Isn't it interesting that people cite OSS as an escape from the licensing hell of a closed, proprietary world, yet it seems every few months brings some dramatic licensing controversy in OSS? I really wish all these issues would get sorted out, but many people--that includes RMS--expect their ideals to rule out everything in spite of lack of practicality or real-world applicability.
Okay, let me try to step through this crazy story.
1.) The guy had an iPod and an Apple laptop. The laptop had his music, which he synced to his iPod.
2.) He decided to buy a Sony Vaio, but he didn't copy any of his music from the Apple laptop to his Vaio. Even iTunes reminds you to make safe backups.
3.) You don't say whether he sold his Apple laptop or not, so presumably he did, which means he got rid of his own music collection.
4.) The iPod wasn't readable in Windows, which was your friend's fault. When you first get an iPod, you're given the option of formatting it for Windows/Mac or just for Mac. Your friend obviously formatted it for Mac, which puts the HFS+ filesystem on it which is unreadable by Windows.
5.) You decided to reformat the whole thing instead of finding a freeware third-party app that would read the HFS+ iPod (there are plenty out there).
6.) You're surprised that formatting the iPod would eliminate the music on it. Yeah, formatting tends to have that effect.
Your friend lost from the very beginning. Strike one was GETTING RID OF THE COMPUTER THAT HAD HIS MUSIC ON IT. He didn't make any backups (as iTunes tells you to when you buy music), and he didn't copy his music over. He just magically expected the music to be transferrable to a brand new computer? You have to have music in iTunes to transfer it to the iPod--it's a one-way transfer. He should have copied his music from computer to computer. What a dumbass.
However, you can transfer the other way using freeware apps if you're using a FAT32-formatted iPod, as most are. Yet, your friend formatted for Mac. If he's going to buy a Windows computer and expect to communicate with his iPod, he needed to format it for Windows. Again, his fault. He should have formatted the iPod for Windows and resynced before he got rid of his Apple laptop.
Finally, you formatted his iPod and then got mad that the music was gone? What did you think, formatting it would keep the music on it? Formatting erases files.
Wow, you're obviously a frothing-at-the-mouth AMD fanboy. You have no idea what the benefits of a unified cache are, and you somehow magically know how "shitty" these new Xeon processors are even though they're not out yet. If AMD didn't need the unified cache, it wouldn't be moving to one next year. Intel is clearly taking back both desktops and servers this year, having already owned the portable market, especially with the Core Duo which totally decimates the Turion while competing performance-wise with an Athlon64 3800+ X2.
Re:Been waiting for this one...
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Songbird Flies Today
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Because the iTunes team doesn't want to sift through a bunch of feedback emails that say "Where's the Ogg support?" or "Why doesn't my random, esoteric GTK app magically work with some random archaic feature of iTunes?" or "RMS SAYS U R EVIL BECUZ U DONT RELEASE UR SOURCE CODES AS GEE PEE ELL."
I see nothing wrong with iTunes. I take issue with the submission's "DRM ridden" phrase. iTunes is not "ridden" with DRM; you don't even have to buy any music from iTunes and have a completely DRM-free experience. iTunes functions just fine as the best music management software without you having to use anything with DRM. I used iTunes for a whole year that way. I imagine most people use it that way, actually.
However, if you do buy from iTunes, Apple provides the most lax DRM in the market. I have never, ever come across any limitation. I can burn as many CDs as I want, share the music with multiple computers, and copy them anywhere at will. When someone rattles on about iTunes DRM, it's clear to me they don't really use iTunes at all. If they did, they'd know the DRM is so invisible that most users don't even know it's there. I always forget it is.
So you read about the software and then realize, this thing is designed to connect to multiple online stores, so it will be just as DRM ridden as anything else! Looking at the screenshots, I suddenly recognize this as the iTunes clone that Mac fans were ripping on last year. The interface is a 100% brain-dead clone of the iTunes interface, widget for widget. They couldn't even come up with their own idea. This makes OSS look bad. I can certainly guarantee this software will never take off in this state, and making goofy claims that "FairPlay is the 8-track of our generation" (huh?) doesn't help any. The developer is very arrogant and claims shopping in one central location like the iTunes Music Store is some backwards idea, when in reality, we've already DONE the multiple stores thing for years, and people have gravitated to one central source (the majority choosing iTunes). It's been the natural progression of the market. That seamless vertical experience is needed to connect it all together. Steve Jobs has stated that relying on 3rd party support in the consumer hardware space doesn't work, and so far, he's been proven correct.
I have no experience with Windows Media Player's offerings, so I can't comment on its DRM. But I find most of the DRM commentary on Slashdot to be alarmist and inapplicable to the real world, and stuff like this just makes OSS look like kooky copycat artists fighting some unseen force that most users aren't even coming into contact with in their daily experiences.
The developers should probably expect a response from Apple's lawyers shortly. The iTunes interface is patented, and this is just blatant! Get an original idea, guys.
Universal Binaries are a transitional stopgap; Apple is, after all, referring to this as a transition to Intel.
Let's get a few things out of the way:
1.) This silicon technology isn't new, it's just the first news of it being rolled out in the desktop in major waves.
2.) This is IBM, who is famous for promising in press releases but never delivering. I still remember when the IBM guy said at WWDC '03 that the G5s would hit 3Ghz "by next summer."
3.) Apple isn't going to "switch back." For Pete's sake, how could anyone actually think they'd do it all again next year? Apple switched to have faster, cooler chips so they could update their Powerbook line. Portables outsell desktop machines in today's computer industry. They liked Intel's future low-power roadmap (particularly Merom). Steve Jobs originally considered x86 in 2000, and again in 2003 (but was dissuaded with the G5). Remember that Rhapsody ran on Windows NT for a while.
4.) Intel chips aren't magically going to sit still until 2007. Intel has already announced a dual-core 3.4Ghz Xeon with a unified 16MB cache, available this fall (AMD's fall server chips won't have unified cache until next year...they'll have two 512kb caches). And of course, Merom and Conroe are due out.
What? You mean a dramatic headline proclaiming Apple switch chips too soon is just fluff? All the misinformed commentary speculating that Apple will "switch back" as if Intel's chips are just going to stand still until 2007 are bogus? Apple switched because they wanted cooler, faster chips in their laptops, period. Unless you guys want to have been stuck with 1.4Ghz G4s in your Powerbooks until 2007.
Why do people keep ignoring what Steve Jobs already said at MacWorld? Intel chips meant faster, cooler chips for faster portable Macs. Portables are outselling desktops, not just at Apple but in the PC industry as a whole. I'm sure supply issues were a nice reason to get away, but the cooler, faster chips was the big reason. It really is that simple.
I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or not. I think 512 to 1GB of RAM is great. I'm saying we won't be using 4GB a year from now. Things will plateau off around 1GB. That's more than enough for most people who use their computers to browse the net and check email (the #1 activity people use their computers for according to Microsoft).
It would be silly to preach now when Turion dual core is almost here in a month or two.
Well, the dual-core Yonah already consumes less power than the single core Turion; I can't imagine the dual-core Turion's power usage. I think it's safe to say Intel owns portables right now.
The Merom will be 64-bit. Intel said they didn't include 64-bit on Yonah because of power usage, but the Merom cuts it down so dramatically that 64-bit power usage is negligable.
Yeah, but Vista is bloated. Users' needs aren't increasing; they're still just surfing the web, taking pictures, and reading email. You rarely need more than 512MB of RAM to do that.
When Windows XP came out five years ago, 256 to 512 MB of RAM was recommended. Five years later, we're just now recommending a 1GB. I think it will be another four to five years before 2GB is being recommended, but I don't know...like I said, user needs have plateaued and aren't growing other than in the hardcore gaming segment. The only tact left is for developers to bloat system memory requirements to force everyone to have more memory, ala Vista.
A lot of those performance gains are based on the extra registers on the chip added by the vendor, not 64-bit memory addressing. Also, 64-bit apps have the benefit of always being able to target SSE, since no 64-bit x86 chip doesn't have SSE. 32-bit code optimized with SSE competes with 64-bit code in many cases.
I believe you're right that someday we'll all be 64-bit, but I believe it's many years from now and will happen when people actually need more than 4GB of RAM.
The Core Duo competes performance-wise with the Athlon64 3800+ X2 while consuming less power at 100% than the Athlon does at idle. It surpasses the Turion in both performance and power usage. It would be silly to avoid the Core Duo in favor of the Turion just for the pointless excursion of 64-bit.
As someone else here also mentioned, all the people I know who were running 64-bit Windows gave up and now run the 32-bit version. Guess what, it's faster for them and runs better. There is little inherently better about a 64-bit chip since its performance gains are offset by its negative qualities (pointer size, cache bloat), especially if the 32-bit code is optimized for SSE as 64-bit apps often are.
Claiming "hardly anyone" will be using the 32-bit version of Vista is quite a claim considering the vast majority of laptops are 32-bit, the majority of desktops are 32-bit, and the majority of 64-bit capable desktops are running in 32-bit mode. The new hardware upgrade cycle just happened, so not as many will be buying new hardware later this year just to run Windows "now with more plastic" Vista.
Others have pointed out that you're wrong, but I wanted to explain why. The world is not rapidly moving to 64-bit except in the server space where memory is a concern. However, Intel chips since the Pentium Pro have supported 36-bit memory addressing which breaks the total 4GB barrier anyway. The reason 64-bit is not rapidly taking off is that 64-bit introduces a bigger pipe but offsets the gains with bigger pointers and more cache bloat. Most of the performance gains you see in benchmarks comes from the fact that in 64-bit chips, SSE3 is a baseline and so you can target it in your code, as well as the extra registers which are added by the vendor and not related to being 64-bit.
In 32-bit code where SSE optimization is implemented, a lot of 64-bit gains disappear. This is particularly interesting for the Mac since their baseline Intel spec will always have at least SSE3, so all apps can target it from now on. Doing 64-bit math doesn't require a 64-bit chip either, as SSE goes up to 128-bit. The real reason you'd want 64-bit is if you're running a server that needs a very high amount of memory.
64-bit gaming has been the most amusing to me, watching as CryTek and AMD teamed up to sell more chips and desperately advertised 64-bit Far Cry as better than its 32-bit version by adding higher-res textures here and there and tweaking the visuals, even though absolutely none of that has to do with being 64-bit and everything to do with your video card. 64-bit Half-Life 2 is actually slower than its 32-bit version according to the benchmarks. Slashdot has an article in its archives about how 64-bit gaming has been overhyped to gamers.
There are times I wonder if 64-bit will die as a fad this year and become an unused set of instructions that only server admins use. It's certainly got all the makings of a tech fad. I think the novelty is wearing off and people are realizing 32-bit is just fine and that there is nothing inherently better about being 64-bit, other than giving AMD and Intel a marketing reason to sell you new chips. I can't think of any reason a desktop computer user today needs a 64-bit chip. Microsoft, of course, is very vocal about wanting to put everyone on 64-bit chips, and the reason for that is that the majority of Windows sales come from pre-installations on OEM computers, so if they can convince people to buy new computers that have new chips in them, they sell more copies of Windows. I think they'll have as much success with that as they did with the XBox 360 launch. Ahem.
As a sidenote, Apple handled 64-bit in OS X Tiger by keeping the GUI 32-bit, but allowing 64-bit processes to be spawned in the background. This means your app is 32-bit but you communicate with a spawned 64-bit console process (it has to be a console process because the GUI libraries are still 32-bit code). It's so little used that it took a while for anyone to notice when one of the 10.4 updates accidentally disabled 64-bit support...
OS X's GUI is still reliant on the CPU for drawing operations and only uses OpenGL for the final compositing stage. OS X Tiger introduced Quartz 2D Extreme (not to be confused with Quartz Extreme which first introduced hardware-based compositing in 2002...). This moves the drawing operations onto the GPU similar to Avalon in Vista. Quartz 2D Extreme was disabled by default because of the high GPU requirements and the preliminary bugginess, but it's expected to be fully enabled in OS X Leopard along with a resolution-independent interface. Note that Quartz has always supported resolution-independence since its inception, but the performance hit was too great all those years ago.
OS X does indeed scream on the Core Duo. It's blazingly fast.
What this issue shows is that there is no black-and-white definition of "free" as RMS would have you believe. What he considers free and right is actually HIS personal definition and may or may not be agreed with by others. I hope this GPL3 controversy continues as it may open the eyes of so many GNU crusaders who follow RMS' every word and flame anyone who doesn't follow his One True Definition Of Freedom.
RMS also actually believes that commercial software is evil and that all software should be "free," but it should be HIS definition of free. He wants to define it and bend everyone to that. I take very little of what he says seriously as he strikes me as the kind of zealot I often find around here, arguing emotively instead of reasonably. Torvalds is far more grounded which is why he gets the respect. So while you play crusader and ramble on about "the corporate world" (ah, dorm-room anti-capitalism) on Slashdot, Torvalds is actually busy right now making something people use to get things done.
I have always had such a strong reaction against DRM that any future with DRM has always seemed distopian to me.
That's because for years, geek sites like Slashdot have tried to create this imaginary world where corporations are giant evil organizations the control the world (like in their favorite science-fiction books). The want you to think DRM is some sort of evil slavery with people getting carted away by DRM Gestapo and whipped for copying and sharing information.
In reality, lazy freeloaders are using the Internet today to distribute content so that others don't have to pay for it. Let me repeat--the basis for piracy is to distribute someone else's hard work so you don't have to pay the creator for it and that you don't get caught for doing it. It's completely ripping off the person who made the content, so those content owners build in copy restrictions so they don't get ripped off. People who buy the content are unaffected; only pirates are the ones bitching because they are no longer able to freeload content without having to pay for it. So to distract from the fact that piracy is immoral and wrong, pirates paint these evil fictional futures that resemble their sci-fi books, where "The Corporations (tm)" control everything and DRM is some great evil.
All this talk from people in the so-called OSS community on Slashdot about how evil DRM is and how great piracy is, when piracy is the exact opposite of the "everybody contributes something back" mentality of OSS. When you have the source code to Linux, you can tweak it and give back to the community. When you rip off System of a Down's latest album, you're not giving anything back. You're just make sure System of a Down doesn't get paid that day. That's not free as in speech; it's free as in loading.
I'm sorry, but in order for the market to work, and chairs to move into the digital age, there has to be chairs rights management so nobody can copy a chair at home.
What the FUCK? You can't make a digital copy of a chair and give it to others on the Internet so that they also don't have to buy that company's chairs. If you could, then there would be chair rights management to protect the people who designed and manufactured the chair.
What you actually must have meant was 'for monopolists to allow humanity to move forward and reap the benefits from the digital age, they must retain the ability to enforce artificial scarcity in the interest of keeping revenues up in a situation where the laws of supply and demand would otherwise eradicate their ability to profit at their current levels of inefficiency'.
So an artist putting out a song protected with DRM is now magically a "monopolist?" It's not "artificial scarcity." Apparently "natural availability" to you means rampant, widespread piracy on Bittorrent? Funny, I just thought he was a guy trying to ensure people can't rip him off on Kazaa. But your argument is typical--distract the issue by scapegoating unnamed corporations and monopolies as the real evil so that people are unable to recognize the truth that what they're doing is immoral and wrong.
Do you believe John Carmack should not be paid a single dime for Doom 3? Should we be able to just pirate the fuck out of it? Would you fault him if he said "Enough" and put DRM restrictions so that the illegal pirates couldn't rip him off anymore?
And piracy is the antithesis of creativity and production. You all just hate DRM because you want to continue pirating the fuck out of everything. Mod me down, but it's my belief. I know this article has next to nothing to do with piracy, but that's where this anti-DRM mindset comes from. You've been told by the Slashdot hivemind for years that it's bad and wrong, so that's the position you take. Five years ago during the Napster suit, everyone here said content holders should stop suing P2P apps and enforce existing laws against individual infringers. Five years later they're trying to do that, and now that's wrong too. You just want to freeload off someone else's work, consuming their content while never paying them a dime. That's all this anti-DRM stuff comes from--not wanting to have to return to those dark days where you had to pay for stuff.
Jesus, if people have to ask if a dual-core Yonah chip that competes performance-wise with an Athlon64 3800+ X2 will be able to run Vista, Vista must be the most bloated and slow operating system on the planet. I've heard the recent leaked builds aren't THAT bad, but I've never used one personally. Can anyone else comment? I have a feeling all those version 1.0 managed.NET APIs wrapping on top of Win32 will be slow and painful and little-used as people just continue compiling natively for best performance.
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Isn't it interesting that people cite OSS as an escape from the licensing hell of a closed, proprietary world, yet it seems every few months brings some dramatic licensing controversy in OSS? I really wish all these issues would get sorted out, but many people--that includes RMS--expect their ideals to rule out everything in spite of lack of practicality or real-world applicability.
Buy music from itumes. get a new computer. copy music to new computer.
Get pissed because music will not play.
Take the 30 seconds to authorize the computer, music plays again.
download jhymn and pray you were not stupid enough to upgrade to itunes 6
Hard drive crash? too bad.
Has nothing to do with Apple.
Itunes would rock if you could download the songs you bought more than once to overcome this nastiness waiting to bite people.
Record labels won't let it happen, but it's moot since you can make as many backups as you want.
not everyone is a techno-genius either. a crash or new pc will upset many users because of the DRM.
Which is why iTunes pops up a dialog reminding you to back up your music after you purchase it. Your fault.
Yeah, uh, the fact it doesn't run on Macs might be a big reason for Mac users to dismiss it and not download it.
Okay, let me try to step through this crazy story.
1.) The guy had an iPod and an Apple laptop. The laptop had his music, which he synced to his iPod.
2.) He decided to buy a Sony Vaio, but he didn't copy any of his music from the Apple laptop to his Vaio. Even iTunes reminds you to make safe backups.
3.) You don't say whether he sold his Apple laptop or not, so presumably he did, which means he got rid of his own music collection.
4.) The iPod wasn't readable in Windows, which was your friend's fault. When you first get an iPod, you're given the option of formatting it for Windows/Mac or just for Mac. Your friend obviously formatted it for Mac, which puts the HFS+ filesystem on it which is unreadable by Windows.
5.) You decided to reformat the whole thing instead of finding a freeware third-party app that would read the HFS+ iPod (there are plenty out there).
6.) You're surprised that formatting the iPod would eliminate the music on it. Yeah, formatting tends to have that effect.
Your friend lost from the very beginning. Strike one was GETTING RID OF THE COMPUTER THAT HAD HIS MUSIC ON IT. He didn't make any backups (as iTunes tells you to when you buy music), and he didn't copy his music over. He just magically expected the music to be transferrable to a brand new computer? You have to have music in iTunes to transfer it to the iPod--it's a one-way transfer. He should have copied his music from computer to computer. What a dumbass.
However, you can transfer the other way using freeware apps if you're using a FAT32-formatted iPod, as most are. Yet, your friend formatted for Mac. If he's going to buy a Windows computer and expect to communicate with his iPod, he needed to format it for Windows. Again, his fault. He should have formatted the iPod for Windows and resynced before he got rid of his Apple laptop.
Finally, you formatted his iPod and then got mad that the music was gone? What did you think, formatting it would keep the music on it? Formatting erases files.
What a ridiculously dumb story.
Wow, you're obviously a frothing-at-the-mouth AMD fanboy. You have no idea what the benefits of a unified cache are, and you somehow magically know how "shitty" these new Xeon processors are even though they're not out yet. If AMD didn't need the unified cache, it wouldn't be moving to one next year. Intel is clearly taking back both desktops and servers this year, having already owned the portable market, especially with the Core Duo which totally decimates the Turion while competing performance-wise with an Athlon64 3800+ X2.
Because the iTunes team doesn't want to sift through a bunch of feedback emails that say "Where's the Ogg support?" or "Why doesn't my random, esoteric GTK app magically work with some random archaic feature of iTunes?" or "RMS SAYS U R EVIL BECUZ U DONT RELEASE UR SOURCE CODES AS GEE PEE ELL."
I see nothing wrong with iTunes. I take issue with the submission's "DRM ridden" phrase. iTunes is not "ridden" with DRM; you don't even have to buy any music from iTunes and have a completely DRM-free experience. iTunes functions just fine as the best music management software without you having to use anything with DRM. I used iTunes for a whole year that way. I imagine most people use it that way, actually.
However, if you do buy from iTunes, Apple provides the most lax DRM in the market. I have never, ever come across any limitation. I can burn as many CDs as I want, share the music with multiple computers, and copy them anywhere at will. When someone rattles on about iTunes DRM, it's clear to me they don't really use iTunes at all. If they did, they'd know the DRM is so invisible that most users don't even know it's there. I always forget it is.
So you read about the software and then realize, this thing is designed to connect to multiple online stores, so it will be just as DRM ridden as anything else! Looking at the screenshots, I suddenly recognize this as the iTunes clone that Mac fans were ripping on last year. The interface is a 100% brain-dead clone of the iTunes interface, widget for widget. They couldn't even come up with their own idea. This makes OSS look bad. I can certainly guarantee this software will never take off in this state, and making goofy claims that "FairPlay is the 8-track of our generation" (huh?) doesn't help any. The developer is very arrogant and claims shopping in one central location like the iTunes Music Store is some backwards idea, when in reality, we've already DONE the multiple stores thing for years, and people have gravitated to one central source (the majority choosing iTunes). It's been the natural progression of the market. That seamless vertical experience is needed to connect it all together. Steve Jobs has stated that relying on 3rd party support in the consumer hardware space doesn't work, and so far, he's been proven correct.
I have no experience with Windows Media Player's offerings, so I can't comment on its DRM. But I find most of the DRM commentary on Slashdot to be alarmist and inapplicable to the real world, and stuff like this just makes OSS look like kooky copycat artists fighting some unseen force that most users aren't even coming into contact with in their daily experiences.
The developers should probably expect a response from Apple's lawyers shortly. The iTunes interface is patented, and this is just blatant! Get an original idea, guys.
Universal Binaries are a transitional stopgap; Apple is, after all, referring to this as a transition to Intel.
Let's get a few things out of the way:
1.) This silicon technology isn't new, it's just the first news of it being rolled out in the desktop in major waves.
2.) This is IBM, who is famous for promising in press releases but never delivering. I still remember when the IBM guy said at WWDC '03 that the G5s would hit 3Ghz "by next summer."
3.) Apple isn't going to "switch back." For Pete's sake, how could anyone actually think they'd do it all again next year? Apple switched to have faster, cooler chips so they could update their Powerbook line. Portables outsell desktop machines in today's computer industry. They liked Intel's future low-power roadmap (particularly Merom). Steve Jobs originally considered x86 in 2000, and again in 2003 (but was dissuaded with the G5). Remember that Rhapsody ran on Windows NT for a while.
4.) Intel chips aren't magically going to sit still until 2007. Intel has already announced a dual-core 3.4Ghz Xeon with a unified 16MB cache, available this fall (AMD's fall server chips won't have unified cache until next year...they'll have two 512kb caches). And of course, Merom and Conroe are due out.
What? You mean a dramatic headline proclaiming Apple switch chips too soon is just fluff? All the misinformed commentary speculating that Apple will "switch back" as if Intel's chips are just going to stand still until 2007 are bogus? Apple switched because they wanted cooler, faster chips in their laptops, period. Unless you guys want to have been stuck with 1.4Ghz G4s in your Powerbooks until 2007.
Why do people keep ignoring what Steve Jobs already said at MacWorld? Intel chips meant faster, cooler chips for faster portable Macs. Portables are outselling desktops, not just at Apple but in the PC industry as a whole. I'm sure supply issues were a nice reason to get away, but the cooler, faster chips was the big reason. It really is that simple.
I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or not. I think 512 to 1GB of RAM is great. I'm saying we won't be using 4GB a year from now. Things will plateau off around 1GB. That's more than enough for most people who use their computers to browse the net and check email (the #1 activity people use their computers for according to Microsoft).
It would be silly to preach now when Turion dual core is almost here in a month or two.
Well, the dual-core Yonah already consumes less power than the single core Turion; I can't imagine the dual-core Turion's power usage. I think it's safe to say Intel owns portables right now.
The Merom will be 64-bit. Intel said they didn't include 64-bit on Yonah because of power usage, but the Merom cuts it down so dramatically that 64-bit power usage is negligable.
Yeah, but Vista is bloated. Users' needs aren't increasing; they're still just surfing the web, taking pictures, and reading email. You rarely need more than 512MB of RAM to do that.
When Windows XP came out five years ago, 256 to 512 MB of RAM was recommended. Five years later, we're just now recommending a 1GB. I think it will be another four to five years before 2GB is being recommended, but I don't know...like I said, user needs have plateaued and aren't growing other than in the hardcore gaming segment. The only tact left is for developers to bloat system memory requirements to force everyone to have more memory, ala Vista.
A lot of those performance gains are based on the extra registers on the chip added by the vendor, not 64-bit memory addressing. Also, 64-bit apps have the benefit of always being able to target SSE, since no 64-bit x86 chip doesn't have SSE. 32-bit code optimized with SSE competes with 64-bit code in many cases.
I believe you're right that someday we'll all be 64-bit, but I believe it's many years from now and will happen when people actually need more than 4GB of RAM.
The Merom will be pin-compatible with the Core Duo and uses the same chipset, suggesting an easy upgrade path.
The Core Duo competes performance-wise with the Athlon64 3800+ X2 while consuming less power at 100% than the Athlon does at idle. It surpasses the Turion in both performance and power usage. It would be silly to avoid the Core Duo in favor of the Turion just for the pointless excursion of 64-bit.
As someone else here also mentioned, all the people I know who were running 64-bit Windows gave up and now run the 32-bit version. Guess what, it's faster for them and runs better. There is little inherently better about a 64-bit chip since its performance gains are offset by its negative qualities (pointer size, cache bloat), especially if the 32-bit code is optimized for SSE as 64-bit apps often are.
Claiming "hardly anyone" will be using the 32-bit version of Vista is quite a claim considering the vast majority of laptops are 32-bit, the majority of desktops are 32-bit, and the majority of 64-bit capable desktops are running in 32-bit mode. The new hardware upgrade cycle just happened, so not as many will be buying new hardware later this year just to run Windows "now with more plastic" Vista.
Others have pointed out that you're wrong, but I wanted to explain why. The world is not rapidly moving to 64-bit except in the server space where memory is a concern. However, Intel chips since the Pentium Pro have supported 36-bit memory addressing which breaks the total 4GB barrier anyway. The reason 64-bit is not rapidly taking off is that 64-bit introduces a bigger pipe but offsets the gains with bigger pointers and more cache bloat. Most of the performance gains you see in benchmarks comes from the fact that in 64-bit chips, SSE3 is a baseline and so you can target it in your code, as well as the extra registers which are added by the vendor and not related to being 64-bit.
In 32-bit code where SSE optimization is implemented, a lot of 64-bit gains disappear. This is particularly interesting for the Mac since their baseline Intel spec will always have at least SSE3, so all apps can target it from now on. Doing 64-bit math doesn't require a 64-bit chip either, as SSE goes up to 128-bit. The real reason you'd want 64-bit is if you're running a server that needs a very high amount of memory.
64-bit gaming has been the most amusing to me, watching as CryTek and AMD teamed up to sell more chips and desperately advertised 64-bit Far Cry as better than its 32-bit version by adding higher-res textures here and there and tweaking the visuals, even though absolutely none of that has to do with being 64-bit and everything to do with your video card. 64-bit Half-Life 2 is actually slower than its 32-bit version according to the benchmarks. Slashdot has an article in its archives about how 64-bit gaming has been overhyped to gamers.
There are times I wonder if 64-bit will die as a fad this year and become an unused set of instructions that only server admins use. It's certainly got all the makings of a tech fad. I think the novelty is wearing off and people are realizing 32-bit is just fine and that there is nothing inherently better about being 64-bit, other than giving AMD and Intel a marketing reason to sell you new chips. I can't think of any reason a desktop computer user today needs a 64-bit chip. Microsoft, of course, is very vocal about wanting to put everyone on 64-bit chips, and the reason for that is that the majority of Windows sales come from pre-installations on OEM computers, so if they can convince people to buy new computers that have new chips in them, they sell more copies of Windows. I think they'll have as much success with that as they did with the XBox 360 launch. Ahem.
As a sidenote, Apple handled 64-bit in OS X Tiger by keeping the GUI 32-bit, but allowing 64-bit processes to be spawned in the background. This means your app is 32-bit but you communicate with a spawned 64-bit console process (it has to be a console process because the GUI libraries are still 32-bit code). It's so little used that it took a while for anyone to notice when one of the 10.4 updates accidentally disabled 64-bit support...
OS X's GUI is still reliant on the CPU for drawing operations and only uses OpenGL for the final compositing stage. OS X Tiger introduced Quartz 2D Extreme (not to be confused with Quartz Extreme which first introduced hardware-based compositing in 2002...). This moves the drawing operations onto the GPU similar to Avalon in Vista. Quartz 2D Extreme was disabled by default because of the high GPU requirements and the preliminary bugginess, but it's expected to be fully enabled in OS X Leopard along with a resolution-independent interface. Note that Quartz has always supported resolution-independence since its inception, but the performance hit was too great all those years ago.
OS X does indeed scream on the Core Duo. It's blazingly fast.
What this issue shows is that there is no black-and-white definition of "free" as RMS would have you believe. What he considers free and right is actually HIS personal definition and may or may not be agreed with by others. I hope this GPL3 controversy continues as it may open the eyes of so many GNU crusaders who follow RMS' every word and flame anyone who doesn't follow his One True Definition Of Freedom.
Oh, and BSD forever!
RMS also actually believes that commercial software is evil and that all software should be "free," but it should be HIS definition of free. He wants to define it and bend everyone to that. I take very little of what he says seriously as he strikes me as the kind of zealot I often find around here, arguing emotively instead of reasonably. Torvalds is far more grounded which is why he gets the respect. So while you play crusader and ramble on about "the corporate world" (ah, dorm-room anti-capitalism) on Slashdot, Torvalds is actually busy right now making something people use to get things done.
I have always had such a strong reaction against DRM that any future with DRM has always seemed distopian to me.
That's because for years, geek sites like Slashdot have tried to create this imaginary world where corporations are giant evil organizations the control the world (like in their favorite science-fiction books). The want you to think DRM is some sort of evil slavery with people getting carted away by DRM Gestapo and whipped for copying and sharing information.
In reality, lazy freeloaders are using the Internet today to distribute content so that others don't have to pay for it. Let me repeat--the basis for piracy is to distribute someone else's hard work so you don't have to pay the creator for it and that you don't get caught for doing it. It's completely ripping off the person who made the content, so those content owners build in copy restrictions so they don't get ripped off. People who buy the content are unaffected; only pirates are the ones bitching because they are no longer able to freeload content without having to pay for it. So to distract from the fact that piracy is immoral and wrong, pirates paint these evil fictional futures that resemble their sci-fi books, where "The Corporations (tm)" control everything and DRM is some great evil.
All this talk from people in the so-called OSS community on Slashdot about how evil DRM is and how great piracy is, when piracy is the exact opposite of the "everybody contributes something back" mentality of OSS. When you have the source code to Linux, you can tweak it and give back to the community. When you rip off System of a Down's latest album, you're not giving anything back. You're just make sure System of a Down doesn't get paid that day. That's not free as in speech; it's free as in loading.
I'm sorry, but in order for the market to work, and chairs to move into the digital age, there has to be chairs rights management so nobody can copy a chair at home.
What the FUCK? You can't make a digital copy of a chair and give it to others on the Internet so that they also don't have to buy that company's chairs. If you could, then there would be chair rights management to protect the people who designed and manufactured the chair.
What you actually must have meant was 'for monopolists to allow humanity to move forward and reap the benefits from the digital age, they must retain the ability to enforce artificial scarcity in the interest of keeping revenues up in a situation where the laws of supply and demand would otherwise eradicate their ability to profit at their current levels of inefficiency'.
So an artist putting out a song protected with DRM is now magically a "monopolist?" It's not "artificial scarcity." Apparently "natural availability" to you means rampant, widespread piracy on Bittorrent? Funny, I just thought he was a guy trying to ensure people can't rip him off on Kazaa. But your argument is typical--distract the issue by scapegoating unnamed corporations and monopolies as the real evil so that people are unable to recognize the truth that what they're doing is immoral and wrong.
Do you believe John Carmack should not be paid a single dime for Doom 3? Should we be able to just pirate the fuck out of it? Would you fault him if he said "Enough" and put DRM restrictions so that the illegal pirates couldn't rip him off anymore?
That's pretty much the opposite of 'the market'.
Funny, that's what illegal piracy is.
And piracy is the antithesis of creativity and production. You all just hate DRM because you want to continue pirating the fuck out of everything. Mod me down, but it's my belief. I know this article has next to nothing to do with piracy, but that's where this anti-DRM mindset comes from. You've been told by the Slashdot hivemind for years that it's bad and wrong, so that's the position you take. Five years ago during the Napster suit, everyone here said content holders should stop suing P2P apps and enforce existing laws against individual infringers. Five years later they're trying to do that, and now that's wrong too. You just want to freeload off someone else's work, consuming their content while never paying them a dime. That's all this anti-DRM stuff comes from--not wanting to have to return to those dark days where you had to pay for stuff.
Jesus, if people have to ask if a dual-core Yonah chip that competes performance-wise with an Athlon64 3800+ X2 will be able to run Vista, Vista must be the most bloated and slow operating system on the planet. I've heard the recent leaked builds aren't THAT bad, but I've never used one personally. Can anyone else comment? I have a feeling all those version 1.0 managed .NET APIs wrapping on top of Win32 will be slow and painful and little-used as people just continue compiling natively for best performance.