with the levies, CD might once again become more expensive than HDD, per MB basis.
But hard disks won't neccessarily be exempt. Canada's proposed levy is CAN $21 per gigabyte of embedded hard disk. That would raise the cost of the 30GB iPod by CAN $630. My 320GB ReplayTV would cost an extra CAN $6720. Obviously, the consumers (and the manufacturers) will not accept a 2x or 4x price increase due to excess levies.
Last I checked, a Sawtooth (G4-AGP) motherboard was $800 (w/o CPU), and the customer was not allow to buy it for self install. Only the certified repair shop was allowed to perform the install. I was looking because I have an older Sawtooth that doesn't support dual processors.
So the cost of the replacement motherboard and a Sonnet Duet card far exceeded the purchase price of a new Mac when offset with selling the old one on eBay.
Re:Availibilty
on
iBox Episode 2
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The aren't broken parts. They are original OEM parts that were intended to be used to replace broken parts on computers brought in for repair.
Burn it to a DVD, stick it in a safe-deposit box, and you're good for at least 50 years.
I hope you lock up a complete A/V system in the safe-deposit box as well, because in 50 years there isn't likely to be anything that will be able to read that DVD.
I recently found a box of 5 1/4" floppies full of software I wrote 15 years ago. I made multiple backups in case a floppy or two went bad. That doesn't really matter. I havn't had a device capable of reading 5 1/4" msdos format disks for more than a decade.
In the same box, I found 4 CP/M format 8" floppy disks, 6 NeXT format 256MB Magneto-Optical disks, and several rolls of punched paper tape.
The triad of Time, Features, Quality most directly influence the ability to deliver a project.
In general, the project manager can pick two of the three. Rarely, if ever, can all three
be fully satisfied. These three attributes work in concert - increasing the importance of
one typically requires decreasing the importance of the others. The situation generally
dictates which of the three are flexible. If two of the three are a fixed quantity, you will
have no control over the third.
In your predicament, Time is fixed. That means you can adjust Quality
and/or Features. Since this project is for a valued external client, Quality
is very important. You cannot ship poor quality product to the customer and expect them
stay a customer (unless you are Microsoft). That leaves Features. You will have
to limit the scope of the project - at least for the first release to the customer at the agreed-upon
time.
My recommendation is to prioritize the requirements (features) of the product. This usually
requires customer input, and, obviously, everything cannot be the highest priority.
Next, estimate the time required to implement each feature (in person-hours, not real-time).
Then pick a selection of features that can be implemented in the time allotted that
produces a reasonably functional product. This requires some careful juggling, selecting
enough of the higher priority features that make a coherent first release by the deadline.
Calculate the hours worked at 8 hours/day, 5 days/week per person, but expect to work at least
10 hours per day, perhaps upto 6 days per week. With meetings, eating, bathroom breaks,
and unexpected delays taking the rest of the time. Do not fall into the trap of 12-16 hour days,
7 days per week. It can be done, but most people can only keep it up for 2-3 weeks before
their productivity falls way off. When you are fatigued, it becomes more difficult to focus and
think clearly. Mistakes happen; more bugs are written; and quality suffers.
At the end of your six weeks, you should have a product that is good enough for the client
to play with, try on real world problems, find bugs, and request enhancements. As long as
the missing features are well delineated and don't prevent any work from being
done, the customer will be glad to have something experiment with. The next release of the
product (a few weeks later) should roll in addition features and bug fixes.
Convince management to bring in food and fun to provide reasonable breaks from the stress
of the crunch. Watching the Simpson's projected on the screen in the conference room while
eating Chinese take-away provides a great 45 minute respite from the grindstone. And the
team feels less exploited (for 2 hours at least).
I know the following to be near certainties:
The scheduling estimate that resulted in 80 hour work weeks was optimistic.
If you worked 80-100 hours per week, the product still would not be completed on time,
and it will be of poor quality. The customer will be disappointed, management will annoyed,
and the team will be fatigued and disgruntled.
There will be a follow-up release with bug fixes, modifications, additional
features, no matter what you do.
If you revolt, you will likely be terminated - or worse, exploited to the max first, and then
terminated. In your predicament, the fault lays squarely with the project manager and/or
the sales guy that committed to an unreasonable schedule. Applying the whip to
the development team does not fix this problem. So if anyone should fear for his job,
it should not be you (unless you are the project manager...). If this kind of screw-up happens
repeatedly, it does not go unnoticed by upper management. If upper management does
believe in a chain-gang worker philosophy, your job is toast no matter what you do, because
it will be outsourced to India or the Philippines next year.
To all you folks out there, you should be buying used whenever possible
I stopped buying used CDs several years ago when, after I was burglarized, I found a slew of my former CDs in the used CD bin at the local Wherehouse. Although I had marked my CDs (with a red dot on the jewel case to avoid mix-ups at work/parties), neither the cops nor the Wherehouse found that sufficient evidence to return my music. I lost around 300 CDs (US $4500), more than half my collection.
Now I couldn't sell my used CDs, even if I wanted to. I've marked them all "Property of Brett Johnson. Stolen if presented for resale."
P.S. Vengeance was soon mine, 'tho. One day I was "working from home" when I caught one of the neighborhood kids crawling out my living room window. I nabbed the brat with 16 of my CD's in his shirt. He turned out to be our son's "friend" that would unlock a window when he was visiting, then come back later to rob us blind.
One is tempted to suspect money under the table from Microsoft
It wasn't "under the table". It was a $427,000 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant the district received at about the same time they instituded the Wintel-only policy.
If you read the second article you notice that the school district instituted the Wintel-only policy at about the same time they won a $427,000 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant. I'm sure its just a coincidence.
Some things never change. The constant bickering over names, standards, and licenses in the unix community 20 years ago was one of the things that kept unix from really taking off. While all the unix providers, licensers, and organizations were suing each other and refusing to cooperate, Linux and Windows servers just took over most of the marketplace. I was hoping all this crap was behind us, but now SCO, Novell, and the Open Group are starting it all over again. All those innept idiots that managed to screw things up so badly in the past, now want a piece of the pie. And companies will keep buying Windows Server 2003.
I got a D in handwriting in the 3rd grade. Not that I was a more competent touch typist. I just was too bored to write page after page of loops, lines, and whorls.
Eventually, I learned to type (on a manual typewriter). Now I can type much faster than I can write with a pen.
As I grew up, my handwriting was always a mess, although architecture school taught me to letter legibly (yes, before CAD).
I never cared about my illegible handwriting until I broke my collar bone. Now my illegible writting is puncuated with spastic jerky lines.
And IBM calls it VMX (Vector Multimedia Extensions, IIRC) because Motorola holds the trademark on the name "Altivec."
Actually, VMX is a different architecture than Altivec, although the implementation in the 970 is Altivec instruction compatible (at Apple's request). The guys at Ars Technica seem to believe that VMX might actually underperform Motorola's current Altivec implementation.
I was at the CENIC conference in Santa Barbara a few weeks ago and was quite surprised by the number of Apple laptops among the presenters and attendees. My best guess is around 40% of the laptops present were PowerBooks and iBooks. I haven't seen anything like that outside of an Apple conference for years. I have noticed a sharp increase in Apple laptops at recent Linux and Java conferences, 'tho.
Granted, CENIC is dedicated to gigabit networking, so the fact that Apple G4 PowerBooks come with gigabit ethernet built-in makes a nice match.
"As nice as the iMac is suppose to be
 that damn hockey puck makes it hideous to me."
Apple hasn't shipped the round "hockey puck" mouse for more than 3 years. I replaced mine with a macally 2 button mouse w/ scrollwheel for something like $20. It works great.
Of couse most of the graphics and video software leverages Altivec, but Seti@home, Folding@home, and BLAST all get a significant boost from the vector processor. There is a significant Mac presence in the physics, genomics, and protienomics sectors. It is the platform of choice for Internet2 connectivity (because of the built-in GigE). Macs aren't just for graphic arts and publishing.
Not quite. Hypertransport is a high speed bus used to connect the CPU to the peripheral chips. There will still be an ethernet chip, and a firewire chip, but they will live on a Hypertransport bus rather than a PCI or PCI-X bus.
HyperTransport technology transfers data at 12.8 Gigabytes per second. It is designed to be approximately 48 times faster than PCI, 12 times faster than PCI X and 10 times faster than 4-channel Infiniband.
The current G4 suffers from a severe bus bandwidth bottleneck. This is an on-chip problem, so no fancy peripheral chips can rectify it. This is why the current DDR PowerMacs don't see the significant benefit that DDR technology should provide. In most current P4/Athlon/G4 performance comparisons, the G4's lagard performace can be much more attributed to its poor memory bandwidth than it's core clock speed.
Although initial 970 core clock speeds don't seem to be significantly greater than the current G4, its peripheral interface bandwidth is lightyears ahead. Hypertransport would help the 970 sing, significantly improving its throughput. Hypertransport would be wasted on a G4. It would be like having a superhighway run by your city, but your on/off ramps are potholed dirt tracks with metering lights.
I just don't know what to say. I am rendered speechless. That is the ugliest monstrosity I've seen in a long time. Comparing it to an iMac is a incredible insult to Apple Design.
Drop the iMike moniker, he should name the thing Kollos.
Actually FAST TCP works well at broadband speeds. I recall one test over GigE that sustained 860+ Kbs. There was also a test between two high energy physics sites that managed to substantially fill a 10Gbs pipe. All of this is from memory, but the references should not be too hard to find.
FAST TCP is currently an easy Linux Kernel option to enable. I personally am waiting for Mac OS X support, since nearly all G4 models have shipped with GigE for the last few years.
Expect Microsoft to add hooks into your Address Book (so you can easily print envelopes with the correct zip code, of course). Then the next Outlook Macro virus with send junk paper mail to everyone in your address book. Once it is also integrated with eStamp, all hell will break loose. Your postal carrier will shoot you when he/she finds 1.3 million outgoing letters in your mailbox.
12" iBook. Powerful enough for taking notes, writing papers, and writing software. Remember that OS X comes with a full development environment, so if you will be writing software, your set. I usually take notes in class with pen and paper (its quieter and quicker), then type it up afterward to reinforce. Most of the campus has wireless access, so the built-in 802.11b kicks ass. Long battery life usually means I rarely need to plug in. The iBooks seem to be less fragile than the G4 PowerBooks at a fraction of the price. If your dorm room is anything like mine was, there just won't be enough room for a sizable desktop machine ( let alone 2 or 3 - roommates too) unless you get a flat panel display.
20GB iPod. Don't laugh. I listen to tunes walking to/from campus. It's also a very small external firewire drive. If I'm using a lab/classroom with available macs, I can shuttle data back & forth on the iPod. It's much lighter than a laptop, and gets power over firewire, so I don't need to carry a power cable & transformer. I wowed a class as a guest lecturer when I just pulled my iPod out of my pocket, plugged it into the professer's PowerBook, and launched my presentation. It also replaced my Palm Vx, holding contacts and calendar.
Cellular Phone. Cheaper than a landline and statewide or nationwide free long distance packages are a dime-a-dozen.
Pens & Paper. Still a neccessity. Number 2 pencils for filling in those little circles.
PDA - NOT. I have a Palm Vx that sits unused. It had degraded to just holding my contacts. After moving them to my iPod, I found I just stopped carrying the Palm around.
Remember most Universities sell hardware to students at a moderate discount (5-10%), and software at a steep discount (70-90%), so check it out before buying on the open market. Apple also has educational discounts that aren't that great - the Apple discount is usually less than the sales tax you can save by ordering from the right online retailer. Look for bundles that add memory for free. If they offer you a crappy printer bundle, decline and ask for even more memory.
Slashdot Mirror
Adobe FrameMaker still won't run on Mac OS X, and only version 6 runs on OS 9.
So lean on Adobe about it. FrameMaker used to run on NeXTSTEP, so a Cocoa port should be half way done already.
with the levies, CD might once again become more expensive than HDD, per MB basis.
But hard disks won't neccessarily be exempt. Canada's proposed levy is CAN $21 per gigabyte of embedded hard disk. That would raise the cost of the 30GB iPod by CAN $630. My 320GB ReplayTV would cost an extra CAN $6720. Obviously, the consumers (and the manufacturers) will not accept a 2x or 4x price increase due to excess levies.
The more I think about it, I think it was $800 including the manditory installation service.
Last I checked, a Sawtooth (G4-AGP) motherboard was $800 (w/o CPU), and the customer was not allow to buy it for self install. Only the certified repair shop was allowed to perform the install. I was looking because I have an older Sawtooth that doesn't support dual processors.
So the cost of the replacement motherboard and a Sonnet Duet card far exceeded the purchase price of a new Mac when offset with selling the old one on eBay.
The aren't broken parts. They are original OEM parts that were intended to be used to replace broken parts on computers brought in for repair.
Burn it to a DVD, stick it in a safe-deposit box, and you're good for at least 50 years.
I hope you lock up a complete A/V system in the safe-deposit box as well, because in 50 years there isn't likely to be anything that will be able to read that DVD.
I recently found a box of 5 1/4" floppies full of software I wrote 15 years ago. I made multiple backups in case a floppy or two went bad. That doesn't really matter. I havn't had a device capable of reading 5 1/4" msdos format disks for more than a decade.
In the same box, I found 4 CP/M format 8" floppy disks, 6 NeXT format 256MB Magneto-Optical disks, and several rolls of punched paper tape.
In your predicament, Time is fixed. That means you can adjust Quality and/or Features. Since this project is for a valued external client, Quality is very important. You cannot ship poor quality product to the customer and expect them stay a customer (unless you are Microsoft). That leaves Features. You will have to limit the scope of the project - at least for the first release to the customer at the agreed-upon time.
My recommendation is to prioritize the requirements (features) of the product. This usually requires customer input, and, obviously, everything cannot be the highest priority. Next, estimate the time required to implement each feature (in person-hours, not real-time). Then pick a selection of features that can be implemented in the time allotted that produces a reasonably functional product. This requires some careful juggling, selecting enough of the higher priority features that make a coherent first release by the deadline.
Calculate the hours worked at 8 hours/day, 5 days/week per person, but expect to work at least 10 hours per day, perhaps upto 6 days per week. With meetings, eating, bathroom breaks, and unexpected delays taking the rest of the time. Do not fall into the trap of 12-16 hour days, 7 days per week. It can be done, but most people can only keep it up for 2-3 weeks before their productivity falls way off. When you are fatigued, it becomes more difficult to focus and think clearly. Mistakes happen; more bugs are written; and quality suffers.
At the end of your six weeks, you should have a product that is good enough for the client to play with, try on real world problems, find bugs, and request enhancements. As long as the missing features are well delineated and don't prevent any work from being done, the customer will be glad to have something experiment with. The next release of the product (a few weeks later) should roll in addition features and bug fixes.
Convince management to bring in food and fun to provide reasonable breaks from the stress of the crunch. Watching the Simpson's projected on the screen in the conference room while eating Chinese take-away provides a great 45 minute respite from the grindstone. And the team feels less exploited (for 2 hours at least).
I know the following to be near certainties:
If you revolt, you will likely be terminated - or worse, exploited to the max first, and then terminated. In your predicament, the fault lays squarely with the project manager and/or the sales guy that committed to an unreasonable schedule. Applying the whip to the development team does not fix this problem. So if anyone should fear for his job, it should not be you (unless you are the project manager...). If this kind of screw-up happens repeatedly, it does not go unnoticed by upper management. If upper management does believe in a chain-gang worker philosophy, your job is toast no matter what you do, because it will be outsourced to India or the Philippines next year.
Actually, WO5 switched from Obj-C to Java, simply because of the portability issues.
I think that it marks a step towards the end of "You must use IE to browse this site" hegemony.
I don't think so. I've encountered a bunch of sites that only support IE on Windows, not IE on Macintosh.
To all you folks out there, you should be buying used whenever possible
I stopped buying used CDs several years ago when, after I was burglarized, I found a slew of my former CDs in the used CD bin at the local Wherehouse. Although I had marked my CDs (with a red dot on the jewel case to avoid mix-ups at work/parties), neither the cops nor the Wherehouse found that sufficient evidence to return my music. I lost around 300 CDs (US $4500), more than half my collection.
Now I couldn't sell my used CDs, even if I wanted to. I've marked them all "Property of Brett Johnson. Stolen if presented for resale."
P.S. Vengeance was soon mine, 'tho. One day I was "working from home" when I caught one of the neighborhood kids crawling out my living room window. I nabbed the brat with 16 of my CD's in his shirt. He turned out to be our son's "friend" that would unlock a window when he was visiting, then come back later to rob us blind.
One is tempted to suspect money under the table from Microsoft
It wasn't "under the table". It was a $427,000 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant the district received at about the same time they instituded the Wintel-only policy.
If you read the second article you notice that the school district instituted the Wintel-only policy at about the same time they won a $427,000 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant. I'm sure its just a coincidence.
"[he] said he paid $500 for it to a guy he met online."
That must be the same guy that sold me my penis enlarger.
Some things never change. The constant bickering over names, standards, and licenses in the unix community 20 years ago was one of the things that kept unix from really taking off. While all the unix providers, licensers, and organizations were suing each other and refusing to cooperate, Linux and Windows servers just took over most of the marketplace. I was hoping all this crap was behind us, but now SCO, Novell, and the Open Group are starting it all over again. All those innept idiots that managed to screw things up so badly in the past, now want a piece of the pie. And companies will keep buying Windows Server 2003.
I got a D in handwriting in the 3rd grade. Not that I was a more competent touch typist. I just was too bored to write page after page of loops, lines, and whorls.
Eventually, I learned to type (on a manual typewriter). Now I can type much faster than I can write with a pen.
As I grew up, my handwriting was always a mess, although architecture school taught me to letter legibly (yes, before CAD).
I never cared about my illegible handwriting until I broke my collar bone. Now my illegible writting is puncuated with spastic jerky lines.
And IBM calls it VMX (Vector Multimedia Extensions, IIRC) because Motorola holds the trademark on the name "Altivec."
Actually, VMX is a different architecture than Altivec, although the implementation in the 970 is Altivec instruction compatible (at Apple's request). The guys at Ars Technica seem to believe that VMX might actually underperform Motorola's current Altivec implementation.
I was at the CENIC conference in Santa Barbara a few weeks ago and was quite surprised by the number of Apple laptops among the presenters and attendees. My best guess is around 40% of the laptops present were PowerBooks and iBooks. I haven't seen anything like that outside of an Apple conference for years. I have noticed a sharp increase in Apple laptops at recent Linux and Java conferences, 'tho.
Granted, CENIC is dedicated to gigabit networking, so the fact that Apple G4 PowerBooks come with gigabit ethernet built-in makes a nice match.
"As nice as the iMac is suppose to be  that damn hockey puck makes it hideous to me." Apple hasn't shipped the round "hockey puck" mouse for more than 3 years. I replaced mine with a macally 2 button mouse w/ scrollwheel for something like $20. It works great.
Of couse most of the graphics and video software leverages Altivec, but Seti@home, Folding@home, and BLAST all get a significant boost from the vector processor. There is a significant Mac presence in the physics, genomics, and protienomics sectors. It is the platform of choice for Internet2 connectivity (because of the built-in GigE). Macs aren't just for graphic arts and publishing.
Not quite. Hypertransport is a high speed bus used to connect the CPU to the peripheral chips. There will still be an ethernet chip, and a firewire chip, but they will live on a Hypertransport bus rather than a PCI or PCI-X bus.
HyperTransport technology transfers data at 12.8 Gigabytes per second. It is designed to be approximately 48 times faster than PCI, 12 times faster than PCI X and 10 times faster than 4-channel Infiniband.
The current G4 suffers from a severe bus bandwidth bottleneck. This is an on-chip problem, so no fancy peripheral chips can rectify it. This is why the current DDR PowerMacs don't see the significant benefit that DDR technology should provide. In most current P4/Athlon/G4 performance comparisons, the G4's lagard performace can be much more attributed to its poor memory bandwidth than it's core clock speed.
Although initial 970 core clock speeds don't seem to be significantly greater than the current G4, its peripheral interface bandwidth is lightyears ahead. Hypertransport would help the 970 sing, significantly improving its throughput. Hypertransport would be wasted on a G4. It would be like having a superhighway run by your city, but your on/off ramps are potholed dirt tracks with metering lights.
Same thing with Altivec; Moto's name is Velocity Engine.
Other way around. The Motorola name for the vector processing unit is "Altivec". Apple calls it "Velocity Engine"
I just don't know what to say. I am rendered speechless. That is the ugliest monstrosity I've seen in a long time. Comparing it to an iMac is a incredible insult to Apple Design.
Drop the iMike moniker, he should name the thing Kollos.
Actually FAST TCP works well at broadband speeds. I recall one test over GigE that sustained 860+ Kbs. There was also a test between two high energy physics sites that managed to substantially fill a 10Gbs pipe. All of this is from memory, but the references should not be too hard to find.
FAST TCP is currently an easy Linux Kernel option to enable. I personally am waiting for Mac OS X support, since nearly all G4 models have shipped with GigE for the last few years.
Expect Microsoft to add hooks into your Address Book (so you can easily print envelopes with the correct zip code, of course). Then the next Outlook Macro virus with send junk paper mail to everyone in your address book. Once it is also integrated with eStamp, all hell will break loose. Your postal carrier will shoot you when he/she finds 1.3 million outgoing letters in your mailbox.
12" iBook. Powerful enough for taking notes, writing papers, and writing software. Remember that OS X comes with a full development environment, so if you will be writing software, your set. I usually take notes in class with pen and paper (its quieter and quicker), then type it up afterward to reinforce. Most of the campus has wireless access, so the built-in 802.11b kicks ass. Long battery life usually means I rarely need to plug in. The iBooks seem to be less fragile than the G4 PowerBooks at a fraction of the price. If your dorm room is anything like mine was, there just won't be enough room for a sizable desktop machine ( let alone 2 or 3 - roommates too) unless you get a flat panel display.
20GB iPod. Don't laugh. I listen to tunes walking to/from campus. It's also a very small external firewire drive. If I'm using a lab/classroom with available macs, I can shuttle data back & forth on the iPod. It's much lighter than a laptop, and gets power over firewire, so I don't need to carry a power cable & transformer. I wowed a class as a guest lecturer when I just pulled my iPod out of my pocket, plugged it into the professer's PowerBook, and launched my presentation. It also replaced my Palm Vx, holding contacts and calendar.
Cellular Phone. Cheaper than a landline and statewide or nationwide free long distance packages are a dime-a-dozen.
Pens & Paper. Still a neccessity. Number 2 pencils for filling in those little circles.
PDA - NOT. I have a Palm Vx that sits unused. It had degraded to just holding my contacts. After moving them to my iPod, I found I just stopped carrying the Palm around.
Remember most Universities sell hardware to students at a moderate discount (5-10%), and software at a steep discount (70-90%), so check it out before buying on the open market. Apple also has educational discounts that aren't that great - the Apple discount is usually less than the sales tax you can save by ordering from the right online retailer. Look for bundles that add memory for free. If they offer you a crappy printer bundle, decline and ask for even more memory.