My wife (yeah yeah, I have one, I failed my Geek Test) likes cute games. When you actually look at them the skills are very similar to those used for the games I like (GTA, RTCW, MoH etc) but where those have plenty of gore the games she likes are all fluffy.
I expect that a GTA like game with little fluffy bunnies would go down a treat:-)
I had one of those Sun boxes. It was called the SUN 386i and it had a 386DX at 20Mhz with 8MB of RAM. It ran SUNOS 4.0.x and was actually pretty quick and able to run X11R4 nicely albeit with only an 8bit framebuffer. There were prototypes of a 486i but that was killed before many were made. The architecture was very different from a PC; the only real similarity was that it used an Intel processor but there was no way to boot DOS. Upgrade options were limited so I replaced it with a SPARC1 although I kept the 19" Trinitron monitor and Type 4 keyboard and optical mouse I had with the 386.
Think of these things as the precursor to the Macintosh with Intel processor due next year. The CPU may have been Intel but the box was SUN all the way through.
These people need to get the message. We don't like advertising. It was reasonably acceptable when it was a little here and there but as it has become more and more in your face it has become some people's mission (mine included) to block it as much as possible.
This isn't to say that I don't appreciate adverts when they are clever and targetted but this is very rare compared with the huge amount of dross that hits our door mats, or spews from every screen or the pages of magazines and poster boards. TiVO, Pithhelmet/adblock and registering with the likes of the Telephone Preference Service etc do make a big difference. I am generally indifferent to advertising these days as a result except when someone really goes out of their way to get to me and that really doesn't make me particularly inclined to listen to their sales pitch.
I find it particularly funny when people say that Mozilla/Firefox/Safari/Opera etc do not render web pages properly when compared to IE and yet when I use Safari or Firefox and filter out all the ads the pages look so much better than they do when using IE so frankly I don't care. And with the move to IE7 do we really think that MS will allow anyone to have something like Pithhelmet/Adblock? Doubtful. In which case I don't think the alternative browsers have anything to worry about for some time.
So, the message for advertisers? Learn the art of subtlety and grow a brain.
Oh, if only those of us with x86 Intel and AMD CPUs could have the sluggish performance and high prices that one can get with a PowerPC system. I feel the jealousy welling up inside of me...:)
I didn't comment on the benchmarks story earlier as I was way too busy but it is now 4:40am and I have nothing better to do...
A lot has been said about the speed of various systems and benchmarks but at the end of the day the only real test for the performance of a computer is how well it runs your work. I have been developing some pretty compute intensive software for the last three months and I have to say that the G5 is a very quick processor. In my benchmarks a 2.3Ghz PPC was able to handily beat a 3.06Ghz Xeon EM64T chip with my code. This is only with gcc at the moment, I expect using the IBM compiler will make a significant difference just as using the DEC compiler on Alpha produced far faster code than gcc could. Opteron is also a very fast chip. So is Centrino. P4 and the Xeon based on it are also fast but clock for clock they are seriously underpowered.
Do not think that because some benchmarks showed what you want (that some cheap tatty Intel box is faster than a high end PPC970) that it is in fact the case. Write your own code and give it a whirl. Heck, my G4 Mac mini (1.42Ghz) is quicker than my Athlon XP 2200+ (1.8Ghz) running my code and it isn't even using Altivec yet.
As for Apple using Intel chips, far more likely it is something derived from the iPod part of their business than the Mac. The PPC970 is not underpowered, it is very quick, very efficient and easily a match for anything Intel has. AMD on the other hand has a very nice CPU in the Athlon64/Opteron and I would be torn to choose between the G5 or Opterons in a cluster as it would come down to performance running our apps as well as price.
The fact is here that just losing weight does not contribute to the overall healthiness of your body. Working your heart above the daily "sitting in the chair" level is what really makes the difference in fighting heart disease and giving yourself an overall sense of balance in life.
I don't actually have any disagreement with this, I walk to work and back which is far more exercise than most folk do but what I disagree with is the implication that some feel going to the gym will make them lose weight. It is quite likely that if you are pretty heavy as I was that going to gym is going to induce a heart attack. Start off by doing a bit of steady exercise like walking regularly which will improve your heart condition and then you can start doing more serious exercise.
Yeah, you can eat cheeseburgers, but can you run a mile? Weight isn't everything, as this study
Probably, now. Certainly couldn't have done so a year ago. I was heavy and out of condition such that stairs were a problem. This was down to some surgery I had a few years back that imobilised me for six months so I lost the ability to run at all and I ended up getting fat and the extra weight prevented me from being able to run or even walk well. Losing weight by dieting has made the impact of exercise much less damaging to me. I had to lose the weight to be in a position to actually be able to exercise. Just walking for an hour a day is excellent for fitness too and since last year and the change in diet my resting pulse has dropped from about 80bpm to under 60, again without all the thrashing about in a gym or jogging (which by the way I couldn't do anyway because of the surgery and the strain on my joints it induced).
proves. I know plenty of people in great shape but that probably don't meet the rigid BMI standards. That means exercising AND eating correctly.
Of course but when we talk about exercise and being overweight etc it is important for people to be able to start somewhere and the first thing to do is to reduce your overall weight and that really can only be achieved by dieting. The exercise will improve your fitness but the diet will reduce the damage the weight and exercise are likely to do to you.
Cutting out fast food and soda (geek staples I know, what the hell, cook for yourself ONCE, drink DIET COKE, its NOT THAT HARD!) is a start, but
Cutting out anything is really not what we want to do, it makes us feel rotten and that makes us less likely to continue with the diet. My attitude was that if I wanted a burger then that was fine if it was within the range of available calories. Diet soda, yeah, not had a regular soda in nearly two years now and that makes a huge difference. Don't put lots of salt in your food, don't order a large burger when a small one will do the trick, and order regular fries rather than going for the larger or supersize. Fast food is nice at times and saying you can't ever eat it is really not going to help. Just cut down the portions, have some salad too, don't have loads of dressing on there. As your weight comes down you can build in some walking into your day, gradually you will find as I have that you can run. The joy I felt the day I found I actually had a spring in my step again (go look at my web site for why) and I could sustain my weight up on my toes again, well, it has been five years since I was last able to run and the fact I can do so again is a revelation.
getting out of doors and going jogging is the other part of that. Situps, pushups, etc. Don't be satisfied with yourself just by not stuffing your maw with fatty foods. Self improvement is the way to self enligtenment.
All these forms of exercise are pretty much impossible to do when you are very heavy and unfit. You need to lose the weight first and then you can build up to these. Like I say, I can now do exercis
People, the concept everyone ought to grasp is that it's EXERCISE that actually avoids obesity, not just eating right.
This is wrong. I have just finished a 9 month experiment on myself as a result of being informed by my doctor that I was clinically obese (back in July last year). My BMI had reached 30 and I was suffering from various digestion related problems.
I did a simple calorie controlled diet reducing my intake from approximately 3200 per day to under 1700 (for each 500 calories a day you cut you should lose 1lb a week) and as a result my weight dropped initially by up to 5lbs per week but eventually settled at 1-2lbs per week. My starting weight was 238lbs and my waist was 41" which made me look chunky for my 6'3" height. Anyway, I controlled my intake of calories and had a more balanced diet where I introduced more fruit and vegetables but I did not go to the gym once. The most I ever did was walk to work and back which was about half an hour each way. In 9 months I have lost 56lbs bringing my BMI down to 23.5 and have reduced my waist to 32". I feel great and have now returned to normal intake levels. I did this without increasing my exercise rate noticibly. The reason for this is that if you go to the gym and really work hard the best you are going to do is burn about 400 calories per hour. Cut out one bag of potato chips or chocolate bar and you have done yourself as much good. A bit of exercise will improve your overall fitness but it will not help you lose weight much at all.
Oh, and the best bit about this diet was that it wasn't a stupid fad diet like Atkins, it works well and I was still able to eat pizza, burgers, kebabs, curry and all that other great stuff and I still lost a load of weight. I didn't feel hungry all the time either because I knew the number of calories available to me each day and had food available that was filling and low in calories but would be finished off with a small piece of chocolate or some other treat. Losing weight is not about working yourself to death in a gym or cutting out all the food you love, it is about moderation and knowing what you are eating. Easiest diet I ever did.
**some pages don't render right since some people only test with explorer
Oddly enough, IE doesn't render any of the pages I go to correctly. Large numbers of them have these little flashing irritating images that Firefox/Adblock doesn't have. Until IE can render the web properly I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to use it. Microsoft really needs to buck up their ideas, how can anyone read a web page when the text is obscured and broken up with these images that constantly get in the way of the information. I don't understand what MS is doing wrong but their browser does a terrible job of rendering web pages.
I think MS is in an unfortunate position if they want to grab the HD high ground as their XBox2 is supposed to only have a DVD drive. While it is conceivable that they will push more of their WMV9 HD DVDs for this platform I would say it is much more likely that there will be significant HD movies on the Blu Ray discs that the PS3 is going to use. More to the point, the extra capacity of the discs will give PS3 developers more room to do some great things. The more I look the more the XBox2 looks like the Dreamcast of this next generation. The DC had a CD-ROM drive whereas the competition have DVD drives. The DC came out too early and the game developers couldn't justify working just on that platform so games didn't really shine compared with those for the PlayStation. It doesn't bode well for Microsoft. They really should wait until HD-DVD is ready and go with that but of course then they lose their six month (at best) head start on Sony. Without an HD video format the XBox2 is going to look old hat before its packaging is cold....
My question is why Americans insist on calling the '#' pound when it looks nothing like '£'? I know what it is called, anyone else know?
To all those who answered 'octothorp' well done! Personally I just call it 'hash' as do others. Certainly not 'pound'. I remember way back in the late 70's when I first started using computers the keyboards often didn't have a £ symbol so it was common to use the # as an alternative. I wonder if that is the source of calling it 'pound'?
The interesting thing about SSE on AMD versus Intel chips is that for some stuff SSE on AMD is incredibly fast but you need to optimise around it. I was doing some work last year to optimise some code written for the PIII to get it to work well on AMD because the PIII was disproportionately fast. After tweaking the code and replacing a block of array manipulations I ended up making the AMD (both XP and 64 chips) much faster. Surprisingly a 1.8Ghz AthlonXP running my optimised SSE code outperformed a 3.0Ghz P4 running code optimised for the Intel platform.
For this reason I have great suspicion of any benchmarks where they haven't got a code base designed specifically for the platform. Like it or not the AMD and Intel platforms are now sufficiently different that benchmarking using the same binary is always going to favour one or the other.
I have been trying to find out what the performance of the AMD and Intel chips is really like with 64 bit apps on a 64 bit OS and have yet to find anything that covers it. This article as usual goes on about 32 bit apps on a 64 bit OS which really doesn't help. I want to know if the Intel implementation is as efficient as AMDs and this would be easy enough with Linux but none of these reviews ever consider running on Linux. Just saying that 64 bit support isn't an issue at the moment doesn't cut it, I want to know now!
This sort of thing drives me nuts. People always try to blame something other than themselves. How many people out there have been serious God botherers and gone on to murder? Many more than have been affected by GTA I would say. So should we ban the Bible or other religious works? No? Why?
Only a simpleton would think that banning these games would have a slightest effect on the number of murders that happen every day in the US. What about guns? 11,000 deaths a year for a population of 260 million versus 60 a year in the UK with a population of 60 million. Nope, don't ban GTA or the Bible, it really won't help.
What will? *shrug* If I knew that I certainly wouldn't be hanging around here:-)
Regardless of how he treats anyone, he has made a greater impact and changed the world for the better than any other individual in his field, except maybe for Tim Berners-Lee and a couple of others.
I'm sorry but this is bunk. Any impact Gates and co have had has been purely coincidental and at the expense of other companies with better products and by destroying an active market place I can't see that they have been beneficial. OK, sure, they have had impact alright but a very negative one. Look at the mess that PCs are today, there is nothing good to say about the things beyond them being a simple toy. Computers should be a great and powerful tool to help us do our job better, not some glorified video game with the ability to run up a few letters. Using a Windows box for anything beyond the basics is just asking for trouble. Financial information is just sitting there to be plucked by the first piece of spyware trojan virual garbage to get on there. The amount of energy expended to try and keep Windows remotely useable is a horrible waste of resouces.
And what about his generous gifts? I think I would be more happy about that if I hadn't spent £500 or so on software I don't use because I couldn't buy the machines without Windows. So, he is giving all our money away, we are the ones being generous because we put the money in the hands of those unfortunates, not Gates and co. We didn't get anything in return for our money therefore it is us giving, not him!
He's a businessman and he runs a company whose goal is to make money. I'm convinced that no matter what he does, there will always be someone like you on Slashdot to bitch about it as immoral.
I don't think there is anything wrong with making money but in a fair and proper market the abuses of Microsoft would not be tolerated. They call us communists and yet it is them who refuse to let us have any choice. Might as well just forget about driving anything other than a Lada......
I'm not so sure about this. I don't think there is enough incentive among game developers to actually make their products run on Linux. The way I figure it is that every Linux user who is also a gamer is dual-booting Windows (or running Windows on another box). Developer makes a Windows game. Linux guy buys it and runs it on Windows. That's one sale. Now what happens if the developer incurs the cost of developing a Linux version? He sells one game to Linux guy who then runs it in Linux and goes "cool!" That's one sale. Where does the developer gain in this scenario?
I have bought a fair number of games for my PC now and some of them will only run on Windows but others run on both. For the ones that run on both I have hardly played the Windows version (UT2004, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom III). They are the games that I enjoyed and got through quickly, the Windows games I have require me to reboot so it takes me longer to get through them. More to the point, the native Linux games play better than their Windows version, especially Doom III which is noticibly smoother.
If the Linux version comes out at the same time, or very shortly after the Windows version I think there is definitely a point, if it comes out at the same time as the Mac version then just forget it. In the end, the developers should make sure that their games work on Linux too and they can ride the wave as Linux inevitably becomes more popular. It took Windows gaming years to get where it is today, Linux will catch up. Mind you, I think the PC, whether Windows or Linux, is going to have to watch out as the next gen consoles look likely to finally be capable of unseating the PC as the high end gaming platform of choice.
I have been a UNIX user since 1990, Linux since 1994 and I got my first Mac just over a year ago when the G4 iBook appeared. The main reason I bought the Mac is that I use my laptop for almost everything I do, it is my portable office, and I decided to give Apple a chance after my third Intel based laptop in as many years keeled over.
I always ran Linux on my laptops and with a bit of care an x86 laptop for Linux is a great tool but to get the best compatiblity I couldn't really go for the budget machines and ended up spending £1500 last time on a Toshiba. It was dead after a year. The surface finish (silver paint) rubbed off and scratched, the case cracked and chipped, the battery stopped holding any charge (just after the guarantee ran out) and the backlight died. The Mac was £500 less, and with OS X, the OS it was designed for, it is more than powerful enough.
Learning to use OS X has taken a bit of time but I have made a decision that my next desktop machine will also be a Mac because I love the UNIX base, the interface, the fact I can use X11 apps too. I also like having the menu bar at the top and also like the dock. Some others in the Mac community laugh at me because I do my development using vi in an xterm but what they hey, it works for me! At least I have syntax colouring turned on:-)
The hardware is well made, it has already outlasted my last three x86 laptops and shows no signs of failing. It doesn't run hot, the battery life is excellent, the performance is also good. Having played with the new iMac G5 I can't say I notice it being blazingly faster than my 933Mhz G4 so I think the desire to jump into a G5 laptop is misplaced, the G4 is still a pretty good chip and excellent for mobile applications. Sticking a G5 in is going to increase the heat output, shorten battery life and probably not really increase performance all that much. Just get a lot of RAM for the Mac, I have 640MB in mine and that makes it a very smooth experience.
Would I run Linux on my Mac? Possibly, but to be honest I like OS X, I like the fact that most open source software is also available for the Mac. Sometimes I choose to use the Mac native app, other times I use open source. I like NeoOffice but have MS Office X too. When NeoOffice becomes fully aqua (widgets and all) then I will use it all the time. I certainly won't be buying another copy of MS Office, I'll just keep the one I have for compatiblity but do new docs in NeoOffice. Firefox is better than Safari. I tried using Safari but the slow page rendering annoyed me so I switched back. I have changed from Thunderbird to Apple Mail which I like a lot.
All in all, I think there is a lot to be said for the Mac. Does it mean I don't like Linux? No, I still have a Linux desktop (at least until my next machine) and I will keep Linux on my servers and continue to use open source apps on my Mac.
I was driving down to Newcastle from Edinburgh last week (15th) wearing my usual dark glasses and there was low cloud which meant I could see the sun's disc without it blinding me. There, right in the centre, a little above the mid point, was a huge spot. I told my wife to look at it too as I thought it was interesting to see a sunspot so clearly without any visual aids other than dark glasses and some cloud. Man, that thing is big......
To be honest, I only use iTunes on Windows to allow me to play the tracks on my Mac. I use iTunes on the Mac to do all the ripping and syncing and it has worked flawlessly. I can't use my iPod with Windows because I only have the firewire cable and my Windows box doesn't have firewire.
I noticed other people commenting that they couldn't use iTunes in countries that don't sell tracks. Well, I used iTunes for a good year or so before I bought one track with it and it was still a very good package, largely because the iTunes store wasn't open here (UK) until recently.
I have not had problems with ripping tracks and syncing them straight to the iPod. Yes, there is a menu that forces it to sync again, normally the iPod will sync with iTunes when it is first plugged in but it won't stay in sync unless you resync but I prefer to encode a load of CDs and then sync all in one go. On the Mac it is under the "File" menu, should be the same on Windows.
No.. iTunes is after the fact. As geeks, you and I apreciate these things but the general public can't. What makes iPods sell is Apples superb marketing and advertising devision.
While you're right when it comes to the original buying decision, what keeps people happy and makes them tell other people is the complete package. If the iPod had software as bad as the NetMD walkman I had previously I wouldn't see any reason to recommend it over other brands. However, the complete package makes a huge difference. I think this is why the iPod Shuffle will also be a raging success. Despite owning a 40GB iPod I am thinking of getting a Shuffle as well because it is so cheap, and for some circumstances the features I use are all present on the Shuffle. Again, iTunes makes the iPod Shuffle a practical proposition whereas without it the thing is little more than a memory stick with a headphone socket.
Sony is about one of those companies seriously capable of making a real iPod killer.
How many times must this be said......?
The iPod is not the killer product, iTunes is. All these people hoping for an iPod killer to come along need to remember that the software you use to interface to the thing is far more important than any other factor. Previously I had a NetMD and quite apart from the fact that it didn't play MP3, the software was ghastly. Sure I could import stuff from other formats and the likes but it was so clumsy compared with iTunes. When I got my Mac I tried to use my NetMD with it but of course Sony didn't provide any software support. What little open source software existed for it was restricted to seeing the tracks and starting and stopping it. You couldn't actually record onto the thing with it. Typical Sony. So I sold it on Ebay and put the money towards an iPod. End result, much happier but also I realised just how great iTunes is, it completes the iPod.
I think for a true iPod competitor to come along it is either going to have to have some seriously nice software backed up by a great music store, or it should just work with iTunes.
I'm pretty sure the temperature is accurate, I had to force my machine to do two compiles at the same time to get it to start the fan. It took ages but once it hit 75 C the fan started, temperature dropped to 72 C and the fan stopped again. My iBook has been on all day and the case feels tepid to the touch. My old PIII used to cook and the fan would start at the slightest bit of work.
Someone was telling me the other day that they have to sit with an oven glove on their lap to use their P4 laptop. That is just madness!
The trouble with faster drives is they generate significant heat and noise. OK, not as bad these days as they were but the choices Apple has made are largely about getting it small and quiet. Of course, more RAM makes a huge difference to the performance of OSX as it will cache disc reads and writes better than Windows can.
Anyway, glad we see eye to eye on the whole G4 is not slow thing. I remember people being pretty impressed with processors that were only 2Mhz so a 1.2 or 1.4Ghz G4 is still a very fast box. Clock for clock the PPC architecture is very efficient compared with x86 and more RAM makes up a great deal for any shortfalls in other parts of the system. PC lovers who bang on about FSB speeds and the likes are simply missing the point that a Mac with a G4 is quick enough to run OS X very comfortably and that is really all that matters.
You know, I am sitting here using my Apple iBook G4 933Mhz and wondering why people get so wound up about the 'lack' of power in the new Mac mini. The only thing I would do is upgrade the RAM as I did with this iBook (added 512MB for £75 from crucial) which makes the machine nice and snappy. Other than that, the G4 is a great processor because it runs cool (my iBook is currently running at about 40 degrees Celsius and the fan doesn't kick in until it hits 75 so it is virtually silent. Same will be true of the Mac mini. Compare that to a typical cheap PC. Also, my iBook has the same graphics capabilities and a slower CPU than the mini but it is able to play UT2004 at 1024x768 surprisingly well, better than the Geforce4MX my PC came with.
All things considered, the Mac mini will be a great machine to use and own. Mac OS X works smoothly even on a sub 1Ghz G4 so the mini is going to be ample. More to the point, where my XP Pro box with Athlon XP 2200+ and 512MB of RAM quite often feels slow and bogged down the iBook multitasks much better. I doubt that the slow hard drive in the Mac mini is going to be that big an issue either. Just do yourself a favour if you buy one, get the cheapest and stick some Crucial RAM in it (512MB is the sweet spot). I would get a Mac keyboard but use a standard 3 button scroll wheel mouse and put a good quality 17" LCD on there. That is going to get you a really nice Mac for budget PC money and it will run OS X, something I think is worth a great deal.
I'd like to see more speed, but capacity hardly matters to anybody these days, now that 200+ gig drives can be had for ridiculously cheap.
You know, 200+ gigs isn't going to go very far once you start storing your DVD collection. Certainly mine would occupy over 2TB if I were to rip it to disc and use a network media player to access it.
Video, especially HD, is going to eat these discs pretty quick. I remember my first PC (previously I had avoided x86 boxes) had 200MB of disc and that seemed huge at the time (able to run a pretty complete Slackware install). My current machine (ten years on) has 200GB and it is already damn full.
DVDs sourced from 24 frames/ps film are encoded at 24 frames/ps 480 scanline progressive and converted to 60 fields/ps NTSC by the player. Material shot on standard NTSC video is sourced at 60 fields 480 scanlines interlaced and the player can just play that back. However, a progressive player while able to show 24fps 480p material nicely has a harder time with 480i material as it has to deinterlace it and the quality of the deinterlacer is going to affect the quality of the picture. However, the vast majority of DVD material is 480p and a progressive player will look fine with it.
MPEG encoding interlace material is less efficient than encoding progressive and that is why film sourced material is encoded as 24fps 480p. Only if the source was originally 480i is it encoded with interlacing.
I remember seeing an article very similar to the one you pointed at back in the days of LaserDisc (I still have a large collection) and it was accurate for LD which was recorded as interlaced NTSC video with 3:2 pulldown. I have a deinterlacer that returns a 480p signal to my projector from 480i LD and it substantially improves the picture.
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My wife (yeah yeah, I have one, I failed my Geek Test) likes cute games. When you actually look at them the skills are very similar to those used for the games I like (GTA, RTCW, MoH etc) but where those have plenty of gore the games she likes are all fluffy.
:-)
I expect that a GTA like game with little fluffy bunnies would go down a treat
Strangely she didn't like The Sims.
I had one of those Sun boxes. It was called the SUN 386i and it had a 386DX at 20Mhz with 8MB of RAM. It ran SUNOS 4.0.x and was actually pretty quick and able to run X11R4 nicely albeit with only an 8bit framebuffer. There were prototypes of a 486i but that was killed before many were made. The architecture was very different from a PC; the only real similarity was that it used an Intel processor but there was no way to boot DOS. Upgrade options were limited so I replaced it with a SPARC1 although I kept the 19" Trinitron monitor and Type 4 keyboard and optical mouse I had with the 386.
Think of these things as the precursor to the Macintosh with Intel processor due next year. The CPU may have been Intel but the box was SUN all the way through.
These people need to get the message. We don't like advertising. It was reasonably acceptable when it was a little here and there but as it has become more and more in your face it has become some people's mission (mine included) to block it as much as possible.
This isn't to say that I don't appreciate adverts when they are clever and targetted but this is very rare compared with the huge amount of dross that hits our door mats, or spews from every screen or the pages of magazines and poster boards. TiVO, Pithhelmet/adblock and registering with the likes of the Telephone Preference Service etc do make a big difference. I am generally indifferent to advertising these days as a result except when someone really goes out of their way to get to me and that really doesn't make me particularly inclined to listen to their sales pitch.
I find it particularly funny when people say that Mozilla/Firefox/Safari/Opera etc do not render web pages properly when compared to IE and yet when I use Safari or Firefox and filter out all the ads the pages look so much better than they do when using IE so frankly I don't care. And with the move to IE7 do we really think that MS will allow anyone to have something like Pithhelmet/Adblock? Doubtful. In which case I don't think the alternative browsers have anything to worry about for some time.
So, the message for advertisers? Learn the art of subtlety and grow a brain.
I didn't comment on the benchmarks story earlier as I was way too busy but it is now 4:40am and I have nothing better to do...
A lot has been said about the speed of various systems and benchmarks but at the end of the day the only real test for the performance of a computer is how well it runs your work. I have been developing some pretty compute intensive software for the last three months and I have to say that the G5 is a very quick processor. In my benchmarks a 2.3Ghz PPC was able to handily beat a 3.06Ghz Xeon EM64T chip with my code. This is only with gcc at the moment, I expect using the IBM compiler will make a significant difference just as using the DEC compiler on Alpha produced far faster code than gcc could. Opteron is also a very fast chip. So is Centrino. P4 and the Xeon based on it are also fast but clock for clock they are seriously underpowered.
Do not think that because some benchmarks showed what you want (that some cheap tatty Intel box is faster than a high end PPC970) that it is in fact the case. Write your own code and give it a whirl. Heck, my G4 Mac mini (1.42Ghz) is quicker than my Athlon XP 2200+ (1.8Ghz) running my code and it isn't even using Altivec yet.
As for Apple using Intel chips, far more likely it is something derived from the iPod part of their business than the Mac. The PPC970 is not underpowered, it is very quick, very efficient and easily a match for anything Intel has. AMD on the other hand has a very nice CPU in the Athlon64/Opteron and I would be torn to choose between the G5 or Opterons in a cluster as it would come down to performance running our apps as well as price.
I don't actually have any disagreement with this, I walk to work and back which is far more exercise than most folk do but what I disagree with is the implication that some feel going to the gym will make them lose weight. It is quite likely that if you are pretty heavy as I was that going to gym is going to induce a heart attack. Start off by doing a bit of steady exercise like walking regularly which will improve your heart condition and then you can start doing more serious exercise.
Probably, now. Certainly couldn't have done so a year ago. I was heavy and out of condition such that stairs were a problem. This was down to some surgery I had a few years back that imobilised me for six months so I lost the ability to run at all and I ended up getting fat and the extra weight prevented me from being able to run or even walk well. Losing weight by dieting has made the impact of exercise much less damaging to me. I had to lose the weight to be in a position to actually be able to exercise. Just walking for an hour a day is excellent for fitness too and since last year and the change in diet my resting pulse has dropped from about 80bpm to under 60, again without all the thrashing about in a gym or jogging (which by the way I couldn't do anyway because of the surgery and the strain on my joints it induced).
Of course but when we talk about exercise and being overweight etc it is important for people to be able to start somewhere and the first thing to do is to reduce your overall weight and that really can only be achieved by dieting. The exercise will improve your fitness but the diet will reduce the damage the weight and exercise are likely to do to you.
Cutting out anything is really not what we want to do, it makes us feel rotten and that makes us less likely to continue with the diet. My attitude was that if I wanted a burger then that was fine if it was within the range of available calories. Diet soda, yeah, not had a regular soda in nearly two years now and that makes a huge difference. Don't put lots of salt in your food, don't order a large burger when a small one will do the trick, and order regular fries rather than going for the larger or supersize. Fast food is nice at times and saying you can't ever eat it is really not going to help. Just cut down the portions, have some salad too, don't have loads of dressing on there. As your weight comes down you can build in some walking into your day, gradually you will find as I have that you can run. The joy I felt the day I found I actually had a spring in my step again (go look at my web site for why) and I could sustain my weight up on my toes again, well, it has been five years since I was last able to run and the fact I can do so again is a revelation.
All these forms of exercise are pretty much impossible to do when you are very heavy and unfit. You need to lose the weight first and then you can build up to these. Like I say, I can now do exercis
This is wrong. I have just finished a 9 month experiment on myself as a result of being informed by my doctor that I was clinically obese (back in July last year). My BMI had reached 30 and I was suffering from various digestion related problems.
I did a simple calorie controlled diet reducing my intake from approximately 3200 per day to under 1700 (for each 500 calories a day you cut you should lose 1lb a week) and as a result my weight dropped initially by up to 5lbs per week but eventually settled at 1-2lbs per week. My starting weight was 238lbs and my waist was 41" which made me look chunky for my 6'3" height. Anyway, I controlled my intake of calories and had a more balanced diet where I introduced more fruit and vegetables but I did not go to the gym once. The most I ever did was walk to work and back which was about half an hour each way. In 9 months I have lost 56lbs bringing my BMI down to 23.5 and have reduced my waist to 32". I feel great and have now returned to normal intake levels. I did this without increasing my exercise rate noticibly. The reason for this is that if you go to the gym and really work hard the best you are going to do is burn about 400 calories per hour. Cut out one bag of potato chips or chocolate bar and you have done yourself as much good. A bit of exercise will improve your overall fitness but it will not help you lose weight much at all.
Oh, and the best bit about this diet was that it wasn't a stupid fad diet like Atkins, it works well and I was still able to eat pizza, burgers, kebabs, curry and all that other great stuff and I still lost a load of weight. I didn't feel hungry all the time either because I knew the number of calories available to me each day and had food available that was filling and low in calories but would be finished off with a small piece of chocolate or some other treat. Losing weight is not about working yourself to death in a gym or cutting out all the food you love, it is about moderation and knowing what you are eating. Easiest diet I ever did.
Oddly enough, IE doesn't render any of the pages I go to correctly. Large numbers of them have these little flashing irritating images that Firefox/Adblock doesn't have. Until IE can render the web properly I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to use it. Microsoft really needs to buck up their ideas, how can anyone read a web page when the text is obscured and broken up with these images that constantly get in the way of the information. I don't understand what MS is doing wrong but their browser does a terrible job of rendering web pages.
I think MS is in an unfortunate position if they want to grab the HD high ground as their XBox2 is supposed to only have a DVD drive. While it is conceivable that they will push more of their WMV9 HD DVDs for this platform I would say it is much more likely that there will be significant HD movies on the Blu Ray discs that the PS3 is going to use. More to the point, the extra capacity of the discs will give PS3 developers more room to do some great things. The more I look the more the XBox2 looks like the Dreamcast of this next generation. The DC had a CD-ROM drive whereas the competition have DVD drives. The DC came out too early and the game developers couldn't justify working just on that platform so games didn't really shine compared with those for the PlayStation. It doesn't bode well for Microsoft. They really should wait until HD-DVD is ready and go with that but of course then they lose their six month (at best) head start on Sony. Without an HD video format the XBox2 is going to look old hat before its packaging is cold....
To all those who answered 'octothorp' well done! Personally I just call it 'hash' as do others. Certainly not 'pound'. I remember way back in the late 70's when I first started using computers the keyboards often didn't have a £ symbol so it was common to use the # as an alternative. I wonder if that is the source of calling it 'pound'?
No, its pronounced £0.53 or 0.78 :-)
My question is why Americans insist on calling the '#' pound when it looks nothing like '£'? I know what it is called, anyone else know?
The interesting thing about SSE on AMD versus Intel chips is that for some stuff SSE on AMD is incredibly fast but you need to optimise around it. I was doing some work last year to optimise some code written for the PIII to get it to work well on AMD because the PIII was disproportionately fast. After tweaking the code and replacing a block of array manipulations I ended up making the AMD (both XP and 64 chips) much faster. Surprisingly a 1.8Ghz AthlonXP running my optimised SSE code outperformed a 3.0Ghz P4 running code optimised for the Intel platform.
For this reason I have great suspicion of any benchmarks where they haven't got a code base designed specifically for the platform. Like it or not the AMD and Intel platforms are now sufficiently different that benchmarking using the same binary is always going to favour one or the other.
I have been trying to find out what the performance of the AMD and Intel chips is really like with 64 bit apps on a 64 bit OS and have yet to find anything that covers it. This article as usual goes on about 32 bit apps on a 64 bit OS which really doesn't help. I want to know if the Intel implementation is as efficient as AMDs and this would be easy enough with Linux but none of these reviews ever consider running on Linux. Just saying that 64 bit support isn't an issue at the moment doesn't cut it, I want to know now!
This sort of thing drives me nuts. People always try to blame something other than themselves. How many people out there have been serious God botherers and gone on to murder? Many more than have been affected by GTA I would say. So should we ban the Bible or other religious works? No? Why?
:-)
Only a simpleton would think that banning these games would have a slightest effect on the number of murders that happen every day in the US. What about guns? 11,000 deaths a year for a population of 260 million versus 60 a year in the UK with a population of 60 million. Nope, don't ban GTA or the Bible, it really won't help.
What will? *shrug* If I knew that I certainly wouldn't be hanging around here
I'm sorry but this is bunk. Any impact Gates and co have had has been purely coincidental and at the expense of other companies with better products and by destroying an active market place I can't see that they have been beneficial. OK, sure, they have had impact alright but a very negative one. Look at the mess that PCs are today, there is nothing good to say about the things beyond them being a simple toy. Computers should be a great and powerful tool to help us do our job better, not some glorified video game with the ability to run up a few letters. Using a Windows box for anything beyond the basics is just asking for trouble. Financial information is just sitting there to be plucked by the first piece of spyware trojan virual garbage to get on there. The amount of energy expended to try and keep Windows remotely useable is a horrible waste of resouces.
And what about his generous gifts? I think I would be more happy about that if I hadn't spent £500 or so on software I don't use because I couldn't buy the machines without Windows. So, he is giving all our money away, we are the ones being generous because we put the money in the hands of those unfortunates, not Gates and co. We didn't get anything in return for our money therefore it is us giving, not him!
I don't think there is anything wrong with making money but in a fair and proper market the abuses of Microsoft would not be tolerated. They call us communists and yet it is them who refuse to let us have any choice. Might as well just forget about driving anything other than a Lada......
I have bought a fair number of games for my PC now and some of them will only run on Windows but others run on both. For the ones that run on both I have hardly played the Windows version (UT2004, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom III). They are the games that I enjoyed and got through quickly, the Windows games I have require me to reboot so it takes me longer to get through them. More to the point, the native Linux games play better than their Windows version, especially Doom III which is noticibly smoother.
If the Linux version comes out at the same time, or very shortly after the Windows version I think there is definitely a point, if it comes out at the same time as the Mac version then just forget it. In the end, the developers should make sure that their games work on Linux too and they can ride the wave as Linux inevitably becomes more popular. It took Windows gaming years to get where it is today, Linux will catch up. Mind you, I think the PC, whether Windows or Linux, is going to have to watch out as the next gen consoles look likely to finally be capable of unseating the PC as the high end gaming platform of choice.
I have been a UNIX user since 1990, Linux since 1994 and I got my first Mac just over a year ago when the G4 iBook appeared. The main reason I bought the Mac is that I use my laptop for almost everything I do, it is my portable office, and I decided to give Apple a chance after my third Intel based laptop in as many years keeled over.
:-)
I always ran Linux on my laptops and with a bit of care an x86 laptop for Linux is a great tool but to get the best compatiblity I couldn't really go for the budget machines and ended up spending £1500 last time on a Toshiba. It was dead after a year. The surface finish (silver paint) rubbed off and scratched, the case cracked and chipped, the battery stopped holding any charge (just after the guarantee ran out) and the backlight died. The Mac was £500 less, and with OS X, the OS it was designed for, it is more than powerful enough.
Learning to use OS X has taken a bit of time but I have made a decision that my next desktop machine will also be a Mac because I love the UNIX base, the interface, the fact I can use X11 apps too. I also like having the menu bar at the top and also like the dock. Some others in the Mac community laugh at me because I do my development using vi in an xterm but what they hey, it works for me! At least I have syntax colouring turned on
The hardware is well made, it has already outlasted my last three x86 laptops and shows no signs of failing. It doesn't run hot, the battery life is excellent, the performance is also good. Having played with the new iMac G5 I can't say I notice it being blazingly faster than my 933Mhz G4 so I think the desire to jump into a G5 laptop is misplaced, the G4 is still a pretty good chip and excellent for mobile applications. Sticking a G5 in is going to increase the heat output, shorten battery life and probably not really increase performance all that much. Just get a lot of RAM for the Mac, I have 640MB in mine and that makes it a very smooth experience.
Would I run Linux on my Mac? Possibly, but to be honest I like OS X, I like the fact that most open source software is also available for the Mac. Sometimes I choose to use the Mac native app, other times I use open source. I like NeoOffice but have MS Office X too. When NeoOffice becomes fully aqua (widgets and all) then I will use it all the time. I certainly won't be buying another copy of MS Office, I'll just keep the one I have for compatiblity but do new docs in NeoOffice. Firefox is better than Safari. I tried using Safari but the slow page rendering annoyed me so I switched back. I have changed from Thunderbird to Apple Mail which I like a lot.
All in all, I think there is a lot to be said for the Mac. Does it mean I don't like Linux? No, I still have a Linux desktop (at least until my next machine) and I will keep Linux on my servers and continue to use open source apps on my Mac.
I was driving down to Newcastle from Edinburgh last week (15th) wearing my usual dark glasses and there was low cloud which meant I could see the sun's disc without it blinding me. There, right in the centre, a little above the mid point, was a huge spot. I told my wife to look at it too as I thought it was interesting to see a sunspot so clearly without any visual aids other than dark glasses and some cloud. Man, that thing is big......
To be honest, I only use iTunes on Windows to allow me to play the tracks on my Mac. I use iTunes on the Mac to do all the ripping and syncing and it has worked flawlessly. I can't use my iPod with Windows because I only have the firewire cable and my Windows box doesn't have firewire.
I noticed other people commenting that they couldn't use iTunes in countries that don't sell tracks. Well, I used iTunes for a good year or so before I bought one track with it and it was still a very good package, largely because the iTunes store wasn't open here (UK) until recently.
I have not had problems with ripping tracks and syncing them straight to the iPod. Yes, there is a menu that forces it to sync again, normally the iPod will sync with iTunes when it is first plugged in but it won't stay in sync unless you resync but I prefer to encode a load of CDs and then sync all in one go. On the Mac it is under the "File" menu, should be the same on Windows.
While you're right when it comes to the original buying decision, what keeps people happy and makes them tell other people is the complete package. If the iPod had software as bad as the NetMD walkman I had previously I wouldn't see any reason to recommend it over other brands. However, the complete package makes a huge difference. I think this is why the iPod Shuffle will also be a raging success. Despite owning a 40GB iPod I am thinking of getting a Shuffle as well because it is so cheap, and for some circumstances the features I use are all present on the Shuffle. Again, iTunes makes the iPod Shuffle a practical proposition whereas without it the thing is little more than a memory stick with a headphone socket.
How many times must this be said......?
The iPod is not the killer product, iTunes is. All these people hoping for an iPod killer to come along need to remember that the software you use to interface to the thing is far more important than any other factor. Previously I had a NetMD and quite apart from the fact that it didn't play MP3, the software was ghastly. Sure I could import stuff from other formats and the likes but it was so clumsy compared with iTunes. When I got my Mac I tried to use my NetMD with it but of course Sony didn't provide any software support. What little open source software existed for it was restricted to seeing the tracks and starting and stopping it. You couldn't actually record onto the thing with it. Typical Sony. So I sold it on Ebay and put the money towards an iPod. End result, much happier but also I realised just how great iTunes is, it completes the iPod.
I think for a true iPod competitor to come along it is either going to have to have some seriously nice software backed up by a great music store, or it should just work with iTunes.
40 C is 104 F but 75 C is 167 F rather than 175.
I'm pretty sure the temperature is accurate, I had to force my machine to do two compiles at the same time to get it to start the fan. It took ages but once it hit 75 C the fan started, temperature dropped to 72 C and the fan stopped again. My iBook has been on all day and the case feels tepid to the touch. My old PIII used to cook and the fan would start at the slightest bit of work.
Someone was telling me the other day that they have to sit with an oven glove on their lap to use their P4 laptop. That is just madness!
The trouble with faster drives is they generate significant heat and noise. OK, not as bad these days as they were but the choices Apple has made are largely about getting it small and quiet. Of course, more RAM makes a huge difference to the performance of OSX as it will cache disc reads and writes better than Windows can.
Anyway, glad we see eye to eye on the whole G4 is not slow thing. I remember people being pretty impressed with processors that were only 2Mhz so a 1.2 or 1.4Ghz G4 is still a very fast box. Clock for clock the PPC architecture is very efficient compared with x86 and more RAM makes up a great deal for any shortfalls in other parts of the system. PC lovers who bang on about FSB speeds and the likes are simply missing the point that a Mac with a G4 is quick enough to run OS X very comfortably and that is really all that matters.
You know, I am sitting here using my Apple iBook G4 933Mhz and wondering why people get so wound up about the 'lack' of power in the new Mac mini. The only thing I would do is upgrade the RAM as I did with this iBook (added 512MB for £75 from crucial) which makes the machine nice and snappy. Other than that, the G4 is a great processor because it runs cool (my iBook is currently running at about 40 degrees Celsius and the fan doesn't kick in until it hits 75 so it is virtually silent. Same will be true of the Mac mini. Compare that to a typical cheap PC. Also, my iBook has the same graphics capabilities and a slower CPU than the mini but it is able to play UT2004 at 1024x768 surprisingly well, better than the Geforce4MX my PC came with.
All things considered, the Mac mini will be a great machine to use and own. Mac OS X works smoothly even on a sub 1Ghz G4 so the mini is going to be ample. More to the point, where my XP Pro box with Athlon XP 2200+ and 512MB of RAM quite often feels slow and bogged down the iBook multitasks much better. I doubt that the slow hard drive in the Mac mini is going to be that big an issue either. Just do yourself a favour if you buy one, get the cheapest and stick some Crucial RAM in it (512MB is the sweet spot). I would get a Mac keyboard but use a standard 3 button scroll wheel mouse and put a good quality 17" LCD on there. That is going to get you a really nice Mac for budget PC money and it will run OS X, something I think is worth a great deal.
You know, 200+ gigs isn't going to go very far once you start storing your DVD collection. Certainly mine would occupy over 2TB if I were to rip it to disc and use a network media player to access it.
Video, especially HD, is going to eat these discs pretty quick. I remember my first PC (previously I had avoided x86 boxes) had 200MB of disc and that seemed huge at the time (able to run a pretty complete Slackware install). My current machine (ten years on) has 200GB and it is already damn full.
I think you are misreading this.
DVDs sourced from 24 frames/ps film are encoded at 24 frames/ps 480 scanline progressive and converted to 60 fields/ps NTSC by the player. Material shot on standard NTSC video is sourced at 60 fields 480 scanlines interlaced and the player can just play that back. However, a progressive player while able to show 24fps 480p material nicely has a harder time with 480i material as it has to deinterlace it and the quality of the deinterlacer is going to affect the quality of the picture. However, the vast majority of DVD material is 480p and a progressive player will look fine with it.
MPEG encoding interlace material is less efficient than encoding progressive and that is why film sourced material is encoded as 24fps 480p. Only if the source was originally 480i is it encoded with interlacing.
I remember seeing an article very similar to the one you pointed at back in the days of LaserDisc (I still have a large collection) and it was accurate for LD which was recorded as interlaced NTSC video with 3:2 pulldown. I have a deinterlacer that returns a 480p signal to my projector from 480i LD and it substantially improves the picture.