But why bother? I've not seen a computer (either Mac or PC) take 2 minutes to copy a 17 MB file unless something was seriously wrong with it or it was doing something horrible (e.g. virus scanning) in the background for a loooong time (the slowest machine I have around -- 450MHz Cube -- just copied 10MB in "about 5s").
I will grant you this: traditionally Macs tended to lag behind PCs in file operations but were considerably more responsive (my 2.4 GHz Dell desktop with 512MB RAM and XP can really lock up during what would seem to be pretty minor file operations). This seems to have been largely addressed as of OS X 10.1 (I don't tend to benchmark stuff so this is based on "feel"), but again Macs err on the side of responsiveness.
OTOH: (1) the Finder window that is the destination of a file operation does not lock up the way it does with Windows; (2) your Mac, in general, will be more responsive than a PC during file operations in Finder; (3) your Mac will generally provide some kind of indication of its progress through a file operation (versus telling you the progress in copying the current file -- utterly useless information -- as per Windows).
As for the remark I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart let me observe that during Apple's darkest performance days (i.e. pre the PowerPC transition), I remember comparing the performance of HyperCard 2.0 with color XCMDs running on a (then) two year old 25MHz Quadra 700 (with 36MB RAM) to Visual Basic running on a brand new IBM 486 DX2/66 (with 64MB RAM) both running a multimedia project with 8-bit graphics -- the Quadra stomped the PC into the dust.
These days, raw performance is usually far less of an issue, and the fact that the Mac just works and the PC just doesn't work is the reason some people think the Macintosh is a superior machine.
My reason is this: PCs tend to crash a lot on the hardware (system errors) and on the users (bad user interface). Linux doesn't crash the hardware much but it really crashes the users a lot (terrible user interface). Old Macs crashed the hardware a lot (system errors) but hardly ever crashed the user (great user interface). OS X hardly ever crashes the hardware OR the user.
Crashing the user is FAR more expensive -- in general -- than crashing the hardware or running slow.
SGI is kind of a parody version of Apple. Their hardware is more overpriced and harder to upgrade, it's great for graphics and scientific computation (and not much else), they use really slow CPUs (MHz myth or no), their hardware looks bizarre (albeit in a much cheesier way, e.g. they used to sell Sony Trinitrons sprayed with flecked paint) and they're even more arrogant.
Unlike Apple, they have a terrible GUI. (Like Apple, they fiercely defend it.)
Also unlike Apple, they were dumb (and arrogant) enough to try to get into the x86 market (an object lesson for those who argue Apple should do it). Would you like our top-of-the-line box with a 6 months out of date CPU at 2x Intergraph's price for a better machine or our entry-level box with a 12 months out of date CPU at 1.5x Intergraph's price for a better machine?
For me, the funniest part of dealing with SGI was watching their sales reps struggle with their own home-grown presentation software. (Keynote it wasn't.)
There's nothing to stop Apple (a) switching to IBM's G3s with Altivec; (b) shipping consumer models with 1.2GHz G5s; (c) naming the 1.2GHz G5 the GWhizItGoesInAConsumerMac.
That said, Apple may choose to keep some of its eggs in Motorola's basket the way it kept some of its eggs in IBM's basket when IBM steadfastly ignored Altivec. The problem for Apple with sticking by Motorola remains that average consumers simply do NOT believe a 1GHz G4 is as fast as a 2GHz Celeron. Hell, I don't.
It seems to me that assuming that by increasing clock speed at roughly Moore's Law (2GHz to 3GHz in 12 months) isn't something that is going to leave Intel in the dust. They've gone from 2GHz to 3GHz in about 12 months.
The real question would seem to me:
Will Itanium be able to deliver competitive price/performance? Will Opteron? Creative professionals are already going to want the G5 simply to use more RAM and the x86 architecture will need to address this soon (will the P5 have segmented memory with 4GB per segment? eeew).
NULL Pointer Dereference (Expression dereferences a NULL pointer) 29 instances
Uninitialized Variable (Variable is not initialized prior to use) 2 instances
Just curious, but...
Why aren't the developers of Apache (or IIS or whatever) using software tools that automatically detect this kind of defect themselves? This doesn't seem like rocket science -- tools like this are available on most platforms.
This is very interesting. So if I were to come up with an essentially identical process whereby the sender submits the message for translation based on the recipient's preferences before sending it (translated) I am free and clear of Microsoft's patent.
This is especially interesting since a scheme whereby my message is translated before being sent and can, presumably, be vetted before being end would be far superior to Microsoft's proposed scheme.
E.g. I might like to see my message translated BACK into my language before sending it, or I might be trying to learn the recipient's language, or I might know the recipient's language well enough to detect howlers. All of this is possible with the scheme I've proposed and not with Microsoft's. No more data need be sent around (except that potentially the sender learns the recipient's preferred language rather than vice versa).
3% Depending on how you look at it
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Bill Gates On Linux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
BGFor any project, if you look at communications costs, hardware costs, personnel costs, all that, software licensing ranges -- the highest you'd ever find is, like, 3% of any IT-type project. And so the question is can that 3% [compensate], in terms of how quickly you get the system set up?
Well if you look at total cost of ownership -- factoring in all the communications, hardware, personnel, and software costs that putting a PC on someone's desk leads do -- Wintel is a very very bad solution to almost any problem.
Back in the mid-90s, the TCO of a Wintel PC to a business was something like $20k p.a. based on obvious clearly measurable costs, and ignoring hard to measure factors productivity lost to downtime etc. etc.
So yes, probably less than 3% of that is software licenses. But a lot of it is makework created by licensing that software.
Note that in many companies, driving down support costs will lose you business. IT is usually a cost center in most companies, so for IT managers being needed and being big equate to power within the organisation.
A Mac desk accessory / extension combination, I believe, that came out in 1990 or so. It allowed you to instantly retrieve lists of file on your hard disk based on name and content (by "instant" I mean the list of matching files changed as you typed your query).
On my IIci it was perfectly fast. Faster than BeOS queries on a dual 603 box.
It took a little time to build your index, but keeping it up-to-date was pretty painless. Apple's developer CDs used to ship with On Location indices on them.
One issue that artists face and programmers do not is the reusability of code. Many open source projects are spawned by the reuse of a project that has already made money as a proprietary project, or which can be used to make money but is not itself commercial.
Often, a company making something Open Source needs a particular program to work but makes it open source to avoid development costs for something that isn't part of their core business.
Finally, some companies Open Source a project simply because they have to because they're using Open Source underpinnings for it.
In general, an artist's products are never going to make him/her a red cent once they're "open sourced". Once you've given away the rights to an art work you can't even really use it in your own project -- ironically, the better the artwork, the more overexposed it will be (remember the dancing baby model given away with 3D Studio Max?)
Your best odds for open source artwork would be stuff created but never used in the course of project -- but you'd also need remarkably generous companies to give this stuff away.
Re:The Apple We All Know and Love
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iBox Episode 2
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· Score: 5, Informative
I've omitted some parts of the preceding post because they were true and I have no problem with them; others because they're so obviously wrong they don't require a response.
Their cases are also too small to put much more then another harddrive.
There's easily space for four extra hard drives and several PCI cards in a typical pro Mac box. In general, Macs have more expansion capability than PCs owing to integrated functionality (no need for a PCI card or a FireWire card etc.)
Or are you talking about iMacs? I can go buy a firewire hard disc and just plug it into my iMac and it...just works.
The overall quality of Apple computers isn't even up to snuff with the x86 world. Read some forums about dented and pain peeling of Powerbooks, noise issues of Powermacs, keys falling off cheeply made iBooks, and you get the picture. The myth of "Apple quality" is greater then their "mhz myth"
You'll find bad stories about every product from every major company. Apple consistently does well in large scale surveys of reliability and customer satisfaction (usually the top or near the top score across the board).
2) OSX is the greatest OS since sliced bread. This comes from the fast that it's a "UNIX-based" OS that's "for a consumer". Well, if you want to compare feature for feature of the OS, Windows XP beats it hand down.
This depends on whether you count features or look at the implementation and usability of features. XP does many, many things badly.
Simple example: Mac OS X clients can find and mount windows file servers faster than XP.... then try to do something useful with it, and you find that the OS doesn't do it, and it's a $20 shareware application to get it to work(joysticks anyone?)
Joysticks are an interesting example of "useful". (Mine work but maybe that's just me.) I have a devil of a time with my Dell laptop requesting I reinstall my Microsoft mouse drivers over and over again (they're already installed, the mouse generally works, it's a Microsoft product, and Dell is as close to Microsoft's favorite vendor as possible).
Every PC I've owned is or was plagued by driver issues, no matter how infrequently their hardware is played with.
3) Apple is a "friendly" company. Apple will sue anyone and everything.
Have they sued you for defamation yet? I think Apple is pretty restrained in its lawsuits. Coming up with a rant like this in response for Apple pointing out that one of the companies it deals with is clearly violating the spirit and letter of a perfectly common and straightforward contract requirement is hardly justification for this. Apple hasn't sued them or anything.
You have a theme that remotely has circular buttons? Apply legal will be on you like flies on manure.
You think that the sudden interest in rounded glass-like buttons is purely coincidental? You think that PC manufacturers got thrilled by translucent plastics just coincidentally with the success of the iMac? Apple is no different from a company like Nike that spends a lot of money building up brand recognition for a new shoe design and then finds its own suppliers selling products they designed to their competition.
If Joe Bag O'Donuts can make Macs for 1/2 price using Apple parts, how much is Apple REALLY overcharging for their systems?
How much does it cost Joe Bag O'Donuts to make copies of Windows install CDs? The cost of assembling a Mac out of parts Apple designed is hardly the same as the total cost. It's not like Apple runs at huge profit margins (unlike Microsoft...). It's quite clear that Microsoft locks in customers to maintain unreasonable margins on its software; Apple is doing just enough to stay afloat.
4)Apple for years hasn't been able to offer workstation level proformance on systems, so they decide "consumers" don't need to do things like upgrade. And to make matters worse, they intentionally cripple their low end o
Usually at WWDC the kinds of announcements that get made are software. If new hardware is announced it's from a software implications viewpoint. They may demo cool new boxes, but they aren't generally announcing ship dates or showing off new plastic cases.
The exception is when they have nothing in the way of new software or architecture announcements. (The Powerbook G3-500 release is the only example I can remember of a major product announcement at WWDC; and the other announcements at that WWDC were highly underwhelming.)
The big news is Panther. Apple hasn't told most of us what will be in Panther so the idea that they will muddy the waters by fuelling a bunch of consumer-related hysteria when what they really want is to get people excited about a new OS release seems to me to be far-fetched.
I'd be looking for a demo of the PPC970 (or an unnamed chip) but not a product release.
Then again, WWDC has become more and more like a pure marketing exercise as the years have gone by and the leaks have been plugged. The days when you could stand around with system engineers being told about the year after next's OS changes and the current OS's most egregious unfixable bugs seem gone (or maybe they just won't talk to me any more).
I believe he was referring to apes (gorillas and chimpanzees at minimum), canines, and various aquatic mammals (dolphins and orcas at minimum).
Or to put it another way (to misquote Douglas Adams):
"Human beings thought they were smarter than dolphins because they invented civilisation and digital watches, while dolphins swam around having sex. Dolphins thought they were more intelligent than humans for exactly the same reason."
And considering the bizaare circumstances that created life on earth was astrnomically rare (no pun intended:P)only created one sentient lifeform here that we know of the chance of meeting intelligent life in this universe is near null.
I recall one scientist suggesting that if you have life on a planet then intelligence is almost inevitable. After all, he pointed out, it's arisen independently three times on this planet.
But then folks says lots of dumb things, especially when it's not exactly in their field of specialisation. I recall an interview quoting David Brin as saying "if there's life on other planets, we'll probably be able to eat it" -- a brave prediction given there's plenty of stuff on Earth we can't eat, either because it's poisonous or biologically alien to us (e.g. stuff outside the plant and animal kingdoms is frequently highly toxic).
Pondering the probability of imponderables is good work if you can get it. Carl Sagan quotes what he admits is a very crude formula -- 1/10 stars has a planet, 1/100 (?) stars with planets has a habitable planet, 1/10 habitable planets has life, life always develops intelligence, intelligence always builds radio telescopes but only has a 1/10 chance of surviving the invention of nuclear weapons, etc. always seemed to me to be far more sketchy as it got to the right side of the blackboard.
What are the odds that an alien intelligence will have a metabolism in our preferred timescale and thus be able to communicate with us in real time? What are the odds it will "see" and/or "hear" as we see and hear? Would an organism that sees with bat-like Sonar be able to convert a prime x prime grid of pixels into a recognisable image or set of symbols?
Bat-like sonar is a sense possessed by a creature quite closely related to us using parts of a brain very similar to ours. Imagine how alien an alien brain connected to alien sense organs might be.
Then there's the convergent evolution argument (exemplified by David Brin). DNA is obviously the best way to encode genes. Expect aliens made of cells, quite possibly with familiar proteins, carbohydrates, DNA etc. etc.
And who knows, maybe silicon-based life is actually by far the easiest one to come by and we're remarkable in that our solar system appears to be devoid of it. But silicon life all lives much slower-paced lives than we do so we simply couldn't relate to it...
By the way sentient i.e. "having a faculty, or faculties, of sensation and perception" is a rather low bar. There's a huge number of sentient creatures on Earth. If you're going for self aware, dolphins, gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, dogs, and probably several other animals have demonstrated self-awareness.
Id like to point out the trends of UFO sightings in past happen to coincide with alpha technology of the respective periods
I think Weather balloons are well into beta by now...
That we are indeed alone as far as intelligent life and people are still desperately trying to find something to believe in.
To misquote Steve Martin: "With all the crazy superstitious people out there, I don't know what I'd do without my astrological mood-ring".
People have been forced to use MS software for years. In order to really fix Open Source software, people will probably need to be forced to use it so that its issues are actually dealt with. I get the feeling that no-one who really writes is using OpenOffice (or whatever) to write, and no-one who really produces graphics is using GIMP. Until someone forces serious users to use these products they won't be fixed.
Most developing nations don't have English as their national language, so a lot of the "benefits" of doing things the Microsoft way are less apparent to begin with. (E.g. many of the rows and rows of Microsoft-product-related-books in your local Barnes & Nobel that folks buy when they can't figure out how to make their Excel spreadsheet work aren't translated into Portugese or Vietnamese.)
Microsoft and PC makers do a lot of dumping in the third world. E.g. in Viet Nam -- a country I have some experience with -- discontinued brand-name PCs are dumped on the market which serves the dual purpose of prepping the country for a full-priced MS invasion when it can afford it and getting rid of stock that would cut into margins in first world markets. Indeed, it's interesting that so much is made of piracy in such countries, since most of the PCs you see look like they would have come with bundled software.
It seems to me that many developing nations are not short of technical expertise, and developing local additions to a large Open Source base would be a good way of avoiding IT slavery, building up the national skill set, providing good localised software, and in general taking advantage of globalisation instead of being victimised by it.
Reporters had spotted machines at Apple with internal Firewire cables sticking out of drive bays.
I'm not sure about the "sticking out of drive bays" bit, but Macs (and PCs) with FireWire support can generally mount internal firewire drives as well as external, which is what that's for. Since (as you go on to point out) many firewire drives are just IDE drives anyway, there's relatively little point to this.
In reality, Firewire drives are simply IDE drives with a new interface slapped on.
Well the cheap ones are. You can also stick a RAID of IDE drives on a FireWire interface, for example, and take advantage of greater throughput. I also have a FireWire storage device that strongly resembles a digital camcorder...
Plus, Apple would get a lot of flak for shipping computers with their proprietary standard. And to be honest, I would be one of those people dishing out the flak.
FireWire -- aka IEEE 1394 -- is hardly all that proprietary (and it's not just owned by Apple; there's a consortium). FireWire has low associated IP costs (a few years ago some companies were complaining that a FireWire controllers cost about $1.00 to add to a device).
The main problem is that IDE is very entrenched and so device manufacturers see FireWire support as an unnecessary added cost. FireWire won't be able to compete with IDE in the low cost hard disk interface market without much greater uptake and it won't get the uptake without cheap IDE hard disks. Oh well.
75% of the world's population may finally get telephone access in the 21st century, thanks to the relatively inexpensive infrastructure requirements of cellular phones.
The bicycle, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, the light bulb, the AC generator. 19th century technologies whose impact is yet to be felt in much of the world.
I don't think folks in villages in Africa will be reading about "freedom" on their web browsers any time soon.
More's the point -- there's a difference between saying something is a "problem" and that it's "evil". I'd suggest the statement might be less inflammatory if it were worded:
"Proprietary software poses a social and ethical problem, and the point of GNU is to solve that problem."
Software (and information in general) is a public good, which according to economic theory should be distributed for free (because it can be replicated for free and hence is not scarce; you should only charge for scarce resources).
Copyrights/patents and other IP laws are attempts to solve the problem posed by information as a public good -- i.e. create temporary monopolies as an incentive to create new IP -- but make them temporary so that eventually the goods will be truly public.
Unfortunately, IP laws are being abused in many ways that make this attempted solution look increasingly bad:
1) Instead of being owned by private individuals who die of old age, IP rights are increasingly owned by corporations which go on indefinitely.
2) Instead of being fairly cleanly defined: X wrote this book; IP rights are becoming intertwined: X, Y, Z created this word processor and its documentation, with intermingled rights. Disney can remaster the sound track of Snow White and reset its copyright clock... (Where's my public domain copy of Snow White with the original sound track, eh?)
3) IP can now be a means of production. I can license a piece of IP to create word documents, but then I can't open my documents without the licensed IP. And when will the file format ever be made public? Is it even fully documented?
4) Indeed, as IP becomes more analogous to physical goods (e.g. software tools become like hardware tools) intentional obfuscation of standards becomes a useful antisocial tactic (word files are incomprehensible to other word processors for some of the same reasons Fords have incompatible spare parts with GMs).
Actually computer software has gotten a lot more reliable in the last 20 years, it's just a different kind of reliability.
Software runs on two platforms -- one of them the user. Usability has -- in general -- improved in leaps and bounds (in large part owing to Apple, Xerox, et al) vastly reducing the tendency of software to crash on humans. Crashing on humans remains such an enormous problem, however, that fixing it is a far larger market differentiator than fixing relatively minor problems with crashes on hardware.
The reason for this is simple. A well-designed and easy-to-use piece of hardware, e.g. the mercedes seat adjustment control given as an example in Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things", is more expensive to manufacture than a badly-designed and difficult-to-use equivalent. So hardware design tends to offer a trade-off between design and price. Generally major appliances are cheap or well-designed, but not both. For software, usable software is more expensive to create, but less expensive to support, and no more expensive to manufacture.
The fact is that the cost effectiveness of hunting down bugs that cause software to crash hardware is much lower than the cost effectiveness of improving usability (i.e. reducing crashes on human beings).
Actually, the models don't have a super hi polycount. They start out as really hi-poly models but then to create ingame models they use the original to make really good bumpmaps and environment maps.
Sure, that's pretty much true of every computer game. They still have a far higher poly count than the FPS from id. And those of us who read Carmack's various statements know he's pulled off a neat optimisation to speed up shadow rendering. Cute. But still, game or tech demo?
Every comment I see with anything but oohing and ahing gets rated a troll. What gives? D'oh guess this is a troll.
Doom 3 looks like every other FPS with more polys, real time shadows. So what?! It's not even as though they've come up with more of a plot, or cooler graphics. If anything, the higher polygon count models look worse because they're not realistic but they're also not stylish.
Will Doom 3 have better gameplay than Doom? (Or as good even?) Will it have a plot? A good story line? Will there be any respect in which this is anything more than a tech demo of a new improved Quake engine?
Our studies here at Nintendo, as well as many independent ones have shown gamers don't want the proverbial kitchen sink when it comes to handheld games.
The question is, what did you show them? Was it a clunky device with lousy controls being used to play a complex console game versus an elegant device with nice controls being used to play a simple game? Sony has -- in my opinion -- a far better record with ergonomics than Nintendo.
For argument's sake, let's suppose there will be games like EverQuest which can be played on multiple platforms but with the same saved games or servers. Do I want to play some random game, or continue my Grand Theft Auto or Final Fantasy XII addiction while commuting?
The inclusion of an optical drive, the load times...
Wasn't this the same argument that Nintendo used for cartridges versus CDs? Cartridges introduce a minimum unit cost for games that hurts when you get into price competition for old games. CDs cost next to nothing to mass produce....and the associated mechanical and skip problems...
In general, the optical media-based consoles do relatively little reading of data within a level, making them far better adapted to use while moving than -- say -- a portable CD-player. Portable CD-players are pretty popular despite occasional skipping, and very cheap, despite the mechanical issues.
Maybe if they introduced PS1 or even PS2 compatibility...
I'm guessing that the system will be -- at minimum -- software-compatible with the PS1. Clearly some folks will be annoyed at having to pay again for games they already have, but this hasn't stopped people buying, essentially, games they already own for GBA.
Slashdot Mirror
But why bother? I've not seen a computer (either Mac or PC) take 2 minutes to copy a 17 MB file unless something was seriously wrong with it or it was doing something horrible (e.g. virus scanning) in the background for a loooong time (the slowest machine I have around -- 450MHz Cube -- just copied 10MB in "about 5s").
I will grant you this: traditionally Macs tended to lag behind PCs in file operations but were considerably more responsive (my 2.4 GHz Dell desktop with 512MB RAM and XP can really lock up during what would seem to be pretty minor file operations). This seems to have been largely addressed as of OS X 10.1 (I don't tend to benchmark stuff so this is based on "feel"), but again Macs err on the side of responsiveness.
OTOH: (1) the Finder window that is the destination of a file operation does not lock up the way it does with Windows; (2) your Mac, in general, will be more responsive than a PC during file operations in Finder; (3) your Mac will generally provide some kind of indication of its progress through a file operation (versus telling you the progress in copying the current file -- utterly useless information -- as per Windows).
As for the remark I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart let me observe that during Apple's darkest performance days (i.e. pre the PowerPC transition), I remember comparing the performance of HyperCard 2.0 with color XCMDs running on a (then) two year old 25MHz Quadra 700 (with 36MB RAM) to Visual Basic running on a brand new IBM 486 DX2/66 (with 64MB RAM) both running a multimedia project with 8-bit graphics -- the Quadra stomped the PC into the dust.
These days, raw performance is usually far less of an issue, and the fact that the Mac just works and the PC just doesn't work is the reason some people think the Macintosh is a superior machine.
My reason is this: PCs tend to crash a lot on the hardware (system errors) and on the users (bad user interface). Linux doesn't crash the hardware much but it really crashes the users a lot (terrible user interface). Old Macs crashed the hardware a lot (system errors) but hardly ever crashed the user (great user interface). OS X hardly ever crashes the hardware OR the user.
Crashing the user is FAR more expensive -- in general -- than crashing the hardware or running slow.
SGI is kind of a parody version of Apple. Their hardware is more overpriced and harder to upgrade, it's great for graphics and scientific computation (and not much else), they use really slow CPUs (MHz myth or no), their hardware looks bizarre (albeit in a much cheesier way, e.g. they used to sell Sony Trinitrons sprayed with flecked paint) and they're even more arrogant.
Unlike Apple, they have a terrible GUI. (Like Apple, they fiercely defend it.)
Also unlike Apple, they were dumb (and arrogant) enough to try to get into the x86 market (an object lesson for those who argue Apple should do it). Would you like our top-of-the-line box with a 6 months out of date CPU at 2x Intergraph's price for a better machine or our entry-level box with a 12 months out of date CPU at 1.5x Intergraph's price for a better machine?
For me, the funniest part of dealing with SGI was watching their sales reps struggle with their own home-grown presentation software. (Keynote it wasn't.)
There's nothing to stop Apple (a) switching to IBM's G3s with Altivec; (b) shipping consumer models with 1.2GHz G5s; (c) naming the 1.2GHz G5 the GWhizItGoesInAConsumerMac.
That said, Apple may choose to keep some of its eggs in Motorola's basket the way it kept some of its eggs in IBM's basket when IBM steadfastly ignored Altivec. The problem for Apple with sticking by Motorola remains that average consumers simply do NOT believe a 1GHz G4 is as fast as a 2GHz Celeron. Hell, I don't.
Panther is running fine on my pre 600 MHz iBook -- better than Jaguar as per some other readers' comments.
Quartz Extreme's minimum requirements are a 16MB OpenGL video card; it works better with 32MB. Radeons are NOT required -- Quartz Extreme is scalable.
It seems to me that assuming that by increasing clock speed at roughly Moore's Law (2GHz to 3GHz in 12 months) isn't something that is going to leave Intel in the dust. They've gone from 2GHz to 3GHz in about 12 months.
The real question would seem to me:
Will Itanium be able to deliver competitive price/performance? Will Opteron? Creative professionals are already going to want the G5 simply to use more RAM and the x86 architecture will need to address this soon (will the P5 have segmented memory with 4GB per segment? eeew).
NULL Pointer Dereference (Expression dereferences a NULL pointer) 29 instances
Uninitialized Variable (Variable is not initialized prior to use) 2 instances
Just curious, but...
Why aren't the developers of Apache (or IIS or whatever) using software tools that automatically detect this kind of defect themselves? This doesn't seem like rocket science -- tools like this are available on most platforms.
This is very interesting. So if I were to come up with an essentially identical process whereby the sender submits the message for translation based on the recipient's preferences before sending it (translated) I am free and clear of Microsoft's patent.
This is especially interesting since a scheme whereby my message is translated before being sent and can, presumably, be vetted before being end would be far superior to Microsoft's proposed scheme.
E.g. I might like to see my message translated BACK into my language before sending it, or I might be trying to learn the recipient's language, or I might know the recipient's language well enough to detect howlers. All of this is possible with the scheme I've proposed and not with Microsoft's. No more data need be sent around (except that potentially the sender learns the recipient's preferred language rather than vice versa).
BG For any project, if you look at communications costs, hardware costs, personnel costs, all that, software licensing ranges -- the highest you'd ever find is, like, 3% of any IT-type project. And so the question is can that 3% [compensate], in terms of how quickly you get the system set up?
Well if you look at total cost of ownership -- factoring in all the communications, hardware, personnel, and software costs that putting a PC on someone's desk leads do -- Wintel is a very very bad solution to almost any problem.
Back in the mid-90s, the TCO of a Wintel PC to a business was something like $20k p.a. based on obvious clearly measurable costs, and ignoring hard to measure factors productivity lost to downtime etc. etc.
So yes, probably less than 3% of that is software licenses. But a lot of it is makework created by licensing that software.
Note that in many companies, driving down support costs will lose you business. IT is usually a cost center in most companies, so for IT managers being needed and being big equate to power within the organisation.
Those both were space elevators -- a different technology NASA is also exploring.
A Mac desk accessory / extension combination, I believe, that came out in 1990 or so. It allowed you to instantly retrieve lists of file on your hard disk based on name and content (by "instant" I mean the list of matching files changed as you typed your query).
On my IIci it was perfectly fast. Faster than BeOS queries on a dual 603 box.
It took a little time to build your index, but keeping it up-to-date was pretty painless. Apple's developer CDs used to ship with On Location indices on them.
One issue that artists face and programmers do not is the reusability of code. Many open source projects are spawned by the reuse of a project that has already made money as a proprietary project, or which can be used to make money but is not itself commercial.
Often, a company making something Open Source needs a particular program to work but makes it open source to avoid development costs for something that isn't part of their core business.
Finally, some companies Open Source a project simply because they have to because they're using Open Source underpinnings for it.
In general, an artist's products are never going to make him/her a red cent once they're "open sourced". Once you've given away the rights to an art work you can't even really use it in your own project -- ironically, the better the artwork, the more overexposed it will be (remember the dancing baby model given away with 3D Studio Max?)
Your best odds for open source artwork would be stuff created but never used in the course of project -- but you'd also need remarkably generous companies to give this stuff away.
I've omitted some parts of the preceding post because they were true and I have no problem with them; others because they're so obviously wrong they don't require a response.
... then try to do something useful with it, and you find that the OS doesn't do it, and it's a $20 shareware application to get it to work(joysticks anyone?)
Their cases are also too small to put much more then another harddrive.
There's easily space for four extra hard drives and several PCI cards in a typical pro Mac box. In general, Macs have more expansion capability than PCs owing to integrated functionality (no need for a PCI card or a FireWire card etc.)
Or are you talking about iMacs? I can go buy a firewire hard disc and just plug it into my iMac and it...just works.
The overall quality of Apple computers isn't even up to snuff with the x86 world. Read some forums about dented and pain peeling of Powerbooks, noise issues of Powermacs, keys falling off cheeply made iBooks, and you get the picture. The myth of "Apple quality" is greater then their "mhz myth"
You'll find bad stories about every product from every major company. Apple consistently does well in large scale surveys of reliability and customer satisfaction (usually the top or near the top score across the board).
2) OSX is the greatest OS since sliced bread. This comes from the fast that it's a "UNIX-based" OS that's "for a consumer". Well, if you want to compare feature for feature of the OS, Windows XP beats it hand down.
This depends on whether you count features or look at the implementation and usability of features. XP does many, many things badly.
Simple example: Mac OS X clients can find and mount windows file servers faster than XP.
Joysticks are an interesting example of "useful". (Mine work but maybe that's just me.) I have a devil of a time with my Dell laptop requesting I reinstall my Microsoft mouse drivers over and over again (they're already installed, the mouse generally works, it's a Microsoft product, and Dell is as close to Microsoft's favorite vendor as possible).
Every PC I've owned is or was plagued by driver issues, no matter how infrequently their hardware is played with.
3) Apple is a "friendly" company. Apple will sue anyone and everything.
Have they sued you for defamation yet? I think Apple is pretty restrained in its lawsuits. Coming up with a rant like this in response for Apple pointing out that one of the companies it deals with is clearly violating the spirit and letter of a perfectly common and straightforward contract requirement is hardly justification for this. Apple hasn't sued them or anything.
You have a theme that remotely has circular buttons? Apply legal will be on you like flies on manure.
You think that the sudden interest in rounded glass-like buttons is purely coincidental? You think that PC manufacturers got thrilled by translucent plastics just coincidentally with the success of the iMac? Apple is no different from a company like Nike that spends a lot of money building up brand recognition for a new shoe design and then finds its own suppliers selling products they designed to their competition.
If Joe Bag O'Donuts can make Macs for 1/2 price using Apple parts, how much is Apple REALLY overcharging for their systems?
How much does it cost Joe Bag O'Donuts to make copies of Windows install CDs? The cost of assembling a Mac out of parts Apple designed is hardly the same as the total cost. It's not like Apple runs at huge profit margins (unlike Microsoft...). It's quite clear that Microsoft locks in customers to maintain unreasonable margins on its software; Apple is doing just enough to stay afloat.
4)Apple for years hasn't been able to offer workstation level proformance on systems, so they decide "consumers" don't need to do things like upgrade. And to make matters worse, they intentionally cripple their low end o
Usually at WWDC the kinds of announcements that get made are software. If new hardware is announced it's from a software implications viewpoint. They may demo cool new boxes, but they aren't generally announcing ship dates or showing off new plastic cases.
The exception is when they have nothing in the way of new software or architecture announcements. (The Powerbook G3-500 release is the only example I can remember of a major product announcement at WWDC; and the other announcements at that WWDC were highly underwhelming.)
The big news is Panther. Apple hasn't told most of us what will be in Panther so the idea that they will muddy the waters by fuelling a bunch of consumer-related hysteria when what they really want is to get people excited about a new OS release seems to me to be far-fetched.
I'd be looking for a demo of the PPC970 (or an unnamed chip) but not a product release.
Then again, WWDC has become more and more like a pure marketing exercise as the years have gone by and the leaks have been plugged. The days when you could stand around with system engineers being told about the year after next's OS changes and the current OS's most egregious unfixable bugs seem gone (or maybe they just won't talk to me any more).
Eh?
I believe he was referring to apes (gorillas and chimpanzees at minimum), canines, and various aquatic mammals (dolphins and orcas at minimum).
Or to put it another way (to misquote Douglas Adams):
"Human beings thought they were smarter than dolphins because they invented civilisation and digital watches, while dolphins swam around having sex. Dolphins thought they were more intelligent than humans for exactly the same reason."
And considering the bizaare circumstances that created life on earth was astrnomically rare (no pun intended :P)only created one sentient lifeform here that we know of the chance of meeting intelligent life in this universe is near null.
I recall one scientist suggesting that if you have life on a planet then intelligence is almost inevitable. After all, he pointed out, it's arisen independently three times on this planet.
But then folks says lots of dumb things, especially when it's not exactly in their field of specialisation. I recall an interview quoting David Brin as saying "if there's life on other planets, we'll probably be able to eat it" -- a brave prediction given there's plenty of stuff on Earth we can't eat, either because it's poisonous or biologically alien to us (e.g. stuff outside the plant and animal kingdoms is frequently highly toxic).
Pondering the probability of imponderables is good work if you can get it. Carl Sagan quotes what he admits is a very crude formula -- 1/10 stars has a planet, 1/100 (?) stars with planets has a habitable planet, 1/10 habitable planets has life, life always develops intelligence, intelligence always builds radio telescopes but only has a 1/10 chance of surviving the invention of nuclear weapons, etc. always seemed to me to be far more sketchy as it got to the right side of the blackboard.
What are the odds that an alien intelligence will have a metabolism in our preferred timescale and thus be able to communicate with us in real time? What are the odds it will "see" and/or "hear" as we see and hear? Would an organism that sees with bat-like Sonar be able to convert a prime x prime grid of pixels into a recognisable image or set of symbols?
Bat-like sonar is a sense possessed by a creature quite closely related to us using parts of a brain very similar to ours. Imagine how alien an alien brain connected to alien sense organs might be.
Then there's the convergent evolution argument (exemplified by David Brin). DNA is obviously the best way to encode genes. Expect aliens made of cells, quite possibly with familiar proteins, carbohydrates, DNA etc. etc.
And who knows, maybe silicon-based life is actually by far the easiest one to come by and we're remarkable in that our solar system appears to be devoid of it. But silicon life all lives much slower-paced lives than we do so we simply couldn't relate to it...
By the way sentient i.e. "having a faculty, or faculties, of sensation and perception" is a rather low bar. There's a huge number of sentient creatures on Earth. If you're going for self aware, dolphins, gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, dogs, and probably several other animals have demonstrated self-awareness.
Id like to point out the trends of UFO sightings in past happen to coincide with alpha technology of the respective periods
I think Weather balloons are well into beta by now...
That we are indeed alone as far as intelligent life and people are still desperately trying to find something to believe in.
To misquote Steve Martin: "With all the crazy superstitious people out there, I don't know what I'd do without my astrological mood-ring".
People have been forced to use MS software for years. In order to really fix Open Source software, people will probably need to be forced to use it so that its issues are actually dealt with. I get the feeling that no-one who really writes is using OpenOffice (or whatever) to write, and no-one who really produces graphics is using GIMP. Until someone forces serious users to use these products they won't be fixed.
Most developing nations don't have English as their national language, so a lot of the "benefits" of doing things the Microsoft way are less apparent to begin with. (E.g. many of the rows and rows of Microsoft-product-related-books in your local Barnes & Nobel that folks buy when they can't figure out how to make their Excel spreadsheet work aren't translated into Portugese or Vietnamese.)
Microsoft and PC makers do a lot of dumping in the third world. E.g. in Viet Nam -- a country I have some experience with -- discontinued brand-name PCs are dumped on the market which serves the dual purpose of prepping the country for a full-priced MS invasion when it can afford it and getting rid of stock that would cut into margins in first world markets. Indeed, it's interesting that so much is made of piracy in such countries, since most of the PCs you see look like they would have come with bundled software.
It seems to me that many developing nations are not short of technical expertise, and developing local additions to a large Open Source base would be a good way of avoiding IT slavery, building up the national skill set, providing good localised software, and in general taking advantage of globalisation instead of being victimised by it.
The way you describe the church ("virulently anti-gay") conjures up a negative image, damning them from the start.
Surely this only "damns them from the start" if you think being "virulently anti-gay" is a bad thing...
Reporters had spotted machines at Apple with internal Firewire cables sticking out of drive bays.
I'm not sure about the "sticking out of drive bays" bit, but Macs (and PCs) with FireWire support can generally mount internal firewire drives as well as external, which is what that's for. Since (as you go on to point out) many firewire drives are just IDE drives anyway, there's relatively little point to this.
In reality, Firewire drives are simply IDE drives with a new interface slapped on.
Well the cheap ones are. You can also stick a RAID of IDE drives on a FireWire interface, for example, and take advantage of greater throughput. I also have a FireWire storage device that strongly resembles a digital camcorder...
Plus, Apple would get a lot of flak for shipping computers with their proprietary standard. And to be honest, I would be one of those people dishing out the flak.
FireWire -- aka IEEE 1394 -- is hardly all that proprietary (and it's not just owned by Apple; there's a consortium). FireWire has low associated IP costs (a few years ago some companies were complaining that a FireWire controllers cost about $1.00 to add to a device).
The main problem is that IDE is very entrenched and so device manufacturers see FireWire support as an unnecessary added cost. FireWire won't be able to compete with IDE in the low cost hard disk interface market without much greater uptake and it won't get the uptake without cheap IDE hard disks. Oh well.
...will be the telephone.
75% of the world's population may finally get telephone access in the 21st century, thanks to the relatively inexpensive infrastructure requirements of cellular phones.
The bicycle, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, the light bulb, the AC generator. 19th century technologies whose impact is yet to be felt in much of the world.
I don't think folks in villages in Africa will be reading about "freedom" on their web browsers any time soon.
More's the point -- there's a difference between saying something is a "problem" and that it's "evil". I'd suggest the statement might be less inflammatory if it were worded:
"Proprietary software poses a social and ethical problem, and the point of GNU is to solve that problem."
Software (and information in general) is a public good, which according to economic theory should be distributed for free (because it can be replicated for free and hence is not scarce; you should only charge for scarce resources).
Copyrights/patents and other IP laws are attempts to solve the problem posed by information as a public good -- i.e. create temporary monopolies as an incentive to create new IP -- but make them temporary so that eventually the goods will be truly public.
Unfortunately, IP laws are being abused in many ways that make this attempted solution look increasingly bad:
1) Instead of being owned by private individuals who die of old age, IP rights are increasingly owned by corporations which go on indefinitely.
2) Instead of being fairly cleanly defined: X wrote this book; IP rights are becoming intertwined: X, Y, Z created this word processor and its documentation, with intermingled rights. Disney can remaster the sound track of Snow White and reset its copyright clock... (Where's my public domain copy of Snow White with the original sound track, eh?)
3) IP can now be a means of production. I can license a piece of IP to create word documents, but then I can't open my documents without the licensed IP. And when will the file format ever be made public? Is it even fully documented?
4) Indeed, as IP becomes more analogous to physical goods (e.g. software tools become like hardware tools) intentional obfuscation of standards becomes a useful antisocial tactic (word files are incomprehensible to other word processors for some of the same reasons Fords have incompatible spare parts with GMs).
All of this sounds like a problem to me.
Actually computer software has gotten a lot more reliable in the last 20 years, it's just a different kind of reliability.
Software runs on two platforms -- one of them the user. Usability has -- in general -- improved in leaps and bounds (in large part owing to Apple, Xerox, et al) vastly reducing the tendency of software to crash on humans. Crashing on humans remains such an enormous problem, however, that fixing it is a far larger market differentiator than fixing relatively minor problems with crashes on hardware.
The reason for this is simple. A well-designed and easy-to-use piece of hardware, e.g. the mercedes seat adjustment control given as an example in Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things", is more expensive to manufacture than a badly-designed and difficult-to-use equivalent. So hardware design tends to offer a trade-off between design and price. Generally major appliances are cheap or well-designed, but not both. For software, usable software is more expensive to create, but less expensive to support, and no more expensive to manufacture.
The fact is that the cost effectiveness of hunting down bugs that cause software to crash hardware is much lower than the cost effectiveness of improving usability (i.e. reducing crashes on human beings).
Actually, the models don't have a super hi polycount. They start out as really hi-poly models but then to create ingame models they use the original to make really good bumpmaps and environment maps.
Sure, that's pretty much true of every computer game. They still have a far higher poly count than the FPS from id. And those of us who read Carmack's various statements know he's pulled off a neat optimisation to speed up shadow rendering. Cute. But still, game or tech demo?
Seems to me this is only something to think about if you haven't done much thinking up to this point.
Every comment I see with anything but oohing and ahing gets rated a troll. What gives? D'oh guess this is a troll.
Doom 3 looks like every other FPS with more polys, real time shadows. So what?! It's not even as though they've come up with more of a plot, or cooler graphics. If anything, the higher polygon count models look worse because they're not realistic but they're also not stylish.
Will Doom 3 have better gameplay than Doom? (Or as good even?) Will it have a plot? A good story line? Will there be any respect in which this is anything more than a tech demo of a new improved Quake engine?
Our studies here at Nintendo, as well as many independent ones have shown gamers don't want the proverbial kitchen sink when it comes to handheld games.
...and the associated mechanical and skip problems...
The question is, what did you show them? Was it a clunky device with lousy controls being used to play a complex console game versus an elegant device with nice controls being used to play a simple game? Sony has -- in my opinion -- a far better record with ergonomics than Nintendo.
For argument's sake, let's suppose there will be games like EverQuest which can be played on multiple platforms but with the same saved games or servers. Do I want to play some random game, or continue my Grand Theft Auto or Final Fantasy XII addiction while commuting?
The inclusion of an optical drive, the load times...
Wasn't this the same argument that Nintendo used for cartridges versus CDs? Cartridges introduce a minimum unit cost for games that hurts when you get into price competition for old games. CDs cost next to nothing to mass produce.
In general, the optical media-based consoles do relatively little reading of data within a level, making them far better adapted to use while moving than -- say -- a portable CD-player. Portable CD-players are pretty popular despite occasional skipping, and very cheap, despite the mechanical issues.
Maybe if they introduced PS1 or even PS2 compatibility...
I'm guessing that the system will be -- at minimum -- software-compatible with the PS1. Clearly some folks will be annoyed at having to pay again for games they already have, but this hasn't stopped people buying, essentially, games they already own for GBA.