One of our contractors at work was saying to me the other day that when I/O is taken into consideration, they're seeing speed on their PowerBooks outclass their AMD MP servers... they narrowed it down to Apple's implementation of the JDK just doing a very good job moving large amounts of data around.
The real trouble here is that it's so hard to say "platform X" is faster, when it really depends on the application being executed. You might find that the PowerBook is a great machine for your first project, but your second project which is less I/O and more CPU intensive doesn't run as well.
I tend to think that ultimately, you can never have the fastest platform at -all- the tasks you want to perform when developing, so the best bet is to buy what you're most comfortable using and be aware of the strengths of your target platform when developing. With Java being cross-platform, this is more difficult because you may be deploying on a range of end-user machines.
This is true with AMD64, AMD's implementation of 64-bit instructions in x86.
How intel will do it, and if/if not it will provide the same benefits isn't yet completely clear, as there is no working product to test and examine.
That said... at least on UltraSPARC (a 64-bit architecture I've been using for years now), applications compiled to 32-bit are generally faster than the same application compiled to 64-bit, regardless of if/if not you are using GCC or Sun's own compilers (which would, presumably, take best advantage of their chips).
You and I know that at 2ghz, the G5 systems, with their fat, highly tuned bus technology are worlds faster then an intel chip at 2ghz. Nobody in their right mind denies this.
-BUT-.. for the average consumer who doesn't know of such things, seeing 2ghz on the G5 and seeing 3.6ghz on a shiny new pentium 4 makes them think that the P4 is almost twice as fast. The fact that the G5 is 64-bit tips the scales... people assume that at twice the bits, it's twice the speed, thus returning the G5 to performance-leader status.
Actually, 64-bit computing isn't any faster than 32-bit computing. This is a common mistake made due to the surface facts.
In reality, 64-bit computing is possibly -slower- than it's 32-bit counterpart due to the increased bandwidth required, though smart engineering in modern 64-bit CPU's tend to work around this.
The advantage to 64-bit computing is, frankly, in the memory space that can be addressed. When you can address larger amounts of memory, you can make an application faster as less disk paging is necessary (assuming you have the memory to match). A good example of this are database servers. When you have 24GB of memory and a 20GB database, you can literally buffer the database in memory, this removing your slower disks from the equation.
Mind, you can do this with PAE on Intel's current 32-bit offerings, but I digress.
Ultimately, I think what Intel is -really- doing here is playing catch up on a modern variation of the "mhz myth game". Intel always took the hearts and minds of the average user, as a 3ghz P4 seemed better than an AMD processor running at 2.2ghz or a PowerPC running at 1.25ghz... even if in some or many cases, the "slower" chips worked faster.
Now, the average user is seeing the G5 at 2ghz, but a whopping 64-bits... and the Athlon64 chips at 2ghz, but a whopping 64-bits... and they're assuming that they must be faster due to their deeper bit depth. This is really nothing new. Sony has been doing this with the PlayStation2 for a few years now... claiming it to be a 128-bit system when it's really just a MIPS chip with a 128-bit vector unit. On this line of thinking the G4 and G5 are -also- 128-bit chips... but Apple just doesn't market them as such.
Intel had to act to counter this assumption, and the easiest way is to add 64-bit extensions to the P4, keep them clocked higher, and then win both of the wars.
Does the average user need 64-bit? No. Does the user who does know where to get it already? Yep. Sun, Apple, AMD, HP and even Intel's Itanium have been offering 64-bit technology for a while now.
This all comes down to marketing. That's it, that's all.
1. I prefer my ISP to -not- touch any of my outgoing mail. I'm not going to get into the privacy issues that are associated to this kind of thing, but it's a slippery slope from "filtering for spam content" to "copying for later inspection". What if the post office opened and read every letter you sent via snail-mail? Regardless of the motivation, for privacy reasons, this is wrong.
2. Thus, I prefer my ISP to act like my postman. All packets I send should NOT be inspected by my ISP. That said, my ISP, like my postman, can't be responsible for my actions. It's a two way street. As a legitimate customer, I deserve privacy. As a legitimate business, my ISP deserves to be saved from reprimand because one of their hundreds, or even thousands of customers is sending spam.
3. Placing the responsibility on the ISP only creates situations where some ISP's will become havens for spammers. If I wanted to make some dirty money from spammers, I'd set up an ISP where spammers were welcome. Sure, I'd have to deal with an upstream, but the possibility exists. The bottom line is, trusting independent ISP's to police themselves means different standards are applied to everyone.
Those points in mind, the only way I see in dealing with this is to make spam messages outright illegal (and finable). If I want to send a newsletter to 500, 1000, or even 10000 people, that should be allowed for... but I should have to prove a clear opt-in procedure exists. The deterrent in the real world for not filling peoples mailboxes with junk mail is the huge cost involved. Similar deterrents should exist for e-mail, in the form of hefty fines for those using non-opt-in lists. At, say, $50 a message, a spam list of 1,000,000 e-mails is going to get very expensive for an "internet marketing" company.
WaterKeeper.ca, the site for the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper (part of Robert F. Kennedy's Waterkeeper Alliance) had the same problem, but with SORBS. WaterKeeper.ca is hosted on a server at a hosting company, shared by many other customers. The problem is, one or more of the other customers were allegedly sending spam messages, and SORBS blacklisted the whole box, leaving Lake Ontario Waterkeeper unable to communicate with many people who depend on their newsletters to keep up to date with environmental battles they are fighting.
Since 1996, I've been involved with running SMTP servers in some capacity, and I've always felt that the real-time blacklist services, while good intentioned, are a poor way to deal with the problem of SPAM. Too often, legitimate organizations get blacklisted because a few (and sometimes, only one) twit(s) forget that they've opted in to something and decide to report a message as spam. We're not talking about someone or some organization buying a mailing list here, either. In 100% of the circumstances that I've been involved with where someone has been blacklisted by an RBL, the messages that triggered the "spam" complaints have been totally opt-in newsletters - the people sending the messages haven't purchased their mailing lists, but instead, compiled them by having the users -specifically- request the content.
What makes things worse is that SORBS, for example, requests a "donation" to a charity in order to have you removed from their list. To me, that borders on extortion.
What makes it even worse still is that with SORBS blacklisting the whole box, all the other legitimate use e-mails being sent from that machine to SORBS-enabled mail servers are left out of luck. It's one thing to punish -one- "spammer", but with hosting companies as popular as they are, blacklisting an IP sometimes blacklists dozens (or even hundreds) of customers at a time, all sharing the same server. Suddenly, many people sharing a server have a problem, because one person was "spamming" and the RBL's are far too wide a net to cast over that single offender as they try to deal with the problem. When does the "service" they provide become a disservice because of the collateral damage it causes?
It's high time we abandon the clearly flawed RBL concept (and any other technological forms of dealing with spam) and start -really- putting pressure on our elected officials to enact sufficiently strong anti-spam legislation. Consider that many forms of copy protection and DRM have been cracked, replaced or upgraded, then cracked again... and you see that where there is a will, there is a way. Everytime we suceed in blocking spam by some means, it takes little time for the spammers to find another way to get their junk into our inboxes.
Not until we make spam a significantly expensive proposition (in the form of fines - I personally would love to see chronic spammers tarred and feathered, but I digress), will the "internet marketing" companies finally be stopped from flooding my mailbox with their messages.
Clearly, there are issues of jurisdiction standing in the way of this... but in my opinion, if copyright laws can be shared and upheld through a multi-national treaty, why can't a similar anti-spam treaty exist?
Now, I should point out that the unrealistic elitist in me remembers when spam didn't really exist, because not everyone and their grandmother had decided to rape the internet so that they could make a quick buck. Spam just reminds me - hundreds of times a day - that for all things good in the world, humanity finds a way to take advantage of it, use it until it's ruined, then move on to the next thing... you know... kind of like what 2nd wave style industry (to reference Toffler) is doing with our planet. Spam is just the next form of pollution that
I should also point out that WMA support requires royalties to Microsoft as well, AFAIK.
We should all face reality... something like Ogg Vorbis, though excellent and commendable, will never be an industry standard.
Think of how long it took Linux to mature to the point that it started seeing action in mainstream data centers. Only after dozens of major companies (IBM, SGI, Sun, etc) starting pushing it as a solution did it really get into people's minds.
Ogg doesn't have that kind of support at all, and as a result, the industry will rally behind a format that has the recognition and support of some major brand names.
This brings us back to square one... is the future format that we'll all support going to be WMA or AAC? It's looking like that's really going to be the choice. MP3 is clearly on it's way out, although it's still popular on the desktop of course and is the format of choice for people just ripping the odd CD they own. As far as buying music on the internet goes (and we all know that this is the future), AAC is the successor, both in lineage and practical implementation.
Add to this, the fact that AAC is a standard format set forth by and designed by committee gives it my vote.
I'm really sorry man... I tried so hard to install Windows XP on my PowerBook, but when I put the CD it just shows an upset Mac face and doesn't do anything.
Can you help me fix this? I really want to get rid of this stable UNIX operating system I'm running. It's too complex, and I'm too much of a pansy to understand it.
Although I don't know you, I'd bet heavily that I'm a far more seasoned UNIX admin than you are.
That said, what exactly is the point you're trying to make about NetInfo?
If I'm getting you, you're suggesting that NetInfo in place of flat text is somehow wrong? Have you ever admin'd a cluster of several dozen boxes with thousands of accounts?
I have better things to do than manually or script-sync thousands of accounts across multiple boxes.
It seems fewer and fewer people can afford clues these days.
Well, I'd argue that performance of a CPU is but a single indicator of it's overall worth.
That said, suggesting that Sun won't be able to sell hardware in the future with their SPARC processor based systems is a little short sighted and misses some key points.
Firstly, Sun is a very capable company when it comes to building systems that have more CPU's then their x86 competitors. We have 2 E4x00 machines with 12 CPU's each and they run like clockwork. Finding intel machines with many more than 8 CPU's is a challenge, and even if you do, you're crippled by the fact that the scalability is pretty much non-existent past 4 processors... especially under Windows NT. Linux isn't much better at larger CPU numbers, although I understand this is being worked on actively.
AMD has been able to correct this with the Opteron CPU's, but I have still yet to see a 12 CPU'd Opteron machine... though I'm sure someone will build one eventually. Itanium on the other hand seems to have better scalability than it's x86 grandparents... but nowhere near the almost linear performance increases seen in UltraSPARC based systems.
When you're around larger iron as much as I am, you quickly learn the value of having many relatively fast CPU's instead of having 2 or 4 really fast CPU's... with the dynamic reconfiguration ability of a good Sun machine, you could even lose 2 CPU's to a hardware failure and still have the CPU power to accommodate your customers.
At one point I heard Mr. Jobs discussing the backend, and yes... the Xserve, Xserve RAID and the venerable MacOS X Server are all the behind-the-scenes puppetmasters for iTunes Music Store.
Of course, Apple also uses Quicktime (once again, their own product), likely coupled with some in-house custom app to do the encoding and maintenace of the store, so you could say that when using iTunes, you're using Apple software from end to end, save for your OS if you happen to be stuck on a Windows box.
Of course for me on this 17" PowerBook, it's Apple to Apple from a to Z.:)
From the encoding of the track, to the storage, to the serving of the data to the client that receives it and the playback engine that processes it... all Apple hardware and software.
Few other companies in the world build "the whole widget", and even fewer make it all work so wonderfully.
I was just telling a friend at the office about this little tidbit. Our local DSL provider in Toronto (Bell Canada) has just removed their download caps after adding them over a year ago.
Of course, it seems more and more that we Canadians are protected from the corrupted empire that is the RIAA... that and given the timeframe that Bell did this on make me sure that it's unrelated... but still.
I say... between my uncapped downloads, the free and easy pot laws and the open season on downloading, Canada is still the hippest place I've ever been... thank goodness I live here.:)
Someone once told me that Sun makes most of their money from their storage business. If you look at the RAID array technology Sun sells, it make sense.
At any rate, this is good news all around, though dooming Sun is preemptive. A lot of larger institutions use Sun machines simply because of the TOC and the reliability of the things.
We have about 12 Sun machines in our data center cabinet, 2 of which are 12 CPU'd monsters, and we have -no- reliability problems with them or our Sun supplied software.
We know that this Intel/AMD platform Apple Mac would get much better support from hardware and software manufacturers. An Apple Mac running the newest hardware would never be significantly disadvantaged performance-wise, and Apple would attract a lot of users who previously considered Macs bad value for money.
I'm still trying to contain my laughter.
Supporting Macintosh hardware has little to do with hardware and much to do with drivers. Just because a Macintosh has an Intel chip in it doesn't mean a thing.
BeOS, OS/2 and Solaris all run on Intel hardware too... it doesn't mean that the drivers are a quick and easy transition from the Windows world... if that were the case, Solaris wouldn't be so damned choosy about hardware on x86.
Our company has been purely 802.11b within the office complex for over 2 years now. Every client machine uses 802.11b, be it desktop or notebook. Our servers, of course, are connected to fast ethernet.
We've recently moved the network to 802.11g draft standard using linksys access points and linksys network adapters... which use the Broadcom chipset. I'm personally using a 17" PowerBook with an Airport Extreme (also Broadcom) card.
On the whole. we get between 15-22Mbps.
We did some pretty minor testing with 802.11a, and although I agree that it's throughput is -better- then 802.11g... it's not -that- much better on a busy LAN, and overall, the lower range makes it useless for us.
802.11a will likely die out as 802.11b/g gain more and more popularity... the "non-standardness" of 11a, coupled with it's range issues, make it a hassle for most network admins.
Slashdot Mirror
This is very interesting.
:)
One of our contractors at work was saying to me the other day that when I/O is taken into consideration, they're seeing speed on their PowerBooks outclass their AMD MP servers... they narrowed it down to Apple's implementation of the JDK just doing a very good job moving large amounts of data around.
The real trouble here is that it's so hard to say "platform X" is faster, when it really depends on the application being executed. You might find that the PowerBook is a great machine for your first project, but your second project which is less I/O and more CPU intensive doesn't run as well.
I tend to think that ultimately, you can never have the fastest platform at -all- the tasks you want to perform when developing, so the best bet is to buy what you're most comfortable using and be aware of the strengths of your target platform when developing. With Java being cross-platform, this is more difficult because you may be deploying on a range of end-user machines.
Sigh... the perils of an open world.
I would comment on all that's wrong with this, but it's just so nonsensical.
Just thought I'd point that out to you.
This is true with AMD64, AMD's implementation of 64-bit instructions in x86.
How intel will do it, and if/if not it will provide the same benefits isn't yet completely clear, as there is no working product to test and examine.
That said... at least on UltraSPARC (a 64-bit architecture I've been using for years now), applications compiled to 32-bit are generally faster than the same application compiled to 64-bit, regardless of if/if not you are using GCC or Sun's own compilers (which would, presumably, take best advantage of their chips).
Documentation echoing this notion is here.
See, this is my point.
.. for the average consumer who doesn't know of such things, seeing 2ghz on the G5 and seeing 3.6ghz on a shiny new pentium 4 makes them think that the P4 is almost twice as fast. The fact that the G5 is 64-bit tips the scales... people assume that at twice the bits, it's twice the speed, thus returning the G5 to performance-leader status.
You and I know that at 2ghz, the G5 systems, with their fat, highly tuned bus technology are worlds faster then an intel chip at 2ghz. Nobody in their right mind denies this.
-BUT-
Actually, 64-bit computing isn't any faster than 32-bit computing. This is a common mistake made due to the surface facts.
In reality, 64-bit computing is possibly -slower- than it's 32-bit counterpart due to the increased bandwidth required, though smart engineering in modern 64-bit CPU's tend to work around this.
The advantage to 64-bit computing is, frankly, in the memory space that can be addressed. When you can address larger amounts of memory, you can make an application faster as less disk paging is necessary (assuming you have the memory to match). A good example of this are database servers. When you have 24GB of memory and a 20GB database, you can literally buffer the database in memory, this removing your slower disks from the equation.
Mind, you can do this with PAE on Intel's current 32-bit offerings, but I digress.
Ultimately, I think what Intel is -really- doing here is playing catch up on a modern variation of the "mhz myth game". Intel always took the hearts and minds of the average user, as a 3ghz P4 seemed better than an AMD processor running at 2.2ghz or a PowerPC running at 1.25ghz... even if in some or many cases, the "slower" chips worked faster.
Now, the average user is seeing the G5 at 2ghz, but a whopping 64-bits... and the Athlon64 chips at 2ghz, but a whopping 64-bits... and they're assuming that they must be faster due to their deeper bit depth. This is really nothing new. Sony has been doing this with the PlayStation2 for a few years now... claiming it to be a 128-bit system when it's really just a MIPS chip with a 128-bit vector unit. On this line of thinking the G4 and G5 are -also- 128-bit chips... but Apple just doesn't market them as such.
Intel had to act to counter this assumption, and the easiest way is to add 64-bit extensions to the P4, keep them clocked higher, and then win both of the wars.
Does the average user need 64-bit? No. Does the user who does know where to get it already? Yep. Sun, Apple, AMD, HP and even Intel's Itanium have been offering 64-bit technology for a while now.
This all comes down to marketing. That's it, that's all.
While this idea -seems- good, it has problems:
1. I prefer my ISP to -not- touch any of my outgoing mail. I'm not going to get into the privacy issues that are associated to this kind of thing, but it's a slippery slope from "filtering for spam content" to "copying for later inspection". What if the post office opened and read every letter you sent via snail-mail? Regardless of the motivation, for privacy reasons, this is wrong.
2. Thus, I prefer my ISP to act like my postman. All packets I send should NOT be inspected by my ISP. That said, my ISP, like my postman, can't be responsible for my actions. It's a two way street. As a legitimate customer, I deserve privacy. As a legitimate business, my ISP deserves to be saved from reprimand because one of their hundreds, or even thousands of customers is sending spam.
3. Placing the responsibility on the ISP only creates situations where some ISP's will become havens for spammers. If I wanted to make some dirty money from spammers, I'd set up an ISP where spammers were welcome. Sure, I'd have to deal with an upstream, but the possibility exists. The bottom line is, trusting independent ISP's to police themselves means different standards are applied to everyone.
Those points in mind, the only way I see in dealing with this is to make spam messages outright illegal (and finable). If I want to send a newsletter to 500, 1000, or even 10000 people, that should be allowed for... but I should have to prove a clear opt-in procedure exists. The deterrent in the real world for not filling peoples mailboxes with junk mail is the huge cost involved. Similar deterrents should exist for e-mail, in the form of hefty fines for those using non-opt-in lists. At, say, $50 a message, a spam list of 1,000,000 e-mails is going to get very expensive for an "internet marketing" company.
WaterKeeper.ca, the site for the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper (part of Robert F. Kennedy's Waterkeeper Alliance) had the same problem, but with SORBS. WaterKeeper.ca is hosted on a server at a hosting company, shared by many other customers. The problem is, one or more of the other customers were allegedly sending spam messages, and SORBS blacklisted the whole box, leaving Lake Ontario Waterkeeper unable to communicate with many people who depend on their newsletters to keep up to date with environmental battles they are fighting.
Since 1996, I've been involved with running SMTP servers in some capacity, and I've always felt that the real-time blacklist services, while good intentioned, are a poor way to deal with the problem of SPAM. Too often, legitimate organizations get blacklisted because a few (and sometimes, only one) twit(s) forget that they've opted in to something and decide to report a message as spam. We're not talking about someone or some organization buying a mailing list here, either. In 100% of the circumstances that I've been involved with where someone has been blacklisted by an RBL, the messages that triggered the "spam" complaints have been totally opt-in newsletters - the people sending the messages haven't purchased their mailing lists, but instead, compiled them by having the users -specifically- request the content.
What makes things worse is that SORBS, for example, requests a "donation" to a charity in order to have you removed from their list. To me, that borders on extortion.
What makes it even worse still is that with SORBS blacklisting the whole box, all the other legitimate use e-mails being sent from that machine to SORBS-enabled mail servers are left out of luck. It's one thing to punish -one- "spammer", but with hosting companies as popular as they are, blacklisting an IP sometimes blacklists dozens (or even hundreds) of customers at a time, all sharing the same server. Suddenly, many people sharing a server have a problem, because one person was "spamming" and the RBL's are far too wide a net to cast over that single offender as they try to deal with the problem. When does the "service" they provide become a disservice because of the collateral damage it causes?
It's high time we abandon the clearly flawed RBL concept (and any other technological forms of dealing with spam) and start -really- putting pressure on our elected officials to enact sufficiently strong anti-spam legislation. Consider that many forms of copy protection and DRM have been cracked, replaced or upgraded, then cracked again... and you see that where there is a will, there is a way. Everytime we suceed in blocking spam by some means, it takes little time for the spammers to find another way to get their junk into our inboxes.
Not until we make spam a significantly expensive proposition (in the form of fines - I personally would love to see chronic spammers tarred and feathered, but I digress), will the "internet marketing" companies finally be stopped from flooding my mailbox with their messages.
Clearly, there are issues of jurisdiction standing in the way of this... but in my opinion, if copyright laws can be shared and upheld through a multi-national treaty, why can't a similar anti-spam treaty exist?
Now, I should point out that the unrealistic elitist in me remembers when spam didn't really exist, because not everyone and their grandmother had decided to rape the internet so that they could make a quick buck. Spam just reminds me - hundreds of times a day - that for all things good in the world, humanity finds a way to take advantage of it, use it until it's ruined, then move on to the next thing... you know... kind of like what 2nd wave style industry (to reference Toffler) is doing with our planet. Spam is just the next form of pollution that
I should also point out that WMA support requires royalties to Microsoft as well, AFAIK.
... is the future format that we'll all support going to be WMA or AAC? It's looking like that's really going to be the choice. MP3 is clearly on it's way out, although it's still popular on the desktop of course and is the format of choice for people just ripping the odd CD they own. As far as buying music on the internet goes (and we all know that this is the future), AAC is the successor, both in lineage and practical implementation.
We should all face reality... something like Ogg Vorbis, though excellent and commendable, will never be an industry standard.
Think of how long it took Linux to mature to the point that it started seeing action in mainstream data centers. Only after dozens of major companies (IBM, SGI, Sun, etc) starting pushing it as a solution did it really get into people's minds.
Ogg doesn't have that kind of support at all, and as a result, the industry will rally behind a format that has the recognition and support of some major brand names.
This brings us back to square one
Add to this, the fact that AAC is a standard format set forth by and designed by committee gives it my vote.
Apple pansy, eh? I see.
... I tried so hard to install Windows XP on my PowerBook, but when I put the CD it just shows an upset Mac face and doesn't do anything.
I'm really sorry man
Can you help me fix this? I really want to get rid of this stable UNIX operating system I'm running. It's too complex, and I'm too much of a pansy to understand it.
Umm, libfaad does AAC on Linux, though it apparently sucks. I wouldn't know, since I use OS X and AAC is, of course, rock solid on OS X.
Also, the latest version of VideoLAN Client does AAC on Linux.
Oh yeah, agreed.
:) So, in the context of the time -when- OS/2 was out, it was the money, for sure. :)
Architecture wise, Pre-OS X versions of MacOS were a scary sight.
Umm, no.
Ever used MacOS X? I was an OS/2 user for years, and OS X is by far and away, hands down a more polished offering.
Although I don't know you, I'd bet heavily that I'm a far more seasoned UNIX admin than you are.
That said, what exactly is the point you're trying to make about NetInfo?
If I'm getting you, you're suggesting that NetInfo in place of flat text is somehow wrong? Have you ever admin'd a cluster of several dozen boxes with thousands of accounts?
I have better things to do than manually or script-sync thousands of accounts across multiple boxes.
It seems fewer and fewer people can afford clues these days.
Well, I'd argue that performance of a CPU is but a single indicator of it's overall worth.
That said, suggesting that Sun won't be able to sell hardware in the future with their SPARC processor based systems is a little short sighted and misses some key points.
Firstly, Sun is a very capable company when it comes to building systems that have more CPU's then their x86 competitors. We have 2 E4x00 machines with 12 CPU's each and they run like clockwork. Finding intel machines with many more than 8 CPU's is a challenge, and even if you do, you're crippled by the fact that the scalability is pretty much non-existent past 4 processors... especially under Windows NT. Linux isn't much better at larger CPU numbers, although I understand this is being worked on actively.
AMD has been able to correct this with the Opteron CPU's, but I have still yet to see a 12 CPU'd Opteron machine... though I'm sure someone will build one eventually. Itanium on the other hand seems to have better scalability than it's x86 grandparents... but nowhere near the almost linear performance increases seen in UltraSPARC based systems.
When you're around larger iron as much as I am, you quickly learn the value of having many relatively fast CPU's instead of having 2 or 4 really fast CPU's... with the dynamic reconfiguration ability of a good Sun machine, you could even lose 2 CPU's to a hardware failure and still have the CPU power to accommodate your customers.
At one point I heard Mr. Jobs discussing the backend, and yes... the Xserve, Xserve RAID and the venerable MacOS X Server are all the behind-the-scenes puppetmasters for iTunes Music Store.
:)
Of course, Apple also uses Quicktime (once again, their own product), likely coupled with some in-house custom app to do the encoding and maintenace of the store, so you could say that when using iTunes, you're using Apple software from end to end, save for your OS if you happen to be stuck on a Windows box.
Of course for me on this 17" PowerBook, it's Apple to Apple from a to Z.
From the encoding of the track, to the storage, to the serving of the data to the client that receives it and the playback engine that processes it... all Apple hardware and software.
Few other companies in the world build "the whole widget", and even fewer make it all work so wonderfully.
Oh look, another redneck with a computer!
I was just telling a friend at the office about this little tidbit. Our local DSL provider in Toronto (Bell Canada) has just removed their download caps after adding them over a year ago.
:)
Of course, it seems more and more that we Canadians are protected from the corrupted empire that is the RIAA... that and given the timeframe that Bell did this on make me sure that it's unrelated... but still.
I say... between my uncapped downloads, the free and easy pot laws and the open season on downloading, Canada is still the hippest place I've ever been... thank goodness I live here.
Umm, Munch rocked dude. :P
Sorry if it ain't some D&D variant.
Someone once told me that Sun makes most of their money from their storage business. If you look at the RAID array technology Sun sells, it make sense.
At any rate, this is good news all around, though dooming Sun is preemptive. A lot of larger institutions use Sun machines simply because of the TOC and the reliability of the things.
We have about 12 Sun machines in our data center cabinet, 2 of which are 12 CPU'd monsters, and we have -no- reliability problems with them or our Sun supplied software.
Too tired for real commentary.
We know that this Intel/AMD platform Apple Mac would get much better support from hardware and software manufacturers. An Apple Mac running the newest hardware would never be significantly disadvantaged performance-wise, and Apple would attract a lot of users who previously considered Macs bad value for money.
I'm still trying to contain my laughter.
Supporting Macintosh hardware has little to do with hardware and much to do with drivers. Just because a Macintosh has an Intel chip in it doesn't mean a thing.
BeOS, OS/2 and Solaris all run on Intel hardware too... it doesn't mean that the drivers are a quick and easy transition from the Windows world... if that were the case, Solaris wouldn't be so damned choosy about hardware on x86.
So... no, we don't all know that...
That's about as funny as a group of Arabs joking about New York having two less towers.
Mass destruction = mass destruction.
Show some respect.
Our company has been purely 802.11b within the office complex for over 2 years now. Every client machine uses 802.11b, be it desktop or notebook. Our servers, of course, are connected to fast ethernet.
... it's not -that- much better on a busy LAN, and overall, the lower range makes it useless for us.
We've recently moved the network to 802.11g draft standard using linksys access points and linksys network adapters... which use the Broadcom chipset. I'm personally using a 17" PowerBook with an Airport Extreme (also Broadcom) card.
On the whole. we get between 15-22Mbps.
We did some pretty minor testing with 802.11a, and although I agree that it's throughput is -better- then 802.11g
802.11a will likely die out as 802.11b/g gain more and more popularity... the "non-standardness" of 11a, coupled with it's range issues, make it a hassle for most network admins.
Good points, but let's still remember that Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is going to be a PlayStation exclusive. :)
Umm, no.
IRIX and Linux will be supported (at a higher price) for some time, I imagine.
I assume you mean the 9800 Pro.
The 9000 is pretty blah by this month's standards.
Still puts my nVidia GeForce4 Go 440 to shame though.