Oh for crying out out loud. How much software really makes use of Altivec anyway?
You are really reaching there. Most of the changes only need to be done once when you abstract the code but most code runs fine on G3's so it will also run fine on X86 without any SSE.
In the future, X86 will be gone. In the future, PPC will be gone.
Why should you. as a consumer care about this? When it does happen, your machine would be old and obsolete anyway regardless of what chip it has in it.
If developers continue to support universal binaries, your "old" hardware will still run the software in some fashion or another.
Do you expect vendors to continue supporting 10 year old hardware?
Whaa! My PC XT does not run windows. Whaa! My Mac Plus does not run OS X.
Cocoa is a core OS Framework/API. You would be an idiot to want to change it because you would break a lot of software other people wrote. iTunes/iLife etc... is "commercial" software but you can still mess around with the.nib files with interface builder. Nobody is forcing you to use quality software.
Way to go guys. How many of you are actually doing something to contribute to the linux community instead of putting people down constantly?
This guy was a developer contributing to open source projects which started out on linux and all you guys can do is hurl insults and belittle his contributions.
The biggest problem with linux on the desktop is not a technical one. The zealots will be the undoing of linux. Linux has become the dark side of the force.
Remember how the nerds on windows scoffed at user's issues? Remember how windows nerds had no interest in supporting cross-platform compatibility? Remember how windows mavins had no interest in standards? Remember how windows developers could not think outside the box?
Sound familiar?
The OSS movement held such promise but it has now been bogged down by zealots, rhetoric, politics and dogma. The words of RMS have practically achieved religious proportions.
Oh, and creating your own pet distro does not count in my book.
100% on software? Do support techs work for free? Did their developers work for free? Did their QA staff work for free? Will bug fixes cost Apple nothing? Is the manufacturing and package design free?
Even with hardware, that 10% margin you quote does not go completely into the profit column of the ledger, in fact most projects (hardware or software) will be in the red for the first two quarters as amortized costs are recouped, if not longer.
Any bug fixes and support will be charged against those margins for the project.
Welcome to the "real" world where beer is not "free".
Uh, no. It was just an empty shell concept that Intel tried to use to spur development of products. Apple needs Intel for chips, not industrial design ideas.
Guess what? Even if IBM had continued to produce faster chips and this switch was not going to occur, the mac that you would have bought would have been just as old and slow a year from now. *Gasp*.
Guess what else would have been true? The software you buy/use now and years into the future would have continued to work fine on your purchase. This change in the "future" changes none of that.
I'm starting to believe that people on slashdot do not know how to use google and have the attention span of a three year old.
Apple has more PPC products in the pipeline. New software will be released as ""universal" (fat) binaries. Current software will work on the new Intel machines through Rosetta.
These technologies will actually "protect" your investment in software into the future and if IBM/Freescale smarten up to produce competitive chips in the future, Apple can use them if they wish in addition to Intel's offerings. Platform independence is a good thing.
And yet, what you consider to be a joke, is currently scored at zero. I also did not find it "funny".
I know what the real situation is and you claim to know what the situation is but there is a lot of FUD being spread around here on slashdot. I'm just trying to educate the uninitiated.
You might want to think about developing your interpersonal skills. The "normal" people don't like arrogant assholes like you.
Which free software movement? There are several camps. Not everyone involved with Open Source Software agrees with/follows RMS. He may indeed be well intentioned but overly zealous which can harm the over all movement.
Zealots tends to turn off the average person from Linux.
You are confusing "Universal binaries" which will have separate #if def blocks for PPC and X86 code with Rosetta, which translates PPC code on the fly into X86 code.
If you need to use Altivec, you can include separate code for altivec and SSE.
You are worried about 68k code? Nobody writes games for 68k anymore.
I'm a windows software developer and a mac user. I use both platforms and end up using windows more because of my job. Because of this, I would say that I know some of the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms.
I say with certainty that there are several paid Apple employees that browse slashdot.
They now have 500, 000 registered developers. Most of the developers at WWDC were ok with the switch including Adobe and MSFT's MBU which both committed to supporting the Universal Binary. Watch the keynote.
Unless you happen to be RMS or a follower of his, you should not care. What you should care about is promoting a thriving OSS movement (BSD/GPL/LGPL/MIT etc..) on whichever unix or unix-like platform is dominant "and" ensuring that your code is as portable as possible to other *nix platforms.
How is this insightful? Apple has been using "commodity" hardware for years now. They just happened to use their own Chipsets, motherboards and PPC CPUs. Commodity hardware is a "wide" range of hardware with differing quality and "price". Don't expect them to use onboard video any time soon.
The attraction of linux "was" that it was the only viable alternative on X86, not that ran on the bottom of the barrel X86 hardware.
I keep on hearing you guys harping on about really cheap hardware but how many of you actually buy that really cheap crap yourselves? I would guess, not many of you. You are hypocrites using them as a strawman.
It depends on what you consider "expensive". Will it cost more? Probably. Will it offer greater value? That is entirely subjective but chances are that people might be interested in a box that is competitively priced with value added software that does not crash and is not prone to viruses "and" runs the most popular commercial apps.
Value is subjective but TCO can affect the value proposition for many people. Ask yourself, how valuable is my time? Ask yourself, how valuable is the time of the Average Joe is is not a computer "enthusiast"?
There will definitely be an impact in the "average joe" home user market.
WTF is your problem? Did this news screw up your mac somehow? Did you RTFA? They will not allow OS X to run on non-Apple Intels.
Will this change make your purchase somehow less useful? The major developers will support the Universal Binary which will include native code for both Intel and PPC.
The next version of OS X will also support PPC.
If you don't know what you are going to do with it, then give it to me.
For crying out loud, RTFA, learn to use google and get laid.
They also did not lower the price on their PPC compilers or help Apple integrate it into their Xcode build toolchain.
Re:Amazing: Apple is/was lying on CPUs performance
on
Apple Switching to Intel
·
· Score: 2, Informative
What OS was the P4 running in the previous tests? Windows. There is your answer. Check out the fine print on the PC Mag tests. The magazine omitted the delay caused GDI in the initialization of the plug-ins. If the delay had been included, even the "G4" machines wiped the floor with the P4's. They also used far smaller datasets to make the windows boxes look better in the magazine tests.
Using large datasets stress test both the computational ability of the hardware "and" the i/o abilities of the underlying OS not to mention memory management.
Is it not possible that a different OS might provide different performance? Maybe windows really does suck bad.
Slashdot Mirror
You are really reaching there. Most of the changes only need to be done once when you abstract the code but most code runs fine on G3's so it will also run fine on X86 without any SSE.
Why should you. as a consumer care about this? When it does happen, your machine would be old and obsolete anyway regardless of what chip it has in it.
If developers continue to support universal binaries, your "old" hardware will still run the software in some fashion or another.
Do you expect vendors to continue supporting 10 year old hardware?
Whaa! My PC XT does not run windows. Whaa! My Mac Plus does not run OS X.
What's this?? form_cat=309
http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php
or this? http://freshmeat.net/browse/839/ What about http://fink.sourceforge.net/ or http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/ or http://www.metadistribution.org/macos/?
Finally this http://www.apple.com/opensource/.
RMS is interested in his personal crusade, not freedom. Freedom must not have artificial limits.
This guy was a developer contributing to open source projects which started out on linux and all you guys can do is hurl insults and belittle his contributions.
The biggest problem with linux on the desktop is not a technical one. The zealots will be the undoing of linux. Linux has become the dark side of the force.
Remember how the nerds on windows scoffed at user's issues? Remember how windows nerds had no interest in supporting cross-platform compatibility? Remember how windows mavins had no interest in standards? Remember how windows developers could not think outside the box?
Sound familiar?
The OSS movement held such promise but it has now been bogged down by zealots, rhetoric, politics and dogma. The words of RMS have practically achieved religious proportions.
Oh, and creating your own pet distro does not count in my book.
Even with hardware, that 10% margin you quote does not go completely into the profit column of the ledger, in fact most projects (hardware or software) will be in the red for the first two quarters as amortized costs are recouped, if not longer.
Any bug fixes and support will be charged against those margins for the project.
Welcome to the "real" world where beer is not "free".
Uh, no. It was just an empty shell concept that Intel tried to use to spur development of products. Apple needs Intel for chips, not industrial design ideas.
Now Intel has a partner that is willing to think outside of the clone box.
Bios runs in Realmode.
Guess what? Even if IBM had continued to produce faster chips and this switch was not going to occur, the mac that you would have bought would have been just as old and slow a year from now. *Gasp*.
Guess what else would have been true? The software you buy/use now and years into the future would have continued to work fine on your purchase. This change in the "future" changes none of that.
I'm starting to believe that people on slashdot do not know how to use google and have the attention span of a three year old.
Apple has more PPC products in the pipeline. New software will be released as ""universal" (fat) binaries. Current software will work on the new Intel machines through Rosetta.
These technologies will actually "protect" your investment in software into the future and if IBM/Freescale smarten up to produce competitive chips in the future, Apple can use them if they wish in addition to Intel's offerings. Platform independence is a good thing.
Unless you have been under a rock, Intel now agrees that Clockspeed != performance. AMD is a perfect example of that as is the Pentium M core.
What Apple was saying was generally true at the time for FPU heavy tasks.
There did come a point where clockspeed started to overtake efficient design but then Intel hit the 4 Ghz wall with the P4 Netburst core.
Clockspeed is one of "many" factors contributing to performance.
Zealots? Pot, meet Kettle.
I know what the real situation is and you claim to know what the situation is but there is a lot of FUD being spread around here on slashdot. I'm just trying to educate the uninitiated.
You might want to think about developing your interpersonal skills. The "normal" people don't like arrogant assholes like you.
Honestly, you are not doing anyone any favours with that attitude. Enemy? That is the cry of the zealot/fanatic.
I realize that the OSS movement is not Freeware. Thanks for stating the obvious.
Zealots tends to turn off the average person from Linux.
The development documentation mentions X86 all over the place.
You are confusing "Universal binaries" which will have separate #if def blocks for PPC and X86 code with Rosetta, which translates PPC code on the fly into X86 code.
If you need to use Altivec, you can include separate code for altivec and SSE.
You are worried about 68k code? Nobody writes games for 68k anymore.
So you long of the days when Apple was going into the toilet with Scully at the helm then?
I say with certainty that there are several paid Apple employees that browse slashdot.
Shell and command line toolset = open source
Webcore = open source
You were saying? The GUI and some of the frameworks are not open source but you have to have something for Apple to sell right?
They now have 500, 000 registered developers. Most of the developers at WWDC were ok with the switch including Adobe and MSFT's MBU which both committed to supporting the Universal Binary. Watch the keynote.
Unless you happen to be RMS or a follower of his, you should not care. What you should care about is promoting a thriving OSS movement (BSD/GPL/LGPL/MIT etc..) on whichever unix or unix-like platform is dominant "and" ensuring that your code is as portable as possible to other *nix platforms.
The attraction of linux "was" that it was the only viable alternative on X86, not that ran on the bottom of the barrel X86 hardware.
I keep on hearing you guys harping on about really cheap hardware but how many of you actually buy that really cheap crap yourselves? I would guess, not many of you. You are hypocrites using them as a strawman.
Value is subjective but TCO can affect the value proposition for many people. Ask yourself, how valuable is my time? Ask yourself, how valuable is the time of the Average Joe is is not a computer "enthusiast"?
There will definitely be an impact in the "average joe" home user market.
Will this change make your purchase somehow less useful? The major developers will support the Universal Binary which will include native code for both Intel and PPC.
The next version of OS X will also support PPC.
If you don't know what you are going to do with it, then give it to me.
For crying out loud, RTFA, learn to use google and get laid.
They also did not lower the price on their PPC compilers or help Apple integrate it into their Xcode build toolchain.
Using large datasets stress test both the computational ability of the hardware "and" the i/o abilities of the underlying OS not to mention memory management.
Is it not possible that a different OS might provide different performance? Maybe windows really does suck bad.