But it is possible to have a very secure Windows environent. No, it does not involve turning the box off;^)
Take this example: you have a highly competent NT/2K administrator (they do exist) and a pitiful *nix administrator. Which one is going to produce a more secure box? Any objective person would have to say the NT/2K guy would, because he knows his platform well enough to shore up vulnerabilities. Nimda, I Love You, and many other worms did not hit affect my company because we took security very seriously beforehand. Malicious attachments (.EXE,.SCR, etc) were banned long before I Love You came along.
Now, having played devil's advocate for a moment, let me say that if you have a tightly controlled *nix box with a competent admin and a focus on security, you can create a damn near impregnable system. The weaknesses then lie with the applications, not the OS, and that's something ALL vendors need to work on (you listening, Larry "Unbreakable" Ellison?)
You are correct that many are stored in 24fps and converted to NTSC on the fly, however the format uses interlaced fields on the disc. I'm encoding my DVD's progressive, and it produces some flicker in stills. Encoding interlaced removes this and resembles the source DVD material. FYI, I'm re-encoding ripped DVD's at a slightly lower bitrate so I can fit them on DVD-R's...
I've got Barco equipment, Plus equipment, and many others (I'm in the A/V field of business). Contrary to what you state, the better the projection equipment the more obvious the flaws can be. Poor contrast/brightness ratios, poor focus, poor color balance/temperature all can conspire to mask MPEG compression artifacts and de-interlacing artifacts. Get a really nice, super clear projector, put it on an 8 foot screen, and you'll notice the artifacts.
Just as some folks can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a CD (or an LP for that matter), some folks won't be able to notice DVD shortcomings. If you can't, consider yourself blessed because you won't feel the urge to buy lots of ridiculously expensive hardware to compensate. I, unfortanately, can notice the difference. You call alleviate much of it, but the base picture can only be improved so much. If DVD's had higher resolution to begin with, much of this equipment would be redundant.
I have seen it at 480p, line doubled, quadrupled, and arbitrarily scaled. While it's light years better than VHS, DVD quality is still clearly inferior to film. Even the best progressive players introduce motion artifacts and jaggies when doing 3:2 pulldown. And contrary to popular belief, DVD's are presented in interlaced format on the disc. I find this reprehensible, but given that the vast majority of people will view DVD's on NTSC interlaced televisions, making the discs interlaced saved companies from having to put an interlacing circuit in the DVD players. All this when we could've had progressive outputs from the get-go. Alas...
Sure, Shrek, 5th Element, Star Wars Ep. I, and many other "reference quality" discs show DVD's at their maximum, but they could be much, much better (in the same way that CD's, while very good, could benefit greatly by going from 16-bit/44.1khz to 24-bit/96khz). You only need a very nice projector and an 8 foot screen to see where DVD's fall down. There is a great deal of very expensive technology (read=Faroudja) you can buy that will alleviate most of these shortcomings, but wouldn't it be better if the DVD's were simply better to begin with?
Ever hear of Macrovision? Just try copying a Macrovision-enabled title on a conventional VCR using the analog outs. You'll get gibberish that looks like those porno TV channels that you don't subscribe to but love listening to.
Macrovision takes advantage of inherent limitations of NTSC technology to embed scrambling and such into the NTSC signal. Taking advantage of the vertical blanking and other caveats, they can look just fine on your TV but will be unviewable if passed through another device. More info can undoubtedly be found on their website.
Now, there are doo-dads that will strip Macrovision from an analog stream, so it's not too intrusive, but I'm sure the propellor heads at Macrovision are eager to try out some new technologies that will screw up the present day anti-Macrovision gadgets. We will overcome, of course, because Macrovision of any type degrades the picture quality -- not noticeable on most TV's, but very noticeable on projector systems and anything that scales/deinterlaces video.
blue laser DVD's, which will probably boost capacity by at least 100% if past technological trends mean anything. Current DVD's look poor on HDTV equipment, limited by their 480 line resolution and MPEG2 compression.
One can only hope that a blue laser DVD would get improved compression algorithms for fewer artifacts, better sound, and much better resolution (1080p anyone?). Unfortunately, I have a very funny feeling that Hollywood and the media moguls will not release any new DVD technology until they find something much, much stronger than CSS to safeguard it. We'll crack it, of course, but how long will it take, and how cumbersome will it be to do so?
Saying that Square Studios failed because of a "lack of ability" is not (IMHO) quite correct. Sure, the script blew more goats than goatse.cx, but the animation and modelling was VERY good. I'm in the 3D multimedia industry, and I have yet to see anything that comes even close to the photorealism introduced by Final Fantasy. The film was a technological tour de force, if perhaps a bit overspent (diving trips in Hawaii to study bubbles? Ever hear of a bathtub?) The facial animation could've been better, but I've never seen textures that realistic in a CG feature film before. Aki Ross has pores, for Pete's sake! That's attention to detail!
That being said, I felt very disappointed by the film's script and ultimately think that FF is a poor movie. It still occupies a slot in my DVD changer, but mainly as a reference disc more than a piece of entertainment. Much like many/. programmers out there, the animators have to build what they're told to build by the script writers (a.k.a. project managers in dev circles) and they're not responsible if the script sucks. Blame Hollywood for allow such dreck to pollute what looked to be the most visually revolutionary CG or CG-assisted film since Tron.
Square should be held (ahem) squarely responsible for the hideous screenplay, but do not disparage the incredible animators and programmers involved in the project by blaming them for said script. The artists were told to paint a bad picture, and they painted a bad picture in the most beautiful fashion they could. My hat's off to them, and I hope they don't stay in the unemployment lines long.
But getting back to the original point, general usage will benefit from OS X's MP agility because one can give iDVD one processor to encode its data while the other processor is used for email, iTunes, web browser, etc.
Which, oddly enough, is exactly what I was implying in paragraph 5 of my previous post. You get Score 2 for agreeing with me, and I'm stuck with Score 1 -- wazzup with dat?
Ah yes, but the G4 is hamstrung in Mhz ceiling without a process shrink. However, that won't help because as soon as the G4 shrinks, the Athlon and P4 will shrink as well (in fact, they'd probably shrink the x86 stuff faster due to more volume). So the very things that make the G4 so good at FP and SIMD are limiting it. I won't argue that the PPC isn't the better, cleaner design -- it is. It is, however, getting more than a little old.
I'm glad you gave credit where credit is due on the Athlon. The FPU in that monster is incredible. I do 3D graphics and FP power rules all. I wouldn't touch a P4 with a ten meter cattle prod for exactly the reason you listed: it's an integer muscleman, but weak in FP. 3D Studio Max rocks on the Athlon XP, besting the P4 even if you install the P4 patch from Discreet. Sure the P4 can scale to ridiculous Mhz, but who cares when it costs so much?
I've got a Matrox Digisuite at work and an RT2500 here at home. I had an RT2000 back when they were new and full of so many bugs it was difficult (almost impossible) to use the system. Now that the 2500 is out (and RTMac), it's a solution that's easy to recommend. But it was difficult not to throw it out the window for about the first damn year.
I'm going to disagree with you on the PPC being "better" for multimedia. What you're probably interpreting as a better chip is more likely to be a better coupling of the OS with the hardware. MacOS and PPC have been hand in hand for a long, long time and it shows. Brute force is the realm of the x86 chips, but elegance is the way of PPC.
Anyone who's coded on x86 versus a Motorola chip would doubtlessly prefer the Motorola chip. The x86 chips have a lot of old baggage to carry around. But you can't morph that into the PPC being a better chip. Properly coded and implemented, the x86 implementation would be just as good. As for your scrubbing problems, I have none whatsoever and have never had any on a good Intel workstation. I'd probably chalk your problems up to poor video drivers, something that's common on Windows machines but practically unheard of on Mac's. My Matrox rig is damn sweet and smooth, and I wouldn't trade it for a Mac.
And if folks tried to break every application that wasn't 100% RFC compliant, you'd see a lot of broken software out there. RFC's are great, and they should be adhered to, but technological progress often outstrips the RFC's ability to keep up. Am I justifying violating an RFC? Absolutely not. I hate working with broken software as much as the next guy, and I sure as hell wish MS would at least adhere to the specs that DON'T get in their way.
But history has pretty much shown that when standards get stodgy, they get superseded by proprietary implementations, and sooner or later the proprietary stuff becomes an RFC. This encourages companies to violate an RFC because if they make the next neato-killer doodad extension that gets wide acceptance, they get to more or less define the new RFC. Microsoft knows this, that's why they're playing fast and loose with the standard in ways that 99.9% of folks won't notice. OpenGL being superseded by DirectX is another nice analogy, albeit one that isn't quite yet finished playing out.
You know, you could fix the "word doc" problem by simply asking them to send it to you in plain text, or RTF, or whatever format you prefer. Word is able to export in any of those formats.
Further, I have to ask why you're complaining so much about receiving Word doc attachments if you have Star Office. It is able to import Word docs without too much difficulty. I can see no real reason why you would refuse to do this unless you were trying to prove a point.
Regardless of your reasoning for refusing said attachments, using MS-like tactics to fight MS makes you just as wrong as they are. Folks can justify it until they're blue in the face, but in the end you're simply punishing others for not thinking and working just like you. Just like MS does. This is not flamebait or troll, I'm just trying to show what it looks like from another perspective.
If you don't like MS products, don't use them. If you don't have a choice (i.e. where you work mandates it) then don't complain, as there are many, many others (myself included) who do not have a choice.
This is not meant to be flamebait or troll, but I want you to consider your statement for a second:
I will definitely put up some simple barriers to entry for people who cannot share my opinions
Does that sound like something you've heard of before, something like censorship? I'm not questioning your right to do such a thing, but discussion forums are enhanced immeasurably when people of dissenting opinion are allowed to debate an issue to resolution. If you create a forum whereby everyone is like-minded, all you've done is create a "me too" atmosphere where everyone proselytizes the same thing. Kicking out (or keeping out) those who disagree with you is intellectual inbreeding. It does you well (it does anyone well!) to hear someone disagree with them sometimes. It keeps you on your toes.
And in closing, let me remind you that Microsoft and its user-base never reverse discriminates against non-MS-users. The benevolent community leaders in Redmond, persecuted as they are by the mainstream, never stoop to such ugly tactics as browser exclusive features or dirty almost-standard protocol tricks. And even though they don't have to, they work overtime to make sure that all non-MS programs and documents work seamlessly with MS applications on the off chance that someone just has to run Windows, or Outlook, or Internet Explorer, or Word, or Excel, or Access, or IIS, or some other program that almost no one uses.
So when a *nix user pulls the same tricks that we constantly bash MS for, it's all just fine and dandy? That's what most folks call a double standard.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to do something about the horrible security in Outlook, but encouraging people to rig their mail headers for no other reason than to break some software is in the same league as virus writers as far as I'm concerned.
Broken software, free or propriatary, needs to be rooted out and destroyed.
No, broken software needs to be fixed, not destroyed. What is there gained by trashing something that's broken? Instead, learn from the experience and improve the product.
(sigh) I feel like the Dunkin Donuts guy
on
Apache 1.3.23 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"It's time to roll Apache"...almost as good as "It's time to make the kernel".
What I want to know is why Apache 2.0 hasn't made anymore beta progress in the last month or two than it has. Mind you, it's coming along, but it seems to have been in beta a long, long time. How are they coming with it? The bug tracking list doesn't ever seem to shrink much.
I fail to see how this proves OS X is adding anything to the app. If anything, your test proves just this: PS7 has been rewritten to take advantage of dual CPU's, where PS6 is not. OS X has nothing to do with it other than perhaps providing a more (or less?) efficient environment for the app to work in.
And let's prove a quick point while I'm here about SMP-aware OS's. Consider the following psuedocode:
begin loop
a+b=c
c+d=e
display e
end loop
Here we have two very simple add operations that cannot be made to run in parallel. Why? The second op is dependent upon the first op before it can be completed. No amount of OS tomfoolery or jiggering can overcome the fact that some applications are inherently unable to take advantage of more than one processor. You could run in on AIX, OS X, Linux, Windows, or DOS, and it wouldn't matter a damn if the OS is SMP capable or not if the algorithm can't be made parallel.
What you could get, however, is some benefit if you could put the serial algorithm on one processor and let the other processor do whatever else is going on in the system. This is the magic that OS X (and NT/2k/XP) will do for you, and it may result in higher application peformance simply because the OS is able to allocate 100% of a processor to nothing but the algorithm, whereas in a uniprocessor environment the process is constantly being interrupted while the system performs background tasks.
Again, as I said earlier, the true test to see if an app is SMP aware is to task it with something that will take it 15-30 seconds to perform, then watch your CPU meter. If all processors show 100% utilization, it's SMP aware. If only one proc pegs, it is not.
That depends on how you define "taking advantage of dual processors". If the program is multithreaded such that it can evenly spread the load over two processors and run them both near 100% utilization, then it's "taking advantage" of the SMP architecture.
Just because it's running on OS X does not mean it's "taking advantage" of the processors. Many programs are NOT coded in a fashion that is easily parallelized. Case in point: try each and every one of the Photoshop filters on a very large image and note your CPU utilization. Blur will run duals at 100%, but others will only show 50% (using only one processor). Another good example: 3D Studio Max. Sure, the renderer is SMP-aware, but many sub-modules (like inverse kinematics) are not.
So, don't swallow the "my OS is SMP capable so all apps are" stuff. It isn't true. As I stated in the original post, if the app isn't SMP-aware, the most you'd get is a more responsive system, as the app will monopolize only one processor while the other one is free to handle system requests (GUI, etc.). The Photoshop core (up to and including version 6) is NOT SMP-aware, but various plugins for it ARE. YMMV.
I use a single Athlon XP on a KT266A motherboard for NLE, although I'm using Premiere instead of Avid. Avid's stuff is awesome but very, very expensive. Most of the stuff I do ends up on CD-ROM's and the web, so I can deal with not having the super-high-end features like HDTV out and such. Given that you can put together an NLE rig that is 80% as good as the Avid for about 5%-10% of the cost is incredible.
As for 700-800Mhz being enough for a Mac but not enough for a PC, that's misleading. First, you can't even buy 700-800Mhz PC processors anymore, so you'd have to pick something a year or two old to compare with. And for NLE, processing speed isn't king, bandwidth is. You'd be far better off with a nice UltraSCSI array and a slower processor than a faster proc and a slower array. Where Avid shines is with custom hardware that has all your transitions implemented in hardware and their custom drive arrays.
And to address Mhz one more time, it is irrelevant to compare Mhz of a PPC chip to an Intel P4, an Athlon, or a SPARC for that matter. If I designed a chip that ran at 100Mhz but performed 10 instructions per cycle (IPC), it would perform roughly on par with a 1Ghz processor that performed 1 IPC, all other things being equal. The PPC chips do more per cycle than the x86 chips, and that's a design choice Motorola made. It is a "worse" or "better" choice than the lower IPC processors Intel/AMD make, anymore than it's "worse" or "better" than the higher IPC processors that Sun makes (400Mhz UltraSPARC, anyone?). What ultimately matters is "does it run well for you in the application you intend to put it in?"
It's a pity that even in a dual configuration it will get spanked by a dual Athlon. Or perhaps it isn't a pity if you've got Athlons;-).
The article notes that the PPC chip can perform more operations per cycle than it's PC counterparts. They are comparing themselves to the P4, which specifically DOES NOT try to do a lot per clock cycle (deep pipelining prevents this). If they were to compare it with an Athlon, things would be different.
And let's not forget the staggering (for PC's anyway) power of the Athlon FPU, which spanks the P4 quite cleanly. Even though I'm sure Apple will again claim their system performs a Photoshop blur 500 billion times faster than any computer ever made, real-world testing will probably end up showing this dual system to be marginally better than its predecessor. Software that can take advantage of dual CPU's isn't found everywhere. Even Photoshop doesn't use dual CPU's (although some of the plugins do).
You can get better system responsiveness with a dual system even if your app does not support duals, but it does not necessarily translate into faster programs.
I've got 5 dual Athlon's right now in a rendering farm, and they absolutely stomp any system I've ever seen in 12 years of being in the 3D industry.
If nothing else, it'll be nice to have an industrial strength competitor to GCC coming from a (former) heavyweight in the development community. I remember Pascal oh so fondly...
And I'll be real interested to see if it will actually compile the kernel!
What needs to be understood is the concept of spin offs. The computer you use today is largely the result of the Apollo space program's needs for a (then) powerful (then) compact system that could pilot something to the moon and back. Teflon, Kapton, Kevlar...many of the "space age" materials you see used around you every day were born in the race to space.
CDROM's? DVD's? All make use of lasers, something so commonplace that kids use them to put red dots on people's foreheads. Lasers were developed by the space program and the military, and the civilian applications have been astounding.
How about commerical aviation? Stronger, lighter planes using less fuel, engines using advanced ceramics that last three times as long. Superconductors, advanced cryogenics, crystallography, holograms...all of these technologies that are changing our daily lives were not the results of stringent research on their particular application, but instead spin off's from other research applications.
Even today, with the cracking of the human genome, we may see a cure for cancer, diabetes, and many other ailments.
To say that we should not do bold things because the money could be better spent elsewhere denies all the advancements of the latter half of the twentieth century, nearly all of which were the result of spin off technology.
The human race is always at its best when driven to do something difficult. Mounting a manned mission to Mars, or creating a permanent Lunar colony would drive the world, its economy, and science in general to new heights that we haven't seen since the late sixties. Not only should we go to Mars and drill, but we must do so.
What happened to the MP3 Pro spec?
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
Subject says all. Has it just not hit mainstream, or is it getting steamrollered by Ogg, WMA, and any of the other popular formats?
Slashdot Mirror
But it is possible to have a very secure Windows environent. No, it does not involve turning the box off ;^)
.SCR, etc) were banned long before I Love You came along.
Take this example: you have a highly competent NT/2K administrator (they do exist) and a pitiful *nix administrator. Which one is going to produce a more secure box? Any objective person would have to say the NT/2K guy would, because he knows his platform well enough to shore up vulnerabilities. Nimda, I Love You, and many other worms did not hit affect my company because we took security very seriously beforehand. Malicious attachments (.EXE,
Now, having played devil's advocate for a moment, let me say that if you have a tightly controlled *nix box with a competent admin and a focus on security, you can create a damn near impregnable system. The weaknesses then lie with the applications, not the OS, and that's something ALL vendors need to work on (you listening, Larry "Unbreakable" Ellison?)
You are correct that many are stored in 24fps and converted to NTSC on the fly, however the format uses interlaced fields on the disc. I'm encoding my DVD's progressive, and it produces some flicker in stills. Encoding interlaced removes this and resembles the source DVD material. FYI, I'm re-encoding ripped DVD's at a slightly lower bitrate so I can fit them on DVD-R's...
I've got Barco equipment, Plus equipment, and many others (I'm in the A/V field of business). Contrary to what you state, the better the projection equipment the more obvious the flaws can be. Poor contrast/brightness ratios, poor focus, poor color balance/temperature all can conspire to mask MPEG compression artifacts and de-interlacing artifacts. Get a really nice, super clear projector, put it on an 8 foot screen, and you'll notice the artifacts.
Just as some folks can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a CD (or an LP for that matter), some folks won't be able to notice DVD shortcomings. If you can't, consider yourself blessed because you won't feel the urge to buy lots of ridiculously expensive hardware to compensate. I, unfortanately, can notice the difference. You call alleviate much of it, but the base picture can only be improved so much. If DVD's had higher resolution to begin with, much of this equipment would be redundant.
I have seen it at 480p, line doubled, quadrupled, and arbitrarily scaled. While it's light years better than VHS, DVD quality is still clearly inferior to film. Even the best progressive players introduce motion artifacts and jaggies when doing 3:2 pulldown. And contrary to popular belief, DVD's are presented in interlaced format on the disc. I find this reprehensible, but given that the vast majority of people will view DVD's on NTSC interlaced televisions, making the discs interlaced saved companies from having to put an interlacing circuit in the DVD players. All this when we could've had progressive outputs from the get-go. Alas...
Sure, Shrek, 5th Element, Star Wars Ep. I, and many other "reference quality" discs show DVD's at their maximum, but they could be much, much better (in the same way that CD's, while very good, could benefit greatly by going from 16-bit/44.1khz to 24-bit/96khz). You only need a very nice projector and an 8 foot screen to see where DVD's fall down. There is a great deal of very expensive technology (read=Faroudja) you can buy that will alleviate most of these shortcomings, but wouldn't it be better if the DVD's were simply better to begin with?
Ever hear of Macrovision? Just try copying a Macrovision-enabled title on a conventional VCR using the analog outs. You'll get gibberish that looks like those porno TV channels that you don't subscribe to but love listening to.
Macrovision takes advantage of inherent limitations of NTSC technology to embed scrambling and such into the NTSC signal. Taking advantage of the vertical blanking and other caveats, they can look just fine on your TV but will be unviewable if passed through another device. More info can undoubtedly be found on their website.
Now, there are doo-dads that will strip Macrovision from an analog stream, so it's not too intrusive, but I'm sure the propellor heads at Macrovision are eager to try out some new technologies that will screw up the present day anti-Macrovision gadgets. We will overcome, of course, because Macrovision of any type degrades the picture quality -- not noticeable on most TV's, but very noticeable on projector systems and anything that scales/deinterlaces video.
blue laser DVD's, which will probably boost capacity by at least 100% if past technological trends mean anything. Current DVD's look poor on HDTV equipment, limited by their 480 line resolution and MPEG2 compression.
One can only hope that a blue laser DVD would get improved compression algorithms for fewer artifacts, better sound, and much better resolution (1080p anyone?). Unfortunately, I have a very funny feeling that Hollywood and the media moguls will not release any new DVD technology until they find something much, much stronger than CSS to safeguard it. We'll crack it, of course, but how long will it take, and how cumbersome will it be to do so?
Saying that Square Studios failed because of a "lack of ability" is not (IMHO) quite correct. Sure, the script blew more goats than goatse.cx, but the animation and modelling was VERY good. I'm in the 3D multimedia industry, and I have yet to see anything that comes even close to the photorealism introduced by Final Fantasy. The film was a technological tour de force, if perhaps a bit overspent (diving trips in Hawaii to study bubbles? Ever hear of a bathtub?) The facial animation could've been better, but I've never seen textures that realistic in a CG feature film before. Aki Ross has pores, for Pete's sake! That's attention to detail!
/. programmers out there, the animators have to build what they're told to build by the script writers (a.k.a. project managers in dev circles) and they're not responsible if the script sucks. Blame Hollywood for allow such dreck to pollute what looked to be the most visually revolutionary CG or CG-assisted film since Tron.
That being said, I felt very disappointed by the film's script and ultimately think that FF is a poor movie. It still occupies a slot in my DVD changer, but mainly as a reference disc more than a piece of entertainment. Much like many
Square should be held (ahem) squarely responsible for the hideous screenplay, but do not disparage the incredible animators and programmers involved in the project by blaming them for said script. The artists were told to paint a bad picture, and they painted a bad picture in the most beautiful fashion they could. My hat's off to them, and I hope they don't stay in the unemployment lines long.
Now if only my pr0n servers could keep up with my gigabit ethernet, I'd be happy!
But getting back to the original point, general usage will benefit from OS X's MP agility because one can give iDVD one processor to encode its data while the other processor is used for email, iTunes, web browser, etc.
Which, oddly enough, is exactly what I was implying in paragraph 5 of my previous post. You get Score 2 for agreeing with me, and I'm stuck with Score 1 -- wazzup with dat?
Ah yes, but the G4 is hamstrung in Mhz ceiling without a process shrink. However, that won't help because as soon as the G4 shrinks, the Athlon and P4 will shrink as well (in fact, they'd probably shrink the x86 stuff faster due to more volume). So the very things that make the G4 so good at FP and SIMD are limiting it. I won't argue that the PPC isn't the better, cleaner design -- it is. It is, however, getting more than a little old.
I'm glad you gave credit where credit is due on the Athlon. The FPU in that monster is incredible. I do 3D graphics and FP power rules all. I wouldn't touch a P4 with a ten meter cattle prod for exactly the reason you listed: it's an integer muscleman, but weak in FP. 3D Studio Max rocks on the Athlon XP, besting the P4 even if you install the P4 patch from Discreet. Sure the P4 can scale to ridiculous Mhz, but who cares when it costs so much?
I've got a Matrox Digisuite at work and an RT2500 here at home. I had an RT2000 back when they were new and full of so many bugs it was difficult (almost impossible) to use the system. Now that the 2500 is out (and RTMac), it's a solution that's easy to recommend. But it was difficult not to throw it out the window for about the first damn year.
I'm going to disagree with you on the PPC being "better" for multimedia. What you're probably interpreting as a better chip is more likely to be a better coupling of the OS with the hardware. MacOS and PPC have been hand in hand for a long, long time and it shows. Brute force is the realm of the x86 chips, but elegance is the way of PPC.
Anyone who's coded on x86 versus a Motorola chip would doubtlessly prefer the Motorola chip. The x86 chips have a lot of old baggage to carry around. But you can't morph that into the PPC being a better chip. Properly coded and implemented, the x86 implementation would be just as good. As for your scrubbing problems, I have none whatsoever and have never had any on a good Intel workstation. I'd probably chalk your problems up to poor video drivers, something that's common on Windows machines but practically unheard of on Mac's. My Matrox rig is damn sweet and smooth, and I wouldn't trade it for a Mac.
And if folks tried to break every application that wasn't 100% RFC compliant, you'd see a lot of broken software out there. RFC's are great, and they should be adhered to, but technological progress often outstrips the RFC's ability to keep up. Am I justifying violating an RFC? Absolutely not. I hate working with broken software as much as the next guy, and I sure as hell wish MS would at least adhere to the specs that DON'T get in their way.
But history has pretty much shown that when standards get stodgy, they get superseded by proprietary implementations, and sooner or later the proprietary stuff becomes an RFC. This encourages companies to violate an RFC because if they make the next neato-killer doodad extension that gets wide acceptance, they get to more or less define the new RFC. Microsoft knows this, that's why they're playing fast and loose with the standard in ways that 99.9% of folks won't notice. OpenGL being superseded by DirectX is another nice analogy, albeit one that isn't quite yet finished playing out.
You know, you could fix the "word doc" problem by simply asking them to send it to you in plain text, or RTF, or whatever format you prefer. Word is able to export in any of those formats.
Further, I have to ask why you're complaining so much about receiving Word doc attachments if you have Star Office. It is able to import Word docs without too much difficulty. I can see no real reason why you would refuse to do this unless you were trying to prove a point.
Regardless of your reasoning for refusing said attachments, using MS-like tactics to fight MS makes you just as wrong as they are. Folks can justify it until they're blue in the face, but in the end you're simply punishing others for not thinking and working just like you. Just like MS does. This is not flamebait or troll, I'm just trying to show what it looks like from another perspective.
If you don't like MS products, don't use them. If you don't have a choice (i.e. where you work mandates it) then don't complain, as there are many, many others (myself included) who do not have a choice.
This is not meant to be flamebait or troll, but I want you to consider your statement for a second:
I will definitely put up some simple barriers to entry for people who cannot share my opinions
Does that sound like something you've heard of before, something like censorship? I'm not questioning your right to do such a thing, but discussion forums are enhanced immeasurably when people of dissenting opinion are allowed to debate an issue to resolution. If you create a forum whereby everyone is like-minded, all you've done is create a "me too" atmosphere where everyone proselytizes the same thing. Kicking out (or keeping out) those who disagree with you is intellectual inbreeding. It does you well (it does anyone well!) to hear someone disagree with them sometimes. It keeps you on your toes.
And in closing, let me remind you that Microsoft and its user-base never reverse discriminates against non-MS-users. The benevolent community leaders in Redmond, persecuted as they are by the mainstream, never stoop to such ugly tactics as browser exclusive features or dirty almost-standard protocol tricks. And even though they don't have to, they work overtime to make sure that all non-MS programs and documents work seamlessly with MS applications on the off chance that someone just has to run Windows, or Outlook, or Internet Explorer, or Word, or Excel, or Access, or IIS, or some other program that almost no one uses.
So when a *nix user pulls the same tricks that we constantly bash MS for, it's all just fine and dandy? That's what most folks call a double standard.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to do something about the horrible security in Outlook, but encouraging people to rig their mail headers for no other reason than to break some software is in the same league as virus writers as far as I'm concerned.
Broken software, free or propriatary, needs to be rooted out and destroyed.
No, broken software needs to be fixed, not destroyed. What is there gained by trashing something that's broken? Instead, learn from the experience and improve the product.
"It's time to roll Apache"...almost as good as "It's time to make the kernel".
What I want to know is why Apache 2.0 hasn't made anymore beta progress in the last month or two than it has. Mind you, it's coming along, but it seems to have been in beta a long, long time. How are they coming with it? The bug tracking list doesn't ever seem to shrink much.
I fail to see how this proves OS X is adding anything to the app. If anything, your test proves just this: PS7 has been rewritten to take advantage of dual CPU's, where PS6 is not. OS X has nothing to do with it other than perhaps providing a more (or less?) efficient environment for the app to work in.
And let's prove a quick point while I'm here about SMP-aware OS's. Consider the following psuedocode:
begin loop
a+b=c
c+d=e
display e
end loop
Here we have two very simple add operations that cannot be made to run in parallel. Why? The second op is dependent upon the first op before it can be completed. No amount of OS tomfoolery or jiggering can overcome the fact that some applications are inherently unable to take advantage of more than one processor. You could run in on AIX, OS X, Linux, Windows, or DOS, and it wouldn't matter a damn if the OS is SMP capable or not if the algorithm can't be made parallel.
What you could get, however, is some benefit if you could put the serial algorithm on one processor and let the other processor do whatever else is going on in the system. This is the magic that OS X (and NT/2k/XP) will do for you, and it may result in higher application peformance simply because the OS is able to allocate 100% of a processor to nothing but the algorithm, whereas in a uniprocessor environment the process is constantly being interrupted while the system performs background tasks.
Again, as I said earlier, the true test to see if an app is SMP aware is to task it with something that will take it 15-30 seconds to perform, then watch your CPU meter. If all processors show 100% utilization, it's SMP aware. If only one proc pegs, it is not.
That depends on how you define "taking advantage of dual processors". If the program is multithreaded such that it can evenly spread the load over two processors and run them both near 100% utilization, then it's "taking advantage" of the SMP architecture.
Just because it's running on OS X does not mean it's "taking advantage" of the processors. Many programs are NOT coded in a fashion that is easily parallelized. Case in point: try each and every one of the Photoshop filters on a very large image and note your CPU utilization. Blur will run duals at 100%, but others will only show 50% (using only one processor). Another good example: 3D Studio Max. Sure, the renderer is SMP-aware, but many sub-modules (like inverse kinematics) are not.
So, don't swallow the "my OS is SMP capable so all apps are" stuff. It isn't true. As I stated in the original post, if the app isn't SMP-aware, the most you'd get is a more responsive system, as the app will monopolize only one processor while the other one is free to handle system requests (GUI, etc.). The Photoshop core (up to and including version 6) is NOT SMP-aware, but various plugins for it ARE. YMMV.
I use a single Athlon XP on a KT266A motherboard for NLE, although I'm using Premiere instead of Avid. Avid's stuff is awesome but very, very expensive. Most of the stuff I do ends up on CD-ROM's and the web, so I can deal with not having the super-high-end features like HDTV out and such. Given that you can put together an NLE rig that is 80% as good as the Avid for about 5%-10% of the cost is incredible.
As for 700-800Mhz being enough for a Mac but not enough for a PC, that's misleading. First, you can't even buy 700-800Mhz PC processors anymore, so you'd have to pick something a year or two old to compare with. And for NLE, processing speed isn't king, bandwidth is. You'd be far better off with a nice UltraSCSI array and a slower processor than a faster proc and a slower array. Where Avid shines is with custom hardware that has all your transitions implemented in hardware and their custom drive arrays.
And to address Mhz one more time, it is irrelevant to compare Mhz of a PPC chip to an Intel P4, an Athlon, or a SPARC for that matter. If I designed a chip that ran at 100Mhz but performed 10 instructions per cycle (IPC), it would perform roughly on par with a 1Ghz processor that performed 1 IPC, all other things being equal. The PPC chips do more per cycle than the x86 chips, and that's a design choice Motorola made. It is a "worse" or "better" choice than the lower IPC processors Intel/AMD make, anymore than it's "worse" or "better" than the higher IPC processors that Sun makes (400Mhz UltraSPARC, anyone?). What ultimately matters is "does it run well for you in the application you intend to put it in?"
It's a pity that even in a dual configuration it will get spanked by a dual Athlon. Or perhaps it isn't a pity if you've got Athlons ;-).
The article notes that the PPC chip can perform more operations per cycle than it's PC counterparts. They are comparing themselves to the P4, which specifically DOES NOT try to do a lot per clock cycle (deep pipelining prevents this). If they were to compare it with an Athlon, things would be different.
And let's not forget the staggering (for PC's anyway) power of the Athlon FPU, which spanks the P4 quite cleanly. Even though I'm sure Apple will again claim their system performs a Photoshop blur 500 billion times faster than any computer ever made, real-world testing will probably end up showing this dual system to be marginally better than its predecessor. Software that can take advantage of dual CPU's isn't found everywhere. Even Photoshop doesn't use dual CPU's (although some of the plugins do).
You can get better system responsiveness with a dual system even if your app does not support duals, but it does not necessarily translate into faster programs.
I've got 5 dual Athlon's right now in a rendering farm, and they absolutely stomp any system I've ever seen in 12 years of being in the 3D industry.
If nothing else, it'll be nice to have an industrial strength competitor to GCC coming from a (former) heavyweight in the development community. I remember Pascal oh so fondly...
And I'll be real interested to see if it will actually compile the kernel!
Alan can rest easy tonight, he's not going to have to leave now.
Don't we all feel better now?
What needs to be understood is the concept of spin offs. The computer you use today is largely the result of the Apollo space program's needs for a (then) powerful (then) compact system that could pilot something to the moon and back. Teflon, Kapton, Kevlar...many of the "space age" materials you see used around you every day were born in the race to space.
CDROM's? DVD's? All make use of lasers, something so commonplace that kids use them to put red dots on people's foreheads. Lasers were developed by the space program and the military, and the civilian applications have been astounding.
How about commerical aviation? Stronger, lighter planes using less fuel, engines using advanced ceramics that last three times as long. Superconductors, advanced cryogenics, crystallography, holograms...all of these technologies that are changing our daily lives were not the results of stringent research on their particular application, but instead spin off's from other research applications.
Even today, with the cracking of the human genome, we may see a cure for cancer, diabetes, and many other ailments.
To say that we should not do bold things because the money could be better spent elsewhere denies all the advancements of the latter half of the twentieth century, nearly all of which were the result of spin off technology.
The human race is always at its best when driven to do something difficult. Mounting a manned mission to Mars, or creating a permanent Lunar colony would drive the world, its economy, and science in general to new heights that we haven't seen since the late sixties. Not only should we go to Mars and drill, but we must do so.
Subject says all. Has it just not hit mainstream, or is it getting steamrollered by Ogg, WMA, and any of the other popular formats?