS (hue, luminance and saturation).
Our brain "constructs" the red parts of the image from the other signals. If our eyes see something that has high luminance, some yellow, very little green and no blue, we perceive it as red (note that here when I say "yellow" I mean "something that is detected by our 'yellow' receivers", not pure yellow).
This is actually similar to the way TV signals are transmitted (a black-and-white signal plus two "difference" colours signals, so it's compatible with both B&W and colour TVs).
And, of course, not everyone's eyes are calibrated the same, so what is brownish green to one person can be greenish brown to another, and so on.
RMN
~~~
The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colours. But it's more sensitive to some frequencies than others, so sometimes 24 bits (16 million colours) may not be enough.
For example, most people can distinguish between two very similar 24-bit medium greens but not between three or four similar 24-bit dark blues.
That said, no monitor can accurately represent 16 million colours, let alone several billions. Even if they could, the dynamic range of monitors is very limited compared to the range our eyes can see (ie, monitors have very limited brightness compared to the normal sunlit world), so most of those colours would be wasted.
Higher colour precision is good because it minimises round-off errors, but this applies mainly to internal calculations (some operations are done directly on the final framebuffer, but very few). For display, 24 bits (and a good monitor) are more than enough.
RMN
~~~
This isn't the only disc that gets stuck in Macs. Here's an article from Apple that mentions two other discs and also the solution. Click here to read the article.
Still, it's pretty silly that they forgot to include a manual eject button; if the power supply dies, for example, your disc is stuck until the computer is repaired.
RMN
~~~
Yup, forgot about zooming. I don't normally use the others.
RMN
~~~
Nikon and Zeiss already sell lenses. But the retina is more like a CCD. So maybe it'll be Foveon or Casio.
:)
But that's only stage one (for people who want to see what's there). For "enhanced" vision you'll need a "Visual Processor" (hm... 3Dlabs...?
RMN
~~~
...a beowulf cluster of these?
(well, someone had to say it)
I wonder how long it'll take until we see NVidia and ATI try to sell us this kind of thing...
RMN
~~~
About the browsers, personally I prefer Opera. Here are the main reasons:
- It's fast, doesn't take up too much memory, etc..
- Pop-up blocking.
- Integrated e-mail with multiple accounts.
- Easy access to the most common options (F12).
- Option to open links in background.
- MDI
- Some nice touches, such as:
- When you create a new window, the cursor is automatically placed in the URL box, so you can start typing the site address.
- Download starts in background while you're still deciding where you want to save the file.
I only wish it had better support for DHTML (I know that a lot of it isn't 100% standard, but a lot of sites use it).RMN
~~~
A render farm is simply a bunch of computers connected through a LAN that each render a different frame (or part of a frame) of a large animation. It's an old concept and is no way way related to Firewire / IEEE-1394. All high-end animation software (and some low-end as well) can be setup to render over a network, regardless of the platform (PC, Mac, SGI, etc.). Naturally, these computers don't need much besides fast CPUs and a network connection.
RMN
~~~
My, my... flamebait without a single reply. I guess there's no fish in this pond.
RMN
~~~
Check your prices on Macs. The "Macs are too expensive" argument is a lie.
I have. Before buying my DVD authoring system I actually considered buying a Mac. It turned out that, for the price of a Dual G4, I was able to buy a system that is 50% faster, has more memory and disk space, does real-time video effects and is easier to upgrade. I may not like Apple's business tactics (just as I don't like Microsoft's), but I also don't like to throw money away. If the Mac was cheaper (or better for the same price), I would have bought one.
Plus, as your argument goes, why doesn't Microsoft make Windows for PPC?
Surely, if they did, there would be some market for PPC clones.
Microsoft does not sell PCs. They sell software, period. Apple sells both the hardware and the software, and forces you to buy one if you want the other. On top of that, they have a deal with Motorola to make sure that no-one else can get PPC processors that are faster (or even the same speed) as the ones used in Macs.
I know you'd love to see OSX on the x86, but that would kill any chance
of having OSX around thereafter, which makes complaining about it pointless.
Why? If OS X is so obviously superior to Windows, surely some people (maybe not most, but enough) would switch from Windows to "OS X86". Overall, the number of OS X users could only increase if it ran on x86 (or x86-64) platforms.
Apple does not have a monopoly on 3d rendering software,
so shake isn't even an issue.
Actually Shake is a compositing program, not a 3D renderer.
And Shake is precisely the issue. Because Apple is deliberately killing all other versions of Shake (that a lot of people use) to force those people to buy their hardware. Shake does not "run better" on Macs. Apple isn't going to "improve" Shake. Shake will continue to be made by the same programmers, who had developed it for x86 platforms (Windows, Linux) and developed it well. And I really don't understand how this can make Mac users feel happy. A new version that runs much faster on Macs, yes, that would be a good thing. But why so much cheering because Apple is destroying something that already existed, and that several people depended on...?
Microsoft is free to produce Windows for PPC
Why should they? PPC is slower and more expensive than x86. Running Windows on PPC would only interest professional masochists. At least Macs have a decent operating system. Couple that with decent hardware and mentally sane prices and you have a great system, that can take on Microsoft on the desktop market. Microsoft is already running on the fastest, cheapest hardware. If there's an area that PC users need to improve, it's the OS. And if there's an area that Mac users need to improve, it's the hardware.
You know what I think? I think Microsoft is using Apple to improve its own image. They can say: "see, there's an alternative to Windows, there's competition. And it's more expensive and slower, and they try to kill their competitors just like we do, so we are the good guys!"
RMN
~~~
I'm sorry, how is this insightful? Because it bashes Miscrosoft? Halo hadn't even been released for the Mac (or any other platform). Microsoft didn't kill it, they simply released the X-Box version first to give it some leverage against Nintendo and Sony in the console market.
Of course there will be Windows and Mac versions of Halo. Microsoft likes money too much not to make them (and they have an investment in Windows and Apple too, remember?).
And Shake isn't a game. Large studios depend on it. And most of all they depend on its speed. Even the fastest PowerMac can't compete with a quad Xeon (Dual G4s barely manage to edge out a single-CPU Athlon, and are crushed by the much cheaper Athlon MPs). If Apple kills Shake on the fastest platforms, it kills Shake completely. Studios have deadlines to meet and they certainly aren't going to meet them if they're forced to use Macs for their render nodes. It's not a matter of price or even bang for the buck. It's a matter of bang, period.
I work in animation and post-production and I know what I'm talking about. Half the artists don't even know which OS they are running, and the other half doesn't care. They just want the thing to render as fast as possible. And if you don't believe me (it seems that I'm a troll for not applauding Apple's scorched earth tactics), check out this post.
Discreet, Eyeon and Silicon Grail probably can't belive their luck right now.
RMN
~~~
I'm sure Big Bill is proud of his pet.
And as a result of that... do you prefer a traditional timeline or a node-based render queue?
RMN
~~~
Did it occur to you that Apple might not want to make $$$ they may
be happy with $? [...]
So what need do they have to buy other companies simply to kill their products, and eliminate the competition?
Sorry but I can't understand what's so good about Apple killing Shake on the PC (it'll start with Windows but other versions will follow).
It it because it "hurts" Microsoft? Does that make it a good thing? In fact it doesn't hurt Microsoft at all. High-end workstations are small business for the OS maker (Microsoft makes about the same money off a high-end workstation as it makes off a home PC). The only people this will hurt is Shake's users. They'll be forced to switch to a different, more expensive, less versatile platform, just to keep using the same program. So they lose.
And a lot of them won't switch (because they rely on other programs, that don't exist for the Mac), so they'll just stop using Shake and move to Combustion or Digital Fusion or some competing product that still runs on Windows. So Shake loses, too.
Besides, since they only make $, Apple doesn't
get viewed with the same resentment that M$ does.
I think you have a point, there. Most people dislike Microsoft not because they are dishonest but because they are successful. For me it's not the amount of money that counts, or who is making it. It's how they make it.
RMN
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VPC is an emulator, it doesn't do anythign to the hardware.
Quoting Connectix:
"The PowerPC has a special mode which allows it to simulate little endian mode (the native mode of Intel-compatible processors). On PowerPC processors prior to the G3, however, this mode came at a high performance cost when the data in memory was misaligned. The G3 and G4 processors removed these performance bottlenecks, allowing Connectix engineers to take advantage of this feature."
So as you can see it does do something to the hardware. And, according to Connectix, there is no performance hit by using little-endian bytes on the G3 / G4. Doesn't mean Apple should change the system, but it shows they could if they wanted to.
And yes PCI did exist on the PC when apple adopted it,
but when Apple went PCI, PCs wer still using ISA.
Er... I'm sorry? So did it exist on PCs or not? It doesn't seem very relevant that some motherboards still came with ISA slots (or EISA, or MCA, or VLB for that that matter). The standard existed. When Apple decided to adopt it they knew it would not be compatible with PCI cards designed for PCs. Which is fine; they don't have to make things the same way others do. But somehow they keep forgetting to mention this difference in their specifications (and a lot of people assume they can simply stick any PCI card in a Mac and it'll work).
RMN
~~~
Porsche does control the production of Porsche cars, just as Apple controls the production of Mac computers and Microsoft controls the development of the MS Windows operating system. And, in a broad sense, you can call those situations 'monopolies'. But that's not the point.
The point is using their position in the market (and their customer's dependency on them) to impose unfair restrictions on their competitors and clients. I didn't say it was illegal (though, in some cases, it might be), I just said that there's no fundamental difference between the way Apple behaves and the way Microsoft behaves. The only difference is the scale.
And if, with PCs, you can still pick the hardware you want (despite Microsoft's control of the OS and software market), with Macs you are bound not only to Apple's OS (and software), but also to their hardware.
How many people will spend money on a new graphics card after being forced to pay for the card that came on their iMac? How many people will buy other editing programs after being forced to pay for Apple's Final Cut Pro? Apple is using its position as sole supplier of Mac OS systems to force people to pay for their software (even if later they decide not to use it, or to buy a competing program), while at the same time putting competitors at a disadvantage.
It's probably not illegal, but personally I don't like it, regardless of who does it (Microsoft, Apple, or any other company or individual).
RMN
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Hm... isn't OS X a complete rewrite anyway...? Doesn't Virtual PC set the CPU to use x86 bit order? And didn't PCI exist on the PC when Apple decided to adopt it?
These decisions aren't arbitrary (most, anyway). The 'formats' business is big business. Just ask Sony why they make 5 new types of plugs each year, and why their 'standards' are often incompatible with the industry standard (SDI vs. QSDI, for example).
RMN
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You say that as if Microsoft had any obligation to port software to Linux. Microsoft cares only about money. If they can profit from Linux versions, they'll make them. The two reasons why they don't are simple: a) the user base (and thus the market share) still isn't attractive enough and b) they've been telling everyone what a terrible thing the GPL and OSS are, so now they can't start developing for a GPL'd, open-source OS without losing face.
RMN
~~~
you have to remember that if you wanted to, you could manufacture your own
PPC motherboard and generic box and throw Linux on it. There just isn't a market
for these things so no one is doing it. On x86 on the other hand, we've got
every single OEM being forced to put Windows on every single PC, or face being
priced out of the business by Microsoft.
Hm... slightly confusing. First, Windows does not come on every single PC; you can buy PCs without any software, or with Linux (at least where I live you can). Even if it did you could always build your own system (which is easy to do with a PC, and lots of people do just that), and pick your own OS. Macs, on the other hand, always come with Mac OS and, as you said, it's not viable to build a PPC system from scratch.
So the way I see it, hardware-wise, Apple has a much bigger influence over their platform than Microsoft does (although MS also has a big influence over Apple, so in the end they play for both teams).
RMN
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Microsoft can't keep saying GPL spells doom for the industry while at the same time profiting from software written for a GPL'd OS.
;-)
I wouldn't be (too) surprised to see Microsoft porting some software for FreeBSD, for example, if the user base gets a bit larger (if only to claim that there are alternatives to Windows, etc., etc.). In fact, I'm pretty sure they even have Linux ports of some of their programs hidden in some basement just in case they feel the (commercial) benefits suddenly outweigh the (moral) damage.
Unlike Intel, Microsoft doesn't suffer from the NIH (not invented here) syndrome. They don't care about anything half as much as they care about making money. And if there's money to be made somewhere, they'll go there to make it. They can't do it now because of the legal mess they're into and the strategy they're adopting, but if Linux ever manages to grab a relevant market share, do you have any doubt that MS will start selling Linux software? Or even selling Linux itself (bundled with their software, of course). I can see it now... the Red Mond distro, with Ballmux the monkey instead of Tux penguin...
RMN
~~~