PowerPC CPUs are generally 25-30% faster than Intel x86 CPU of the same clockrate. However when you compare a G5 2.7GHz against a P4 3.6GHz the PowerPC advantage evaporates.
Being able to run the current retail Windows XP on a Mac is a fluke, or more accurately a side effect of the temporary development systems using off-the-shelf PC hardware. Apple has a history of using one type of hardware during development of an OS and then requiring different hardware in the retail product. When the retail Apple hardware arrives I expect that it will be proprietary hardware that is not PC-compatible and a new version of Windows XP will be needed. I also expect that Mac OS X will be designed to only run on this proprietary hardware and will never be offered for generic PC compatible hardware. Mac hardware clones nearly killed Apple when they had some control over the cloners, letting Mac OS X run on generic hardware would be suicidal. Apple is largely a hardware company, their software exists to sell the hardware.
What part of TR left the republican party because he didn't agree with them and then ran for president again don't you understand?
None of it, because that was not what happened. TR ran for the Republican nomination, lost it, and created a third party because the thought that he was "robbed" by the party bosses who gave the nomination to Taft. It had nothing to do with issues.
That AC is a hell of a lot more insightful than your lying ass.
Only to those more ignorant than him.
TR wasn't a Republican in the sense your lying partisan ass is AT ANY POINT IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE EVEN WHEN HE WAS A MEMBER OF THAT PARTY. TR was a decent human being, you are just dumb.
Well I am not a Republican but TR was an awesome one. Folks refer to Reagan and Bush Jr as cowboys but TR was the real thing, Reagan and Bush were posers in comparison. TR loved target shooting, he loved hunting, matter of fact the national parks were created in part to ensure some place to hunt would persist. He believed in exploiting the land for commercial gain, the panama canal. He believed in violating sovereign nations and gratuitous nation building to promote US business interests, again the canal. He practiced gunboat diplomacy. He was a realist, he knew if we didn't do it someone else would.
Personally, I don't think there is anything wrong with choosing to follow only those teachings you agree with. From any source...
That's fine when dealing with secular philosophers or scholars. However when you start citing religious figures you are drawing on divine authority to support your position, you don't get to cherry pick and say your divine authority is correct on this and incorrect on that. By doing so you would effectively admit that your authority is non-existent. The vast majority of liberals and conservatives quoting JC are hypocrites and would be better off making different arguments.
What part of TR was a Republican when he created national parks don't you understand? What he did afterwards isn't relavant. He was at the time and that was my point.
Also, I'm neither a Republican nor a partisan. I merely stated in my original post that 'Liberal' has been redefined to mean socialist/communist/hippy. 'Conservative' has been redefined to mean religious fundamentalist. In other words the vocal fringe minorities of both political extremes are portrayed as the typical liberals and conservatives. Neither is accurate. For a demonstration of how this happens watch the ignorant followups roll in complaining that I am right about "liberal" being erroneously applied but I am wrong about "conservative". Many people can not help but demonize their "enemy". I thank you ACs for helping to prove this point.
Anyway... Wrong is wrong. Your moral relativism is frankly disgusting.
What I offered is not moral relavitism, it is the simple truth that the truth is harder to find than you seem to suggest. You merely seem to believe the scientists that are more in tune with your politics or philosophy. I observe that both sides have scientists saying different things and that both sets of scientists are coloring their reports, intentionally or unintentionally, to some degree. In general when you honestly listen to both camps you are probably closer to the truth than when you listen to only one camp.
Well briteboy, everyone with a real education knows that Nader pushed for the EPA and that Nixon signed it because the society around him (liberal society) forced him to.
Wrong, Nixon was a moderate in many areas. Ever watch the Kennedy/Nixon debates, you might find that instructive if you can get over the preconceptions and biases you seem to have.
Also, Teddy Roosevelt also ran for president under his own Bull Moose AKA Progressive party, AFTER he was elected as a Republican. That is to say he BROKE with the Republicans. Republicans didn't do shit...
You contradict yourself, or maybe failed to grasp the concept that *when* he created national parks he was a Republican president.
... and you yankee imperialist bastards need to kindly shut the fuck up and leave those of us in the civilised world alone.
Thank you for demonstating that you are not merely misinformed but really a close minded fool.
You ought to go look up a few facts before you go spouting partisan nonsense.
Sorry but the facts are Republican Teddy Roosevelt created the National Park system and Republican Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency.
I think it's interesting that you lament about labels, but then label anybody who makes a point as being partisan instead of educated on the subject.
I labeled one person, the author of the GP whose post went far beyond partisan and borders on lunacy. Do you really think Republicans want to poison their children? Get real, there is partisanship and there is delusional.
Frankly, IMHO, when you've got lobbyists working for the Whitehouse actively rewriting scientific reports to downplay evidence... we're no longer talking about balance.
Actually we are. One administration overstates, another understates, one is pessimistic, another optimistic, one brings in lobbyists from one camp, another lobbyists from the other camp, one scientific report is biased in one direction due to politics or philosophy, another is biased in the other direction,... You did not make the naive assemption that all scientific reports are free of politics and agendas did you? I know people at the EPA, things are far more complicated than you suggest.
"For a demonstration of how this happens watch the ignorant followups roll in complaining that I am right about "liberal" being erroneously applied but I am wrong about "conservative". Many people can not help but demonize their "enemy"."
Go back and look at the former Soviet Union... past or present, it doesn't matter too much.
Russia is extremely socially conservative. Try getting a gay marriage in Russia and you'll get less of a warm welcome than you'd see in Texas.
Russia hates the environment. I mean literally, they think Finlanders are idiots for replanting forests after harvesting the trees. "HA! you fools! Don't you know trees grow on trees!" There's no environmental protection, because it's a fundamental waste of money, in their view.
And when the country was Communist, hell they didn't even need to put protection on Nuclear reactor plants cause really whose going to complain if it blows up and kills everybody? What!? you're going to complain? Off to the gulag! No Tort for you!
I could just keep going... The similarities between the Republicans and the Russian Communists are incredibly striking. Yeah, sure Republicans aren't quite as bad, but who ever uses that as a campaign slogan? "Vote for me! I'm not as bad as Stalin!"
So why is it then that say advocating for universal healthcare makes you a commie, but suggesting we not re-plant trees after harvesting a forest makes you a capitalist?
Just interesting...
Thank you for proving my point that fools often define a label, "Republican" in your case, using only the most extreme and distorted, and in your case erroneous as well, examples. In reality Republicans created the National Park system, Republicans created the Evironmental Protection Agency, Republicans breathe the same air, drink the same water, as liberals. The arguments are over where to strike a balance, not whether air, water, etc. need protection. You confuse political posturing with reality, for example the arsenic levels that were just fine for the 8 years of the Clinton/Gore administration but horrendous once someone else entered office. Yes, that is a simplified version of events but it is fundamentally accurate.
'Liberal' has been redefined to mean socialist/communist/hippy. 'Conservative' has been redefined to mean religious fundamentalist. In other words the vocal fringe minorities of both political extremes are portrayed as the typical liberals and conservatives. Neither is accurate.
For a demonstration of how this happens watch the ignorant followups roll in complaining that I am right about "liberal" being erroneously applied but I am wrong about "conservative". Many people can not help but demonize their "enemy".
And for the record, JC will probably be smacking a lot of people on both sides of the political fence upside the head. A lot of liberals and conservatives, and I user those labels in the true sense, are cherry picking his teachings. Following some, ignoring other, trying to blend his teachings with their personal politics or philosophies.
Yes, and when I'm in my consumer/product development hat I run screaming from any architecture that is "interesting" for reasearch.
Agreed, but the GP said "Well, after you take the Compilers course..." not "Well, after you get that promotion and lead a product development team...". We have different casts of characters here.
If it was anything like my EE class (1998 era) they were also handing out Itanium architecture manuals, Itanium platform reference guides, a book about Processor Architecture written by a guy from Intel, taught by a professor who drank out of an "intel" mug, and the cute female grad student had an "intel inside" t-shirt on with an arrow pointing down.
Yeah, I had that class.
If you substitute 1996 for 1998, Alpha for Itanium, DEC for Intel, and change the T-Shirt on the cute female grad student it sounds like my graduate architecture class. Are you suggesting there is something odd here? Well, other than the girls.
Well, after you take the "Compilers" course maybe your love for IA-64 will have, uh, dimished a bit.
Maybe the "C" student think so, those just taking the class because they are required to do so. The "A" students and those with an interest in compilers often think the opposite. Here is a challenge, here is an open area for research, parallelization is the future and here is a CPU that fits in with that concept.
For professional programmers, having the source to a library, for example, can be a lifesaver when undocumented things start to happen.
I feel so fortunate that whenever we were licensing commercial 3rd party libraries I was always able to convince management to purchase the more expensive source license rather than the less expensive binary-only license.
Hey, 1990 called. They want their open-source-failure theory back!
The "hippies" writing OSS were not as charitable as you suggest. Many were getting paid or compensated, just not by their software customers. A cushy academic job where you get to choose you own area of research and/or projects, a student working school project, etc.
I'm not saying people did not give away code they wrote on their own time, I did, so did others, it just wasn't called OSS in the 80s and early 90s. However a lot of open source software was and is subsidized one way or another.
Why would Apple want to waste any more time with PowerPC? I thought Intel had the most appealing "roadmap".
The high end desktops are not going Intel until 2007'ish. The more modest systems and the laptops are going first in 2006'ish. Until then Apple can save some money, well hypothetically, by shipping one dual core CPU as opposed to the current dual CPUs.
I agree with the need for a test regardless of paper qualifications or experience on the resume but developing a good test is far harder than most people think. I find your question a rather poor one unless you are looking to hire someone working on RAID software. And the the person who offered XOR as a solution, you failed. 0^0^0 = 2^2^0 = 0. Please tell me that XOR was not the answer the question author expected?
I've often passed pop quizzes by pointing out how poor they are. My favorite answer was to a question about the time complexity of several sorting algorithms. I replied that I own Knuth vol. 3 so I don't have to memorize that sort of thing. Be sure to bring this up to the "boss" when he asks you about the quiz, the "engineer" graded me down, the "boss" asked for more info. I told him what vol 3 was about, and then pointed out that the stated time complexities make assumptions about the data that may not match the real world. I was hired and got to write the new test.
Well, I've been programming the Mac as long as you, and in one of my particular niches your "assembly language is rarely used, byte swapping is only a minor annoyance" statement is incorrect. That niche is, surprise, porting Windows games. Specifically, the Paradox games, Celtic Kings, etc. for Virtual Programming, vpltd.com.
Sorry, but "been there, done that", and I disagree. I also have experience with cross-platform game development and this includes porting PC titles that were never written with portability in mind. I have replaced many thousands of lines of x86 assembly with C code. After profiling I've only needed to write less than 200 lines of PowerPC assembly. I actually enjoy assembly language but I have to admit that in the last 5 or so years the need for it has greatly declined. The performance bottleneck is not instruction scheduling, it is the pattern of access of main memory. This is true for PC and Mac.
Byte swapping may be a common cause of bugs but these problems are easily found and fixed. Therefore only an annoyance. Even in naively written PC code where they just fwrite structures to disk or send them in network packets it is easy to search for key function calls and add byte swapping. At times this is somewhat painful to do but the pain is due to the mechanical nature of the fix, boring simplicity. Again, a mere annoyance.
Real problems in porting are Win32 calls everywhere, DirectPlay, etc. If assembly language and byte swapping were the big problems in a project then that would be a dream project.
Yes, but the person in the article was fired for talking about something non-work-related because they didn't like his opinion.
You read the article? "Mr Hanff has declared that he is opposed to copyright and intellectual property laws. Since much of our business is based around the protection of our copyright and intellectual property, we consider our dismissal of Mr Hanff entirely justified and appropriate."
I started reading Inside Macintosh in '83 and programming the Mac in '84 as well. I have also worked extensively on the dark side. Two things about this shift to x86:
It changes almost nothing for developers or users. The reasons to target or use Macs were the same before the x86 announcement and after. For users: They rarely even know what kind of CPU is in the box let alone care. For developers: assembly language is rarely used, byte swapping is only a minor annoyance, the real problem is technological like portions of the DirectX API and that is unchanged.
The switch to x86 was not part of some brilliant plan. It was a business contingency forced upon Apple. It was wise for Apple to build Mac OS X for x86 all these years but it was a quite natural thing to do given that NextStep was portable and already ran on x86. Running code on multiple platforms is a great way to shake out bugs and to ensure that your code is portable. It was also a prudent "plan B" sort of thing, it would be rediculously unwise to set yourself up for a "sole source" problem. Motorola and IBM do not have the desktop as their primary focus, Apple was screwed. They were not getting the type of CPUs that they needed, especially on the critial laptop side, and they were forced to execute their Intel contingency plan. Intel is focused on the desktop, they are a better partner for Apple. That said the switch will hurt Apple in the short term, it hurts sales, distracts internal developers, makes external developers revisit the notion of whether they want to continue to support Mac or not and thereby requires Apple to re-evangilze again, it destroys a major component of their existing marketing campaigns, etc. I agree the switch is a good business descision, but it was not a long term goal, it was forced upon Apple.
Games? A year from now, we'll be seeing Windows games getting ported to the Mac.
Actually there is less incentive for porting games to x86 Macs than PowerPC Macs. Basically x86 Mac shares the same problem as Linux, emulation is viable. With PowerPC emulation was not a viable alternative, you had to emulate the API and the CPU. Emulating the CPU is a monstrous performance killer. With an x86 Mac CPU emulation is not necessary, VirtualPC and presumably Wine may run a Windows game at near native speed.
If gamers can emulate the Win32 version of a game then doing a port to Linux or x86 Mac is much harder to justify financially. You can not just look at the number of potential sales because the Linux/Mac version is canabalizing Win32 sales. If a Linux/Mac sale replaces a Win32 sale then you actually lost money. The potential market is the segmnent that refuses to emulate, and in the Linux case those who refuse to dual boot as well.
Economic comparison is not about "wants." It is about power...
Economics is based upon "wants". Power is based upon "force".
... I think you are confusing contentedness with financial success.
Not at all. I am saying that wanting a yacht and wanting to travel the world in style are arbitrary non-universal wants. To define a person's financial well being in terms of those is naive and simplistic. This tangent about luxuries is a red herring.
No, not at all. If there were "far fewer" high end UNIX positions, as you claim, I should be having trouble finding work, and my income should be going down. What I see is completely different.
No, you would only have trouble finding work if you are part of the mediocre crowd, are you mediocre? Also there is plain luck, good contacts, etc.
I did "misspeak". I don't know why I wrote Unix jobs are fewer, well I do - I was tired and just got home at 2am and left out the word "relative", my point has nothing to do with absolute jobs but increased competition for the jobs. The absolute number of jobs has probably increased since FreeBSD and Linux came onto the scene and "saved" Unix but the number of people with sufficient Unix knowledge has grown faster. The supply of Unix expertise has driven down its cost. Now for niche jobs where they still use traditional Unix hardware and vendors (Sun, Sgi, etc) or operate larger sites it may be that not much has changed, but in the lower end of the Unix market companies are no longer forced into buying the upscale hardware and people, or forced into using Windows.
To say two salaries are equal once you factor in the cost of living assumes both people spend 100% of their salaries in the local economy. Only an idiot would do that.
Every year billions of people pretty much only spend their income in their local economy. While most are poor some are very comfortable. Again, the world travel and yacht arguments are red herring.
Unless you are comparing 2 idiots, more money really is more money.
And the money vs money comparison is naive and simplistic, the real economic comparison is "wants" satisfied.
On the contrary, your example is consistent with my point. As a matter of fact you seem to be unknowingly agreeing with me. No one is arguing that there are no high end Unix positions, merely that there are far fewer. Perhaps you are merely qualified enough that you can effectively compete for the scarcer opportunities. What has changed is that when talent was scarce those with mediocre skills could still find high paying jobs. Now that talent is not scarce they have to settle for lesser paying jobs. Being part of the "high priest" class no longer means job security. Most of what the Unix admin did when I was in school, late 80s early 90s, is now part of the skillset of some of the incoming freshman.
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PowerPC CPUs are generally 25-30% faster than Intel x86 CPU of the same clockrate. However when you compare a G5 2.7GHz against a P4 3.6GHz the PowerPC advantage evaporates.
Being able to run the current retail Windows XP on a Mac is a fluke, or more accurately a side effect of the temporary development systems using off-the-shelf PC hardware. Apple has a history of using one type of hardware during development of an OS and then requiring different hardware in the retail product. When the retail Apple hardware arrives I expect that it will be proprietary hardware that is not PC-compatible and a new version of Windows XP will be needed. I also expect that Mac OS X will be designed to only run on this proprietary hardware and will never be offered for generic PC compatible hardware. Mac hardware clones nearly killed Apple when they had some control over the cloners, letting Mac OS X run on generic hardware would be suicidal. Apple is largely a hardware company, their software exists to sell the hardware.
What part of TR left the republican party because he didn't agree with them and then ran for president again don't you understand?
None of it, because that was not what happened. TR ran for the Republican nomination, lost it, and created a third party because the thought that he was "robbed" by the party bosses who gave the nomination to Taft. It had nothing to do with issues.
That AC is a hell of a lot more insightful than your lying ass.
Only to those more ignorant than him.
TR wasn't a Republican in the sense your lying partisan ass is AT ANY POINT IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE EVEN WHEN HE WAS A MEMBER OF THAT PARTY. TR was a decent human being, you are just dumb.
Well I am not a Republican but TR was an awesome one. Folks refer to Reagan and Bush Jr as cowboys but TR was the real thing, Reagan and Bush were posers in comparison. TR loved target shooting, he loved hunting, matter of fact the national parks were created in part to ensure some place to hunt would persist. He believed in exploiting the land for commercial gain, the panama canal. He believed in violating sovereign nations and gratuitous nation building to promote US business interests, again the canal. He practiced gunboat diplomacy. He was a realist, he knew if we didn't do it someone else would.
Personally, I don't think there is anything wrong with choosing to follow only those teachings you agree with. From any source ...
That's fine when dealing with secular philosophers or scholars. However when you start citing religious figures you are drawing on divine authority to support your position, you don't get to cherry pick and say your divine authority is correct on this and incorrect on that. By doing so you would effectively admit that your authority is non-existent. The vast majority of liberals and conservatives quoting JC are hypocrites and would be better off making different arguments.
What part of TR was a Republican when he created national parks don't you understand? What he did afterwards isn't relavant. He was at the time and that was my point.
Also, I'm neither a Republican nor a partisan. I merely stated in my original post that 'Liberal' has been redefined to mean socialist/communist/hippy. 'Conservative' has been redefined to mean religious fundamentalist. In other words the vocal fringe minorities of both political extremes are portrayed as the typical liberals and conservatives. Neither is accurate. For a demonstration of how this happens watch the ignorant followups roll in complaining that I am right about "liberal" being erroneously applied but I am wrong about "conservative". Many people can not help but demonize their "enemy". I thank you ACs for helping to prove this point.
Anyway... Wrong is wrong. Your moral relativism is frankly disgusting.
What I offered is not moral relavitism, it is the simple truth that the truth is harder to find than you seem to suggest. You merely seem to believe the scientists that are more in tune with your politics or philosophy. I observe that both sides have scientists saying different things and that both sets of scientists are coloring their reports, intentionally or unintentionally, to some degree. In general when you honestly listen to both camps you are probably closer to the truth than when you listen to only one camp.
Well briteboy, everyone with a real education knows that Nader pushed for the EPA and that Nixon signed it because the society around him (liberal society) forced him to.
...
... and you yankee imperialist bastards need to kindly shut the fuck up and leave those of us in the civilised world alone.
Wrong, Nixon was a moderate in many areas. Ever watch the Kennedy/Nixon debates, you might find that instructive if you can get over the preconceptions and biases you seem to have.
Also, Teddy Roosevelt also ran for president under his own Bull Moose AKA Progressive party, AFTER he was elected as a Republican. That is to say he BROKE with the Republicans. Republicans didn't do shit
You contradict yourself, or maybe failed to grasp the concept that *when* he created national parks he was a Republican president.
Thank you for demonstating that you are not merely misinformed but really a close minded fool.
You ought to go look up a few facts before you go spouting partisan nonsense.
... You did not make the naive assemption that all scientific reports are free of politics and agendas did you? I know people at the EPA, things are far more complicated than you suggest.
Sorry but the facts are Republican Teddy Roosevelt created the National Park system and Republican Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency.
I think it's interesting that you lament about labels, but then label anybody who makes a point as being partisan instead of educated on the subject.
I labeled one person, the author of the GP whose post went far beyond partisan and borders on lunacy. Do you really think Republicans want to poison their children? Get real, there is partisanship and there is delusional.
Frankly, IMHO, when you've got lobbyists working for the Whitehouse actively rewriting scientific reports to downplay evidence... we're no longer talking about balance.
Actually we are. One administration overstates, another understates, one is pessimistic, another optimistic, one brings in lobbyists from one camp, another lobbyists from the other camp, one scientific report is biased in one direction due to politics or philosophy, another is biased in the other direction,
"For a demonstration of how this happens watch the ignorant followups roll in complaining that I am right about "liberal" being erroneously applied but I am wrong about "conservative". Many people can not help but demonize their "enemy"."
Go back and look at the former Soviet Union... past or present, it doesn't matter too much. Russia is extremely socially conservative. Try getting a gay marriage in Russia and you'll get less of a warm welcome than you'd see in Texas. Russia hates the environment. I mean literally, they think Finlanders are idiots for replanting forests after harvesting the trees. "HA! you fools! Don't you know trees grow on trees!" There's no environmental protection, because it's a fundamental waste of money, in their view. And when the country was Communist, hell they didn't even need to put protection on Nuclear reactor plants cause really whose going to complain if it blows up and kills everybody? What!? you're going to complain? Off to the gulag! No Tort for you! I could just keep going... The similarities between the Republicans and the Russian Communists are incredibly striking. Yeah, sure Republicans aren't quite as bad, but who ever uses that as a campaign slogan? "Vote for me! I'm not as bad as Stalin!" So why is it then that say advocating for universal healthcare makes you a commie, but suggesting we not re-plant trees after harvesting a forest makes you a capitalist? Just interesting...
Thank you for proving my point that fools often define a label, "Republican" in your case, using only the most extreme and distorted, and in your case erroneous as well, examples. In reality Republicans created the National Park system, Republicans created the Evironmental Protection Agency, Republicans breathe the same air, drink the same water, as liberals. The arguments are over where to strike a balance, not whether air, water, etc. need protection. You confuse political posturing with reality, for example the arsenic levels that were just fine for the 8 years of the Clinton/Gore administration but horrendous once someone else entered office. Yes, that is a simplified version of events but it is fundamentally accurate.
'Liberal' has been redefined to mean socialist/communist/hippy. 'Conservative' has been redefined to mean religious fundamentalist. In other words the vocal fringe minorities of both political extremes are portrayed as the typical liberals and conservatives. Neither is accurate.
For a demonstration of how this happens watch the ignorant followups roll in complaining that I am right about "liberal" being erroneously applied but I am wrong about "conservative". Many people can not help but demonize their "enemy".
And for the record, JC will probably be smacking a lot of people on both sides of the political fence upside the head. A lot of liberals and conservatives, and I user those labels in the true sense, are cherry picking his teachings. Following some, ignoring other, trying to blend his teachings with their personal politics or philosophies.
Yes, and when I'm in my consumer/product development hat I run screaming from any architecture that is "interesting" for reasearch.
..." not "Well, after you get that promotion and lead a product development team ...". We have different casts of characters here.
Agreed, but the GP said "Well, after you take the Compilers course
If it was anything like my EE class (1998 era) they were also handing out Itanium architecture manuals, Itanium platform reference guides, a book about Processor Architecture written by a guy from Intel, taught by a professor who drank out of an "intel" mug, and the cute female grad student had an "intel inside" t-shirt on with an arrow pointing down. Yeah, I had that class.
If you substitute 1996 for 1998, Alpha for Itanium, DEC for Intel, and change the T-Shirt on the cute female grad student it sounds like my graduate architecture class. Are you suggesting there is something odd here? Well, other than the girls.
Well, after you take the "Compilers" course maybe your love for IA-64 will have, uh, dimished a bit.
Maybe the "C" student think so, those just taking the class because they are required to do so. The "A" students and those with an interest in compilers often think the opposite. Here is a challenge, here is an open area for research, parallelization is the future and here is a CPU that fits in with that concept.
For professional programmers, having the source to a library, for example, can be a lifesaver when undocumented things start to happen.
I feel so fortunate that whenever we were licensing commercial 3rd party libraries I was always able to convince management to purchase the more expensive source license rather than the less expensive binary-only license.
Hey, 1990 called. They want their open-source-failure theory back!
The "hippies" writing OSS were not as charitable as you suggest. Many were getting paid or compensated, just not by their software customers. A cushy academic job where you get to choose you own area of research and/or projects, a student working school project, etc.
I'm not saying people did not give away code they wrote on their own time, I did, so did others, it just wasn't called OSS in the 80s and early 90s. However a lot of open source software was and is subsidized one way or another.
Why would Apple want to waste any more time with PowerPC? I thought Intel had the most appealing "roadmap".
The high end desktops are not going Intel until 2007'ish. The more modest systems and the laptops are going first in 2006'ish. Until then Apple can save some money, well hypothetically, by shipping one dual core CPU as opposed to the current dual CPUs.
I agree with the need for a test regardless of paper qualifications or experience on the resume but developing a good test is far harder than most people think. I find your question a rather poor one unless you are looking to hire someone working on RAID software. And the the person who offered XOR as a solution, you failed. 0^0^0 = 2^2^0 = 0. Please tell me that XOR was not the answer the question author expected?
I've often passed pop quizzes by pointing out how poor they are. My favorite answer was to a question about the time complexity of several sorting algorithms. I replied that I own Knuth vol. 3 so I don't have to memorize that sort of thing. Be sure to bring this up to the "boss" when he asks you about the quiz, the "engineer" graded me down, the "boss" asked for more info. I told him what vol 3 was about, and then pointed out that the stated time complexities make assumptions about the data that may not match the real world. I was hired and got to write the new test.
Well, I've been programming the Mac as long as you, and in one of my particular niches your "assembly language is rarely used, byte swapping is only a minor annoyance" statement is incorrect. That niche is, surprise, porting Windows games. Specifically, the Paradox games, Celtic Kings, etc. for Virtual Programming, vpltd.com.
Sorry, but "been there, done that", and I disagree. I also have experience with cross-platform game development and this includes porting PC titles that were never written with portability in mind. I have replaced many thousands of lines of x86 assembly with C code. After profiling I've only needed to write less than 200 lines of PowerPC assembly. I actually enjoy assembly language but I have to admit that in the last 5 or so years the need for it has greatly declined. The performance bottleneck is not instruction scheduling, it is the pattern of access of main memory. This is true for PC and Mac.
Byte swapping may be a common cause of bugs but these problems are easily found and fixed. Therefore only an annoyance. Even in naively written PC code where they just fwrite structures to disk or send them in network packets it is easy to search for key function calls and add byte swapping. At times this is somewhat painful to do but the pain is due to the mechanical nature of the fix, boring simplicity. Again, a mere annoyance.
Real problems in porting are Win32 calls everywhere, DirectPlay, etc. If assembly language and byte swapping were the big problems in a project then that would be a dream project.
Yes, but the person in the article was fired for talking about something non-work-related because they didn't like his opinion.
You read the article? "Mr Hanff has declared that he is opposed to copyright and intellectual property laws. Since much of our business is based around the protection of our copyright and intellectual property, we consider our dismissal of Mr Hanff entirely justified and appropriate."
I started reading Inside Macintosh in '83 and programming the Mac in '84 as well. I have also worked extensively on the dark side. Two things about this shift to x86:
It changes almost nothing for developers or users. The reasons to target or use Macs were the same before the x86 announcement and after. For users: They rarely even know what kind of CPU is in the box let alone care. For developers: assembly language is rarely used, byte swapping is only a minor annoyance, the real problem is technological like portions of the DirectX API and that is unchanged.
The switch to x86 was not part of some brilliant plan. It was a business contingency forced upon Apple. It was wise for Apple to build Mac OS X for x86 all these years but it was a quite natural thing to do given that NextStep was portable and already ran on x86. Running code on multiple platforms is a great way to shake out bugs and to ensure that your code is portable. It was also a prudent "plan B" sort of thing, it would be rediculously unwise to set yourself up for a "sole source" problem. Motorola and IBM do not have the desktop as their primary focus, Apple was screwed. They were not getting the type of CPUs that they needed, especially on the critial laptop side, and they were forced to execute their Intel contingency plan. Intel is focused on the desktop, they are a better partner for Apple. That said the switch will hurt Apple in the short term, it hurts sales, distracts internal developers, makes external developers revisit the notion of whether they want to continue to support Mac or not and thereby requires Apple to re-evangilze again, it destroys a major component of their existing marketing campaigns, etc. I agree the switch is a good business descision, but it was not a long term goal, it was forced upon Apple.
Games? A year from now, we'll be seeing Windows games getting ported to the Mac.
Actually there is less incentive for porting games to x86 Macs than PowerPC Macs. Basically x86 Mac shares the same problem as Linux, emulation is viable. With PowerPC emulation was not a viable alternative, you had to emulate the API and the CPU. Emulating the CPU is a monstrous performance killer. With an x86 Mac CPU emulation is not necessary, VirtualPC and presumably Wine may run a Windows game at near native speed.
If gamers can emulate the Win32 version of a game then doing a port to Linux or x86 Mac is much harder to justify financially. You can not just look at the number of potential sales because the Linux/Mac version is canabalizing Win32 sales. If a Linux/Mac sale replaces a Win32 sale then you actually lost money. The potential market is the segmnent that refuses to emulate, and in the Linux case those who refuse to dual boot as well.
Economic comparison is not about "wants." It is about power ...
... I think you are confusing contentedness with financial success.
Economics is based upon "wants". Power is based upon "force".
Not at all. I am saying that wanting a yacht and wanting to travel the world in style are arbitrary non-universal wants. To define a person's financial well being in terms of those is naive and simplistic. This tangent about luxuries is a red herring.
No, not at all. If there were "far fewer" high end UNIX positions, as you claim, I should be having trouble finding work, and my income should be going down. What I see is completely different.
No, you would only have trouble finding work if you are part of the mediocre crowd, are you mediocre? Also there is plain luck, good contacts, etc.
I did "misspeak". I don't know why I wrote Unix jobs are fewer, well I do - I was tired and just got home at 2am and left out the word "relative", my point has nothing to do with absolute jobs but increased competition for the jobs. The absolute number of jobs has probably increased since FreeBSD and Linux came onto the scene and "saved" Unix but the number of people with sufficient Unix knowledge has grown faster. The supply of Unix expertise has driven down its cost. Now for niche jobs where they still use traditional Unix hardware and vendors (Sun, Sgi, etc) or operate larger sites it may be that not much has changed, but in the lower end of the Unix market companies are no longer forced into buying the upscale hardware and people, or forced into using Windows.
To say two salaries are equal once you factor in the cost of living assumes both people spend 100% of their salaries in the local economy. Only an idiot would do that.
Every year billions of people pretty much only spend their income in their local economy. While most are poor some are very comfortable. Again, the world travel and yacht arguments are red herring.
Unless you are comparing 2 idiots, more money really is more money.
And the money vs money comparison is naive and simplistic, the real economic comparison is "wants" satisfied.
On the contrary, your example is consistent with my point. As a matter of fact you seem to be unknowingly agreeing with me. No one is arguing that there are no high end Unix positions, merely that there are far fewer. Perhaps you are merely qualified enough that you can effectively compete for the scarcer opportunities. What has changed is that when talent was scarce those with mediocre skills could still find high paying jobs. Now that talent is not scarce they have to settle for lesser paying jobs. Being part of the "high priest" class no longer means job security. Most of what the Unix admin did when I was in school, late 80s early 90s, is now part of the skillset of some of the incoming freshman.