I don't know if arithmetic is the whole deal, though. Arithmetically, the new iMac is a good deal. If you're in the market for a dual-core machine, you're going to find that even the cheaper name-brands (eg: HP) will cost you around the iMacs' $1300 or $1600 price-points when you include a good monitor. At that point, the iMac's design might just seal the deal.
Now, on the laptop side, the numbers are a bit different. Dell's Yonah notebooks will likely be a bit cheaper than Apple's. The problem is, Dell's high-end notebooks are flimsy pieces of shit. Trust me, I have one. They're reliable enough, don't get me wrong, but I can't pick the damn thing up without cringing as the thin plastic strains under my grip. Whenever I go through the airport, it'd be easier to use one hand to take it out of its case to put on the x-ray belt, but I always use two, because I get very nervous when the plastic behind the screen flexes heavily under the weight of the machine distributed over so few fingers. A PowerBook or iBook, on the other hand, those things are sturdy. I'd have no problem picking it up by the fingers of one hand (rather than with the whole hand as I use for the Dell --- weight distribution again). That piece of mind alone would be worth $500 to me over the lifetime of the notebook (ie: 50+ trips through an airport).
See, design doesn't matter so much when the computer is a box sitting by your desk. For something like a laptop, which you have to hold, carry, and look at all the time, a nice design makes a very big difference, one that is worth a decent amount of money.
The new MacTels are quite reasonably priced if you consider the fact that they are high-quality machines (more like Alienware or Sony than Dell or HP). The new iMac 2.0 GHz is a great deal, for example. For $1675, you get a Intel Core Duo T2500 along with a 250GB disk, 512MB of RAM, and a Radeon X1600 Pro 256MB graphics card. AnandTech's article showed the T2500 to be comparable to a X2 4400+ in integer and an X2 3800+ in floating-point. Let's compromise and choose the in-between model, the X2 4200+. So take an HP Pavillion, spec it out with comparable CPU, memory, disk, and GPU, you get this here. It's $1250, after a $150 mail-in-rebate. The cheapest price for a monitor comparable to the iMac 2.0 GHz's 20" LCD is for the 2005FPW, which can be had for $450 on Dell's site (though down to the upper $300's if you get a good deal). Even if you low-ball it and say you get the LCD for $350, you've already hit $1600 for the HP, and the iMac is likely a much more nicely-built machine. Yes, there is a tradeoff here between the iMac's sleek design and the HP's expandability, but given the two end up being the same price, its really hard to argue that the iMac is overpriced.
Apple PC's have been overpriced for awhile. My PowerMac G5 is quite overpriced --- its roughly the same in performance is the new iMac, but cost $1000 more without a monitor (and about $1000 more than the comparable X2 PC I have). This particular run of Apple computers, however, is quite reasonable. I don't know if that will last, but it just might.
Aerospace engineers in the United States generally still use imperial units. The main reason being that a lot of existing data is in imperial units, as are a lot of emperical equations, rules of thumb, etc.
This new Intel chips aren't any faster than the Pentium M's that were available before. They are now just dual-core standard. Look at the benchmarks Apple presented. The new Yonah is 3x faster in SPECint_rate. That means even with a single core (ie: if they'd used a Pentium-M, which has been available for awhile), it'd still be 50% faster. And of course, these new Yonah chips are only even or a little bit slower than Athlon64s at similar clock speeds. In short, the G5 is a very mediocre CPU and has been behind the curve ever since the Opteron/Athlon64 came out. This is coming from somebody who owns a dual-core G5 PowerMac.
Clock for clock, the Intels are a lot faster than the G5s. Look at the SPECint_rate scores. 32.6 for the 2.0 GHz Yonah, 10.2 for the 2.1 GHz G5. Since the Yonah is dual-core, that nets 8.15 per core per GHz for Yonah, and 4.86 per core per GHz for the G5. So that 1.8 GHz G5 is basically the same as a 1.0 GHz Core Duo.
I've got two iPods getting on two years old now, and they've work as well today as the day I got them. The biggest problem with owning an iPod long term is the infernally easy-to-scratch lucite face.
I wish I could have been in that room to ask them why the hell this issue does not create great problems for CDROM media.
To be completely fair, CD-ROM and CD-AUDIO are very different formats. The CD-AUDIO format has a very basic error recovery layer in the protocol. The CD-ROM format has another layer of much more extensive error correction on top of that. CD-AUDIO, although digital, is not close to being "bit-perfect", because its generally assumed that you'd rather hear an interpolated sample instead of hearing an audible break as the CD player goes and tries to fix a read-error.
That said, the "freezing the media" thing is probably crap.
Careful, you're making some very crucial simplifications. First, consider what signal we are trying to reproduce without error. What's stored on the CD? Of course not. The signal stored on the CD is merely an approximation of what went into the ADC. Perhaps the original input signal? Possibly. However, I'd guess that most people wanting to listen to music would rather have the output reproduce what they would hear in the studio if they were there. Therein lies the folly of assuming that a player that reproduces exactly what is on the disc is a good one.
Beyond that, no player perfecly reproduces to original input signal. They will all have some distortion, and thus will all measure differently. Now you're back to psychoacoustics --- what kind of distortion sounds bad, and what kind of distortion is bearable, even pleasureable?
And what exactly does the response curve tell you? You can say "oh, its different from the source and the iPod's output is down -0.7db at 20khz", but what does that sound like? Measurement is fine and good, but a music player is not a servo controller. Nobody cares how it measures, just how it sounds. How something sounds is a very complex function of basic measurements, along with psychoacoustics and a hearing sensitivity model. Without a full analysis of these factors, a measurement means nothing to somebody looking for an audio player.
Now, I am not saying that reading well is not a good thing, but that is all reading has on TV.
While the rest of your comments are well-taken, this one is a bit erroneous. Reading and watching TV exercise very different parts of the brain. Reading is an exercise in symbolic cognition, a faculty of the brain that underlies logical thought. The ability to reason symbolically is one of the fundamental aspects of higher human thought, and it is something that watching TV does not help develop.
To be more accurate, almost all of OS X is still compiled at a 32-bit PowerPC binary (the kernel, the GUI, etc). The only things that aren't are libsystem and the accelerate library. OS X can support fully 64-bit applications, but in 64-bit mode, the services available from the OS are very minimal (basically limited to the BSD subset). Compared to Linux and Windows, where the system is compiled as 64-bit binaries, and full services are available to 64-bit applications, OS X's 64-bit support is indeed very limited.
The G5 has a really kick-ass FPU. Two (nearly) symmetric pipelines capable of two double-precision multiply-accumulate's per cycle. The FMAC support and larger register file give it a significant per-clock advantage in certain scientific codes.
The G4 is 32-bit. The G5 is 64-bit, but most of OS X's code is 32-bit, with some very limited application-level support for 64-bit apps. It's not a fully 64-bit OS in the way Linux or Windows x64 is.
Apple can't use the number of cores to differentiate the lines. Look at the new Yonah lineup. Out of half a dozen processors, only one is not dual-core. What does this imply? Intel is moving aggressively to dual core. If they weren't, there would be no point to releasing Yonah, since the top Yonah actually clocks lower than the top Dothan. Also, look at Intel's pricing --- the dual core 1.66 GHz is only $40 more than the single core 1.66 GHz. You'd be an idiot to buy a notebook with the latter instead of the former.
No doubt about it, as far as Intel is concerned, the number of cores is part of the basic performance spec. Apple wouldn't be able to sell single-core iBooks at $1299 any more than they could sell 733 MHz G4s in the current iBook line.
To be fair, RE4's system is arguably more accurate than your average arcade 3rd peson FPS. Ever try to shoot a gun while moving? It's very difficult, and there is a reason why in the real world people who shoot guns (soldiers, policemen), are trained to do so from a stationary stance.
The problem is that each of these technologies has a prolem. Nuclear power scares midwesterners who are worried that we'll start using their back yard as a waste dumping facility. Wind power worries those who love the little birdies. Hydro power screws anybody down-stream of a hydro station, who previously depended on the free-flowing river that is now dammed up. Aquathermal (OTEC), scares the "chaos theory" butterfly flaps its wings contingent. Apparently, all the various brands of tree-huggers consider oil and coal the safest of our possible sources of energy.
My take? Let's go nuclear. Dig a big hole where Nevada used to be, and keep the waste there.
This is highly unlikely to happen. The first Intel machines are supposed to be released by mid-to-late next year. 10.5 won't see the light of day until late 2006.
Water has an enormously high heat capacity. In a typical water cooling system the water after a hot component (the CPU for example), is unlikely to be more than a degree warmer than the water before it.
The way XGL works is that it represents window buffers are textures. This requires the OpenGL driver to support the pbuffers extension, which (IIRC), none of the open source drivers do.
Exactly! Those terrorists have millions of dollars in funding, access to all sorts of cold war technology, have managed to orchastrate an intricate plot involving the simultanious hijacking of several American airliners, have managed to destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon, but they absolutely depend on Google *fricking* Earth for their maps! Please!
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I don't know if arithmetic is the whole deal, though. Arithmetically, the new iMac is a good deal. If you're in the market for a dual-core machine, you're going to find that even the cheaper name-brands (eg: HP) will cost you around the iMacs' $1300 or $1600 price-points when you include a good monitor. At that point, the iMac's design might just seal the deal.
Now, on the laptop side, the numbers are a bit different. Dell's Yonah notebooks will likely be a bit cheaper than Apple's. The problem is, Dell's high-end notebooks are flimsy pieces of shit. Trust me, I have one. They're reliable enough, don't get me wrong, but I can't pick the damn thing up without cringing as the thin plastic strains under my grip. Whenever I go through the airport, it'd be easier to use one hand to take it out of its case to put on the x-ray belt, but I always use two, because I get very nervous when the plastic behind the screen flexes heavily under the weight of the machine distributed over so few fingers. A PowerBook or iBook, on the other hand, those things are sturdy. I'd have no problem picking it up by the fingers of one hand (rather than with the whole hand as I use for the Dell --- weight distribution again). That piece of mind alone would be worth $500 to me over the lifetime of the notebook (ie: 50+ trips through an airport).
See, design doesn't matter so much when the computer is a box sitting by your desk. For something like a laptop, which you have to hold, carry, and look at all the time, a nice design makes a very big difference, one that is worth a decent amount of money.
All the current generation of iMacs and PowerMacs have dual-DVI outputs.
The new MacTels are quite reasonably priced if you consider the fact that they are high-quality machines (more like Alienware or Sony than Dell or HP). The new iMac 2.0 GHz is a great deal, for example. For $1675, you get a Intel Core Duo T2500 along with a 250GB disk, 512MB of RAM, and a Radeon X1600 Pro 256MB graphics card. AnandTech's article showed the T2500 to be comparable to a X2 4400+ in integer and an X2 3800+ in floating-point. Let's compromise and choose the in-between model, the X2 4200+. So take an HP Pavillion, spec it out with comparable CPU, memory, disk, and GPU, you get this here. It's $1250, after a $150 mail-in-rebate. The cheapest price for a monitor comparable to the iMac 2.0 GHz's 20" LCD is for the 2005FPW, which can be had for $450 on Dell's site (though down to the upper $300's if you get a good deal). Even if you low-ball it and say you get the LCD for $350, you've already hit $1600 for the HP, and the iMac is likely a much more nicely-built machine. Yes, there is a tradeoff here between the iMac's sleek design and the HP's expandability, but given the two end up being the same price, its really hard to argue that the iMac is overpriced.
Apple PC's have been overpriced for awhile. My PowerMac G5 is quite overpriced --- its roughly the same in performance is the new iMac, but cost $1000 more without a monitor (and about $1000 more than the comparable X2 PC I have). This particular run of Apple computers, however, is quite reasonable. I don't know if that will last, but it just might.
Why are there so many kooks on Slashdot? What is it about this place that attracts the ignorant and paranoid?
Aerospace engineers in the United States generally still use imperial units. The main reason being that a lot of existing data is in imperial units, as are a lot of emperical equations, rules of thumb, etc.
The thing is, it isn't two FX-55's. It's a Toledo core chip. Thus, basically its a 4800+ clocked to 2.6 GHz.
Um, they don't call them Pentium-M's, because they aren't. Intel changed the name of the brand to "Intel Core" awhile ago.
This new Intel chips aren't any faster than the Pentium M's that were available before. They are now just dual-core standard. Look at the benchmarks Apple presented. The new Yonah is 3x faster in SPECint_rate. That means even with a single core (ie: if they'd used a Pentium-M, which has been available for awhile), it'd still be 50% faster. And of course, these new Yonah chips are only even or a little bit slower than Athlon64s at similar clock speeds. In short, the G5 is a very mediocre CPU and has been behind the curve ever since the Opteron/Athlon64 came out. This is coming from somebody who owns a dual-core G5 PowerMac.
Clock for clock, the Intels are a lot faster than the G5s. Look at the SPECint_rate scores. 32.6 for the 2.0 GHz Yonah, 10.2 for the 2.1 GHz G5. Since the Yonah is dual-core, that nets 8.15 per core per GHz for Yonah, and 4.86 per core per GHz for the G5. So that 1.8 GHz G5 is basically the same as a 1.0 GHz Core Duo.
I've got two iPods getting on two years old now, and they've work as well today as the day I got them. The biggest problem with owning an iPod long term is the infernally easy-to-scratch lucite face.
I wish I could have been in that room to ask them why the hell this issue does not create great problems for CDROM media.
To be completely fair, CD-ROM and CD-AUDIO are very different formats. The CD-AUDIO format has a very basic error recovery layer in the protocol. The CD-ROM format has another layer of much more extensive error correction on top of that. CD-AUDIO, although digital, is not close to being "bit-perfect", because its generally assumed that you'd rather hear an interpolated sample instead of hearing an audible break as the CD player goes and tries to fix a read-error.
That said, the "freezing the media" thing is probably crap.
Careful, you're making some very crucial simplifications. First, consider what signal we are trying to reproduce without error. What's stored on the CD? Of course not. The signal stored on the CD is merely an approximation of what went into the ADC. Perhaps the original input signal? Possibly. However, I'd guess that most people wanting to listen to music would rather have the output reproduce what they would hear in the studio if they were there. Therein lies the folly of assuming that a player that reproduces exactly what is on the disc is a good one.
Beyond that, no player perfecly reproduces to original input signal. They will all have some distortion, and thus will all measure differently. Now you're back to psychoacoustics --- what kind of distortion sounds bad, and what kind of distortion is bearable, even pleasureable?
And what exactly does the response curve tell you? You can say "oh, its different from the source and the iPod's output is down -0.7db at 20khz", but what does that sound like? Measurement is fine and good, but a music player is not a servo controller. Nobody cares how it measures, just how it sounds. How something sounds is a very complex function of basic measurements, along with psychoacoustics and a hearing sensitivity model. Without a full analysis of these factors, a measurement means nothing to somebody looking for an audio player.
Dude, I remember that! I used to read the Redwall series (400+ pages apiece). Got a lot of pizza back then :)
Now, I am not saying that reading well is not a good thing, but that is all reading has on TV.
While the rest of your comments are well-taken, this one is a bit erroneous. Reading and watching TV exercise very different parts of the brain. Reading is an exercise in symbolic cognition, a faculty of the brain that underlies logical thought. The ability to reason symbolically is one of the fundamental aspects of higher human thought, and it is something that watching TV does not help develop.
To be more accurate, almost all of OS X is still compiled at a 32-bit PowerPC binary (the kernel, the GUI, etc). The only things that aren't are libsystem and the accelerate library. OS X can support fully 64-bit applications, but in 64-bit mode, the services available from the OS are very minimal (basically limited to the BSD subset). Compared to Linux and Windows, where the system is compiled as 64-bit binaries, and full services are available to 64-bit applications, OS X's 64-bit support is indeed very limited.
The G5 has a really kick-ass FPU. Two (nearly) symmetric pipelines capable of two double-precision multiply-accumulate's per cycle. The FMAC support and larger register file give it a significant per-clock advantage in certain scientific codes.
To bad the rest of the chip is so mediocre...
The G4 is 32-bit. The G5 is 64-bit, but most of OS X's code is 32-bit, with some very limited application-level support for 64-bit apps. It's not a fully 64-bit OS in the way Linux or Windows x64 is.
Apple can't use the number of cores to differentiate the lines. Look at the new Yonah lineup. Out of half a dozen processors, only one is not dual-core. What does this imply? Intel is moving aggressively to dual core. If they weren't, there would be no point to releasing Yonah, since the top Yonah actually clocks lower than the top Dothan. Also, look at Intel's pricing --- the dual core 1.66 GHz is only $40 more than the single core 1.66 GHz. You'd be an idiot to buy a notebook with the latter instead of the former.
No doubt about it, as far as Intel is concerned, the number of cores is part of the basic performance spec. Apple wouldn't be able to sell single-core iBooks at $1299 any more than they could sell 733 MHz G4s in the current iBook line.
To be fair, RE4's system is arguably more accurate than your average arcade 3rd peson FPS. Ever try to shoot a gun while moving? It's very difficult, and there is a reason why in the real world people who shoot guns (soldiers, policemen), are trained to do so from a stationary stance.
The problem is that each of these technologies has a prolem. Nuclear power scares midwesterners who are worried that we'll start using their back yard as a waste dumping facility. Wind power worries those who love the little birdies. Hydro power screws anybody down-stream of a hydro station, who previously depended on the free-flowing river that is now dammed up. Aquathermal (OTEC), scares the "chaos theory" butterfly flaps its wings contingent. Apparently, all the various brands of tree-huggers consider oil and coal the safest of our possible sources of energy.
My take? Let's go nuclear. Dig a big hole where Nevada used to be, and keep the waste there.
This is highly unlikely to happen. The first Intel machines are supposed to be released by mid-to-late next year. 10.5 won't see the light of day until late 2006.
Water has an enormously high heat capacity. In a typical water cooling system the water after a hot component (the CPU for example), is unlikely to be more than a degree warmer than the water before it.
The way XGL works is that it represents window buffers are textures. This requires the OpenGL driver to support the pbuffers extension, which (IIRC), none of the open source drivers do.
Exactly! Those terrorists have millions of dollars in funding, access to all sorts of cold war technology, have managed to orchastrate an intricate plot involving the simultanious hijacking of several American airliners, have managed to destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon, but they absolutely depend on Google *fricking* Earth for their maps! Please!