Yes, I would buy a Mac in a heartbeat if I could A) tinker and upgrade it myself, or B) they charged a resonable price for the hardware I'm getting.
I can't get myself to pay more for a product just for "status". I won't buy an 80 dollar pair of designer jeans if I can get 4 pairs of Levi's for the same price.
I'm looking at MacMini, and it just isn't worth 500 bucks.
Have you ever seen microsoft.com, msdn.com, msn.com get slashdotted, or even slow down in the slightest?
apple.com did slow down, despite all the big content being on Akamai.
Therefore, OS/X sucks, and people who own Macintoshes are ugly losers. Of course, it can be more complicated than that.
I'm fucking sick of hearing from Apple fans. I've used OS/X, they don't have any kind of fucking magic going on. It felt to me as kludgy and hackish as running KDE on a linux box, just more polished and pretty looking.
Articles like this are why trolls love slashdot. There's no news here. Just some moronic "ho ho ho OS/X is better than Windows 2003" bullshit.
Let me ask you something, Timothy. Why do you think Apple used Win2003 at MacExpo, instead of plugging in a couple of their magical little OS/X based servers?
Obviously someone at Apple decided Win2003 was a better tool for the job.
Pull your heads out of your asses and start acting like computer geeks and discussing the real technical merits. The fanboy shit belongs somewhere else.
It would also be nice if Firefox rendered/. properly.
No, increasing then decreasing the font size to have it re-render the screen properly is not an acceptable workaround.
We all liked cracking wise when NT wasn't up to the task of running MS Hotmail, yet our leading OSS browser can't properly display an OSS zealot fansite.
It's pretty funny trying to read how great FF is when the text is overlapping the menu, or not on the screen at all, or it's not wordwrapping..
Also, it only has DVI out, so an adapter for RGBS would be needed if you plan to use an old CRT.
All told, you're going to spend about 600-700 bucks for a fully working system.
You can get a similarly specced box from gateway, with twice the HDD space (80 gig vs 40), with CRT and all the jibber jabber, and a free printer, for 350 bucks.
Apple still isn't cheap, they're just a little closer to affordable.
How crippled is the version of OS/X that ships with Mac Mini? I was to understand it's to be somewhat like XP Home vs Pro.
You can get a half-gig flash based mp3 player for under 50 bucks.
As for the MacMini, for 499 you get: 1.25ghz G4, 256 megs of PC2700, 40 gig HDD, and a 10/100 ethernet and a 32 meg Radeon 9200.
Compare to This for 349 - oh, this comes with a 17" Flat CRT
Apple is still overpriced, but the Mac Mini is as close as they've ever come to putting it in the "regular folk" price range.
I'm just not in the market for a 2.9 lb mini-box that I can't upgrade or tinker with myself, or I'd consider one.
I really wish there was such a thing as a "barebones" mac, or that they'd open the platform up to third parties. But then, they'd face the same software challenges as MSFT, and their OS would perform about as well.
I didn't want a broad liberal education. I wanted to study CS and nothing else. That's why I went to the U of Waterloo, who have supposedly one of the best math and CS depts that there is, certainly about the best in Canada.
I spent three years reviewing high school calculus and algebra, and holding my head in my hands as my peers learned how to write programs.
I was already quite proficient in C, had taught myself some ASM, knew a whole lot about OS design, CPU design - how computers worked. Maybe my expectations were too high, because I studied on the stuff since I was a little kid. I knew most Boolean algebra when I was 10, DeMorgans theorum, all of that shit.
I guess others in the class, who didn't pay attention in high school Calc, or who never used a computer before, they got something out of the experience. I'm just of the mindset that those people had no real business in a post-secondary CS course.
What really pissed me off was when, and it happened more than once, a prof would scrap some part of the course in favor of doing a "refresher" on matrices and determinants (or other such remedial shit). Eventually I got to a 3D programming course, which I was really jazzed about.. All that 3D stuff was fairly new and exciting at the time, and I couldn't wait to dig my teeth into it. Instead, we spent our days plotting simple 2D projections on paper, because the stupids that were my peers couldn't grok the concept of collapsing a 3D volume onto a 2D plane.
It's almost like english as a second language students showing up for literature class, and the prof stopping to teach the alphabet instead of discussing Shakespeare.
You can mitigate that somewhat by doing some traffic shaping on your side.
Look for the wondershaper script if you run linux, although I found it too complex for what I needed and wrote my own. tc is easy to figure out.
It was dead simple to prioritize by IP rather than protocol (ie; in order of high to low my network goes Vonage->XBox Live->"User PCs"->"Backend gruntwork PCs"->Tivo). "User PCs" are PCs with people in front of them (anything in the DHCP range), where the gruntwork PCs have static IPs and basically chug away doing bittorrent or other such things all day.
It doesn't scale all that well, but does the trick for a simple home network. No matter how hard the PCs are hitting the network, XBox Live always gets priority, and Vonage gets priority over that.
You can get satellite, and that meets the FCCs litmus test of 200kbps peak downstream throughput.
The FCC and all the naysayers need to get off their asses. If we're going to base our economy on imaginary cyber bullshit (IP), we better have the fastest and most robust network, lest we find ourself "pwned by chinese".
They're the ones so eager for the "information age". This is like going into the Iron Age with a military based on pointy sticks.
DirecPC satellite broadband counts by their definition.
200kbps downstream is broadband to the FCC.
So basically this report and ensuing discussion doesn't tell us anything useful. We know how many people have marginally-faster-than-multilink-dialup access.
They count satellite as a broadband option, so that covers everyone in the 48 contiguous states. Alaska and Hawaii have to fend for themselves.
But lets talk about speed, what does broadband mean to them? (Pedants aside, since we all know broadband doesn't technically mean fast internet)
Koreans and Japanese have these crazy fat 100mbit pipes and whatnot I'm always reading about.
We're far behind when I'm actually getting excited because Comcast bumped my service up to 3mbits.
Re:How incredibly convenient!
on
Top 50 DVDs
·
· Score: 1
Hellboy, Superman and Daredevil all made the list.
Yet Spiderman and Batman get the finger.
Since it's all subjective, I'll go ahead and say that the first Batman movie was THE BEST superhero movie ever made, until Spiderman 2.
I still remember seeing people in my small town lined down the street, around the corner, and about a mile up the highway when Batman came out. I've never seen anything like that at the local theater before or since.
I have no idea how these are ranked, I figured sales but there's no way Hellboy outsold other movies, like say (off the top of my head) Batman or Spiderman (neither of which are listed).
Based on what?
on
Top 50 DVDs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sales, I imagine.
Which makes me wonder, who really cares? What purpose do articles like this serve?
It's like lists like these exist so that people with nothing rewarding in their lives can read it and go "oh! I've seen, or own, most of those movies! Phew, I can relax! I'm normal like everyone else!"
They really need to change the business model with MMOGs.
Give me the entire game as a free download (or nominal charge to ship it), with a couple days of free access. Then, once I'm hooked, I'll start paying.
I would never have tried XBox Live if not for a free trial offer. Now that I'm hooked on Halo 2 and Burnout 3, I'm paying.
WoW would cost me what, 70 bucks for the game, and another 20 or so to play for a month? That's me going 90 bucks out of pocket for a game, hell a whole genre of gaming, that I don't know if I'd like or completely hate.
Good for them for doing so well with it, but I can't be alone, they could have ridiculously huge subscriber bases if they make the first hit free.
Every drug dealer worth his weight knows how well this works.
There's no room for competition, that's what people keep missing.
There's a coax wire, a telephone wire, and a power wire going into my home. Let's ignore wireless/satellite as an option (and it's not a real HSI option anyways), and my ISP has to be sending my stuff through one of those wires.
New construction may well be equipped with fiber, so big deal, it has 4 wires.
There's no room for competition. Despite de-regulation, Comcast owns the coax, Verizon owns the Cat-3, and BGE owns the power line.
The most competition there can be is between those three companies.
The free market will never come through with the type of connections you see in Japan or Korea.
If we want those crazy fat everyone-gets-100-mbit pipes, we need to have the government step in and bankroll it. That's what the asian countries are doing, and that's why they're leapfrogging past us.
A multi-CPU system, maybe, but a dual-core chip has two cores sharing the same memory and io controllers, so it would be either servicing the NIC or the game engine, but not both.
Code will have to be rewritten to take advantage of it. The game engines themselves will have to be multithreaded, and in such a way that the threads aren't constantly fighting over the same chunk of memory.
There's not a lot of code out there (yet) that would make any real use of a dual core CPU. I've had SMP systems, and aside from a few specific tasks, they really don't have much use as far as modern software goes.
As for games, people constantly blow the demands that games place on the CPU out of proportion. A 3.6ghz P4 plays Doom 3 just as well as a 1.8ghz Celeron, all things being the same on both systems.
I've never seen a game push the CPU hard, as in >75% CPU utilization while playing.
Try running two or three Prime95 stress tests in the background, then run Doom 3. It'll play just fine, even with so little CPU headroom left.
Well that's why your CD-R/DVD-R has BurnProof, or similar technology built into it.
If you notice TFA talks about SATA-II and Matrix-RAID.
Their doing all they can about the storage bottleneck, although frankly we need something better to replace the spinning magnetic disc. Holographic storage? Who knows.
There exist good third party passive heatsinks for P4's and Athlons.
They aren't practical unless you really need them, though. The Dells and Gateways would have a hard time selling PC's with a 2 kg slab of copper bolted to the motherboard, without it being damaged during shipping.
Just use good fans (which doesn't mean expensive), and stay away from the high-airflow tornado stuff. The HDDs in my main machine easily drown out the fans, and it has 10 fans, all told (2 PSU, 5 case, CPU, GPU and chipset).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I would buy a Mac in a heartbeat if I could A) tinker and upgrade it myself, or B) they charged a resonable price for the hardware I'm getting.
I can't get myself to pay more for a product just for "status". I won't buy an 80 dollar pair of designer jeans if I can get 4 pairs of Levi's for the same price.
I'm looking at MacMini, and it just isn't worth 500 bucks.
Have you ever seen microsoft.com, msdn.com, msn.com get slashdotted, or even slow down in the slightest?
apple.com did slow down, despite all the big content being on Akamai.
Therefore, OS/X sucks, and people who own Macintoshes are ugly losers. Of course, it can be more complicated than that.
I'm fucking sick of hearing from Apple fans. I've used OS/X, they don't have any kind of fucking magic going on. It felt to me as kludgy and hackish as running KDE on a linux box, just more polished and pretty looking.
Articles like this are why trolls love slashdot. There's no news here. Just some moronic "ho ho ho OS/X is better than Windows 2003" bullshit.
Let me ask you something, Timothy. Why do you think Apple used Win2003 at MacExpo, instead of plugging in a couple of their magical little OS/X based servers?
Obviously someone at Apple decided Win2003 was a better tool for the job.
Pull your heads out of your asses and start acting like computer geeks and discussing the real technical merits. The fanboy shit belongs somewhere else.
They only serve up text, all the images and other bandwidth hoggers (QT movie trailers, et al) are on akamai.
This is just more fanboy flamebaiting.
I think Apple's products are third rate. OS/X only LOOKS like a powerful mature operating system. On the inside it's as ugly and kludgy as linux.
If the father is the son's legal next of kin, then the son's property belongs to the father, if I understand the law correctly.
It is the father's e-mail account, and privacy has nothing to do with it.
It would also be nice if Firefox rendered /. properly.
No, increasing then decreasing the font size to have it re-render the screen properly is not an acceptable workaround.
We all liked cracking wise when NT wasn't up to the task of running MS Hotmail, yet our leading OSS browser can't properly display an OSS zealot fansite.
It's pretty funny trying to read how great FF is when the text is overlapping the menu, or not on the screen at all, or it's not wordwrapping..
Give the feminazi shit a rest for awhile.
If Lara Croft was a fat bull-dyke noone would buy or play the game.
BTW, before you start crying "sexism", you might want to note that male characters are invariably the 6'4 rugged Dirty-Harry type.
I've never seen an FPS where you play a myopic, balding, fat kernel hacker.
Half Life was as non-stereotype a lead character as I've seen, and that's only because Gordon wears glasses.
Also, it only has DVI out, so an adapter for RGBS would be needed if you plan to use an old CRT.
All told, you're going to spend about 600-700 bucks for a fully working system.
You can get a similarly specced box from gateway, with twice the HDD space (80 gig vs 40), with CRT and all the jibber jabber, and a free printer, for 350 bucks.
Apple still isn't cheap, they're just a little closer to affordable.
How crippled is the version of OS/X that ships with Mac Mini? I was to understand it's to be somewhat like XP Home vs Pro.
Depends how you define cheap.
You can get a half-gig flash based mp3 player for under 50 bucks.
As for the MacMini, for 499 you get: 1.25ghz G4, 256 megs of PC2700, 40 gig HDD, and a 10/100 ethernet and a 32 meg Radeon 9200.
Compare to This for 349 - oh, this comes with a 17" Flat CRT
Apple is still overpriced, but the Mac Mini is as close as they've ever come to putting it in the "regular folk" price range.
I'm just not in the market for a 2.9 lb mini-box that I can't upgrade or tinker with myself, or I'd consider one.
I really wish there was such a thing as a "barebones" mac, or that they'd open the platform up to third parties. But then, they'd face the same software challenges as MSFT, and their OS would perform about as well.
I didn't want a broad liberal education. I wanted to study CS and nothing else. That's why I went to the U of Waterloo, who have supposedly one of the best math and CS depts that there is, certainly about the best in Canada.
I spent three years reviewing high school calculus and algebra, and holding my head in my hands as my peers learned how to write programs.
I was already quite proficient in C, had taught myself some ASM, knew a whole lot about OS design, CPU design - how computers worked. Maybe my expectations were too high, because I studied on the stuff since I was a little kid. I knew most Boolean algebra when I was 10, DeMorgans theorum, all of that shit.
I guess others in the class, who didn't pay attention in high school Calc, or who never used a computer before, they got something out of the experience. I'm just of the mindset that those people had no real business in a post-secondary CS course.
What really pissed me off was when, and it happened more than once, a prof would scrap some part of the course in favor of doing a "refresher" on matrices and determinants (or other such remedial shit). Eventually I got to a 3D programming course, which I was really jazzed about.. All that 3D stuff was fairly new and exciting at the time, and I couldn't wait to dig my teeth into it. Instead, we spent our days plotting simple 2D projections on paper, because the stupids that were my peers couldn't grok the concept of collapsing a 3D volume onto a 2D plane.
It's almost like english as a second language students showing up for literature class, and the prof stopping to teach the alphabet instead of discussing Shakespeare.
You can mitigate that somewhat by doing some traffic shaping on your side.
Look for the wondershaper script if you run linux, although I found it too complex for what I needed and wrote my own. tc is easy to figure out.
It was dead simple to prioritize by IP rather than protocol (ie; in order of high to low my network goes Vonage->XBox Live->"User PCs"->"Backend gruntwork PCs"->Tivo). "User PCs" are PCs with people in front of them (anything in the DHCP range), where the gruntwork PCs have static IPs and basically chug away doing bittorrent or other such things all day.
It doesn't scale all that well, but does the trick for a simple home network. No matter how hard the PCs are hitting the network, XBox Live always gets priority, and Vonage gets priority over that.
You can get satellite, and that meets the FCCs litmus test of 200kbps peak downstream throughput.
The FCC and all the naysayers need to get off their asses. If we're going to base our economy on imaginary cyber bullshit (IP), we better have the fastest and most robust network, lest we find ourself "pwned by chinese".
They're the ones so eager for the "information age". This is like going into the Iron Age with a military based on pointy sticks.
DirecPC satellite broadband counts by their definition.
200kbps downstream is broadband to the FCC.
So basically this report and ensuing discussion doesn't tell us anything useful. We know how many people have marginally-faster-than-multilink-dialup access.
Nunavut bah, it's the Northwest Territories and always will be.
Yeah, they had to slice it up for some kind of political bullshit, that had more to do with the discovery of diamonds up there than anything else.
They count satellite as a broadband option, so that covers everyone in the 48 contiguous states. Alaska and Hawaii have to fend for themselves.
But lets talk about speed, what does broadband mean to them? (Pedants aside, since we all know broadband doesn't technically mean fast internet)
Koreans and Japanese have these crazy fat 100mbit pipes and whatnot I'm always reading about.
We're far behind when I'm actually getting excited because Comcast bumped my service up to 3mbits.
Hellboy, Superman and Daredevil all made the list.
Yet Spiderman and Batman get the finger.
Since it's all subjective, I'll go ahead and say that the first Batman movie was THE BEST superhero movie ever made, until Spiderman 2.
I still remember seeing people in my small town lined down the street, around the corner, and about a mile up the highway when Batman came out. I've never seen anything like that at the local theater before or since.
Rushmore?
Boogie Nights?
Almost Famous?
Blade II?
X-Men United?
Hellboy?
Royal Tenenbaums?
I have no idea how these are ranked, I figured sales but there's no way Hellboy outsold other movies, like say (off the top of my head) Batman or Spiderman (neither of which are listed).
Sales, I imagine.
Which makes me wonder, who really cares? What purpose do articles like this serve?
It's like lists like these exist so that people with nothing rewarding in their lives can read it and go "oh! I've seen, or own, most of those movies! Phew, I can relax! I'm normal like everyone else!"
Meh
They really need to change the business model with MMOGs.
Give me the entire game as a free download (or nominal charge to ship it), with a couple days of free access. Then, once I'm hooked, I'll start paying.
I would never have tried XBox Live if not for a free trial offer. Now that I'm hooked on Halo 2 and Burnout 3, I'm paying.
WoW would cost me what, 70 bucks for the game, and another 20 or so to play for a month? That's me going 90 bucks out of pocket for a game, hell a whole genre of gaming, that I don't know if I'd like or completely hate.
Good for them for doing so well with it, but I can't be alone, they could have ridiculously huge subscriber bases if they make the first hit free.
Every drug dealer worth his weight knows how well this works.
There's no room for competition, that's what people keep missing.
There's a coax wire, a telephone wire, and a power wire going into my home. Let's ignore wireless/satellite as an option (and it's not a real HSI option anyways), and my ISP has to be sending my stuff through one of those wires.
New construction may well be equipped with fiber, so big deal, it has 4 wires.
There's no room for competition. Despite de-regulation, Comcast owns the coax, Verizon owns the Cat-3, and BGE owns the power line.
The most competition there can be is between those three companies.
The free market will never come through with the type of connections you see in Japan or Korea.
If we want those crazy fat everyone-gets-100-mbit pipes, we need to have the government step in and bankroll it. That's what the asian countries are doing, and that's why they're leapfrogging past us.
How interesting.
That's what VOIP is, you dumbass.
90kbps for VOIP?
Isn't a regular POTS voice line only 56k, and only 33.6 of that is used?
A multi-CPU system, maybe, but a dual-core chip has two cores sharing the same memory and io controllers, so it would be either servicing the NIC or the game engine, but not both.
Code will have to be rewritten to take advantage of it. The game engines themselves will have to be multithreaded, and in such a way that the threads aren't constantly fighting over the same chunk of memory.
There's not a lot of code out there (yet) that would make any real use of a dual core CPU. I've had SMP systems, and aside from a few specific tasks, they really don't have much use as far as modern software goes.
As for games, people constantly blow the demands that games place on the CPU out of proportion. A 3.6ghz P4 plays Doom 3 just as well as a 1.8ghz Celeron, all things being the same on both systems.
I've never seen a game push the CPU hard, as in >75% CPU utilization while playing.
Try running two or three Prime95 stress tests in the background, then run Doom 3. It'll play just fine, even with so little CPU headroom left.
In times of old, an IDE channel would configure itself to the slowest device on the channel.
That is, if you put your UDMA/133 hard drive on the same cable as a CD-ROM that can only do PIO mode, the whole channel runs at PIO mode.
Modern controllers don't have this limitation.
Well that's why your CD-R/DVD-R has BurnProof, or similar technology built into it.
If you notice TFA talks about SATA-II and Matrix-RAID.
Their doing all they can about the storage bottleneck, although frankly we need something better to replace the spinning magnetic disc. Holographic storage? Who knows.
There exist good third party passive heatsinks for P4's and Athlons.
They aren't practical unless you really need them, though. The Dells and Gateways would have a hard time selling PC's with a 2 kg slab of copper bolted to the motherboard, without it being damaged during shipping.
Just use good fans (which doesn't mean expensive), and stay away from the high-airflow tornado stuff. The HDDs in my main machine easily drown out the fans, and it has 10 fans, all told (2 PSU, 5 case, CPU, GPU and chipset).