Actually, it was a blind bidding process. The vendors not only did not know the prices quoted by the other vendors, they supposedly did not know who the other bidders were.
I don't know if Apple explicitly knew Dell was in the running, but I do know that Dell did not know that Apple was a strong contender.
> Eolus is happy with the several hundred million
IIRC Eolus got on the order of $50M settlement. What they
were hoping for was:
1) Microsoft would buy the patent or comany for hundreds of millions.
- or -
2) Microsoft paying licensing fees for years to come, then
Eolus going after all other brower makers.
What they did not want was 'Fuck you' from MS, changing
the infringing code, with all other browser manufacturers
following.
> Go get a goddamn calculator, as your brain is obviously incapable of performing arithmetic: > > 1000/1024 ~= 0.977
Sorry, but you are one incapable of performing arithmetic. You got the ratio upside down. It should be:
1024/1000 = 1.024
1 computer kilobyte is 1024 bytes rather than the uninformed consumer assumption of 1000 bytes.
> Ditto with your filesystem overhead remark.
File system overhead is 5-15% depending on the filesystem and features. And don't accuse me of "lack of brain usage" or not knowing what I am talking about. I have written 2 filesystems in my career - I do know what I'm talking about and I don't appreciate being flamed.
According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system.
I certainly hope the lawyers know more about than the Reuters' reporter. The discrepancy has nothing to do with "decimal vs. binary" notation. In fact, even if you correct it to "base 10 vs base 2" notation, base 10 usually underestimates rather than overestimates the power of 2 value.
The real discrepancy is due to a combination of boot sectors, partition overhead, filesystem overhead, virtual memory swap space, and bad blocks. Consumers don't realize that these take from 5%-15% of the available disk space.
This is like taxpayers complaining that the town library wastes valuable floor-space with a card catalog and information desk rather than have books occupy that space. However, if you through away the card catalog, you won't be able to find any book you are looking for.
Likewise, a disk's filesystem structures and directory structures are its equivalent of a card catalog. Without it, you won't be able to locate any of the data stored on the disk. Sure you may be able to hold a few hundred more MP3s in that space, but that is useless if you cannot locate any song you want to hear.
Do computer users sue the manufacturers because the operating system occupies between 100KB and 100MB of RAM, robbing them of space to run their applications?
Hard disk manufacturers can accurately specify how many hard sectors the disk has, but the cannot specify the exact amount of disk space that will be available to the user after system overhead. The filesystem overhead depends upon what filesystem is used (FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, UFSl, HFS, etc). Journaling filesystems require more overhead than non-journaled filesystems. Indexed filesystems (which allow you to search for data very quickly require even more space.
Commodity disks tend to have upto 1% bad sectors, especially with high capacity disks. Nearly all OSs will isolate these bad blocks when formatting the disk as they are unsafe for data storage. Sectors go bad as disks age, so the filesystem usually reserves a cylinder of space to remap bad sectors to.
Because of the various amounts of overhead sucked up by various filesystem structures and OS features, drive manufacturers cannot reasonably state how much space is available for user data.
This is a slap in the face of Microsoft. But obviously Microsoft will be solicited for input. Unfortunately, I see one (or both) of two things happening:
1) "This standard will enable mass production of a class of operating systems that meet the minimum expectations of consumers for security and general reliability by establishing a floor for these characteristics,"
MS will attempt to set the "floor" to be barely above its current standard for security and reliability.
2) Microsoft will drag the whole thing down some "Trusted Computing" DRM rathole.
At a company I worked for 8 years ago, Microsoft "evaluated" our product for more than a year, then filed a patent application for the fundamental technology behind it. We didn't even have to sue them. We just demonstrated to the patent office that:
1) Microsoft was trying to patent technology that we had been shipping for 3 years.
2) Microsoft had "evaluated" our product for a year before filing for a patent.
3) We had implemented the technologies straight out of textbooks, giving concrete evidence of prior art. (That's one reason we were not foolish enough to try to patent it ourselves.)
The patent application was rejected. The most interesting note about the incident was that it all happened within 2 months - amazingly fast.
Both the G5 and the Opteron are capable of addressing exabytes of memory. The distinction here is the amount of physical RAM the machine can hold. Show me an Opteron motherboard with 34 trillion DIMM slots. Most Opteron MBs have 16 DIMM slots that can hold... 8GB of RAM.
I worked on a word processor for Lotus in the late '80s. It started out an elegant outline-based editor. After 2 years, we called it the "Feature Creature". It was one huge-ass monolithic application that required a custom-built dynamic linking loader and overlay manager to fit in 640K. It shipped on more than 30 diskettes - compressed. It had features up the wazzoo. So did all the other monstrosities in the Lotus Office suite. 99% of the users didn't use more than 20% of all the crap in the applications and just had to wade through enourmous manuals and deep menus to get at anything.
Toward the end of that project, I read some essay on the philosophy of Unix programming. It stressed the concept of very many small special purpose programs, that when chained together, produce useful work. I saw the light. A crap-load of features is not neccessarily the right thing.
I've found that I much prefer an application that does one or two things very well over and application that does 100 things poorly.
During the keynote, Jobs said iChat was built on existing standards. He didn't mention which ones. I've seen dozens of "standards-based" video conferencing applications. Very few of them interoperate well.
<font size="0.01"> ** Subscriber agrees to purchase 6.023 x 10^23 DVDs at full retail over the next 15 years. Subscriber will receive 6 new DVDs each month from Artisan Entertainment or New Line Cinema. Subscriber may elect to receive only the titles they desire by decrypting the DES3 encoded message supplied on a postcard sent to the subscriber 3 weeks in advance of the DVD shipment. Failure to provide a valid response to the postcard message will be interpreted as a "YES" reply to our excellent selection of all 6 DVDs. Your credit card will be charged for each DVD delivered plus $8.95 shipping and handling for each order. Unopened DVDs may be returned for full credit (less S&H). Each returned DVD is subject to a small $8.95 restocking fee. </font>
As I watch the keynote yesterday, I was dismayed by a couple of the claims Steve made. I use Macs, Wintel, and several "proprietary" Unix workstations heavily and am quite familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of each. That said, I am undeniably fond of my macs running OS X, and use my iBook 600 more than any of my other computers.
But when Steve introduced the new PowerMac G5 as the "worlds first 64 bit desktop personal computer" that tweaked me a bit. I've used 64-bit DEC, SGI, and Sun desktop systems for more than a decade. Don't flame me with the "PC vs Workstation" argument. Most of those Unix workstations were smaller than the G5. And yesterday's demos show Apple is undeniably targeting the same high end multimedia, graphics, software development and scientific markets.
But the SPEC benchmark claims set my BS senses tingling. I too checked out the Veritest results yesterday after Apple's claimed Intel SPEC results didn't jibe with the official published numbers for the same Dell 650. I was annoyed to read that the "independent" tester didn't attempt to maximize the results for all contestants. Granted Apple [probably] paid for the testing, but they should be outsource the evaluation for objectivity, not to have someone lie on their behalf.
It has been known for years that SPECmarks are an indication of CPU performance, but a poor predictor of overall system performance. There are several application benchmarks that are better indicators of performance for certain classes of applications (database, web serving, desktop applications, etc). Apple doesn't seem to publicize these, (other than the perennial Photoshop demo). If "honest" benchmarks don't support your marketing case, I believe it is better to remain silent than to deceive.
I do believe that the PowerMac G5 really will be a very strong contender in the high end desktop market. I do believe that the new PowerMac G5s are probably performance and price comparable to the high end 1st tier Intel boxes. I don't believe the old "macs cost %50 more" or the new "the G5 is $1000 less" arguments. I know from experience that when you kit out these things with the hardware and software needed to get real work done, the prices are comparable. I did say 1st tier manufacturers - not some OC'd LAN party generic white box that's been riced out with mercury cooling and neon.
However, for more than %80 of the work I do, my 600Mhz G3 iBook is more than sufficient. And it's easy to carry around. The other %20, however, pegs my PowerMac G4. It also pegs my Athlon 2200 box. I will probably replace the G4 within the year. The only question is: Dual 2Ghz G5 this fall, or Dual 3Ghz G5 next year?
In the Keynote, Steve Jobs priced out a Dell dual-Xeon desktop system that was similarly equipped to the high end dual G5 system. The Dell cost $1100 more (~$4100) than the Mac.
But don't forget, Apple is a hardware AND software company. I don't think the Dell in the keynote was outfitted with equivalent software to the Apple bundle (OS, dev env, office suite, iLife, etc). If you added that stuff to the Dell, I'm sure it would drive the price up another grand.
Actually, even though some 32-bit machines can have more than 4GB of RAM, individual processes cannot address more than 4GB of RAM. In fact, for many 32-bit OSs, processes cannot address more than 2GB of memory.
Why would you want too directly address that much memory? My answer: Memory-Mapped-Files. I worked on an application that had multiple database tables that easily exceeded 2GB in size. On 64-bit systems, we memory mapped the files and let the OS handle paging-in segments of the tables as we accessed them. With 32-bit systems, we ran out of address space real quickly. We had to load the tables in segments, effectively mimicing a VM system, discarding least recently used segments of the tables, in order to load in new segments.
Memory mapping the tables was much easier, much faster, and allowed us to use much more of the RAM that was installed on these monster servers. (One system we deployed had 12 CPUs and 1/2 Terabyte of RAM - cha-ching!)
Sure, you could buy it for the home, but that is really the iMac target market. Look at the demos from the keynote. They were aimed at professional graphic artists, professional motion picture post processing, professional music processing, professional mathematicians and scientists. Expect to see more professional engineering and simulation applications in the very near future.
That said, one of those dual-G5 boxes will surely replace my 4 year-old AGP PowerMac G4 at home.
I got tired of all the noise my '486-66 PC was making, so I decided to move the machine further away from my desk. I went down to Fry's and picked up some VGA/keyboard/mouse extension cables, cut a hole in the wall, and ran the cables through the wall. With the machine in the other room, I could barely hear it.
But if put my ear to the wall, I could still discern a hum. And my CPU temp was still consistently above 20C. I considered freon cooling, but that's bad for the environment. I then tried water cooling, but zebra mussels clogged my water pump.
Then ZAM! I thought of Arctic Cooling. So I called up Belkin and ordered 3000 miles of VGA/keyboard/mouse extension cables and ran them along the Alaskan pipeline. I wanted to place the '486 as near to the north pole as possible, but financial constraints forced me to put it outside a raindeer herder's shed in Nome.
When I first hooked everything up, there were some minor glitches to work through. Timber wolves had chewed through the VGA cable in the northern Yukon. This was easily fixed with my trusty portable butane solder gun and Kevlar heat-shrink tubing.
Back in my home office. I couldn't hear the PC at all. And CPU temps hover at just about -18C most of the year.
Now about that faint buzzing produced by my monitor...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it was a blind bidding process. The vendors not only did not know the prices quoted by the other vendors, they supposedly did not know who the other bidders were. I don't know if Apple explicitly knew Dell was in the running, but I do know that Dell did not know that Apple was a strong contender.
> Eolus is happy with the several hundred million IIRC Eolus got on the order of $50M settlement. What they were hoping for was: 1) Microsoft would buy the patent or comany for hundreds of millions. - or - 2) Microsoft paying licensing fees for years to come, then Eolus going after all other brower makers. What they did not want was 'Fuck you' from MS, changing the infringing code, with all other browser manufacturers following.
> Go get a goddamn calculator, as your brain is obviously incapable of performing arithmetic:
>
> 1000/1024 ~= 0.977
Sorry, but you are one incapable of performing arithmetic. You got the ratio upside down. It should be:
1024/1000 = 1.024
1 computer kilobyte is 1024 bytes rather than the uninformed consumer assumption of 1000 bytes.
> Ditto with your filesystem overhead remark.
File system overhead is 5-15% depending on the filesystem and features. And don't accuse me of "lack of brain usage" or not knowing what I am talking about. I have written 2 filesystems in my career - I do know what I'm talking about and I don't appreciate being flamed.
According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system.
I certainly hope the lawyers know more about than the Reuters' reporter. The discrepancy has nothing to do with "decimal vs. binary" notation. In fact, even if you correct it to "base 10 vs base 2" notation, base 10 usually underestimates rather than overestimates the power of 2 value.
The real discrepancy is due to a combination of boot sectors, partition overhead, filesystem overhead, virtual memory swap space, and bad blocks. Consumers don't realize that these take from 5%-15% of the available disk space.
This is like taxpayers complaining that the town library wastes valuable floor-space with a card catalog and information desk rather than have books occupy that space. However, if you through away the card catalog, you won't be able to find any book you are looking for.
Likewise, a disk's filesystem structures and directory structures are its equivalent of a card catalog. Without it, you won't be able to locate any of the data stored on the disk. Sure you may be able to hold a few hundred more MP3s in that space, but that is useless if you cannot locate any song you want to hear.
Do computer users sue the manufacturers because the operating system occupies between 100KB and 100MB of RAM, robbing them of space to run their applications?
Hard disk manufacturers can accurately specify how many hard sectors the disk has, but the cannot specify the exact amount of disk space that will be available to the user after system overhead. The filesystem overhead depends upon what filesystem is used (FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, UFSl, HFS, etc). Journaling filesystems require more overhead than non-journaled filesystems. Indexed filesystems (which allow you to search for data very quickly require even more space.
Commodity disks tend to have upto 1% bad sectors, especially with high capacity disks. Nearly all OSs will isolate these bad blocks when formatting the disk as they are unsafe for data storage. Sectors go bad as disks age, so the filesystem usually reserves a cylinder of space to remap bad sectors to.
Because of the various amounts of overhead sucked up by various filesystem structures and OS features, drive manufacturers cannot reasonably state how much space is available for user data.
This is a slap in the face of Microsoft. But obviously Microsoft will be solicited for input.
Unfortunately, I see one (or both) of two things happening:
1) "This standard will enable mass production of a class of operating systems that meet
the minimum expectations of consumers for security and general reliability by establishing
a floor for these characteristics,"
MS will attempt to set the "floor" to be barely above its current standard for security and reliability.
2) Microsoft will drag the whole thing down some "Trusted Computing" DRM rathole.
Oh yeah, SGI is just flush with cash, ripe for the picking...
At a company I worked for 8 years ago, Microsoft "evaluated" our product for more than a year, then filed a patent application for the fundamental technology behind it. We didn't even have to sue them. We just demonstrated to the patent office that:
1) Microsoft was trying to patent technology that we had been shipping for 3 years.
2) Microsoft had "evaluated" our product for a year before filing for a patent.
3) We had implemented the technologies straight out of textbooks, giving concrete evidence of prior art. (That's one reason we were not foolish enough to try to patent it ourselves.)
The patent application was rejected. The most interesting note about the incident was that it all happened within 2 months - amazingly fast.
Both the G5 and the Opteron are capable of addressing exabytes of memory. The distinction here is the amount of physical RAM the machine can hold. Show me an Opteron motherboard with 34 trillion DIMM slots. Most Opteron MBs have 16 DIMM slots that can hold ... 8GB of RAM.
I have found the people who now how to spell do not need to proofread their comments.
CD that's not needed almost all of the time is indeed an unwanted expense
But when you need it, waiting a week for a shipment from IBM is incredibly annoying.
Airbags are a relatively expensive addition to automobiles that are not needed almost all of the time.
... you have disabled your phone line, ... and your phone rings
Phone ringing on disabled phone line... hmmm. Yep that happens to me all the time.
I worked on a word processor for Lotus in the late '80s. It started out an elegant outline-based editor. After 2 years, we called it the "Feature Creature". It was one huge-ass monolithic application that required a custom-built dynamic linking loader and overlay manager to fit in 640K. It shipped on more than 30 diskettes - compressed. It had features up the wazzoo. So did all the other monstrosities in the Lotus Office suite. 99% of the users didn't use more than 20% of all the crap in the applications and just had to wade through enourmous manuals and deep menus to get at anything.
Toward the end of that project, I read some essay on the philosophy of Unix programming. It stressed the concept of very many small special purpose programs, that when chained together, produce useful work. I saw the light. A crap-load of features is not neccessarily the right thing.
I've found that I much prefer an application that does one or two things very well over and application that does 100 things poorly.
During the keynote, Jobs said iChat was built on existing standards. He didn't mention which ones. I've seen dozens of "standards-based" video conferencing applications. Very few of them interoperate well.
I saw it on CNN before I saw it on /.
There's absolutely no law that says you can't splice a USB keyboard onto your xbox controller.
But there is a law (DMCA) that forbids you from figuring out how to write a device driver for that USB keyboard.
Yes but did they patent "10 DVDs for 1 cent **"?
<font size="0.01"> ** Subscriber agrees to purchase 6.023 x 10^23 DVDs at full retail over the next 15 years. Subscriber will receive 6 new DVDs each month from Artisan Entertainment or New Line Cinema. Subscriber may elect to receive only the titles they desire by decrypting the DES3 encoded message supplied on a postcard sent to the subscriber 3 weeks in advance of the DVD shipment. Failure to provide a valid response to the postcard message will be interpreted as a "YES" reply to our excellent selection of all 6 DVDs. Your credit card will be charged for each DVD delivered plus $8.95 shipping and handling for each order. Unopened DVDs may be returned for full credit (less S&H). Each returned DVD is subject to a small $8.95 restocking fee. </font>
As I watch the keynote yesterday, I was dismayed by a couple of the claims Steve made. I use Macs, Wintel, and several "proprietary" Unix workstations heavily and am quite familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of each. That said, I am undeniably fond of my macs running OS X, and use my iBook 600 more than any of my other computers.
But when Steve introduced the new PowerMac G5 as the "worlds first 64 bit desktop personal computer" that tweaked me a bit. I've used 64-bit DEC, SGI, and Sun desktop systems for more than a decade. Don't flame me with the "PC vs Workstation" argument. Most of those Unix workstations were smaller than the G5. And yesterday's demos show Apple is undeniably targeting the same high end multimedia, graphics, software development and scientific markets.
But the SPEC benchmark claims set my BS senses tingling. I too checked out the Veritest results yesterday after Apple's claimed Intel SPEC results didn't jibe with the official published numbers for the same Dell 650. I was annoyed to read that the "independent" tester didn't attempt to maximize the results for all contestants. Granted Apple [probably] paid for the testing, but they should be outsource the evaluation for objectivity, not to have someone lie on their behalf.
It has been known for years that SPECmarks are an indication of CPU performance, but a poor predictor of overall system performance. There are several application benchmarks that are better indicators of performance for certain classes of applications (database, web serving, desktop applications, etc). Apple doesn't seem to publicize these, (other than the perennial Photoshop demo). If "honest" benchmarks don't support your marketing case, I believe it is better to remain silent than to deceive.
I do believe that the PowerMac G5 really will be a very strong contender in the high end desktop market. I do believe that the new PowerMac G5s are probably performance and price comparable to the high end 1st tier Intel boxes. I don't believe the old "macs cost %50 more" or the new "the G5 is $1000 less" arguments. I know from experience that when you kit out these things with the hardware and software needed to get real work done, the prices are comparable. I did say 1st tier manufacturers - not some OC'd LAN party generic white box that's been riced out with mercury cooling and neon.
However, for more than %80 of the work I do, my 600Mhz G3 iBook is more than sufficient. And it's easy to carry around. The other %20, however, pegs my PowerMac G4. It also pegs my Athlon 2200 box. I will probably replace the G4 within the year. The only question is: Dual 2Ghz G5 this fall, or Dual 3Ghz G5 next year?
In the Keynote, Steve Jobs priced out a Dell dual-Xeon desktop system that was similarly equipped to the high end dual G5 system. The Dell cost $1100 more (~$4100) than the Mac.
But don't forget, Apple is a hardware AND software company. I don't think the Dell in the keynote was outfitted with equivalent software to the Apple bundle (OS, dev env, office suite, iLife, etc). If you added that stuff to the Dell, I'm sure it would drive the price up another grand.
Yes, it does.
Actually, even though some 32-bit machines can have more than 4GB of RAM, individual processes cannot address more than 4GB of RAM. In fact, for many 32-bit OSs, processes cannot address more than 2GB of memory.
Why would you want too directly address that much memory? My answer: Memory-Mapped-Files. I worked on an application that had multiple database tables that easily exceeded 2GB in size. On 64-bit systems, we memory mapped the files and let the OS handle paging-in segments of the tables as we accessed them. With 32-bit systems, we ran out of address space real quickly. We had to load the tables in segments, effectively mimicing a VM system, discarding least recently used segments of the tables, in order to load in new segments.
Memory mapping the tables was much easier, much faster, and allowed us to use much more of the RAM that was installed on these monster servers. (One system we deployed had 12 CPUs and 1/2 Terabyte of RAM - cha-ching!)
And the PowerPC was codeveloped with Apple/IBM/Motorola.
Sure, you could buy it for the home, but that is really the iMac target market. Look at the demos from the keynote. They were aimed at professional graphic artists, professional motion picture post processing, professional music processing, professional mathematicians and scientists. Expect to see more professional engineering and simulation applications in the very near future.
That said, one of those dual-G5 boxes will surely replace my 4 year-old AGP PowerMac G4 at home.
Actually, rumors indicate the system has a wireless (Bluetooth?) 2-button mouse with aluminum scroll wheel.
Actually the 8088 and 8086 could access 1MB directly. They used bank switching to address up to 16MB.
And don't say "What about the 640KB limit?". That was an IBM system architecture limitation, not a processor limitation.
I got tired of all the noise my '486-66 PC was making, so I decided to move the machine further away from my desk. I went down to Fry's and picked up some VGA/keyboard/mouse extension cables, cut a hole in the wall, and ran the cables through the wall. With the machine in the other room, I could barely hear it.
But if put my ear to the wall, I could still discern a hum. And my CPU temp was still consistently above 20C. I considered freon cooling, but that's bad for the environment. I then tried water cooling, but zebra mussels clogged my water pump.
Then ZAM! I thought of Arctic Cooling. So I called up Belkin and ordered 3000 miles of VGA/keyboard/mouse extension cables and ran them along the Alaskan pipeline. I wanted to place the '486 as near to the north pole as possible, but financial constraints forced me to put it outside a raindeer herder's shed in Nome.
When I first hooked everything up, there were some minor glitches to work through. Timber wolves had chewed through the VGA cable in the northern Yukon. This was easily fixed with my trusty portable butane solder gun and Kevlar heat-shrink tubing.
Back in my home office. I couldn't hear the PC at all. And CPU temps hover at just about -18C most of the year.
Now about that faint buzzing produced by my monitor...