Somewhat tangential to you post, but I've always thought that, given the religious divide in today's evolutionary debate, that it's somewhat amusing that one of the first researchers to lend serious validity to genetic heredity was an Augistinian monk.:-)
You mean like the Bohr model of the atom which is decades out of date and has been disproven, but is what's taught in most classrooms still? Don't think this is limited to evolution, but is rather more indicative how science in general is taught in our schools.
Agreed with you on most points, though I really wish they'd gone with the "other" lowend GPU - the FX5200 Ultra. The reason? The 5200 is on the list to be supported by CoreImage in Tiger, the 9200 is not. Sucks that an all new machine won't support one of the major features of an OS update that's only a few months away.
Apple's market share, before the Mac mini was released, was growing. Therefore the comment about it failing to stop Apple's marketshare from shrinking makes no sense. (Its very low right now, if it shrank, it would be zero. Again, makes no sense unless you think Apple's going out of business.)
Incorrect. Apple's sales and revenues were increasing, but at a lesser rate than the rest of the industry. Therefore, their overall market share was most certainly shrinking.
Second, you aren't forced to make a "second trip" to the store. Most stores will sell you a keyboard and mouse at the same time as a Mac Mini. They don't force you to leave the store after you buy the computer and then come back to buy a mouse and keyboard.
This wouldn't bother me personally if it weren't for the fact that the cheapest KB/Mouse combo Apple is offering with the Mac mini is $58. Over 10% of the cost of the entire unit for a basic input peripheral if someone needs it? Seems a bit steep to me. Fortunately, I have a USB KVM already, so this won't be affecting my decision to pick one of these up within the next few months, but it'd certainly suck for the potential switcher to get home and find out their existing KB/Mouse are PS/2.
Unless Apple has revised the requrements for CoreImage since the last time I looked, this thing will run 10.4, but not the CoreImage APIs, as the minimum requirement for that is the FX5200 Ultra. This was one of the reasons I ended up not buying an iBook a few months ago (and I wasn't going to pay $600 more for the 12" PB just to get CI).
I'm honestly shocked that Apple would bring out an all-new system just months before Tiger that lacks CoreImage support.
I seriously doubt you've never seen a Mercator projection - it's simply a method of representing a round object on a flat plane. The problem you run into with it is that the further you move away from the equator and toward the poles, the more exagerated the size of a landmass becomes. This is what your parent poster was referring to.
Are you going out of your way to troll? Simple things like a keyboard and mouse most certainly are included in the base price, and you only add to the cost if you get the *optional* Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. As far as monitors go, I'm pretty sure if you go order from Dell, that's a seperate item as well on most units.
I don't know what you're smoking if you honestly consider Itanium a desktop processor. Maybe Intel had world domination plans with it, but it never happened. I mean, really, if you wanted to cite an earlier 64 bit desktop CPU Alpha would've been a much better choice.
As far as cost goes, the G5 *WAS* really cheap when it was first introduced. When Slashdot first reported the G5's introduction, I did a bit of a cost comparison between the G5 and a similar spec dual Opteron machine (As Athlon 64 didn't yet exist at the time, and wouldn't do SMP anyway). What did I find? That it wasn't even possible to match the specs of the G5 given the hardware available at the time (No K8 mainboards had 8x AGP at the time) and that the cost of the Opteron box ended up being within a couple hundred dollars of the G5. When you're talking about $3000 units, a couple hundred dollars is small change, so if that's not cost competitive, I don't know what is.
I don't consider Apple infallible or an angel of a company, but I'm not even going to get into this rumored unit if you can't be bothered to get the facts straight on a machine that's a year and a half old now.
MS has always used codenames. XP was originally Whistler, 95 was origially Chicago. I imagine Longhorn will take on a different name as well when it goes public, as with this spyware removal tool.
Actually, if AMD has a cash cow, it's their flash memory business. It's what kept the company's head above water during the lean years where the microprocessor division was doing nothing but losing money.
It doesn't even have to be an installer. Ever used OS X? To install software on X, you simply drag a.APP container file into your Applications directory. To uninstall, you drag it to the trash.
How is this not better than the current Unix way of doing things?
Yes, the link is hosted on MS servers, but before you ignore it for that, at least notice that the forward is by Dennis Ritchie and it was contributed to primarily by Unix geeks. It's about 10 years old, but large portions of it are still relevent today.
This is exactly what I was about to post about. Intel is most definitely not having fabrication problems - if anyone is, it's AMD.
You know all the rumors about Dell possibly picking up AMD CPUs? While Dell has talked about it for their servers and possibly some of the XPS gaming units, you know why it won't happen for general purpose desktops for the forseeable future? AMD literally can not produce enough chips to feed Dell's demand.
Granted, AMD has been working to increase production - Fab 30 in Dresden has been undergoing conversion to a 300mm wafers (AMD currently uses 200mm wafers which make for much smaller yieldS) for a while now and production should come online some time late this year.
AMD production in IBM's East Fishkill fab had been rumored for a long time, but was only recently publicly acknowledged, and fabrication there is supposed to be growing.
Finally, AMD signed a deal with a Singapore fab about 2 months ago to produce Athlons, which is expected to come online some time in late 2005/early 2006.
While all of these will greatly bolster AMD's production cabability, they still will have a long way to go to come anyway close to the sheer number of chips Intel is already capable of fabbing.
Interesting. I actually ended up building an Ubuntu box today since I needed something to do anyway. BeatrIX looks interesting, but I'm not happy with the panel being moved to the bottom, being a bit of a HIG freak.
That's not far off from what I ended up setting up though, dumped OpenOffice Word Processor, Firefox, Evolution, and a link to her Home directory on the desktop. Just gotta get Gnome PPP or an equivalent set up now in a similar, easy-to-use fashion.:-)
How solid/usable is it at this point? Does it support dial up networking? I'm assuming that the addition of Firefox and Thunderbird means it'd be suitable for a basic user with limited needs, perhaps some word processing. On that front - does it has printer support/how good is it?
Basically, I can see some definite use for this, assuming it lives up to the hype, and I wouldn't be beyond paying the $30 registration as a "beta tester" to find out if it does. The use I have in mind in particular is getting my 90 year old grandmother who is not computer literate online in an environment where she won't be confused by everything on screen. Is this a possible solution or should I look at customizing an Ubuntu install instead?
In Photoshop press Q and you enter Quick Mask mode which is a step better in the sense the you actually *are* paiting the areas you want to select. When you press Q again to exit Quick Mask mode, the areas you painted over will now be selected just as if you'd used the lasso tool.
It makes pulling a person off a background etc much easier than attempting to lasso them out. Not sure if the GIMP has a similar feature or not.
"My first reaction as someone new to both applications was: "Huh? They're both almost the same!""
As someone new to programming, I tried out both DevC++ 4 and MSVC.NET and my first reaction was "Huh? They're both almost the same!":-)
Not knocking on you, but someone that's a novice in a given field generally isn't the most qualified to judge what makes a tool good, bad, or excellent for work in that area. Yes, the GIMP and Photoshop have definite similarities, but for someone that works in that field, they're not equivalent in the same way that DevC++, while a nice little IDE, simply does not match VS.NET as a development environment.
I use Photoshop nearly exclusively, but I have the GIMP installed from the last time I gave it a spin. Firing it up just now, I'll grant you it does at least have keystrokes for accessing the tools (though some of the bindings seem a bit odd - Z for accessing the wand tool when W's unbound?). In fact the *only* basic keybinding I found that was the same was D for default colors and X to switch foreground and background colors. But Photoshop's interface is a bit more than that - for example I couldn't find a way to easily change brush size from the keyboard.
I also have no problems saying I find the right click for everything interface absolutely horrid. To me, one of the beauties of Photoshop's interface is the fact that I rarely have to move my mouse from the work area for most common tasks. When I do, there's usually a nice way of doing what I want. Either way, I know I invested much less time figuring out basic operations in Photoshop than I have *attempting* to do so in the GIMP. It's a decent program, and I sincerely hope it improves in the future, but as it stands, it just doesn't compare on enough different front that Photoshop is still leaps and bounds ahead of it.
So basically what you're saying is that if things were different, then they'd be different? I've used ed2k for over two years and BitTorrent for nearly as long. I think ed2k is great for what it is, but what it is is *not* a BT replacement.
I've checked out your other posts in this article, and you make a couple of mentions about there needing to be a "Suprnova-like site for ed2k." Newsflash for you: There was one and it was called ShareReactor. Before it was shut down, it directed hordes of users to single files, much in the way Suprnova did. Even with this relatively high availability, you could expect to spend more time sitting and waiting in queue than actually downloading. This is why I made the comment about needing 20-30 items enqueued in order to keep anything approaching a constant downstream of data.
ed2k's greatest strength is that you can find almost anything on it, and that you can find it at almost any time. BT is incredibly fast, but torrents are generally short lived, this being its weakness. Even so, ed2k is most definitely not a network for the impatient. What I can download in 2 hours with BT would often take a week with ed2k.
Again, don't think I'm bashing ed2k or calling it inferior - I'm merely stating that it does not work as a drop in replacement for BT. I think it's a great network - it's one of the first that I can remember that supported the uploading of partially downloaded files, a HUGE deal at the time - but the "wait in line" situation is by far its biggest weakness. It's not that I'm a Johnny Come Lately that thinks BT is the greatest thing since sliced bread and that everything else must suck, it's simply that I'm a user of both protocols because each has its advantages at times, and I have no problem being critical of either.
First off, ed2k links and torrent files are both essentially hashes - you're no more in the clear hosting one than the other. The actual tracker mechanism does possibly leave you open to greater legal attack, but often times the torrents and tracker are hosted in seperate locations.
Secondly, ed2k isn't slow because of the protocol itself so much as the queueing system. With ed2k you *will* spend most of your time simply waiting to download a file. When I used it regularly, I found that you generally had to have at least 20-30 things queued up to have *something* downloading at all time. ed2k is great for finding older or obscure files, but I wouldn't call it a replacement for the pure power that a torrent leverages.
The Pentium-M and the P4-M aren't the same thing. Easy mistake to make as Intel really botched up mobile chip naming the past couple of years. The P4-M, Mobile P4, and Pentium M are all different chips. The one you're talking about in your post is the Pentium M, which is based on the old P6 core - the heart of the PIII.
As far as AMD lacking manufacturing capacity, this is true, but AMD has been aggressively expanding recently. Their Dresden facility is currently in the process of moving over to 300mm wafer production, which will greatly increase the number of chips the plant can produce. AMD has also signed a deal with a fabrication plant in Singapore to build Athlons. Both the refit and the set up for manufacturing in Singapore are scheduled for completion in late 2005 or early 2006. They've also announced that production of Athlons at IBM's East Fishkill plant will be expanded (the fact that AMD was fabbing at East Fishkill at all has long been rumored, but only publicly confirmed in the past few weeks).
How much larger a chunk of the market this may open up for AMD, I can't say. Intel could have a number of rabbits to pull out of its hat between now and the time these facilities come online, but at the least the move to 300mm wafers should make Athlons more profitable for AMD.
Well, that and the fact that AMD just plain doesn't have the manufacturing capacity that even approaches Intel right now. Granted, they're retrofitting Fab 30 in Dresden for 300mm wafers, they've publicly confirmed that Athlons are being fabbed at IBM's East Fishkill plant, and they've signed a manufacturing deal with a fab in Singapore recently as well.
The Dresden refit and Singapore aren't scheduled to come online until late 2005/early 2006, however, and even then I think AMD will have a hard time producing enough chips to compete with Intel on a large scale.
When it was adopted by the Visual Studio team and dubbed Intellisense, massively.
Google Suggest may end up being the same way - not too useful in its current incarnation, but a huge usability boost when a solid usage for it is found.
For most people, water cooling is silly, but it actually does make sense for people that are seriously overclocking or *really* concerned about noise. You can build a much quieter water cooled system than you can an equivalently cooled air-cooled system.
As far as a VW bug goes - air cooled engines are actually oil-cooled in reality. There's a reason why Porsche 911s had a 12QT oil reserve and a massive oil cooler.
I haven't RTFA but I can't imagine they're using standard 2.4GHz 802.11 for this. It'd take one *heck* of a transmitter to get that to reach 65K feet:)
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhat tangential to you post, but I've always thought that, given the religious divide in today's evolutionary debate, that it's somewhat amusing that one of the first researchers to lend serious validity to genetic heredity was an Augistinian monk. :-)
You mean like the Bohr model of the atom which is decades out of date and has been disproven, but is what's taught in most classrooms still? Don't think this is limited to evolution, but is rather more indicative how science in general is taught in our schools.
Agreed with you on most points, though I really wish they'd gone with the "other" lowend GPU - the FX5200 Ultra. The reason? The 5200 is on the list to be supported by CoreImage in Tiger, the 9200 is not. Sucks that an all new machine won't support one of the major features of an OS update that's only a few months away.
Incorrect. Apple's sales and revenues were increasing, but at a lesser rate than the rest of the industry. Therefore, their overall market share was most certainly shrinking.
This wouldn't bother me personally if it weren't for the fact that the cheapest KB/Mouse combo Apple is offering with the Mac mini is $58. Over 10% of the cost of the entire unit for a basic input peripheral if someone needs it? Seems a bit steep to me. Fortunately, I have a USB KVM already, so this won't be affecting my decision to pick one of these up within the next few months, but it'd certainly suck for the potential switcher to get home and find out their existing KB/Mouse are PS/2.
Unless Apple has revised the requrements for CoreImage since the last time I looked, this thing will run 10.4, but not the CoreImage APIs, as the minimum requirement for that is the FX5200 Ultra. This was one of the reasons I ended up not buying an iBook a few months ago (and I wasn't going to pay $600 more for the 12" PB just to get CI).
I'm honestly shocked that Apple would bring out an all-new system just months before Tiger that lacks CoreImage support.
I seriously doubt you've never seen a Mercator projection - it's simply a method of representing a round object on a flat plane. The problem you run into with it is that the further you move away from the equator and toward the poles, the more exagerated the size of a landmass becomes. This is what your parent poster was referring to.
More information can be found at the Wikipedia.
Are you going out of your way to troll? Simple things like a keyboard and mouse most certainly are included in the base price, and you only add to the cost if you get the *optional* Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. As far as monitors go, I'm pretty sure if you go order from Dell, that's a seperate item as well on most units.
I don't know what you're smoking if you honestly consider Itanium a desktop processor. Maybe Intel had world domination plans with it, but it never happened. I mean, really, if you wanted to cite an earlier 64 bit desktop CPU Alpha would've been a much better choice.
As far as cost goes, the G5 *WAS* really cheap when it was first introduced. When Slashdot first reported the G5's introduction, I did a bit of a cost comparison between the G5 and a similar spec dual Opteron machine (As Athlon 64 didn't yet exist at the time, and wouldn't do SMP anyway). What did I find? That it wasn't even possible to match the specs of the G5 given the hardware available at the time (No K8 mainboards had 8x AGP at the time) and that the cost of the Opteron box ended up being within a couple hundred dollars of the G5. When you're talking about $3000 units, a couple hundred dollars is small change, so if that's not cost competitive, I don't know what is.
I don't consider Apple infallible or an angel of a company, but I'm not even going to get into this rumored unit if you can't be bothered to get the facts straight on a machine that's a year and a half old now.
MS has always used codenames. XP was originally Whistler, 95 was origially Chicago. I imagine Longhorn will take on a different name as well when it goes public, as with this spyware removal tool.
Actually, if AMD has a cash cow, it's their flash memory business. It's what kept the company's head above water during the lean years where the microprocessor division was doing nothing but losing money.
It doesn't even have to be an installer. Ever used OS X? To install software on X, you simply drag a .APP container file into your Applications directory. To uninstall, you drag it to the trash.
How is this not better than the current Unix way of doing things?
The Unix Hater's Handbook
Yes, the link is hosted on MS servers, but before you ignore it for that, at least notice that the forward is by Dennis Ritchie and it was contributed to primarily by Unix geeks. It's about 10 years old, but large portions of it are still relevent today.
This is exactly what I was about to post about. Intel is most definitely not having fabrication problems - if anyone is, it's AMD.
You know all the rumors about Dell possibly picking up AMD CPUs? While Dell has talked about it for their servers and possibly some of the XPS gaming units, you know why it won't happen for general purpose desktops for the forseeable future? AMD literally can not produce enough chips to feed Dell's demand.
Granted, AMD has been working to increase production - Fab 30 in Dresden has been undergoing conversion to a 300mm wafers (AMD currently uses 200mm wafers which make for much smaller yieldS) for a while now and production should come online some time late this year.
AMD production in IBM's East Fishkill fab had been rumored for a long time, but was only recently publicly acknowledged, and fabrication there is supposed to be growing.
Finally, AMD signed a deal with a Singapore fab about 2 months ago to produce Athlons, which is expected to come online some time in late 2005/early 2006.
While all of these will greatly bolster AMD's production cabability, they still will have a long way to go to come anyway close to the sheer number of chips Intel is already capable of fabbing.
I'd like to know where he got Photoshop for $45 as academic pricing for Photoshop CS is $299.
Interesting. I actually ended up building an Ubuntu box today since I needed something to do anyway. BeatrIX looks interesting, but I'm not happy with the panel being moved to the bottom, being a bit of a HIG freak.
:-)
That's not far off from what I ended up setting up though, dumped OpenOffice Word Processor, Firefox, Evolution, and a link to her Home directory on the desktop. Just gotta get Gnome PPP or an equivalent set up now in a similar, easy-to-use fashion.
How solid/usable is it at this point? Does it support dial up networking? I'm assuming that the addition of Firefox and Thunderbird means it'd be suitable for a basic user with limited needs, perhaps some word processing. On that front - does it has printer support/how good is it?
Basically, I can see some definite use for this, assuming it lives up to the hype, and I wouldn't be beyond paying the $30 registration as a "beta tester" to find out if it does. The use I have in mind in particular is getting my 90 year old grandmother who is not computer literate online in an environment where she won't be confused by everything on screen. Is this a possible solution or should I look at customizing an Ubuntu install instead?
In Photoshop press Q and you enter Quick Mask mode which is a step better in the sense the you actually *are* paiting the areas you want to select. When you press Q again to exit Quick Mask mode, the areas you painted over will now be selected just as if you'd used the lasso tool.
It makes pulling a person off a background etc much easier than attempting to lasso them out. Not sure if the GIMP has a similar feature or not.
"My first reaction as someone new to both applications was: "Huh? They're both almost the same!""
.NET and my first reaction was "Huh? They're both almost the same!" :-)
.NET as a development environment.
As someone new to programming, I tried out both DevC++ 4 and MSVC
Not knocking on you, but someone that's a novice in a given field generally isn't the most qualified to judge what makes a tool good, bad, or excellent for work in that area. Yes, the GIMP and Photoshop have definite similarities, but for someone that works in that field, they're not equivalent in the same way that DevC++, while a nice little IDE, simply does not match VS
I use Photoshop nearly exclusively, but I have the GIMP installed from the last time I gave it a spin. Firing it up just now, I'll grant you it does at least have keystrokes for accessing the tools (though some of the bindings seem a bit odd - Z for accessing the wand tool when W's unbound?). In fact the *only* basic keybinding I found that was the same was D for default colors and X to switch foreground and background colors. But Photoshop's interface is a bit more than that - for example I couldn't find a way to easily change brush size from the keyboard.
I also have no problems saying I find the right click for everything interface absolutely horrid. To me, one of the beauties of Photoshop's interface is the fact that I rarely have to move my mouse from the work area for most common tasks. When I do, there's usually a nice way of doing what I want. Either way, I know I invested much less time figuring out basic operations in Photoshop than I have *attempting* to do so in the GIMP. It's a decent program, and I sincerely hope it improves in the future, but as it stands, it just doesn't compare on enough different front that Photoshop is still leaps and bounds ahead of it.
So basically what you're saying is that if things were different, then they'd be different? I've used ed2k for over two years and BitTorrent for nearly as long. I think ed2k is great for what it is, but what it is is *not* a BT replacement.
I've checked out your other posts in this article, and you make a couple of mentions about there needing to be a "Suprnova-like site for ed2k." Newsflash for you: There was one and it was called ShareReactor. Before it was shut down, it directed hordes of users to single files, much in the way Suprnova did. Even with this relatively high availability, you could expect to spend more time sitting and waiting in queue than actually downloading. This is why I made the comment about needing 20-30 items enqueued in order to keep anything approaching a constant downstream of data.
ed2k's greatest strength is that you can find almost anything on it, and that you can find it at almost any time. BT is incredibly fast, but torrents are generally short lived, this being its weakness. Even so, ed2k is most definitely not a network for the impatient. What I can download in 2 hours with BT would often take a week with ed2k.
Again, don't think I'm bashing ed2k or calling it inferior - I'm merely stating that it does not work as a drop in replacement for BT. I think it's a great network - it's one of the first that I can remember that supported the uploading of partially downloaded files, a HUGE deal at the time - but the "wait in line" situation is by far its biggest weakness. It's not that I'm a Johnny Come Lately that thinks BT is the greatest thing since sliced bread and that everything else must suck, it's simply that I'm a user of both protocols because each has its advantages at times, and I have no problem being critical of either.
First off, ed2k links and torrent files are both essentially hashes - you're no more in the clear hosting one than the other. The actual tracker mechanism does possibly leave you open to greater legal attack, but often times the torrents and tracker are hosted in seperate locations.
Secondly, ed2k isn't slow because of the protocol itself so much as the queueing system. With ed2k you *will* spend most of your time simply waiting to download a file. When I used it regularly, I found that you generally had to have at least 20-30 things queued up to have *something* downloading at all time. ed2k is great for finding older or obscure files, but I wouldn't call it a replacement for the pure power that a torrent leverages.
The Pentium-M and the P4-M aren't the same thing. Easy mistake to make as Intel really botched up mobile chip naming the past couple of years. The P4-M, Mobile P4, and Pentium M are all different chips. The one you're talking about in your post is the Pentium M, which is based on the old P6 core - the heart of the PIII.
As far as AMD lacking manufacturing capacity, this is true, but AMD has been aggressively expanding recently. Their Dresden facility is currently in the process of moving over to 300mm wafer production, which will greatly increase the number of chips the plant can produce. AMD has also signed a deal with a fabrication plant in Singapore to build Athlons. Both the refit and the set up for manufacturing in Singapore are scheduled for completion in late 2005 or early 2006. They've also announced that production of Athlons at IBM's East Fishkill plant will be expanded (the fact that AMD was fabbing at East Fishkill at all has long been rumored, but only publicly confirmed in the past few weeks).
How much larger a chunk of the market this may open up for AMD, I can't say. Intel could have a number of rabbits to pull out of its hat between now and the time these facilities come online, but at the least the move to 300mm wafers should make Athlons more profitable for AMD.
Well, that and the fact that AMD just plain doesn't have the manufacturing capacity that even approaches Intel right now. Granted, they're retrofitting Fab 30 in Dresden for 300mm wafers, they've publicly confirmed that Athlons are being fabbed at IBM's East Fishkill plant, and they've signed a manufacturing deal with a fab in Singapore recently as well.
The Dresden refit and Singapore aren't scheduled to come online until late 2005/early 2006, however, and even then I think AMD will have a hard time producing enough chips to compete with Intel on a large scale.
When it was adopted by the Visual Studio team and dubbed Intellisense, massively.
Google Suggest may end up being the same way - not too useful in its current incarnation, but a huge usability boost when a solid usage for it is found.
For most people, water cooling is silly, but it actually does make sense for people that are seriously overclocking or *really* concerned about noise. You can build a much quieter water cooled system than you can an equivalently cooled air-cooled system.
As far as a VW bug goes - air cooled engines are actually oil-cooled in reality. There's a reason why Porsche 911s had a 12QT oil reserve and a massive oil cooler.
I haven't RTFA but I can't imagine they're using standard 2.4GHz 802.11 for this. It'd take one *heck* of a transmitter to get that to reach 65K feet :)