Re:Breaking interoperability... again???
on
GCC 3.2 Released
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· Score: 2
Well, I compiled all the software on my Gentoo system with GCC 3.1, presuming the ABI would be stable. It worked perfectly fine (no crashes, ever). Well, its a couple of days of recompiling for me, I guess.
propper hardware or setup a processing farm. >>>>>>>>> I don't know if PCs *aren't* proper hardware. PC platforms today are very powerful. Let's compare a dual processor Hammer setup to a dual processor Sun Blade 2000. The Hammer clearly wins in the CPU speed department, the UltraSparcs in the Blade already lab behind a high-end P4. The Hammer wins in memory bandwidth (5.4 GB/sec vs 2.4 to 4.8 GB/sec). The Hammer wins bus bandwidth (6.4 GB/sec per processor vs 4.8 GB/sec). The Hammer, if equiped with a relatively cheap Quadro 4 graphics card, is extremely competitive (within 10-20%) in the graphics department. So, for something like $6000 you can have a digital video workstation that rivals a Sun costing many times more. If Hammer were 32-bit, it would be a huge lost opportunity for the digital video market.
1) PCs are the fastest machines you can get until you get to workstations costing several times as much. None of the low end Sun or SGI machines can touch a good dual proc PC for performance.
2) PCs are pervasive. If you aren't rich and want to use your machine for some prosumer video editing, what are you to do? PCs allow people who otherwise could not enter this field to enter it.
3) RAM is dirt cheap.
Thus, if the only thing stopping PCs from being good low end video editing workstations is an artificial RAM limit, then why not move to 64 bits and get rid of it?
Apple uses proprietary boards so they can offer features like autoswitching networking (just plug in an ordinary ethernet cable between two macs, and the two computers show up on each others local network) >>>>> On PC's, it's $10 for a cross-over cable. Big deal.
target disk mode (use a scsi or firewire cable between two macs, and one computer becomes a HDD on the second computer) >>>>>>> In WinXP, you have firewire networking built in as well. Essentially the same thing, but you still have to deal with security (which is a good thing).
, instant dynamic network configuration (change your IP/ or configure multiple network devices with just a few clicks, no restarts), >>>>>> And this is different from Win2k+/Linux how?
dynamically driving multiple monitors with multiple cards (I can plug in two graphics cards, and two monitors, then tell the mac which monitor to drive with which card, while its on.) >>>>>>>> Been able to do this since Windows 98 (maybe SE).
and USB/Firewire plug and play ease that's still years ahead of windows (oh look, it's the windows hardware manager, again...). On the portables, multimonitor/external monitor support is so slick, it's enough to make a Wintel laptop user cry. >>>>>>> Specifically how?
Not really a valid comparison. If you are comparing Apple vs Intel, and you compare a $1000 iMac circa 2000 vs a $1000 dollar Dell circa 2000, its a very valid comparison. Both are in wide circulation, and give a very good picture of the state of the two systems in the real world, not just in the bleeding edge lab benches. Similarly, both Windows 2000 and Redhat 7.3 are extremely widely deployed. Using Windows NT would have been unfair (since it is no longer supported) and since Windows XP hasn't taken off like MS had hoped, it wouldn't have been the best choice either. If you go into a server room today, you'll most likely find Win2k or Redhat 7.x. Given that they're both roughly the same age, the article (if anything) is just slightly out of date, not biased.
Actually, QE doesn't really get around it. If you look at the PowerPoint Apple put out, all QE does is accelerated compositing of windows to the desktop and accelerates stuff like the genie effect. It doesn't seem to accelerate the actual drawing of PDF paths (even though it would be trivial with current OpenGL hardware to do so).
How is this rigged. 7.3 isn't really any different from 7.0, which was released in 2000 as well. Besides, the Sony machine came installed with Windows 2000 Pro, which would tend to mean that the machine was built for it (ie. all hardware was supported out of box).
Heck, the Gentoo manual install isn't even tricky if you read the instructions. Heck, it is even REAL easy. >>>>>>>>> He he. I've got it down to about ten minutes (stage3 tarballs). After having to do it nearly a dozen times while I hosed my system continuously trying to prelink it, I got to the point where the install commands had commited itself to muscle memory. Finally got a clue and just xfsdump'ed an installed system image*.
* Which, btw, is just one of the cool things you can do totally easily in Linux (just man xfsdump; xfsdump [options]) yet you need to read tons of MSDN articles and figure out complex GUI programs to do in Windows.
Redhat certainly does have a lead here, given that it has tons of help info in the left hand pane, and the setup tool is graphical, while Microsoft's is text-menu based.
Both pale in comparison to the ease of installing BeOS (back in the day). First, a nice graphical menu allowed you to partition your disk, or simply choose the whole disk as the target. Then, a simple list allowed you to install the base system, the examples, and the japaneese support pack. After that, it was a single reboot, then one quick trip to the preferences menu to set up your display resolution and network IP. Everything else was autodetected.
I'm typing this on an Inspiron 8200 at the moment, and I must say, its a seriously cool machine. Not cool in that sense (it'll burn your lap if you use it on your knees) but quite hackable. Check out the Dell forums, there's all sorts of help about doing everything from upgrading your video card (there is talk about stuffing the mobile NV30 in Inspirons when it comes out) to upgrading your LCD screen. One thing, though, that pissed me off about the article was its response to my font sizes. The 8200 (and the 8100 that the article is about) have ridiculously high res (SXGA+ and UXGA) screens. On my 1600x1200 screen, the fonts are turned up quite large. Everything on the page wasa screwy. Oh when will vector graphics GUIs come out?
The friggin thing is quad core with 128MB of cache per chip and like 680 million transistors. At 1.5 volts (the more likely voltage for a chip of its die size) that's 150 watts, which is entirely reasonable given that some athlons are north of 50 watts.
Apple people are such morons. A few years ago, Compaq got lambasted for making proprietory motherboards. They promptly stopped that practice. Yet, Apple people *like* their proprietory crap. You should be asking for higher quality, less troublesome open hardware, not pretending that proprietory hardware is okay at any cost.
Huh? Which ones? The only ones I could find are based on the old Rage chips. The new Sun cards (the Elite3d-lite and the XVR-1000) are based on 3D labs chipsets.
Since when is content a fucking service? Content is a product. It may be a low-brow product (like anything on FOX or toilet bowl cleaner) or a high-brow product (like jewelery) but it is still a product. I can hug it and cuddle it or stomp it into the dirt if I want to. Now, if it was a service, things would be different. I don't encourage you to hug or cuddle or stomp on your maid. But it's not. Its a product, and once I've forked over the $50 or whatever it costs its mine.
I suspect that we store the information necessary to do physical motions in a very lightweight format. >>>>>>> It's in XML of course! Isn't everything nowadays?
I don't see any Solaris drivers on ATI's website. Thus, Sun must be writing drivers. There is also nothing more recent than the Rage Pro Turbo. Even if ATI wrote those drivers (and they didn't) 3D back then was completely different. Hell, the Rage Pro didn't even do multitexturing!
Hmm. ATI's drivers sucked with the Radeon series, and guess what? They sucked with the Radeon 8500 as well! And they sucked back in the Rage 128 days also! S3 sucked back in the ViRGE days, and sucked more recently in the Savage days. Past history is a very good indicator of future performance. Its up to Trident to overcome their past history. Until then, they deserve the negative response they get.
The Radeon 9700 is getting nearly that (19.2 GB/sec) with current technologies. In 2000, this would have been impressive. Now, its not nearly enough to make for a good architecture.
Re:Bumps the Mig-19 from my list
on
IBM's Deep View
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· Score: 2
We'll, its more like 60 fps average, though. For most people as long as it doesn't go below 40-50 fps minimum it looks fine.
Re:Bandwidth...
on
IBM's Deep View
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· Score: 5, Informative
Umm, just over 8 gigabits per second is nothing. That's about 1 GB/sec, and an 8x AGP (2 GB/sec) graphics adapter (Radeon 9700) would have no trouble handling that data rate. Besides, you don't have to pump *all* of that data over the AGP bus. You send only display lists and textures and whatnot over the AGP bus. The local graphics card (where the actual data rate would hit near 1 GB/sec) has (on a Radeon 9700) about 20 GB/sec of bandwidth.
Re:Bumps the Mig-19 from my list
on
IBM's Deep View
·
· Score: 2
Well, the referesh rate on an LCD doesn't matter that much. 56 HZ doesn't cause any flicker. And its low enough ( 25 ms response time) that you probably wouldn't see any ghosting in games.
Actually, the same level of effort wouldn't do much to get stuff like Quicken working. Games are pretty emulatable to begin with. They spend most of their time in their own engine code, and only call out to the operating system for some very specific services (memory management, file I/O, and threads). As long as you can get these basic things working, along with DirectX (which is a very specific and well-documented target) you can run most games. Application software, on the other hand, calls all sorts of uncommon, freaky Win32 functions. Getting that sort of app to work is much, much harder.
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Well, I compiled all the software on my Gentoo system with GCC 3.1, presuming the ABI would be stable. It worked perfectly fine (no crashes, ever). Well, its a couple of days of recompiling for me, I guess.
propper hardware or setup a processing farm.
>>>>>>>>>
I don't know if PCs *aren't* proper hardware. PC platforms today are very powerful. Let's compare a dual processor Hammer setup to a dual processor Sun Blade 2000. The Hammer clearly wins in the CPU speed department, the UltraSparcs in the Blade already lab behind a high-end P4. The Hammer wins in memory bandwidth (5.4 GB/sec vs 2.4 to 4.8 GB/sec). The Hammer wins bus bandwidth (6.4 GB/sec per processor vs 4.8 GB/sec). The Hammer, if equiped with a relatively cheap Quadro 4 graphics card, is extremely competitive (within 10-20%) in the graphics department. So, for something like $6000 you can have a digital video workstation that rivals a Sun costing many times more. If Hammer were 32-bit, it would be a huge lost opportunity for the digital video market.
Some points:
1) PCs are the fastest machines you can get until you get to workstations costing several times as much. None of the low end Sun or SGI machines can touch a good dual proc PC for performance.
2) PCs are pervasive. If you aren't rich and want to use your machine for some prosumer video editing, what are you to do? PCs allow people who otherwise could not enter this field to enter it.
3) RAM is dirt cheap.
Thus, if the only thing stopping PCs from being good low end video editing workstations is an artificial RAM limit, then why not move to 64 bits and get rid of it?
Apple uses proprietary boards so they can offer features like autoswitching networking (just plug in an ordinary ethernet cable between two macs, and the two computers show up on each others local network)
>>>>>
On PC's, it's $10 for a cross-over cable. Big deal.
target disk mode (use a scsi or firewire cable between two macs, and one computer becomes a HDD on the second computer)
>>>>>>>
In WinXP, you have firewire networking built in as well. Essentially the same thing, but you still have to deal with security (which is a good thing).
, instant dynamic network configuration (change your IP/ or configure multiple network devices with just a few clicks, no restarts),
>>>>>>
And this is different from Win2k+/Linux how?
dynamically driving multiple monitors with multiple cards (I can plug in two graphics cards, and two monitors, then tell the mac which monitor to drive with which card, while its on.)
>>>>>>>>
Been able to do this since Windows 98 (maybe SE).
and USB/Firewire plug and play ease that's still years ahead of windows (oh look, it's the windows hardware manager, again...). On the portables, multimonitor/external monitor support is so slick, it's enough to make a Wintel laptop user cry.
>>>>>>>
Specifically how?
Not really a valid comparison. If you are comparing Apple vs Intel, and you compare a $1000 iMac circa 2000 vs a $1000 dollar Dell circa 2000, its a very valid comparison. Both are in wide circulation, and give a very good picture of the state of the two systems in the real world, not just in the bleeding edge lab benches. Similarly, both Windows 2000 and Redhat 7.3 are extremely widely deployed. Using Windows NT would have been unfair (since it is no longer supported) and since Windows XP hasn't taken off like MS had hoped, it wouldn't have been the best choice either. If you go into a server room today, you'll most likely find Win2k or Redhat 7.x. Given that they're both roughly the same age, the article (if anything) is just slightly out of date, not biased.
Well, the NVIDIA drivers supposedly have pretty good support.
Actually, QE doesn't really get around it. If you look at the PowerPoint Apple put out, all QE does is accelerated compositing of windows to the desktop and accelerates stuff like the genie effect. It doesn't seem to accelerate the actual drawing of PDF paths (even though it would be trivial with current OpenGL hardware to do so).
How is this rigged. 7.3 isn't really any different from 7.0, which was released in 2000 as well. Besides, the Sony machine came installed with Windows 2000 Pro, which would tend to mean that the machine was built for it (ie. all hardware was supported out of box).
Heck, the Gentoo manual install isn't even tricky if you read the instructions. Heck, it is even REAL easy.
>>>>>>>>>
He he. I've got it down to about ten minutes (stage3 tarballs). After having to do it nearly a dozen times while I hosed my system continuously trying to prelink it, I got to the point where the install commands had commited itself to muscle memory. Finally got a clue and just xfsdump'ed an installed system image*.
* Which, btw, is just one of the cool things you can do totally easily in Linux (just man xfsdump; xfsdump [options]) yet you need to read tons of MSDN articles and figure out complex GUI programs to do in Windows.
Redhat certainly does have a lead here, given that it has tons of help info in the left hand pane, and the setup tool is graphical, while Microsoft's is text-menu based.
Both pale in comparison to the ease of installing BeOS (back in the day). First, a nice graphical menu allowed you to partition your disk, or simply choose the whole disk as the target. Then, a simple list allowed you to install the base system, the examples, and the japaneese support pack. After that, it was a single reboot, then one quick trip to the preferences menu to set up your display resolution and network IP. Everything else was autodetected.
I'm typing this on an Inspiron 8200 at the moment, and I must say, its a seriously cool machine. Not cool in that sense (it'll burn your lap if you use it on your knees) but quite hackable. Check out the Dell forums, there's all sorts of help about doing everything from upgrading your video card (there is talk about stuffing the mobile NV30 in Inspirons when it comes out) to upgrading your LCD screen. One thing, though, that pissed me off about the article was its response to my font sizes. The 8200 (and the 8100 that the article is about) have ridiculously high res (SXGA+ and UXGA) screens. On my 1600x1200 screen, the fonts are turned up quite large. Everything on the page wasa screwy. Oh when will vector graphics GUIs come out?
The friggin thing is quad core with 128MB of cache per chip and like 680 million transistors. At 1.5 volts (the more likely voltage for a chip of its die size) that's 150 watts, which is entirely reasonable given that some athlons are north of 50 watts.
Apple people are such morons. A few years ago, Compaq got lambasted for making proprietory motherboards. They promptly stopped that practice. Yet, Apple people *like* their proprietory crap. You should be asking for higher quality, less troublesome open hardware, not pretending that proprietory hardware is okay at any cost.
Huh? Which ones? The only ones I could find are based on the old Rage chips. The new Sun cards (the Elite3d-lite and the XVR-1000) are based on 3D labs chipsets.
Since when is content a fucking service? Content is a product. It may be a low-brow product (like anything on FOX or toilet bowl cleaner) or a high-brow product (like jewelery) but it is still a product. I can hug it and cuddle it or stomp it into the dirt if I want to. Now, if it was a service, things would be different. I don't encourage you to hug or cuddle or stomp on your maid. But it's not. Its a product, and once I've forked over the $50 or whatever it costs its mine.
I suspect that we store the information necessary to do physical motions in a very lightweight format.
>>>>>>>
It's in XML of course! Isn't everything nowadays?
I don't see any Solaris drivers on ATI's website. Thus, Sun must be writing drivers. There is also nothing more recent than the Rage Pro Turbo. Even if ATI wrote those drivers (and they didn't) 3D back then was completely different. Hell, the Rage Pro didn't even do multitexturing!
Hmm. ATI's drivers sucked with the Radeon series, and guess what? They sucked with the Radeon 8500 as well! And they sucked back in the Rage 128 days also! S3 sucked back in the ViRGE days, and sucked more recently in the Savage days. Past history is a very good indicator of future performance. Its up to Trident to overcome their past history. Until then, they deserve the negative response they get.
But the Radeon 9700 is available for benchmarking. Benchmarks are on the anandtech site.
The Radeon 9700 is getting nearly that (19.2 GB/sec) with current technologies. In 2000, this would have been impressive. Now, its not nearly enough to make for a good architecture.
We'll, its more like 60 fps average, though. For most people as long as it doesn't go below 40-50 fps minimum it looks fine.
Umm, just over 8 gigabits per second is nothing. That's about 1 GB/sec, and an 8x AGP (2 GB/sec) graphics adapter (Radeon 9700) would have no trouble handling that data rate. Besides, you don't have to pump *all* of that data over the AGP bus. You send only display lists and textures and whatnot over the AGP bus. The local graphics card (where the actual data rate would hit near 1 GB/sec) has (on a Radeon 9700) about 20 GB/sec of bandwidth.
Well, the referesh rate on an LCD doesn't matter that much. 56 HZ doesn't cause any flicker. And its low enough ( 25 ms response time) that you probably wouldn't see any ghosting in games.
Actually, the same level of effort wouldn't do much to get stuff like Quicken working. Games are pretty emulatable to begin with. They spend most of their time in their own engine code, and only call out to the operating system for some very specific services (memory management, file I/O, and threads). As long as you can get these basic things working, along with DirectX (which is a very specific and well-documented target) you can run most games. Application software, on the other hand, calls all sorts of uncommon, freaky Win32 functions. Getting that sort of app to work is much, much harder.