Almost. 4 gigs of address space, slightly different.
But realistically, how many people do you know that have 4 gig of RAM in a desktop machine? Not many. It's primarily useful for large servers and database systems that need huge working sets in addressable memory at all times for performance reasons.
Nothing's free my friend. You can pay Red Hat $60/year or Apple $129. I think the Apple user experience is worth the extra $69 to support actual R&D, don't you?
Sure, but with Red Hat the first hit is free. You only pay more if you want more than one computer with free updates. How many machines does the $129 buy support for? Not a troll, I don't really know, maybe they are pretty leniant with it.
Oh and BTW Red Hat do plenty of R&D as well, but it tends to be in boring stuff like advanced threading and kernel scalability etc.
Re:This will be another solid update
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Write a Carbon app instead of a Cocoa app and it will run on every MacOS from 8.1 thru X. If you want your app to run on every mac every made, you build a classic "fat binary".
Yah, that's one solution, but then your users don't like you anymore because somehow they can tell when an app is Cocoa and when it's Carbon. I dunno why, but details of the APIs used are allowed to leak into the UI.
The main problem that the original poster was referring to btw is the fact that MacOS has no real upgrade management. The way it works is this:
On Windows, you have installers, which check your system for the components they need. Typical components are, ActiveX, DirectX, MDAC, Internet Explorer, Shell32 etc. If the version is too old, it is upgraded. This sometimes breaks things, but generally people prefer it to having apps require XP for instance.
On Linux you have ELF (symbol) versioning. When you compile an app, you can control which set of libraries (and for glibc, symbols) it links against. Then you can install sideloaded libraries if the versions on the system are too old or two new, and glibc never breaks backwards compat so that's OK.
Apple generally doesn't make large core upgrades available for free, so application authors have a problem. Not all their users will be on the latest version, so they have to cleanly disable code that needs the new features. Unfortunately, MachO wierdness means that isn't always as simple as dlopen()ing a library like what you'd do on Linux or Windows, so they use something called "weak references". Basically if a symbol is missing, when run instead of failing to start, the app will run but with the missing symbol set to NULL. If it's used, the app will crash, but you can check if it's NULL before use.
Sounds great right? Well, it would be, but weak symbols were only introduced with 10.2, and API coverage was not complete. In fact, it wasn't even mostly complete. IIRC not even all of Cocoa was covered. So, in the absence of any easy way to cleanly fail features, and no way to upgrade the OS legally, apps end up having hard dependancies on the latest version of the OS.
That fulfills Apples goal of getting more upgrade sales because suddenly all your apps need the latest version (or the developers must be careful to code things and compile on separate copies of the OS etc), but makes life harder for the user and developer. Hopefully they will get weak symbols sorted out soon. It's still lame compared to Windows because you have to switch off features, but at least it's an acceptable compromise.
Re:This will be another solid update
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
Riiiight. So, you can run IE 6 under Windows 3.1? Uh huh.
Hmm. Well you can run IE5 under Windows 3.1 yes. Get it here. Let's face it, in terms of user experience, v5 and v6 aren't that different.
I mean, Microsoft get backwards compatability dude. Win16 was an even more horrible API than Win32, I would not want to be the guy to backport the entirety of IE to Windows 3.1 - but they did it anyway.
Regardless, this is offtopic. I think it's fair to roll a browser upgrade into the OS, after all it's not free to develop (despite using lots of free code). That doesn't necessarily make it good value though. I mean, NFS file locking is a "new feature"? A lot of stuff simply will not work without that, I'd call it a bugfix.
Well, it's kind of complex. Like most benchmarks, a lot of things can affect it.
GCC is engineered for lots of things, but portability ranks pretty highly. That means it isn't always as optimized for a chip as a vendors own compiler is. For instance, for a while (but apparently not anymore) the icc compiler gave much better results on Intel chips than gcc did.
So, on one hand using GCC makes it fairer. But on the other hand GCC can and does optimize very well for certain classes of chips. So, really, you have to assume that it's optimized as much as possible for their chip.
That's entirely fair though. Arguably a non optimized compiler is unfair to have, as you aren't using all the abilities of the CPU.
I mean, you don't need more then 32 bit ints for the vast majority of the calculations you need to do on a PC (whereas on a 16 bit computer, you need to use several instructions to calculate 'both halves' of the number anytime you needed to do math with numbers larger then 64k.). And anyway, all of the major CPUs available today have instructions that deal with huge amounts of data for floating point and SIMD multimedia stuff.
Indeedy. Kind of amusing to note how it "breaks through the 4gig barrier".
That'd be the barrier that virtually nobody ever hits then;-)
Still, looks like an interesting machine. I'm not taken with the looks personally, if anything it looks like a..... beige box. Good to see fast PPC chips on the market again, even if the attitude of my local Mac user will become even more annoying.
There are limits, even for Doom III. I'd bet a couple of beers that it won't be realistically able to use more than 4gig of RAM.
Someone somewhere else on this thread sarcastically suggested that I was simply assuming 64bit to be twice the speed of 32bit.
Well, at one point you said "64 bit processors can process twice as much data as 32 bit processors", or words to that affect. Which is a pretty meaningless statement without a time reference.
However, 64bit quite clearly is the future, and whether x86 or PPC is your architecture, it's where we're going.
Sure. Eventually. In much the same way that ipv6 is the future.
surely the ability to fetch 64bits of data at a time rather than just 32bits is going to speed things up?
I'm pretty sure that the rate CPUs read from memory is actually limited by things like memory bandwidth and speed. I think most CPUs already fetch memory speculatively in chunks of 128bits or more, so I doubt that'd make much difference.
You also have to remember that the size of the pointer type doubles. That can actually decrease efficiency - as pointed out in the article linked to in a sibling post, a lot of computation involves linked list traversal. The increased pointer size would cause greater amounts of data to need to be processed.
It is quite clear from your posting history that you do not like Macs
Well this is the interesting thing. I don't have much against Macs themselves, other than a general dislike of proprietary platforms (but the same is true of Windows or Solaris for instance). It's more the attitude of some (unfortunately the most vocal) Mac users that annoys me. A lot of, well, to be frank inaccurate things are said about Apple and their products, and it's a big turnoff.
It's especially annoying when people work themselves into a frenzy then treat a corporation and its product almost like a religion. So that's where a lot of my "anti-Mac" viewpoint comes from, not in fact the technology or even the company themselves (though apple have done their fair share of shady things) - just the blind loyalty of its users.
Your statement about VMware graphics emulation makes no sense. How else is it supposed to emulate a graphics card? Windows requires a driver, so it makes sense that this driver translates to the underlying windowing system. How is that not emulation?
In fact, Windows does come bundled with a virtual machine, but it's so seamless nobody even knows its there. 16 bit Windows and DOS applications are run inside an emulation of Win 3.1 (but which uses semi-native controls so they look more like modern Windows). This emulator contains its own scheduler, windowing code and thunking system. Windows ships with some 16bit DLLs and code for precisely this reason. No, this doesn't always work perfectly, but it works in the majority of cases.
As pointed out by another poster, Classic emulation is not perfect either - there are some apps which simply won't run, same as Windows.
There's a pithy few words that you'd do well to remember, Mike (and this does kinda make me a bit of a bitchy troll) - "can't win, don't try."
I find your attitude remarkably arrogant. So far almost every post you've made has contained factual errors. It's pretty clear your understanding of issues like 64 bit computing and OS backwards compatability is somewhat limited.
In fact, several people have had to correct you on all these details. Meanwhile you overload your arguments with hyperbole and sarcasm, which doesn't make you look any more competant. Please stop, and focus on the actual issues, as opposed to trolling people who reply to you.
Macs of today still feature Motorola 68k emulation so that they can run software written for those chips, for OS 9 and for OS X...... Windows XP (the equivalent of OS X in terms of consumer accessibility and reliability), on the other hand, has terrible backwards compatibility
Well, iirc Classic mode is basically running the complete OS 9 in a VM. But by this logic, Windows is perfectly backwards compatable because you can run any previous version inside VMware.
So, to measure how backwards compatable an OS is, running complete old versions inside a VM is to me cheating. You should test how well old apps run in the same environment as modern apps. By this measure, Windows scores pretty well.
Why would iD make Doom III 64 bit? They have nothing to gain from it whatsoever. There are virtually no 64 bit machines out there today, and even if there were there would not be any real performance improvement to do so. Not to mention that they'd have to audit the code for 64 bit cleanness, which is a PITA.
As regards the 32bit vs 64bit issue, I think you only need to look at some of the performance figures to see that the PPC chips give some serious competition to Intel.
This is entirely offtopic, but whatever. If PPC chips are back in the running great, but it has nothing to do with 64bitness.
64bit chips process twice as much information as 32bit chips
Can you provide some articles to back this up? I'm pretty sure this statement is entirely wrong, and it's extremely vague anyway. Per clock cycle?
As you will see, clock-for-clock, they can blow x86 out of the water.
I think you need to drink less of the koolaid dude. Even if all the speculation is true and there are PPC970 based Macs out today, they will be competitive with x86 based solutions yes, but they will not exceed them, not even right now.
I think you need to tone down the hype and tone up the statistics and technical details a bit.... I'd want to see convincing proof that going 64bit actually increases real world performance. 64bit is useful in some settings, esp scientific/server work, and I expect eventually it'll trickle down onto the desktop. But not yet.
Re:Does anyone really care anymore?
on
P4 3.2GHz Reviews
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· Score: 2, Insightful
1.2 ghz is enough for 90% of people out there!
Sure. Until the next release of (insert favourite OS here) is out. At which point it'll have more eyecandy, be working harder in the background and users will be pushing it harder without even realising it.
Trivial example - I like antialiased text. It sucks CPU power. Well seeing as I couldn't actually buy a CPU slower than a gigahertz when I last looked around, that's not such a big deal anymore.
And anyway there's a lot of times when you want speed just because you don't want to be hanging around for it. Compiling (for developers), waiting while your web browser reflows a really really big webpage and so on. And games of course.
64 bit has very little to do with speed, it's mostly related to how much memory is addressable by the CPU. In a 32bit machine, the maximum address space is 4gig, which is a bit limiting for some things (bear in mind that's not necessarily physical ram, but RAM+Swap+mmapped files etc).
The potential for huge performance increases in games (I'm thinking Doom III of course) is massive.
How does that work? Doom III is not 64bit software, so would have to be run in 32bit mode anyway.
64bit vs 32bit isn't really relevant for "consumers" (i wish there was another word for that). Very little really benefits from 64bit at the moment.
Still, that's not to say you can't do interesting things with it. Imagine an OS in which every object is conceivable mapped into the address space at once, with the hard disk simply backing it mmap style. It'd require a totally new OS design to make it work, but I think you could do some cool stuff with such a beast. No more file IO!
Well you can't compare a CPU against a computer. A more interesting comparison would be the new IBM chips against these ones. Still, CPU benchmarks of that type are interesting in an academic fashion only, they can always be contested (for not using the right optimizations etc).
I dunno why people focus so much on CPU benchmarks. Why can't I have a faster BIOS? I want a machine that passes control to the OS bootloader in under a second. Instead, if anything, it takes longer and longer with every machine I try - a second or two staring at the NVidia copyright notice, a few more seconds staring at the bios, quick memory check, autodetect devices. Some system info, some beeps, some whirrs, some clicks, then finally the OS starts loading. Of course that takes ages as well.
If we are capable of making such insanely fast pieces of electronics, why the hell is the rest so slow?
The gnome startup notification is better. It's more reliable, as the system doesn't try to second guess the app. The notification itself takes the form of a busy cursor and an entry in the window list saying "Starting Whatever....."
I think most people don't understand how unique this initiative is.
Huh? You realise that the Red Hat apt repositories have been allying with each other for some time, to reduce duplication, overlap and synchronize metadata right? They just don't do press releases for it.
Most of the times open source projects don't really notice eachother and when they do, they just start a flamewar about who's best and who stole feature from who.
It's good too see there are some developers out there with organizational talents who are willing to communicate with other projects in order to speed up development time and create a better product.
Sure, it's all good. I still don't understand how they intend to reduce duplication when using different packaging systems and different sources though. If we have packages A and B in fink and gentoo, but they both depend on package C, which network gets to "hold" package C? How do you interface emerge to apt? How do they synchronize the metadata between these two large bodies of packages? In the cases where there already is duplication, who gets to keep the package?
Lots of unanswered questions here. Will be interesting to find out the answers.
Looks to me like you spoke a bit too soon on that one.
Indeed, I appear to have been mod bombed. Almost all posts to this topic in the space of 5 minutes have received a Troll mod.
Now, you said you were anti-BS, so let's filter out your own BS here. You do *not* know several people who bought iBooks which are now on eBay. You know one person who bought an iBook, and this person may have threatened to put it on eBay in the past year, though they have not and continue to use the machine.
Uh, no. They did. They showed me the PC they bought partly with the money they got from it. "May" have threatened? A former boss of mine did the same thing (well, not buy a dual processor machine right afterwards, but whatever). Sure, tell me to my face that I'm lying, when you don't have any way to know. That's just great.
Oh fuck this. I've been here before. You can't say anything against the party in a forum as biased as apple.slashdot.org
People just end up attacking you personally. I STILL have not seen anybody address my original points. I don't think anybody will.
I'm going home. 3 troll-modded posts in row is a record. OK guys, I've learnt my lesson. You don't like people who don't like Macs. Fine. Bye bye.
Slashdot is a tough crowd. Facts are paramount. You don't have any "points" you just put forth an opinion.
I don't have points? How do I not have points? My original post had some very clear, very specific points - namely that the assertion that there were no advantages to the PC platform anymore was rubbish. I pointed out several facts - the advantages of vendor independance, application compatability (no, Virtual PC doesn't count, nobody except hard core geeks want to pay for and run two OSs at once), and so on. These are points, backed up by facts.
In return, I get personal stabs.
Look, I'm not trying to start a war here. But there are other opinions. I do respect yours but you need to back it up every so often.
Well this is what I don't understand. My posts to Apple stories are backed up just as much as any of my other posts, which are often highly rated. Are you going to deny that the PC has more vendor independance than the Mac? Do I need to cross reference every post I make?
Fuck off. "Classic Mac troll at work." See how that goes?
Yeah, except I'm not a troll. Never have been. You haven't addressed ANY of my original points. You haven't tackled the issues of vendor independance, application compatability, or price point. Instead, you chose to say things like "everybody loves MacOS" and "you are so tiresome".
But, again, stop telling me what I think. You've dodged the issue once again and are dancing on the periphery of an ad hominem.
That's rich. This whole thread started because you chose to make an ad hominem attack against me, rather than address my points. "Can't resist taking a swipe can you" doesn't address the reasons for the original swipe.
You're probably wondering why you got a -1 Interesting. Welcome to Slashdot.
The first rule is that don't bother posting to Apple stories if you are not pro Apple. It doesn't matter how valid or interesting you think your points are, they won't be seen, or somebody will post a reply that doesn't address your original assertions and you'll be modded down, normally via Overrated or Redundant mods.
The second rule is that the more meta moderation you do, the more mod points you get. So, it's in your interests to spend your time meta moderating rather than posting to these stories, if you wish to have an impact on the discussion.
Finally, you might be wondering how you can get -1 Interesting, a seemingly impossible combination of score and adjective. Basically, Overrated/Underrated mods change the score, but not the associated word. Why? Dunno. Ask Taco. They also aren't metamoderated.
I would like to point out that the above post has now been moderated:
60% Insightful
20% Troll
20% Redundant
This is interesting. I would like to know how the post is a troll. I would also like to know why it's redundant.
Redundant mods are designed to stop different people posting the same thing over and over, so you only have to read the same point once. At the time that was posted, I was the only one to make this point. So I don't see how it's redundant. If anything, it offers an opposing view, which should be discussed.
Troll mods are designed to hide posts from people who deliberately craft their posts to provoke the maximum number of people possible. They hold no real opinions of their own, it's just a game to them. I am not a troll.
I find it interesting to note that when I first saw this thread, a post laying out the authors scepticism about the validity of this was at +5 Interesting. Looking at the posting history of rebeka thomas showed that despite only having just signed up for an account, she (i will assume it's a she) had only ever been modded up, and in fact most posts had been modded up. Nonetheless, the post is now at -1 Interesting.
Why is "Overrated" used so often to mod down non-pro-Apple posts? The answer is because for some reason Overrated/Underrated is not metamoderated, so there is no punishment for abusing it. It also provides a convenient euphamism for "-1 I don't agree with this but it's not flamebait nor a troll".
It's too bad so many people are so sensitive about this issue. The fact is that Apple are a corporation, like any other. Mindless frothing and drooling over them or their products is naive, and will lead to disappoint or worse the day they turn around and screw you over. This has happened to Apple customers before, just like with any other company.
I expect as this is not pro Apple, this post will be moderated down. I find it interesting to note that the only time I ever get modded down, is when I post to Apple stories. The moderations received are normally not in proportion to the content of the post - simply put, any showing of distate for Apple, their products or their tactics, will get you modded down regardless of the validity of the post or history of the poster.
Mike, your anti-Mac bias becomes more evident with each post.
Anti-Mac? Maybe. I am definately anti-BS however, which is normally thrown around in huge quantities whenever Apple is mentioned on Slashdot. The reality distortion field is strong here, and it annoys me. Or what, are my points not valid now because we're suddenly talking about Apple instead of a different slashdot topic?
You can't seem to help taking a swipe. It's tiresome.
And yet I keep getting modded up for it! You know what is really tiresome? Seeing people get +5 Interesting for posts that say little more than "wow apple are so cooooool maybe I will buy one now. it's unix but it's mac! sw33t". Even the well written ones basically boil down to that normally. This happens even when the post is blatantly offtopic - somehow, somebody will find a way to link the current topic to Apple or MacOS, no matter how tenuous. It's just noise, or maybe karma whoring.
Home users care nothing for 'vendor independence', etc. They usually just buy the cheapest machine that has the specs they want.
Are you sure about that? They may not actually realise it, but things as simple as being able to shop around and feel you got a good deal without having to throw away all their old software is caring about vendor independance, but it's so natural that nobody ever thinks about it explicitly.
The *really* big news is that a huge chunk of the geek-set here on Slashdot will soon have a really, really compelling alternative to any high-end PC workstation.
Why is this news? There has been plenty of competition in the high end workstation space for years. Oh right, I forgot. This is Apple. Their cases glow in the dark. Of course it's news.
Think about it - almost everyone on here drools over Mac OS X
I hate to burst your bubble, but no they don't. Of course only the drooling fanboy posts get modded up, but I took a stab at explaining why that was a few months ago in terms of marketing psychology etc. FWIW I know several people who bought iBooks which are now on ebay - they tried out MacOS in a shop, thought "cool!" and bought it, then dumped a year later after its faults started annoying them. Obviously people don't post about that on Slashdot. Why should they?
whether justified or not; I still suspect a lot of these goons screaming for speed just want it for Doom 3
Classic Mac apologism at work. All the Mac users I know (well, all one of them ignoring slashdot) are treating this like christmas come early, but for the longest time the party line seemed to be "who needs speed when you have MacOS X" or whatever. Of course before that it was "ho hum, another day, another supercomputer" - will Mac users please decide whether they care about speed or not? The story changes every few years!
With 64bit dual-Ghz high-speed-bus Macs, you will see an even larger migration of those Unix geeks to the Mac. Something I look forward to.
This does of course lead to the question of why you look forward to it. You look forward to it, because you have made a large (almost certainly personal) investment in the platform. Platforms suffer network effects - the more people who invest in the platform with you, the more valuable your investment becomes. The more people who use the Mac, the better your user experience becomes. It's simple market economics.
Clearly, this is the type of thinking that keeps Microsoft in the top spot, keeps IE dominating the web in the face of superior free alternatives etc. You want people to use Macs, despite the fact that this ultimately profits only Apple, because the nature of proprietary systems makes it a winner/loser scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
That buys you approximately a year of updates I believe. Or you can use the demo one and get it for free
I only have 256 :(
But realistically, how many people do you know that have 4 gig of RAM in a desktop machine? Not many. It's primarily useful for large servers and database systems that need huge working sets in addressable memory at all times for performance reasons.
Sure, but with Red Hat the first hit is free. You only pay more if you want more than one computer with free updates. How many machines does the $129 buy support for? Not a troll, I don't really know, maybe they are pretty leniant with it.
Oh and BTW Red Hat do plenty of R&D as well, but it tends to be in boring stuff like advanced threading and kernel scalability etc.
Yah, that's one solution, but then your users don't like you anymore because somehow they can tell when an app is Cocoa and when it's Carbon. I dunno why, but details of the APIs used are allowed to leak into the UI.
The main problem that the original poster was referring to btw is the fact that MacOS has no real upgrade management. The way it works is this:
On Windows, you have installers, which check your system for the components they need. Typical components are, ActiveX, DirectX, MDAC, Internet Explorer, Shell32 etc. If the version is too old, it is upgraded. This sometimes breaks things, but generally people prefer it to having apps require XP for instance.
On Linux you have ELF (symbol) versioning. When you compile an app, you can control which set of libraries (and for glibc, symbols) it links against. Then you can install sideloaded libraries if the versions on the system are too old or two new, and glibc never breaks backwards compat so that's OK.
Apple generally doesn't make large core upgrades available for free, so application authors have a problem. Not all their users will be on the latest version, so they have to cleanly disable code that needs the new features. Unfortunately, MachO wierdness means that isn't always as simple as dlopen()ing a library like what you'd do on Linux or Windows, so they use something called "weak references". Basically if a symbol is missing, when run instead of failing to start, the app will run but with the missing symbol set to NULL. If it's used, the app will crash, but you can check if it's NULL before use.
Sounds great right? Well, it would be, but weak symbols were only introduced with 10.2, and API coverage was not complete. In fact, it wasn't even mostly complete. IIRC not even all of Cocoa was covered. So, in the absence of any easy way to cleanly fail features, and no way to upgrade the OS legally, apps end up having hard dependancies on the latest version of the OS.
That fulfills Apples goal of getting more upgrade sales because suddenly all your apps need the latest version (or the developers must be careful to code things and compile on separate copies of the OS etc), but makes life harder for the user and developer. Hopefully they will get weak symbols sorted out soon. It's still lame compared to Windows because you have to switch off features, but at least it's an acceptable compromise.
Hmm. Well you can run IE5 under Windows 3.1 yes. Get it here. Let's face it, in terms of user experience, v5 and v6 aren't that different.
I mean, Microsoft get backwards compatability dude. Win16 was an even more horrible API than Win32, I would not want to be the guy to backport the entirety of IE to Windows 3.1 - but they did it anyway.
Regardless, this is offtopic. I think it's fair to roll a browser upgrade into the OS, after all it's not free to develop (despite using lots of free code). That doesn't necessarily make it good value though. I mean, NFS file locking is a "new feature"? A lot of stuff simply will not work without that, I'd call it a bugfix.
GCC is engineered for lots of things, but portability ranks pretty highly. That means it isn't always as optimized for a chip as a vendors own compiler is. For instance, for a while (but apparently not anymore) the icc compiler gave much better results on Intel chips than gcc did.
So, on one hand using GCC makes it fairer. But on the other hand GCC can and does optimize very well for certain classes of chips. So, really, you have to assume that it's optimized as much as possible for their chip.
That's entirely fair though. Arguably a non optimized compiler is unfair to have, as you aren't using all the abilities of the CPU.
Indeedy. Kind of amusing to note how it "breaks through the 4gig barrier".
That'd be the barrier that virtually nobody ever hits then ;-)
Still, looks like an interesting machine. I'm not taken with the looks personally, if anything it looks like a ..... beige box. Good to see fast PPC chips on the market again, even if the attitude of my local Mac user will become even more annoying.
Someone somewhere else on this thread sarcastically suggested that I was simply assuming 64bit to be twice the speed of 32bit.
Well, at one point you said "64 bit processors can process twice as much data as 32 bit processors", or words to that affect. Which is a pretty meaningless statement without a time reference.
However, 64bit quite clearly is the future, and whether x86 or PPC is your architecture, it's where we're going.
Sure. Eventually. In much the same way that ipv6 is the future.
surely the ability to fetch 64bits of data at a time rather than just 32bits is going to speed things up?
I'm pretty sure that the rate CPUs read from memory is actually limited by things like memory bandwidth and speed. I think most CPUs already fetch memory speculatively in chunks of 128bits or more, so I doubt that'd make much difference.
You also have to remember that the size of the pointer type doubles. That can actually decrease efficiency - as pointed out in the article linked to in a sibling post, a lot of computation involves linked list traversal. The increased pointer size would cause greater amounts of data to need to be processed.
It is quite clear from your posting history that you do not like Macs
Well this is the interesting thing. I don't have much against Macs themselves, other than a general dislike of proprietary platforms (but the same is true of Windows or Solaris for instance). It's more the attitude of some (unfortunately the most vocal) Mac users that annoys me. A lot of, well, to be frank inaccurate things are said about Apple and their products, and it's a big turnoff.
It's especially annoying when people work themselves into a frenzy then treat a corporation and its product almost like a religion. So that's where a lot of my "anti-Mac" viewpoint comes from, not in fact the technology or even the company themselves (though apple have done their fair share of shady things) - just the blind loyalty of its users.
In fact, Windows does come bundled with a virtual machine, but it's so seamless nobody even knows its there. 16 bit Windows and DOS applications are run inside an emulation of Win 3.1 (but which uses semi-native controls so they look more like modern Windows). This emulator contains its own scheduler, windowing code and thunking system. Windows ships with some 16bit DLLs and code for precisely this reason. No, this doesn't always work perfectly, but it works in the majority of cases.
As pointed out by another poster, Classic emulation is not perfect either - there are some apps which simply won't run, same as Windows.
There's a pithy few words that you'd do well to remember, Mike (and this does kinda make me a bit of a bitchy troll) - "can't win, don't try."
I find your attitude remarkably arrogant. So far almost every post you've made has contained factual errors. It's pretty clear your understanding of issues like 64 bit computing and OS backwards compatability is somewhat limited.
In fact, several people have had to correct you on all these details. Meanwhile you overload your arguments with hyperbole and sarcasm, which doesn't make you look any more competant. Please stop, and focus on the actual issues, as opposed to trolling people who reply to you.
Well, iirc Classic mode is basically running the complete OS 9 in a VM. But by this logic, Windows is perfectly backwards compatable because you can run any previous version inside VMware.
So, to measure how backwards compatable an OS is, running complete old versions inside a VM is to me cheating. You should test how well old apps run in the same environment as modern apps. By this measure, Windows scores pretty well.
"Muggles" is too innocent really. I like it all the same. Must buy the book soon!
I prefer "the public", but yeah, in future I'll try harder to avoid the word consumer.
As regards the 32bit vs 64bit issue, I think you only need to look at some of the performance figures to see that the PPC chips give some serious competition to Intel.
This is entirely offtopic, but whatever. If PPC chips are back in the running great, but it has nothing to do with 64bitness.
64bit chips process twice as much information as 32bit chips
Can you provide some articles to back this up? I'm pretty sure this statement is entirely wrong, and it's extremely vague anyway. Per clock cycle?
As you will see, clock-for-clock, they can blow x86 out of the water.
I think you need to drink less of the koolaid dude. Even if all the speculation is true and there are PPC970 based Macs out today, they will be competitive with x86 based solutions yes, but they will not exceed them, not even right now.
I think you need to tone down the hype and tone up the statistics and technical details a bit.... I'd want to see convincing proof that going 64bit actually increases real world performance. 64bit is useful in some settings, esp scientific/server work, and I expect eventually it'll trickle down onto the desktop. But not yet.
Sure. Until the next release of (insert favourite OS here) is out. At which point it'll have more eyecandy, be working harder in the background and users will be pushing it harder without even realising it.
Trivial example - I like antialiased text. It sucks CPU power. Well seeing as I couldn't actually buy a CPU slower than a gigahertz when I last looked around, that's not such a big deal anymore.
And anyway there's a lot of times when you want speed just because you don't want to be hanging around for it. Compiling (for developers), waiting while your web browser reflows a really really big webpage and so on. And games of course.
The potential for huge performance increases in games (I'm thinking Doom III of course) is massive.
How does that work? Doom III is not 64bit software, so would have to be run in 32bit mode anyway.
Still, that's not to say you can't do interesting things with it. Imagine an OS in which every object is conceivable mapped into the address space at once, with the hard disk simply backing it mmap style. It'd require a totally new OS design to make it work, but I think you could do some cool stuff with such a beast. No more file IO!
I dunno why people focus so much on CPU benchmarks. Why can't I have a faster BIOS? I want a machine that passes control to the OS bootloader in under a second. Instead, if anything, it takes longer and longer with every machine I try - a second or two staring at the NVidia copyright notice, a few more seconds staring at the bios, quick memory check, autodetect devices. Some system info, some beeps, some whirrs, some clicks, then finally the OS starts loading. Of course that takes ages as well.
If we are capable of making such insanely fast pieces of electronics, why the hell is the rest so slow?
The gnome startup notification is better. It's more reliable, as the system doesn't try to second guess the app. The notification itself takes the form of a busy cursor and an entry in the window list saying "Starting Whatever....."
Huh? You realise that the Red Hat apt repositories have been allying with each other for some time, to reduce duplication, overlap and synchronize metadata right? They just don't do press releases for it.
Most of the times open source projects don't really notice eachother and when they do, they just start a flamewar about who's best and who stole feature from who.
How do you explain that then?
It's good too see there are some developers out there with organizational talents who are willing to communicate with other projects in order to speed up development time and create a better product.
Sure, it's all good. I still don't understand how they intend to reduce duplication when using different packaging systems and different sources though. If we have packages A and B in fink and gentoo, but they both depend on package C, which network gets to "hold" package C? How do you interface emerge to apt? How do they synchronize the metadata between these two large bodies of packages? In the cases where there already is duplication, who gets to keep the package?
Lots of unanswered questions here. Will be interesting to find out the answers.
Indeed, I appear to have been mod bombed. Almost all posts to this topic in the space of 5 minutes have received a Troll mod.
Now, you said you were anti-BS, so let's filter out your own BS here. You do *not* know several people who bought iBooks which are now on eBay. You know one person who bought an iBook, and this person may have threatened to put it on eBay in the past year, though they have not and continue to use the machine.
Uh, no. They did. They showed me the PC they bought partly with the money they got from it. "May" have threatened? A former boss of mine did the same thing (well, not buy a dual processor machine right afterwards, but whatever). Sure, tell me to my face that I'm lying, when you don't have any way to know. That's just great.
Oh fuck this. I've been here before. You can't say anything against the party in a forum as biased as apple.slashdot.org
People just end up attacking you personally. I STILL have not seen anybody address my original points. I don't think anybody will.
I'm going home. 3 troll-modded posts in row is a record. OK guys, I've learnt my lesson. You don't like people who don't like Macs. Fine. Bye bye.
I don't have points? How do I not have points? My original post had some very clear, very specific points - namely that the assertion that there were no advantages to the PC platform anymore was rubbish. I pointed out several facts - the advantages of vendor independance, application compatability (no, Virtual PC doesn't count, nobody except hard core geeks want to pay for and run two OSs at once), and so on. These are points, backed up by facts.
In return, I get personal stabs.
Look, I'm not trying to start a war here. But there are other opinions. I do respect yours but you need to back it up every so often.
Well this is what I don't understand. My posts to Apple stories are backed up just as much as any of my other posts, which are often highly rated. Are you going to deny that the PC has more vendor independance than the Mac? Do I need to cross reference every post I make?
Fuck off. "Classic Mac troll at work." See how that goes?
Yeah, except I'm not a troll. Never have been. You haven't addressed ANY of my original points. You haven't tackled the issues of vendor independance, application compatability, or price point. Instead, you chose to say things like "everybody loves MacOS" and "you are so tiresome".
But, again, stop telling me what I think. You've dodged the issue once again and are dancing on the periphery of an ad hominem.
That's rich. This whole thread started because you chose to make an ad hominem attack against me, rather than address my points. "Can't resist taking a swipe can you" doesn't address the reasons for the original swipe.
The first rule is that don't bother posting to Apple stories if you are not pro Apple. It doesn't matter how valid or interesting you think your points are, they won't be seen, or somebody will post a reply that doesn't address your original assertions and you'll be modded down, normally via Overrated or Redundant mods.
The second rule is that the more meta moderation you do, the more mod points you get. So, it's in your interests to spend your time meta moderating rather than posting to these stories, if you wish to have an impact on the discussion.
Finally, you might be wondering how you can get -1 Interesting, a seemingly impossible combination of score and adjective. Basically, Overrated/Underrated mods change the score, but not the associated word. Why? Dunno. Ask Taco. They also aren't metamoderated.
Good luck, and have fun! :)
This is interesting. I would like to know how the post is a troll. I would also like to know why it's redundant.
Redundant mods are designed to stop different people posting the same thing over and over, so you only have to read the same point once. At the time that was posted, I was the only one to make this point. So I don't see how it's redundant. If anything, it offers an opposing view, which should be discussed.
Troll mods are designed to hide posts from people who deliberately craft their posts to provoke the maximum number of people possible. They hold no real opinions of their own, it's just a game to them. I am not a troll.
I find it interesting to note that when I first saw this thread, a post laying out the authors scepticism about the validity of this was at +5 Interesting. Looking at the posting history of rebeka thomas showed that despite only having just signed up for an account, she (i will assume it's a she) had only ever been modded up, and in fact most posts had been modded up. Nonetheless, the post is now at -1 Interesting.
Why is "Overrated" used so often to mod down non-pro-Apple posts? The answer is because for some reason Overrated/Underrated is not metamoderated, so there is no punishment for abusing it. It also provides a convenient euphamism for "-1 I don't agree with this but it's not flamebait nor a troll".
It's too bad so many people are so sensitive about this issue. The fact is that Apple are a corporation, like any other. Mindless frothing and drooling over them or their products is naive, and will lead to disappoint or worse the day they turn around and screw you over. This has happened to Apple customers before, just like with any other company.
I expect as this is not pro Apple, this post will be moderated down. I find it interesting to note that the only time I ever get modded down, is when I post to Apple stories. The moderations received are normally not in proportion to the content of the post - simply put, any showing of distate for Apple, their products or their tactics, will get you modded down regardless of the validity of the post or history of the poster.
That is all. Think about it before you act.
Anti-Mac? Maybe. I am definately anti-BS however, which is normally thrown around in huge quantities whenever Apple is mentioned on Slashdot. The reality distortion field is strong here, and it annoys me. Or what, are my points not valid now because we're suddenly talking about Apple instead of a different slashdot topic?
You can't seem to help taking a swipe. It's tiresome.
And yet I keep getting modded up for it! You know what is really tiresome? Seeing people get +5 Interesting for posts that say little more than "wow apple are so cooooool maybe I will buy one now. it's unix but it's mac! sw33t". Even the well written ones basically boil down to that normally. This happens even when the post is blatantly offtopic - somehow, somebody will find a way to link the current topic to Apple or MacOS, no matter how tenuous. It's just noise, or maybe karma whoring.
Home users care nothing for 'vendor independence', etc. They usually just buy the cheapest machine that has the specs they want.
Are you sure about that? They may not actually realise it, but things as simple as being able to shop around and feel you got a good deal without having to throw away all their old software is caring about vendor independance, but it's so natural that nobody ever thinks about it explicitly.
The *really* big news is that a huge chunk of the geek-set here on Slashdot will soon have a really, really compelling alternative to any high-end PC workstation.
Why is this news? There has been plenty of competition in the high end workstation space for years. Oh right, I forgot. This is Apple. Their cases glow in the dark. Of course it's news.
Think about it - almost everyone on here drools over Mac OS X
I hate to burst your bubble, but no they don't. Of course only the drooling fanboy posts get modded up, but I took a stab at explaining why that was a few months ago in terms of marketing psychology etc. FWIW I know several people who bought iBooks which are now on ebay - they tried out MacOS in a shop, thought "cool!" and bought it, then dumped a year later after its faults started annoying them. Obviously people don't post about that on Slashdot. Why should they?
whether justified or not; I still suspect a lot of these goons screaming for speed just want it for Doom 3
Classic Mac apologism at work. All the Mac users I know (well, all one of them ignoring slashdot) are treating this like christmas come early, but for the longest time the party line seemed to be "who needs speed when you have MacOS X" or whatever. Of course before that it was "ho hum, another day, another supercomputer" - will Mac users please decide whether they care about speed or not? The story changes every few years!
With 64bit dual-Ghz high-speed-bus Macs, you will see an even larger migration of those Unix geeks to the Mac. Something I look forward to.
This does of course lead to the question of why you look forward to it. You look forward to it, because you have made a large (almost certainly personal) investment in the platform. Platforms suffer network effects - the more people who invest in the platform with you, the more valuable your investment becomes. The more people who use the Mac, the better your user experience becomes. It's simple market economics.
Clearly, this is the type of thinking that keeps Microsoft in the top spot, keeps IE dominating the web in the face of superior free alternatives etc. You want people to use Macs, despite the fact that this ultimately profits only Apple, because the nature of proprietary systems makes it a winner/loser scenario.