Yes, it is an old saw. It's also a sad fact that most of the people that say it are idiots. However, that shouldn't reflect on the statement itself, at least not to the extent that the statement is ignored or rebutted without sufficient evidence.
>>Since there are millions of Macs, there ought to be at least ONE or maybe even two malware programs out there for Macs in the wilds of the Internet. However AFAIK there are still ZERO such programs out there.>> What kind of person actually bothers to write malware? The kind of person that would much rather write malware for a system that is both much easier to exploit and in much wider use. That doesn't mean you should run any machine without basic protection.
Also, there are definitely more than zero such programs out there (feel free to consult archives or Dr. Google). They are not nearly as widespread as ones for Windows, for the reasons pointed out above, but they exist.
>>Also ALL ordinary Mac programs run without the user having to be an administrator. There are MANY programs in Windows (especially games) that will NOT work properly in a restricted user account.>> That is an old saw!
It's also completely correct. This is a big chunk of what I was referring to when I said that OS X was innately more secure than NT, and it is (imho) a MAJOR flaw in NT, and why I'd never consider it as even approaching secure (it practically requires the regular users to be administrators at all times).
An interesting fact: I never once objected to the concept that OS X was superior from a security standpoint, and yet you felt obligated to raise that reason. Are you wondering about any possible bias you may possess at this point?
Damn, but I hate that assumption. Look, a Mac isn't secure out of the box. Nothing is completely secure. OS X is innately more secure than NT5-- no one in their right mind is going to argue about that-- but the fact is that EVERYTHING has holes, and EVERYTHING needs basic measures of protection. If you don't think you need those for your Mac, you're relying on the age-old principle of security through obscurity.
Yes, that's right, I said security through obscurity. It's not completely fair, since you're actually relying on the COMBINATION of an innately more secure platform and less reason to attack that platform. However, you can NOT rely on an innately more secure platform when recommending something to others. Sure, it's a nice bonus, and it means that exploits will doubtless be fewer and farther between. Fact is, though, that if a platform becomes very popular, people with too much time on their hands will find even the smallest holes in the most secure software, and OS X was never actually designed for security, just based on something that was. It's kind of like saying that a box with a few small holes in it is water-proof and a box with more holes than box isn't. Yes, it's definitely more resistant to filling with water, but that doesn't mean that you should throw it in the damned ocean without covering it up. You know, assuming you didn't want water in the box or something. Okay, that was stupid, but you got the general point, right?
On a side note, it's my opinion that OSS solves this problem pretty well. Higher popularity means lower water potential for the inside of the box (lord, what a stupid simile/analogy/whatever), but it also means that holes will be fixed more quickly, and that they have a much better chance of being found by those who know what they're doing and simply want to fix things. It's slow response time that's the killer, here, and you don't see slow response time with OSS maintained by so many people.
Dothan-based P4s? Dothan is the Pentium-M core, and it's based on P6 (not the Pentium 4-exclusive P7). I don't think they're replacing the P4 line with Dothan, they're doing it with its successor (Merom or something, hell if I can keep track of their roadmap at the rate it's been changing). Also, I'd be surprised if they call 'em P4s, seeing as they have way less in common with any of the P4 cores we know than they do with, say, the good ol' Tualatin P3.
Still, nitpicking aside, I get what you're saying. P6 just has more promise than P7, and a P6-based chip with all the fancypants improvements off the P4 with none of the high-speed low-efficiency madness would... actually, what am I saying? It DOES rule. Just look at Dothan: really fast (no Athlon 64, sure, but still really fast) with-- and here's my favorite bit-- a load heat output in the low twenties. Prescott is in the TRIPLE DIGITS. Finally, cooler desktops.
If you had to upgrade your PSU, it's because you got a cruddy one that couldn't actually put out 300W to begin with. You can easily run a full A64 system on a 300W power supply, and the A64 is in fact LESS power hungry than the Athlon XP, Pentium 4, and Athlon Thunderbird.
Opterons at a certain clock speed use about as much power as A64s, by the way. That'll soon become "more power than," because AMD want to make all A64s except the FX line have 512KB of L2 cache instead of 1MB.
Even the regular Opteron is no Xeon; typical heat output for a regular Opteron 244 is estimated at 58W (I believe Xbit Labs did the testing), and they've got Oversized Novelty Dies to spread that over as well (something like 193 square millimeters, courtesy of x86-64 and a 1MB L2 cache).
I suspect they're looking into low-voltage Opterons, though, which would mean even lower heat consumption. Max heat dissipation for the entire line of.13u Opteron HEs (LV) is 55W; consider that max heat dissipation for the entire line of regular.13u Opterons is, what, 89W and as I said heat dissipation under load for a normal (old-stepping, actually) 1.8GHz/x44 Opteron is 58W, and you're getting some pretty chilly-running chips. Max heat spec for the.13u Opteron EE (ULV) line is 30W, which puts it in Tualatin territory.
So yeah, reversing the trend towards hotter chips is a very very good thing.
So because you don't want to bother doing the conversions from crappy to metric once (that's right, you can just write it down!) and altering your gameplay rules slightly for that, you'd rather take a vastly inferior system with a half-broken core mechanic?
Hmmmmmmmm.
Maybe at some level most of us believe that morality is the indirect result of stupidity, that people aim for a code of ethics to follow because it gives them a framework with which they can interpret the world around them (for what good is data without rules to sort it?).
Or maybe it's because it's a central plot device in lots of entertainment. Who knows?
Even if you ignore 64-bitosity (64-bittiness?)-- others have already pointed out valid reasons not to do so, so I won't go there-- the A64 is quite fast even in 32-bit operation. I see it as more of a neat feature than a hook, but then again I've never had to use more than 2GB of RAM in a 32-bit system.
You could just replace the existing fans with Panaflo L1As (probably the best "quiet fans" in existence), put vibration dampeners on any fan mounts that need it, and get a quiet power supply such as an Antec TruePower. Provided that you spend an estimated ten U.S. dollars on getting a decent CPU heatsink, you should never have any heat problems even given the low output of these fans.
Of course, if this approach is too radical, you could build an exterior case for your computer the size of a car.
I probably should have put emphasis on "supposed." Yeah, I was afraid of someone responding and saying "but HL2's will be better!" Old habits die hard.
It's not just comparing to hype, anyway, with the leak out. Of course, since I haven't touched the leak myself I'm only relying on secondhand information.
So maybe the physics aren't quite up to what HL2 is supposed to offer, but they sure are neat. Knocking a bucket with a plank in it off of a ledge offered me more satisfaction than any part of the plot. See, it fell off, then bounced, then the plank came out! And it was the real deal, no scripting.
Another highlight of the game was having an bum (armed with dual 9mm pistols) say in a slurred, drunken voice "I'll cover you from here!"
The story is still awful in an amusing way, if you're wondering.
There were single Opterons with AGP video cards (the Radeon 9700 Pro was a popular combination) being sold as "desktop systems" for gamers by certain small OEMs. I know you may have not heard of them, but I suggest you spend a minute or two with Google and take a look.
One interview with Apple mentioned these. Apple waffled.
Cards with 128MB of VRAM are only slower when textures are enormous or AA/AF are heavy. I suggest you actually look at the benchmarks you claim to have seen, you'll notice I'm right.
This is the last time I'm responding to a complaint about the VRAM. Honest.
256MB cards don't offer any real performance benefits for modern games right now over their 128MB counterparts, and they CERTAINLY won't under something like Quake III. Quake III is heavily CPU dependent to begin with, the textures are quite small by today's standards and it doesn't come anywhere near stressing the video card, let alone the video card's amount of VRAM over 128MB. When Quake III was useful, cards with 64MB of VRAM were impressive.
Sheesh, what is this unhealthy obsession people have with VRAM?
A less advanced graphics card? No, it had the same one with 128MB of VRAM: a Radeon 9800 Pro, AKA R350. Core clock 380MHz, memory clock 340MHz (680MHz effective). The extra VRAM should not offer a remotely significant performance increase in games like Unreal Tournament 2003 on standard settings, let alone something Quake III. This strange obsession that people have with VRAM confuses and scares me.
No offense meant, but you're wrong about the video card bit. The 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro runs at the same clock speed (yes, core AND memory) as the 128MB one, and unless you have heavy AA and AF on you won't even notice the extra memory. Benchmarks have shown that the 256MB one offers something like a 1% performance increase unless textures are huge or AA+AF are heavy. Perhaps you are thinking of the Radeon 9800XT.
Er.. but the Opteron came out BEFORE the G5. And there were desktop computers based on Opterons available. (Yeah, I know it's overkill, but that's the in thing now.) So, actually, Apple did lie. They didn't put out the first 64-bit desktop, a couple small enterprising OEMs who were in love with AMD64 did.
Please do your research beforehand!
Nice to see Apple putting out parts this fast. Not that I'd buy a dual G5, or anything at that price (I'm a cheapskate DIYer), but I have to admit, there's some impressive technology in that box.
Still... am I the only one who really wants to see a dual G5 compared to a dual Opteron? That'd be as close to apples to apples (no pun intended. oh, God, NO PUN INTENDED) as you could get. No sense in comparing a dual G5 to Intel space hea-- err, Xeons.
Nope, but if you've got the cash you can get yourself a GeForce 256 Dee Dee Arr and blazing Pentium III 800EB with its fat 133MHz pipe and still play it at low settings. I can't afford such a high-end rig myself, sadly:(
IOW, Half-Life 2 is highly scalable. A TNT2 is the video baseline, which is why there's a DirectX 6 path. Provided one has a powerful enough processor to handle some of the basic physics work (think Coppermine or K75 700MHz+, though a GHz Coppermine or Thunderbird would be better).
Actually, I doubt the motherboards can be tweaked all that much. You see, usually any performance increase from motherboard tweaking comes from memory controller optimization, and the ClawHammer (Athlon 64) and SledgeHammer (Athlon 64 FX / Opteron) have an on-die memory controller. I'd look more to code optimization than motherboard revisions if I were you.
This also means that the performance difference between chipsets is tiny. nForce3 will probably be very popular just because of nForce2, even though it was nForce2's robust memory controller that gave it its superb reputation). Even the ALi (shudder) chipsets will do fine.
Just how do they think they're going to sell this? Apple succeeded because Apple stuff is well-made and looks really cool. What the hell is Dell's angle, "The Dell DJ features levels of ugliness you've never seen before!"? Or, better yet, "Dude, you're getting a tacky iPod ripoff!"
They made a deal with Valve, eh? Then why is it that many independent sources (including the developers of AquaMark 3 and John Carmack) have noticed that NV3x has a lot of trouble with PS2.0 and that to get good performance out of it you have to program a special path? And why is it that NV3x clearly only has 16-bit and 32-bit precision when the DX9 specs call for 24-bit? Don't you think this could account for NV3x's terrible "real" DX9 performance? Don't be so quick to jump to conclusions.
That having been said, ATi's Linux driver support is shameful, although they ARE working on it. I think they're both fine companies, it's just silly to accuse one of cheating when there's so much evidence to support what Valve is saying.
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Yes, it is an old saw. It's also a sad fact that most of the people that say it are idiots. However, that shouldn't reflect on the statement itself, at least not to the extent that the statement is ignored or rebutted without sufficient evidence.
>>Since there are millions of Macs, there ought to be at least ONE or maybe even two malware programs out there for Macs in the wilds of the Internet. However AFAIK there are still ZERO such programs out there.>>
What kind of person actually bothers to write malware? The kind of person that would much rather write malware for a system that is both much easier to exploit and in much wider use. That doesn't mean you should run any machine without basic protection.
Also, there are definitely more than zero such programs out there (feel free to consult archives or Dr. Google). They are not nearly as widespread as ones for Windows, for the reasons pointed out above, but they exist.
>>Also ALL ordinary Mac programs run without the user having to be an administrator. There are MANY programs in Windows (especially games) that will NOT work properly in a restricted user account.>>
That is an old saw!
It's also completely correct. This is a big chunk of what I was referring to when I said that OS X was innately more secure than NT, and it is (imho) a MAJOR flaw in NT, and why I'd never consider it as even approaching secure (it practically requires the regular users to be administrators at all times).
An interesting fact: I never once objected to the concept that OS X was superior from a security standpoint, and yet you felt obligated to raise that reason. Are you wondering about any possible bias you may possess at this point?
Damn, but I hate that assumption. Look, a Mac isn't secure out of the box. Nothing is completely secure. OS X is innately more secure than NT5-- no one in their right mind is going to argue about that-- but the fact is that EVERYTHING has holes, and EVERYTHING needs basic measures of protection. If you don't think you need those for your Mac, you're relying on the age-old principle of security through obscurity.
Yes, that's right, I said security through obscurity. It's not completely fair, since you're actually relying on the COMBINATION of an innately more secure platform and less reason to attack that platform. However, you can NOT rely on an innately more secure platform when recommending something to others. Sure, it's a nice bonus, and it means that exploits will doubtless be fewer and farther between. Fact is, though, that if a platform becomes very popular, people with too much time on their hands will find even the smallest holes in the most secure software, and OS X was never actually designed for security, just based on something that was. It's kind of like saying that a box with a few small holes in it is water-proof and a box with more holes than box isn't. Yes, it's definitely more resistant to filling with water, but that doesn't mean that you should throw it in the damned ocean without covering it up. You know, assuming you didn't want water in the box or something. Okay, that was stupid, but you got the general point, right?
On a side note, it's my opinion that OSS solves this problem pretty well. Higher popularity means lower water potential for the inside of the box (lord, what a stupid simile/analogy/whatever), but it also means that holes will be fixed more quickly, and that they have a much better chance of being found by those who know what they're doing and simply want to fix things. It's slow response time that's the killer, here, and you don't see slow response time with OSS maintained by so many people.
Dothan-based P4s? Dothan is the Pentium-M core, and it's based on P6 (not the Pentium 4-exclusive P7). I don't think they're replacing the P4 line with Dothan, they're doing it with its successor (Merom or something, hell if I can keep track of their roadmap at the rate it's been changing). Also, I'd be surprised if they call 'em P4s, seeing as they have way less in common with any of the P4 cores we know than they do with, say, the good ol' Tualatin P3.
Still, nitpicking aside, I get what you're saying. P6 just has more promise than P7, and a P6-based chip with all the fancypants improvements off the P4 with none of the high-speed low-efficiency madness would... actually, what am I saying? It DOES rule. Just look at Dothan: really fast (no Athlon 64, sure, but still really fast) with-- and here's my favorite bit-- a load heat output in the low twenties. Prescott is in the TRIPLE DIGITS. Finally, cooler desktops.
If you had to upgrade your PSU, it's because you got a cruddy one that couldn't actually put out 300W to begin with. You can easily run a full A64 system on a 300W power supply, and the A64 is in fact LESS power hungry than the Athlon XP, Pentium 4, and Athlon Thunderbird.
Opterons at a certain clock speed use about as much power as A64s, by the way. That'll soon become "more power than," because AMD want to make all A64s except the FX line have 512KB of L2 cache instead of 1MB.
Even the regular Opteron is no Xeon; typical heat output for a regular Opteron 244 is estimated at 58W (I believe Xbit Labs did the testing), and they've got Oversized Novelty Dies to spread that over as well (something like 193 square millimeters, courtesy of x86-64 and a 1MB L2 cache).
.13u Opteron HEs (LV) is 55W; consider that max heat dissipation for the entire line of regular .13u Opterons is, what, 89W and as I said heat dissipation under load for a normal (old-stepping, actually) 1.8GHz/x44 Opteron is 58W, and you're getting some pretty chilly-running chips. Max heat spec for the .13u Opteron EE (ULV) line is 30W, which puts it in Tualatin territory.
I suspect they're looking into low-voltage Opterons, though, which would mean even lower heat consumption. Max heat dissipation for the entire line of
So yeah, reversing the trend towards hotter chips is a very very good thing.
So because you don't want to bother doing the conversions from crappy to metric once (that's right, you can just write it down!) and altering your gameplay rules slightly for that, you'd rather take a vastly inferior system with a half-broken core mechanic? Hmmmmmmmm.
Maybe at some level most of us believe that morality is the indirect result of stupidity, that people aim for a code of ethics to follow because it gives them a framework with which they can interpret the world around them (for what good is data without rules to sort it?).
Or maybe it's because it's a central plot device in lots of entertainment. Who knows?
Even if you ignore 64-bitosity (64-bittiness?)-- others have already pointed out valid reasons not to do so, so I won't go there-- the A64 is quite fast even in 32-bit operation. I see it as more of a neat feature than a hook, but then again I've never had to use more than 2GB of RAM in a 32-bit system.
You could just replace the existing fans with Panaflo L1As (probably the best "quiet fans" in existence), put vibration dampeners on any fan mounts that need it, and get a quiet power supply such as an Antec TruePower. Provided that you spend an estimated ten U.S. dollars on getting a decent CPU heatsink, you should never have any heat problems even given the low output of these fans.
Of course, if this approach is too radical, you could build an exterior case for your computer the size of a car.
I probably should have put emphasis on "supposed." Yeah, I was afraid of someone responding and saying "but HL2's will be better!" Old habits die hard. It's not just comparing to hype, anyway, with the leak out. Of course, since I haven't touched the leak myself I'm only relying on secondhand information.
So maybe the physics aren't quite up to what HL2 is supposed to offer, but they sure are neat. Knocking a bucket with a plank in it off of a ledge offered me more satisfaction than any part of the plot. See, it fell off, then bounced, then the plank came out! And it was the real deal, no scripting. Another highlight of the game was having an bum (armed with dual 9mm pistols) say in a slurred, drunken voice "I'll cover you from here!" The story is still awful in an amusing way, if you're wondering.
This is the best joke ever. I'm going to have to tell it to my friends.
There were single Opterons with AGP video cards (the Radeon 9700 Pro was a popular combination) being sold as "desktop systems" for gamers by certain small OEMs. I know you may have not heard of them, but I suggest you spend a minute or two with Google and take a look.
One interview with Apple mentioned these. Apple waffled.
Why, thank you for your maturity.
Cards with 128MB of VRAM are only slower when textures are enormous or AA/AF are heavy. I suggest you actually look at the benchmarks you claim to have seen, you'll notice I'm right.
If nothing bad (*cough*) had ever happened to DEC, how would our desktops be now? We wouldn't be stuck with THESE wimpy processors, that's for sure.
This is the last time I'm responding to a complaint about the VRAM. Honest. 256MB cards don't offer any real performance benefits for modern games right now over their 128MB counterparts, and they CERTAINLY won't under something like Quake III. Quake III is heavily CPU dependent to begin with, the textures are quite small by today's standards and it doesn't come anywhere near stressing the video card, let alone the video card's amount of VRAM over 128MB. When Quake III was useful, cards with 64MB of VRAM were impressive. Sheesh, what is this unhealthy obsession people have with VRAM?
A less advanced graphics card? No, it had the same one with 128MB of VRAM: a Radeon 9800 Pro, AKA R350. Core clock 380MHz, memory clock 340MHz (680MHz effective). The extra VRAM should not offer a remotely significant performance increase in games like Unreal Tournament 2003 on standard settings, let alone something Quake III. This strange obsession that people have with VRAM confuses and scares me.
No offense meant, but you're wrong about the video card bit. The 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro runs at the same clock speed (yes, core AND memory) as the 128MB one, and unless you have heavy AA and AF on you won't even notice the extra memory. Benchmarks have shown that the 256MB one offers something like a 1% performance increase unless textures are huge or AA+AF are heavy. Perhaps you are thinking of the Radeon 9800XT.
Er.. but the Opteron came out BEFORE the G5. And there were desktop computers based on Opterons available. (Yeah, I know it's overkill, but that's the in thing now.) So, actually, Apple did lie. They didn't put out the first 64-bit desktop, a couple small enterprising OEMs who were in love with AMD64 did. Please do your research beforehand!
Nice to see Apple putting out parts this fast. Not that I'd buy a dual G5, or anything at that price (I'm a cheapskate DIYer), but I have to admit, there's some impressive technology in that box. Still... am I the only one who really wants to see a dual G5 compared to a dual Opteron? That'd be as close to apples to apples (no pun intended. oh, God, NO PUN INTENDED) as you could get. No sense in comparing a dual G5 to Intel space hea-- err, Xeons.
They didn't leak the source code, they canceled the delay!
Nope, but if you've got the cash you can get yourself a GeForce 256 Dee Dee Arr and blazing Pentium III 800EB with its fat 133MHz pipe and still play it at low settings. I can't afford such a high-end rig myself, sadly :(
IOW, Half-Life 2 is highly scalable. A TNT2 is the video baseline, which is why there's a DirectX 6 path. Provided one has a powerful enough processor to handle some of the basic physics work (think Coppermine or K75 700MHz+, though a GHz Coppermine or Thunderbird would be better).
Actually, I doubt the motherboards can be tweaked all that much. You see, usually any performance increase from motherboard tweaking comes from memory controller optimization, and the ClawHammer (Athlon 64) and SledgeHammer (Athlon 64 FX / Opteron) have an on-die memory controller. I'd look more to code optimization than motherboard revisions if I were you. This also means that the performance difference between chipsets is tiny. nForce3 will probably be very popular just because of nForce2, even though it was nForce2's robust memory controller that gave it its superb reputation). Even the ALi (shudder) chipsets will do fine.
Just how do they think they're going to sell this? Apple succeeded because Apple stuff is well-made and looks really cool. What the hell is Dell's angle, "The Dell DJ features levels of ugliness you've never seen before!"? Or, better yet, "Dude, you're getting a tacky iPod ripoff!"
They made a deal with Valve, eh? Then why is it that many independent sources (including the developers of AquaMark 3 and John Carmack) have noticed that NV3x has a lot of trouble with PS2.0 and that to get good performance out of it you have to program a special path? And why is it that NV3x clearly only has 16-bit and 32-bit precision when the DX9 specs call for 24-bit? Don't you think this could account for NV3x's terrible "real" DX9 performance? Don't be so quick to jump to conclusions. That having been said, ATi's Linux driver support is shameful, although they ARE working on it. I think they're both fine companies, it's just silly to accuse one of cheating when there's so much evidence to support what Valve is saying.