I love how paragraph 12 of the lawsuit is just flat out incorrect. I hope Google slaps this down with ease, and I wouldn't mind some lovely counter suits against Oracle's database patent portfolio just to silence Larry.
No, as another Vegas Valley resident, I do not think this is a good idea. Solar cells should be required on every new home built. We don't need to waste land and natural resources to put our solar cells out of sight. We need to be building everything with power conservation in mind, not a centralized power plant (out of eye site) so we can pretend power consumption doesn't matter.
Actually, the largest solar network should in part be built on the top of Prius's. Why is it that when we think of clean electric power we think we have to build the BIGGEST solar energy park? Why waste the space. Every item we make something, we should make it as efficient as possible and use solar and wind power as much as is practicle. We shouldn't have to make a solar plant like a traditional power plant. That defeats a large portion of why we are going to solar power in the first place!
I know the linked article doesn't say so, but for anybody that saw or remember what Jobs actually said in the keynote was that the benchmark showed the cpu was 2 to 4 x faster. He said actual performace would not be that drastic as the processor is only a part of the real world speed equation. The new computers are still limitted by slower disk access and even RAM to some extent. It was only misleading to people who don't understand want SPEC (int and float) is.
To be honest, I thought Jobs was going to be more deceptive, because they always used to tout how PPC beat Intel easily in floating point. The first thing he showed this time was integer (where Intel always beat PPC anyway). I was impressed that float actually was about 2x faster on the new Intel than PPC. Now granted that is most likely due to the Intel chip being dual core, but the fact that float speeds per GHz, per core are about even now, goes to show the work that went into this new Intel chip. That is definately better than the old Intel days.
If you check Apple's website (or talk to somebody at Apple) they could point you to their professional services. You could purchase a premium service plan from Apple, or get a server parts kit (to keep parts around just in case) without buying a second system.
I don't think wanting to do most of his work on his PowerBook will cause him to fail. I remember going through the same thing in my assembly class.
That being said, in addition to VPC on my PowerBook (which was probably much slower than his), I did end up setting up a junker PC to do MASM work on while at home (the PowerBook was while I was mobile).
I think what is key to being a good programmer coming from a Mac perspective, is to learn multiple platforms, and knowing the strong points of each. There are many Windows users/programmers that never come to terms with that. I have found Mac/Linux programmers (not most Mac users though) are more open to experimenting with other platforms and OSs.
Also, when it came to MIPS assembly (in my assembly class), I had a better time with SSH than most Windows programmers did. The PowerBook ended up being quite flexible for tasks at hand.
Somebody had already mentioned SSH into a remote PC, but since the original post mentioned MASM (Microsoft ASM), what about the free version of Remote Desktop from Microsoft to log into a Windows Server that has MASM loaded on it?
This takes care of testing on the actual hardware, and the user still doesn't have to touch a non-Apple keyboard.
Maybe I wasn't clear. I am not saying BASIC doesn't have its place. However, using BASIC and OpenGL just doesn't seem to make sense. If know OpenGL, your language of choice doesn't matter much. You can do the same 10 line demo the original post was so proud of in C++ in the same 10 lines of code using GLUT. If you understand 3D OpenGL, C++ will be a breeze.
XCode and GLUT are free, so if you are an aspiring 3D game developer, I would say C++ is the way to start. If you just want to make a simplistic 2D game and concentrate more on art and sound, feel free to pay to use BASIC (though I don't find it any easier...and I find debugging it harder), HyperCard, or whatever programming environment you want.
You do realize Longhorn is still over a year away right? Tiger will be old news by then, and Apple will already be hyping the next "insanely great" thing. Not to mention, the Spotlight type searching was dropped from Longhorn to prevent the schedule from slipping further. That will be shipping shortly with Tiger.
Maybe I am the programmer that isn't getting it. True I didn't look to see what (if any) game specific APIs this has. However, from their OpenGL example, why wouldn't somebody just do that in GLUT (the cross platform GL utility)?
If there really is a big interest in an open OpenGL game API, why not get one started that is modeled roughly on GLUT? Isn't that the basic idea behind OpenGL anyway?
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I love how paragraph 12 of the lawsuit is just flat out incorrect. I hope Google slaps this down with ease, and I wouldn't mind some lovely counter suits against Oracle's database patent portfolio just to silence Larry.
It may not mess with the weather system, but it sure does mess with the wildlife in the area where you install these wind turbines.
No, as another Vegas Valley resident, I do not think this is a good idea. Solar cells should be required on every new home built. We don't need to waste land and natural resources to put our solar cells out of sight. We need to be building everything with power conservation in mind, not a centralized power plant (out of eye site) so we can pretend power consumption doesn't matter.
Actually, the largest solar network should in part be built on the top of Prius's. Why is it that when we think of clean electric power we think we have to build the BIGGEST solar energy park? Why waste the space. Every item we make something, we should make it as efficient as possible and use solar and wind power as much as is practicle. We shouldn't have to make a solar plant like a traditional power plant. That defeats a large portion of why we are going to solar power in the first place!
I know the linked article doesn't say so, but for anybody that saw or remember what Jobs actually said in the keynote was that the benchmark showed the cpu was 2 to 4 x faster. He said actual performace would not be that drastic as the processor is only a part of the real world speed equation. The new computers are still limitted by slower disk access and even RAM to some extent. It was only misleading to people who don't understand want SPEC (int and float) is.
To be honest, I thought Jobs was going to be more deceptive, because they always used to tout how PPC beat Intel easily in floating point. The first thing he showed this time was integer (where Intel always beat PPC anyway). I was impressed that float actually was about 2x faster on the new Intel than PPC. Now granted that is most likely due to the Intel chip being dual core, but the fact that float speeds per GHz, per core are about even now, goes to show the work that went into this new Intel chip. That is definately better than the old Intel days.
If you check Apple's website (or talk to somebody at Apple) they could point you to their professional services. You could purchase a premium service plan from Apple, or get a server parts kit (to keep parts around just in case) without buying a second system.
I don't think wanting to do most of his work on his PowerBook will cause him to fail. I remember going through the same thing in my assembly class. That being said, in addition to VPC on my PowerBook (which was probably much slower than his), I did end up setting up a junker PC to do MASM work on while at home (the PowerBook was while I was mobile). I think what is key to being a good programmer coming from a Mac perspective, is to learn multiple platforms, and knowing the strong points of each. There are many Windows users/programmers that never come to terms with that. I have found Mac/Linux programmers (not most Mac users though) are more open to experimenting with other platforms and OSs. Also, when it came to MIPS assembly (in my assembly class), I had a better time with SSH than most Windows programmers did. The PowerBook ended up being quite flexible for tasks at hand.
Somebody had already mentioned SSH into a remote PC, but since the original post mentioned MASM (Microsoft ASM), what about the free version of Remote Desktop from Microsoft to log into a Windows Server that has MASM loaded on it? This takes care of testing on the actual hardware, and the user still doesn't have to touch a non-Apple keyboard.
Maybe I wasn't clear. I am not saying BASIC doesn't have its place. However, using BASIC and OpenGL just doesn't seem to make sense. If know OpenGL, your language of choice doesn't matter much. You can do the same 10 line demo the original post was so proud of in C++ in the same 10 lines of code using GLUT. If you understand 3D OpenGL, C++ will be a breeze. XCode and GLUT are free, so if you are an aspiring 3D game developer, I would say C++ is the way to start. If you just want to make a simplistic 2D game and concentrate more on art and sound, feel free to pay to use BASIC (though I don't find it any easier...and I find debugging it harder), HyperCard, or whatever programming environment you want.
You do realize Longhorn is still over a year away right? Tiger will be old news by then, and Apple will already be hyping the next "insanely great" thing. Not to mention, the Spotlight type searching was dropped from Longhorn to prevent the schedule from slipping further. That will be shipping shortly with Tiger.
Maybe I am the programmer that isn't getting it. True I didn't look to see what (if any) game specific APIs this has. However, from their OpenGL example, why wouldn't somebody just do that in GLUT (the cross platform GL utility)? If there really is a big interest in an open OpenGL game API, why not get one started that is modeled roughly on GLUT? Isn't that the basic idea behind OpenGL anyway?