A PowerPC Mac is almost a regular PC. You can use standard memory, hard drives, optical drives, etc. The graphics cards are standard, but the BIOS in them is not. It's usually pretty trivial, though, to flash a Mac BIOS onto a regular PC card.
The new Intel Macs are regular PCs. Within the limits of the form-factor, they are just as upgradable as a PC. For example, you can pop out the CPU on an iMac and stick in whatever Core Duo chip you want. You can't upgrade the motherboards on the current set of Intel Macs, but that's mostly a result of the fact that the iMac and Macbook use laptop components, and thus the motherboards use a custom form-factor.
Being happy about being able to run Windows isn't out of any thrill of running Windows. It's a pragmatic issue: now, we can run software we can't find on OS X on the Mac. Better yet, with virtualization, we can run that software in a comfortable OS X environment. The net result is that we no longer have to keep a PC around if there is some piece of software we need to run occasionally.
The PS3 isn't built with off the shelf parts. The RSX is custom-made for Sony, and the Cell CPU was developed by a consortium of Sony, IBM, and Toshiba. Around $400m went into the design of Cell (which is about in line for the cost of a modern CPU design), several hundred million went into fabrication technology (Sony will manufacture the Cell and RSX chips), and a non-trivial amount probably went into board design (there are tons of multi-GHz signals running around a PS3 motherboard). Not to mention the software development costs (OS, OpenGL/OpenML/OpenVG stacks, the online gameplay backbone, developer tools, etc).
Many inertial navigation systems are based on accelerometers. If you can measure acceleration, you can integrate it to get velocity and position. The Wii controller and the PS3 controller don't seem any different in this regard.
OS X is a desktop OS. It's server performance is mostly irrelevent. Software options are also irrelevent to the quality of the OS itself, though it should be pointed out that while the OS X software library is smaller, it's also far higher quality. Lastly, Windows may very well have more programming frameworks, but its main APIs are nowhere near as good as Cocoa.
What does bypass ratio have to do with anything? Turboshafts don't have bypass ratios, because they don't have fans. Turbojets don't have bypass ratios either --- otherwise they'd be turbofans...
You've got a point that the gas generator in a turboshaft and a turbojet are optimized for different things, but saying that a turboshaft is a turbojet with an extra turbine, a gearbox, and a shaft is a good first-order approximation. Indeed, many turboshafts (eg: RR AE1107C) share a common engine core with turbofans or turbojets (eg: RR AE3007).
You've also got a point in that the highest thrust engines are super-high bypass turbofans like the GE90 or Trent 900, but that doesn't change the fact that turbojets are still designed to produce a lot of thrust. A turboshaft, properly converted to a turbojet, should also produce a lot of thrust (in the case of this engine, perhaps 1000+ lbs).
Which has what to do with terrorists in the US again?
Frankly, I don't see what's so special about the Kurds. If saving lives were the goal, then it'd be far more efficient to just ship $10bn worth of food aid to Africa. If security were the goal, it'd be far more efficient to invade Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Sudan. If regional stability were the goal, it'd be more efficient to invade Iran.
I'm no pacifist and I'm no dirty hippy. I'm all to aware that war is a part of human life. However, of all the wars we could be fighting right now, Iraq makes the least sense (well, except maybe invading Italy...)
You think Apple would make a killing selling their software for PC, but then you say that all that software is maybe worth $100 more? Huh? Microsoft gets away with charging $150-$300 for Windows, and OS X is simply better.
Yes, it can be done without violating Apple's copyright. That's exactly what's being done in this case --- a small exerpt used for criticism the work is not a violation of copyright.
Ever try and open a 15" laptop in coach? Ever feel conspicuous opening up a big silver laptop in a meeting or on a class? There are absolutely tons of reasons for having small (~12") laptops, which is why everyone makes them.
I have to agree with you. I originally bought a "desktop replacement" Inspiron 8200. It was fast, but it was the worst of both worlds. It wasn't expandable as a desktop, and it was too big, heavy, and hot to use comfortably as a laptop (eg: no opening it on an airline tray table, for example). I finally decided to screw convergence, and got myself a big PowerMac and am looking to get on of the 13" Macbooks.
Apple can't use single-core as a differentiator for the consumer and pro lines. Look at Intel's pricing scheme --- a Duo costs only a tiny bit more than a Solo. Intel wants dual-core CPUs at all levels of the market --- Apple can't get away with offering a Solo in a $1000 machine.
There are three things working against dedicated graphics:
1) Cost 2) Size 3) Power
Especially in the 12" iBook, the space and cost saved by integrated graphics is going to be non-trivial. The power dissipation will also be a factor. The 1.67 GHz Core Duo uses extremely little power. At that level, even an X1300 is going to cause the battery life to go down significantly. For the iBook, where portability, cost, and battery life are important driving factors, integrated graphics make perfect sense.
Uh, by all accounts, terrorism has increased since the US occupation. Terrorism thrives under anarchy or a sympathetic government. Iraq under Saddam was neither. In any case, the fact that no Iraqi terrorists were fighting in the US is irrelevent. How many attacks have there been on US soil by Iraquis, before the occupation?
Unless you're a Calvinist, usury is looked down upon by most of the modern Christian faiths as well. The Pope spoke against the practice (which was still banned by the Church), as late as 1745.
The underlying point is that capitalism isn't really compatible with your beliefs. The true Christians are the Calvinists and Puritans of the world, who had the balls to actually take their beliefs to their logical conclusion, and actually live the way the Bible says to live.
Trouble is that that kind of engine isn't designed to do that. It's a T-58 engine, a turboshaft engine off of a helicopter. While the engine on a jet is designed to shoot lots of hot air out the back, producing thrust to drive the jet forward, turboshafts are designed to, well, turn a shaft, to turn a rotor blade. In other words, they're torquey, not thrusty, and helicopters don't go fast because of the engine exhaust, they go fast because of the rotor.
In a more detailed article, they reported that he converted the engine to a turbojet by taking out the shaft turbine, the gearbox, and sticking in a nozzle. Since a turboshaft is just a turbojet with these extra components, it's quite a reasonable conversion.
A delay could mean that they're taking extra time to perfect the code, but it more often means that "the code is unshipable, we need more time to fix it". These fixes, of course, only get done to the point where the code is shippable, not to the point where the code is good.
Now, one could give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, but given the previous knowledge we have, such as the fact that they scrapped six months of code development and had to rewrite it, the second scenario seems more likely.
Reiser4 is transaction-oriented, just like ZFS. The two actually use a similar principle (not journaling) to maintain consistency, based on COW'ing blocks in a tree, then committing the change atomically by swapping the pointer to the root of the tree in the parent node. Reiser4, however, instead of using the traditional block tree ZFS does, uses "dancing trees", which is kind of a B*-tree with ideas from log-structured filesystems mixed in.
They can be clocked higher, but the timings must be relaxed for them to operate at that speed. It's a limitation of the DRAM core, not the interface. The bus could be widened, but that doesn't help latency. The big problem with modern machines is actually not bandwidth, but latency. The AMD64, for example, gains almost nothing with DDR2, even with an almost doubling of bandwidth, because latency is not reduced.
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A PowerPC Mac is almost a regular PC. You can use standard memory, hard drives, optical drives, etc. The graphics cards are standard, but the BIOS in them is not. It's usually pretty trivial, though, to flash a Mac BIOS onto a regular PC card.
The new Intel Macs are regular PCs. Within the limits of the form-factor, they are just as upgradable as a PC. For example, you can pop out the CPU on an iMac and stick in whatever Core Duo chip you want. You can't upgrade the motherboards on the current set of Intel Macs, but that's mostly a result of the fact that the iMac and Macbook use laptop components, and thus the motherboards use a custom form-factor.
Being happy about being able to run Windows isn't out of any thrill of running Windows. It's a pragmatic issue: now, we can run software we can't find on OS X on the Mac. Better yet, with virtualization, we can run that software in a comfortable OS X environment. The net result is that we no longer have to keep a PC around if there is some piece of software we need to run occasionally.
Crystal Chronicles sucked donkey balls on the GC. Why do you expect it to be any better on the Wii?
The PS3 isn't built with off the shelf parts. The RSX is custom-made for Sony, and the Cell CPU was developed by a consortium of Sony, IBM, and Toshiba. Around $400m went into the design of Cell (which is about in line for the cost of a modern CPU design), several hundred million went into fabrication technology (Sony will manufacture the Cell and RSX chips), and a non-trivial amount probably went into board design (there are tons of multi-GHz signals running around a PS3 motherboard). Not to mention the software development costs (OS, OpenGL/OpenML/OpenVG stacks, the online gameplay backbone, developer tools, etc).
Many inertial navigation systems are based on accelerometers. If you can measure acceleration, you can integrate it to get velocity and position. The Wii controller and the PS3 controller don't seem any different in this regard.
How can you type 'Wii-mote" and not want to kill yourself?
Yeah, but you're stuck playing shitty PC RPGs...
Give me a good console RPG any day.
Because PC games suck compared to console games? Aside from first person shooters and RTSs, there aren't any PC games worth playing.
OS X is a desktop OS. It's server performance is mostly irrelevent. Software options are also irrelevent to the quality of the OS itself, though it should be pointed out that while the OS X software library is smaller, it's also far higher quality. Lastly, Windows may very well have more programming frameworks, but its main APIs are nowhere near as good as Cocoa.
What does bypass ratio have to do with anything? Turboshafts don't have bypass ratios, because they don't have fans. Turbojets don't have bypass ratios either --- otherwise they'd be turbofans...
You've got a point that the gas generator in a turboshaft and a turbojet are optimized for different things, but saying that a turboshaft is a turbojet with an extra turbine, a gearbox, and a shaft is a good first-order approximation. Indeed, many turboshafts (eg: RR AE1107C) share a common engine core with turbofans or turbojets (eg: RR AE3007).
You've also got a point in that the highest thrust engines are super-high bypass turbofans like the GE90 or Trent 900, but that doesn't change the fact that turbojets are still designed to produce a lot of thrust. A turboshaft, properly converted to a turbojet, should also produce a lot of thrust (in the case of this engine, perhaps 1000+ lbs).
YIAAAE (Yes, I am an aerospace engineer).
Which has what to do with terrorists in the US again?
Frankly, I don't see what's so special about the Kurds. If saving lives were the goal, then it'd be far more efficient to just ship $10bn worth of food aid to Africa. If security were the goal, it'd be far more efficient to invade Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Sudan. If regional stability were the goal, it'd be more efficient to invade Iran.
I'm no pacifist and I'm no dirty hippy. I'm all to aware that war is a part of human life. However, of all the wars we could be fighting right now, Iraq makes the least sense (well, except maybe invading Italy...)
You think Apple would make a killing selling their software for PC, but then you say that all that software is maybe worth $100 more? Huh? Microsoft gets away with charging $150-$300 for Windows, and OS X is simply better.
Yes, it can be done without violating Apple's copyright. That's exactly what's being done in this case --- a small exerpt used for criticism the work is not a violation of copyright.
Visual Studio? Sissy. Real men run emacs and code in Lisp. And they run it on milky-white iBooks :)
Ever try and open a 15" laptop in coach? Ever feel conspicuous opening up a big silver laptop in a meeting or on a class? There are absolutely tons of reasons for having small (~12") laptops, which is why everyone makes them.
I have to agree with you. I originally bought a "desktop replacement" Inspiron 8200. It was fast, but it was the worst of both worlds. It wasn't expandable as a desktop, and it was too big, heavy, and hot to use comfortably as a laptop (eg: no opening it on an airline tray table, for example). I finally decided to screw convergence, and got myself a big PowerMac and am looking to get on of the 13" Macbooks.
Apple can't use single-core as a differentiator for the consumer and pro lines. Look at Intel's pricing scheme --- a Duo costs only a tiny bit more than a Solo. Intel wants dual-core CPUs at all levels of the market --- Apple can't get away with offering a Solo in a $1000 machine.
There are three things working against dedicated graphics:
1) Cost
2) Size
3) Power
Especially in the 12" iBook, the space and cost saved by integrated graphics is going to be non-trivial. The power dissipation will also be a factor. The 1.67 GHz Core Duo uses extremely little power. At that level, even an X1300 is going to cause the battery life to go down significantly. For the iBook, where portability, cost, and battery life are important driving factors, integrated graphics make perfect sense.
Uh, by all accounts, terrorism has increased since the US occupation. Terrorism thrives under anarchy or a sympathetic government. Iraq under Saddam was neither. In any case, the fact that no Iraqi terrorists were fighting in the US is irrelevent. How many attacks have there been on US soil by Iraquis, before the occupation?
Unless you're a Calvinist, usury is looked down upon by most of the modern Christian faiths as well. The Pope spoke against the practice (which was still banned by the Church), as late as 1745.
The underlying point is that capitalism isn't really compatible with your beliefs. The true Christians are the Calvinists and Puritans of the world, who had the balls to actually take their beliefs to their logical conclusion, and actually live the way the Bible says to live.
And how many terrorists were from Iraq again?
Trouble is that that kind of engine isn't designed to do that. It's a T-58 engine, a turboshaft engine off of a helicopter. While the engine on a jet is designed to shoot lots of hot air out the back, producing thrust to drive the jet forward, turboshafts are designed to, well, turn a shaft, to turn a rotor blade. In other words, they're torquey, not thrusty, and helicopters don't go fast because of the engine exhaust, they go fast because of the rotor.
In a more detailed article, they reported that he converted the engine to a turbojet by taking out the shaft turbine, the gearbox, and sticking in a nozzle. Since a turboshaft is just a turbojet with these extra components, it's quite a reasonable conversion.
A delay could mean that they're taking extra time to perfect the code, but it more often means that "the code is unshipable, we need more time to fix it". These fixes, of course, only get done to the point where the code is shippable, not to the point where the code is good.
Now, one could give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, but given the previous knowledge we have, such as the fact that they scrapped six months of code development and had to rewrite it, the second scenario seems more likely.
Reiser4 is transaction-oriented, just like ZFS. The two actually use a similar principle (not journaling) to maintain consistency, based on COW'ing blocks in a tree, then committing the change atomically by swapping the pointer to the root of the tree in the parent node. Reiser4, however, instead of using the traditional block tree ZFS does, uses "dancing trees", which is kind of a B*-tree with ideas from log-structured filesystems mixed in.
They can be clocked higher, but the timings must be relaxed for them to operate at that speed. It's a limitation of the DRAM core, not the interface. The bus could be widened, but that doesn't help latency. The big problem with modern machines is actually not bandwidth, but latency. The AMD64, for example, gains almost nothing with DDR2, even with an almost doubling of bandwidth, because latency is not reduced.