It is true. The original StarOffice was sold by a German company. It was pretty famous for being able to run on most OSes of the time.
Sun bought them out a few years later and opened the code. The OpenOffice code is based on this old StarOffice, even though today StarOffice is a derivate of OpenOffice.org.
This is ancient history. Both StarOffice and OpenOffice today are derived from the same old version of StarOffice (SO5.2 was the last closed source version). As I said before the original article is an unnecessary put down of OpenOffice when you realise that StarOffice 6+ is a fork from the OpenOffice codebase. This is very similar to the current situation with Mozilla except that much more of the original Netscape code was dumped when they moved to Mozilla than was the case with StarOffice going to OpenOffice.
Um, actually, Netscape is Mozilla currently, for the most part, so that's not really that good of an analogy. Besides, I believe that OOo *was* forked from StarOffice ages ago.
Actually, Netscape and StarOffice have the same relationship to their open source relatives. Mozilla is periodically forked to produce a new version of Netscape just as OpenOffice is periodically forked to produce a new version of StarOffice.
You should give the 1.1.2 test release a go. I couldn't use 1.0.3 sensibly as it was so slow and ugly; I used NeoOffice instead which was OK but still damn slow but it does use the CMD key correctly. 1.1.2 is so fast it is unreal, it starts as quickly as MS Office on OSX does. Yes, the interface is still X11, no it doesn't use CMD, but consider this:- I can now open a document on my 933 G4 iBook and be editing it in 10 seconds! It used to take nearly a 60 using 1.0.3 and that is frankly worth the extra hassle of dealing with CTRL. Oh, and it is also nice to have a version that is not only up to date with the Linux version, but is in fact ahead.
But StarOffice faces increasing competition from other would-be Microsoft-killers, including OpenOffice, a free open-source package based on an early version of StarOffice.
Since when was OpenOffice based on an early version of StarOffice. They're the same thing, if anything OpenOffice (I'm running 1.1.2 on my Mac and it is fabulous) is more up to date than StarOffice.
Sometimes you have to wonder where these chumps get their information. The quoted statement puts down OpenOffice in the same way as saying that Netscape is in competition with Mozilla (Mozilla being based on an early version of Netscape). While strictly true, it distorts a positive attribute into something that appears negative.
That was something I tried way early on. It is set to true in my copy of Mozilla, and yet I never get a new tab when I click a link with my middle mouse button on my Macally mouse. Now it is possible that there is some sort of driver thing I need to do, but since it works fine with Safari not to mention X11 I don't see why Mozilla should not work. Weird.
It doesn't mention whether the middle mouse button can be made to open a tab as it does under Safari. That really is the one thing that keeps me coming back to Safari for my general browsing. Some sites work best with Mozilla and I have 1.7rc2 installed for that (they just fixed a problem with large images that wouldn't display on previous versions) but still no middle mouse click. I have to do left + CMD combination. Yuk.
I have OfficeX running under Panther and generally it is nicer than the Windows version of Office. On my big machine I have Office 2K running under WindowsXP and the problem I have been having is that when I create a file on the Mac the formatting goes a bit screwy on the PC. Fonts change, characters just simply vanish. A case in point, I wrote a doc using OfficeX but when I opened it using Office2K a table that had * in it had lost them. I put them back and saved it. When I opened it again with OfficeX the table looked fine but it had changed every instance of courier font to arial and wrecked all the formatting.
I love the justification MS has for VPC, that you can check the formatting of your office docs to see that they will look right. If MS used a standard file format rather than having a program that just blows its brains all over the disc there wouldn't be these problems with formatting and that would be one less reason to buy VPC (from MS), Windows (from MS) and Office twice (both from MS). Oh, wait.......
What this article misses is that SUN really isn't the threat they were, it's IBM. SUN is small beer, now look at IBM, Novell, and all the non-US/EU countries turning to alternative platforms. Look at Apple and how you can now buy a very nice and usable Mac for cheap PC money and drop all the MS platform problems. MS can only control the market if everyone agrees to it, they cannot really force upgrades, they cannot really force us all to use MS platforms. There will always be competitors and MS will just keep on being hated if they don't start to cooperate with standards and stop expecting to control everything.
I had been using OpenOffice on my Mac to remain compatible with the OO.o docs I had created on my Linux systems but as you say it was ghastly. Recently I tried out NeoOffice/J (http://www.neooffice.org) which removes the need for X11 and looks better as it is at least somewhat integrated with the desktop. Still not aqua but it is a definite improvement. It is based on 1.0 which means it isn't quite as nice as 1.1, maybe it will be updated with this new release of OO.o. They are also working on testing approaches to aquafication but are rightly waiting until 2.0 of OO.o comes out as it is going to be more portable.
In then end I had to stump up money for MS Office X which frankly I hate. It is unreliable (crashed 6 times while trying to edit a powerpoint file created on Office XP) and doesn't produce files that are completely readable by Office on a PC so it is barely and improvement over OpenOffice. However, it does start pretty quick and people don't seem to complain about the necessary tweaks to fix font problems and layout as that is expected when moving docs from one version of MS Office to another. Of course, when the same thing happens with conversions between OO.o and MS Office it is the fault of OO.o and I should use MS Office even though OO.o rarely produces more severe problems than my copy of Office X....... sigh.
Sorry you got modded as flamebait, I think that was uncalled for as you have posed an interesting question.
Certainly in my case I hardly ever actually use Windows. My job means I use UNIX all day long, the nice thing about OS X is that I have a copy of MS Office X on my Mac which means I have few problems dealing with the day to day issues. I didn't buy my Mac to play games on (although it isn't bad at them) but I do have a number of Windows games I like to play. I haven't booted Windows in a week or so though as I have been using Fedora all the time on that machine.
Essentially, if I didn't play my Windows games I would never boot into Windows. Ever. I have never needed to use Windows to do my job, all the apps I need are UNIX based so Linux or OS X are perfect. While they work on Cygwin it isn't as fast as running natively on Linux.
So, the order of my use is MacOS X primarily as this is essentially my office machine, Linux on my home desktop and server, with Windows XP when I have a Windows game I am playing, just finished Halo and Max Payne 2 and since then haven't booted into Windows although I am thinking about getting Call to Duty.
OS X is the first OS that came with a computer I bought in the last 20 years that has actually stayed on the machine rather than either with BSD or Linux. OK, I confess I have a Windows XP/Linux dual boot machine, but I use XP only for games and some casual web browsing with Firefox, no e-mail, no work. That machine defaults to Fedora 1 but my Mac defaults to OS X and that is fine by me. Terrific. Panther is a vast improvement over the previous versions, and they were hugely better than Windows XP.
It will be interesting to see where we stand with OS X 10.6 when Longhorn finally releases. Most interesting is the fact that MS makes a big song and dance about OSS destroying the software industry whereas Apple has built a very nice symbiotic relationship with OSS. Proves the lie. In reality what threatens MS is serious competition that can't just be bought out.
Look at the windfall that occured when CD came in, large amounts of profit made from people buying the same material again on the new format. Now that it is in digital format, how is the industry going to repeat that windfall now that everyone has bought pretty much every CD they are ever likely to need and the current music production is ghastly. I for one know that the 2.7K tracks I have on my iPod is quite frankly enough. If people are able to copy this material for their own use then you can have backups.
Strictly speaking when you buy a CD you are buying a license to the material, not he delivery media. By preventing people from being able to copy the material they have a license to onto a fresh media platform the record companies are trying to preserve the cash flow generated by selling people multiple licenses to the same thing which is frankly, money for old rope!
Incidentally, a similar thing has happened with TV, certainly in the UK anyway. Here if you get Sky (Murdoch's digital sat system) you get a single box and a single card. If you want to record one channel and watch another you need two boxes and two subscriptions, paying twice for the same thing. This also strikes me as quite unfair.
I think it depends on whether you count performance in pure numbers, ie of course a P4 or Athlon is going to be faster than an iMac running a G4 but at the end of the day I don't see that big a problem when the OS is designed to work on that class of hardware. The thing with Apple gear is to look at what you are buying and keep the basic spec quite low. Then upgrade like you would with any other PC. I am looking at adding more RAM to my iBook but the original Apple stuff will make your eyes water. However, I can get compatible RAM from other manufacturers for prices which are in the same ball park as for PCs. Same goes for disc drives. I looked at the difference in spec between my iBook (933Mhz G4, 40GB drive, 14" monitor) with top iBook (1Ghz G4, 60GB drive, everything else the same as mine) and it costs an extra 200 quid. Now, a 60GB 2.5" drive doesn't cost anything like 200 quid, and the extra 77Mhz on the processor isn't going to show up in normal use). I thought the 12" iBook looked a little under spec'd and the middle one was ideal.
The same is probably true if you look at desktops. Some friends on mine bought the 15" iMac with 733 G4 a year ago and they are very happy. Yes, at the time they could have spent the same amount of money (1000 quid) on a nice PC which would have been faster but for them the attraction of the design and OSX made all the difference. The overall performance of a Mac as a complete package makes them good value for money IMHO.
Just this last november I was looking at getting a new laptop to replace the Toshiba I had bought 18 months previously which had suffered battery failure (replaced it) and then backlight failure (killed it as a laptop so I turned it into a server, hey, might as well use the new battery for something and a server with built in UPS is worth something to me).
That Toshiba spec'ed in with a 1Ghz PIII, 256MB RAM, 14" LCD, 20GB drive and Nvidia Gforce 2Go graphics, was pretty sweet at the time. Trouble was, it was very poorly built. The nice silver paint they put on the palm rest rubbed off in weeks leaving two nasty looking palm prints, and the case chipped and cracked like mad because it was made from very brittle plastic.
OK, so when looking at replacing the machine I decided I would go with one of the new G4 iBooks as it had a better spec than the old laptop and is definitely made from better materials. Oh, and unlike the previous laptop I wasn't going to pay an extra 100 or so to MS for an OS I wasn't going to use. This Mac is the first machine I have bought in 20 years that kept the originally installed OS. Best of all the Mac ocst 1000, thats a cool 500 less than the Toshiba. Yes, I could have got some cut down POS Intel laptop for similar money but they are simply not built as well as this iBook.
I think it is fair to say that anyone claiming that Apple gear is more expensive than Intel based stuff is talking out of the wrong orifice!
Best of all, once I got the iBook I just had to buy an iPod, then I got an Airport card, next I am going to dump the POS Windows XP box I have and replace it with a Mac, possibly a nice iMac or I might splash out on a G5 as they are very good value for money.
There is nothing not to like about Apple kit, it is really nicely put together, the OS is simply a joy to use for this long time UNIX bod, even if the stuff was more expensive it would be worth it, and in fact it isn't more expensive. These machines are to die for, and yes, I have lots of friends who are picking up Macs too. Oh, and I am a scientist and a Mac is the best of all worlds, it is a powerful UNIX box and yet has the one blasted thing that people just assume we all have, MS Office. Office X on the Mac is better than any version on the PC. I would prefer to use OpenOffice and one day I will, NeoOffice shows the potential and doesn't need X11 by the way.
All in all, I can't see why everyone doesn't use Macs now, I am currently on a crusade to get all my friends to use them and frankly, it isn't that hard a sell!
Why on earth mod this as funny? It's not funny, its a really good comment. If something lasts longer it is more environmentally friendly.
I am currently conducting such an experiment having had a Toshiba laptop that died after 18 months of daily use. The battery died, the back light died, the case cracked and chipped, the paint rubbed off within weeks. Basically it seemed to have been designed to be disposable. Now I have an Apple iBook G4 and so far it still looks really good after daily hard use for four months and cost 2/3rds of the price of the Toshiba too. By this point my old Toshiba looked like a wreck. I fully expect this laptop to survive significantly longer than the old one and therefore be considerably more environmentally friendly. In addition, the thing draws far less juice and generates a lot less heat so that is good too.
Hold on one minute. This is a license for IP right? Doesn't that mean 95% of it should go to Novell? I could see how they could spin the MS money as being a loan or some such thing, but this has to be for UNIX related IP and that means Novell gets 95% of it regardless of who owns the copyright (which I believe is Novell anyway).
I have both the original and SE versions on LaserDisc and the original is far better. There is running commentary and extras, the whole nine yards and the picture (THX mastered) and sound (THX uncompressed Dolby Surround) are excellent.
Looks like I'll still be able to lord it over people even when this DVD set is released:-) I bet they don't even release these new ones with DTS sound, savages!
My bad. I did a quick search and the first occurance of arch/alpha in the kernel tree was version 1.1.67 dated Nov 28 1994. I was a little early on my estimate with 93. I started using Linux in 94 using a 1.0 kernel which was perfectly usable to me coming from SUNOS 4.1 on SPARC. I remember seeing my first Alpha boxes two years earlier running DEC OSF (yuk!). The first alpha releases were 32 bit, DEC demo'd axp-linux in May 1995 which is said to have been fully functional so that may or may not have been 64 bit. I believe Linux was fully 64 bit by the time 2.0 was released anyway and that was certainly in 1995. I didn't start running Alpha/Linux until 1998 by which point they were very well supported. Either way, it is fair to say that Linux has been 64 bit for a long time now, probably 9 years.
Microsoft has had a 64-bit version of NT since almost the start. Also sizeof (int) == 4 on AMD64, same as IA32. Just the pointers are larger.
Ummmm, no. While NT was able to run on the 64 bit Alpha processor, the code was all 32 bit. It is only very recently that MS has got around to doing 64 bit code. Compared with Linux they are very late in the game, Linux was running in full 64 bit mode way back in '93 or so.
The main difference I am seeing between running 2.4 and 2.6 on my system (Fedora Core 1 Athlon 2200+ 512MB) is that with 2.6 the system never seems to get bogged down.
I am able to continue using the system normally even when disc intensive tasks are running, something I could never do with 2.4. For example, try running updatedb as root and see what that does to your GUI responsiveness. Do the same with 2.6 and you will be hard pressed to even notice.
This is an enormous improvement and will likely make all the difference in the world to the use of Linux on the desktop. This machine now feels more responsive running Linux/X11 than it does with WindowsXP, a major milestone. There were always some things that Linux was fast at but a responsive GUI wasn't one of them. I would be interested to see how this works on older hardware, boxes that had only been able to run Windows98 for example should now be able to run a brand new OS. Cool!
"When the PS2 was released (October 2000), you could get a 700-933MHz, 256MB, GeForce equipped PC from Dell for less than $2,000. That type of PC > PS2."
A 300Mhz MIPS chip is a very nice RISC processor. When the PS2 was being designed it was far faster than any Intel processor available. Even with a PIII running at 700Mhz+ the MIPS could hold its own with well optimised code, not to mention that they then added the VUs which are not standard equipment on MIPS. The design process for the PS2 would have started around '96, what were Intel producing then? It went into full production in early 2000 and had a price point of what, $400? Compare that to your $2000 PC.
I get asked all the time which machine is most powerful. It is easy to answer that it is the Xbox because it has a 733Mhz processor and NVidia GPU but in reality that is missing the point. When Sony designed the PS2 they were a couple of years earlier than the Xbox so clock speeds were lower, the 300Mhz MIPS RISC processor was very fast for the time, much faster than any available Intel chip, they were still being used in SGI workstations for example and those are beefy pieces of kit. The problem for Sony was to increase the grunt while being limited by clock speed and the best solution is to introduce parallel processing. The VUs are no different to SSE and SSE2 that Intel introduced in the PIII and P4 line but you don't hear people throwing stones at Intel for doing that.
The problem Sony has is convincing programmers to look beyond the capabilities of the basic MIPS processor and getting them to use the VUs but just as it is difficult to really make SSE kick arse it is difficult to get VUs working well. I used to program massively parallel computers (look up MasPar) for a living and they were hard, one of the reasons the company eventually failed in fact. However, the techniques used to program that beast are the same as used to write code on the VUs and SSE. I have seen applications that increased in speed by a factor of 20 (not 20%, 20x!) through the use of SSE on Pentium chips so when Sony gets annoyed that people are not using the VUs and so making the PS2 look like it isn't very powerful, well, you can see their point.
As for the relative power of the PS2 versus the other hardware, have a look at Gran Tourismo 4, or Killzone and reconsider your position if you blindly believe that power is all about clock speed and DirectX.
As I just wrote in my journal today I predict that what Nintendo will anounce is a portable gamecube that uses the same media. Perfectly possible and it would give the PSP something serious to think about given that there is already a stack of GC software out there. Add in the Gameboy player and you're really cooking.
Odd that the GCN was so low, it is a bit of a self fullfilling prophecy though. When people came into the shop I work at without any idea what they wanted there was no problem guiding them to the system best suited to their needs - young kids would always be better off with the GCN; where the family all wanted to use it then the PS2 would be better and if a mature person wanted a machine then the Xbox would be ideal. However, the name recognition of Playstation also plays a big part in it, we would frequently get people in who had no idea what they wanted but it had to be a playstation. Its getting like people buying a hoover instead of a vacuum cleaner. I'm sure Sony loves that,
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This is ancient history. Both StarOffice and OpenOffice today are derived from the same old version of StarOffice (SO5.2 was the last closed source version). As I said before the original article is an unnecessary put down of OpenOffice when you realise that StarOffice 6+ is a fork from the OpenOffice codebase. This is very similar to the current situation with Mozilla except that much more of the original Netscape code was dumped when they moved to Mozilla than was the case with StarOffice going to OpenOffice.
Actually, Netscape and StarOffice have the same relationship to their open source relatives. Mozilla is periodically forked to produce a new version of Netscape just as OpenOffice is periodically forked to produce a new version of StarOffice.
You should give the 1.1.2 test release a go. I couldn't use 1.0.3 sensibly as it was so slow and ugly; I used NeoOffice instead which was OK but still damn slow but it does use the CMD key correctly. 1.1.2 is so fast it is unreal, it starts as quickly as MS Office on OSX does. Yes, the interface is still X11, no it doesn't use CMD, but consider this:- I can now open a document on my 933 G4 iBook and be editing it in 10 seconds! It used to take nearly a 60 using 1.0.3 and that is frankly worth the extra hassle of dealing with CTRL. Oh, and it is also nice to have a version that is not only up to date with the Linux version, but is in fact ahead.
Since when was OpenOffice based on an early version of StarOffice. They're the same thing, if anything OpenOffice (I'm running 1.1.2 on my Mac and it is fabulous) is more up to date than StarOffice.
Sometimes you have to wonder where these chumps get their information. The quoted statement puts down OpenOffice in the same way as saying that Netscape is in competition with Mozilla (Mozilla being based on an early version of Netscape). While strictly true, it distorts a positive attribute into something that appears negative.
That was something I tried way early on. It is set to true in my copy of Mozilla, and yet I never get a new tab when I click a link with my middle mouse button on my Macally mouse. Now it is possible that there is some sort of driver thing I need to do, but since it works fine with Safari not to mention X11 I don't see why Mozilla should not work. Weird.
It doesn't mention whether the middle mouse button can be made to open a tab as it does under Safari. That really is the one thing that keeps me coming back to Safari for my general browsing. Some sites work best with Mozilla and I have 1.7rc2 installed for that (they just fixed a problem with large images that wouldn't display on previous versions) but still no middle mouse click. I have to do left + CMD combination. Yuk.
I have OfficeX running under Panther and generally it is nicer than the Windows version of Office. On my big machine I have Office 2K running under WindowsXP and the problem I have been having is that when I create a file on the Mac the formatting goes a bit screwy on the PC. Fonts change, characters just simply vanish. A case in point, I wrote a doc using OfficeX but when I opened it using Office2K a table that had * in it had lost them. I put them back and saved it. When I opened it again with OfficeX the table looked fine but it had changed every instance of courier font to arial and wrecked all the formatting.
I love the justification MS has for VPC, that you can check the formatting of your office docs to see that they will look right. If MS used a standard file format rather than having a program that just blows its brains all over the disc there wouldn't be these problems with formatting and that would be one less reason to buy VPC (from MS), Windows (from MS) and Office twice (both from MS). Oh, wait.......
What this article misses is that SUN really isn't the threat they were, it's IBM. SUN is small beer, now look at IBM, Novell, and all the non-US/EU countries turning to alternative platforms. Look at Apple and how you can now buy a very nice and usable Mac for cheap PC money and drop all the MS platform problems. MS can only control the market if everyone agrees to it, they cannot really force upgrades, they cannot really force us all to use MS platforms. There will always be competitors and MS will just keep on being hated if they don't start to cooperate with standards and stop expecting to control everything.
I had been using OpenOffice on my Mac to remain compatible with the OO.o docs I had created on my Linux systems but as you say it was ghastly. Recently I tried out NeoOffice/J (http://www.neooffice.org) which removes the need for X11 and looks better as it is at least somewhat integrated with the desktop. Still not aqua but it is a definite improvement. It is based on 1.0 which means it isn't quite as nice as 1.1, maybe it will be updated with this new release of OO.o. They are also working on testing approaches to aquafication but are rightly waiting until 2.0 of OO.o comes out as it is going to be more portable.
In then end I had to stump up money for MS Office X which frankly I hate. It is unreliable (crashed 6 times while trying to edit a powerpoint file created on Office XP) and doesn't produce files that are completely readable by Office on a PC so it is barely and improvement over OpenOffice. However, it does start pretty quick and people don't seem to complain about the necessary tweaks to fix font problems and layout as that is expected when moving docs from one version of MS Office to another. Of course, when the same thing happens with conversions between OO.o and MS Office it is the fault of OO.o and I should use MS Office even though OO.o rarely produces more severe problems than my copy of Office X....... sigh.
Sorry you got modded as flamebait, I think that was uncalled for as you have posed an interesting question.
Certainly in my case I hardly ever actually use Windows. My job means I use UNIX all day long, the nice thing about OS X is that I have a copy of MS Office X on my Mac which means I have few problems dealing with the day to day issues. I didn't buy my Mac to play games on (although it isn't bad at them) but I do have a number of Windows games I like to play. I haven't booted Windows in a week or so though as I have been using Fedora all the time on that machine.
Essentially, if I didn't play my Windows games I would never boot into Windows. Ever. I have never needed to use Windows to do my job, all the apps I need are UNIX based so Linux or OS X are perfect. While they work on Cygwin it isn't as fast as running natively on Linux.
So, the order of my use is MacOS X primarily as this is essentially my office machine, Linux on my home desktop and server, with Windows XP when I have a Windows game I am playing, just finished Halo and Max Payne 2 and since then haven't booted into Windows although I am thinking about getting Call to Duty.
OS X is the first OS that came with a computer I bought in the last 20 years that has actually stayed on the machine rather than either with BSD or Linux. OK, I confess I have a Windows XP/Linux dual boot machine, but I use XP only for games and some casual web browsing with Firefox, no e-mail, no work. That machine defaults to Fedora 1 but my Mac defaults to OS X and that is fine by me. Terrific. Panther is a vast improvement over the previous versions, and they were hugely better than Windows XP.
It will be interesting to see where we stand with OS X 10.6 when Longhorn finally releases. Most interesting is the fact that MS makes a big song and dance about OSS destroying the software industry whereas Apple has built a very nice symbiotic relationship with OSS. Proves the lie. In reality what threatens MS is serious competition that can't just be bought out.
For the producers of the media.
Look at the windfall that occured when CD came in, large amounts of profit made from people buying the same material again on the new format. Now that it is in digital format, how is the industry going to repeat that windfall now that everyone has bought pretty much every CD they are ever likely to need and the current music production is ghastly. I for one know that the 2.7K tracks I have on my iPod is quite frankly enough. If people are able to copy this material for their own use then you can have backups.
Strictly speaking when you buy a CD you are buying a license to the material, not he delivery media. By preventing people from being able to copy the material they have a license to onto a fresh media platform the record companies are trying to preserve the cash flow generated by selling people multiple licenses to the same thing which is frankly, money for old rope!
Incidentally, a similar thing has happened with TV, certainly in the UK anyway. Here if you get Sky (Murdoch's digital sat system) you get a single box and a single card. If you want to record one channel and watch another you need two boxes and two subscriptions, paying twice for the same thing. This also strikes me as quite unfair.
I think it depends on whether you count performance in pure numbers, ie of course a P4 or Athlon is going to be faster than an iMac running a G4 but at the end of the day I don't see that big a problem when the OS is designed to work on that class of hardware. The thing with Apple gear is to look at what you are buying and keep the basic spec quite low. Then upgrade like you would with any other PC. I am looking at adding more RAM to my iBook but the original Apple stuff will make your eyes water. However, I can get compatible RAM from other manufacturers for prices which are in the same ball park as for PCs. Same goes for disc drives. I looked at the difference in spec between my iBook (933Mhz G4, 40GB drive, 14" monitor) with top iBook (1Ghz G4, 60GB drive, everything else the same as mine) and it costs an extra 200 quid. Now, a 60GB 2.5" drive doesn't cost anything like 200 quid, and the extra 77Mhz on the processor isn't going to show up in normal use). I thought the 12" iBook looked a little under spec'd and the middle one was ideal. The same is probably true if you look at desktops. Some friends on mine bought the 15" iMac with 733 G4 a year ago and they are very happy. Yes, at the time they could have spent the same amount of money (1000 quid) on a nice PC which would have been faster but for them the attraction of the design and OSX made all the difference. The overall performance of a Mac as a complete package makes them good value for money IMHO.
What are you talking about?
Just this last november I was looking at getting a new laptop to replace the Toshiba I had bought 18 months previously which had suffered battery failure (replaced it) and then backlight failure (killed it as a laptop so I turned it into a server, hey, might as well use the new battery for something and a server with built in UPS is worth something to me).
That Toshiba spec'ed in with a 1Ghz PIII, 256MB RAM, 14" LCD, 20GB drive and Nvidia Gforce 2Go graphics, was pretty sweet at the time. Trouble was, it was very poorly built. The nice silver paint they put on the palm rest rubbed off in weeks leaving two nasty looking palm prints, and the case chipped and cracked like mad because it was made from very brittle plastic.
OK, so when looking at replacing the machine I decided I would go with one of the new G4 iBooks as it had a better spec than the old laptop and is definitely made from better materials. Oh, and unlike the previous laptop I wasn't going to pay an extra 100 or so to MS for an OS I wasn't going to use. This Mac is the first machine I have bought in 20 years that kept the originally installed OS. Best of all the Mac ocst 1000, thats a cool 500 less than the Toshiba. Yes, I could have got some cut down POS Intel laptop for similar money but they are simply not built as well as this iBook.
I think it is fair to say that anyone claiming that Apple gear is more expensive than Intel based stuff is talking out of the wrong orifice!
Best of all, once I got the iBook I just had to buy an iPod, then I got an Airport card, next I am going to dump the POS Windows XP box I have and replace it with a Mac, possibly a nice iMac or I might splash out on a G5 as they are very good value for money.
There is nothing not to like about Apple kit, it is really nicely put together, the OS is simply a joy to use for this long time UNIX bod, even if the stuff was more expensive it would be worth it, and in fact it isn't more expensive. These machines are to die for, and yes, I have lots of friends who are picking up Macs too. Oh, and I am a scientist and a Mac is the best of all worlds, it is a powerful UNIX box and yet has the one blasted thing that people just assume we all have, MS Office. Office X on the Mac is better than any version on the PC. I would prefer to use OpenOffice and one day I will, NeoOffice shows the potential and doesn't need X11 by the way.
All in all, I can't see why everyone doesn't use Macs now, I am currently on a crusade to get all my friends to use them and frankly, it isn't that hard a sell!
Why on earth mod this as funny? It's not funny, its a really good comment. If something lasts longer it is more environmentally friendly.
I am currently conducting such an experiment having had a Toshiba laptop that died after 18 months of daily use. The battery died, the back light died, the case cracked and chipped, the paint rubbed off within weeks. Basically it seemed to have been designed to be disposable. Now I have an Apple iBook G4 and so far it still looks really good after daily hard use for four months and cost 2/3rds of the price of the Toshiba too. By this point my old Toshiba looked like a wreck. I fully expect this laptop to survive significantly longer than the old one and therefore be considerably more environmentally friendly. In addition, the thing draws far less juice and generates a lot less heat so that is good too.
Macs - the environmentally friendly choice!
Hold on one minute. This is a license for IP right? Doesn't that mean 95% of it should go to Novell? I could see how they could spin the MS money as being a loan or some such thing, but this has to be for UNIX related IP and that means Novell gets 95% of it regardless of who owns the copyright (which I believe is Novell anyway).
I have both the original and SE versions on LaserDisc and the original is far better. There is running commentary and extras, the whole nine yards and the picture (THX mastered) and sound (THX uncompressed Dolby Surround) are excellent.
:-) I bet they don't even release these new ones with DTS sound, savages!
Looks like I'll still be able to lord it over people even when this DVD set is released
Damn. 2.0 was 1996 not 1995, too quick off the mark. So, linux has been 64 bit for 8 years anyway.
My bad. I did a quick search and the first occurance of arch/alpha in the kernel tree was version 1.1.67 dated Nov 28 1994. I was a little early on my estimate with 93. I started using Linux in 94 using a 1.0 kernel which was perfectly usable to me coming from SUNOS 4.1 on SPARC. I remember seeing my first Alpha boxes two years earlier running DEC OSF (yuk!). The first alpha releases were 32 bit, DEC demo'd axp-linux in May 1995 which is said to have been fully functional so that may or may not have been 64 bit. I believe Linux was fully 64 bit by the time 2.0 was released anyway and that was certainly in 1995. I didn't start running Alpha/Linux until 1998 by which point they were very well supported. Either way, it is fair to say that Linux has been 64 bit for a long time now, probably 9 years.
Microsoft has had a 64-bit version of NT since almost the start. Also sizeof (int) == 4 on AMD64, same as IA32. Just the pointers are larger.
Ummmm, no. While NT was able to run on the 64 bit Alpha processor, the code was all 32 bit. It is only very recently that MS has got around to doing 64 bit code. Compared with Linux they are very late in the game, Linux was running in full 64 bit mode way back in '93 or so.
The main difference I am seeing between running 2.4 and 2.6 on my system (Fedora Core 1 Athlon 2200+ 512MB) is that with 2.6 the system never seems to get bogged down.
I am able to continue using the system normally even when disc intensive tasks are running, something I could never do with 2.4. For example, try running updatedb as root and see what that does to your GUI responsiveness. Do the same with 2.6 and you will be hard pressed to even notice.
This is an enormous improvement and will likely make all the difference in the world to the use of Linux on the desktop. This machine now feels more responsive running Linux/X11 than it does with WindowsXP, a major milestone. There were always some things that Linux was fast at but a responsive GUI wasn't one of them. I would be interested to see how this works on older hardware, boxes that had only been able to run Windows98 for example should now be able to run a brand new OS. Cool!
"When the PS2 was released (October 2000), you could get a 700-933MHz, 256MB, GeForce equipped PC from Dell for less than $2,000. That type of PC > PS2."
A 300Mhz MIPS chip is a very nice RISC processor. When the PS2 was being designed it was far faster than any Intel processor available. Even with a PIII running at 700Mhz+ the MIPS could hold its own with well optimised code, not to mention that they then added the VUs which are not standard equipment on MIPS. The design process for the PS2 would have started around '96, what were Intel producing then? It went into full production in early 2000 and had a price point of what, $400? Compare that to your $2000 PC.
I get asked all the time which machine is most powerful. It is easy to answer that it is the Xbox because it has a 733Mhz processor and NVidia GPU but in reality that is missing the point. When Sony designed the PS2 they were a couple of years earlier than the Xbox so clock speeds were lower, the 300Mhz MIPS RISC processor was very fast for the time, much faster than any available Intel chip, they were still being used in SGI workstations for example and those are beefy pieces of kit. The problem for Sony was to increase the grunt while being limited by clock speed and the best solution is to introduce parallel processing. The VUs are no different to SSE and SSE2 that Intel introduced in the PIII and P4 line but you don't hear people throwing stones at Intel for doing that.
The problem Sony has is convincing programmers to look beyond the capabilities of the basic MIPS processor and getting them to use the VUs but just as it is difficult to really make SSE kick arse it is difficult to get VUs working well. I used to program massively parallel computers (look up MasPar) for a living and they were hard, one of the reasons the company eventually failed in fact. However, the techniques used to program that beast are the same as used to write code on the VUs and SSE. I have seen applications that increased in speed by a factor of 20 (not 20%, 20x!) through the use of SSE on Pentium chips so when Sony gets annoyed that people are not using the VUs and so making the PS2 look like it isn't very powerful, well, you can see their point.
As for the relative power of the PS2 versus the other hardware, have a look at Gran Tourismo 4, or Killzone and reconsider your position if you blindly believe that power is all about clock speed and DirectX.
As I just wrote in my journal today I predict that what Nintendo will anounce is a portable gamecube that uses the same media. Perfectly possible and it would give the PSP something serious to think about given that there is already a stack of GC software out there. Add in the Gameboy player and you're really cooking.
Odd that the GCN was so low, it is a bit of a self fullfilling prophecy though. When people came into the shop I work at without any idea what they wanted there was no problem guiding them to the system best suited to their needs - young kids would always be better off with the GCN; where the family all wanted to use it then the PS2 would be better and if a mature person wanted a machine then the Xbox would be ideal. However, the name recognition of Playstation also plays a big part in it, we would frequently get people in who had no idea what they wanted but it had to be a playstation. Its getting like people buying a hoover instead of a vacuum cleaner. I'm sure Sony loves that,