Note that they weren't first to ship computers without floppies - e.g., Commodore dropped the floppy on the CDTV years earlier. Yes, they were probably the first to have a machine to lack floppies and have USB simultaneously on the same machine, but I'm not sure why that's extra special. It seems rather contrived and pointless - "let's drop the floppy, and provide a means so that they can add back in the floppy drive that they still need to buy anyway".
There was a point when the features of the iPhone made it somewhat unique.
Multitouch - but it's also worth noting that the original Iphone was shockingly lacking compared to many other phones, including dirt cheap old feature phones. I'd argue the original Iphone wasn't even a smartphone by any non-arbitrary definition.
The Iphones have now caught up in several of those areas, but at the same time, multitouch is ancient news now (and it's not the be all and end all of technology - resistive touchscreens have their own advantages too). I agree; the Iphone is just one of many phones in the market. It might have some things people like better, but the same is true of other phones.
I agree about the marketing. It's hiliarious to see people argue that everything the Iphone lacks is an advantage (I wish I'd thought of this in the last days of the Amiga - "Oh, the fact that the Amiga still doesn't do Flash and Java? That's an advantage you see!") And it's even better to see them change their minds as soon as Apple does add it - just watch how multitasking will suddenly be important, the moment that Apple finally allow it. The same happened for video, 3G, copy/paste.
I'm sick and tired of the non-Iphone bashing, primarily for reasons that the Iphone works "for me" and therefore must be best for everyone else.
I'd also note that if it wasn't for Apple, there would be a lot less pressure on Motorola, Nokia and Samsung to produce phones with a better user experience
If it wasn't for Nokia, there would be a lot less pressure on Motorola, Apple and Samsung to produce phones with a better user experience
If it wasn't for Motorola, there would be a lot less pressure on Nokia, Apple and Samsung to produce phones with a better user experience
If it wasn't for Samsung, there would be a lot less pressure on Motorola, Apple and Nokia to produce phones with a better user experience
Yeah, it's called competition. There's nothing special about any one company, and these companies were doing it before Apple started making phones, anyway.
Apple is not the end-all, be-all of technology
Exactly, the problem is that people talk about them as if they were. When was the last time we even had a story on the platforms with much bigger market share, whilst there are multiple stories a day on the Iphone and now the Ipad.
Yes, it is. "PR" refers to many systems of voting, including the one the OP was discussing. And, since the issue if the Lib Dems, let's see what they're proposing:
Of course they're proposing proportional representation, they've got the most to gain from it.
Even if they really only had a self-interest, what has that got to the question of voting for them? You're telling me that if a party was supporting something, that you wanted, you wouldn't vote for them because they gained from it? That makes no sense.
LibDems, OTOH, seem to like the idea of even more taxes
No, that's a few years out of date. The Lib Dems in fact plan to raise personal allowance to £10,000. (The sad thing is that I've heard other people criticising the Lib Dems precisely for this reason, that they've moved right economically, and here you are criticising them for the opposite reason!)
I think suggesting that the LibDems "stood up" to this is giving them a little more credit than they deserve. They ended up supporting it in the Lords and even adding the controversial web-censoring clause
That was one Lord who supported it. It isn't party policy, nor is it the view of any MPs. The fact that the Lords act independently is both the blessing and the curse of the second house. But these is no sense in using the actions of Lords to decide your vote for MPs (whether you view it as voting for an MP, or voting for a party - in neither case do we vote for Lords).
Yes, that there weren't more Lib Dem MPs turning up to vote against it was a bit depressing. I guess it's a question of checking who your local candidate is, and also seeing if there a better option if they didn't vote against it (who are you voting for then, OOI?)
Rendering when you have a powerful graphics chip should not take all that much CPU power
Yes, but it takes more GPU power. I'm confused by this argument - that because the CPU isn't being used much, the GPU can suddenly do twice as much work for free? That's backwards. The only thing you can do for free is more stuff on the CPU.
The PS3 has a dedicated graphics chip. It can be running graphics at 100% and still not use up 100% of the CPU, which only hands data off to other components to be rendered.
That doesn't change his argument - PCs have had "dedicated graphics chips" for 3D for 10-15 years. This is hardly new information.
Yes, so the GPU does most of the rendering. So if it's running at 100% running a normal game, how exactly do you magically make it render twice as much information, with only a 10-20% slowdown as the OP claimed?
There is no "between renders". The GPU is working on rendering while the CPU is doing something else.
You're being overly pedantic. Firstly, it's still correct to say "between the rendering calls that the CPU makes", which is what he presumably meant. Secondly, yes you could run the CPU rendering calls in a separate thread, but that doesn't really change his point - yes, a game with large amounts of AI might be CPU bound rather than GPU bound, thus you could get extra fill rate with little noticable slowdown. But this doesn't apply to all games, is the point.
Where are these numbers pulled from? To describe the whole 3D graphics rendering pipeline as merely "flattening" is rather an understatement. It also makes no sense to compare that with "modern graphics are modeled in 3D" - modelling is not part of rendering, and doesn't factor into the performance.
"Flattening", i.e., vertex processing; as well as rendering every pixel, has to be repeated for each viewpoint (unless someone knows they're using some kind of shortcut?). Depending on the game, this can be far more than 20% of the time. Other things don't have to be repeated - for example, some kinds of hidden surface removal, as well as obviously non-rendering things like AI. But you can't make any kind of blanket statement of the bottlenecks of 3D games in general.
Indeed - not to mention that there are plenty of other mainstream widely used alternatives too (e.g., Nokia).
Jailbreaking is NOT a solution. It just isn't.
Exactly. It's interesting that it's considered an acceptable workaround for a phone that's meant to "Just Work", and is supposed to be easy to use and good for non-geeks. The irony is that whenever a similar workaround is suggested for another platform, the Iphone fans ridicule it.
Then there's the point that when we get stories about Iphone viruses, people claim it doesn't count because it only affects jailbroken phones - which is it, I wonder?
Because it's not optimal for how graphics cards work these days. What would you prefer - an API that makes it clear what the optimal code path is, or a way that lets you save a few lines, but results in poorer performance?
And DirectX works exactly this way too, by the way, so it's not just OpenGL. The problem that OpenGL was having was that it was getting bogged down with legacy calls that these days are bad practice.
Your argument is basically a 3D version of the "But I can write Hello World in BASIC in much fewer lines than in C!"
Well, apart from Nokia (5800), a range of Android and Windows phones from companies like Motorola and HTC; and in fact the vast majority of phones, yes sure, it's only Apple trying to cater for you.
(When I looked for a phone recently, I was interested in a physical keyboard, and the choice for those is far more limited than the choice of those that don't have one.)
Yes, getting outraged over this ad is stupid, but that should be the case regardless of gender. It only seems odd because so many people are stuck with the idea that a woman photographing herself for a man is normal, but not the other way round.
Indeed - but I can understand the fear of this being publicised, due to the hysteria in Western countries. In the UK, possession of such images would now (as of April 2010) get you three years in prison and time on the SOR (similar with other countries such as Australia, I imagine).
To think that the Japanese only have to worry about being accused of copyright infringement...
Ipad sales aren't skyrocketing. Rather during months of worldwide free hype and media advertising, they've shipped about what you'd expect for that period of time and free media advertising and astroturfing (of which this article is a prime example - for heaven's sake, there've been three Ipad stories today alone, as well as another Iphone story - Slashdot is officially now an Apple iPhone/Pad site). Netbooks have sold in the millions.
"It doesn't matter that people have been making yellow snow cones for years, no one started eating them until Apple came along, and they were the ones who popularised it!"
"You can't eat with unless you have a special cup for it, but that's a good thing, it makes the product better!"
"Apple make the best ones, even though I've not tried all the other ones on the market. In fact I wasn't even aware alternatives existed. If you tell me that Apple aren't the largest producer in the market and show data to back that up, I'm going to pretend it isn't true."
"It doesn't matter that the Apple ones don't taste as good, the quality is not as consistent, and the coloring will run down your sleeve - what's important is that it gives you a superior tasting experience. I can't explain how it's better, it just is, you just have to believe."
"It doesn't matter that over cones look better on paper. What's more important is that this shows off my yellow moustache."
Not to mention the absurdity that Slashdot would start covering snow cones as soon as Apple produced the iCone, even though it obviously doesn't now.
The fact that people have made phones/tablets/etc for years is worth mentioning, because so many people round here, including the coverage from Slashdot, suggests the belief that Apple really were first.
With your second comment, are you suggesting that the policies about Apple's App Store and what an Iphone can't do unless jailbroken and so on are simply made up? My sources for these claims are Apple users themselves - who insist that it's a good thing that their phone is locked down like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, buy something else and move on.
Don't worry - that's what 95% of the market is doing, outside of Slashdot.
Note that they weren't first to ship computers without floppies - e.g., Commodore dropped the floppy on the CDTV years earlier. Yes, they were probably the first to have a machine to lack floppies and have USB simultaneously on the same machine, but I'm not sure why that's extra special. It seems rather contrived and pointless - "let's drop the floppy, and provide a means so that they can add back in the floppy drive that they still need to buy anyway".
Indeed, though just to add:
There was a point when the features of the iPhone made it somewhat unique.
Multitouch - but it's also worth noting that the original Iphone was shockingly lacking compared to many other phones, including dirt cheap old feature phones. I'd argue the original Iphone wasn't even a smartphone by any non-arbitrary definition.
The Iphones have now caught up in several of those areas, but at the same time, multitouch is ancient news now (and it's not the be all and end all of technology - resistive touchscreens have their own advantages too). I agree; the Iphone is just one of many phones in the market. It might have some things people like better, but the same is true of other phones.
I agree about the marketing. It's hiliarious to see people argue that everything the Iphone lacks is an advantage (I wish I'd thought of this in the last days of the Amiga - "Oh, the fact that the Amiga still doesn't do Flash and Java? That's an advantage you see!") And it's even better to see them change their minds as soon as Apple does add it - just watch how multitasking will suddenly be important, the moment that Apple finally allow it. The same happened for video, 3G, copy/paste.
I'm sick and tired of the non-Iphone bashing, primarily for reasons that the Iphone works "for me" and therefore must be best for everyone else.
I'd also note that if it wasn't for Apple, there would be a lot less pressure on Motorola, Nokia and Samsung to produce phones with a better user experience
If it wasn't for Nokia, there would be a lot less pressure on Motorola, Apple and Samsung to produce phones with a better user experience
If it wasn't for Motorola, there would be a lot less pressure on Nokia, Apple and Samsung to produce phones with a better user experience
If it wasn't for Samsung, there would be a lot less pressure on Motorola, Apple and Nokia to produce phones with a better user experience
Yeah, it's called competition. There's nothing special about any one company, and these companies were doing it before Apple started making phones, anyway.
Apple is not the end-all, be-all of technology
Exactly, the problem is that people talk about them as if they were. When was the last time we even had a story on the platforms with much bigger market share, whilst there are multiple stories a day on the Iphone and now the Ipad.
So if /. changed their TOS to say that you personally owed them $1 million, that'd be fine, right? You used the service - pay up.
Yes, it is. "PR" refers to many systems of voting, including the one the OP was discussing. And, since the issue if the Lib Dems, let's see what they're proposing:
"In Parliament, introducing a "single transferable vote" system of proportional representation, where candidates are ranked in order of preference."
Would you like to try again?
Of course they're proposing proportional representation, they've got the most to gain from it.
Even if they really only had a self-interest, what has that got to the question of voting for them? You're telling me that if a party was supporting something, that you wanted, you wouldn't vote for them because they gained from it? That makes no sense.
LibDems, OTOH, seem to like the idea of even more taxes
No, that's a few years out of date. The Lib Dems in fact plan to raise personal allowance to £10,000. (The sad thing is that I've heard other people criticising the Lib Dems precisely for this reason, that they've moved right economically, and here you are criticising them for the opposite reason!)
and even more bureaucracy
Such as?
I think suggesting that the LibDems "stood up" to this is giving them a little more credit than they deserve. They ended up supporting it in the Lords and even adding the controversial web-censoring clause
That was one Lord who supported it. It isn't party policy, nor is it the view of any MPs. The fact that the Lords act independently is both the blessing and the curse of the second house. But these is no sense in using the actions of Lords to decide your vote for MPs (whether you view it as voting for an MP, or voting for a party - in neither case do we vote for Lords).
Yes, that there weren't more Lib Dem MPs turning up to vote against it was a bit depressing. I guess it's a question of checking who your local candidate is, and also seeing if there a better option if they didn't vote against it (who are you voting for then, OOI?)
Rendering when you have a powerful graphics chip should not take all that much CPU power
Yes, but it takes more GPU power. I'm confused by this argument - that because the CPU isn't being used much, the GPU can suddenly do twice as much work for free? That's backwards. The only thing you can do for free is more stuff on the CPU.
The PS3 has a dedicated graphics chip. It can be running graphics at 100% and still not use up 100% of the CPU, which only hands data off to other components to be rendered.
That doesn't change his argument - PCs have had "dedicated graphics chips" for 3D for 10-15 years. This is hardly new information.
Yes, so the GPU does most of the rendering. So if it's running at 100% running a normal game, how exactly do you magically make it render twice as much information, with only a 10-20% slowdown as the OP claimed?
There is no "between renders". The GPU is working on rendering while the CPU is doing something else.
You're being overly pedantic. Firstly, it's still correct to say "between the rendering calls that the CPU makes", which is what he presumably meant. Secondly, yes you could run the CPU rendering calls in a separate thread, but that doesn't really change his point - yes, a game with large amounts of AI might be CPU bound rather than GPU bound, thus you could get extra fill rate with little noticable slowdown. But this doesn't apply to all games, is the point.
Where are these numbers pulled from? To describe the whole 3D graphics rendering pipeline as merely "flattening" is rather an understatement. It also makes no sense to compare that with "modern graphics are modeled in 3D" - modelling is not part of rendering, and doesn't factor into the performance.
"Flattening", i.e., vertex processing; as well as rendering every pixel, has to be repeated for each viewpoint (unless someone knows they're using some kind of shortcut?). Depending on the game, this can be far more than 20% of the time. Other things don't have to be repeated - for example, some kinds of hidden surface removal, as well as obviously non-rendering things like AI. But you can't make any kind of blanket statement of the bottlenecks of 3D games in general.
Indeed - not to mention that there are plenty of other mainstream widely used alternatives too (e.g., Nokia).
Jailbreaking is NOT a solution. It just isn't.
Exactly. It's interesting that it's considered an acceptable workaround for a phone that's meant to "Just Work", and is supposed to be easy to use and good for non-geeks. The irony is that whenever a similar workaround is suggested for another platform, the Iphone fans ridicule it.
Then there's the point that when we get stories about Iphone viruses, people claim it doesn't count because it only affects jailbroken phones - which is it, I wonder?
Well, we get three stories a day, everytime someone says they do like something about the Iphone/pad, so fair's fair.
Because it's not optimal for how graphics cards work these days. What would you prefer - an API that makes it clear what the optimal code path is, or a way that lets you save a few lines, but results in poorer performance?
And DirectX works exactly this way too, by the way, so it's not just OpenGL. The problem that OpenGL was having was that it was getting bogged down with legacy calls that these days are bad practice.
Your argument is basically a 3D version of the "But I can write Hello World in BASIC in much fewer lines than in C!"
Well, apart from Nokia (5800), a range of Android and Windows phones from companies like Motorola and HTC; and in fact the vast majority of phones, yes sure, it's only Apple trying to cater for you.
(When I looked for a phone recently, I was interested in a physical keyboard, and the choice for those is far more limited than the choice of those that don't have one.)
Doesn't mean it makes any sense though.
Yes, getting outraged over this ad is stupid, but that should be the case regardless of gender. It only seems odd because so many people are stuck with the idea that a woman photographing herself for a man is normal, but not the other way round.
And you can run Flash on the Ipad?
though I'm not sure it goes as far as criminalising hentai
It covers any image - including drawings, cartoons. Coronors and Justice Act 2009.
Indeed - but I can understand the fear of this being publicised, due to the hysteria in Western countries. In the UK, possession of such images would now (as of April 2010) get you three years in prison and time on the SOR (similar with other countries such as Australia, I imagine).
To think that the Japanese only have to worry about being accused of copyright infringement...
Citation needed.
Ipad sales aren't skyrocketing. Rather during months of worldwide free hype and media advertising, they've shipped about what you'd expect for that period of time and free media advertising and astroturfing (of which this article is a prime example - for heaven's sake, there've been three Ipad stories today alone, as well as another Iphone story - Slashdot is officially now an Apple iPhone/Pad site). Netbooks have sold in the millions.
Wait - it only has 256MB of RAM? How much is this thing costing when it's finally released, again?
They beat Microsoft. Now how do either of these compare to RIM, LG, Samsung, Motorola, or (most notably) Nokia?
Only a month???
We're coming up for three years for the Iphone.
And only one a day? Look at the current Ipad story rate! :)
Slashdot in 2015: Consumer News for Appliance Users; Stuff about Tasty Snow Cones.
FTFY:
"It doesn't matter that people have been making yellow snow cones for years, no one started eating them until Apple came along, and they were the ones who popularised it!"
"You can't eat with unless you have a special cup for it, but that's a good thing, it makes the product better!"
"Apple make the best ones, even though I've not tried all the other ones on the market. In fact I wasn't even aware alternatives existed. If you tell me that Apple aren't the largest producer in the market and show data to back that up, I'm going to pretend it isn't true."
"It doesn't matter that the Apple ones don't taste as good, the quality is not as consistent, and the coloring will run down your sleeve - what's important is that it gives you a superior tasting experience. I can't explain how it's better, it just is, you just have to believe."
"It doesn't matter that over cones look better on paper. What's more important is that this shows off my yellow moustache."
Not to mention the absurdity that Slashdot would start covering snow cones as soon as Apple produced the iCone, even though it obviously doesn't now.
The fact that people have made phones/tablets/etc for years is worth mentioning, because so many people round here, including the coverage from Slashdot, suggests the belief that Apple really were first.
With your second comment, are you suggesting that the policies about Apple's App Store and what an Iphone can't do unless jailbroken and so on are simply made up? My sources for these claims are Apple users themselves - who insist that it's a good thing that their phone is locked down like this.