All you fan bois need to get over it. You can easily spend the same amount on a PC and get a far superior computer in terms of expandibility, speed, value, capability. Coming up with lame examples that 'prove' it isn't possible (not what this parent poster did, but many others did) just makes you look like pissy whiners who don't let reality get in your way.
Well, this is going to be modded as redundant, but, please, remember that you get an amazing operating system (XP and Linux do not come close wrt usability, despite progress) and a lot of software bundled with it. And great software, that really increases your productivity. Coming from Linux, I used Thunderbird and its address book for some time on the mac. But then I saw the sinergy of the OS X Address Book with Mail.app and other apps (like Adium), because friends used those. It was simply astounding. You cannot come close to that on XP unless you do everything INSIDE Office, and still there's a big gap. I miss only NNTP in Mail... Note that Office does not come bundled with the under-$500 cheapo Dells.
Of course the mac mini does not have 5 PCI slots. Of course it does not have an AGP 8x slot. Of course thereì's no room in it for two 10000 rpm 160Gb S-ATA Hard drives. Of course it does not come with 2 2.5Ghz IBM PowerPC 970fx processors. That would be a completely different machine (which in fact, except for the number of PCI slots, Apple also offers).
So I have to say, after shopping the competition, the Apple laptops are unique
They are. After some years with pc laptops provided by my university, I decided to shop for an Apple powerbook. I paid it with my money because I was leaving to tour universities for a short stay at each one of them in several parts of the world (Singapore, Indonesia, South Africa, Italy, France, Canada, U.S. - later also India and Singapore, South Africa again) and where I officially live (in Germany) is 1000 km (600 miles) from my girfriend's home.
I wanted a laptop with unix, *and* with a good desktop. I needed to use all my mathematical software (Mathematica, Maple and Magma I use regularly, as well as pari and GAP for some group theory stuff). Office software is required, or at least the ability of reading MS Office files because university administratins sometimes send you ten lines of plain text wrapped in a 28Kb Word file. I need to use TeX/LaTeX for my mathematical presentations. And good presentation software for other purposes (Keynote!). Wireless connectivity, the ability of running a second screen (I have a 21" LCD in one office), DVI output, fast ethernet, and no lack of peripherals/drives, DVD burner for some backups (I seldom watch movies), relatively long battery life if the machine is used judiciously (4 hours at least on one battery, and I can get a second one to swap in on intercontinental flights).
The computer has to be fast, too, have good graphics (I love eye candy even when I am using LaTeX and command-line mathematical software), quite sturdy (no cheap plastic).
There is basically only one series of laptops on the market that would satisfy my needs. Apple Powerbooks. I am a happy owner of a 17" 1.5 Ghz 1Gb RAM 80Gb HD PB.
It is an addictive machine, too. My girlfriend and 5 of my best friends bought Powerbooks or iBooks too. One even told me he wanted the machine because it was cool and he wanted linux on it. After a few months he erased the linux partition and used only OS 10, because (his words) "there is everything also a unix developer needs for programming".
Apple hardware is much more expensive than the _cheapest_ wintel offerings, this is true, but not much for what you get, and if the operating system is something you are ready to pay for, then OS 10 is a terrific value. I am now at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, for some weeks - and they are building a 32 node dual-processor Xserve G5 cluster. when I walk by the window of the lab where they are assembly that beauty I drool for a few hours....
I think that a lot of consumers think that there will be a signifigant difference in the rectangular dimensions of an 8MP image versus a 5MP. They don't consider that as the area expands, exponentially more pixels are needed to gain, say, another inch in height and width (i.e. the pixel count increases as the square of the dimensions), so that a 5MP image would represent an image side of 2236.1 pixels, while an 8MP image has 2828.4 pixel sides, a ~26% pixel increase per side from 5MP, where the user was thinking of a straight ratio (60%) increase.
It is a polynomial increase in file size (in particular, quadratic), not an exponential one...
They must enjoy Windows security flaws, like the Epsilons in Huxley's Brave New World that enjoy their state... NOW that security flaws are found in Mac OS X they badly WANT to have it on their PC at all costs...;-)
(It's meant to be funny, if you want to flame me, note that I am fireproof:-)
I attend cryptographic conferences on a regular basis, being a young scientist in the field.
Three years ago, I saw NO mac laptops in the audience. 300 people, all mathematicians,computer scientists and electrical engineers, half of them with a laptop, no mac.
Two years ago, some appeared.
Last years, one in twenty had a mac laptop.
This year, one in ten. It's amazing how people are "discovering" powerbooks and ibooks.
And you can tell the owner from the machine!
Firm execs or young academicians backed by a middle-class family which choose not to buy a car (read: me): 17". Others in academia, many from software firs: 15". Women and Ph.D. Students: iBooks:)
And then there are the old-style professors (like my boss) that would NEVER buy a laptop without floppy disc drive, look in disgust at everything that does not run Windows 98, shake their heads when people use USB memory sticks to exchange data...
the [Linux] kernel is still essential due to the high level of hardware support.. but hopefully if something would happen, the drivers get ported to other kernels..
... and SCO will say that since Linux is their intellectual property and those drivers were developed for use under linux, they are also intellectual property, and using them, even if properly ported, with BSD, will make also BSD their intellectual property and bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
In the past Apple always avoided SPEC benchmarks because they knew that the Intel processors would smoke them (on that particular benchmark): One of the many reasons (real performance aside) was that the Intel compilers were tweaked in order to get unrealistic results - a difference in performance not showing up in real-world applications, at least not as big as the benchmark suggested.
Now Apple is less shy to show SPEC results, even though their approach for "making competition fair" sounds suspiciously like tweaking a bit.
This is an important change.
Furthermore, that was a developer's conference, so the developers now now one thing: Apple is working on the compiler, the tool they use most. You can expect more performance in the future on the same machines, and Apple is deadly serious about this.
Last, if you do Word, Tex, some compiles and Spreadsheets, 1, 2 or 3 Ghz do not make much of a difference.
But if you do INTEGER number crunching (cryptography or number theory research) the G4 and G5 processors can emulate with Altivec a fast 128 bit arithmetic unit. And if you do serious FLOATING point operations, you can do them in single precision with Altivec and then refine the results in double precision. I do both, and I know which CPU is now fastest.
SSE2 *cannot* do this, and SPEC does not reflect this difference. SPEC does not tell the whole story...
For example, prior to version 3 of GCC, gcc did fairly well on load-store architectures like SPARC and SGI machines but was horrid on Intel x86 compared to other compilers available on those platforms (such as Intel's and Microsoft's).
Well, the PowerPC backend of GCC prior to version 3 has always been rather poor, and usually considered much poorer than that for x86 CPUs.
With GCC 3 things changed: the backend for x86 is much better, but that for PowerPC still needs some working.
For example, PowerPC cpus have multiple condition registers, and no open-source compiler makes use of this, which can be a trememndous bonus on unrolled loops -- also you can decide whether some operations affect condition bits or not. I hope APPLE and IBM will add support for this in GCC, you can easily get much more performance across the whole system, in all types of applications,
see for example:
Apple assigned a few engineers to optimize GCC about one year ago. Their work showed the first results a few months ago, and I bet we shall see further improvements pretty soon.
If they can patent/trademark/copyright all the notes used in music, they will be able to own the RIAA.
The have: C#,F#
Left: A,A#,B,C,D,D#,E,F,G,G#
Can't wait for the other 10 programming languages
A, B and C have been already been used for
programmin languages, so this leaves out
only 7 available names.
OTOH, they can still use flats, and if they pretend that the equal temperament is not used
at MS (today, different tunings are used also
to perform music of the past in an authentic way)
then C# and Db would be different languages.
Not to speak of the possibility of using quarter-tones! That would be AVANTGARDE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES.
And what about even smaller intervals?
Later, they must go directly to frequences. THey
could call a language 440 instead of A, for
example.
I fear, however, that this is typical MS monopolistic strategy. They are clearly
trying to steal the professional music market away from Apple. And the fact that they do not fear
to use strange intervals, not to speak of the possibility
to use microtonal intervals, might even suggest
an attempt to court music institutions like the
IRCAM, which are almost standardised on Macs.
Not really. F# and g form a dissonance,
called a minor second.
It happens though that I like g-f#, a major
seventh. But maybe a listen to too much
contemporary music.
PPC 970 is an explicitly desktop implementation of the Power 4 server chip, including altivec. Price ratio should be comparable to that of the G3/Power3 -- the server products are more expensive because they are produced to more demanding specifications. PPC 970 should not be any more expensive than the G4 is.
we should not forget that for big servers there is Power4, and soon Power5.
These processors are in another league. for example, they have two cores on each chip, to start
Yes. You see, the GNU HURD project is just a front. These guys are just looking for a little lovin'. I, for one, will be downloading and running HURD 1.0 as soon as it's released, to support the libidos of these great, visionary men.
Wow, what we really need is to write a software library named "ido" or "idos" (something like "Implementation of DOS calls" to allow also DOS software to run after a recompile).
Then we would have libidos.so in/usr/share/lib
Honestly, no PC-based laptop can compete. Size, battery life, specs other than CPU speed....style
And don't forget that it has only one mouse (ehr, pad)
button! shame! shame! Apple will never learn.
And I want 2Ghz, even if battery lasts only 30 minutes. I do not need to get work done, I only want
to brag! (wink, wink, lotta smileys;-);-)
"subsidizing of unprofitable and uncompetitive industries" - And what did Bush do to support the US Steel industry in several swing states?
Not to forget that the EU has even decided to _cut_ industrial sectors which had problems, for example coal mining and steel production - in Sardinia or in the Ruhr region. With a purpose: at the same time funds are poured in the area to create new opportunities. This is, IMNSHO, much better than letting the market regulate everything and allow these industries to perish (even if you know it will happen soon) without leaving nothing behind, except unemployed people without perspectives. The Ruhr region has still big problems, but new industries are developing.
This is a kind of insurance on my own future, and I prefer to pay a bit more of taxes for it.
Of course, I might be called a communist for saying this...
One can only hope that the EU gets its act together, ousts the corrupt political system and law system and recreates justice and order.
Of course, also here in Europe there is corruption. The recent behaviour of Schoeder towards tax-payers is not different from that of many italian governments, incouding Prodi and Berlusconi. Atleast the French have been to reverse the wave and actually reduce the tax level, but not everybody is honest enough to tell the nation there are real sacrifices to be done, and to be believed.
Of course I want that the
EU gets its act together, ousts the corrupt political system and law system and recreates justice and order as much as anybody else...
This however does not change the fact that the current trends might lead to a very harsh opposition of US and EU. And I firmly believe that the european view of free market is more sound than the american way.
And oh by the way, let's not see any more Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins, Schroders, anti-Semitism, racism, skinheads, anti-immigrant violence, football hooligans, subsidizing of unprofitable and uncompetitive industries, anti-Americanism, lazy unions, tolerance of Islamic terror groups, and... oh, nevermind!
Nevermind. I am no nazi, no racist, and not even anti-american. Look at the noble principles on which the US have been founded - let's ignore slave trade and racism still nowadays, or sexual repression in many states. Look at those principles... and you will see that Bush does not belong to this line of ideals. He's the true anti-american in my eyes, because to me the US is the nation that gave an Abraham Lincoln to history.
Yes, but people in the american administration is not happy about the "europan" attitude towards the behaviour of an allegedly "free market". The EU stance is that there is no free market if market is allowed to create a monopoly. In physics this is called a singularity, and Microsoft is indeed a kind of black hole. It engulfs everything, and distorts and ultimately breaks what gets near to it. I am quite happy that we (well, actually, France) also have nukes: GWB will not treat us like Iraqis. After all, we are becoming a "rebel market" in Bush' eyes...
I want to see them melt.
You can make nice sculptures melting glass:
I was born not too far from Venice, and I have
seen how they do it in Murano.
Overclocking will be then rightly called a
form of art.
> > "only 90% of altivecs hundreds of opcodes will be offerred though." > > Source? > > Altivec is 162 instructions, and the Microprocessor forum brief > on the GPUL stated "over 160 instructions"
Yes, IBM is implementing only 161 instructions.
The remaining not-yet-disclosed instruction will be emulated in millicode (read Power4 white paper for definition). However rumors say that it is the exotic "add every 3rd bit to every 5th bit in a specified register and store this inverted in a second specified register after extracting the square root of the instruction count and put the result in a third specified register, then lock the cpu until a hard reset is issued"
It is unknown how this will affect performance. However MSCNN analys Billgnew Microsowsky stated that "beleaguered apple is doomed".
> Actually, IPC is *increased* from the current G4. It will now fetch 8 instructions per clock, > and retire 5 per clock.
This for the branch/integer/fp core only. Which is borrowed from the Power4 one. This does not count altivec, which is a separate unit on the same chip. Further, the two fp units of the core can work in parallel with the altivec unit, which the P4 cannot do, because its vector unit uses the normal fpu pipelines...
>The current G4 IIRC fetches either 3 or 4 per clock. I have no idea how > many it can retire at once.
fetche 3, retire 2 (IIRC, recent iterations may also retire 3)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this is going to be modded as redundant, but, please, remember that you get an amazing operating system (XP and Linux do not come close wrt usability, despite progress) and a lot of software bundled with it. And great software, that really increases your productivity. Coming from Linux, I used Thunderbird and its address book for some time on the mac. But then I saw the sinergy of the OS X Address Book with Mail.app and other apps (like Adium), because friends used those. It was simply astounding. You cannot come close to that on XP unless you do everything INSIDE Office, and still there's a big gap. I miss only NNTP in Mail... Note that Office does not come bundled with the under-$500 cheapo Dells.
Of course the mac mini does not have 5 PCI slots. Of course it does not have an AGP 8x slot. Of course thereì's no room in it for two 10000 rpm 160Gb S-ATA Hard drives. Of course it does not come with 2 2.5Ghz IBM PowerPC 970fx processors. That would be a completely different machine (which in fact, except for the number of PCI slots, Apple also offers).
yes, like megahertz for assessing the speed of a computer...
They are. After some years with pc laptops provided by my university, I decided to shop for an Apple powerbook. I paid it with my money because I was leaving to tour universities for a short stay at each one of them in several parts of the world (Singapore, Indonesia, South Africa, Italy, France, Canada, U.S. - later also India and Singapore, South Africa again) and where I officially live (in Germany) is 1000 km (600 miles) from my girfriend's home. I wanted a laptop with unix, *and* with a good desktop. I needed to use all my mathematical software (Mathematica, Maple and Magma I use regularly, as well as pari and GAP for some group theory stuff). Office software is required, or at least the ability of reading MS Office files because university administratins sometimes send you ten lines of plain text wrapped in a 28Kb Word file. I need to use TeX/LaTeX for my mathematical presentations. And good presentation software for other purposes (Keynote!). Wireless connectivity, the ability of running a second screen (I have a 21" LCD in one office), DVI output, fast ethernet, and no lack of peripherals/drives, DVD burner for some backups (I seldom watch movies), relatively long battery life if the machine is used judiciously (4 hours at least on one battery, and I can get a second one to swap in on intercontinental flights). The computer has to be fast, too, have good graphics (I love eye candy even when I am using LaTeX and command-line mathematical software), quite sturdy (no cheap plastic). There is basically only one series of laptops on the market that would satisfy my needs. Apple Powerbooks. I am a happy owner of a 17" 1.5 Ghz 1Gb RAM 80Gb HD PB. It is an addictive machine, too. My girlfriend and 5 of my best friends bought Powerbooks or iBooks too. One even told me he wanted the machine because it was cool and he wanted linux on it. After a few months he erased the linux partition and used only OS 10, because (his words) "there is everything also a unix developer needs for programming". Apple hardware is much more expensive than the _cheapest_ wintel offerings, this is true, but not much for what you get, and if the operating system is something you are ready to pay for, then OS 10 is a terrific value. I am now at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, for some weeks - and they are building a 32 node dual-processor Xserve G5 cluster. when I walk by the window of the lab where they are assembly that beauty I drool for a few hours....
It is a polynomial increase in file size (in particular, quadratic), not an exponential one...
>... and playing games besides nethack!
Oh no. I played even Moria and Angband, too.
There are at least three games, I think.
They must enjoy Windows security flaws, like ;-)
:-)
the Epsilons in Huxley's Brave New World that
enjoy their state... NOW that security flaws
are found in Mac OS X they badly WANT to have
it on their PC at all costs...
(It's meant to be funny, if you want to flame me,
note that I am fireproof
I attend cryptographic conferences on a regular basis, being a young scientist in the field.
:)
Three years ago, I saw NO mac laptops in the audience. 300 people, all mathematicians,computer scientists and electrical engineers, half of them with a laptop, no mac.
Two years ago, some appeared.
Last years, one in twenty had a mac laptop.
This year, one in ten. It's amazing how people are "discovering" powerbooks and ibooks.
And you can tell the owner from the machine!
Firm execs or young academicians backed by a middle-class family which choose not to buy a car (read: me): 17". Others in academia, many from software firs: 15". Women and Ph.D. Students: iBooks
And then there are the old-style professors (like my boss) that would NEVER buy a laptop without floppy disc drive, look in disgust at everything that does not run Windows 98, shake their heads when people use USB memory sticks to exchange data...
I bet Microsoft will also dislike California, now ;)
Isn't this web site "unfair"?
Now Apple is less shy to show SPEC results, even though their approach for "making competition fair" sounds suspiciously like tweaking a bit. This is an important change.
Furthermore, that was a developer's conference, so the developers now now one thing: Apple is working on the compiler, the tool they use most. You can expect more performance in the future on the same machines, and Apple is deadly serious about this.
Last, if you do Word, Tex, some compiles and Spreadsheets, 1, 2 or 3 Ghz do not make much of a difference.
But if you do INTEGER number crunching (cryptography or number theory research) the G4 and G5 processors can emulate with Altivec a fast 128 bit arithmetic unit. And if you do serious FLOATING point operations, you can do them in single precision with Altivec and then refine the results in double precision. I do both, and I know which CPU is now fastest.
SSE2 *cannot* do this, and SPEC does not reflect this difference. SPEC does not tell the whole story...
Well, the PowerPC backend of GCC prior to version 3 has always been rather poor, and usually considered much poorer than that for x86 CPUs.
With GCC 3 things changed: the backend for x86 is much better, but that for PowerPC still needs some working.
For example, PowerPC cpus have multiple condition registers, and no open-source compiler makes use of this, which can be a trememndous bonus on unrolled loops -- also you can decide whether some operations affect condition bits or not. I hope APPLE and IBM will add support for this in GCC, you can easily get much more performance across the whole system, in all types of applications, see for example:
http://www6.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~csc2420/lect3/power.h tm
Apple assigned a few engineers to optimize GCC about one year ago. Their work showed the first results a few months ago, and I bet we shall see further improvements pretty soon.
You mean like the G5 Quake3 benchmarks on this page?
Ok Dual 2Ghz G5 against single Ghz P4. And against a Dual P4?
You need to believe more in Jobs. X is the only Truth.
A, B and C have been already been used for programmin languages, so this leaves out only 7 available names.
OTOH, they can still use flats, and if they pretend that the equal temperament is not used at MS (today, different tunings are used also to perform music of the past in an authentic way) then C# and Db would be different languages.
Not to speak of the possibility of using quarter-tones! That would be AVANTGARDE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES. And what about even smaller intervals?
Later, they must go directly to frequences. THey could call a language 440 instead of A, for example.
I fear, however, that this is typical MS monopolistic strategy. They are clearly trying to steal the professional music market away from Apple. And the fact that they do not fear to use strange intervals, not to speak of the possibility to use microtonal intervals, might even suggest an attempt to court music institutions like the IRCAM, which are almost standardised on Macs.
Not really. F# and g form a dissonance, called a minor second. It happens though that I like g-f#, a major seventh. But maybe a listen to too much contemporary music.
we should not forget that for big servers there is Power4, and soon Power5.
These processors are in another league. for example, they have two cores on each chip, to start
Are they saying that as many people have died by asteroid strike as plane crash?
I do not know. But I am confident that more dinosaurs have died because of asteroid impact than in plane crashes...
Wow, what we really need is to write a software library named "ido" or "idos" (something like "Implementation of DOS calls" to allow also DOS software to run after a recompile). Then we would have libidos.so in /usr/share/lib
And don't forget that it has only one mouse (ehr, pad) button! shame! shame! Apple will never learn. And I want 2Ghz, even if battery lasts only 30 minutes. I do not need to get work done, I only want to brag! (wink, wink, lotta smileys ;-) ;-)
Not to forget that the EU has even decided to _cut_ industrial sectors which had problems, for example coal mining and steel production - in Sardinia or in the Ruhr region. With a purpose: at the same time funds are poured in the area to create new opportunities. This is, IMNSHO, much better than letting the market regulate everything and allow these industries to perish (even if you know it will happen soon) without leaving nothing behind, except unemployed people without perspectives. The Ruhr region has still big problems, but new industries are developing.
This is a kind of insurance on my own future, and I prefer to pay a bit more of taxes for it.
Of course, I might be called a communist for saying this...
Of course, also here in Europe there is corruption. The recent behaviour of Schoeder towards tax-payers is not different from that of many italian governments, incouding Prodi and Berlusconi. Atleast the French have been to reverse the wave and actually reduce the tax level, but not everybody is honest enough to tell the nation there are real sacrifices to be done, and to be believed.
Of course I want that the EU gets its act together, ousts the corrupt political system and law system and recreates justice and order as much as anybody else...
This however does not change the fact that the current trends might lead to a very harsh opposition of US and EU. And I firmly believe that the european view of free market is more sound than the american way.
And oh by the way, let's not see any more Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins, Schroders, anti-Semitism, racism, skinheads, anti-immigrant violence, football hooligans, subsidizing of unprofitable and uncompetitive industries, anti-Americanism, lazy unions, tolerance of Islamic terror groups, and... oh, nevermind!
Nevermind. I am no nazi, no racist, and not even anti-american. Look at the noble principles on which the US have been founded - let's ignore slave trade and racism still nowadays, or sexual repression in many states. Look at those principles... and you will see that Bush does not belong to this line of ideals. He's the true anti-american in my eyes, because to me the US is the nation that gave an Abraham Lincoln to history.
Yes, but people in the american administration is not happy about the "europan" attitude towards the behaviour of an allegedly "free market". The EU stance is that there is no free market if market is allowed to create a monopoly. In physics this is called a singularity, and Microsoft is indeed a kind of black hole. It engulfs everything, and distorts and ultimately breaks what gets near to it. I am quite happy that we (well, actually, France) also have nukes: GWB will not treat us like Iraqis. After all, we are becoming a "rebel market" in Bush' eyes...
I want to see them melt. You can make nice sculptures melting glass: I was born not too far from Venice, and I have seen how they do it in Murano. Overclocking will be then rightly called a form of art.
> > "only 90% of altivecs hundreds of opcodes will be offerred though."
>
> Source?
>
> Altivec is 162 instructions, and the Microprocessor forum brief
> on the GPUL stated "over 160 instructions"
Yes, IBM is implementing only 161 instructions.
The remaining not-yet-disclosed instruction will be
emulated in millicode (read Power4 white paper
for definition). However rumors say that it is
the exotic "add every 3rd bit to every 5th bit in
a specified register and store this inverted in
a second specified register after extracting the
square root of the instruction count and put the
result in a third specified register, then lock the
cpu until a hard reset is issued"
It is unknown how this will affect performance.
However MSCNN analys Billgnew Microsowsky stated that
"beleaguered apple is doomed".
> Actually, IPC is *increased* from the current G4. It will now fetch 8 instructions per clock,
> and retire 5 per clock.
This for the branch/integer/fp core only. Which is borrowed from the Power4 one. This does not count
altivec, which is a separate unit on the same chip. Further, the two fp units of the core
can work in parallel with the altivec unit, which the P4 cannot do, because its vector unit uses the normal fpu pipelines...
>The current G4 IIRC fetches either 3 or 4 per clock. I have no idea how
> many it can retire at once.
fetche 3, retire 2 (IIRC, recent iterations may also retire 3)