Actually, the article does give a source, but you have to dig really deep into it. It's in the second set of sections that appears accessible only by going to the very last article in the first set and clicking "next". In the section "living in a windows world", it cites IDC for its 94% (yes, 94% in this part of the article) figure.
Given how long the TFA is, I wouldn't say "RTFM" is a viable suggestion, however.
Actually, there may be something to what you wrote. I was reading in the paper (LA times... print edition, so I don't have a link) the other day that a lot of everyday Koreans are getting wary of Samsung because they have obscene amount of power there.
The typical Korean household wakes up in Samsung furniture, cook breakfast on Samsung appliances, drive to work in Samsung cars (insured by Samsung insurance) to office buildings owned by Samsung, and use Samsung equipment to get work done. They may take vacations at a Samsung theme park and stay at a Samsung Hotel...etc. etc. etc.
I can see how politicians can be afraid of this situation as well.
Back in college, I bought a used 150MB external SCSI hard disk from a computer geek friend of mine. As some may know, Macs can be easily set from any SCSI disk device (well, back when they were all SCSI, anyways). I put an OS and all of my software on this drive.
With this set up, any Mac in the computer lab will become "mine" simply by booting from my drive. Unlike Windows, most of the programs on the regular internal hard drives will run without issue when booted from my drive, so I still had access to word processors, stats software, etc. This was particularly useful since at the time, the standard quota on the file servers for individual students was only 10 MB. It filled up quickly once I discovered the 'net and started downloading every piece of shareware game I can find.
Unfortunately, the drive was a Full height, 5 1/4" monstorisity, so carrying the thing was a bit of a pain. The chassis fan was quite loud, too.
It seems x86 machines with BIOSes that can boot from external devices have finally become common enough to make this viable. (Not saying they didn't exist before, but it takes a while for the older systems to get flushed out of the general population so that you can assume that a machine you run across is capable of it.)
No, no VMWare. Plain Jane Adaptec on a plain Jane BH-6.
As pointed out by another poster, it seems my error was specifying/dev/sda1 rather than/dev/sda when I tried to override the "1st hard drive" default for the boot loader config.
Or rather, I know it works from SCSI, but this is the issue I had when I tried to install to my SCSI drive from my SCSI CD-ROM.
Tell the BIOS to boot from SCSI, tell the SCSI card to use the CD-ROM to boot. Put my CD of Hoary in, and it happily starts the detection process and all that. However, fairly early on, it tells me that it can't detect the install CD please insert it. YOU JUST BOOTED FROM THE DARN THING! WHADDA YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T FIND THE CD!?! I sit there re-inserting the CD for a couple of tries, and finally give up. I figured it is looking for the IDE drive, so I pop the CD in my IDE drive and it finally continues installing.
At the end of the install, it askes me whether I want to put a boot loader on my "1st hard drive." I'm not sure exactly what it means (I don't remember whether it listed which device it's refering to). Since I didn't want it to touch my Windows drive on IDE, I tell it to boot from/dev/sda1. My plan was to have the boot switching done via the BIOS rather than the boot loader on the IDE drive. This has the nice effect of leaving my Windows drive untouched, as well as the boot loader not freaking out if I ever move my SCSI drive to another computer. (is it easy to remove the boot loader these days?) Furthermore, the SCSI drive with the Linux install can theoretically be moved to another machine and boot itself (rather than depending on the settings on the IDE drive.) Perhaps all of this is supposed to be easy, but I am a newbie, so I didn't want to have to deal with changing boot loader settings or having to remove them later.
In any case, I rebooted after the install, and it couldn't find my kernel... it said something about file not found, and I had no idea how to fix it (as far as I could tell, it was supposed to be looking in/dev/sda1, and that's what I told it to do), so I had to reinstall.
This time, I thought I'd be clever so I booted from the IDE drive... but the CD gives me a checksum error. I pop the same CD back in the SCSI drive and it boots happily (and still asks me to put in the CD at the same place in the install.)
To make the installer do what I want it to do, I had to disconnect the IDE Windows drive. Now I have it happily set up so that I switch boot drives in the BIOS, and my Windows drive remains intact.
Actually, the best example I can think of is UT2k4 where "switch back to previous weapon after firing the translocator" is a "right-hold-left-click". It's an important function in that game. If Apple maintained finer granularity access to the finger-sensor state in the mouse, they can still implement this, though one would lose the tactile click while the button is being held down.
Though I wouldn't begrudge your fondness for the original AD&D, the one aspect of it I'm glad to see "corrected" in later editions is the unarmed combat system... As written in first edition, it was basically unusable unless you wanted to mire yourself in hours of dice rolling. The complexity didn't really add anything to the game.
Along with all those cloners you mentioned, there was a smaller player actually named Mactel. I believe they were a division of APS or something. With the rumors of Apple trademarking the name, I wonder how that works out, since it was already used for a line of Mac (PowerPC) clones.
I'm surprised no one's brought it up as people throw around all these names for the Intel Macs.
Well, the precise arguments there are moot, but I would still contend that the PowerPC is technologically and aesthetically superior to x86. But, economics trumps both those by a huge margin every time.
Intel/AMD are in the position to throw 10x the resources at an architecture thats 5x as crappy as the PPC and still come out 2x ahead (the numbers are arbitrary... but you get the idea.)
In an ideal world, those vast resources would be spent on improving something a little nicer than the x86, and the overal benefit to the general public would probably be greater. I can only imagine how much more performance we'd be seeing in CPUs if that were the case.
I still lament the fact that some of those vast resources are being diverted to working around a 30 year old design that had some nearly inexplicable quirks.
I also lament the overall loss of diversity in the CPU market. Just like in the loss of biodiversity, how many good ideas and concepts are being lost with the "death" of MIPS, Sparc, Alpha, PA, etc.... and now PPC. (yes, they're still around, but don't nearly have as much effort put into their development as x86.)
Understandably, it's a necessary business decision for Apple... but it sort of makes me feel "dirty" having to use an x86 in my next Mac. Oh, I'm sure I'll get over it. I still recall the shock I felt at the kludginess of it all when I read the 286/386/486 programmers manuals way back when.
I'm probably not the first one to think of this, but the said "libraries/engines" could very well be coreimage/corevideo/coreaudio. Part of the problem of using a specialized processor is that people have to code for it. If apple abstracts the hardware so that the developer doesn't have to care whether it's running on the CPU, GPU, or Cell would make the adoption so much faster. In fact, the Cell may be the REAL reason Apple started developing Core* tech.
>And it will be so bloody easy to give > everything a diamond coat, won't it? >How do you propose that, growing a > diamond around everything? gluing a layer >of diamond dust around things?
Yeah, exactly those two.
CVD (chemical vapor deposition) technique, I believe, is the current preferred method of giving diamond coating to just about anything. Also, diamond is hard, but brittle (given that any crystal will have some imperfections). So the diamond hanger will not bend, but it will likely shatter if you drop it.
Gluing diamond dust can also be done, as done with industrial grinding/cutting tools.
You seem to already know the answers, so I guess the question was rhetorical.
Ah... Now I think I see your point. Yeah, it'd be not nearly as useful to try to diamond coat soft, bendy things, but that's kinda obvious, isn't it?
Although it's cool to have cheap, plentiful diamond for all kinds of everyday purposes, I wonder what happens when _EVERYTHING_ has a diamond coating to prevent scratches and make them harder.
These new products will be able to scrach each other, and the world will soon fill up with excessive diamond dust that can scratch _everything else_ very easily. Food for thought.
From there, the next step up would be huge multiplayer space battles a la BF1942. Some folks in the capital ships, while others in the fighters... or even space marines boarding the enemy ships. Mmm.. yum.
Add the Natural Selection-esque commander aspect of it (so some people will get teh "Homeworld" view of the action) and it would be interesting.
This post reminds me of the time I got groans all the way around the table at lunch one day.
There's a fellow who always brings his lunch in pieces--some cold cuts, bread, lettuce, tomato, all separately wrapped, along with some mayo and mustard in little packets.
Noticing this, I proclaimed "ah, he's got a Dynamically Linked Sandwich".
One more thing to add to this.... put the internet explorer icon on the moz/FF app. This is what I did for mom. Although I haven't taken the IE icon off the desktop, I changed its name to "popup magnet" and put it in a less prominent lower left of the desktop.
Here's where I lament (and I seem to take almost every opportunity to do so) the fact that the industry went IDE rather than SCSI. As far as I know (and I may just be clueless), SCSI was designed with a little more foresight such that it didn't run into so many wierd size limitations as technology progressed, and the original poster (and the hordes of other consumers) who lamented the motherboard upgrades could have avoided such fates. And before you complain that SCSI was too expensive, it should be apparent that if it became the de-facto standard embedded in every motherboard, it wouldn't cost any more than what IDE does now, and would have much better functionality.
I guess the biggest peeve I have with those supermarket cards is that they call it a "discount", when it was patently obvious that the "discount" price is higher than what the prices used to be, and the "regular" price is artificially inflated to ridiculous levels.
When I first saw that at the Ralph's in So Cal, I immediately left the store and went to Albertson's (who didn't have a card program at the time)
What peeves me even more, though, is that on more than a couple occasions, I was behind someone in line who would cheerfully ask the cashier how much they "saved" with the card. I was appalled that someone actually believed the "discount" BS.
The conclusion is, that to make the gullible massess happier, all these grocery store chains should make the regular prices of all products $1 million.
Then they can say, "Mrs. Smith, you saved 48.4 million dollars today on your groceries."
I hate those stupid card things as much as (more than?) the next guy. Don't even get me started on how I feel about them. If you're interested, there's always this. The site has real information on what those stupid things really mean, and they have a database of stores that don't use it. (though it could really use some updating.)
In my area, the stores that don't insult me with this stupid scam have become extremely scarce, especially after Albertson's of So Cal finally gave in and started doing it. My choices are Trader Joe's (which only has food) or some of the uppity chains like Bristol Farms, though 30%-40% premium on groceries is hard to take, even for my principles.
Actually, I read some time ago that the AMD-K5 had a feature where you can do just that. In a certain mode, it will run binaries compiled for its RISC-like core directly without going through the x86->internal code translator.
"Nobody" used this feature, so it was dropped. I forgot where I read this, though. Probably the "great uP of the past and present" page. That's a good read for hardware geeks.
Slashdot Mirror
Given how long the TFA is, I wouldn't say "RTFM" is a viable suggestion, however.
The typical Korean household wakes up in Samsung furniture, cook breakfast on Samsung appliances, drive to work in Samsung cars (insured by Samsung insurance) to office buildings owned by Samsung, and use Samsung equipment to get work done. They may take vacations at a Samsung theme park and stay at a Samsung Hotel...etc. etc. etc.
I can see how politicians can be afraid of this situation as well.
With this set up, any Mac in the computer lab will become "mine" simply by booting from my drive. Unlike Windows, most of the programs on the regular internal hard drives will run without issue when booted from my drive, so I still had access to word processors, stats software, etc. This was particularly useful since at the time, the standard quota on the file servers for individual students was only 10 MB. It filled up quickly once I discovered the 'net and started downloading every piece of shareware game I can find.
Unfortunately, the drive was a Full height, 5 1/4" monstorisity, so carrying the thing was a bit of a pain. The chassis fan was quite loud, too.
It seems x86 machines with BIOSes that can boot from external devices have finally become common enough to make this viable. (Not saying they didn't exist before, but it takes a while for the older systems to get flushed out of the general population so that you can assume that a machine you run across is capable of it.)
No, no VMWare. Plain Jane Adaptec on a plain Jane BH-6.
/dev/sda1 rather than /dev/sda when I tried to override the "1st hard drive" default for the boot loader config.
As pointed out by another poster, it seems my error was specifying
Tell the BIOS to boot from SCSI, tell the SCSI card to use the CD-ROM to boot. Put my CD of Hoary in, and it happily starts the detection process and all that. However, fairly early on, it tells me that it can't detect the install CD please insert it. YOU JUST BOOTED FROM THE DARN THING! WHADDA YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T FIND THE CD!?! I sit there re-inserting the CD for a couple of tries, and finally give up. I figured it is looking for the IDE drive, so I pop the CD in my IDE drive and it finally continues installing.
At the end of the install, it askes me whether I want to put a boot loader on my "1st hard drive." I'm not sure exactly what it means (I don't remember whether it listed which device it's refering to). Since I didn't want it to touch my Windows drive on IDE, I tell it to boot from /dev/sda1. My plan was to have the boot switching done via the BIOS rather than the boot loader on the IDE drive. This has the nice effect of leaving my Windows drive untouched, as well as the boot loader not freaking out if I ever move my SCSI drive to another computer. (is it easy to remove the boot loader these days?) Furthermore, the SCSI drive with the Linux install can theoretically be moved to another machine and boot itself (rather than depending on the settings on the IDE drive.) Perhaps all of this is supposed to be easy, but I am a newbie, so I didn't want to have to deal with changing boot loader settings or having to remove them later.
In any case, I rebooted after the install, and it couldn't find my kernel... it said something about file not found, and I had no idea how to fix it (as far as I could tell, it was supposed to be looking in /dev/sda1, and that's what I told it to do), so I had to reinstall.
This time, I thought I'd be clever so I booted from the IDE drive... but the CD gives me a checksum error. I pop the same CD back in the SCSI drive and it boots happily (and still asks me to put in the CD at the same place in the install.)
To make the installer do what I want it to do, I had to disconnect the IDE Windows drive. Now I have it happily set up so that I switch boot drives in the BIOS, and my Windows drive remains intact.
I can't wait til they change their name to PTMC and need a "material defender" to clean up certain "messes" in their martian labs.
Actually, the best example I can think of is UT2k4 where "switch back to previous weapon after firing the translocator" is a "right-hold-left-click". It's an important function in that game. If Apple maintained finer granularity access to the finger-sensor state in the mouse, they can still implement this, though one would lose the tactile click while the button is being held down.
No no no.... with the awesome power of this battlestation,
All your bass are belong to the empire.
Though I wouldn't begrudge your fondness for the original AD&D, the one aspect of it I'm glad to see "corrected" in later editions is the unarmed combat system... As written in first edition, it was basically unusable unless you wanted to mire yourself in hours of dice rolling. The complexity didn't really add anything to the game.
...which was a Mac cloner back in the day of the clones. I think they also made processor upgrade cards for powermacs of that era, but I'm not sure.
Along with all those cloners you mentioned, there was a smaller player actually named Mactel. I believe they were a division of APS or something. With the rumors of Apple trademarking the name, I wonder how that works out, since it was already used for a line of Mac (PowerPC) clones.
I'm surprised no one's brought it up as people throw around all these names for the Intel Macs.
It's a keyboard, a weapon from a more civilized age. Not as random as a mouse, a true weapon of the Coder.
Or something like that. I'm not enough of a SW fan to remember the exact quote.
Intel/AMD are in the position to throw 10x the resources at an architecture thats 5x as crappy as the PPC and still come out 2x ahead (the numbers are arbitrary... but you get the idea.)
In an ideal world, those vast resources would be spent on improving something a little nicer than the x86, and the overal benefit to the general public would probably be greater. I can only imagine how much more performance we'd be seeing in CPUs if that were the case.
I still lament the fact that some of those vast resources are being diverted to working around a 30 year old design that had some nearly inexplicable quirks.
I also lament the overall loss of diversity in the CPU market. Just like in the loss of biodiversity, how many good ideas and concepts are being lost with the "death" of MIPS, Sparc, Alpha, PA, etc. ... and now PPC. (yes, they're still around, but don't nearly have as much effort put into their development as x86.)
Understandably, it's a necessary business decision for Apple... but it sort of makes me feel "dirty" having to use an x86 in my next Mac. Oh, I'm sure I'll get over it. I still recall the shock I felt at the kludginess of it all when I read the 286/386/486 programmers manuals way back when.
I'm probably not the first one to think of this, but the said "libraries/engines" could very well be coreimage/corevideo/coreaudio. Part of the problem of using a specialized processor is that people have to code for it. If apple abstracts the hardware so that the developer doesn't have to care whether it's running on the CPU, GPU, or Cell would make the adoption so much faster.
In fact, the Cell may be the REAL reason Apple started developing Core* tech.
>And it will be so bloody easy to give
> everything a diamond coat, won't it?
>How do you propose that, growing a
> diamond around everything? gluing a layer
>of diamond dust around things?
Yeah, exactly those two.
CVD (chemical vapor deposition) technique, I believe, is the current preferred method of giving diamond coating to just about anything. Also, diamond is hard, but brittle (given that any crystal will have some imperfections). So the diamond hanger will not bend, but it will likely shatter if you drop it.
Gluing diamond dust can also be done, as done with industrial grinding/cutting tools.
You seem to already know the answers, so I guess the question was rhetorical.
Ah... Now I think I see your point. Yeah, it'd be not nearly as useful to try to diamond coat soft, bendy things, but that's kinda obvious, isn't it?
Although it's cool to have cheap, plentiful diamond for all kinds of everyday purposes, I wonder what happens when _EVERYTHING_ has a diamond coating to prevent scratches and make them harder.
These new products will be able to scrach each other, and the world will soon fill up with excessive diamond dust that can scratch _everything else_ very easily. Food for thought.
From there, the next step up would be huge multiplayer space battles a la BF1942. Some folks in the capital ships, while others in the fighters... or even space marines boarding the enemy ships. Mmm.. yum.
Add the Natural Selection-esque commander aspect of it (so some people will get teh "Homeworld" view of the action) and it would be interesting.
Along the same lines, a choice quote from my little sister in her youth:
Is that an invisible man, or am I just seeing things?
I'm too lazy to look it up, but the word you're looking for, I think, was kinesthetic sense. (I hope I'm right).
There's a fellow who always brings his lunch in pieces--some cold cuts, bread, lettuce, tomato, all separately wrapped, along with some mayo and mustard in little packets.
Noticing this, I proclaimed "ah, he's got a Dynamically Linked Sandwich".
OT, I know. Mod me down...
One more thing to add to this.... put the internet explorer icon on the moz/FF app. This is what I did for mom. Although I haven't taken the IE icon off the desktop, I changed its name to "popup magnet" and put it in a less prominent lower left of the desktop.
Here's where I lament (and I seem to take almost every opportunity to do so) the fact that the industry went IDE rather than SCSI. As far as I know (and I may just be clueless), SCSI was designed with a little more foresight such that it didn't run into so many wierd size limitations as technology progressed, and the original poster (and the hordes of other consumers) who lamented the motherboard upgrades could have avoided such fates.
And before you complain that SCSI was too expensive, it should be apparent that if it became the de-facto standard embedded in every motherboard, it wouldn't cost any more than what IDE does now, and would have much better functionality.
When I first saw that at the Ralph's in So Cal, I immediately left the store and went to Albertson's (who didn't have a card program at the time)
What peeves me even more, though, is that on more than a couple occasions, I was behind someone in line who would cheerfully ask the cashier how much they "saved" with the card. I was appalled that someone actually believed the "discount" BS.
The conclusion is, that to make the gullible massess happier, all these grocery store chains should make the regular prices of all products $1 million.
Then they can say, "Mrs. Smith, you saved 48.4 million dollars today on your groceries."
If you're interested, there's always this. The site has real information on what those stupid things really mean, and they have a database of stores that don't use it. (though it could really use some updating.)
In my area, the stores that don't insult me with this stupid scam have become extremely scarce, especially after Albertson's of So Cal finally gave in and started doing it. My choices are Trader Joe's (which only has food) or some of the uppity chains like Bristol Farms, though 30%-40% premium on groceries is hard to take, even for my principles.
When will the madness end?
Actually, I read some time ago that the AMD-K5 had a feature where you can do just that. In a certain mode, it will run binaries compiled for its RISC-like core directly without going through the x86->internal code translator.
"Nobody" used this feature, so it was dropped. I forgot where I read this, though. Probably the "great uP of the past and present" page. That's a good read for hardware geeks.