If you took a look at the URL, you'd see that that's a document from Apple's Siggraph 2002 presentation. Do you think Apple would put all the pure technical detail (heavy sarcasm) in that PDF on their website where the Mac users go? They don't even tell you what kind of sound card the machines you're buying comes with! If you still don't believe me, the the article is on OSNews.
IE is fast on windows because it shares dll's(libraries) with the OS, Konq performs similiar on a kde system for pretty much the same reasons. >>>>>>> Uh no. On Windows, that statement is an unproved rumor. On Linux, its a physical impossibility, since the whole of the GUI is in USERSPACE!
He he. I'm sitting here on my Inspiron 8200 with its 1600x1200 resolution, 25ms pixel response (no ghosting, even in Quake3) and thirty degrees of freedom in either direction. Laptop LCDs have come quite aways since 1990. Plus, there's talk that the Inspiron 8200's might be upgradable, video-wise:)
You could build a couple AMD boxes with quality assured hardware, tested and retested to make sure its bug free, that included Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire and a host of awesome applications such as iTunes, iMovie etc.... for 1600? >>>>>>>>>>>>.. Yes. As for the gigabit ethernet comment, who gets gigabit ethernet into their desktop? How is this a feature? Its Apple's bullshit again. Besides, a gigabit ethernet card is $50, so I don't think it counts much towards the $1600. I built a machine over the summer (Athlon XP 2000) for about $850. I'd be willing to put it up against a low-end G4 any day.
For most retailers, you can't even configure a machine that matches a low-end iMac. The closest I could find is this an $1120 Dell vs this a $1433 Apple iMac. Even then, its not a fair comparison because the Dell is using an UltraSharp flat panel (vs the regular flat panel in the iMac, which has more ghosting and less contrast) hooked to a GeForce4 MX (vs the GeForce2 MX in the iMac) and with a vastly superior 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 (vs the 700 MHz G4 in the iMac). That's $200, and at the low end, thats a huge chunk of change. At the high end, I can configure a Dell Precision Workstation with dual 2.4 Ghz P4 Xeon procs, Quadro4 graphics, 2GB of RAM, 120 GB of disk, DVD-RW, 20" flat panel, etc, to compete with Apple top of the line machine with comparable features, but vastly slower procs, a non-workstation graphics card (regular GeForce4) and a 23" flat panel display.
whole seperate codebase "just in case" be a bit much? >>>>>>>> Well, let's see. Darwin, the core, already runs on x86, and thats where all the hardware dependent stuff is. The high-level stuff should be completely portable (just like KDE is mostly a recompile away from working on PPC, for example), with only some optimized AltiVec routines needing rewriting.
This is the biggest load of crap I've ever seen. Apple PowerMac parts are consistantly of mediocre quality. Only the very highest-end Macs have real GeForce4 cards, while most have cut down cards like the GeForce4 MX (actually a souped-up GeForce2 for you morons who actually believe Apple's marketing department) and Radeon 9000s (slower than a Radeon 8500, for those same people). Apple used to use crappy crystal chipset sound cards, now they use some USB DMA crap with absolutely zero hardware acceleration. Compare this to a nice Sound Blaster Audigy (or even an SB Live! which goes for chicken feed these days) and the Mac dies in embarrasment. Then you have the Apple "Pro" speakers, which are a joke compared to a comparably priced Logitech 560 setup (or Klipsch, if you wanna spring for a little more change). And the stuff that isn't crap in a standard Mac is just PC hardware. What, you thought Apple made their own hard drives? As for Linux driver quality, that's bull. I've been using Linux for years on Dell machines, and the only driver issue I've ever had is a WinModem not being supported. Linux uses every single piece of hardware on my laptop (including my QuickCam) just as well as OS-X uses any piece of (much inferior I might add) hardware on an PowerBook.
Apple: Our 3GHz P4 runs Photoshop 20% faster than Dell's 3GHz P4. >>>> Yeah. That's the real reason an x86 OS X port would never happen. It makes it harder for Apple's marketing department to lie.
I've never understood drag and drop. Its so inefficient. I tend to run my web browsers full screen and my word processors full screen. I'd bet that this is something most people do. Thus, drag and drop becomes a very exacting process, where meanwhile right-click->copy and right-click->past is so much more efficient! Perhaps the real reason OS-X users prefer drag and drop is that they have to go all the way to the keyboard to "right-click."
Umm, drawing to the desktop window is what Quartz is all about! It draws all the scrollbars, buttons, text, etc. The stuff QE accelerates (transparent windows and window effects) is nice, but its fluff, just eye-candy.
A boot standard based on Forth? How can that NOT be evil and proprietary? Yea yeah, I know, I stuck my foot in my mouth. I didn't know they changed it awhile back.
Prove it. I'm getting my info right from Apple's released info. Read this document. Note, especially, page 10, where it shows the data flow diagram. Note how Quartz "Extreme" simply takes the place of Quartz Compositor, and the Quartz2D drawing to window buffers is still done in software (read the legend). Now, beg for forgiveness.
The limitations of QE are clearly noted. The PowerPoint they released awhile ago cleared showed that QE was only used for compositing and window effects. QE works by taking windows, software rendering them to textures, and using OpenGL to draw textured quads to the screen. This way they can do compositing by making the quads partially transparent, and they can do stuff like the genie effect by using vertex shaders to manipulate the verticies of the quad. But the REAL work, drawing to the window, is done by the software renderer.
Motherboards.. video cards.. etc. >>>>>>>>>> If you hadn't noticed, the current Mac's are basically just PCs with G4s in them. I mean the system bus is PCI, the graphics bus is AGP, they have Firewire and USB, they use ATA hard drives, DDR-SDRAM, and NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards. The only things they'd have to change around are the code hooking into some motherboard/firmware level stuff (Apple-Evil-Proprietory-Boot vs ACPI for example) and they'd be good to go.
It also has an amazing rendering engine by sporting PDF under the hood. >>>>>>> Actually, Quartz is a stupid software rendered piece of junk that will get blown away when Microsoft releases a "real" next-gen GUI API in the form of the 3D accelerated Longhorn desktop. Quartz is a holdover from the early 1990s, something that Steve foisted on Apple, causing them to miss the boat on where graphics was really heading, into the hardware accelerated realm. Case in point: Quartz "Extreme" which utilizes all the power of a GeForce4 just to accelerate compositing and window effects, instead of actually accelerating DRAWING. And why can't QE accelerate drawing? Because tying the Quartz API to PDF (instead of making the rendering backends generic and abstract, is it should be) has tied them too tightly to fully utilize OpenGL acceleration.
I agree with you 100% It's entirely within the patent regulations, no doubt. But the spirit behind the patent system is that patents exist to bring consumers better technology, not screw them over. Frauenhofer is not following the spirit of the patent system.
A) Obviously, you don't understand what an analogy is. I never compared the GPL to the right to life. I just said that the GPL restricts in order to protect freedom, just as the Constitution restricts in order to protect freedom. Let me give you an example Gorilla is the Lemeur as Skyscraper is to shanty. The relationship between Gorilla and Lemeur is big::small, just as the relationship between skyscraper and shanty is big::small. Nowhere in the analogy is their an implied relationship between a lemeur and a shanty, aside from the aformentioned similarity in their relationships with another object. B) The GPL doesn't just protect Stallman's rights (as you say) by restricting software developers. It restricts the rights of the software developer (one person) in return for protecting the right of the entire Open Source community to use free software (many people). Under other licenses, changes to free software do not get put back into the software, which makes the software less free. In the rationale of the GPL, free software is recognized as a right, and the GPL protects people's rights to free software by making sure closed improvements cannot be made to it. Say someone takes a piece of free software, improves it tremendously, and closes it up. Now, people are forced to choose between good software and free software. Just as (here is another analogy coming up here) the Constitution bars people from making others choose between money and life (ie. give us all your money or we will kill you) the GPL prevents people from making otheres choose between quality and freedom.
Seriously.. This whole speed thing is becoming quite the moot point now. How much power does a fella need? I'm still sitting behind a 600mhz machine and don't feel the need to upgrade at all. >>>>>>>>>> You're obviously not a real man. How long are you? 3"? Seriously, this is/., News for Nerds, not/., News for People who Do Nothing but Surf and E-Mail.
The gpl is all about restrictions, restricting someone to only writing open source software is just as bad as restricting people to only closed source software >>>>>>>>>>> Uh no? Open Source == Good. Closed Source == Bad. The GPL only has restrictions to protect certain freedoms. Just like there is a restriction on murder to protect people right to life.
I finally came up with a good use for those spyware products like DragNet and Carnivore. Instead of using their powers for evil, use them for good. Have them digest the Slashdot archives (at a gigabit per second, should only take a few years:) and whenever a new submission comes along, have them use their heuristics to see if it matches old stories!
Actually, its fairly cheap to shield a small room so the EMI snooper techniques don't work. And you can do it yourself by applying some wire-mesh "wallpaper." Certainly a better upgrade to a room than say new cabinets or whatnot.
Slashdot Mirror
If you took a look at the URL, you'd see that that's a document from Apple's Siggraph 2002 presentation. Do you think Apple would put all the pure technical detail (heavy sarcasm) in that PDF on their website where the Mac users go? They don't even tell you what kind of sound card the machines you're buying comes with! If you still don't believe me, the the article is on OSNews.
IE is fast on windows because it shares dll's(libraries) with the OS, Konq performs similiar on a kde system for pretty much the same reasons.
>>>>>>>
Uh no. On Windows, that statement is an unproved rumor. On Linux, its a physical impossibility, since the whole of the GUI is in USERSPACE!
He he. I'm sitting here on my Inspiron 8200 with its 1600x1200 resolution, 25ms pixel response (no ghosting, even in Quake3) and thirty degrees of freedom in either direction. Laptop LCDs have come quite aways since 1990. Plus, there's talk that the Inspiron 8200's might be upgradable, video-wise :)
You could build a couple AMD boxes with quality assured hardware, tested and retested to make sure its bug free, that included Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire and a host of awesome applications such as iTunes, iMovie etc.... for 1600?
>>>>>>>>>>>>..
Yes. As for the gigabit ethernet comment, who gets gigabit ethernet into their desktop? How is this a feature? Its Apple's bullshit again. Besides, a gigabit ethernet card is $50, so I don't think it counts much towards the $1600. I built a machine over the summer (Athlon XP 2000) for about $850. I'd be willing to put it up against a low-end G4 any day.
For most retailers, you can't even configure a machine that matches a low-end iMac. The closest I could find is this an $1120 Dell vs this a $1433 Apple iMac. Even then, its not a fair comparison because the Dell is using an UltraSharp flat panel (vs the regular flat panel in the iMac, which has more ghosting and less contrast) hooked to a GeForce4 MX (vs the GeForce2 MX in the iMac) and with a vastly superior 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 (vs the 700 MHz G4 in the iMac). That's $200, and at the low end, thats a huge chunk of change. At the high end, I can configure a Dell Precision Workstation with dual 2.4 Ghz P4 Xeon procs, Quadro4 graphics, 2GB of RAM, 120 GB of disk, DVD-RW, 20" flat panel, etc, to compete with Apple top of the line machine with comparable features, but vastly slower procs, a non-workstation graphics card (regular GeForce4) and a 23" flat panel display.
whole seperate codebase "just in case" be a bit much?
>>>>>>>>
Well, let's see. Darwin, the core, already runs on x86, and thats where all the hardware dependent stuff is. The high-level stuff should be completely portable (just like KDE is mostly a recompile away from working on PPC, for example), with only some optimized AltiVec routines needing rewriting.
This is the biggest load of crap I've ever seen. Apple PowerMac parts are consistantly of mediocre quality. Only the very highest-end Macs have real GeForce4 cards, while most have cut down cards like the GeForce4 MX (actually a souped-up GeForce2 for you morons who actually believe Apple's marketing department) and Radeon 9000s (slower than a Radeon 8500, for those same people). Apple used to use crappy crystal chipset sound cards, now they use some USB DMA crap with absolutely zero hardware acceleration. Compare this to a nice Sound Blaster Audigy (or even an SB Live! which goes for chicken feed these days) and the Mac dies in embarrasment. Then you have the Apple "Pro" speakers, which are a joke compared to a comparably priced Logitech 560 setup (or Klipsch, if you wanna spring for a little more change). And the stuff that isn't crap in a standard Mac is just PC hardware. What, you thought Apple made their own hard drives? As for Linux driver quality, that's bull. I've been using Linux for years on Dell machines, and the only driver issue I've ever had is a WinModem not being supported. Linux uses every single piece of hardware on my laptop (including my QuickCam) just as well as OS-X uses any piece of (much inferior I might add) hardware on an PowerBook.
Apple: Our 3GHz P4 runs Photoshop 20% faster than Dell's 3GHz P4.
>>>>
Yeah. That's the real reason an x86 OS X port would never happen. It makes it harder for Apple's marketing department to lie.
I've never understood drag and drop. Its so inefficient. I tend to run my web browsers full screen and my word processors full screen. I'd bet that this is something most people do. Thus, drag and drop becomes a very exacting process, where meanwhile right-click->copy and right-click->past is so much more efficient! Perhaps the real reason OS-X users prefer drag and drop is that they have to go all the way to the keyboard to "right-click."
Umm, drawing to the desktop window is what Quartz is all about! It draws all the scrollbars, buttons, text, etc. The stuff QE accelerates (transparent windows and window effects) is nice, but its fluff, just eye-candy.
A boot standard based on Forth? How can that NOT be evil and proprietary? Yea yeah, I know, I stuck my foot in my mouth. I didn't know they changed it awhile back.
Dude. I use Linux for 90% of my work. I've gone months without even having it installed. Still, I can recognize a good idea when I see it.
Prove it. I'm getting my info right from Apple's released info. Read this document. Note, especially, page 10, where it shows the data flow diagram. Note how Quartz "Extreme" simply takes the place of Quartz Compositor, and the Quartz2D drawing to window buffers is still done in software (read the legend). Now, beg for forgiveness.
The limitations of QE are clearly noted. The PowerPoint they released awhile ago cleared showed that QE was only used for compositing and window effects. QE works by taking windows, software rendering them to textures, and using OpenGL to draw textured quads to the screen. This way they can do compositing by making the quads partially transparent, and they can do stuff like the genie effect by using vertex shaders to manipulate the verticies of the quad. But the REAL work, drawing to the window, is done by the software renderer.
Motherboards.. video cards.. etc.
>>>>>>>>>>
If you hadn't noticed, the current Mac's are basically just PCs with G4s in them. I mean the system bus is PCI, the graphics bus is AGP, they have Firewire and USB, they use ATA hard drives, DDR-SDRAM, and NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards. The only things they'd have to change around are the code hooking into some motherboard/firmware level stuff (Apple-Evil-Proprietory-Boot vs ACPI for example) and they'd be good to go.
It also has an amazing rendering engine by sporting PDF under the hood.
>>>>>>>
Actually, Quartz is a stupid software rendered piece of junk that will get blown away when Microsoft releases a "real" next-gen GUI API in the form of the 3D accelerated Longhorn desktop. Quartz is a holdover from the early 1990s, something that Steve foisted on Apple, causing them to miss the boat on where graphics was really heading, into the hardware accelerated realm. Case in point: Quartz "Extreme" which utilizes all the power of a GeForce4 just to accelerate compositing and window effects, instead of actually accelerating DRAWING. And why can't QE accelerate drawing? Because tying the Quartz API to PDF (instead of making the rendering backends generic and abstract, is it should be) has tied them too tightly to fully utilize OpenGL acceleration.
I agree with you 100% It's entirely within the patent regulations, no doubt. But the spirit behind the patent system is that patents exist to bring consumers better technology, not screw them over. Frauenhofer is not following the spirit of the patent system.
A) Obviously, you don't understand what an analogy is. I never compared the GPL to the right to life. I just said that the GPL restricts in order to protect freedom, just as the Constitution restricts in order to protect freedom. Let me give you an example Gorilla is the Lemeur as Skyscraper is to shanty. The relationship between Gorilla and Lemeur is big::small, just as the relationship between skyscraper and shanty is big::small. Nowhere in the analogy is their an implied relationship between a lemeur and a shanty, aside from the aformentioned similarity in their relationships with another object.
B) The GPL doesn't just protect Stallman's rights (as you say) by restricting software developers. It restricts the rights of the software developer (one person) in return for protecting the right of the entire Open Source community to use free software (many people). Under other licenses, changes to free software do not get put back into the software, which makes the software less free. In the rationale of the GPL, free software is recognized as a right, and the GPL protects people's rights to free software by making sure closed improvements cannot be made to it. Say someone takes a piece of free software, improves it tremendously, and closes it up. Now, people are forced to choose between good software and free software. Just as (here is another analogy coming up here) the Constitution bars people from making others choose between money and life (ie. give us all your money or we will kill you) the GPL prevents people from making otheres choose between quality and freedom.
Seriously.. This whole speed thing is becoming quite the moot point now. How much power does a fella need? I'm still sitting behind a 600mhz machine and don't feel the need to upgrade at all. /., News for Nerds, not /., News for People who Do Nothing but Surf and E-Mail.
>>>>>>>>>>
You're obviously not a real man. How long are you? 3"? Seriously, this is
I have a P4 2.0 GHz laptop. The battery life is fine, but I can feel it through the 3/4" wood of my desk!
The gpl is all about restrictions, restricting someone to only writing open source software is just as bad as restricting people to only closed source software
>>>>>>>>>>>
Uh no? Open Source == Good. Closed Source == Bad. The GPL only has restrictions to protect certain freedoms. Just like there is a restriction on murder to protect people right to life.
I finally came up with a good use for those spyware products like DragNet and Carnivore. Instead of using their powers for evil, use them for good. Have them digest the Slashdot archives (at a gigabit per second, should only take a few years :) and whenever a new submission comes along, have them use their heuristics to see if it matches old stories!
When you said technological solutions, I thought there would be a fence somewhere in this story...
Slave! Make me a daiquiri. And put a little umbrella in it!
Actually, its fairly cheap to shield a small room so the EMI snooper techniques don't work. And you can do it yourself by applying some wire-mesh "wallpaper." Certainly a better upgrade to a room than say new cabinets or whatnot.