Good. Dell using AMD will free up some of the Intel CPU supply for Apple. Apple has a history of demanding more CPUs than their suppliers can provide. This move will help Intel provide the demand Apple will soon be generating.
- Jasen.
P.S. Oh, it was just a rumor? And it's been denied already? What site am I reading? "Rumors for nerds. Stuff that won't matter in 20 minutes after all those involved deny it."
Agreed. 32-bits from an address space point of view doesn't seem like a real issue for any "consumer" machine. Even MS Office can't fill all that memory. Maybe Vista will be bloated enough to require a 64-bit address space.
But, if Apple can go straight to requiring 64-bit CPUs, that cuts out a WHOLE lotta current Wintel machines from pirating OS X. I'm still undecided whether Apple really wants to prevent Wintel machines from running OS X or if they'll just make it hard enough that the "average" user won't go through the hassle. If they can make it easier to run Windows on a Mac (via Virtual PC, et al) than to run OS X on a Wintel machine, more folks may be inclined to taste Apple's hardware and be exposed to OS X at the same time.
You figure that anyone willing to "illegally" run OS X on a Wintel box will also pirate/steal any apps they run. Can that "cost" be considered marketing/advertising expenses with the hope that pirates will switch over to Apple's hardware? But if they're too cheap to buy a Mac in the first place, will anything convince them to?
I can't believe Microsoft really cares whether their OS and apps are run on a Mac or a Dell; they still (in theory) make a sale. MS may even prefer to run Windows in a nice virtual machine they control (Virtual PC) than on the plethora of beige boxes out there.
"The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks."
Could? The dual-core Yonah's had better deliver performance better than any of Apple's current laptop lineup. One of the main reasons for the switch to Intel is the sad state of Motorola and IBM's low-power chips.
Other places are indicating that Apple will release the Powerbooks first because the higher performance CPUs are what Intel has available now, with the lower performance ones coming in the Spring.
I'd like to see theaters modify the price based on the size of the screen.
My local AMC 24 has 4 GIANT screens where most movies spend one week. Then they get shuffled down to the medium sized screens, and finally end up on the slightly-larger-than-a-home-theater screen.
I'm glad to pay $8 for the giant theater experience, but I'm not going to pay full price for a dinky screen with sound quality no better than I have at home, and the film so worn by then that the DVD will be much clearer.
There used to be dollar theaters for this sort of thing, but I think they've mostly gone under because by the time movies make it to them, the DVD has been released and people just rent it.
But that's probably not so much a Hollywood issue as a theater owner issue.
First, I'm not "in the biz" so this may all be talking out my a**.
Developing compelling interesting gameplay with licensed characters is great and all, until the owners of said property have to sign off on what you've done. Stretch the gameplay into uncharted territory just a bit and they're likely to pull you back to generic first person shooter land.
I think Firefly is an excellent example of recent original sci-fi. Unfortunately, it is also a text book example of TV executive cluelessness.
Let's all pray that the upcoming Star Wars series will be well done. It has the power to blast through TV exec cluelessness. And maybe enough power to keep TV execs from messing with it too much.
I know nothing about how ICANN makes these decisions, so this is wild speculation on my part. If I'm on target, those in the know can mod this up or supply their own insightful comment.
With every new TLD, big corporations with brand names to protect essentially must register their name in the new domain. Chevron, GM, IBM, Verizon, etc., etc. There are a LOT of companies out there with a vested interest in keeping their brand/trademark undiluted. Sure, they can seek arbitration to get domain names back from people squatting, but is it cheaper to just register the name?
Who makes $$$ from all these "frivolous" registrations? Anyone directly involved with ICANN? If so, then ICANN can't be trusted to make these decisions anymore, the representatives have a profit motive to create more TLDs.
Native support for SVG in two popular browsers (Firefox and Safari) would be great. Hopefully the two (three?) development camps - Mozilla, WebCore/KDE - will be able to keep their DOMS, JavaScript interactions, and other related SVG things compatible.
You have that in writing? These concepts of "likely" and "probably" and "I'm sure" don't hold much water in court. All it takes is one engineer who does an outside project that they don't want Google to own, that Google thinks is something they'd like to own, and *WHAM* all those quaint notions are squashed.
I'd like to think there are still "nice" companies - and that Google is one of them. But business majors, accountants, and lawyers aren't trained to be "nice", they're trained to make money, count beans, and enforce contracts.
I switched to Dvorak many years ago, not because it's so much easier, or better for my hands, or anything so noble as that, but because I'm a terrible typist. With QWERTY, I'm a head-down typist. I could never break myself from staring at the keys. So I switched to Dvorak and for a few months had a little cheat sheet above the keyboard. After a while my brain reinforced the appropriate neural pathways and I could type without looking at the keys, stare out the window a bit, glance at a book, hold a casual conversation while typing, etc. I still make plenty of mistakes, and I'm sure my speed is nowhere near 90 wpm, but as a sucky typist, I suck less when using Dvorak.
Switching to Dvorak also had the added benefit of keeping people from messing with my computer. I'm also left-handed and use a track ball. All those things added together make it nearly impossible for most people to use my machine. (I don't know why trackballs freak people out so much, but they do. And the buttons being switched causes massive confusion.) On the occasions when I do want someone else to use my machine a simple key combination switches between the different layouts.
Dvorak is also an interesting way to enter passwords. For my machine login, the keyboard defaults to QWERTY, I enter my password as if it were the Dvorak layout, presto, gibberish - even if my password is "password"(ra;;,soh)
Personally, I think the context switches required when I do use a QWERTY keyboard, a mouse or other pointing device, make me a better person (both in the sense of being superior and improving my capabilities). Much as being multi-lingual makes you aware of different ways to express things (I imagine, I'm a stupid mono-lingual American) switching around the way I interface with the computer helps keep my brain a wee bit flexible.
QWERTY (like Windows) is "good enough". It has some flaws and there are "better" alternatives, but for the vast majority of people it gets the job done and doesn't get in the way enough to compel them to switch.
My guess, Steve Jobs will announce an Intel laptop this year. I'm holding off on replacing my laptop until the Intels come out, and so is my partner. Even if they come out next year.
If you (and those you're advising) can afford to wait, that's fine. But if you follow that pattern too far you enter the "wait forever because something better is coming in 6 months" zone.
I think NOW is a good time to buy any of the PPC laptop products (maybe not the iBook because that should be updated Real Soon Now). They are mature machines with mature architectures. Apple won't be putting any more effort into improving the PPC versions so you're safe that a much faster PPC version won't come out. It is usually a good idea to give the first version of Apple (and most) hardware a pass. There's ALWAYs annoying little (or big) problems.
Buying now gets you experience with OS X and the Apple Way. Then when the second generation of Intel laptops come out you can switch to the new architecture. And, you have a true PPC machine loaded with apps known to work - no emulation issues. If when you switch to Intel some critical app you use is abysmally slow under emulation, won't work, or there's no Intel native version, you still have the PPC machine to fall back on.
If you have a two to three year buying cycle and you're considering buying a Mac now, I say go for it. The Intel machines will hopefully have worked through any initial release issues by the time you're ready to buy again.
But there could certainly be a year where you see the shiny new Macintels leaving your lowly PPC machine in the dust. Just grin and bear it as the early adoptors work through version 1.0 hassles.
- Jasen.
You are what's known as "old". Game companies (and record companies, and movie companies, and....) don't care about you. You either have better things to do with your money, or give it all to your kids. THEY buy (or pester their parents into buying) the vast majority of video games, etc. If you're out of college, have a "real" job, a car payment (or two), a mortgage, a retirement plan, a college savings account, etc., etc. you don't matter.
Game companies are interested in selling to the 12-18 (maybe 25 at the outside) year old demographic, and kids that age weren't around for any of the things you mention. To kids fighting, shooting, driving, etc. are new and exciting. In ten years they'll have had their fill and the game companies will have another fresh batch of consumers.
MAYBE this will change a bit as those of us who grew up on games continue to buy them into our dotage, but the kids will always be there to lap up the next rehashed twitch-fest.
If you check the site carefully, you'll see Apple has taken a platform neutral approach. You can produce HD-DVD (i.e. H.264) content and then write it to whichever disc format you choose.
On a related note: We have a 2003 VW Jetta. The engine light came on once. We took it in to the shop like good citizens. Apparently my wife hadn't screwed the gas cap on quite right and the Jetta was complaining about the air pressure in the gas tank.
We've had the light come on a few times since then and have dutifully taken the car in to the shop. Every time it has been some stupid thing like the gas cap. We now ignore the light. It comes on and goes off now and then. I suppose next time we take it in to have the oil changed we'll tell the shop about the idiot light; they will hook the diagnostic computer up and see what the problem has been.
So to tie back into the computer analogy: If the error warning is too simplistic, people will ignore it after awhile assuming the problem is minor, even though it may not be.
As others have stated, people just want their computers (and cars) to work well enough to get the job at hand done (write letter, surf the web, edit some photos, etc.). Beyond that, unless the equipment is unusable, they won't try to fix it or take it to someone else to fix.
You can't fix that mentality with any technology. With cars we are trained that if they don't receive regular maintenance from someone who knows what they're doing, they'll break. People, unfortunately, need to learn the same thing about computers.
- Jasen.
P.S. I've tried running with a non Administrator account on my WinXP system at work. The brilliant folks in corporate IT have some scripts on there that have to run as Admin upon start-up. So when I was using a non-admin login account, the scripts would puke and die. So much for trying to be a safe user. Apple has it right in that by default users are not logged in with admin privelages, if Microsoft could change that expectation and mentality it would help.
So John Carmack, one of the semi-dieties of game programming, has set his sites on the cell phone market.
What if he follows through on this attempt to make a cell phone game and does what he's done in the past with PC gaming? That is, pick the best, fastest hardware available at the time and then develop something that requires specs a LITTLE better than what's available to be really playable.
Let's suppose he finds a phone with a good, "fast" Java implementation, with a decent amount of memory, and targets his game for that minimum spec. Once the game is released, will we suddenly see a shift in cell phone performance? As every Doom fanboi wants the game and dumps their current lame phone and provider for whoever supports/carries a phone good enough to run MobileDoomRPG.
Will John Carmack be able to redefine the performance expectations of the cell phone industry? Will DoomRPG Capable(tm) become a new standard?
I certainly hope so. If the state of the industry is as bad as some have indicated in this thread, there needs to be a compelling reason to get performance beyond "good enough".
On the drive in to work this morning, the local radio duo covered this story in their news segment. It was interesting to hear the radio jocks debating some of the same things being talked about here - Does this really apply to IM? How annoying that it applies retroactively. etc.
Why is the US limited to a single launch vehicle for human payloads? The shuttle has proven hugely expensive to launch and maintain. Why don't we have our astronauts hitch a ride on a Russian rocket for this mission?
The shuttle was a good first try. I'm sure we've learned a lot about reusable space vehicles, and many other things. But it has proven hugely complex and dangerous. Get rid of it and move on to another launch vehicle. The sooner the better.
I'm too lazy to RTFA, but I have some comments on the comments.
1) Many municipalities are too small to attract a viable commercial provider of some services. Competition may be good, but if no one wants to play the game, the people (i.e. the governmenet) may need to get it done themselves.
2) The government may utilize and benefit from the service as well - wi-fi enable police cars, fire trucks, survey vehicles, etc. If the government can provide the service to the citizens for no or nominal additional cost, why shouldn't they?
3) Web access to government information is probably cheaper (or just as cheap) for the government to provide as having "real people". e.g. Public record research. Is it cheaper to have a staff digging through the archives and printing out information for people impatiently standing in line? Or to provide wi-fi and net access and let people serve themselves?
4) It does open a can of worms of liability. What happens when the first kiddie porn ring is found using the municipal wi-fi? Or gangs are found to be using it to coordinate drug deals? Or some third grader is caught surfing barnyard porn at the Sunday School picnic?
The municipalities won't (for long) be able to offer unencumbered Net access. They will either be forced to shutdown or restrict to the point of losing usefulness by the "What about the children?" crowd.
And the corollary: Why should you expect to love your work?
Suck it up and do your thankless job. All this "I feel unfulfilled" mamby-pamby crap is crap. Accept that you are a tiny cog in the giant, faceless, uncaring world for eight or ten hours a day. Then go home, kiss your wife, pet your dog, raise your kids, and find your meaning in life OUTSIDE OF WORK.
Just as TFA says to search out real fulfillment outside of high school, once you graduate and are in the "real world" continue to find fulfillment beyond what you do to pay the bills. Having a job you LOVE and gives you warm fuzzy feelings of empowerment, blah, blah, blah is nice and all, but lots of people just work. Deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Good. Dell using AMD will free up some of the Intel CPU supply for Apple. Apple has a history of demanding more CPUs than their suppliers can provide. This move will help Intel provide the demand Apple will soon be generating.
- Jasen.
P.S. Oh, it was just a rumor? And it's been denied already? What site am I reading? "Rumors for nerds. Stuff that won't matter in 20 minutes after all those involved deny it."
Agreed. 32-bits from an address space point of view doesn't seem like a real issue for any "consumer" machine. Even MS Office can't fill all that memory. Maybe Vista will be bloated enough to require a 64-bit address space.
But, if Apple can go straight to requiring 64-bit CPUs, that cuts out a WHOLE lotta current Wintel machines from pirating OS X. I'm still undecided whether Apple really wants to prevent Wintel machines from running OS X or if they'll just make it hard enough that the "average" user won't go through the hassle. If they can make it easier to run Windows on a Mac (via Virtual PC, et al) than to run OS X on a Wintel machine, more folks may be inclined to taste Apple's hardware and be exposed to OS X at the same time.
You figure that anyone willing to "illegally" run OS X on a Wintel box will also pirate/steal any apps they run. Can that "cost" be considered marketing/advertising expenses with the hope that pirates will switch over to Apple's hardware? But if they're too cheap to buy a Mac in the first place, will anything convince them to?
I can't believe Microsoft really cares whether their OS and apps are run on a Mac or a Dell; they still (in theory) make a sale. MS may even prefer to run Windows in a nice virtual machine they control (Virtual PC) than on the plethora of beige boxes out there.
- Jasen.
"The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks."
Could? The dual-core Yonah's had better deliver performance better than any of Apple's current laptop lineup. One of the main reasons for the switch to Intel is the sad state of Motorola and IBM's low-power chips.
Other places are indicating that Apple will release the Powerbooks first because the higher performance CPUs are what Intel has available now, with the lower performance ones coming in the Spring.
Not news. Merely rumor.
- Jasen.
But they better all speak English. Because otherwise we won't understand a thing they say.
- Jasen.
I'd like to see theaters modify the price based on the size of the screen.
My local AMC 24 has 4 GIANT screens where most movies spend one week. Then they get shuffled down to the medium sized screens, and finally end up on the slightly-larger-than-a-home-theater screen.
I'm glad to pay $8 for the giant theater experience, but I'm not going to pay full price for a dinky screen with sound quality no better than I have at home, and the film so worn by then that the DVD will be much clearer.
There used to be dollar theaters for this sort of thing, but I think they've mostly gone under because by the time movies make it to them, the DVD has been released and people just rent it.
But that's probably not so much a Hollywood issue as a theater owner issue.
- Jasen.
Only on Slashdot would this method be considered "simple".
- Jasen.
First, I'm not "in the biz" so this may all be talking out my a**.
Developing compelling interesting gameplay with licensed characters is great and all, until the owners of said property have to sign off on what you've done. Stretch the gameplay into uncharted territory just a bit and they're likely to pull you back to generic first person shooter land.
-----
Yeah, that website was awful! Blech.
- Jasen.
I think Firefly is an excellent example of recent original sci-fi. Unfortunately, it is also a text book example of TV executive cluelessness.
Let's all pray that the upcoming Star Wars series will be well done. It has the power to blast through TV exec cluelessness. And maybe enough power to keep TV execs from messing with it too much.
- Jasen.
I bought a DVD recorder this week primarily to record the new seasons of these shows (and Monk on USA).
I'm in the married, with a small child, engineer, sci-fi semi-geek demographic. The kid is in bed and mommy and daddy are almost there by 10pm.
- Jasen.
I know nothing about how ICANN makes these decisions, so this is wild speculation on my part. If I'm on target, those in the know can mod this up or supply their own insightful comment.
With every new TLD, big corporations with brand names to protect essentially must register their name in the new domain. Chevron, GM, IBM, Verizon, etc., etc. There are a LOT of companies out there with a vested interest in keeping their brand/trademark undiluted. Sure, they can seek arbitration to get domain names back from people squatting, but is it cheaper to just register the name?
Who makes $$$ from all these "frivolous" registrations? Anyone directly involved with ICANN? If so, then ICANN can't be trusted to make these decisions anymore, the representatives have a profit motive to create more TLDs.
- Jasen.
Native support for SVG in two popular browsers (Firefox and Safari) would be great. Hopefully the two (three?) development camps - Mozilla, WebCore/KDE - will be able to keep their DOMS, JavaScript interactions, and other related SVG things compatible.
- Jasen.
You have that in writing? These concepts of "likely" and "probably" and "I'm sure" don't hold much water in court. All it takes is one engineer who does an outside project that they don't want Google to own, that Google thinks is something they'd like to own, and *WHAM* all those quaint notions are squashed.
I'd like to think there are still "nice" companies - and that Google is one of them. But business majors, accountants, and lawyers aren't trained to be "nice", they're trained to make money, count beans, and enforce contracts.
- Jasen.
I switched to Dvorak many years ago, not because it's so much easier, or better for my hands, or anything so noble as that, but because I'm a terrible typist. With QWERTY, I'm a head-down typist. I could never break myself from staring at the keys. So I switched to Dvorak and for a few months had a little cheat sheet above the keyboard. After a while my brain reinforced the appropriate neural pathways and I could type without looking at the keys, stare out the window a bit, glance at a book, hold a casual conversation while typing, etc. I still make plenty of mistakes, and I'm sure my speed is nowhere near 90 wpm, but as a sucky typist, I suck less when using Dvorak.
Switching to Dvorak also had the added benefit of keeping people from messing with my computer. I'm also left-handed and use a track ball. All those things added together make it nearly impossible for most people to use my machine. (I don't know why trackballs freak people out so much, but they do. And the buttons being switched causes massive confusion.) On the occasions when I do want someone else to use my machine a simple key combination switches between the different layouts.
Dvorak is also an interesting way to enter passwords. For my machine login, the keyboard defaults to QWERTY, I enter my password as if it were the Dvorak layout, presto, gibberish - even if my password is "password"(ra;;,soh)
Personally, I think the context switches required when I do use a QWERTY keyboard, a mouse or other pointing device, make me a better person (both in the sense of being superior and improving my capabilities). Much as being multi-lingual makes you aware of different ways to express things (I imagine, I'm a stupid mono-lingual American) switching around the way I interface with the computer helps keep my brain a wee bit flexible.
QWERTY (like Windows) is "good enough". It has some flaws and there are "better" alternatives, but for the vast majority of people it gets the job done and doesn't get in the way enough to compel them to switch.
- Jasen.
You are what's known as "old". Game companies (and record companies, and movie companies, and ....) don't care about you. You either have better things to do with your money, or give it all to your kids. THEY buy (or pester their parents into buying) the vast majority of video games, etc. If you're out of college, have a "real" job, a car payment (or two), a mortgage, a retirement plan, a college savings account, etc., etc. you don't matter.
Game companies are interested in selling to the 12-18 (maybe 25 at the outside) year old demographic, and kids that age weren't around for any of the things you mention. To kids fighting, shooting, driving, etc. are new and exciting. In ten years they'll have had their fill and the game companies will have another fresh batch of consumers.
MAYBE this will change a bit as those of us who grew up on games continue to buy them into our dotage, but the kids will always be there to lap up the next rehashed twitch-fest.
- Jasen. (Feeling old and curmugeonly.)
If you check the site carefully, you'll see Apple has taken a platform neutral approach. You can produce HD-DVD (i.e. H.264) content and then write it to whichever disc format you choose.
- Jasen.
On a related note:
We have a 2003 VW Jetta. The engine light came on once. We took it in to the shop like good citizens. Apparently my wife hadn't screwed the gas cap on quite right and the Jetta was complaining about the air pressure in the gas tank.
We've had the light come on a few times since then and have dutifully taken the car in to the shop. Every time it has been some stupid thing like the gas cap. We now ignore the light. It comes on and goes off now and then. I suppose next time we take it in to have the oil changed we'll tell the shop about the idiot light; they will hook the diagnostic computer up and see what the problem has been.
So to tie back into the computer analogy: If the error warning is too simplistic, people will ignore it after awhile assuming the problem is minor, even though it may not be.
As others have stated, people just want their computers (and cars) to work well enough to get the job at hand done (write letter, surf the web, edit some photos, etc.). Beyond that, unless the equipment is unusable, they won't try to fix it or take it to someone else to fix.
You can't fix that mentality with any technology. With cars we are trained that if they don't receive regular maintenance from someone who knows what they're doing, they'll break. People, unfortunately, need to learn the same thing about computers.
- Jasen.
P.S. I've tried running with a non Administrator account on my WinXP system at work. The brilliant folks in corporate IT have some scripts on there that have to run as Admin upon start-up. So when I was using a non-admin login account, the scripts would puke and die. So much for trying to be a safe user. Apple has it right in that by default users are not logged in with admin privelages, if Microsoft could change that expectation and mentality it would help.
So John Carmack, one of the semi-dieties of game programming, has set his sites on the cell phone market.
What if he follows through on this attempt to make a cell phone game and does what he's done in the past with PC gaming? That is, pick the best, fastest hardware available at the time and then develop something that requires specs a LITTLE better than what's available to be really playable.
Let's suppose he finds a phone with a good, "fast" Java implementation, with a decent amount of memory, and targets his game for that minimum spec. Once the game is released, will we suddenly see a shift in cell phone performance? As every Doom fanboi wants the game and dumps their current lame phone and provider for whoever supports/carries a phone good enough to run MobileDoomRPG.
Will John Carmack be able to redefine the performance expectations of the cell phone industry? Will DoomRPG Capable(tm) become a new standard?
I certainly hope so. If the state of the industry is as bad as some have indicated in this thread, there needs to be a compelling reason to get performance beyond "good enough".
- Jasen.
On the drive in to work this morning, the local radio duo covered this story in their news segment. It was interesting to hear the radio jocks debating some of the same things being talked about here - Does this really apply to IM? How annoying that it applies retroactively. etc.
- Jasen.
Why is the US limited to a single launch vehicle for human payloads? The shuttle has proven hugely expensive to launch and maintain. Why don't we have our astronauts hitch a ride on a Russian rocket for this mission?
The shuttle was a good first try. I'm sure we've learned a lot about reusable space vehicles, and many other things. But it has proven hugely complex and dangerous. Get rid of it and move on to another launch vehicle. The sooner the better.
- Jasen.
I'm too lazy to RTFA, but I have some comments on the comments.
1) Many municipalities are too small to attract a viable commercial provider of some services. Competition may be good, but if no one wants to play the game, the people (i.e. the governmenet) may need to get it done themselves.
2) The government may utilize and benefit from the service as well - wi-fi enable police cars, fire trucks, survey vehicles, etc. If the government can provide the service to the citizens for no or nominal additional cost, why shouldn't they?
3) Web access to government information is probably cheaper (or just as cheap) for the government to provide as having "real people". e.g. Public record research. Is it cheaper to have a staff digging through the archives and printing out information for people impatiently standing in line? Or to provide wi-fi and net access and let people serve themselves?
4) It does open a can of worms of liability. What happens when the first kiddie porn ring is found using the municipal wi-fi? Or gangs are found to be using it to coordinate drug deals? Or some third grader is caught surfing barnyard porn at the Sunday School picnic?
The municipalities won't (for long) be able to offer unencumbered Net access. They will either be forced to shutdown or restrict to the point of losing usefulness by the "What about the children?" crowd.
- Jasen.
That your desire for a tasty burrito is stronger than your concern over being Coke's bitch every moment of your life.
- Jasen.
And the corollary: Why should you expect to love your work?
Suck it up and do your thankless job. All this "I feel unfulfilled" mamby-pamby crap is crap. Accept that you are a tiny cog in the giant, faceless, uncaring world for eight or ten hours a day. Then go home, kiss your wife, pet your dog, raise your kids, and find your meaning in life OUTSIDE OF WORK.
Just as TFA says to search out real fulfillment outside of high school, once you graduate and are in the "real world" continue to find fulfillment beyond what you do to pay the bills. Having a job you LOVE and gives you warm fuzzy feelings of empowerment, blah, blah, blah is nice and all, but lots of people just work. Deal with it.
- Jasen.
I'm willing to give it a try! Someone front me the money to travel, etc. and get back to me in a couple years.
- Jasen.