As early as Pong, the gender distribution was about 50-50. And there were always games which attracted a ton of women, culminating with The Sims. (We're talking people who registered an off-line game, not people pretending to be women in an on-line game or IRC/chat-room. Just so noone jumps in with that stupidity again.)
The problem is that, at some point, the guys _making_ or _publishing_ games were happy to catter only to 16 year old males. Or males which remained at the 16 year old mental stage. Offending more than half the market in the process. (I.e., not only women, but also males who are past the "awesome! tits!" point of judging gameplay.)
The circular logic and self-fulfilling prophecy that "chicks don't like games" turned a 50-50 market, into a market filled with games which are actually _supposed_ to offend a lot of female gamers.
For starters whenever corners had to be cut in a game to meet the budget, it was almost invariably cutting off female avatars, quests which might have been more interesting to females, etc.
E.g., although there's nothing to say that _only_ a male can save the world, about 75% of the RPGs out there don't even offer a choice to play as a female. Or if they do, they have maybe 1 or 2 races which have female models at all.
Then comes the sexist part. Since we all "know" that "chicks don't play games", it was ok for women to star in games only as erotic incentive for the male player.
I'm not only talking about huge breasts, skimpy outfits, and "armours" that only cover the crotch and nipples. Nor even about the fact that female models usually get seductive moans when hit or when jumping.
I'm talking the fundamental role they're given there. Invariably the best female role is the male hero's love interest. Which also means having to be rescued at least once. And being grateful to the Man ever after.
They also typically get severely shafted stats.
And they often get to use some utterly ridiculous weapon, like brooms, laddles and frying pans. (E.g., Leena from Chrono Cross, or Linear from Evolution.) Or to have some insulting animations. (E.g., in Legend of Dragoon, you can see your Wingly party member invariably falling and hitting her head when she does a combination attack.)
So here's a thought for you. Have you played Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast? Well, try it sometime. They have this male character which fights in a BDSM harness, with the leather pants cut behind to reveal his ass. Well, that's as close as it gets to how most games have been dressing women.
Now imagine a world where most games dressed men in that kind of an outfit. And gave you some broom or laddle as a weapon. (Sorry, you're not the right gender to get a sword in this world.) Would _you_ want to play those games?
And maybe in that world _you_ would be the one who prefers a board game, since it mercifully doesn't give you an avatar at all?
Well, the web site I could live with, seein' as you can eventually find the free link. Waste of time and lame, yes, but still... it's a one time affair.
What really got my goat when I could last be arsed to try RealOne, though, was that it was the worst annoy-ware ever. None of the obvious options seemed to convince it that
1. no, I do _not_ want it to keep pre-loading itself, and
2. no, I don't want to be spammed with their lame pop-ups... even when I'm not even watching and realmedia files any more, and have manually removed all file associations to it
It was _not_ convincing me to fork over the dough for the premium version. Au contraire, it just served to convince me that I _don't_ want to "vote with the wallet" that such lame practices continue.
Now mind you, this was some two versions back, so I don't know if they fixed it or not in the meantime. But still, it's left such a bitter taste in my mouth, that I don't want to have anything to do with them again. Ever.
And just for the sake of having a good rant, what the **** is with all these business models based on annoying the potential customer? I can understand that they need money, but then don't bloody advertise it as "FREE!!!"
The whole thing is as if I advertised "FREE MP3 players!" Only once you've got one, I started showing up at your house, reading your diary, making a list of what music you're playing, listening to your phone conversations (the non-Internet equivalent of what spyware does to a TCP/IP connection), and shouting in front of your window to give me money if you want me to shut up. Even when you're not actually using that MP3 player.
Surely noone would put up with that kind of a trick, for a non-computer product. But in the software world it's become accepted and expected that, hey, the user is a computer-illiterate anyway. You're _expected_ to sell him/her snake oil, rape his/her privacy as hard as you can, never test or debug the product first, and generally be as annoying or dishonest as possible if it makes you money. etc. How did this happen?
Lemme guess... you haven't even read the post you're defending. Right?
The parent post very literally said that he needed 64 bit precision. Capisci? Not more registers, not a 64 bit architecture, not even 64 bit addressing. Precision.
In which case, yes, it's one mother of all bogus arguments.
Unless you're using _integers_, the x86 FPUs already gave you not only 64 bit floats, they gave you _80_ bit floats. Even in the 16 bit ages, since someone mentioned the 286, you still had an 80 bit FPU.
Guess it just shows that just because someone is an engineer and doing "real work" (and being snotty about it), they can still be computer-illiterate and/or riding the hype bandwagon;)
Of course, if instead of paying millions for that huge 32+ server, they:
A. Hired a competent programmer, for a change, and
B. stopped letting a clueless maketroid or PHB insist that the software must have all possible buzzwords (e.g., instead of directly write a value in the database, it now sends a SOAP message over MQ to an EJB, which finds and parses another XML message _in_ the SOAP message, and parses it to find the value and table name)... then they could do the exact same job on a "measly" 4 way Xeon or Opteron.
To be blunt, _extremely_ few sites need server farms of 32+ CPU machines. Google does. Slashdot probably could use such servers too. A small B2B site with maybe 5,000 registered users total (not concurrent users!) does _not_.
I'll say that 99% of those monsters exist _only_ because some management droid gets a boner from buying millions of dollars worth of buzzwords. And then sinking more millions into consultants to even make it work. And to round it off, then they get the cheapest burger-flippers, who couldn't design _or_ code an efficient (or even working) architecture if their life depended on it.
You know, I can understand advice like running Opera or Mozilla instead. They do, more or less, achieve the same task _and_ more importantly: it won't break everything else running on that computer.
But installing Linux? Gimme a break. That's like recommending chopping off both legs to solve an athlete's foot problem.
Maybe some people actually use that computer for more than browsing the web. Maybe the vast majority of them don't have the time and inclination to throw away all their programs and spend months learning to use lame F/OSS stuff that offers half the functionality, and only twice the inconvenience. Maybe they want to just play a damn 3D game without going through the nightmare of recompiling WineX _and_ half the system, including X. Etc.
As the old saying went "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing." Well, maybe you don't have anything better to do with your time than mess with Linux. Good for you. I'm glad you found something to fill your time with.
But other people have better stuff to do.
Either way, I'm getting tired of the kind of fanboy that just has to drop by and pollute every single thread with "nooo! Install Linux instead!" or "nooo! Buy a Mac instead!" (I'm sure there must be one of those Mac zealots around here too.)
Here's a novel idea for you: when recommending a solution, how about thinking about what the victim _needs_, rather than just thinking about your religious duty to convert everyone to Linux?
And how about thinking a little about what the topic is in the first place? Is it about Windows vs Linux? Well, no. Is it some inherent problem that can _only_ be solved by changing the OS? Nope.
Anyone interested or affected by that bug is most likely someone who didn't want to convert to the One True OSS Religion (TM) to start with. And they've probably heard the fanboy mantra 10,000 times already. So why polute one more thread with it?
Yeah, I know. This "thinking" stuff is hard. Much harder than switching the brains off-line and letting your religion do the talking for you. But I'm sure you'll get the hang of it eventually.
"No, consumers actually *want* unlimited access and actually *believe* that's what they're getting."
No. This consumer doesn't use that much bandwidth to start with. My downstream total is maybe 10-20 MB per day. On a weekend.
I'm not the only one. In fact, I'd say that for the vast majority of internet users, e-mail, some web surfing and some IRC or ICQ is all that they ever use. That doesn't suck that much bandwidth.
Most of the caps I've seen were _far_ over what such a user needs. I'm talking limits where it would need one to download 200+ MP3's a day to even get close to the limit.
At which point you're already not just wasting the ISP's resources, you're actively driving the prices up for everyone else.
You're saying no less than that I should chip in to pay the bill for every single retard who downloads terabytes of porn. Or downloads 3 movies per night, and then maybe actually watches 1.
And all this "ooh, [insert ISP] is evil to the consumer with those caps" crap is just the self-serving bullshit of a few leeches and freeloaders. Cry me a river. Get your own T1 line, if you really need that bandwidth. And pay for it from your own pocket, not from mine.
I'll tell you what _this_ consumer wants: an ISP where you pay per megabyte. Unlimited time online, but you pay per megabyte.
Much as I'm not really a Mac fan, if you want a RISC and Unix based workstation, just get a G5 with MacOS X. There you go. It's Unix, it's RISC, and it runs circles around Sun's workstations, at a fraction of the price.
Or yeah, x86. Get a cheap Dell, install Linux on it, and there you go. It's a Unix workstation. Sun's over-priced under-perfoming stuff won't even come near it in terms of performance.
Well, I don't know, methinks you're going on an unnecessary tangent. You don't really need to go into the "my OS beats your OS" holy war to see that this guy has problems. I just don't understand why anyone would feel _guilt_ for using or not using an OS. Period.
What next? Feel guilty that he's installed a distro, instead of compiling the whole system from sources? Feel guilty for using KDE instead of Gnome? Or for saving a hundred megabytes of RAM by using IceWM and DFM instead of both?
Way I see it, using an OS or a computer is just like using a tool. If it fits your needs, there you go. That's it.
Anyone who thinks they have some sacred duty to use X instead of Y, and worse yet feels guilt whenever they fail to do so... well, just needs a good shrink. IMHO.
Actually, the difference was that back then you were supposed to read it on paper, not on the screen.
There still are novelists who describe every bloody rock and tree, and go on a tangent each time an unrelated idea crosses their mind. Try reading something non-technical, and see for yourself.
On the other hand, if that stuff is supposed to go in an e-mail, or web site, or Word doc, or man page, or PDF, please do _not_ make a novel out of it. Stick to short paragraphs and clear phrases.
So it's not really sterility you're seeing today, it's just that people have actually learned that different media have different rules, and different things that work well.
Actually, the situations I've mentioned, like asking people if they eat more meat when the price of meat just went up, or asking a tribe of agricultors if they define themselves as hunters, are examples of _actual_ anonymous polls which produced completely false answers. They're, in fact, textbook examples of why sending an anthropologist to observe beats sending someone to do a quick poll with some printed forms.
Making the poll anonymous will help get people to open up and not consciously lie about some stuff. Yes. In an oppressive dictatorship, for example, indeed it might get people to speak against the government.
The problem is when you want to get them to speak about _themselves_.
Admitting that the government is oppressive, or that the neighbour is a stupid nosy git, is easy. That's talking about someone else. Whether or not they tell it to the government or to the neighbour, they can still have a bad opinion about someone else.
The problem is when you basically ask them if they have a bad opinion about _themselves_. Very few people do.
See what I've said about going to hell. The funny stuff about religion is that it promises bad stuff. Burning in Hell, being reincarnated as something/someone bad, whatever. Why would anyone dedicate their life to a theory that they'll go to hell? But therein lies the funny part. Everyone thinks that _other_ people will go to hell, while they themselves will surely not.
It's just an extreme case of selective confirmation. Everyone remembers the examples that confirm their feeling good about themselves. E.g., "uh, 50 years ago we did help someone build a house, so we're a community which helps each other" or "well, we do have one crazy guy who goes hunting, and most of us have a bow somewhere, so we're hunters after all." And they conveniently skip over stuff like "but then we found good excuses not to help anyone else" or "but we really just plough the land."
What's good and wrong in that case is actually a personal definition. Someone who defines themselves as an upstanding member of the community, will skew the answers in one direction. A 16 year old who defines themselves as a rebellious youth who obeys noone, will skew them in the other direction. Even if said rebellious youth really is a nice kid whose worst disobedience is having a bad haircut, he/she will make it sound a lot worse on the poll. I.e., closer to their personalized ideal of what they ought to be like.
You know what was the most powerful weapon, that the worst totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe had? The carefully crafted illusion that the state can know anything you did or said, and _will_ use it against you. Anything you ever said or did, could come back to haunt you for the rest of your life. Or your children's life.
In fact, the illusion that there is truly _no_ privacy.
I don't even mean big "crimes" like open propaganda against the state. Nothing that the secret police would torture you for. But sometime, when you'd find the next job, or when your next promotion would be discussed, something you said or did could come back and bite you in the ass.
The communist states, of course, were so low tech that they could only know a very very small fraction of it all. But the idea remained. They _might_ know what you did, and if so, they _will_ use it.
So people preferred to avoid controversial topics completely. Better not to say anything which could be construed as "bad" by the regime, than risk having it stuck on your file for ever.
Now picture a world where privacy truly doesn't exist. Where _everything_ you ever said, or did, or bought, _will_ be known by everyone willing to do a search.
So once, while in college and drunk, you said that only retards wear a tie. Oops. Wanna bet that 99% of those reviewing your job application are wearing a tie?
So you once said that you've spent the day at work hitting "refresh" on Slashdot. Of course, you had nothing to do at the time, but that didn't go on your record. Just that you admitted wasting corporate money for surfing the web. Want to bet it will haunt you the next time you apply for a job?
So you once said that you're either pro- or anti-abortion. Or pro- or anti-war. Or that the president is a retard. And anyone can access that, for the rest of your life. Are you _sure_ that noone ever reviewing your resume won't be fanatical about the _opposite_ point of view? Are you sure they won't let their personal feelings influence their choice?
So people will start being careful what they say. Better be safe than sorry. Any controversial issue will rather be avoided.
That's what officially lacking any privacy really means. Do you really want to live in that kind of a world? No, don't answer me. Answer to yourself. Look yourself in the mirror, and give yourself an answer.
So do you really need privacy? Unless you're a vegetable that only nods its way through life and never has any opinion of its own, I'd say you do.
One of the things I've learned from anthropology is that people not only want to conform to some ideal, they're actually skewing their answers and mental image of themselves to conform to it.
E.g., if during a shortage of some resource, let's say food, you ask in a poll if people eat less, the vast majority will answer "yes". Even if a lot of them actually do the exact opposite. Just because "yes" is the perceived "right answer".
E.g., if you ask in some communities if they help each other, e.g, to build a house, they'll all answer "yes". If you investigate a bit, it generally turns out that the last time anyone actually helped build a house was 50 years ago.
E.g., whole cultures may define themselves as "hunters" or "warriors", even if they're at a point where 99% of them are _not_ that.
It's not that people lie. It's that almost everyone wants to think of themselves as doing the right thing, or being the right kind of human. They don't "lie", they actually believe a rose tinted version of reality. A version where they're the Good Ones. (How many people actually believe that they themselves are going to Hell? Right. That's what I'm talking about.)
And for that reason making a poll anonymous won't help either.
What I'm getting at? The whole "I have nothing to hide" charade is just one of these fabricated illusions. If having some embarassing secret is perceived as being something bad, dang right people aren't going to admit that.
Worse yet, a lot of people will conveniently find a way to convince themselves that it's actually true. Either just learning not to think about that secret, or pretending that it's nothing they wouldn't just be able to tell everyone. They, uh, just never got around to it.
Well, IMHO partially you're just seeing the phenomenon that companies now believe that they have a _right_ to make a profit. They don't exist to provide a product or a service, they exist to show a profit at the next board meeting.
And, by Jove, they'll get that profit even if they have to step over your dead body. Literally, if needed.
But IMHO partially you're also just seeing a lot of pointless stuff that's just a corporate or personal ego trip. Stuff which happens not even for a quick buck, but because they make some retard feel powerful.
A stereotype of phantasy stories, myths and legends is that words and names give you power over something or someone. One variant, for example, is that knowing an entity's "true name" gives you complete power over it. Etc.
Well, I believe that the gross invasion of privacy is just a variant of that. We're forced to give up data which is just pointless to anyone, just because all that data gives some cretin an illusion of having some power.
E.g., look at some data that's required to just register a product nowadays. (And in Maxis's case, you can't even download the damn patch without it.)
What's all that data supposed to help with? I can understand how marketting could use some aggregate statistics, like "what percentage of our buyers are female?" Or "how many live in Germany?" Or even "how many are over 30 years old"?
But, for example, do they need the exact house number for those statistics? Or my telephone number? Does anyone actually make statistics at the level of "5 people on 1'st street bought our product, but we have only 1 buyer on 2'nd street"?
At that level, it's no longer a statistic, nor even information. It's just trivia. It's about as useful as stuff like "this is the highest score in a game played on a rainy Friday 13'th." Good for trivia, but completely devoid of any other use.
So, no, they don't _need_ that information. And more likely than not, they don't even have any plan how to make a buck out of it. But it gives some management retard a boner to think that he has so much data about all those people. It almost feels like... POWER!
"Plus, the iMac has the same type of RAM, its not SDRAM. You should read more closely."
Heh. Right. DDR RAM on an 133 MHz SDR memory bus. Do you even realize the absurdity of that? Or are you one of those "the mac is good for non-technical people like me" people?;) No, the memory bandwidth that the G4 sees _is_ perfectly on par with a PC with 133 MHz SDR RAM.
"And when did I say that all PCs were cheaper? Never. I was more taking a shot at Element for their highly overpriced PCs that should be much cheaper because they DON'T pay the MS Tax."
Right. In other words, you had to search far and wide to find a PC that's worse overpriced than Macs are. In a thread that was _not_ about Macs to start with.
And wait, it wasn't a Dell either. Presumably since Dells are cheaper even _with_ the MS Tax. Although this thread is about _Dell_.
So you had to go off-topic on every possible count, just to spew your piece of fanboy propaganda. You just _had_ to do your piece of tail wagging to your corporate idols.
You know... actually I _don't_ hate Macs, nor Apple. I've used about 6 different computer architectures, and about two dozen OSs. The Mac or the PC are just another in the list. I have friends who use macs. Good for them.
What I actually do hate is: you. The Mac fanboys. The Jehovah's Witnesses of the computing world. The religious squad who just _have_ to take a completely unrelated topic, and drown all useful signal in "nooo! buy a mac instead!" and "but Macs aren't overpriced" _noise_. No matter how fundamentally off-topic you have to drag it all.
"There's nothing minor about the changes between 10, 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3. Its just that they release MAJOR system updates more frequently. And most software that runs on 10.3 will run on 10.2 and 10.1 as well. And 10.1 was a free upgrade from 10.0. Do your homework, you're obviously misinformed."
There's nothing minor between 2000 and XP either. But the fact remains that I can stick to 2000, or for that matter I could even still use Windows 98. For non-games, even NT.
Can you run MacOS X binaries on MacOS 7? Or even on MacOS 9? No? Well, then don't come spewing that "Microsoft tax" crap in all topics, because it's you who's paying a yearly "Apple tax".
"And iMacs start at 1299, cheaper than your 1500 quote"
Except for that price you'll still have a bottom-of-the-barrel iMac with a 1 GHz or less G4. And some cheap-ass graphics card that's useless for anything even resembling 3d.
While I'll still have a top of the line 64 bit Athlon 64 3200+, with a Radeon 9800 XT. Oh wait, you Mac people don't even have the option of getting an XT yet. Have a look on ATI's site.
So, please, spare me the crap. If you want to convince me that the Mac isn't overpriced, how about comparing apples to apples? (Pun intended.) You'll have to come up with something _far_ better than that low end iMac.
"and a consumer doesn't have to waste days putting it all together, installing OSes, downloading drivers, etc. You get the picture. I'm guessing your time isn't worth anything."
If your time is worth more than about $500 per hour, then indeed, please stick to pre-built Macs. Because that low end $1299 iMac is just about $1000 overpriced. And you saved about two hours total for that money.
Of course, even if you _are_ the kind of CEO who does make $500 per hour, after taxes, you also could realize that you could pay some $20 extra to have it all put together at the shop. Or you could just order a Dell.
"I build PCs too buddy. Its a pretty much "slot-A into tab-A" affair, and if I were you I wouldn't take so much pride in it - somewhere out there is an 8 year old who could built a PC that's better faster and cheaper."
Bingo. So don't tell _me_ that. Tell it to the Mac lemming I was answering to. He's the one who was making it sound like building a PC was some uber-scary horror movie. He's the one who was willing to get an overpriced Mac just to avoid that horror. Heck, maybe he'll listen to you more;)
Dimension 4600 Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional (not the default "Home Edition") FREE TurboTax(R) Basic for Tax Year 2003 512MB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 333MHz (2x256M) 80GB Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive (7200 RPM) 3.5 in Floppy Drive Single Drive: 8x DVD+RW Drive Combo: RecordNow! and MyDVD Deluxe (DVD+RW only) Dell(R) Quietkey(R) Keyboard Dell(R) 2-button scroll mouse Productivity Pack including WordPerfect(R) and Money(R) 17 in E171FPb Flat Panel Display 128MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Graphics Card with TV-Out and DVI Integrated 5.1 Channel Audio Stereo Speakers Dell Media Experience Dell Picture Studio, Paint Shop Pro Trial, Photo Album Starter Edition Integrated Intel(R) PRO 10/100 Ethernet 56K PCI Data Fax Modem
The cost? $1,627
What do we have here? It's a good $272 cheaper than that Mac. Even though it has an 8x DVD burner, as opposed to the Mac's 4x. Also note that the DVD writer software and everything _is_ included in the price.
Even then, the comparison is already skewed. A more exact comparison would be a 2 GHz Celeron machine with el-cheapo SDR RAM. That's still faster than the G4, but not as overkill as the P4.
And still more useful than the Mac. On the PC you can actually play games.
Also note that it involves _no_ assembling stuff on your own.
Do I need to spell it out for you? Yes, the Macs are overpriced. Way overpriced. And for a lot of us, just plain useless either way.
Actually, no. I haven't stolen a single piece of software on my computer, and it's still cheaper than those macs.
Plus, there's something about being able to upgrade that PC as needed, instead of being locked into Apple's (or Dell's) lame "throw away the whole computer and buy a new one" scheme.
E.g., do I need new hard drives? Not really.
Do I need to buy a new OS _minor_ version every year, like you Mac fans seem happy to? Hell, no. This here Windows 2000 (full version, and yes, paid for) still runs everything perfectly. Maybe because unlike Apple, Microsoft can stick to an API, instead of blundering through "oh, this year we're using a completely different kernel" experiments.
Do I need a new LCD monitor with each PC, like you iMac lemmings get? Nope.
So putting that all together, it's cost me about 1000$ to swap a new mobo, an A64 3200+ and a Radeon 9800 XT into the existing computer. Even if I'm to add the price of the already bought 16ms LCD monitor (which is light-years ahead of the lame cheap-ass panel in the iMac), I still end up under 1500$.
And unlike the Mac, I can actually run games on this machine.
So what do we have? In one corner, the fastest (non-overclocked) gaming PC money can buy. In the other corner a lame iMac which is useless for anything except web browsing. No, thanks. I'll stick to my PC, and save a bunch of money in the process.
Haven't had a dead CPU _ever_, and surprisingly enough the memory was true to the specs printed on it. (E.g., surprisingly enough, if you were a cheapskate and bought CL3 RAM, don't expect it to run at CL2.) Also surprisingly enough, the machine booted on the first try. Go figure.
So, please... just because you're the non-technical kind who's terminally affraid to install a CPU, doesn't mean everyone else is in the same bracket. You stick to your Macs, I'll stick to my PC.
As I've said in countless other messages: the right tool for the right job. If the Mac is the right tool for you, hey, good for you. I don't have anything against Macs. It's just another computer, and just another OS.
What I _am_ against is:
1. Fanboy advocacy. The kind where if Joe Average asks for advice about _anything_, he gets religion instead of advice. Some fanboy's priorities are pegged at "must recommend XYZ to everyone." (Where XYZ can be AMD, Intel, Apple, NVidia, ATI, or whatever.) It doesn't matter what Joe wants or needs, the tail-wagging fanboy absolutely _must_ preach the One True Way of his corporate masters. Even if he just wants a car stereo or a lawn mower, someone just _has_ to figure out a way to recommend a Mac or Linux instead.
Point in case: we're discussing a comparison between A64 motherboards. That's it. _Not_ a comparison between the A64 and the G5. _Not_ a comparison between MacOS X and Windows. Not even one between AMD and Intel. That's it: which A64 mobo is better, for people who already decided they want an A64.
But no, you just _have_ to get people dropping by to say "noooo! buy a G5 instead!" Hello? What does it have to do with what we were talking about? All this fanboy stuff is just noise drowning the useful signal. No more.
2. The kind of troll which you can find a couple of messages up the thread, who even has to throw phrases like "penis envy" or "cheap-ass homebrewed box". (That cheap-ass box being an Athlon 64 3200+ with a Radeon 9800 XT. I.e., the fastest gaming PC money can buy.)
It's not just trolling, the "penis envy" thing is just disturbing. Not only it's not helping the discussion at hand, it's not even helping the other Mac advocates either. It's practically spelling it out that, in his sad little mind, it's the computer equivalent of the "if I put a big wing on my car it will compensate for this here small dick" syndrome.
Yeah, that ought to help Apple's cause;)
So if you're going to pick on that last phrase, please do bear in mind the troll I was answering to in that message.
As you probably know, the Athlon 64 has 3 floating point units, versus the Athlon XP's 2. That's 50% more FP power, in and by itself, even in 32 bit code. Which, among other things, is a reason why the Athlon 64 does better in games.
On the other hand, the on-chip memory interface does lower memory latency, but not (directly) the raw bandwidth. It's still a 64 bit wide, 400 MHz memory bus. Stuff which mostly reads sequentially through memory will still run faster on a Pentium 4 with a 533 MHz memory bus. For the obvious reson.
So you can't really extrapolate Athlon XP results to an Athlon 64.
That said, as I've said, the right tool for the right job. If for your DSP code the G5 runs faster (and it could happen), then the G5 is the right tool for you. For me, my home PC being basically a glorified game console in a big tower case, well, it _has_ to be a PC just for the games part.
I'd offer to run your test for you. I'm curious myself. But, you know, in this time and age I'm too paranoid to run executables from perfect strangers on my computer.
(Yes, before someone points it out, I'll admit that the virus and trojan situation did make me consider a Mac before. Then again, installing a firewall and Opera was cheaper.)
Tell you what. If you can write a Java test that I can look at and compile personally, I'll be more than happy to run it for you. (Not going to buy MSVC for that.)
Indeed. The full name is Moraelin F Asshole. F stands for "Flaming";)
But now seriously, it's not even about _my_ GUI. I know of other teams which have programmed Swing GUIs too. E.g., there's one big Swing-based enterprise front-end being built two floors up from my office.
I can't recall any of them having _Swing_ related performance problems. Performance problems with the database or the EJB back end, yes. "Swing is too slow" problems, no.
A Swing GUI may take milliseconds for the whole form to be painted, instead of micro-seconds for a native Windows GUI. But that's still orders of magnitude below what the user even starts to notice. And even further below what the user will call "slow".
Don't get me wrong. I'm _not_ a fan of Swing. It does have issues. As I've said, it is _not_ newbie friendly.
E.g., for a language (Java) whose claim to glory included automatic-dealocation via a garbage collector... Swing sure brings back precisely memory leaks and the need to de-allocate stuff manually. (Yes, those listeners.)
It also does require some expertise and some work to get that performance out there. E.g., if you add items one by one to a combo box, and they're lots of items, be prepared to spend _minutes_ before that loop completes. On the other hand, adding them all together, finishes in milliseconds. Better yet, write your own Model class for that combo box(sein' as Swing _is_ MVC based.) That'll work even faster.
So, to wrap it up, yes, Swing needs you to _work_ and _read_ to get a good program done. But then that's what programming is all about. And if you do your homework, yes, you don't need an Athlon 3200+ (nor a G5) to get adequate performance with Swing.
I'd expect anyone who's paid to code to a framework -- regardless of whether it's Swing, EJB, Struts, MFC,.Net or whatever -- to actually spend some time _learning_ what they're supposed to do. Learn the patterns (a.k.a. best practices) _and_ the anti-patterns (a.k.a. worst practices) _and_ spend some time thinking how and why and which apply to your actuall problem (a.k.a. design.) _Then_ jump into coding.
Programming is _not_ about randomly banging on a keyboard, and hoping that it'll eventually work.
This "crappy cheap-ass homebrewed computer" can run more than an order of magnitude more games than that "shiny G5". So no, thanks. I don't need, nor want a G5.
But, hey... I know that some finer points, like "a computer is only useful if it runs the software _I_ want to run", are lost on most Mac fans.
"Anything ever written with SWING in Java. It was slow in 1996 and it's slow now. To avoid flames, I love Java as a language, but SWING is slower than a dead slug stuck in frozen molasses."
That's funny.
I wrote a very complex Swing GUI in 1999, complete with highly customized look and feel, font anti-aliasing, and overkill use of graphics. Guess what? It ran perfectly ok on a 400 MHz K6-II with a TNT graphics card. Go figure.
Yes, Swing is _not_ newbie friendly. If you're clueless, Swing gives you enough rope to hang yourself, _and_ the guns to shoot yourself in both feet.
However, any half-competent Swing programmer should be able to get perfectly adequate performance out of it. Anyone who can't get it to work fast enough on an Athlon 3200+, no offense, but is one of those clueless burger-flippers who shouldn't have got hired as a programmer to start with.
I'll give you a price benefit all right. I've built an Athlon 64 system, with a Radeon 9800 XT and 512 MB DDR400 RAM. I did keep most of my old computer components, like hard drives, DVD drive, etc.
It was less than _half_ the price of an 1600 MHz G5 Mac with a Radeon 9800 Pro (i.e. previous generation), 512 DDR 333 RAM (yep, slower), a smaller hard drive, etc.
Even after changing the Mac's DVD writer to a DVD/CDR drive, it still stayed more than twice as expensive, and offering far less horse power. Go figure.
And if I'm to factor in the cost of buying all my software again, if I were to "switch"... well, you get the idea.
So there you go. Maybe you can't see it, but half the cost for _more_ power, sure looks like enough of a price advantage to me.
Slashdot Mirror
As early as Pong, the gender distribution was about 50-50. And there were always games which attracted a ton of women, culminating with The Sims. (We're talking people who registered an off-line game, not people pretending to be women in an on-line game or IRC/chat-room. Just so noone jumps in with that stupidity again.)
The problem is that, at some point, the guys _making_ or _publishing_ games were happy to catter only to 16 year old males. Or males which remained at the 16 year old mental stage. Offending more than half the market in the process. (I.e., not only women, but also males who are past the "awesome! tits!" point of judging gameplay.)
The circular logic and self-fulfilling prophecy that "chicks don't like games" turned a 50-50 market, into a market filled with games which are actually _supposed_ to offend a lot of female gamers.
For starters whenever corners had to be cut in a game to meet the budget, it was almost invariably cutting off female avatars, quests which might have been more interesting to females, etc.
E.g., although there's nothing to say that _only_ a male can save the world, about 75% of the RPGs out there don't even offer a choice to play as a female. Or if they do, they have maybe 1 or 2 races which have female models at all.
Then comes the sexist part. Since we all "know" that "chicks don't play games", it was ok for women to star in games only as erotic incentive for the male player.
I'm not only talking about huge breasts, skimpy outfits, and "armours" that only cover the crotch and nipples. Nor even about the fact that female models usually get seductive moans when hit or when jumping.
I'm talking the fundamental role they're given there. Invariably the best female role is the male hero's love interest. Which also means having to be rescued at least once. And being grateful to the Man ever after.
They also typically get severely shafted stats.
And they often get to use some utterly ridiculous weapon, like brooms, laddles and frying pans. (E.g., Leena from Chrono Cross, or Linear from Evolution.) Or to have some insulting animations. (E.g., in Legend of Dragoon, you can see your Wingly party member invariably falling and hitting her head when she does a combination attack.)
So here's a thought for you. Have you played Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast? Well, try it sometime. They have this male character which fights in a BDSM harness, with the leather pants cut behind to reveal his ass. Well, that's as close as it gets to how most games have been dressing women.
Now imagine a world where most games dressed men in that kind of an outfit. And gave you some broom or laddle as a weapon. (Sorry, you're not the right gender to get a sword in this world.) Would _you_ want to play those games?
And maybe in that world _you_ would be the one who prefers a board game, since it mercifully doesn't give you an avatar at all?
Just food for thought.
Well, the web site I could live with, seein' as you can eventually find the free link. Waste of time and lame, yes, but still... it's a one time affair.
What really got my goat when I could last be arsed to try RealOne, though, was that it was the worst annoy-ware ever. None of the obvious options seemed to convince it that
1. no, I do _not_ want it to keep pre-loading itself, and
2. no, I don't want to be spammed with their lame pop-ups... even when I'm not even watching and realmedia files any more, and have manually removed all file associations to it
It was _not_ convincing me to fork over the dough for the premium version. Au contraire, it just served to convince me that I _don't_ want to "vote with the wallet" that such lame practices continue.
Now mind you, this was some two versions back, so I don't know if they fixed it or not in the meantime. But still, it's left such a bitter taste in my mouth, that I don't want to have anything to do with them again. Ever.
And just for the sake of having a good rant, what the **** is with all these business models based on annoying the potential customer? I can understand that they need money, but then don't bloody advertise it as "FREE!!!"
The whole thing is as if I advertised "FREE MP3 players!" Only once you've got one, I started showing up at your house, reading your diary, making a list of what music you're playing, listening to your phone conversations (the non-Internet equivalent of what spyware does to a TCP/IP connection), and shouting in front of your window to give me money if you want me to shut up. Even when you're not actually using that MP3 player.
Surely noone would put up with that kind of a trick, for a non-computer product. But in the software world it's become accepted and expected that, hey, the user is a computer-illiterate anyway. You're _expected_ to sell him/her snake oil, rape his/her privacy as hard as you can, never test or debug the product first, and generally be as annoying or dishonest as possible if it makes you money. etc. How did this happen?
You might also notice that Opera doesn't have this problem, even thought *gasp* it's not Open Source. Go figure, eh?
Lemme guess... you haven't even read the post you're defending. Right?
;)
The parent post very literally said that he needed 64 bit precision. Capisci? Not more registers, not a 64 bit architecture, not even 64 bit addressing. Precision.
In which case, yes, it's one mother of all bogus arguments.
Unless you're using _integers_, the x86 FPUs already gave you not only 64 bit floats, they gave you _80_ bit floats. Even in the 16 bit ages, since someone mentioned the 286, you still had an 80 bit FPU.
Guess it just shows that just because someone is an engineer and doing "real work" (and being snotty about it), they can still be computer-illiterate and/or riding the hype bandwagon
Of course, if instead of paying millions for that huge 32+ server, they:
... then they could do the exact same job on a "measly" 4 way Xeon or Opteron.
A. Hired a competent programmer, for a change, and
B. stopped letting a clueless maketroid or PHB insist that the software must have all possible buzzwords (e.g., instead of directly write a value in the database, it now sends a SOAP message over MQ to an EJB, which finds and parses another XML message _in_ the SOAP message, and parses it to find the value and table name)
To be blunt, _extremely_ few sites need server farms of 32+ CPU machines. Google does. Slashdot probably could use such servers too. A small B2B site with maybe 5,000 registered users total (not concurrent users!) does _not_.
I'll say that 99% of those monsters exist _only_ because some management droid gets a boner from buying millions of dollars worth of buzzwords. And then sinking more millions into consultants to even make it work. And to round it off, then they get the cheapest burger-flippers, who couldn't design _or_ code an efficient (or even working) architecture if their life depended on it.
Amen. Opera is great.
You know, I can understand advice like running Opera or Mozilla instead. They do, more or less, achieve the same task _and_ more importantly: it won't break everything else running on that computer.
But installing Linux? Gimme a break. That's like recommending chopping off both legs to solve an athlete's foot problem.
Maybe some people actually use that computer for more than browsing the web. Maybe the vast majority of them don't have the time and inclination to throw away all their programs and spend months learning to use lame F/OSS stuff that offers half the functionality, and only twice the inconvenience. Maybe they want to just play a damn 3D game without going through the nightmare of recompiling WineX _and_ half the system, including X. Etc.
As the old saying went "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing." Well, maybe you don't have anything better to do with your time than mess with Linux. Good for you. I'm glad you found something to fill your time with.
But other people have better stuff to do.
Either way, I'm getting tired of the kind of fanboy that just has to drop by and pollute every single thread with "nooo! Install Linux instead!" or "nooo! Buy a Mac instead!" (I'm sure there must be one of those Mac zealots around here too.)
Here's a novel idea for you: when recommending a solution, how about thinking about what the victim _needs_, rather than just thinking about your religious duty to convert everyone to Linux?
And how about thinking a little about what the topic is in the first place? Is it about Windows vs Linux? Well, no. Is it some inherent problem that can _only_ be solved by changing the OS? Nope.
Anyone interested or affected by that bug is most likely someone who didn't want to convert to the One True OSS Religion (TM) to start with. And they've probably heard the fanboy mantra 10,000 times already. So why polute one more thread with it?
Yeah, I know. This "thinking" stuff is hard. Much harder than switching the brains off-line and letting your religion do the talking for you. But I'm sure you'll get the hang of it eventually.
No. This consumer doesn't use that much bandwidth to start with. My downstream total is maybe 10-20 MB per day. On a weekend.
I'm not the only one. In fact, I'd say that for the vast majority of internet users, e-mail, some web surfing and some IRC or ICQ is all that they ever use. That doesn't suck that much bandwidth.
Most of the caps I've seen were _far_ over what such a user needs. I'm talking limits where it would need one to download 200+ MP3's a day to even get close to the limit.
At which point you're already not just wasting the ISP's resources, you're actively driving the prices up for everyone else.
You're saying no less than that I should chip in to pay the bill for every single retard who downloads terabytes of porn. Or downloads 3 movies per night, and then maybe actually watches 1.
And all this "ooh, [insert ISP] is evil to the consumer with those caps" crap is just the self-serving bullshit of a few leeches and freeloaders. Cry me a river. Get your own T1 line, if you really need that bandwidth. And pay for it from your own pocket, not from mine.
I'll tell you what _this_ consumer wants: an ISP where you pay per megabyte. Unlimited time online, but you pay per megabyte.
Not even only x86.
Much as I'm not really a Mac fan, if you want a RISC and Unix based workstation, just get a G5 with MacOS X. There you go. It's Unix, it's RISC, and it runs circles around Sun's workstations, at a fraction of the price.
Or yeah, x86. Get a cheap Dell, install Linux on it, and there you go. It's a Unix workstation. Sun's over-priced under-perfoming stuff won't even come near it in terms of performance.
Well, I don't know, methinks you're going on an unnecessary tangent. You don't really need to go into the "my OS beats your OS" holy war to see that this guy has problems. I just don't understand why anyone would feel _guilt_ for using or not using an OS. Period.
What next? Feel guilty that he's installed a distro, instead of compiling the whole system from sources? Feel guilty for using KDE instead of Gnome? Or for saving a hundred megabytes of RAM by using IceWM and DFM instead of both?
Way I see it, using an OS or a computer is just like using a tool. If it fits your needs, there you go. That's it.
Anyone who thinks they have some sacred duty to use X instead of Y, and worse yet feels guilt whenever they fail to do so... well, just needs a good shrink. IMHO.
Actually, the difference was that back then you were supposed to read it on paper, not on the screen. There still are novelists who describe every bloody rock and tree, and go on a tangent each time an unrelated idea crosses their mind. Try reading something non-technical, and see for yourself. On the other hand, if that stuff is supposed to go in an e-mail, or web site, or Word doc, or man page, or PDF, please do _not_ make a novel out of it. Stick to short paragraphs and clear phrases. So it's not really sterility you're seeing today, it's just that people have actually learned that different media have different rules, and different things that work well.
Actually, the situations I've mentioned, like asking people if they eat more meat when the price of meat just went up, or asking a tribe of agricultors if they define themselves as hunters, are examples of _actual_ anonymous polls which produced completely false answers. They're, in fact, textbook examples of why sending an anthropologist to observe beats sending someone to do a quick poll with some printed forms.
Making the poll anonymous will help get people to open up and not consciously lie about some stuff. Yes. In an oppressive dictatorship, for example, indeed it might get people to speak against the government.
The problem is when you want to get them to speak about _themselves_.
Admitting that the government is oppressive, or that the neighbour is a stupid nosy git, is easy. That's talking about someone else. Whether or not they tell it to the government or to the neighbour, they can still have a bad opinion about someone else.
The problem is when you basically ask them if they have a bad opinion about _themselves_. Very few people do.
See what I've said about going to hell. The funny stuff about religion is that it promises bad stuff. Burning in Hell, being reincarnated as something/someone bad, whatever. Why would anyone dedicate their life to a theory that they'll go to hell? But therein lies the funny part. Everyone thinks that _other_ people will go to hell, while they themselves will surely not.
It's just an extreme case of selective confirmation. Everyone remembers the examples that confirm their feeling good about themselves. E.g., "uh, 50 years ago we did help someone build a house, so we're a community which helps each other" or "well, we do have one crazy guy who goes hunting, and most of us have a bow somewhere, so we're hunters after all." And they conveniently skip over stuff like "but then we found good excuses not to help anyone else" or "but we really just plough the land."
What's good and wrong in that case is actually a personal definition. Someone who defines themselves as an upstanding member of the community, will skew the answers in one direction. A 16 year old who defines themselves as a rebellious youth who obeys noone, will skew them in the other direction. Even if said rebellious youth really is a nice kid whose worst disobedience is having a bad haircut, he/she will make it sound a lot worse on the poll. I.e., closer to their personalized ideal of what they ought to be like.
You know what was the most powerful weapon, that the worst totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe had? The carefully crafted illusion that the state can know anything you did or said, and _will_ use it against you. Anything you ever said or did, could come back to haunt you for the rest of your life. Or your children's life.
In fact, the illusion that there is truly _no_ privacy.
I don't even mean big "crimes" like open propaganda against the state. Nothing that the secret police would torture you for. But sometime, when you'd find the next job, or when your next promotion would be discussed, something you said or did could come back and bite you in the ass.
The communist states, of course, were so low tech that they could only know a very very small fraction of it all. But the idea remained. They _might_ know what you did, and if so, they _will_ use it.
So people preferred to avoid controversial topics completely. Better not to say anything which could be construed as "bad" by the regime, than risk having it stuck on your file for ever.
Now picture a world where privacy truly doesn't exist. Where _everything_ you ever said, or did, or bought, _will_ be known by everyone willing to do a search.
So once, while in college and drunk, you said that only retards wear a tie. Oops. Wanna bet that 99% of those reviewing your job application are wearing a tie?
So you once said that you've spent the day at work hitting "refresh" on Slashdot. Of course, you had nothing to do at the time, but that didn't go on your record. Just that you admitted wasting corporate money for surfing the web. Want to bet it will haunt you the next time you apply for a job?
So you once said that you're either pro- or anti-abortion. Or pro- or anti-war. Or that the president is a retard. And anyone can access that, for the rest of your life. Are you _sure_ that noone ever reviewing your resume won't be fanatical about the _opposite_ point of view? Are you sure they won't let their personal feelings influence their choice?
So people will start being careful what they say. Better be safe than sorry. Any controversial issue will rather be avoided.
That's what officially lacking any privacy really means. Do you really want to live in that kind of a world? No, don't answer me. Answer to yourself. Look yourself in the mirror, and give yourself an answer.
So do you really need privacy? Unless you're a vegetable that only nods its way through life and never has any opinion of its own, I'd say you do.
Just a small, probably irrelevant, observation.
One of the things I've learned from anthropology is that people not only want to conform to some ideal, they're actually skewing their answers and mental image of themselves to conform to it.
E.g., if during a shortage of some resource, let's say food, you ask in a poll if people eat less, the vast majority will answer "yes". Even if a lot of them actually do the exact opposite. Just because "yes" is the perceived "right answer".
E.g., if you ask in some communities if they help each other, e.g, to build a house, they'll all answer "yes". If you investigate a bit, it generally turns out that the last time anyone actually helped build a house was 50 years ago.
E.g., whole cultures may define themselves as "hunters" or "warriors", even if they're at a point where 99% of them are _not_ that.
It's not that people lie. It's that almost everyone wants to think of themselves as doing the right thing, or being the right kind of human. They don't "lie", they actually believe a rose tinted version of reality. A version where they're the Good Ones. (How many people actually believe that they themselves are going to Hell? Right. That's what I'm talking about.)
And for that reason making a poll anonymous won't help either.
What I'm getting at? The whole "I have nothing to hide" charade is just one of these fabricated illusions. If having some embarassing secret is perceived as being something bad, dang right people aren't going to admit that.
Worse yet, a lot of people will conveniently find a way to convince themselves that it's actually true. Either just learning not to think about that secret, or pretending that it's nothing they wouldn't just be able to tell everyone. They, uh, just never got around to it.
Well, IMHO partially you're just seeing the phenomenon that companies now believe that they have a _right_ to make a profit. They don't exist to provide a product or a service, they exist to show a profit at the next board meeting.
And, by Jove, they'll get that profit even if they have to step over your dead body. Literally, if needed.
But IMHO partially you're also just seeing a lot of pointless stuff that's just a corporate or personal ego trip. Stuff which happens not even for a quick buck, but because they make some retard feel powerful.
A stereotype of phantasy stories, myths and legends is that words and names give you power over something or someone. One variant, for example, is that knowing an entity's "true name" gives you complete power over it. Etc.
Well, I believe that the gross invasion of privacy is just a variant of that. We're forced to give up data which is just pointless to anyone, just because all that data gives some cretin an illusion of having some power.
E.g., look at some data that's required to just register a product nowadays. (And in Maxis's case, you can't even download the damn patch without it.)
What's all that data supposed to help with? I can understand how marketting could use some aggregate statistics, like "what percentage of our buyers are female?" Or "how many live in Germany?" Or even "how many are over 30 years old"?
But, for example, do they need the exact house number for those statistics? Or my telephone number? Does anyone actually make statistics at the level of "5 people on 1'st street bought our product, but we have only 1 buyer on 2'nd street"?
At that level, it's no longer a statistic, nor even information. It's just trivia. It's about as useful as stuff like "this is the highest score in a game played on a rainy Friday 13'th." Good for trivia, but completely devoid of any other use.
So, no, they don't _need_ that information. And more likely than not, they don't even have any plan how to make a buck out of it. But it gives some management retard a boner to think that he has so much data about all those people. It almost feels like... POWER!
Heh. Right. DDR RAM on an 133 MHz SDR memory bus. Do you even realize the absurdity of that? Or are you one of those "the mac is good for non-technical people like me" people? ;) No, the memory bandwidth that the G4 sees _is_ perfectly on par with a PC with 133 MHz SDR RAM.
"And when did I say that all PCs were cheaper? Never. I was more taking a shot at Element for their highly overpriced PCs that should be much cheaper because they DON'T pay the MS Tax."
Right. In other words, you had to search far and wide to find a PC that's worse overpriced than Macs are. In a thread that was _not_ about Macs to start with.
And wait, it wasn't a Dell either. Presumably since Dells are cheaper even _with_ the MS Tax. Although this thread is about _Dell_.
So you had to go off-topic on every possible count, just to spew your piece of fanboy propaganda. You just _had_ to do your piece of tail wagging to your corporate idols.
You know... actually I _don't_ hate Macs, nor Apple. I've used about 6 different computer architectures, and about two dozen OSs. The Mac or the PC are just another in the list. I have friends who use macs. Good for them.
What I actually do hate is: you. The Mac fanboys. The Jehovah's Witnesses of the computing world. The religious squad who just _have_ to take a completely unrelated topic, and drown all useful signal in "nooo! buy a mac instead!" and "but Macs aren't overpriced" _noise_. No matter how fundamentally off-topic you have to drag it all.
There's nothing minor between 2000 and XP either. But the fact remains that I can stick to 2000, or for that matter I could even still use Windows 98. For non-games, even NT.
Can you run MacOS X binaries on MacOS 7? Or even on MacOS 9? No? Well, then don't come spewing that "Microsoft tax" crap in all topics, because it's you who's paying a yearly "Apple tax".
"And iMacs start at 1299, cheaper than your 1500 quote"
Except for that price you'll still have a bottom-of-the-barrel iMac with a 1 GHz or less G4. And some cheap-ass graphics card that's useless for anything even resembling 3d.
While I'll still have a top of the line 64 bit Athlon 64 3200+, with a Radeon 9800 XT. Oh wait, you Mac people don't even have the option of getting an XT yet. Have a look on ATI's site.
So, please, spare me the crap. If you want to convince me that the Mac isn't overpriced, how about comparing apples to apples? (Pun intended.) You'll have to come up with something _far_ better than that low end iMac.
"and a consumer doesn't have to waste days putting it all together, installing OSes, downloading drivers, etc. You get the picture. I'm guessing your time isn't worth anything."
If your time is worth more than about $500 per hour, then indeed, please stick to pre-built Macs. Because that low end $1299 iMac is just about $1000 overpriced. And you saved about two hours total for that money.
Of course, even if you _are_ the kind of CEO who does make $500 per hour, after taxes, you also could realize that you could pay some $20 extra to have it all put together at the shop. Or you could just order a Dell.
"I build PCs too buddy. Its a pretty much "slot-A into tab-A" affair, and if I were you I wouldn't take so much pride in it - somewhere out there is an 8 year old who could built a PC that's better faster and cheaper."
Bingo. So don't tell _me_ that. Tell it to the Mac lemming I was answering to. He's the one who was making it sound like building a PC was some uber-scary horror movie. He's the one who was willing to get an overpriced Mac just to avoid that horror. Heck, maybe he'll listen to you more ;)
Dimension 4600
Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional (not the default "Home Edition")
FREE TurboTax(R) Basic for Tax Year 2003
512MB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 333MHz (2x256M)
80GB Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
3.5 in Floppy Drive
Single Drive: 8x DVD+RW Drive
Combo: RecordNow! and MyDVD Deluxe (DVD+RW only)
Dell(R) Quietkey(R) Keyboard
Dell(R) 2-button scroll mouse
Productivity Pack including WordPerfect(R) and Money(R)
17 in E171FPb Flat Panel Display
128MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Graphics Card with TV-Out and DVI
Integrated 5.1 Channel Audio
Stereo Speakers
Dell Media Experience
Dell Picture Studio, Paint Shop Pro Trial, Photo Album Starter Edition
Integrated Intel(R) PRO 10/100 Ethernet
56K PCI Data Fax Modem
The cost? $1,627
What do we have here? It's a good $272 cheaper than that Mac. Even though it has an 8x DVD burner, as opposed to the Mac's 4x. Also note that the DVD writer software and everything _is_ included in the price.
Even then, the comparison is already skewed. A more exact comparison would be a 2 GHz Celeron machine with el-cheapo SDR RAM. That's still faster than the G4, but not as overkill as the P4.
And still more useful than the Mac. On the PC you can actually play games.
Also note that it involves _no_ assembling stuff on your own.
Do I need to spell it out for you? Yes, the Macs are overpriced. Way overpriced. And for a lot of us, just plain useless either way.
Actually, no. I haven't stolen a single piece of software on my computer, and it's still cheaper than those macs.
Plus, there's something about being able to upgrade that PC as needed, instead of being locked into Apple's (or Dell's) lame "throw away the whole computer and buy a new one" scheme.
E.g., do I need new hard drives? Not really.
Do I need to buy a new OS _minor_ version every year, like you Mac fans seem happy to? Hell, no. This here Windows 2000 (full version, and yes, paid for) still runs everything perfectly. Maybe because unlike Apple, Microsoft can stick to an API, instead of blundering through "oh, this year we're using a completely different kernel" experiments.
Do I need a new LCD monitor with each PC, like you iMac lemmings get? Nope.
So putting that all together, it's cost me about 1000$ to swap a new mobo, an A64 3200+ and a Radeon 9800 XT into the existing computer. Even if I'm to add the price of the already bought 16ms LCD monitor (which is light-years ahead of the lame cheap-ass panel in the iMac), I still end up under 1500$.
And unlike the Mac, I can actually run games on this machine.
So what do we have? In one corner, the fastest (non-overclocked) gaming PC money can buy. In the other corner a lame iMac which is useless for anything except web browsing. No, thanks. I'll stick to my PC, and save a bunch of money in the process.
Haven't had a dead CPU _ever_, and surprisingly enough the memory was true to the specs printed on it. (E.g., surprisingly enough, if you were a cheapskate and bought CL3 RAM, don't expect it to run at CL2.) Also surprisingly enough, the machine booted on the first try. Go figure.
So, please... just because you're the non-technical kind who's terminally affraid to install a CPU, doesn't mean everyone else is in the same bracket. You stick to your Macs, I'll stick to my PC.
As I've said in countless other messages: the right tool for the right job. If the Mac is the right tool for you, hey, good for you. I don't have anything against Macs. It's just another computer, and just another OS.
;)
What I _am_ against is:
1. Fanboy advocacy. The kind where if Joe Average asks for advice about _anything_, he gets religion instead of advice. Some fanboy's priorities are pegged at "must recommend XYZ to everyone." (Where XYZ can be AMD, Intel, Apple, NVidia, ATI, or whatever.) It doesn't matter what Joe wants or needs, the tail-wagging fanboy absolutely _must_ preach the One True Way of his corporate masters. Even if he just wants a car stereo or a lawn mower, someone just _has_ to figure out a way to recommend a Mac or Linux instead.
Point in case: we're discussing a comparison between A64 motherboards. That's it. _Not_ a comparison between the A64 and the G5. _Not_ a comparison between MacOS X and Windows. Not even one between AMD and Intel. That's it: which A64 mobo is better, for people who already decided they want an A64.
But no, you just _have_ to get people dropping by to say "noooo! buy a G5 instead!" Hello? What does it have to do with what we were talking about? All this fanboy stuff is just noise drowning the useful signal. No more.
2. The kind of troll which you can find a couple of messages up the thread, who even has to throw phrases like "penis envy" or "cheap-ass homebrewed box". (That cheap-ass box being an Athlon 64 3200+ with a Radeon 9800 XT. I.e., the fastest gaming PC money can buy.)
It's not just trolling, the "penis envy" thing is just disturbing. Not only it's not helping the discussion at hand, it's not even helping the other Mac advocates either. It's practically spelling it out that, in his sad little mind, it's the computer equivalent of the "if I put a big wing on my car it will compensate for this here small dick" syndrome.
Yeah, that ought to help Apple's cause
So if you're going to pick on that last phrase, please do bear in mind the troll I was answering to in that message.
As you probably know, the Athlon 64 has 3 floating point units, versus the Athlon XP's 2. That's 50% more FP power, in and by itself, even in 32 bit code. Which, among other things, is a reason why the Athlon 64 does better in games.
On the other hand, the on-chip memory interface does lower memory latency, but not (directly) the raw bandwidth. It's still a 64 bit wide, 400 MHz memory bus. Stuff which mostly reads sequentially through memory will still run faster on a Pentium 4 with a 533 MHz memory bus. For the obvious reson.
So you can't really extrapolate Athlon XP results to an Athlon 64.
That said, as I've said, the right tool for the right job. If for your DSP code the G5 runs faster (and it could happen), then the G5 is the right tool for you. For me, my home PC being basically a glorified game console in a big tower case, well, it _has_ to be a PC just for the games part.
I'd offer to run your test for you. I'm curious myself. But, you know, in this time and age I'm too paranoid to run executables from perfect strangers on my computer.
(Yes, before someone points it out, I'll admit that the virus and trojan situation did make me consider a Mac before. Then again, installing a firewall and Opera was cheaper.)
Tell you what. If you can write a Java test that I can look at and compile personally, I'll be more than happy to run it for you. (Not going to buy MSVC for that.)
Indeed. The full name is Moraelin F Asshole. F stands for "Flaming" ;)
.Net or whatever -- to actually spend some time _learning_ what they're supposed to do. Learn the patterns (a.k.a. best practices) _and_ the anti-patterns (a.k.a. worst practices) _and_ spend some time thinking how and why and which apply to your actuall problem (a.k.a. design.) _Then_ jump into coding.
But now seriously, it's not even about _my_ GUI. I know of other teams which have programmed Swing GUIs too. E.g., there's one big Swing-based enterprise front-end being built two floors up from my office.
I can't recall any of them having _Swing_ related performance problems. Performance problems with the database or the EJB back end, yes. "Swing is too slow" problems, no.
A Swing GUI may take milliseconds for the whole form to be painted, instead of micro-seconds for a native Windows GUI. But that's still orders of magnitude below what the user even starts to notice. And even further below what the user will call "slow".
Don't get me wrong. I'm _not_ a fan of Swing. It does have issues. As I've said, it is _not_ newbie friendly.
E.g., for a language (Java) whose claim to glory included automatic-dealocation via a garbage collector... Swing sure brings back precisely memory leaks and the need to de-allocate stuff manually. (Yes, those listeners.)
It also does require some expertise and some work to get that performance out there. E.g., if you add items one by one to a combo box, and they're lots of items, be prepared to spend _minutes_ before that loop completes. On the other hand, adding them all together, finishes in milliseconds. Better yet, write your own Model class for that combo box(sein' as Swing _is_ MVC based.) That'll work even faster.
So, to wrap it up, yes, Swing needs you to _work_ and _read_ to get a good program done. But then that's what programming is all about. And if you do your homework, yes, you don't need an Athlon 3200+ (nor a G5) to get adequate performance with Swing.
I'd expect anyone who's paid to code to a framework -- regardless of whether it's Swing, EJB, Struts, MFC,
Programming is _not_ about randomly banging on a keyboard, and hoping that it'll eventually work.
It's not _that_ unreasonable a wish, is it?
This "crappy cheap-ass homebrewed computer" can run more than an order of magnitude more games than that "shiny G5". So no, thanks. I don't need, nor want a G5.
But, hey... I know that some finer points, like "a computer is only useful if it runs the software _I_ want to run", are lost on most Mac fans.
That's funny.
I wrote a very complex Swing GUI in 1999, complete with highly customized look and feel, font anti-aliasing, and overkill use of graphics. Guess what? It ran perfectly ok on a 400 MHz K6-II with a TNT graphics card. Go figure.
Yes, Swing is _not_ newbie friendly. If you're clueless, Swing gives you enough rope to hang yourself, _and_ the guns to shoot yourself in both feet.
However, any half-competent Swing programmer should be able to get perfectly adequate performance out of it. Anyone who can't get it to work fast enough on an Athlon 3200+, no offense, but is one of those clueless burger-flippers who shouldn't have got hired as a programmer to start with.
I'll give you a price benefit all right. I've built an Athlon 64 system, with a Radeon 9800 XT and 512 MB DDR400 RAM. I did keep most of my old computer components, like hard drives, DVD drive, etc.
It was less than _half_ the price of an 1600 MHz G5 Mac with a Radeon 9800 Pro (i.e. previous generation), 512 DDR 333 RAM (yep, slower), a smaller hard drive, etc.
Even after changing the Mac's DVD writer to a DVD/CDR drive, it still stayed more than twice as expensive, and offering far less horse power. Go figure.
And if I'm to factor in the cost of buying all my software again, if I were to "switch"... well, you get the idea.
So there you go. Maybe you can't see it, but half the cost for _more_ power, sure looks like enough of a price advantage to me.