VLC, IIRC, uses the superb FFMPEG library for MPEG4-compatible-encoded video playback. Thus it is, fortunately, unaffected by this little bit of evilness.
VLC, for those unaware, is a superb piece of cross-platform video-playback software, notably allowing region-encumbered DVDs to be played back on different region drives (certainly on Windows, anyway) and playing a load of formats to boot.
DivXNetworks, IIRC, closed the source on an originally open project. This is just the (albeit rather belated) final stage in their evil plans.
Anyway, DivX sucks! I can't quite see why anyone would bother with it when XviD and FFMPEG are available, both offering vastly superior picture quality. Still, I suppose DivX has the most bullshit and adware, ergo greater end-user appeal...*sigh*
Durability: Dell's computers - yes; HP's computers, no. Though the latter's printers are first class.
Reliability-wise: from a hardware point of view, again, the former excels in the computer department, but all the machines are running Windows, so that's where the support costs come in. No critique at all of the computers - I have... oooh, three Dells at home here - they are superb, but you have to think of the whole equation. We had hordes of Dells at school - they were fine, Windows sucked.
True, Windows has more software - the statement is inarguable. However, if the Mac runs the requisite software then there is no problem. And, as the past week has taught us, more software includes viri.
Much is made of the Mac's durability, reliability, low TCO (when everything is factored in). Doesn't this have any appeal any more in education?
Quoth the article: It all comes back to what I call the lemming effect -- the willingness of people to follow blindly along, never questioning as they march in step with everyone else.
Ah, the age old problem. One might say Mac zealots are a similar breed, but I'd have thought that for education, a computer as damn simple as a Mac would be an enormous boon, especially when you think of the savings on support.
And they're so purdy...:P Of course, IT managers don't care about purdy, and I do feel inclined to, once again, make a comment about IT managers recommending what they know and what will keep them in a job...
Oh well, guess it's all downhill hereon. Still, he shoulda called Apple beleaguered...:P
It is about time some company/someone did something serious about this. IBM's just standing there, unmovable, almost playing with SCO, whose efforts to attack them are like water off a duck's back. It's a bit like a cat playing with a mouse before it eats it. And after Novell's rather brief and quickly-dismissed effort, we have been left wondering, to an extent...
And of course, the users who matter, businesses - at least some of them - have been getting scared shitless by the threat of litigation. In these uncertain economic times, who can blame them? Slashdotters may see through SCO's FUD, but we are rather a fringe group in society as a whole, and the average Pointy-Haired just sees "Lawsuit!" and thinks "Run."
Whether this be IBM-funded or a wholly Red Hat initiated effort (although the former seems far more likely, given the relationship between the two companies), it is much needed. Although the SCO FUD seems to have lessened somewhat in the past few days (I'm using that good ole indicator of Number of Slashdot Stories), the damage has been not inconsiderable.
And then the Open Source Now Fund - such a wonderful response to Microsoft's undertaking to underwrite any legal costs incurred by their customers as a result of similar disputes. The community was, I think, left reeling somewhat as to this rather clever attack on open source, an attack which exploited its distributed nature of development and limited accountability. Once again, a solution has been found. (I suppose, perhaps, Michael Robertson might have done something otherwise...)
Let's hope this whole mess is resolved reasonably quickly now. To be frank, questions ought to be asked of a country/legal system where a company can get away with such shocking behaviour for so long, but that, maybe, is for the aftermath...
This is a bit OT, and I'm sure it's been said before, but do the 80 lines matter? That SCO distributed and continues to distribue Linux from its FTP servers under the GPL licence means that its threats are at the very least a waste of court time.
Wasted quite a few hours today trying to work out how the hell I could make it compile. There are some diffs here but I had a lot of problems applying them (not overly familiar with patch, to be frank). In the end I gave up as I was pretty much getting nowhere, but it was detecting my native Qt/Mac compile.
You'll need Qt/X, the KDE libraries and an X server for that.
You are misinformed. This makes it quite clear, I think, that X11 is not needed for running KDE applications - notably Konqueror. Yes, it's quite OK to make "ooooh" noises at the eye candy.
Partly a fair point, I'll acknowledge - shoddy coding does have a lot to do with it. I've had games which supported NT4 but wanted Service Pack 6 or something. When they found Windows 2000 without a supposed Service Pack 6, they just gave up.
As far as I'm concerned though, for the really old stuff, the Mac has the edge. And yes, I do have a Mac - my first one bought last year, after 9 years of PCs. That's more than enough for me...:)
And now watch and laugh as x86 users take that classic Mac argument - MHz doesn't matter - and try to use it against every Mac user. But dear x86er, only yesterday, you said that MHz did matter!? I'm so confused...
The tables are turned. Now you have something very pretty, you have Microsoft Office, you have some decent games, you have pro applications, you have UNIX, you have open source...
It's all there, and the speed argument is over. This is what every geek has been waiting for.
Your statement about VMware graphics emulation makes no sense. How else is it supposed to emulate a graphics card? Windows requires a driver, so it makes sense that this driver translates to the underlying windowing system. How is that not emulation?
My point related to DOS games. VMware's emulation is too high level to enable DOS games to work - certainly some of them anyway. It was not a criticism of the way it handles Windows-based graphics emulation, which is fine, but just stating the point that it is not true emulation. If it were, such DOS games would work.
I know there is some emulation in Windows. But what there is isn't really that good. Yeah, it does run quite a lot of old stuff, but there is plenty that it doesn't do, and certainly from a technical prowess point of view, the Mac wins out - hey, it's running stuff written for a different OS and/or CPU! At the end of the day, certainly for really old stuff, the Mac is better.
To the last part of your post - the two points raised about arrogance and focusing on issues. Ahem. Pots. Kettles. #000000 anyone? Do I need to raise the issue of self-contradiction?
You should test how well old apps run in the same environment as modern apps. By this measure, Windows scores pretty well.
This really does make me laugh. As someone who has been unfortunate enough to be with Windows thru the ages (I cut my teeth on 3.0, and no, I do not miss UAEs), I know how damn bad Windows is at backwards compatibility. Try getting Windows XP to play a game written for Windows 95 or 98. There are more than a few which simply will not run!.
In all honesty, I do not particularly like Microsoft, but am willing to give credit where credit is due. Microsoft Office v. X for the Mac is a fine example of (pretty) good software. However, I am of the opinion that it is not unreasonable to suggest that certainly in terms of backwards compatibility, Windows really does suck.
To be fair, I don't know the precise details of Classic mode. I would assume that it is some kind of VM. But even if it is, it is one almost seamlessly integrated into the operating system and it is supplied with it. It also runs at a fairly decent speed.
Now, for this darling operating system of yours - Microsoft Windows. We have VMware, at a cost of $299, and Bochs at a cost of nothing but the speed of a slug. In addition, I would point out that my experience of running DOS games on VMware (aside from the speed issue) is that they simply do not work. VMware does very little proper graphics emulation but instead relies on clever interfacing with a Windows driver or Linux XF86 server. I know little about Bochs in this regard.
(Incidentally, I'd be interested to know if Windows XP can play the original Monkey Island without any non-Microsoft software like VMware or something. My iBook, with Mac OS X, can play it flawlessly, which is the only reason I choose it as an example.)
The fact of the matter is that you are clutching at straws. The Macintosh achieves backwards compatibility almost perfectly, as well as doing so much else. There's a pithy few words that you'd do well to remember, Mike (and this does kinda make me a bit of a bitchy troll) - "can't win, don't try."
Doom III is going to be beautiful. Absolutely fucking beautiful. No-one is going to argue with that. And it is going to eat everyone's machine for breakfast - CPU, RAM, 3D card. Throw at it what you like, and it will say - thank you, please may I have some more?
Apple are, with any luck, going to be releasing a machine in a couple of hours time, which will have a 64bit CPU (whose biggest benefits are, I will allow, partially dependent on 64bit optimisations), 8x AGP graphics from the big two, Serial ATA hard disks and up to 8GB of RAM. Now I am not for one moment suggesting that Doom III is going to milk 8GB of RAM, but I am certainly suggesting that if Carmack wants his "technology demonstration" to look its prettiest, he might do it on something vaguely cutting edge. A PPC64-optimised Doom III might do that rather nicely.
If PPC chips are back in the running great, but it has nothing to do with 64bitness.
Someone somewhere else on this thread sarcastically suggested that I was simply assuming 64bit to be twice the speed of 32bit. I am not that much of an idiot, I am afraid, although I do fear that there are not a few Mac zealots who are claiming performance figures simply on the basis of 2Ghz x 2 processors + a bit because PPC is better than x86.
However, 64bit quite clearly is the future, and whether x86 or PPC is your architecture, it's where we're going. The increased RAM addressing is one of the benefits, but surely the ability to fetch 64bits of data at a time rather than just 32bits is going to speed things up?
It is quite clear from your posting history that you do not like Macs (I should be careful not to be reckless with understatement), which is fine and fair enough - each to their own and all that. But sometimes it's not a bad thing to give credit where credit is due. All you manage to do is end up sounding bitter and defensive...
Doom III isn't actually out yet, so let's give it time shall we? When its in the shops and there is no 64bit version available, then you can make the above claim.
As regards the 32bit vs 64bit issue, I think you only need to look at some of the performance figures to see that the PPC chips give some serious competition to Intel. 64bit chips process twice as much information as 32bit chips - this is more than just a memory-addressing thing.
As you will see, clock-for-clock, they can blow x86 out of the water.
Now this is really pure FUD, I'm afraid, but it does make me laugh.
Yeah, it's true that the masses will probably stick to what is cheaper. It's what they're always gonna do, and that's fine, because most people just want Office and maybe the occasional game. Apple will never really penetrate that market.
But this is Slashdot. We demand more from our machines here. We want high speed UNIX boxen and game stations that we can frag at 150 fps on, and if we're lucky, both at the same time.
The bit about binary compatibility shows that you know nothing about Macs. The PPC 970 _is_ backwards compatible with all the old software - everything will run! And the best thing is, as has always been the case with Macs, backwards compatibility is unrivalled. Macs of today still feature Motorola 68k emulation so that they can run software written for those chips, for OS 9 and for OS X.
Windows XP (the equivalent of OS X in terms of consumer accessibility and reliability), on the other hand, has terrible backwards compatibility, and I find that many, many, many old DOS or even Windows programs will not run...
I can't entirely agree on the suggestion that 64bit vs. 32bit isn't relevant.
Whilst Intel has screwed 64bit on x86 up for the moment by keeping the Itanium high-end and very much server only, Apple is about to usher in something that is available to the general public, albeit at something of an Apple price premium.
x86ers would like it very much if 64bit wasn't relevant for the consumer, because they're not going to get it for a little while yet, but in truth, it really is huge. The potential for huge performance increases in games (I'm thinking Doom III of course) is massive.
This brings about a very interesting situation. Apple will now effectively have the lead and the tables are thus turned. Intel zealots will now be the ones arguing that increased performance is not needed and just wasted (as Apple users have said for years, because of the crappy Motorola G4s). Suddenly Apple users have the upper hand - and so PC users will now have to go back on everything they have said and try desperately to claim that a faster chip doesn't actually matter.
To echo the sentiments of so many x86 lovers, speed does matter, and at last, Apple is about to be on top again.
Well of course not, but this really is small fry. It's not really news - certainly not groundbreaking by any means - it's just evolution. I can't see this actually stealing that much thunder, except in the hearts of Intel zealots, who will continue to be sorely disappointed.
Whilst I would extend my sincerest thanks to dear Intel for yet more predictable inching up of the top speed for x86, I would like to point out that a far more interesting processor revolution is to take place today at 17:00 UTC, in the form of the PowerPC 970.
64bit for the consumer and the world's most beautiful OS or a meagre increase for a 32bit chip with Microsoft Windows. I know what I'll pick...
It's because they're developing for the Mac, so they can Think Different.:P
Tho' you might think all the stereotypical arty types who use Macs (amongst which I include myself, occasionally) would be more likely to bitch about and compete with others' efforts.
Slashdot Mirror
VLC, IIRC, uses the superb FFMPEG library for MPEG4-compatible-encoded video playback. Thus it is, fortunately, unaffected by this little bit of evilness.
:)
VLC, for those unaware, is a superb piece of cross-platform video-playback software, notably allowing region-encumbered DVDs to be played back on different region drives (certainly on Windows, anyway) and playing a load of formats to boot.
iqu
DivXNetworks, IIRC, closed the source on an originally open project. This is just the (albeit rather belated) final stage in their evil plans.
:)
Anyway, DivX sucks! I can't quite see why anyone would bother with it when XviD and FFMPEG are available, both offering vastly superior picture quality. Still, I suppose DivX has the most bullshit and adware, ergo greater end-user appeal...*sigh*
iqu
0.2.9 is out?
:)
I've been running 0.2.16 for a few months!
iqu
Durability: Dell's computers - yes; HP's computers, no. Though the latter's printers are first class.
... oooh, three Dells at home here - they are superb, but you have to think of the whole equation. We had hordes of Dells at school - they were fine, Windows sucked.
:)
Reliability-wise: from a hardware point of view, again, the former excels in the computer department, but all the machines are running Windows, so that's where the support costs come in. No critique at all of the computers - I have
True, Windows has more software - the statement is inarguable. However, if the Mac runs the requisite software then there is no problem. And, as the past week has taught us, more software includes viri.
iqu
Much is made of the Mac's durability, reliability, low TCO (when everything is factored in). Doesn't this have any appeal any more in education?
:P Of course, IT managers don't care about purdy, and I do feel inclined to, once again, make a comment about IT managers recommending what they know and what will keep them in a job...
:P
:s
Quoth the article:
It all comes back to what I call the lemming effect -- the willingness of people to follow blindly along, never questioning as they march in step with everyone else.
Ah, the age old problem. One might say Mac zealots are a similar breed, but I'd have thought that for education, a computer as damn simple as a Mac would be an enormous boon, especially when you think of the savings on support.
And they're so purdy...
Oh well, guess it's all downhill hereon. Still, he shoulda called Apple beleaguered...
iqu
Oooh, my bad. As others are saying, perhaps the poster should RTFA. :P This one's iDVD compatible.
:D
iqu
It's not a cheap route, but c'mon - you gotta be lusting after the 17" one, surely :D
:)
And aren't there issues with using non-Apple DVD drives with iDVD et al?
iqu
It is about time some company/someone did something serious about this. IBM's just standing there, unmovable, almost playing with SCO, whose efforts to attack them are like water off a duck's back. It's a bit like a cat playing with a mouse before it eats it. And after Novell's rather brief and quickly-dismissed effort, we have been left wondering, to an extent...
:)
And of course, the users who matter, businesses - at least some of them - have been getting scared shitless by the threat of litigation. In these uncertain economic times, who can blame them? Slashdotters may see through SCO's FUD, but we are rather a fringe group in society as a whole, and the average Pointy-Haired just sees "Lawsuit!" and thinks "Run."
Whether this be IBM-funded or a wholly Red Hat initiated effort (although the former seems far more likely, given the relationship between the two companies), it is much needed. Although the SCO FUD seems to have lessened somewhat in the past few days (I'm using that good ole indicator of Number of Slashdot Stories), the damage has been not inconsiderable.
And then the Open Source Now Fund - such a wonderful response to Microsoft's undertaking to underwrite any legal costs incurred by their customers as a result of similar disputes. The community was, I think, left reeling somewhat as to this rather clever attack on open source, an attack which exploited its distributed nature of development and limited accountability. Once again, a solution has been found. (I suppose, perhaps, Michael Robertson might have done something otherwise...)
Let's hope this whole mess is resolved reasonably quickly now. To be frank, questions ought to be asked of a country/legal system where a company can get away with such shocking behaviour for so long, but that, maybe, is for the aftermath...
iqu
This is a bit OT, and I'm sure it's been said before, but do the 80 lines matter? That SCO distributed and continues to distribue Linux from its FTP servers under the GPL licence means that its threats are at the very least a waste of court time.
iqu
Wasted quite a few hours today trying to work out how the hell I could make it compile. There are some diffs here but I had a lot of problems applying them (not overly familiar with patch, to be frank). In the end I gave up as I was pretty much getting nowhere, but it was detecting my native Qt/Mac compile.
Any help from anyone will be much appreciated!
iqu
You'll need Qt/X, the KDE libraries and an X server for that.
You are misinformed. This makes it quite clear, I think, that X11 is not needed for running KDE applications - notably Konqueror. Yes, it's quite OK to make "ooooh" noises at the eye candy.
iqu
Partly a fair point, I'll acknowledge - shoddy coding does have a lot to do with it. I've had games which supported NT4 but wanted Service Pack 6 or something. When they found Windows 2000 without a supposed Service Pack 6, they just gave up.
As far as I'm concerned though, for the really old stuff, the Mac has the edge. And yes, I do have a Mac - my first one bought last year, after 9 years of PCs. That's more than enough for me...:)
iqu
I believe you wanted figures. This is the best I can do for the moment.
Now go and cry in a corner...
iqu
We've been waiting for it for so long now.
:D:P
And now watch and laugh as x86 users take that classic Mac argument - MHz doesn't matter - and try to use it against every Mac user. But dear x86er, only yesterday, you said that MHz did matter!? I'm so confused...
The tables are turned. Now you have something very pretty, you have Microsoft Office, you have some decent games, you have pro applications, you have UNIX, you have open source...
It's all there, and the speed argument is over. This is what every geek has been waiting for.
iqu
Your statement about VMware graphics emulation makes no sense. How else is it supposed to emulate a graphics card? Windows requires a driver, so it makes sense that this driver translates to the underlying windowing system. How is that not emulation?
My point related to DOS games. VMware's emulation is too high level to enable DOS games to work - certainly some of them anyway. It was not a criticism of the way it handles Windows-based graphics emulation, which is fine, but just stating the point that it is not true emulation. If it were, such DOS games would work.
I know there is some emulation in Windows. But what there is isn't really that good. Yeah, it does run quite a lot of old stuff, but there is plenty that it doesn't do, and certainly from a technical prowess point of view, the Mac wins out - hey, it's running stuff written for a different OS and/or CPU! At the end of the day, certainly for really old stuff, the Mac is better.
To the last part of your post - the two points raised about arrogance and focusing on issues. Ahem. Pots. Kettles. #000000 anyone? Do I need to raise the issue of self-contradiction?
iqu
You should test how well old apps run in the same environment as modern apps. By this measure, Windows scores pretty well.
:)
This really does make me laugh. As someone who has been unfortunate enough to be with Windows thru the ages (I cut my teeth on 3.0, and no, I do not miss UAEs), I know how damn bad Windows is at backwards compatibility. Try getting Windows XP to play a game written for Windows 95 or 98. There are more than a few which simply will not run!.
In all honesty, I do not particularly like Microsoft, but am willing to give credit where credit is due. Microsoft Office v. X for the Mac is a fine example of (pretty) good software. However, I am of the opinion that it is not unreasonable to suggest that certainly in terms of backwards compatibility, Windows really does suck.
iqu
To be fair, I don't know the precise details of Classic mode. I would assume that it is some kind of VM. But even if it is, it is one almost seamlessly integrated into the operating system and it is supplied with it. It also runs at a fairly decent speed.
Now, for this darling operating system of yours - Microsoft Windows. We have VMware, at a cost of $299, and Bochs at a cost of nothing but the speed of a slug. In addition, I would point out that my experience of running DOS games on VMware (aside from the speed issue) is that they simply do not work. VMware does very little proper graphics emulation but instead relies on clever interfacing with a Windows driver or Linux XF86 server. I know little about Bochs in this regard.
(Incidentally, I'd be interested to know if Windows XP can play the original Monkey Island without any non-Microsoft software like VMware or something. My iBook, with Mac OS X, can play it flawlessly, which is the only reason I choose it as an example.)
The fact of the matter is that you are clutching at straws. The Macintosh achieves backwards compatibility almost perfectly, as well as doing so much else. There's a pithy few words that you'd do well to remember, Mike (and this does kinda make me a bit of a bitchy troll) - "can't win, don't try."
iqu
Why would id make Doom III 64 bit?
Doom III is going to be beautiful. Absolutely fucking beautiful. No-one is going to argue with that. And it is going to eat everyone's machine for breakfast - CPU, RAM, 3D card. Throw at it what you like, and it will say - thank you, please may I have some more?
Apple are, with any luck, going to be releasing a machine in a couple of hours time, which will have a 64bit CPU (whose biggest benefits are, I will allow, partially dependent on 64bit optimisations), 8x AGP graphics from the big two, Serial ATA hard disks and up to 8GB of RAM. Now I am not for one moment suggesting that Doom III is going to milk 8GB of RAM, but I am certainly suggesting that if Carmack wants his "technology demonstration" to look its prettiest, he might do it on something vaguely cutting edge. A PPC64-optimised Doom III might do that rather nicely.
If PPC chips are back in the running great, but it has nothing to do with 64bitness.
Someone somewhere else on this thread sarcastically suggested that I was simply assuming 64bit to be twice the speed of 32bit. I am not that much of an idiot, I am afraid, although I do fear that there are not a few Mac zealots who are claiming performance figures simply on the basis of 2Ghz x 2 processors + a bit because PPC is better than x86.
However, 64bit quite clearly is the future, and whether x86 or PPC is your architecture, it's where we're going. The increased RAM addressing is one of the benefits, but surely the ability to fetch 64bits of data at a time rather than just 32bits is going to speed things up?
It is quite clear from your posting history that you do not like Macs (I should be careful not to be reckless with understatement), which is fine and fair enough - each to their own and all that. But sometimes it's not a bad thing to give credit where credit is due. All you manage to do is end up sounding bitter and defensive...
iqu
Well, of course, they are. But you pay rather more than most people are prepared to pay for a basic computer - the Apple tax.
iqu
Doom III isn't actually out yet, so let's give it time shall we? When its in the shops and there is no 64bit version available, then you can make the above claim.
As regards the 32bit vs 64bit issue, I think you only need to look at some of the performance figures to see that the PPC chips give some serious competition to Intel. 64bit chips process twice as much information as 32bit chips - this is more than just a memory-addressing thing.
As you will see, clock-for-clock, they can blow x86 out of the water.
iqu
Now this is really pure FUD, I'm afraid, but it does make me laugh.
Yeah, it's true that the masses will probably stick to what is cheaper. It's what they're always gonna do, and that's fine, because most people just want Office and maybe the occasional game. Apple will never really penetrate that market.
But this is Slashdot. We demand more from our machines here. We want high speed UNIX boxen and game stations that we can frag at 150 fps on, and if we're lucky, both at the same time.
The bit about binary compatibility shows that you know nothing about Macs. The PPC 970 _is_ backwards compatible with all the old software - everything will run! And the best thing is, as has always been the case with Macs, backwards compatibility is unrivalled. Macs of today still feature Motorola 68k emulation so that they can run software written for those chips, for OS 9 and for OS X.
Windows XP (the equivalent of OS X in terms of consumer accessibility and reliability), on the other hand, has terrible backwards compatibility, and I find that many, many, many old DOS or even Windows programs will not run...
I rest my case.
iqu
I can't entirely agree on the suggestion that 64bit vs. 32bit isn't relevant.
Whilst Intel has screwed 64bit on x86 up for the moment by keeping the Itanium high-end and very much server only, Apple is about to usher in something that is available to the general public, albeit at something of an Apple price premium.
x86ers would like it very much if 64bit wasn't relevant for the consumer, because they're not going to get it for a little while yet, but in truth, it really is huge. The potential for huge performance increases in games (I'm thinking Doom III of course) is massive.
This brings about a very interesting situation. Apple will now effectively have the lead and the tables are thus turned. Intel zealots will now be the ones arguing that increased performance is not needed and just wasted (as Apple users have said for years, because of the crappy Motorola G4s). Suddenly Apple users have the upper hand - and so PC users will now have to go back on everything they have said and try desperately to claim that a faster chip doesn't actually matter.
To echo the sentiments of so many x86 lovers, speed does matter, and at last, Apple is about to be on top again.
iqu
Well of course not, but this really is small fry. It's not really news - certainly not groundbreaking by any means - it's just evolution. I can't see this actually stealing that much thunder, except in the hearts of Intel zealots, who will continue to be sorely disappointed.
iqu
Whilst I would extend my sincerest thanks to dear Intel for yet more predictable inching up of the top speed for x86, I would like to point out that a far more interesting processor revolution is to take place today at 17:00 UTC, in the form of the PowerPC 970.
64bit for the consumer and the world's most beautiful OS or a meagre increase for a 32bit chip with Microsoft Windows. I know what I'll pick...
iqu
It's because they're developing for the Mac, so they can Think Different. :P
:D
Tho' you might think all the stereotypical arty types who use Macs (amongst which I include myself, occasionally) would be more likely to bitch about and compete with others' efforts.
iqu