Another interesting-sounding game that will apparently never make its way to the Mac.
A fellow on the web site commented that Mac users could probably run it with WineX. I don't have a problem with people knowing plenty about Windows and Linux and nothing at all about Macs, but if that's your background, don't try to answer questions about them.
Isn't it sad? He was feeling all smug about finding that mistake, but somehow he missed the dozen other mistakes on that line, PLUS he didn't notice the fact that they were all intentional.
Okay, this is for all of you dozens of people who admired the Windows emulation hardware cards, and wonder where they went.
First off, a general idea of what these were. Basically, in the most recent incarnations, you had a PCI card. On this PCI card you had: An Intel-compatible CPU of some sort, usually socketed Memory, usually on removable DIMMs A graphics processor with its own RAM A soundblaster 16 chip A whole bus architecture, and all the support chips
Basically, an entire motherboard, except for the PCI slots, on a PCI card. The only thing the card used the Mac for was The keyboard and mouse Sometimes other USB devices (on the last generation of cards) Mass storage devices
The back of one of these cards was educational, because right up until the end a lot of them had a giant dongol that you hooked to the back of the card. One end of the dongol was this thing with about six zillion pins. On the other end was a set of connectors, thus:
A video-out port to go to a monitor A video-in port, to plug your Mac video into if you wanted to share one monitor A printer port A joystick port
In addition, there was usually an internal connector that connected the audio out from the card to the internal audio in port for the CD player.
So basically what you had was an entire special-purpose Intel motherboard, complete with most of what you would find on a basic motherboard, in a form factor 1/4 the size of an ATX.
And the software was bloody expensive and very difficult to write, requiring a very close interfacing between the computer and the card. It had sync issues, it had DMA issues, it had all sorts of issues.
And you need to offer your solution at less than the price of a comparable PC system.
So basically, you need to provide:
1/4-size full-featured Intel motherboard-on-a-stick memory CPU Highly-engine ered, high-maintenance software
For the same price that Dell provides:
generic Intel motherboard memory CPU hard drive CD-ROM drive (or whatever)
So basically, if you want a Mac that can run both Mac and PC software at full speeds, here's what you do:
Buy a Mac. Buy a PC. Buy a KVM switch and hook them both to the same monitor and keyboard. Set up file sharing correctly.
And yes, I'm speaking as someone who has used two different and perfectly functional PC Compatibility cards, one an Apple-brand and one by Orange Micro. They were great, just as good as any PC I've ever used... and 50% more expensive.
My guess is he doesn't stay at Connectix, because my guess is Connectix will shut its doors in five and a half months, when the whole tech handover is finished.
They don't have any other viable products right now, nothing that could support a company of half their size. My guess is they fold. Eric might go to Apple, or to somewhere else, or he might just retire on what he made out of the Microsoft deal.
GCC's processor optimization is so-so for x86 and stinks for PPC. This will not change anytime soon.
The x86 has been picked over until the cows come home, and it's still not as good as some of the competing stuff. Why? Because a lot of very important ways to do optimization are, you guessed it, patented. You can license these and include them in your proprietary compiler, but if you're altering gcc and actually releasing the alterations back to the community, as Apple is, you can't use them at all.
This is why MrC, Apple's ancient optimizing PPC C compiler, still (as of last year, anyway, and I doubt anything has changed) produces code that iss on average between 15 and 30 percent faster than gcc's. I saw some bottlenecks entirely removed by MrC, where the code went up to 3 times as fast.
So yes, it will still be slow when compiled with the optimized gcc that is built for the blah blah blah. If you want to speed up the program, spend some time optimizing IT.
> Hmm, I wonder if Apple's applied for a patent on 'running old OS paradigms in virtual machines on new OS > paradigms' or whatever. Boy, wouldn't that be cool.
> If they don't, everyone will get PO'd and say "Why the hey didn't you do that?"
Oh, come on now. I don't even expect them to be shipping a real version of VPC after a year or two.
I *do* expect them to take the emulation environment, paste an app (say Microsoft Access) into it, and then sell the resulting sludge as an application. In the blink of an eye, they get to 'support' the Mac with one of their applications, and at the same time prove that the Mac is an order of magnitude slower than the PC, thus luring more people to abandon the platform.
There was a lot of speculation about 'red box' but there was never any information released to suggest that it even existed. If it did exist, it was nothing more than a pipe dream.
What you may be thinking of was the Yellow Box for Windows, which was basically supposed to be the Cocoa API implemented on Windows. Don't know why they canned it, but I could speculate.
And I'll agree with you about the online record store paying half for distribution, although I would contend that, even assuming equal volume, that's going to be significantly cheaper than running CDs to every town in America.
As for the album's share of the marginal cost of home broadband vs. dialup, that MAY be accurate for you, but you're in a pretty tiny minority around here where that is concerned... it seems to me that very few people on Slashdot would even try to live without broadband if they had any choice in the matter.
And at that point, the album's share becomes either very small (if you look at it from a mechanical bandwidth point of view) or, more properly, $0, since you've got broadband anyway, and if you're like me the fact that you're downloading something in the background doesn't slow you noticably.
Also, bear in mind that back when I had a modem connection, I used to download some pretty huge things. As long as my connection was fairly reliable (it usually was), I didn't mind starting the download, going to bed, getting up in the morning and going to work, and then coming home that next evening and making sure everything was correctly set up. Of course, that does require either that you don't do it very often or that you have an actual unlimited dialup, but I probably won't be tempted to download more than one album's-worth of songs per month, so it wouldn't be a big problem for me.
You know, typically I stay out of typo-slinging fights, but good god. Yes, the man needs a proofreader. No, it's not the end of the world, nor does it make him untalented and uneducated, just because he missed a typo that changed one word into another.
On the other hand, implying that it does certainly *does* make you an irritating nit-picker with nothing better to do.
I mean, why should it be on the main page? If you don't care at all about Apple or Macintoshes, you won't care at all about this article.
There are things that Apple does, or things that involve the Mac platform, that at least a good percentage of slashdotters would be interested in. These are the things that should be on the main page.
Not the things, like this, that smell to me like an interesting success story, and would smell to any non-Mac person like blatant advertisment for something he doesn't give a damn about.
...the only real reasons that many Mac users are still using OS 9.x are that:
a) Lots of people don't want to fork over a hundred bucks when what they have works just fine for them.
b) Lots of people are still using 5-year-old computers, OR OLDER; old Macs stay in use forever. And these people won't be switching to MacOS X until they feel the need to upgrade their computers. How long with that be? See (a).
c) There are plenty of people who like 9's interface a lot better than X's. I don't agree with them, and I think it's a little silly in a lot of cases, but they sure aren't going to spend a hundred bucks on an OS that they don't consider to be any improvement over what they're using now.
Try to stay with the program here. Just because everyone you know and read about is a new tech junkie doesn't mean that that's any real reflection of the world as it is.
Yes, it actually is kind of nice to see an article from the point of view of someone who uses his computer for something other than
a) recreation b) programming c) showing off
The idea that there may actually be users out there who don't actually NEED to become a Perl guru who can rewrite the kernel on his Linux box when he sees something out of whack is one that is rarely seen around here. Linux on the desktop? Sure! After all, if they don't know enough to run it themselves, why are they wasting time running companies and suchlike, instead of learning more about Linux?
...I'm as big a Mac fan as anybody, but who the hell modded this as flamebait? It's a perfectly fair question.
Mind you, I think the answer is no... I still think using Linux for the desktop is basically farcical, unless you're an experienced IT professional or programmer or suchlike.
No aid what-so-ever to financially strapped states... a first for any state budget shortfall of any real magnitude since before the great depression, and this is the worst state budget shortfall SINCE the great depression.
Bush claims that the problems are all due to massive overspending from the boom years, but the fact is, most states cut taxes during the boom years, because they didn't care about doing the smart thing and retaining some of that money, just the popular thing. Now they're having to cut services. I know of a school that will be firing its entire music staff, shutting down the music program, and just turning off the lights and heat in that area of the building.
God, I hate this administration. The temptation to vote with my feet and move to some other country grows ever larger.
I bought my G4/400 dual processor for $1100, used, while they were still shipping. I got an offer on it of $800 a few weeks ago. That means that the total cost to me for using this machine for 2.5 years was $300, plus (if you want to get technical) the lost utility of the remaining $800 for 2.5 years, which given the stock market and so forth in the last 2.5 years is negligible, possibly negative.
Not a bad price, really.
(Oop, I added some memory and an extra hard drive, didn't I? I got the hard drive for free, but it was probably worth $60 or so (refurb 20 gig), and I got the memory for $60. So let's say the total cost was $420. Still not bad.)
Perhaps you assume that their saying that they've had almost no problems with damage, vandalism, theft, and so forth means 'most of the students haven't carved their initials so deeply into the case that they've penetrated into the circuit boards,' but that's not what I assume.
I've found, personally, that if you give a child a responsibility, and make it clear that you are trusting them with something valuable, they will almost always live up to that responsibility. If you refuse to trust a child with anything, they will become untrustworthy. Of course, there are always exceptions... but it sounds like, by and large, the state of Maine isn't one.
He didn't say 'find me someplace more sparsely populated than Maine'. He said 'find me someplace with more small towns than Maine.'
Honestly, if you took the entire population of Maine outside the largest population centers (i.e. anywhere you could consider a 'small town' but not a 'large town' or a 'hamlet' or 'village'), and the entire population of Alaska outside of the largest population centers, I bet you'd end up with many more people in Maine than in Alaska. Which by default almost HAS to equal more people in small towns.
Slashdot Mirror
Another interesting-sounding game that will apparently never make its way to the Mac.
A fellow on the web site commented that Mac users could probably run it with WineX. I don't have a problem with people knowing plenty about Windows and Linux and nothing at all about Macs, but if that's your background, don't try to answer questions about them.
-fred
Fun the first couple times you play it, but it just doesn't have enough depth for a serious strategy enthusiast.
It's 'cute' and 'diverting' but not 'interesting' or 'engrossing'.
-fred
Although he apparently was saying this out loud. So it's awfully hard to justify citing his lack of a comma as a grammatical error, ne?
-fred
Isn't it sad? He was feeling all smug about finding that mistake, but somehow he missed the dozen other mistakes on that line, PLUS he didn't notice the fact that they were all intentional.
Review, friend. Review. Or at least reread.
-fred
Okay, this is for all of you dozens of people who admired the Windows emulation hardware cards, and wonder where they went.
e ered, high-maintenance software
First off, a general idea of what these were. Basically, in the most recent incarnations, you had a PCI card. On this PCI card you had:
An Intel-compatible CPU of some sort, usually socketed
Memory, usually on removable DIMMs
A graphics processor with its own RAM
A soundblaster 16 chip
A whole bus architecture, and all the support chips
Basically, an entire motherboard, except for the PCI slots, on a PCI card. The only thing the card used the Mac for was
The keyboard and mouse
Sometimes other USB devices (on the last generation of cards)
Mass storage devices
The back of one of these cards was educational, because right up until the end a lot of them had a giant dongol that you hooked to the back of the card. One end of the dongol was this thing with about six zillion pins. On the other end was a set of connectors, thus:
A video-out port to go to a monitor
A video-in port, to plug your Mac video into if you wanted to share one monitor
A printer port
A joystick port
In addition, there was usually an internal connector that connected the audio out from the card to the internal audio in port for the CD player.
So basically what you had was an entire special-purpose Intel motherboard, complete with most of what you would find on a basic motherboard, in a form factor 1/4 the size of an ATX.
And the software was bloody expensive and very difficult to write, requiring a very close interfacing between the computer and the card. It had sync issues, it had DMA issues, it had all sorts of issues.
And you need to offer your solution at less than the price of a comparable PC system.
So basically, you need to provide:
1/4-size full-featured Intel motherboard-on-a-stick
memory
CPU
Highly-engin
For the same price that Dell provides:
generic Intel motherboard
memory
CPU
hard drive
CD-ROM drive (or whatever)
So basically, if you want a Mac that can run both Mac and PC software at full speeds, here's what you do:
Buy a Mac.
Buy a PC.
Buy a KVM switch and hook them both to the same monitor and keyboard.
Set up file sharing correctly.
And yes, I'm speaking as someone who has used two different and perfectly functional PC Compatibility cards, one an Apple-brand and one by Orange Micro. They were great, just as good as any PC I've ever used... and 50% more expensive.
-fred
My guess is he doesn't stay at Connectix, because my guess is Connectix will shut its doors in five and a half months, when the whole tech handover is finished.
They don't have any other viable products right now, nothing that could support a company of half their size. My guess is they fold. Eric might go to Apple, or to somewhere else, or he might just retire on what he made out of the Microsoft deal.
-fred
GCC's processor optimization is so-so for x86 and stinks for PPC. This will not change anytime soon.
The x86 has been picked over until the cows come home, and it's still not as good as some of the competing stuff. Why? Because a lot of very important ways to do optimization are, you guessed it, patented. You can license these and include them in your proprietary compiler, but if you're altering gcc and actually releasing the alterations back to the community, as Apple is, you can't use them at all.
This is why MrC, Apple's ancient optimizing PPC C compiler, still (as of last year, anyway, and I doubt anything has changed) produces code that iss on average between 15 and 30 percent faster than gcc's. I saw some bottlenecks entirely removed by MrC, where the code went up to 3 times as fast.
So yes, it will still be slow when compiled with the optimized gcc that is built for the blah blah blah. If you want to speed up the program, spend some time optimizing IT.
-fred
> Hmm, I wonder if Apple's applied for a patent on 'running old OS paradigms in virtual machines on new OS
> paradigms' or whatever. Boy, wouldn't that be cool.
Ever opened a DOS window on your Windows machine?
-fred
Don't you mean:
He's saying that this is going to eventually be having been a good thing?
-fred
The main problem is that it's an incredible pain in the butt to build and support one of these things.
Apple did it. Orange Micro did it. Neither one does it any more. The reason was that it was a gigantic pain in the tuchas.
Reply didn't do it, by the way... they just bought Apple's design.
-fred
> If they don't, everyone will get PO'd and say "Why the hey didn't you do that?"
Oh, come on now. I don't even expect them to be shipping a real version of VPC after a year or two.
I *do* expect them to take the emulation environment, paste an app (say Microsoft Access) into it, and then sell the resulting sludge as an application. In the blink of an eye, they get to 'support' the Mac with one of their applications, and at the same time prove that the Mac is an order of magnitude slower than the PC, thus luring more people to abandon the platform.
-fred
There was a lot of speculation about 'red box' but there was never any information released to suggest that it even existed. If it did exist, it was nothing more than a pipe dream.
What you may be thinking of was the Yellow Box for Windows, which was basically supposed to be the Cocoa API implemented on Windows. Don't know why they canned it, but I could speculate.
-fred
As opposed to the rest of us, who are bitter cynics.
-fred
And I'll agree with you about the online record store paying half for distribution, although I would contend that, even assuming equal volume, that's going to be significantly cheaper than running CDs to every town in America.
As for the album's share of the marginal cost of home broadband vs. dialup, that MAY be accurate for you, but you're in a pretty tiny minority around here where that is concerned... it seems to me that very few people on Slashdot would even try to live without broadband if they had any choice in the matter.
And at that point, the album's share becomes either very small (if you look at it from a mechanical bandwidth point of view) or, more properly, $0, since you've got broadband anyway, and if you're like me the fact that you're downloading something in the background doesn't slow you noticably.
Also, bear in mind that back when I had a modem connection, I used to download some pretty huge things. As long as my connection was fairly reliable (it usually was), I didn't mind starting the download, going to bed, getting up in the morning and going to work, and then coming home that next evening and making sure everything was correctly set up. Of course, that does require either that you don't do it very often or that you have an actual unlimited dialup, but I probably won't be tempted to download more than one album's-worth of songs per month, so it wouldn't be a big problem for me.
-fred
...you ARE a conceited git!
(Sorry, I just had to. If it's any consolation, I agree with you about the rest of it, too.)
-fred
You know, typically I stay out of typo-slinging fights, but good god. Yes, the man needs a proofreader. No, it's not the end of the world, nor does it make him untalented and uneducated, just because he missed a typo that changed one word into another.
On the other hand, implying that it does certainly *does* make you an irritating nit-picker with nothing better to do.
-fred
I mean, why should it be on the main page? If you don't care at all about Apple or Macintoshes, you won't care at all about this article.
There are things that Apple does, or things that involve the Mac platform, that at least a good percentage of slashdotters would be interested in. These are the things that should be on the main page.
Not the things, like this, that smell to me like an interesting success story, and would smell to any non-Mac person like blatant advertisment for something he doesn't give a damn about.
-fred
...the only real reasons that many Mac users are still using OS 9.x are that:
a) Lots of people don't want to fork over a hundred bucks when what they have works just fine for them.
b) Lots of people are still using 5-year-old computers, OR OLDER; old Macs stay in use forever. And these people won't be switching to MacOS X until they feel the need to upgrade their computers. How long with that be? See (a).
c) There are plenty of people who like 9's interface a lot better than X's. I don't agree with them, and I think it's a little silly in a lot of cases, but they sure aren't going to spend a hundred bucks on an OS that they don't consider to be any improvement over what they're using now.
Try to stay with the program here. Just because everyone you know and read about is a new tech junkie doesn't mean that that's any real reflection of the world as it is.
-fred
It was a bad GPU. Under X, for some reason, it ran a lot hotter than under 9, and that made the machine lock up at odd moments.
And yes, as of recently the GPU is intimately involved in even 'software rendering'.
It might be worth testing, anyway.
-fred
I love it.
Yes, it actually is kind of nice to see an article from the point of view of someone who uses his computer for something other than
a) recreation
b) programming
c) showing off
The idea that there may actually be users out there who don't actually NEED to become a Perl guru who can rewrite the kernel on his Linux box when he sees something out of whack is one that is rarely seen around here. Linux on the desktop? Sure! After all, if they don't know enough to run it themselves, why are they wasting time running companies and suchlike, instead of learning more about Linux?
-fred
...I'm as big a Mac fan as anybody, but who the hell modded this as flamebait? It's a perfectly fair question.
Mind you, I think the answer is no... I still think using Linux for the desktop is basically farcical, unless you're an experienced IT professional or programmer or suchlike.
But it's a perfectly reasonable point to make.
-fred
No aid what-so-ever to financially strapped states... a first for any state budget shortfall of any real magnitude since before the great depression, and this is the worst state budget shortfall SINCE the great depression.
Bush claims that the problems are all due to massive overspending from the boom years, but the fact is, most states cut taxes during the boom years, because they didn't care about doing the smart thing and retaining some of that money, just the popular thing. Now they're having to cut services. I know of a school that will be firing its entire music staff, shutting down the music program, and just turning off the lights and heat in that area of the building.
God, I hate this administration. The temptation to vote with my feet and move to some other country grows ever larger.
-fred
I bought my G4/400 dual processor for $1100, used, while they were still shipping. I got an offer on it of $800 a few weeks ago. That means that the total cost to me for using this machine for 2.5 years was $300, plus (if you want to get technical) the lost utility of the remaining $800 for 2.5 years, which given the stock market and so forth in the last 2.5 years is negligible, possibly negative.
Not a bad price, really.
(Oop, I added some memory and an extra hard drive, didn't I? I got the hard drive for free, but it was probably worth $60 or so (refurb 20 gig), and I got the memory for $60. So let's say the total cost was $420. Still not bad.)
-fred
Perhaps you assume that their saying that they've had almost no problems with damage, vandalism, theft, and so forth means 'most of the students haven't carved their initials so deeply into the case that they've penetrated into the circuit boards,' but that's not what I assume.
I've found, personally, that if you give a child a responsibility, and make it clear that you are trusting them with something valuable, they will almost always live up to that responsibility. If you refuse to trust a child with anything, they will become untrustworthy. Of course, there are always exceptions... but it sounds like, by and large, the state of Maine isn't one.
-fred
He didn't say 'find me someplace more sparsely populated than Maine'. He said 'find me someplace with more small towns than Maine.'
Honestly, if you took the entire population of Maine outside the largest population centers (i.e. anywhere you could consider a 'small town' but not a 'large town' or a 'hamlet' or 'village'), and the entire population of Alaska outside of the largest population centers, I bet you'd end up with many more people in Maine than in Alaska. Which by default almost HAS to equal more people in small towns.
-fred