I've listened to it (at least, on the previous rev of the G5s --- not the newest 2.5GHz ones) and it's not that great. Onboard sound is never great (way too close to very noise circuitry), and the G5 is no different.
The fact that it has optical in/out doesn't change the fact that it's a shitty onboard soundcard. You can get $100 PC motherboards that have optical input/output. That doesn't change the fact that a $3000 machine shouldn't come with onboard sound.
Also, most PCs in the $3000 price range don't require buying good speakers --- they come with decent external speakers in the box. Apple will sell you some, but that's ~$200 extra.
That said, I still think the dual G5s come in at a decent price. $3000 isn't too much for a *dual* 64-bit machine, especially at 2.5GHz (faster than any Opteron, which is comparable in speed clock-for-clock). However, the "Apple uses higher-quality hardware" argument that Mac people love to trot out doesn't work here. The case, the motherboard, and the CPU are very well engineered, but it's clear that Apple had to cut some corners in other parts of the machine.
Well, it's obvious that you disagree fundementally and irreconcilably with the Debian developers. To them, software *isn't* just software, but critical infrastructure in a modern society that is increasingly dependent on computers. When a tool becomes so pervasive that there are serious social ramifications involved in doing without it (consider, for example, disadvantaged children who cannot afford computers), then it becomes something a bit more than an ordinary tool.
Actually, a lot of the hardware on the G5 is pretty half-assed. Onboard sound, shitty speakers, low-end graphics card, etc. Still pretty decent price for a 2.5GHz 64-bit system.
It's not that many people consider rich people to be evil, but rather rich people who do evil things. There are lot's of rich people (eg. Warren Buffet), who have some semblance of a conscience.
Well, it's a bit more complex than that. For most chips, the IP is in the hardware, and the software is just a bit-banger. For a graphics card, you've got the GL stack, which means all sorts of nifty stuff like the command stream optimizer, shading language assembler, etc. It's a very different situation.
if someone has the source code without the hardware isn't it inherently useless to them anyway? It's not useless to ATI. Since graphics drivers are an entire OpenGL stack, there are lots of interesting things in there that you don't find in most drivers.
You'd be surprised. I have a pretty high-res dispay (133 ppi) and KDE does a better job of scaling than Windows does. The main reason is that the Qt widget set is font-sensitive, so when you increase the fonts to the appropriate size, everything else follows. KDE also has several large icon sizes available, so icons aren't a problem either. In Windows, the widget set is not font-sensitive, so you have to hope your application's author took scaling into account. And there is a hard-coded icon size, so you're stuck there as well.
This isn't a network filesystem, but a *distributed* filesystem. There is a significant difference. Also, NFS suffers from some well-known design flaws that newer network filesystems correct.
The other thing that F/OSS enforces and encourages is mediocrity. Most folks will download for free (as in beer) anything that does a "good enough" job for what they want, even though it doesn't necessarily do anything better than other offerings and is potentially more buggy and less useful.
Welcome to capitalism. Capitalism encourages mediocrity, not F/OSS. People will buy the cheapest thing that is "good enough." Better products cost more money to make, and if people won't pay for the extra quality (which they usually do not), then "good enough" well win. F/OSS is really just an edge-case of the free market, where "the cheapest thing" is close to $0 in cost.
How does 'kopete' relate to 'chat' or 'instant messaging'? How does 'Konqueror' relate to 'browsing the web'? How does 'Apollon' apply to p2p? How does 'K3b' apply to CD burning/ripping? How does Trillian relate to chat? How does Safari relate to browsing the web? How does KaZaA (or Gnutella or Morpheus) relate to p2p? How does Nero apply to CD burning?
Knowing assembly is useful. Assembly itself, as a general purpose language, is pretty much useless. A programmer should intimately know his compiler, and what sorts of machine code it generates, and then just write in the high-level language, confident that his low-level knowledge will allow him to coerce his compiler into generating good code.
Those aren't mathematical problems (except maybe P=NP). Those are engineering problems. Mathematicians show how to do something, and prove that doing something is even possible. Engineers can make it go faster.
I haven't seen a beige box PC for awhile now. True, most PC cases these days are ugly plastic jobs, but the same seems to be true of cars too, so chalk that up to bad consumer taste. A G5 looks nice, but these machines are hardly nondescript beige boxes!
Sorry, I don't believe in taking behavior-altering drugs. I mean, drugs are for when your body isn't working properly, not when it *is* working properly!
Um, X is actually a standard, unlike the windowing protocols used by MacOS and Windows. There are *way* more implementations of the X11 standard than implementations of either of the other two protocols.
You seem to still miss the point. If I want to encode 100CDs to put on my iPod, it doesn't matter if Vorbis at a certain setting will give me 150kbps for certain songs and 100kbps for other songs, as long as they average out to about 128kbps per song. My metric is quality/kbps, but its quality/kbps averaged over the whole collection of music. Its simply a weakness of CBR encoders that they can't vary their encoding rate depending on song complexity, to give you the best overall quality/size ratio over your entire collection.
There is no way in hell that would ever happen. Ever.
But it already exists. Lisp programs are stored as sexpr's, which are just a less-verbose way to do the same thing XML does. And Lisp programs can treat Lisp programs as data, just like XSLT programs, except in a natural and easy-to-program way!
Re:I'm with Tannebaum about microkernels
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You tried to replace the sound subsystem of your kernel. You would have had to do the same thing to replace the sound subsystem in Windows, but you wouldn't be able to, because you don't have the source code. Instead, you would have had to wait a couple of years for Microsoft to release their next version. Installing a driver for either system (assuming binary compatibility), is as simple as dropping a module into a module directory.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with monolithic vs microkernels --- both XP and Linux are monolithic kernels. Its simply a matter of release frequency (every month or two for Linux, once every few years for Windows), and availability of pre-compiled drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
I've listened to it (at least, on the previous rev of the G5s --- not the newest 2.5GHz ones) and it's not that great. Onboard sound is never great (way too close to very noise circuitry), and the G5 is no different.
The fact that it has optical in/out doesn't change the fact that it's a shitty onboard soundcard. You can get $100 PC motherboards that have optical input/output. That doesn't change the fact that a $3000 machine shouldn't come with onboard sound.
Also, most PCs in the $3000 price range don't require buying good speakers --- they come with decent external speakers in the box. Apple will sell you some, but that's ~$200 extra.
That said, I still think the dual G5s come in at a decent price. $3000 isn't too much for a *dual* 64-bit machine, especially at 2.5GHz (faster than any Opteron, which is comparable in speed clock-for-clock). However, the "Apple uses higher-quality hardware" argument that Mac people love to trot out doesn't work here. The case, the motherboard, and the CPU are very well engineered, but it's clear that Apple had to cut some corners in other parts of the machine.
Well, it's obvious that you disagree fundementally and irreconcilably with the Debian developers. To them, software *isn't* just software, but critical infrastructure in a modern society that is increasingly dependent on computers. When a tool becomes so pervasive that there are serious social ramifications involved in doing without it (consider, for example, disadvantaged children who cannot afford computers), then it becomes something a bit more than an ordinary tool.
Actually, a lot of the hardware on the G5 is pretty half-assed. Onboard sound, shitty speakers, low-end graphics card, etc. Still pretty decent price for a 2.5GHz 64-bit system.
It's not that many people consider rich people to be evil, but rather rich people who do evil things. There are lot's of rich people (eg. Warren Buffet), who have some semblance of a conscience.
Well, it's a bit more complex than that. For most chips, the IP is in the hardware, and the software is just a bit-banger. For a graphics card, you've got the GL stack, which means all sorts of nifty stuff like the command stream optimizer, shading language assembler, etc. It's a very different situation.
if someone has the source code without the hardware isn't it inherently useless to them anyway?
It's not useless to ATI. Since graphics drivers are an entire OpenGL stack, there are lots of interesting things in there that you don't find in most drivers.
Um, the 213T is 21.3", which is a lowly ~100 dpi.
You'd be surprised. I have a pretty high-res dispay (133 ppi) and KDE does a better job of scaling than Windows does. The main reason is that the Qt widget set is font-sensitive, so when you increase the fonts to the appropriate size, everything else follows. KDE also has several large icon sizes available, so icons aren't a problem either. In Windows, the widget set is not font-sensitive, so you have to hope your application's author took scaling into account. And there is a hard-coded icon size, so you're stuck there as well.
This isn't a network filesystem, but a *distributed* filesystem. There is a significant difference. Also, NFS suffers from some well-known design flaws that newer network filesystems correct.
I for one welcome our smelly xenophobic Slashdotter overlords?
I'd watch it, as long as Kirsten Dunst was in it!
The other thing that F/OSS enforces and encourages is mediocrity. Most folks will download for free (as in beer) anything that does a "good enough" job for what they want, even though it doesn't necessarily do anything better than other offerings and is potentially more buggy and less useful.
Welcome to capitalism. Capitalism encourages mediocrity, not F/OSS. People will buy the cheapest thing that is "good enough." Better products cost more money to make, and if people won't pay for the extra quality (which they usually do not), then "good enough" well win. F/OSS is really just an edge-case of the free market, where "the cheapest thing" is close to $0 in cost.
GPL is a partial solution? Better tell that to the kernel folks!
How does 'kopete' relate to 'chat' or 'instant messaging'? How does 'Konqueror' relate to 'browsing the web'? How does 'Apollon' apply to p2p? How does 'K3b' apply to CD burning/ripping?
How does Trillian relate to chat? How does Safari relate to browsing the web? How does KaZaA (or Gnutella or Morpheus) relate to p2p? How does Nero apply to CD burning?
Knowing assembly is useful. Assembly itself, as a general purpose language, is pretty much useless. A programmer should intimately know his compiler, and what sorts of machine code it generates, and then just write in the high-level language, confident that his low-level knowledge will allow him to coerce his compiler into generating good code.
Those aren't mathematical problems (except maybe P=NP). Those are engineering problems. Mathematicians show how to do something, and prove that doing something is even possible. Engineers can make it go faster.
Vimacs? To tell the truth, a Common-Lisp based editor with the Vi modal setup would kick ass...
I haven't seen a beige box PC for awhile now. True, most PC cases these days are ugly plastic jobs, but the same seems to be true of cars too, so chalk that up to bad consumer taste. A G5 looks nice, but these machines are hardly nondescript beige boxes!
There is no escaping reality. Humans *are* animals, and that is the simple reality of it.
But I think creating genetically-modified foods in the first place are terrorist activites!
Sorry, I don't believe in taking behavior-altering drugs. I mean, drugs are for when your body isn't working properly, not when it *is* working properly!
Um, X is actually a standard, unlike the windowing protocols used by MacOS and Windows. There are *way* more implementations of the X11 standard than implementations of either of the other two protocols.
You seem to still miss the point. If I want to encode 100CDs to put on my iPod, it doesn't matter if Vorbis at a certain setting will give me 150kbps for certain songs and 100kbps for other songs, as long as they average out to about 128kbps per song. My metric is quality/kbps, but its quality/kbps averaged over the whole collection of music. Its simply a weakness of CBR encoders that they can't vary their encoding rate depending on song complexity, to give you the best overall quality/size ratio over your entire collection.
There is no way in hell that would ever happen. Ever.
But it already exists. Lisp programs are stored as sexpr's, which are just a less-verbose way to do the same thing XML does. And Lisp programs can treat Lisp programs as data, just like XSLT programs, except in a natural and easy-to-program way!
You tried to replace the sound subsystem of your kernel. You would have had to do the same thing to replace the sound subsystem in Windows, but you wouldn't be able to, because you don't have the source code. Instead, you would have had to wait a couple of years for Microsoft to release their next version. Installing a driver for either system (assuming binary compatibility), is as simple as dropping a module into a module directory.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with monolithic vs microkernels --- both XP and Linux are monolithic kernels. Its simply a matter of release frequency (every month or two for Linux, once every few years for Windows), and availability of pre-compiled drivers.