Meanwhile, IBM recently built the prototype for a single BlueGene/L node, and it manages to cram 1024 PPC440 processors, with a Rpeak of 2Teraflops, and an Rmax of over 1.4TF into about half the space of the full racks mentioned in this article.
While this article is obviously about a somewhat less custom system than BlueGene/L, I'd have to say I'm much more impressed with IBM's achievement.
I'd hardly call this "better than bittorrent". While the principles may be similar, the target users are entirely different.
Bittorrent is for people who can barely afford to run their one server, and need others to take some of the load off.
This seems to be targeted at people who can set up a whole bunch of servers in a bunch of locations, and just want to use them efficiently to deliver huge content very quickly.
There are some other interesting semi-commodity hardware based new additions to the top 500 right under VT's #3 slot. BigMac is certainly impressive, but even if these systems can't quite match it's scores, they deserve a mention.
In addition to iTunesDL, mentioned in the article for mac, there's iSlurp which does basically the same thing in platform independent java. and has been out for six months.
But now we have a bunch of hype and publicity. So the Record companies are probably going to give apple shit and force more limitations down our throats, just like when Apple had to limit iTunes to sharing on the local network only.
This newkid managed to find all of 3 people out of millions of mac users who have had their netinfo database corrupted. All of which were fairly easily repaired, all of which managed to write constructive articles. (and at least one of which explicitly said they thought it was because of a pseudo-brownout while writing to disk, not some flaw in apple's software)
And now newkid claims he's having the same problem on 4 servers at once (of which I'm somewhat dubious), and writes this flamebait article, implying that Apple's OS is horribly flawed.
He then goes on to ask for the info he could have just read out of those 3 pages he linked to as documentation of his "serious flaws"; these problems are very rare, and fairly easily repaired by someone moderately cluefull.
"Had batteries advanced at the pace of the computer processor, a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke." - Paul Saffo
I suppose that would be somewhat hazardous wouldn't it. At least a current day leaking battery will leave a nasty burn mark on my table, not burn thru the table and into the concrete floor underneath.
It's not nonsense. Look here in their own press archive, 3rd article from the top. They still have their old PPC stuff in "matinance mode", but they only actually develop on x86. (unless they meekly pulled back from their position without bothering to make a statement to that effect).
"When Apple can produce a piece of software that adapts to the way I organise files, rather than expecting me to adapt to it, then I'll buy an iPod. Until then I'll just have to keep my money.
Apple released iTunes 4.1.1 a few days after the 4.1 version you tried, and it comes with the prefrence to organize your music folder off by default. Now go buy that iPod.
As you might guess, I'm primarily a mac person. I've only tried developing for QuickTime on Cocoa (which actually isn't much better than what you describe for windows, if you want to use anything more advanced than import/export/play functionality provided in the NSMovie object), and via Java (which, somewhat ironically has the best, most complete, OO API for QuickTime on any platform, QT4Java).
It would be nice if Apple provided access to an OO API similar to QT4Java from more native languages on both platforms.
I really wish people would do their research before assuming something can't be done.
iTunes for windows *can* burn DVDs
You can "Access your purchased music at full quality outside of iTunes". Any app that supports quicktime files can play them, there aren't as many such apps on windows as there ought to be (and as there are on mac), but that will change if there's any real demand for this feature. Plus you can burn your music to CD with no quality loss.
"Apple uses it's own tag format" is technically true, but misleading because Apple's metadata fromat from quicktime was adopted as an open standard for MPEG-4. Any app that properly supports the MPEG-4 file format should be able to read those tags.
Also, AAC *is* an open standard, it's just pattented, the same as MP3. All the documentation is available, any you can make a MPEG-4 AAC codec and legally sell it up to 50,000 times without paying any liscencing fees.
Well, you should have been uncertain. Since some of your points were factually wrong, certainty on your part just makes you seem willfully ignorant instead of meerly misinformed.
In any case, the emotions of FUD are generally assumed to be those of the listener, not the speaker. Someone spreading fear uncertainty and doubt often is quite cretain of what they're doing.
As for the rest, if you like using obscure codecs and formats that 99.997% of the world have never heard of (note I'm not talking about ogg here), refuse to use plug-ins, enjoy scripting your own database querys whenever you want to find a song's name, and like pirating your music as huge lossless files, you are *definitely* not the target audience.
Go ahead and use something else, just don't expect everyone else to bend over backwards to support your predilictions. It isn't Apple's responsibility to insure that it supports every possible obscure little codec or algorythm in every possible field, that's what plugins and add-ons are for. You seem to have no problem with them when the plug-in is for fb2k rather than QT/iTunes; and how you can simultaneously expound the virtues or open source software, and question the "quality and source" of long standing open source QT plugins is beyond me.
iTunes does support embeding ID3v2 track relative volume adjustments, which is basicall what ReplayGain is.
iTunes does have a plugin system, but it's primarily for visualizers, extra codecs are handled thru quicktime. If you want to add support for another codec, or file format, you do it by making a quicktime component.
I'm listening to a.ogg in iTunes (the mac version) right now via the open source Ogg component. Someone just has to port the component to windows.
And that 35MB footprint is only when it's streaming someone's library, normally it's arround 25MB, and neither of those numbers represent actual use, just what's allocated iirc.
And, it's a matter of personal prefrence, but the GUI seems well laid out to me, and I haven't noticed any speed problems (although the visualizer could use some optimising).
Take a look at the pics here: http://www.skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?117 8316
The Taipei 101 is counting that little thin section as part of the building rather than the spire. But it's pretty obvious it's not usable office space, there wouldn't be room.
The sears tower, with 108 usable floors to it's 101 still beats it in my mind.
Interestingly, I entered the same account information I use on my Mac at home, but that does not allow me to re-download music already purchased onto this machine at the office; if I want it here again (outside of my home network), I need to buy it again.
No, you just need to transfer the file from your other box, it'll play on your work box as long as you've authorized it, you just have to get it there.
Did you look at the apps they compared the G5s and the Athlon64s with?
Word- It's Microsoft, no shit it's going to be faster on windows, who would have guessed that? Premiere - The video app that sucks so hard on mac that Adobe stoped making it. Try the same functions on FCP and watch it come out a few times faster. Quake 3 - A game, 'cause you know macs are what everyone uses for gaming, and developers spend just as much time optimising their mac versions.
Photoshop - The only relavant and fair app they bothered to test, and the G5 is noticablly faster than any of the Athlon 64 systems, beaten only by the Opteron.
Um... It sounds like the only thing you actually used matroska for was muxing the final file. Quicktime is quite capable of taking a Xvid video track, an AAC audio track, and a properly formated text track and rolling them into a movie with nothing more than Quicktime Player, so it can be used for what you just did.
Of course, it could have been used for much of the rest of the process too.
Hell, Apple even provides a tool to get the MPEG2 transport stream off your HDTV receiver in their firewire dev tools.
Unfortunately, the "easier to use interface" isn't guaranteed, apple has never really bothered to put an end-user-UI-polish on alot of the more obscure Quicktime features.
Slashdot Mirror
You only have to loose one, and suddenly you have no reduandancy.
I would think for such an important link, there would be at least 3 (so you still have some redundancy durring repairs if one fails).
(you can already imagine the movie being made -- 'I Was a Hacker for The Mob')
I prefer the title "Sneakers".
As you can see here, the DB2 systems they seem to be comparing themselves with scored more than double what this one did.
I would expect a larger system to score lower on a pre-processor basis just from scaling issues, even if the processors were identical.
While the 3.5x ratio is impressive, the manner of it's announcement is very misleading.
Meanwhile, IBM recently built the prototype for a single BlueGene/L node, and it manages to cram 1024 PPC440 processors, with a Rpeak of 2Teraflops, and an Rmax of over 1.4TF into about half the space of the full racks mentioned in this article.
While this article is obviously about a somewhat less custom system than BlueGene/L, I'd have to say I'm much more impressed with IBM's achievement.
I'd hardly call this "better than bittorrent". While the principles may be similar, the target users are entirely different.
Bittorrent is for people who can barely afford to run their one server, and need others to take some of the load off.
This seems to be targeted at people who can set up a whole bunch of servers in a bunch of locations, and just want to use them efficiently to deliver huge content very quickly.
There are some other interesting semi-commodity hardware based new additions to the top 500 right under VT's #3 slot.
BigMac is certainly impressive, but even if these systems can't quite match it's scores, they deserve a mention.
4
NCSA
United States/2003
Tungsten
PowerEdge 1750, P4 Xeon 3.06 GHz, Myrinet / 2500
Dell
9819 Rmax
15300 Rpeak
5
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
United States/2003
Mpp2
Integrity rx2600 Itanium2 1.5 GHz, Quadrics / 1936
HP
8633 Rmax
11616 Rpeak
6
Los Alamos National Laboratory
United States/2003
Lightning
Opteron 2 GHz, Myrinet / 2816
Linux Networx
8051 Rmax
11264 Rpeak
They only have the 'Clean' version of the latest Outkast album. Which also has the #1 selling song on iTMS right now.
They have the uncensored version of that Outcast album.
It's right here.
In addition to iTunesDL, mentioned in the article for mac, there's iSlurp which does basically the same thing in platform independent java. and has been out for six months.
But now we have a bunch of hype and publicity.
So the Record companies are probably going to give apple shit and force more limitations down our throats, just like when Apple had to limit iTunes to sharing on the local network only.
Good job people.
This newkid managed to find all of 3 people out of millions of mac users who have had their netinfo database corrupted. All of which were fairly easily repaired, all of which managed to write constructive articles. (and at least one of which explicitly said they thought it was because of a pseudo-brownout while writing to disk, not some flaw in apple's software)
And now newkid claims he's having the same problem on 4 servers at once (of which I'm somewhat dubious), and writes this flamebait article, implying that Apple's OS is horribly flawed.
He then goes on to ask for the info he could have just read out of those 3 pages he linked to as documentation of his "serious flaws"; these problems are very rare, and fairly easily repaired by someone moderately cluefull.
"Had batteries advanced at the pace of the computer processor, a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke." - Paul Saffo
I suppose that would be somewhat hazardous wouldn't it.
At least a current day leaking battery will leave a nasty burn mark on my table, not burn thru the table and into the concrete floor underneath.
It's not nonsense.
Look here in their own press archive, 3rd article from the top.
They still have their old PPC stuff in "matinance mode", but they only actually develop on x86. (unless they meekly pulled back from their position without bothering to make a statement to that effect).
You ought to just go ahead and put linux on it then, or perhaps plain old Darwin.
GNU-Darwin decided to support only x86, not PPC, some time ago in a fit of 'activisim'.
"When Apple can produce a piece of software that adapts to the way I organise files, rather than expecting me to adapt to it, then I'll buy an iPod. Until then I'll just have to keep my money.
Apple released iTunes 4.1.1 a few days after the 4.1 version you tried, and it comes with the prefrence to organize your music folder off by default. Now go buy that iPod.
I can do all that with iTunes, and any computer with a CD drive and 802.11.
In point of fact, I *do* do all of that except the wireless part, and that's just because I live in a well wired building.
This guy publicized a security flaw, why hasn't he been sued yet?
Interesting...
As you might guess, I'm primarily a mac person.
I've only tried developing for QuickTime on Cocoa (which actually isn't much better than what you describe for windows, if you want to use anything more advanced than import/export/play functionality provided in the NSMovie object), and via Java (which, somewhat ironically has the best, most complete, OO API for QuickTime on any platform, QT4Java).
It would be nice if Apple provided access to an OO API similar to QT4Java from more native languages on both platforms.
I really wish people would do their research before assuming something can't be done.
iTunes for windows *can* burn DVDs
You can "Access your purchased music at full quality outside of iTunes". Any app that supports quicktime files can play them, there aren't as many such apps on windows as there ought to be (and as there are on mac), but that will change if there's any real demand for this feature.
Plus you can burn your music to CD with no quality loss.
"Apple uses it's own tag format" is technically true, but misleading because Apple's metadata fromat from quicktime was adopted as an open standard for MPEG-4. Any app that properly supports the MPEG-4 file format should be able to read those tags.
Also, AAC *is* an open standard, it's just pattented, the same as MP3. All the documentation is available, any you can make a MPEG-4 AAC codec and legally sell it up to 50,000 times without paying any liscencing fees.
Well, you should have been uncertain. Since some of your points were factually wrong, certainty on your part just makes you seem willfully ignorant instead of meerly misinformed.
In any case, the emotions of FUD are generally assumed to be those of the listener, not the speaker. Someone spreading fear uncertainty and doubt often is quite cretain of what they're doing.
As for the rest, if you like using obscure codecs and formats that 99.997% of the world have never heard of (note I'm not talking about ogg here), refuse to use plug-ins, enjoy scripting your own database querys whenever you want to find a song's name, and like pirating your music as huge lossless files, you are *definitely* not the target audience.
Go ahead and use something else, just don't expect everyone else to bend over backwards to support your predilictions. It isn't Apple's responsibility to insure that it supports every possible obscure little codec or algorythm in every possible field, that's what plugins and add-ons are for.
You seem to have no problem with them when the plug-in is for fb2k rather than QT/iTunes; and how you can simultaneously expound the virtues or open source software, and question the "quality and source" of long standing open source QT plugins is beyond me.
The Ogg Quicktime component allready has a windows version up on sourceforge, no need to port it.
Go get it:
http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/
Wow, that's alot of FUD.
.ogg in iTunes (the mac version) right now via the open source Ogg component. Someone just has to port the component to windows.
iTunes does support embeding ID3v2 track relative volume adjustments, which is basicall what ReplayGain is.
iTunes does have a plugin system, but it's primarily for visualizers, extra codecs are handled thru quicktime. If you want to add support for another codec, or file format, you do it by making a quicktime component.
I'm listening to a
And that 35MB footprint is only when it's streaming someone's library, normally it's arround 25MB, and neither of those numbers represent actual use, just what's allocated iirc.
And, it's a matter of personal prefrence, but the GUI seems well laid out to me, and I haven't noticed any speed problems (although the visualizer could use some optimising).
Only because taipei built a tiny little framework arround the bottom of their spire, and called the top of it the roof.
7 8316
Look at the picture here:
http://www.skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?11
The Taipei 101's 'roof' is barely any wider than their spire, and looks narrower than some other buildings' spires.
Take a look at the pics here:7 8316
http://www.skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?11
The Taipei 101 is counting that little thin section as part of the building rather than the spire. But it's pretty obvious it's not usable office space, there wouldn't be room.
The sears tower, with 108 usable floors to it's 101 still beats it in my mind.
No, you just need to transfer the file from your other box, it'll play on your work box as long as you've authorized it, you just have to get it there.
Did you look at the apps they compared the G5s and the Athlon64s with?
/. calls this a trouncing?
Word- It's Microsoft, no shit it's going to be faster on windows, who would have guessed that?
Premiere - The video app that sucks so hard on mac that Adobe stoped making it. Try the same functions on FCP and watch it come out a few times faster.
Quake 3 - A game, 'cause you know macs are what everyone uses for gaming, and developers spend just as much time optimising their mac versions.
Photoshop - The only relavant and fair app they bothered to test, and the G5 is noticablly faster than any of the Athlon 64 systems, beaten only by the Opteron.
And
Um... It sounds like the only thing you actually used matroska for was muxing the final file.
Quicktime is quite capable of taking a Xvid video track, an AAC audio track, and a properly formated text track and rolling them into a movie with nothing more than Quicktime Player, so it can be used for what you just did.
Of course, it could have been used for much of the rest of the process too.
Hell, Apple even provides a tool to get the MPEG2 transport stream off your HDTV receiver in their firewire dev tools.
Unfortunately, the "easier to use interface" isn't guaranteed, apple has never really bothered to put an end-user-UI-polish on alot of the more obscure Quicktime features.