But I have a job. I mean when $300 monitor buying time comes around the corner I am not going to be sobbing because I won't be able to afford ramen this week like you will.
I don't believe you purchased the right to do anything other than put that DVD in the drive and hit play; movie companies do not license you to make "backup copies" or move it to VHS tape. That is some right you are afforded by some legal precendent from years past.
It is not an essential right - not like the right for any citizen not to be bound by slavery, not like the right to not incriminate yourself in court, et cetera. You are not going to have your life ruined because you can't watch a DVD.
I liken this to the good ol' right to bear arms.
It's a right that I am happy to have but I am not going to cry about it if I didn't have it.
Owning a gun is okay, but not only do you not have the right to own one without a license and precursor background check, in most states you aren't even allowed to have it in the trunk of your car or in your pocket unless you have yet another license.
Fair enough. Let's get those. Now, I have them and I face a simple problem: None of that gives me the right to shoot people.
That makes the right to bear arms a pretty useless right to have, doesn't it?
I have the right to own a handgun, in the privacy of my own home, and shoot at tin cans and squirrels. Now, where am I supposed to be crying about this as something that is absolutely and completely missing in my life, what part of this blatant restriction of rights means that I cannot and would not consider living another painful, gunless day?
Replace guns with HD DVD, and do you see what I am getting at?
The DRM is so unobtrusive to most people who will have that new monitor anyway, nobody is going to care but geeks who are latched onto their old technology.
99.9% of people buying DRM-enabled media; they are watching it through a TV. If they have a digital TV with HDCP then they have nothing to worry about. If they don't, it probably can't view HD content anyway! This means MS can sell Windows 2K7 Media Center Edition without restriction.
Sometimes maybe the way to go against DRM is.. wait.. why are we going against it anyway? Why would I want to play my HD content on my Archos player at 320x240 by re-encoding? That's one application of DRM that people whine about. What's the difference here? Playing HD content on a resolution restricted device isn't a limitation of rights.
You are going to have a choice of monitors, and because they have announced this years in advance, monitor manufacturers have all that time to bring up to spec their monitor lines (application of technology; add a single chip between DVI decode and display. Not rocket science, not expensive). When you buy a PC when Longhorn arrives - and you will need to, by the way they are pushing these damned graphics technologies and audio APIs and multi-core chips through - it will just play this content just fine. And all the monitors on the market will play this content just fine.
DRM that I am worried about is that I can't play iTunes songs on anything other than iTunes enabled computers or an iPod.. okay, so I am truly locked in to some device that dictates how I play my music that I purchased. I have to buy an Apple music player, or stream music from an Apple application, or I am screwed.
Sony, Philips, Samsung, Eizo, AOC, Iiyama I could go on all day about how nobody is "dictating" how you view your media or what device you need to buy. As an application of securing digital content this system seems fairly tame. It won't rely on authenticating machines with internet servers, restricting your content to an arbitrary subset of systems you own (only 5? oh man!), only that you have a monitor which provides a secure digital path for your content.
You should buy the hell a new monitor because it WON'T work perfectly. You DON'T have the hardware now. Don't you read the articles?
The guy above (parentparentparent) says a $500 box will fix your tricks but you can buy a new one for that.
If you are THAT worried about watching HD content that is secured, you will be buying a new monitor anyway. You have 3 or 4 years until it becomes a standard which is the upgrade cycle anyway (unless you really really DO have one of those dirty yellow/beige 14" CRTs in front of you right now).
Out of all the DRM through the years that times out, locks up, only allows X amount of copying to other systems, degrading content so you can't videotape it is no worse than what.. Macrovision? If you can sit through screeners of movies where the screen is clipped, wobbly, practically greyscale and marvel at the wonders of mldonkey+interweb for letting you download it, then you are not going to care if you are watching the SD resolution-funnelled version of an HD clip.
Right, so you can buy a $500 box to decode the video and display it on an old monitor.
That's nice. Why don't people just buy new monitors for $200-$300 that have the capability of displaying the content?
The problem people miss here is that if you do have that capable display (any decent TV for example), the content plays fine. To hell with restrictions if you have the right hardware; the high definiton video is available to you. Why is that always simply glossed over in favour of discussing the down side?:)
Move to x86 = anger Lack of Java support = more anger
Are Apple just trying to piss off their loyal developer base? Maybe they are arrogant enough to think they can replace them with thousands of mindless VisualBasic migrants and AppleScript/Automator?
Sure the G5 has two floating point units where the G4 only has one. This lends very well to screwing around with double precision floating point.
The G4's AltiVec unit - for every occasion where single precision will do - out rocks the G5's in many areas, not just in instruction execution times. And it will do integer too. And the G4's integer unit is not worse than the G5's at all, so,
I mean if you were believing Steve Jobs today, then his whole move to the G5 was bullshit too (Integer Performance Per Watt being his benchmark for how great a CPU is)
But anyway. The G5's power budget meant that it did double the FPU performance at double the power envelope. Okay, so this is something for system designers to keep in mind; and it's something that needs to be decided on system-to-system. There is no generic "yeah G5 is better" or "yeah G4 is better", there is a lot of evaluation to do, usually by running code to check.
That's apparently why Virginia Tech housed a bunch of 2GHz PowerMacs before they bought XServes, so that they could do a real feasibility/code study on the things before they got real hardware that would be there for 20 years. The G5 passed the test but it didn't stop them calling the server room "hotter than the surface of the sun":)
For a single Mac user it wouldn't matter but if you are going to buy 250+ cluster nodes to do calculations, you can get the G4 (lower power envelope, easier to cool as in air conditioning) into much higher density configurations than the G5.
The rough estimate is that for every 3U of XServes you could get 16 dual G4 blades on a half-length rack chassis. 32 processors instead of 6. And you could put another blade chassis on the back of that, taking up the rest of the space. 64 processors instead of 6.
The power budget is increased but the processing power in terms of clock speed has gone up by a factor of 5-10 for the same amount of space used.
The JS20 blade system uses 7U blade chassis and fits 14 blades. In a smaller space and for arguably the same power budget you again double the processing power in terms of clock speed. This more than makes up for the lack of FPU performance per rack unit, and in integer and AltiVec the G4 cluster would scream along having double the capability. There are supercomputers in the top500 which are benchmarked using LINPACK double precision floating point tests, but actually only use 8-bit precision for their daily work. G4 is "just as good" here, the only thing it isn't is clean 64-bit for pointers.
So you can save a little electricity, a little server farm space, and the G4 system would be simpler and cheaper to design and manufacture (and to buy at retail). At high volumes, supercomputer or datacenter markets, it is just as good a chip. Or was; I am not sure we can make the power budget arguments swim anymore.
The Opteron has an integrated memory controller. The frontside bus is inside the chip; you'll never see it. It is not Hypertransport.
The G5 has a memory controller on the Northbridge, but it is also not Hypertransport. IBM call it Elastic IO. It is a BIT like Hypertransport but it's not.
Hypertransport is a chip interconnect in both designs, not a memory-cpu bus.
The 970FX already matches (at 1.6GHz) the power envelope of the 1.6GHz G4 that Apple are using in their PowerBook.
Apple's "we can't because it's too hot" bleating is yet another example of Jobs' bullshit.
IBM's PowerTune beats the pants off of the DFS functionality in the 7447A/7447B Apple are using. They could drop power usage to tiny levels and keep battery life at their usual high values.
The real reason might be simpler and slightly more technical; clock for clock the G4 would outperform their G5 version in everything except a memory bandwidth shoot- out. They had a benchmark right there on the show floor at Motorola SNDF (Dallas), in April 2004. You would expect it from the figures but to see it in real life.. it's quite enlightening. You could bet that Apple could gloss over this though, like they gloss over everything else important (like the useful Mac Mini with wireless and bluetooth being $700, Mac Mini's performance sucking cock wrt hard disk and peripherals, the hard disk cooling problems in the iMac, iBook logic board blowouts..:)
One of the things we do at the company I work for is tell people the G4 is better than the G5. The G4 is wonderfully more generic in performance - random memory access is a good one to benchmark. The G5 is very good at streaming huge contiguous blocks, but the high RAM access latencies and cache latency/line width problems kill random access or impact code such as array lookups (best Vector Permute trick on the planet, also hampered by a weak Permute unit).
But that's not to say the G5 doesn't have merits; it just has some VERY specific applications that it's very good at. Perhaps too specific for Apple. Companies like Mercury (www.mc.com) would probably have gone for the G5 if they hadn't found an even more specific processor for their needs (Cell, in this case).
With lower power chips the G5 could actually start to replace the G4 in places where performance in high memory and streaming data are paramount.
For laptops, desktops, and places where we don't need 16GB of memory, the G4 is going to rock for years to come though. I actually wonder why there couldn't be a special "pseudo-64bit" version of Linux for the G4, which used the 36-bit addressing modes to implement high memory support. Maybe it's because IBM practically own ppc64 Linux and don't want to overshadow their own chips?:)
I would say IBM's offerings are competitive. Steve Jobs and his "wah I wanted a 3GHz chip!" is all bullshit when you look at it; he wanted to compete with the Intel marketing machine, and still hasn't noticed that AMD Opteron chips top out at 2.6GHz - and have done for some time. The G5 is competitive in that it matches or outperforms the AMD Opteron (that frontside bus helps).
Their dual cores top out at 2.2GHz and also probably will for some time. Apple still have the potential to create a 2.4GHz PowerMac and an XServe with up to 4 processors which competes with AMD's most expensive and little used 400 and 800 processor lines.
I don't see why it "illustrates" anything except that Steve Jobs is a nut job who lied himself through a developer conference. It's a damn shame Apple has gone so low and a damn shame the developers are so loyal that they keep so quiet.
There is a lot of dissent in private quarters. All that PowerPC hype Apple pushed down our throats - some of it actually real as it turned out - has left 1000s of developers with a lot of AltiVec code and not a lot of choice. They are mighty pissed about rewriting their apps again, especially to bridge the gap between now and the 10 years in the future that Steve's Intel Roadmap says they will have better integer performance.
IBM fart out $100,000,000 cheques all the time. They are not concerned with the loss of Apple considering the holiday season for the XBox alone will give them enough chip sales to cover a couple of years of Apple purchasing.
Apple's PowerPC purchasing was focussed heavily on Freescale, G4 chips, not IBM. The PowerBook, iBook and eMac outsold high end G5 systems (including the iMac) 4:1 at least by Apple's reckoning. Let's not mention the Mac Mini, I'm sure it contributed something but not much:)
I'd much rather see those hundreds of millions of dollars invested in, for instance, making all out of print recordings and books available on-line. It's a smaller problem (sounds like), but would benefit the world much more than online copies of every government employee's timecard records
They already invest hundreds of millions of dollars in that. It's called the Library Of Congress.
Quite possibly since enterprise customers will be replacing their stuff with Longhorn-capable uber-boxes anyway. Why not go Mac? I can't think of a good reason why to pick either over either to be honest.. the choice is so bland:)
In my experience I have always been stepping over two versions of Windows on corporate desktops. DOS and Win 3.11 (and Netware:) went straight to Windows 2000 at a University I worked at. The plan there was to stay with 2000 (since they had been running it since beta 2 in 1998 as a rapid deployment program), an when XP came out it was.. totally irrelevant.
I think they may have migrated a few servers to 2003 by now but for performance reasons more than anything else (2000 had some pretty annoying server-related bugs in DFS and so on, and the new SQL Server, Exchange etc. run better on it).
Longhorn might be the upgrade that's worth upgrading to. What's really quite so different between 2000 and XP apart from the pretty GUI? All the Windows 2000 drivers for everything are still being produced. All the features on the client desktop are identical. Okay so remote desktop is not 32bit colour and not palette mapped... really do secretaries and research postgraduates notice these things?
Longhorn will introduce software and hardware support that will make moving seem worth the millions of dollars it would take again, significantly more so than a forced migration to XP from 2000, and for similar kinds of gains in functionality as from Windows 3.11 to Windows 2000.
There are more PowerPC architecture chips floating around in the world than there are and ever will be x86 desktop processors. IBM afford the R&D by being IBM - a company people keep saying "is so small and insignificant compared to Intel" made $1.8bn profit last year which was a little more than Intel did, and have a total revenue of almost triple Intel's.
IBM's fortunes rest in many many other places than "in boxed and OEM processors for the desktop PC market". Market share is moot - you could say that Intel have a much lower market share than AMD in some areas, does that make AMD the R&D behemoth that people should be entertaining for a switch?
If Apple switch to x86 then I will eat my laptop. The news articles clearly state that they are switching to Intel Chips - nobody has yet dared say that this means Intel IA-32 with or without EM64T. I wonder what Intel could produce that would replace IBM's efforts in this field.
One company I would say this is a risk for is Freescale.. who ARE a little smaller a company than Intel (despite also outselling Intel processor products across the board in embedded markets).
Re:He's talking about professonal stuff
on
Are CRTs History?
·
· Score: 1
I don't shop at Best Buy because they don't sell the high-end professional CRTs I personally would need to buy; but I get your meaning. The fact is that professional high-end CRTs are no more disappearing from markets than the ones at Best Buy.
If he is really looking at suppliers that should be shipping CRT monitors for his 3D-glasses application, and finding they have no CRT products any longer, he is looking at the wrong suppliers - as you said, something like Best Buy, rather than a professional high-end CRT manufacturer.
The last time I saw CrystalEyes in action it was on a bunch of fairly high spec Iiyama and Eizo monitors. Neither manufacturer ditched their CRT lines and both are into the medical imaging market, engineering and kiosk displays. If you go for the even more deeply "embedded" manufacturers, they are reappropriating things like Samsung and LG CRT modules and putting them to good use; they may be shutting down factories in Wales because of lack of demand but there is absolutely no chance they will stop producing them in the next 18 months before a 3D-shutter-glasses-compatible TFT monitor becomes available.
Slashdot Mirror
My parents are dead.
But I have a job. I mean when $300 monitor buying time comes around the corner
I am not going to be sobbing because I won't be able to afford ramen this week
like you will.
Neko
I don't believe you purchased the right to do anything other than put that DVD
in the drive and hit play; movie companies do not license you to make "backup
copies" or move it to VHS tape. That is some right you are afforded by some legal
precendent from years past.
It is not an essential right - not like the right for any citizen not to be bound
by slavery, not like the right to not incriminate yourself in court, et cetera.
You are not going to have your life ruined because you can't watch a DVD.
I liken this to the good ol' right to bear arms.
It's a right that I am happy to have but I am not going to cry about it if I
didn't have it.
Owning a gun is okay, but not only do you not have the right to own one without a
license and precursor background check, in most states you aren't even allowed to
have it in the trunk of your car or in your pocket unless you have yet another
license.
Fair enough. Let's get those. Now, I have them and I face a simple problem: None
of that gives me the right to shoot people.
That makes the right to bear arms a pretty useless right to have, doesn't it?
I have the right to own a handgun, in the privacy of my own home, and shoot at tin
cans and squirrels. Now, where am I supposed to be crying about this as something
that is absolutely and completely missing in my life, what part of this blatant
restriction of rights means that I cannot and would not consider living another
painful, gunless day?
Replace guns with HD DVD, and do you see what I am getting at?
Neko
The DRM is so unobtrusive to most people who will have that new monitor anyway,
nobody is going to care but geeks who are latched onto their old technology.
99.9% of people buying DRM-enabled media; they are watching it through a TV. If
they have a digital TV with HDCP then they have nothing to worry about. If they
don't, it probably can't view HD content anyway! This means MS can sell Windows
2K7 Media Center Edition without restriction.
Sometimes maybe the way to go against DRM is.. wait.. why are we going against it
anyway? Why would I want to play my HD content on my Archos player at 320x240 by
re-encoding? That's one application of DRM that people whine about. What's the
difference here? Playing HD content on a resolution restricted device isn't a
limitation of rights.
You are going to have a choice of monitors, and because they have announced this
years in advance, monitor manufacturers have all that time to bring up to spec
their monitor lines (application of technology; add a single chip between DVI
decode and display. Not rocket science, not expensive). When you buy a PC when
Longhorn arrives - and you will need to, by the way they are pushing these damned
graphics technologies and audio APIs and multi-core chips through - it will just
play this content just fine. And all the monitors on the market will play this
content just fine.
DRM that I am worried about is that I can't play iTunes songs on anything other
than iTunes enabled computers or an iPod.. okay, so I am truly locked in to some
device that dictates how I play my music that I purchased. I have to buy an
Apple music player, or stream music from an Apple application, or I am screwed.
Sony, Philips, Samsung, Eizo, AOC, Iiyama I could go on all day about how nobody
is "dictating" how you view your media or what device you need to buy. As an
application of securing digital content this system seems fairly tame. It won't
rely on authenticating machines with internet servers, restricting your content
to an arbitrary subset of systems you own (only 5? oh man!), only that you have
a monitor which provides a secure digital path for your content.
Neko
I think it's real simple.
You should buy the hell a new monitor because it WON'T work perfectly. You DON'T
have the hardware now. Don't you read the articles?
The guy above (parentparentparent) says a $500 box will fix your tricks but you
can buy a new one for that.
If you are THAT worried about watching HD content that is secured, you will be
buying a new monitor anyway. You have 3 or 4 years until it becomes a standard
which is the upgrade cycle anyway (unless you really really DO have one of those
dirty yellow/beige 14" CRTs in front of you right now).
Out of all the DRM through the years that times out, locks up, only allows X
amount of copying to other systems, degrading content so you can't videotape it
is no worse than what.. Macrovision? If you can sit through screeners of movies
where the screen is clipped, wobbly, practically greyscale and marvel at the
wonders of mldonkey+interweb for letting you download it, then you are not going
to care if you are watching the SD resolution-funnelled version of an HD clip.
Neko
Right, so you can buy a $500 box to decode the video and display it on an old
:)
monitor.
That's nice. Why don't people just buy new monitors for $200-$300 that have
the capability of displaying the content?
The problem people miss here is that if you do have that capable display (any
decent TV for example), the content plays fine. To hell with restrictions if
you have the right hardware; the high definiton video is available to you.
Why is that always simply glossed over in favour of discussing the down side?
Neko
You replied with your comment in reply to my comment about "the frontside bus helps"
You commented that Opteron and G5 use the same Hypertransport bus.
If I was wrong, you were being irrelevant in the first place. But I still love you.
Move to x86 = anger
Lack of Java support = more anger
Are Apple just trying to piss off their loyal developer base? Maybe they are
arrogant enough to think they can replace them with thousands of mindless
VisualBasic migrants and AppleScript/Automator?
Neko
Neither Opteron nor 970 use it for the frontside bus as you stipulated, no
matter what "Google tells you".
I'm sorry, but telling people that they are wrong is the least personable
thing anyone can do, maybe I should have said it nicer?
You're wrong, but I love you anyway *kiss*.
Dvorak doesn't stop you getting RSI. Bad posture and bad habits is what gives
you RSI. They are all still applicable to a Dvorak keyboard.
Sure the G5 has two floating point units where the G4 only has one. This lends very
:)
well to screwing around with double precision floating point.
The G4's AltiVec unit - for every occasion where single precision will do - out
rocks the G5's in many areas, not just in instruction execution times. And it will
do integer too. And the G4's integer unit is not worse than the G5's at all, so,
I mean if you were believing Steve Jobs today, then his whole move to the G5 was
bullshit too (Integer Performance Per Watt being his benchmark for how great a
CPU is)
But anyway. The G5's power budget meant that it did double the FPU performance at
double the power envelope. Okay, so this is something for system designers to
keep in mind; and it's something that needs to be decided on system-to-system.
There is no generic "yeah G5 is better" or "yeah G4 is better", there is a lot of
evaluation to do, usually by running code to check.
That's apparently why Virginia Tech housed a bunch of 2GHz PowerMacs before they
bought XServes, so that they could do a real feasibility/code study on the things
before they got real hardware that would be there for 20 years. The G5 passed the
test but it didn't stop them calling the server room "hotter than the surface of
the sun"
For a single Mac user it wouldn't matter but if you are going to buy 250+ cluster
nodes to do calculations, you can get the G4 (lower power envelope, easier to
cool as in air conditioning) into much higher density configurations than the G5.
The rough estimate is that for every 3U of XServes you could get 16 dual G4 blades
on a half-length rack chassis. 32 processors instead of 6. And you could put
another blade chassis on the back of that, taking up the rest of the space. 64
processors instead of 6.
The power budget is increased but the processing power in terms of clock speed has
gone up by a factor of 5-10 for the same amount of space used.
The JS20 blade system uses 7U blade chassis and fits 14 blades. In a smaller space
and for arguably the same power budget you again double the processing power in
terms of clock speed. This more than makes up for the lack of FPU performance
per rack unit, and in integer and AltiVec the G4 cluster would scream along having
double the capability. There are supercomputers in the top500 which are benchmarked
using LINPACK double precision floating point tests, but actually only use 8-bit
precision for their daily work. G4 is "just as good" here, the only thing it isn't
is clean 64-bit for pointers.
So you can save a little electricity, a little server farm space, and the G4 system
would be simpler and cheaper to design and manufacture (and to buy at retail). At
high volumes, supercomputer or datacenter markets, it is just as good a chip. Or
was; I am not sure we can make the power budget arguments swim anymore.
Wrong.
The Opteron has an integrated memory controller. The frontside bus is inside the
chip; you'll never see it. It is not Hypertransport.
The G5 has a memory controller on the Northbridge, but it is also not Hypertransport. IBM call it Elastic IO. It is a BIT like Hypertransport but it's
not.
Hypertransport is a chip interconnect in both designs, not a memory-cpu bus.
-- Neko
The 970FX already matches (at 1.6GHz) the power envelope of the 1.6GHz G4 that
:)
Apple are using in their PowerBook.
Apple's "we can't because it's too hot" bleating is yet another example of Jobs'
bullshit.
IBM's PowerTune beats the pants off of the DFS functionality in the 7447A/7447B
Apple are using. They could drop power usage to tiny levels and keep battery
life at their usual high values.
The real reason might be simpler and slightly more technical; clock for clock the
G4 would outperform their G5 version in everything except a memory bandwidth shoot-
out. They had a benchmark right there on the show floor at Motorola SNDF (Dallas),
in April 2004. You would expect it from the figures but to see it in real life..
it's quite enlightening. You could bet that Apple could gloss over this though,
like they gloss over everything else important (like the useful Mac Mini with
wireless and bluetooth being $700, Mac Mini's performance sucking cock wrt hard
disk and peripherals, the hard disk cooling problems in the iMac, iBook logic
board blowouts..
-- Neko
You're 100% right.
:)
One of the things we do at the company I work for is tell people the G4 is better
than the G5. The G4 is wonderfully more generic in performance - random memory
access is a good one to benchmark. The G5 is very good at streaming huge
contiguous blocks, but the high RAM access latencies and cache latency/line width
problems kill random access or impact code such as array lookups (best Vector
Permute trick on the planet, also hampered by a weak Permute unit).
But that's not to say the G5 doesn't have merits; it just has some VERY specific
applications that it's very good at. Perhaps too specific for Apple. Companies
like Mercury (www.mc.com) would probably have gone for the G5 if they hadn't
found an even more specific processor for their needs (Cell, in this case).
With lower power chips the G5 could actually start to replace the G4 in places
where performance in high memory and streaming data are paramount.
For laptops, desktops, and places where we don't need 16GB of memory, the G4 is
going to rock for years to come though. I actually wonder why there couldn't be
a special "pseudo-64bit" version of Linux for the G4, which used the 36-bit
addressing modes to implement high memory support. Maybe it's because IBM practically own ppc64 Linux and don't want to overshadow their own chips?
-- Neko
How are they "topped out for performance"?
I would say IBM's offerings are competitive. Steve Jobs and his "wah I wanted a
3GHz chip!" is all bullshit when you look at it; he wanted to compete with the
Intel marketing machine, and still hasn't noticed that AMD Opteron chips top out
at 2.6GHz - and have done for some time. The G5 is competitive in that it matches
or outperforms the AMD Opteron (that frontside bus helps).
Their dual cores top out at 2.2GHz and also probably will for some time. Apple
still have the potential to create a 2.4GHz PowerMac and an XServe with up to 4
processors which competes with AMD's most expensive and little used 400 and 800 processor lines.
I don't see why it "illustrates" anything except that Steve Jobs is a nut job
who lied himself through a developer conference. It's a damn shame Apple has gone
so low and a damn shame the developers are so loyal that they keep so quiet.
There is a lot of dissent in private quarters. All that PowerPC hype Apple pushed
down our throats - some of it actually real as it turned out - has left 1000s
of developers with a lot of AltiVec code and not a lot of choice. They are mighty
pissed about rewriting their apps again, especially to bridge the gap between now
and the 10 years in the future that Steve's Intel Roadmap says they will have
better integer performance.
-- Neko
IBM fart out $100,000,000 cheques all the time. They are not concerned with the
:)
loss of Apple considering the holiday season for the XBox alone will give them
enough chip sales to cover a couple of years of Apple purchasing.
Apple's PowerPC purchasing was focussed heavily on Freescale, G4 chips, not IBM.
The PowerBook, iBook and eMac outsold high end G5 systems (including the iMac)
4:1 at least by Apple's reckoning. Let's not mention the Mac Mini, I'm sure it
contributed something but not much
-- Neko
Since I was curious I googled and apparently a voiced velar fricative is exactly
_ fricative
like this, sound sample and all..
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Voiced_velar
Amazing, this internet.
They already invest hundreds of millions of dollars in that. It's called the Library Of Congress.
http://www.loc.gov/
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/
Quite possibly since enterprise customers will be replacing their stuff with :)
Longhorn-capable uber-boxes anyway. Why not go Mac? I can't think of a good
reason why to pick either over either to be honest.. the choice is so bland
In my experience I have always been stepping over two versions of Windows on
corporate desktops. DOS and Win 3.11 (and Netware
Windows 2000 at a University I worked at. The plan there was to stay with
2000 (since they had been running it since beta 2 in 1998 as a rapid deployment
program), an when XP came out it was.. totally irrelevant.
I think they may have migrated a few servers to 2003 by now but for performance
reasons more than anything else (2000 had some pretty annoying server-related
bugs in DFS and so on, and the new SQL Server, Exchange etc. run better on it).
Longhorn might be the upgrade that's worth upgrading to. What's really quite
so different between 2000 and XP apart from the pretty GUI? All the Windows
2000 drivers for everything are still being produced. All the features on the
client desktop are identical. Okay so remote desktop is not 32bit colour and
not palette mapped... really do secretaries and research postgraduates notice
these things?
Longhorn will introduce software and hardware support that will make moving
seem worth the millions of dollars it would take again, significantly more
so than a forced migration to XP from 2000, and for similar kinds of gains in
functionality as from Windows 3.11 to Windows 2000.
Woz is still a goddamned billionaire. I think he bounced back pretty well
from your dire, dire example of Jobs being nasty to him.
Ironically it's an IBM Thinkpad :)
*gnaw*
Bzzt.
There are more PowerPC architecture chips floating around in the world than there
are and ever will be x86 desktop processors. IBM afford the R&D by being IBM -
a company people keep saying "is so small and insignificant compared to Intel"
made $1.8bn profit last year which was a little more than Intel did, and have a
total revenue of almost triple Intel's.
IBM's fortunes rest in many many other places than "in boxed and OEM processors
for the desktop PC market". Market share is moot - you could say that Intel have
a much lower market share than AMD in some areas, does that make AMD the R&D
behemoth that people should be entertaining for a switch?
If Apple switch to x86 then I will eat my laptop. The news articles clearly state
that they are switching to Intel Chips - nobody has yet dared say that this means
Intel IA-32 with or without EM64T. I wonder what Intel could produce that would
replace IBM's efforts in this field.
One company I would say this is a risk for is Freescale.. who ARE a little
smaller a company than Intel (despite also outselling Intel processor products
across the board in embedded markets).
I don't shop at Best Buy because they don't sell the high-end professional CRTs
I personally would need to buy; but I get your meaning. The fact is that professional high-end CRTs are no more disappearing from markets than the ones at Best Buy.
If he is really looking at suppliers that should be shipping CRT monitors for his
3D-glasses application, and finding they have no CRT products any longer, he is looking at the wrong suppliers - as you said, something like Best Buy, rather than a professional high-end CRT manufacturer.
The last time I saw CrystalEyes in action it was on a bunch of fairly high spec Iiyama and Eizo monitors. Neither manufacturer ditched their CRT lines and both
are into the medical imaging market, engineering and kiosk displays. If you go for the even more deeply "embedded" manufacturers, they are reappropriating things like Samsung and LG CRT modules and putting them to good use; they may be shutting down factories in Wales because of lack of demand but there is absolutely no chance they will stop producing them in the next 18 months before a 3D-shutter-glasses-compatible TFT monitor becomes available.
You're worried that you have to wait 18 months for a suitable LCD?
CRT screens won't disappear from the market for YEARS yet. What are you
whining about?
I can't see how this is ergonomically better than his current keyboard or up
to par with the $230 one.
Probably he will end up crippled all for the want of being a cheap-ass. Such is
the hippy FLOSS way, right?