I agree that Zelda is a good game, but let's set that aside for a moment. Nintendo is really turning into Disney. Disney is infamous for re-releasing, re-re-releasing, re-re-re-releasing Golden Collector's Editions, etc, to squeeze the last tiny bit of juice out of their movies.
You on the other hand have been socially engineered by Linux zealots to think that people who don't want to spend 38 consecutive hours to get their system up and working are idiots.
You know, this was not only true, but a vast understatement just a few years ago -- you could spend *weeks* getting a network connection or 3d working.
Now, just about everything is pretty darn easy to set up. Plop CD in drive, click through series of choices, done.
It still takes a system a long, long time to work exactly the way you want -- all your tweaks and preferences, your favorite combination of software, your favorite look -- but the same is true of any box I've ever used -- Mac OS and Windows included.
I've never been infected with a virus or trojan horse (mainly because I never run as admin)
It's possible, but a PITA not to run as admin. Some software doesn't work if you aren't admin, and it's impossible to install most software without being admin.
IRC really is the best thing going for real-time, group-based discussion. Unfortunately, it's also missing a large number of pretty useful features.
The current state of/list is one. If I were designing an IRC-like protocol,/list would be done on a separate TCP connection to avoid tying up the first and avoid having to implement multiplexing over a single connection (a la HTTP pipelining).
The lack of security design is another. Using nicks as identifiers just isn't a fantastic idea -- in this day and age, a public key can reasonably be part of an identifier. Encryption should be simply part of the protocol, at least client-to-client, and ideally to the server as well. There isn't *that* much traffic from each client (though it'd certainly put more load on the server, and might require a more fanned-out-network.
Fserves are an affront to humanity. Granted, this isn't really a native IRC issue, but client support for easy linking to sftp servers would be a good idea.
A fair bit of IRC is a holdover from the days when everything was terminal-based. There's no reason you can't make good text-based clients that provide the same presentation (say, showing chanop prefixed with an "@", but the data being transferred to the client shouldn't be constrained by these formatting issues.
It would be nice to have some kind of anonyminity features, even if most people don't use them and doing so degrades performance. Say, the ability to form "rings" of clients that proxy each others' server-bound data.
Some sort of native support in IRC for mapping IRC networks would be nice.
Re:Mono - the most important OS project currently
on
Mono 2.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
Up until 1.5, Java lacked some rather significant modern features -- the biggest one of which was typed generics.
Ultimately, Microsoft executives do a pretty good job of making money for their companies. If this hit Paul Allen's radar, he probably just considered resisting handing over information to be a good business move.
Last time I looked, Sun computers had the same issue as Apple boxes do, though more so -- they aren't remostly performance/price comparable to x86 boxes. With Sun boxes, you're paying for a system that you can get good support for, certain high-end features for, can easily migrate to more expensive systems from Sun, and are likely to be pretty reliable.
A single 2GHz G5 easily beats a single whatever-the-fast-one-is P4, and finishes so close to a Xeon that it's essentially too close to call.
Remember NASA? They were benchmarking a custom-written PPC app for fluid dynamics. It was hand-tuned to exploit AltiVec for floating-point vector computations. It showed that an equivalently-clocked G5 ran about 30% faster than a P4. If this is what you're going on, I'm laughing. The instructions-per-cycle on a processor means nothing -- P4s run at a significantly faster clock. The problem is that the fastest G5 available on-market runs at 2.0 Ghz, and the fastest available P4 on-market runs at 3.2 Ghz. So the G5 loses if we measure by absolute fastest possible speed. Perhaps we should use a value metric instead? The best bang-for-the-buck you can get in a G5 from Apple is their $1999 1.6Ghz model. If I pick out a new P4 desktop at Dell using the Apple price as a guide, I can get a 3.0 Ghz desktop for less, which runs about half again as fast as the Mac...*with* a monitor, which Apple doesn't include, plus a bunch of other goodies, for over a hundred dollars less.
Wrongo, dimwit. The "overwhelming number of times" (speak English much?) it's I/O. Your computer spends more time waiting than it does working. This has been true for years and years now.
Heh. All right, you're right -- I wasn't very clear. I was thinking of long-running tasks (which *are* generally CPU-bound), not simply browsing through your filesystem -- the latency there isn't going to kill anyone. Trust me, you don't want to change the competition to I/O latency rather than CPU speed -- OS X is an extremely heavy RAM consumer, and Apple charges a notoriously high premium on RAM.
Is this a metaphor, or are you just an idiot? You know that Quake 3 isn't CPU bound, right?
It certainly was on my computer when I played it. I'm sure it's possible to build a system where that's not the case, but given that the rate of graphic chipset speed increases significantly outpaces that of CPU speed increases, that's a pretty weak claim you're making if you're considering an ordinary old computer.
You also know that nobody gives a flying fuck about Quake 3 frame rates, right? I mean, you do realize that the people who hang out in apple.slashdot.org actually do this for a living, and are more interested in Final Cut Pro or Logic performance than silly games. RIGHT?
You do realize that the majority of people on apple.slashdot.org (or any slashdot subdomain) are under 20 and care more about games than Final Cut Pro, right?
But, hell, since I've made assumptions to favor you all the way through here, I'll do so again. We'll go with your DV folks -- want to read their opinion? Apple's PR people are full of it WRT performance.
That doesn't mean that the G5 systems are bad, as I pointed out above. They're a great choice if you use Macs. But claims of them stomping x86 boxes are simply not true, and folks simply repeating false claims that Apple's made are not doing anyone any favors.
IIRC, Q3 is "SMP-aware" in that the sound system runs in a different thread than the rest of the game. Not a significant chunk of the processing, especially with hardware mixing...
I wonder if Fisher ever recouped the cost. It said that he *did* spend over a million dollars in development, and with the pens selling for $3 (well, $3 to NASA, at least), he'd have to sell 300K fairly unusual niche-market pens to make back his costs.
I'm not trying to be insulting, but I want to point out that the "Porsche phenomenon" seems to apply to many tech items.
The idea is that if you spend a whole ton of money on a luxury variant of something, you tend to become an advocate of it to ensure that you don't look like an idiot for blowing a ton of money on something. The actual quality of the item becomes a secondary factor. I've seen this happen all over the place. With schoolchildren, a video game system is a big purchase, which gives rise to the mindless "fanboyism" of video game systems. The same applies to Macs and SGIs (and probably other luxury computer systems, but those are the two I've seen).
People come up with fairly empty, unbacked claims ("Of course I spent all that money on Ciscos! People who *really* appreciate reliability always buy Cisco!") There may well be an improvement in the product, but frequently it is minimal -- completely out of whack with the claims of the luxury customer.
All this doesn't mean that I dislike Macs or any of the abovementioned products (I owned Macs for years), but I started noticing myself unconsciously doing this on various things (you don't *think* about why you argue in favor of your purchase -- you just *do* it), and then noticed other people doing it. The more expensive an item, the more people will bitterly defend against any comments that might be construed as criticism of their purchase.
The review didn't (unfortunately) seem to compare the dual-proc Mac to a PC, so the "meet or beat" claim is simply conjecture on the part of the story submitter.
However, it's a reasonable bet (given that a 2Ghz G5 isn't competitive with a top-of-the-line P4) that the submitter intended a multi-proc Mac to be compared to a single-proc PC. Comparing a dual-processor system to a single-processor is ridiculous (and I'm not talking about price concerns, either).
The overwhelming number of times when there's a bottlenecked task, it's a single CPU-bound thread. Having multiple processors will provide only nominal benefits. Apple putting multiple processors on-board won't *hurt*, except in the wallet, but it's not going to give Quake 3 double the framerate. Most raytracers support multiple threads of execution when rendering or can be hacked up to do so (even if, like PovRay, they require multiple processes to do so). Very few pieces of 2d software (video, still, etc) can benefit from multiple processors, however.
The claim should be "this system is faster than Apple's older systems, and worth a look for Mac users". Comparing one of Apple's systems to x86 boxes on a CPU horsepower or bang/buck metric not only isn't particularly favorable to Apple, but doesn't make much sense.
I wouldn't quite say that education has been "lost", even if they did take a beating there. As long as they stay in the double digits, and continue to have successes like Henrico, Maine, and the dozen or so smaller copycat deployments that I have heard of - then Apple is still in the game when it comes to education.
You're splicing hairs. Apple was *was* educational computing at one point, and is now a bit player in their own niche. Yes, there will be Macs around for years, no matter what, but they have effectively lost the battle for the education market. Macs are not what people are being taught in schools.
If Microsoft dropped Office for Mac, I think Apple would jump on OpenOffice.org whole heartedly.
I agree (though I think they'd start an Apple-supported fork), but they'd also be *way* behind, on the same level as Linux WRT office apps.
Thankfully, Microsoft's success in having become 'the establishment' will make it very hard for them to acquire street cred.
Dammit, no. Microsoft does not have a bad reputation because they are "the establishment". Slinky has had an effective market monopoly for over fifty years, but people still like slinkeys ("-ies?"). They're a nice product. Microsoft has a bad reputation because they produce expensive, poor products. The street is unrelenting when it comes to criticism of expensive, poor products.
Frankly, the reason *Apple* has the appeal it does is largely because its products get contrasted to those of Microsoft -- and Microsoft's suck so badly. It's not because Apple is producing stuff that's anywhere as near as eye-opening as back in its early days. There's a lot of buzz about Linux because it's so much better than Windows -- not because everything in Linux is executed flawlessly.
Unbelivable. A Nintendo fan has just changed "Nintendo lost out in the market, is getting financially hammered, and is having to drop prices on its products to get them to sell" to "Nintendo is about to kick ass". Amazing. Even Linux doesn't get this degree of mindless dumb faith.
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And with WindowsXP they've even made it intelligent enough that the interactive user's environment is loaded.
Try "su -" in Unix for the same effect.
I agree that Zelda is a good game, but let's set that aside for a moment. Nintendo is really turning into Disney. Disney is infamous for re-releasing, re-re-releasing, re-re-re-releasing Golden Collector's Editions, etc, to squeeze the last tiny bit of juice out of their movies.
You on the other hand have been socially engineered by Linux zealots to think that people who don't want to spend 38 consecutive hours to get their system up and working are idiots.
You know, this was not only true, but a vast understatement just a few years ago -- you could spend *weeks* getting a network connection or 3d working.
Now, just about everything is pretty darn easy to set up. Plop CD in drive, click through series of choices, done.
It still takes a system a long, long time to work exactly the way you want -- all your tweaks and preferences, your favorite combination of software, your favorite look -- but the same is true of any box I've ever used -- Mac OS and Windows included.
I've never been infected with a virus or trojan horse (mainly because I never run as admin)
It's possible, but a PITA not to run as admin. Some software doesn't work if you aren't admin, and it's impossible to install most software without being admin.
Actually linus implemented clone() instead. Please learn.
Wow. Amazing that all my software that uses fork() runs, eh?
IRC really is the best thing going for real-time, group-based discussion. Unfortunately, it's also missing a large number of pretty useful features.
/list is one. If I were designing an IRC-like protocol, /list would be done on a separate TCP connection to avoid tying up the first and avoid having to implement multiplexing over a single connection (a la HTTP pipelining).
The current state of
The lack of security design is another. Using nicks as identifiers just isn't a fantastic idea -- in this day and age, a public key can reasonably be part of an identifier. Encryption should be simply part of the protocol, at least client-to-client, and ideally to the server as well. There isn't *that* much traffic from each client (though it'd certainly put more load on the server, and might require a more fanned-out-network.
Fserves are an affront to humanity. Granted, this isn't really a native IRC issue, but client support for easy linking to sftp servers would be a good idea.
A fair bit of IRC is a holdover from the days when everything was terminal-based. There's no reason you can't make good text-based clients that provide the same presentation (say, showing chanop prefixed with an "@", but the data being transferred to the client shouldn't be constrained by these formatting issues.
It would be nice to have some kind of anonyminity features, even if most people don't use them and doing so degrades performance. Say, the ability to form "rings" of clients that proxy each others' server-bound data.
Some sort of native support in IRC for mapping IRC networks would be nice.
Up until 1.5, Java lacked some rather significant modern features -- the biggest one of which was typed generics.
No, he's probably an emacs developer.
vigilante, n : a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily
I believe the word you wanted was "rogue", not "vigilante".
I personally know several AOL users (really!!!) and not one of them would capable if installing, configuring and using a P2P application.
They don't have to be. They just need to be able to use it and know someone who knows how to install and configure the thing.
Ultimately, Microsoft executives do a pretty good job of making money for their companies. If this hit Paul Allen's radar, he probably just considered resisting handing over information to be a good business move.
They want people to stop sharing music via peer-to-peer in the mistaken belief that it will return their member companies to profitability.
AFAIK, RIAA member companies *are* profitable -- just less so than during the dot-com boom years.
I agree with your point, though.
Last time I looked, Sun computers had the same issue as Apple boxes do, though more so -- they aren't remostly performance/price comparable to x86 boxes. With Sun boxes, you're paying for a system that you can get good support for, certain high-end features for, can easily migrate to more expensive systems from Sun, and are likely to be pretty reliable.
A single 2GHz G5 easily beats a single whatever-the-fast-one-is P4, and finishes so close to a Xeon that it's essentially too close to call.
Remember NASA? They were benchmarking a custom-written PPC app for fluid dynamics. It was hand-tuned to exploit AltiVec for floating-point vector computations. It showed that an equivalently-clocked G5 ran about 30% faster than a P4. If this is what you're going on, I'm laughing. The instructions-per-cycle on a processor means nothing -- P4s run at a significantly faster clock. The problem is that the fastest G5 available on-market runs at 2.0 Ghz, and the fastest available P4 on-market runs at 3.2 Ghz. So the G5 loses if we measure by absolute fastest possible speed. Perhaps we should use a value metric instead? The best bang-for-the-buck you can get in a G5 from Apple is their $1999 1.6Ghz model. If I pick out a new P4 desktop at Dell using the Apple price as a guide, I can get a 3.0 Ghz desktop for less, which runs about half again as fast as the Mac...*with* a monitor, which Apple doesn't include, plus a bunch of other goodies, for over a hundred dollars less.
Wrongo, dimwit. The "overwhelming number of times" (speak English much?) it's I/O. Your computer spends more time waiting than it does working. This has been true for years and years now.
Heh. All right, you're right -- I wasn't very clear. I was thinking of long-running tasks (which *are* generally CPU-bound), not simply browsing through your filesystem -- the latency there isn't going to kill anyone. Trust me, you don't want to change the competition to I/O latency rather than CPU speed -- OS X is an extremely heavy RAM consumer, and Apple charges a notoriously high premium on RAM.
Is this a metaphor, or are you just an idiot? You know that Quake 3 isn't CPU bound, right?
It certainly was on my computer when I played it. I'm sure it's possible to build a system where that's not the case, but given that the rate of graphic chipset speed increases significantly outpaces that of CPU speed increases, that's a pretty weak claim you're making if you're considering an ordinary old computer.
You also know that nobody gives a flying fuck about Quake 3 frame rates, right? I mean, you do realize that the people who hang out in apple.slashdot.org actually do this for a living, and are more interested in Final Cut Pro or Logic performance than silly games. RIGHT?
You do realize that the majority of people on apple.slashdot.org (or any slashdot subdomain) are under 20 and care more about games than Final Cut Pro, right?
But, hell, since I've made assumptions to favor you all the way through here, I'll do so again. We'll go with your DV folks -- want to read their opinion? Apple's PR people are full of it WRT performance.
That doesn't mean that the G5 systems are bad, as I pointed out above. They're a great choice if you use Macs. But claims of them stomping x86 boxes are simply not true, and folks simply repeating false claims that Apple's made are not doing anyone any favors.
IIRC, Q3 is "SMP-aware" in that the sound system runs in a different thread than the rest of the game. Not a significant chunk of the processing, especially with hardware mixing...
Same here, though to a lesser extent. The word processor/text editor isn't just a typewritter with fast error correction. It's a composition tool.
I wonder if Fisher ever recouped the cost. It said that he *did* spend over a million dollars in development, and with the pens selling for $3 (well, $3 to NASA, at least), he'd have to sell 300K fairly unusual niche-market pens to make back his costs.
I'm not trying to be insulting, but I want to point out that the "Porsche phenomenon" seems to apply to many tech items.
The idea is that if you spend a whole ton of money on a luxury variant of something, you tend to become an advocate of it to ensure that you don't look like an idiot for blowing a ton of money on something. The actual quality of the item becomes a secondary factor. I've seen this happen all over the place. With schoolchildren, a video game system is a big purchase, which gives rise to the mindless "fanboyism" of video game systems. The same applies to Macs and SGIs (and probably other luxury computer systems, but those are the two I've seen).
People come up with fairly empty, unbacked claims ("Of course I spent all that money on Ciscos! People who *really* appreciate reliability always buy Cisco!") There may well be an improvement in the product, but frequently it is minimal -- completely out of whack with the claims of the luxury customer.
All this doesn't mean that I dislike Macs or any of the abovementioned products (I owned Macs for years), but I started noticing myself unconsciously doing this on various things (you don't *think* about why you argue in favor of your purchase -- you just *do* it), and then noticed other people doing it. The more expensive an item, the more people will bitterly defend against any comments that might be construed as criticism of their purchase.
The review didn't (unfortunately) seem to compare the dual-proc Mac to a PC, so the "meet or beat" claim is simply conjecture on the part of the story submitter.
However, it's a reasonable bet (given that a 2Ghz G5 isn't competitive with a top-of-the-line P4) that the submitter intended a multi-proc Mac to be compared to a single-proc PC. Comparing a dual-processor system to a single-processor is ridiculous (and I'm not talking about price concerns, either).
The overwhelming number of times when there's a bottlenecked task, it's a single CPU-bound thread. Having multiple processors will provide only nominal benefits. Apple putting multiple processors on-board won't *hurt*, except in the wallet, but it's not going to give Quake 3 double the framerate. Most raytracers support multiple threads of execution when rendering or can be hacked up to do so (even if, like PovRay, they require multiple processes to do so). Very few pieces of 2d software (video, still, etc) can benefit from multiple processors, however.
The claim should be "this system is faster than Apple's older systems, and worth a look for Mac users". Comparing one of Apple's systems to x86 boxes on a CPU horsepower or bang/buck metric not only isn't particularly favorable to Apple, but doesn't make much sense.
I wouldn't quite say that education has been "lost", even if they did take a beating there. As long as they stay in the double digits, and continue to have successes like Henrico, Maine, and the dozen or so smaller copycat deployments that I have heard of - then Apple is still in the game when it comes to education.
You're splicing hairs. Apple was *was* educational computing at one point, and is now a bit player in their own niche. Yes, there will be Macs around for years, no matter what, but they have effectively lost the battle for the education market. Macs are not what people are being taught in schools.
If Microsoft dropped Office for Mac, I think Apple would jump on OpenOffice.org whole heartedly.
I agree (though I think they'd start an Apple-supported fork), but they'd also be *way* behind, on the same level as Linux WRT office apps.
You are saying Apple would lose sales if they dropped their prices.
No, that isn't what I said at all.
Thankfully, Microsoft's success in having become 'the establishment' will make it very hard for them to acquire street cred.
Dammit, no. Microsoft does not have a bad reputation because they are "the establishment". Slinky has had an effective market monopoly for over fifty years, but people still like slinkeys ("-ies?"). They're a nice product. Microsoft has a bad reputation because they produce expensive, poor products. The street is unrelenting when it comes to criticism of expensive, poor products.
Frankly, the reason *Apple* has the appeal it does is largely because its products get contrasted to those of Microsoft -- and Microsoft's suck so badly. It's not because Apple is producing stuff that's anywhere as near as eye-opening as back in its early days. There's a lot of buzz about Linux because it's so much better than Windows -- not because everything in Linux is executed flawlessly.
That's ridiculous. You're assuming a linear valuation function, which is not even remotely close to the case.
Unbelivable. A Nintendo fan has just changed "Nintendo lost out in the market, is getting financially hammered, and is having to drop prices on its products to get them to sell" to "Nintendo is about to kick ass". Amazing. Even Linux doesn't get this degree of mindless dumb faith.
I know. It's redouculus, isn't it?