I'd love to know how you did that, especially as I can't even find the quad-3.0 Xeons on NewEgg. The closest I can find are the quad-2.66s, which are $1,189 each. And at two of those, you're already at over your stated $2000...
Or did you mean to compare to the "base" Mac Pro? Which isn't $4000, but is $2499 (seeing as it only has two dual 2.66s)?
Interestingly, when the motherboard is *overclocked*, the 2% increase is continued. However, when it's *underclocked*, say to 199MHz instead of "200"Mhz, then the speed suddenly matches what it's supposed to.
So... doesn't sound like a reference clock is the problem to me!
Incorrect. There's over 20 Colleges, if that's what you mean. Each college deals with supervisions (very small group tutelage), housing, and extracurricular affairs; however, the University deals with lectures and practicals, and your degree is actually from the University.
It does look pretty complicated, now that I've written it. Think of the colleges as halls of residence with tutors attached.
No real new features per se, but it's all been integrated very nicely from what I've seen from screenshots.
It's actually been rolled in to the print dialog; so hit print in ANY application, hit the fax button, and then either enter a number or use that lovely Address Book integration.
I like technology when it reaches the "well, that's the obvious way to do it" stage.
When you say uncompressed DV resolution... why use a format that isn't even DV if, by all likelihood, you're using something that came off DV? Is it to preserve the 32bpp? Or is this something you rendered yourself?
Excuse the qusetions, just a curious video n00b... I though working with DVs ~215MB/min was bad enough... less than five minutes of footage per gig! Aaargh! High Density resolution is going to murder hard disks!;)
I'm sure they did not disable hyperthreading on some tests in order to make the results better for the Dell's:)
Hehe, too true!
He actually answered a troll in his "Answering the Hate Mail" section that included this point, he said...... Also, what you think is Windows-style anti-aliasing is actually NO anti-aliasing. That's right, anti-aliasing is DISABLED in that screenshot, I turned it off.
Good spot! I'm still not convinced, though - all he says is that he's turned off antialiasing, and it's far easier to do this on XP than on Mac OS X. On Mac OS X, you have to tweak plists to switch it off, and Quartz non-antialiased fonts look like ass (the tracking and kerning get mushed, or at least they used to). However, that screenshot looks exactly how this XP machine renders text without antialiasing.
Not that that has any real effect on his arguments, but hey, picking holes in his opening statements is fun too:)
I don't think the P4 bus is point-to-point; that is, I think that on the P4 bus each subsystem effectively shares the same bus so you have overhead and bus contention. The G5 uses a point-to-point bus with each subsystem talking directly to what it should.
Or as least that's what I understood... someone care to educate me further?
As for the benchmarks, hmmm. The huge difference between Apple's SPEC of Dell and Dell's SPEC of Dell is easy to explain - Apple used GCC 3.3 on both machines, Dell uses Intel's optimised compiler. Similarly, IBM's compiler should produce better results on the PPC 970 than GCC 3.3. I can't quite figure out whether they have cheated on hyperthreading, so I'll stay mum on that (although I wouldn't be surprised if they had).
Also, despite his protestations that he's a mac user, his screenshot looks like it's on a Windows machine to me. No antialiasing...
As well as the depth of the pipeline, I believe the article also says you need to look at the width of the pipeline; it points out the G4+ is wide and shallow, the Pentium 4 is narrow and deep, and the 970 is wide and deep. You will therefore get bubbles in the 970's pipeline, but their effect is minimised and you're far less likely to get stalls.
Combine this with the more intelligent branch prediction, out-of-order execution etc in the 970, and you're probably looking at a chip which is slightly less efficient clock-for-clock than the G4+, but more efficient than the Pentium 4.
Integer performance wise, it looks like the 970 will be about equal to a Pentium 4 of 25-50% higher clockspeed; FPU-wise, and of course Altivec-wise, it looks like a monster. So; it probably won't outperform the current Pentium 4s at a lot of tasks, but will kick it about on other more specialised tasks, which is a big step over the G4+. We're not looking at a Pentium-crusher, but we are looking at something that will be vaguely competitive.
Just gotta see how well it scales, after that, and whether 64-bit will mean anything for average tasks... and when it actually happens, of course.
Here's a little constructive posting to enlighten you as to the grandparent...
The post you objected to, line-by-line:
"Would you please not use the term special-needs when you mean retard."
That is, with emphasis, "would you please not use the term special-needs when you mean retard.".
Read carefully... now laugh:)
Mr Coward posted because your comment of "It's people like you who are so politically correct that your making EVERYONE'S life/society a f**ing nightmare to live in" misses the original point... quoting again from the post you flamed, "Political Correctness is very offensive to those of us that do not try to make ourselves feel better by assigning kinder, gentler words to things while doing nothing about them."
If I had any mod points, I'd be tempted to mod you as a troll.
I don't think most of slashdot sees typos and dupes as part of the fun, judging by the comments about it whenever it crops up. Sure, it serves as a basis for discussion, but then so would posting an extra funny article a day.
IMHO, the linkup and article from Slashdot should be pretty much error-free; the trench part of slashdot always happens in the comments anyway. And it's lovely to be able to read unique stories without trawling through hundreds of comments on incorrect spellings.
Sure, sometimes things will go wrong, but with a 10-20 minute lead time on most articles after they've been posted, it shouldn't happen quite so often. And I don't think it's anything to be defended.
The SE phones allow construction of a menu via AT commands, which is trivial. As soon as you start getting onto other phones/devices, you need several things: ideally, a way to send a file/program via bluetooth and then run it, a way for that program to display menus and dialogs and send key presses, and a way for that program to communicate via bluetooth. It's a tricky combination, and one I'll have a look into after 1.0.
Wow... I made slashdot:) There goes my monthly bandwidth, on the fourth day of the new month...
As a quick note in response to the most frequently asked questions:
1) Romeo will always be free. I may need to start a bandwidth fund, but it'll always be free.
2) 1.0 will include not only full user scripting - and key press scripting for apps like mplayer which don't use applescript - but also several other cool features, including tweaking it's status as an Application.
3) 1.0 will be out soon. No, really. On the order of a single-digit amount of days, although possibly on the high end of that.
4) Support for other phones apart from Ericsson would be nice, but may be impossible. Nokia and Simiens phones with bluetooth should connect quite happily with the current codebase, but won't display any menus because they don't have the necessary hooks. I'm looking into this, potentailly by means of a java app on phones that support it, but if anyone knows an accessory-menu equivalent for Nokia/Siemens do please drop me a line.
5) The P800 will be supported when the next version of the firmware for the P800 is released.
And finally, a few cool functions most people don't seem to notice:
* Try the slider on the side of the phone when in mouse mode. (Note: in 0.5 you need to have Zoom enabled in the Universal Access prefpane)
* Make sure you have mute-on-ring enabled in the prefs, and then get someone to phone you on the mobile:)
Afraid not. At the moment, it doesn't even work with the P800 - this relies on the menu publishing capabilities that Ericsson put in phones from the T38 to the T68i.
I'm working on alternative methods for the P800 though, as it seems to be the hot new phone to have:)
Axpoint takes a xml file and uses those values and a template to generate the pdf slideshow, no? Keynote natively has the xml format, so you can just skip the middle step. Get your database app/whatever you use to generate the xml file, and just get it to modify a Keynote file instead. Instant update.
Converting xml to xml is a whole lot easier than xml to pdf...:)
I can't figure out if this is a troll, but as it's been marked Insightful....
We're talking central London. very Central London. This is all office blocks, shops, and clubhouses. Property here is really expensive, and real estate is at a premium. Widening the roads would either require rebuilding practically the whole of the area or removing pedestrian walkways. Neither is practical.
The point of the congestion charge is however to move traffic onto the public transport systems instead. Of which both the bus and tube networks are overcrowded anyway, especially the Tube. The Govn't claims the Tube isn't overcrowded, but the Underground regularly closes stations due to overcrowding and is jam-packed* for a very broad definition of 'Rush Hour'.
At the moment, of course, a couple of the arterial underground lines are closed due to a derailment that happened a couple of weeks ago. This has made it oh so much worse...
*Disclaimer: not as full as systems like the Tokyo tube, obviously, but London isn't nearly as dense and could be vastly improved.
While I agree with some of your comments, I'm not so sure about others.
1) I used to run Mac OS X 10.1 on my iMacDV quite happily - that's over three years old by now. And this was 10.1 - rather than jack up the requirements with each release, Apple have so far lowered them. This isn't a trend that's likely to continue (!) but it's a pretty nice achievemnt nonetheless. However much people complain it should have been this fast to start with, OS X did mean an enormous step up in what it was doing - full alpha compositing, etc. And the reason it was included at the time was so that OS X wouldn't change too drastically as it developed; we've been seeing a lot of changes, including API changes, but the overall technique of the OS hasn't changed and is fairly unlikely to.
I'm not saying Apple don't render old hardware obsolete, cos they do... especially some of the older graphics hardware, which still doesn't have OSX acceleration. But I wouldn't say they're always pushing up the hardware requirements; things like Quartz extreme aren't a requirement, they're an acceleration.
2) Open source-isms; Apple haven't released many totally new projects into the community, except for a few minorish things such as Rendezvous, but they have done some sterling work on some of the projects they've used. The KHTML team received an enormous amount of changes, fixes and optimisations; it's not just a one-way path, and while it may just be compliance with the licences, they're being pretty nice about it. I was working on a little app recently, wrote apple's engineers about something I was having problems with, and the guy didn't just help but sent me some of their proprietary (ie, not Darwin) code to illustrate how they had performed certain functions.
Yes, I am an Apple fan; no, I'm not an Apple zealot. For all their problems and some of their suckitude, they're also doing some rather nice things in a rather nice way.
Well, if they're not harmful to [most] humans, I'm not sure how they'll mutilate cows - unless the countryside has been invaded by robotic bovines, in which case the ufo community has something else to worry about.
Anothe nicely misleading title... after reading the article, the robot is used to drill through the porous bone of the skull. This is no mean feat by itself, reducing a 6-hour drill to a 3-hour drill, but surgeons still have to feed the robot all information on blood vessels, nerves, and sensitive areas.
That being said, it's still pretty impressive. And I thought dentists were bad enough...
It's officially the 'year of the notebook' - so that's how Apple is coping with slow processors then!
Very nice new powerbooks though - especially the 17-incher, with glowing keyboards and ambient light detection. It also adjusts the screen brightness, mmmm:)
Safari, the web browser, is actually based of KHTML - KDE's HTML library. Not bad, especially seeing as they're going to give the 'orders of magnitude' speedups back in the way of the source code.
And digs at Quark. And the rumors sites were practically all wrong. Hah. Best keynote in ages.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to know how you did that, especially as I can't even find the quad-3.0 Xeons on NewEgg. The closest I can find are the quad-2.66s, which are $1,189 each. And at two of those, you're already at over your stated $2000...
Or did you mean to compare to the "base" Mac Pro? Which isn't $4000, but is $2499 (seeing as it only has two dual 2.66s)?
Interestingly, when the motherboard is *overclocked*, the 2% increase is continued. However, when it's *underclocked*, say to 199MHz instead of "200"Mhz, then the speed suddenly matches what it's supposed to.
So... doesn't sound like a reference clock is the problem to me!
Incorrect. There's over 20 Colleges, if that's what you mean. Each college deals with supervisions (very small group tutelage), housing, and extracurricular affairs; however, the University deals with lectures and practicals, and your degree is actually from the University.
It does look pretty complicated, now that I've written it. Think of the colleges as halls of residence with tutors attached.
Jupiter being 140km?
Crikey, that puts a 2km cycle to work in perspective. No wonder I'm always turning up late!
No real new features per se, but it's all been integrated very nicely from what I've seen from screenshots.
It's actually been rolled in to the print dialog; so hit print in ANY application, hit the fax button, and then either enter a number or use that lovely Address Book integration.
I like technology when it reaches the "well, that's the obvious way to do it" stage.
That's... odd.
;)
When you say uncompressed DV resolution... why use a format that isn't even DV if, by all likelihood, you're using something that came off DV? Is it to preserve the 32bpp? Or is this something you rendered yourself?
Excuse the qusetions, just a curious video n00b... I though working with DVs ~215MB/min was bad enough... less than five minutes of footage per gig! Aaargh! High Density resolution is going to murder hard disks!
I think the news here isn't the quality of the track... it's the advertising for Apple.
So at the end of the film - if anyone's still there - there'll be, on the screen, "Soundtrack available exclusively through the Apple Music Store".
Clever marketing. I'm guessing Apple paid a ton for this, especially to make up for the lost sales...
I'm sure they did not disable hyperthreading on some tests in order to make the results better for the Dell's :)
... Also, what you think is Windows-style anti-aliasing is actually NO anti-aliasing. That's right, anti-aliasing is DISABLED in that screenshot, I turned it off.
:)
Hehe, too true!
He actually answered a troll in his "Answering the Hate Mail" section that included this point, he said...
Good spot! I'm still not convinced, though - all he says is that he's turned off antialiasing, and it's far easier to do this on XP than on Mac OS X. On Mac OS X, you have to tweak plists to switch it off, and Quartz non-antialiased fonts look like ass (the tracking and kerning get mushed, or at least they used to). However, that screenshot looks exactly how this XP machine renders text without antialiasing.
Not that that has any real effect on his arguments, but hey, picking holes in his opening statements is fun too
I don't think the P4 bus is point-to-point; that is, I think that on the P4 bus each subsystem effectively shares the same bus so you have overhead and bus contention. The G5 uses a point-to-point bus with each subsystem talking directly to what it should.
Or as least that's what I understood... someone care to educate me further?
As for the benchmarks, hmmm. The huge difference between Apple's SPEC of Dell and Dell's SPEC of Dell is easy to explain - Apple used GCC 3.3 on both machines, Dell uses Intel's optimised compiler. Similarly, IBM's compiler should produce better results on the PPC 970 than GCC 3.3. I can't quite figure out whether they have cheated on hyperthreading, so I'll stay mum on that (although I wouldn't be surprised if they had).
Also, despite his protestations that he's a mac user, his screenshot looks like it's on a Windows machine to me. No antialiasing...
As well as the depth of the pipeline, I believe the article also says you need to look at the width of the pipeline; it points out the G4+ is wide and shallow, the Pentium 4 is narrow and deep, and the 970 is wide and deep. You will therefore get bubbles in the 970's pipeline, but their effect is minimised and you're far less likely to get stalls.
Combine this with the more intelligent branch prediction, out-of-order execution etc in the 970, and you're probably looking at a chip which is slightly less efficient clock-for-clock than the G4+, but more efficient than the Pentium 4.
Integer performance wise, it looks like the 970 will be about equal to a Pentium 4 of 25-50% higher clockspeed; FPU-wise, and of course Altivec-wise, it looks like a monster. So; it probably won't outperform the current Pentium 4s at a lot of tasks, but will kick it about on other more specialised tasks, which is a big step over the G4+. We're not looking at a Pentium-crusher, but we are looking at something that will be vaguely competitive.
Just gotta see how well it scales, after that, and whether 64-bit will mean anything for average tasks... and when it actually happens, of course.
Here's a little constructive posting to enlighten you as to the grandparent...
:)
:)
The post you objected to, line-by-line:
"Would you please not use the term special-needs when you mean retard."
That is, with emphasis, "would you please not use the term special-needs when you mean retard.".
Read carefully... now laugh
Mr Coward posted because your comment of "It's people like you who are so politically correct that your making EVERYONE'S life/society a f**ing nightmare to live in" misses the original point... quoting again from the post you flamed, "Political Correctness is very offensive to those of us that do not try to make ourselves feel better by assigning kinder, gentler words to things while doing nothing about them."
See? Reading posts saves arguments
If I had any mod points, I'd be tempted to mod you as a troll.
I don't think most of slashdot sees typos and dupes as part of the fun, judging by the comments about it whenever it crops up. Sure, it serves as a basis for discussion, but then so would posting an extra funny article a day.
IMHO, the linkup and article from Slashdot should be pretty much error-free; the trench part of slashdot always happens in the comments anyway. And it's lovely to be able to read unique stories without trawling through hundreds of comments on incorrect spellings.
Sure, sometimes things will go wrong, but with a 10-20 minute lead time on most articles after they've been posted, it shouldn't happen quite so often. And I don't think it's anything to be defended.
Eeek, can't believe I forgot to submit it to the most important download site of all!
:)
The registration has been started
/me thanks Arstechnica for a good supply of beta-testers when it was first mentioned
The SE phones allow construction of a menu via AT commands, which is trivial. As soon as you start getting onto other phones/devices, you need several things: ideally, a way to send a file/program via bluetooth and then run it, a way for that program to display menus and dialogs and send key presses, and a way for that program to communicate via bluetooth. It's a tricky combination, and one I'll have a look into after 1.0.
Not yet - :)
- Frankly, I want the kudos for now
- The code is still mucky, as this is the app I learnt Cocoa and objective-c on.
But eventually, yeah, I'd quite like it to be.
Wow... I made slashdot :) There goes my monthly bandwidth, on the fourth day of the new month...
:)
As a quick note in response to the most frequently asked questions:
1) Romeo will always be free. I may need to start a bandwidth fund, but it'll always be free.
2) 1.0 will include not only full user scripting - and key press scripting for apps like mplayer which don't use applescript - but also several other cool features, including tweaking it's status as an Application.
3) 1.0 will be out soon. No, really. On the order of a single-digit amount of days, although possibly on the high end of that.
4) Support for other phones apart from Ericsson would be nice, but may be impossible. Nokia and Simiens phones with bluetooth should connect quite happily with the current codebase, but won't display any menus because they don't have the necessary hooks. I'm looking into this, potentailly by means of a java app on phones that support it, but if anyone knows an accessory-menu equivalent for Nokia/Siemens do please drop me a line.
5) The P800 will be supported when the next version of the firmware for the P800 is released.
And finally, a few cool functions most people don't seem to notice:
* Try the slider on the side of the phone when in mouse mode. (Note: in 0.5 you need to have Zoom enabled in the Universal Access prefpane)
* Make sure you have mute-on-ring enabled in the prefs, and then get someone to phone you on the mobile
Afraid not. At the moment, it doesn't even work with the P800 - this relies on the menu publishing capabilities that Ericsson put in phones from the T38 to the T68i.
:)
I'm working on alternative methods for the P800 though, as it seems to be the hot new phone to have
[Note: am in no way connected with Clicker]
Is there really much point?
:)
Axpoint takes a xml file and uses those values and a template to generate the pdf slideshow, no? Keynote natively has the xml format, so you can just skip the middle step. Get your database app/whatever you use to generate the xml file, and just get it to modify a Keynote file instead. Instant update.
Converting xml to xml is a whole lot easier than xml to pdf...
I can't figure out if this is a troll, but as it's been marked Insightful....
We're talking central London. very Central London. This is all office blocks, shops, and clubhouses. Property here is really expensive, and real estate is at a premium. Widening the roads would either require rebuilding practically the whole of the area or removing pedestrian walkways. Neither is practical.
The point of the congestion charge is however to move traffic onto the public transport systems instead. Of which both the bus and tube networks are overcrowded anyway, especially the Tube. The Govn't claims the Tube isn't overcrowded, but the Underground regularly closes stations due to overcrowding and is jam-packed* for a very broad definition of 'Rush Hour'.
At the moment, of course, a couple of the arterial underground lines are closed due to a derailment that happened a couple of weeks ago. This has made it oh so much worse...
*Disclaimer: not as full as systems like the Tokyo tube, obviously, but London isn't nearly as dense and could be vastly improved.
While I agree with some of your comments, I'm not so sure about others.
1) I used to run Mac OS X 10.1 on my iMacDV quite happily - that's over three years old by now. And this was 10.1 - rather than jack up the requirements with each release, Apple have so far lowered them. This isn't a trend that's likely to continue (!) but it's a pretty nice achievemnt nonetheless. However much people complain it should have been this fast to start with, OS X did mean an enormous step up in what it was doing - full alpha compositing, etc. And the reason it was included at the time was so that OS X wouldn't change too drastically as it developed; we've been seeing a lot of changes, including API changes, but the overall technique of the OS hasn't changed and is fairly unlikely to.
I'm not saying Apple don't render old hardware obsolete, cos they do... especially some of the older graphics hardware, which still doesn't have OSX acceleration. But I wouldn't say they're always pushing up the hardware requirements; things like Quartz extreme aren't a requirement, they're an acceleration.
2) Open source-isms; Apple haven't released many totally new projects into the community, except for a few minorish things such as Rendezvous, but they have done some sterling work on some of the projects they've used. The KHTML team received an enormous amount of changes, fixes and optimisations; it's not just a one-way path, and while it may just be compliance with the licences, they're being pretty nice about it. I was working on a little app recently, wrote apple's engineers about something I was having problems with, and the guy didn't just help but sent me some of their proprietary (ie, not Darwin) code to illustrate how they had performed certain functions.
Yes, I am an Apple fan; no, I'm not an Apple zealot. For all their problems and some of their suckitude, they're also doing some rather nice things in a rather nice way.
Yeah, but is he going to be printed the right way up, or on his side?
Well, if they're not harmful to [most] humans, I'm not sure how they'll mutilate cows - unless the countryside has been invaded by robotic bovines, in which case the ufo community has something else to worry about.
UPS, pronounced 'Oops'.
Anothe nicely misleading title... after reading the article, the robot is used to drill through the porous bone of the skull. This is no mean feat by itself, reducing a 6-hour drill to a 3-hour drill, but surgeons still have to feed the robot all information on blood vessels, nerves, and sensitive areas.
That being said, it's still pretty impressive. And I thought dentists were bad enough...
Fascinating.
:)
It's officially the 'year of the notebook' - so that's how Apple is coping with slow processors then!
Very nice new powerbooks though - especially the 17-incher, with glowing keyboards and ambient light detection. It also adjusts the screen brightness, mmmm
Safari, the web browser, is actually based of KHTML - KDE's HTML library. Not bad, especially seeing as they're going to give the 'orders of magnitude' speedups back in the way of the source code.
And digs at Quark. And the rumors sites were practically all wrong. Hah. Best keynote in ages.