Transmeta probably had little impact on Intel's decision to develop the Pentium M. Starting from the beginning it was known that NetBurst wasn't going to be as efficient nor powerful as marketing claims. It was also confirmed that the 1+ ghz P3s could easily outperform all the P4s available at the time, if you look at the point in time that the P3s were discontinued, it was exactly that situation. Releasing the Pentium M was basically bringing back the P3s with a few tweaks.
Discontinuing the faster product in favor of what milks the consumer better is shady, but they're not stupid. They knew it's just not going to work for laptops. Whether or not transmeta existed, Intel had to do something to get a chip that will run at a speed similar to the desktops and have a reasonable battery life.
Contrary to popular opinion, your brother's experience is more likely to be the more common experience
The Nano's screen design isn't new at all.
It's the same material as in the 4th gen ipod. Most likely the same as earlier ipods as well. The difference is that the 4th gen isn't as easily stuck in a pocket.
As for why 1st gen Apple products suck? There's are reasons for that.
Often times when they're creating a new product, there's quite a bit of secrecy involved. (duh, it's Apple) For example, the 1st gen 12 inch Powerbook G4 was thought to be a G4 version of the iBook during its design phase. If the designers didn't even know what it was they were designing, what kind of consistency can you expect? Not much.
What about the MacBook Pro? Everybody's gotta know what that was supposed to be when working on it cuz it's too different. Very true. Chalk this one up to lack of experience. In all seriousness and with marketing bullshit pushed aside, the heat output of the Core Duos is much greater than the G4s. There's a reason there's no other PC manufacturer out there with an all metal Core Duo notebook at about 1 inch thick, because they've all heard about the Dell owner who burned his vitals with his P4 "laptop." Couple that with the fact that Apple was one of the first to release a dual processor laptop, and you've got a heat disaster in the making.
There are four groups of people in the MBP heat debate. 1) People who say the CPU is too hot because of improper thermal paste usage. (perhaps, depends what temps you're getting) 2) People who say the MBP outside shell is too hot because of improper thermal paste usage. (you're the type of people we make one button mice for) 3) People who say the thermal paste usage doesn't matter much. (perhaps, depends on what temps you're getting at the CPU) 4) Intel sucks. It's their fault.
Groups 1 and 3 both have good reasons (because they're talking about the CPU temps) all centered around the thickness of thermal transfer compound. I use the words "thermal transfer compound" very carefully. When you go to install your Athlon, the heatsink comes with a half millimeter thick layer of some transfer compound. Do you smooth that out? No. Because the pressure of the heatsink clamp coupled with the heat from the CPU melts it and then squeezes out the excess as soon as you turn it on for the first time. Don't believe me? I've seen P4 dies which have so much pressure and heat that when I try removing the heatsink, the compound has such a thin and well spread layer I pulled the chip out of the socket. This is WITH the clamps set in place. My vote is towards it not being a problem, unless whatever tech assembled your MBP didn't tighten the screws enough, in which case, yeah, good idea to reapply or screw it in tighter.
As for group 2: The thermal paste has almost nothing to do with your burning sensation. Think about it. Proper use of thermal paste transfers heat. Improper use of thermal paste makes heat transfer slower. Putting the right amount means the heat transfers better. What does "better" mean? It means the case gets hotter. There is no magical property of thermal paste that causes heat to vanish, it has to go somewhere. Heat comes from the cpu and goes to the heatsinks and case. If you use too much, the cpu overheats and the case is cool. If you use the right amount, the cpu is nice and cool because all the heat goes to the case. Now that you know this, go educate the rest of your brethern.
However, using CDMA is actually a benefit to me and is pretty much the only reason I stayed with Verizon so long. In short, their use of CDMA is what gives my phone a better reception, data handling, and reliability over other networks using GSM. (Sprint's a bit of a mess just cuz they haven't invest in enough cdma towers)
Regardless, I'm also using a E815 with java imported from canada on the verizon network.
I'm posting from a MBP RevD, and have taken to naming it evilBook to the chagrin of my coworkers. While it's got major coolness and performance compared to other WinXP machines while running XP, it's not what I've come to expect as a Mac user. I am running all native apps (or at least for the apps that matter since sometimes I have to do testing on old versions). This thing's just got all sorts of issues.
While it is definetely faster than my old PB G4 12" 867, it's also much hotter than anything I've seen. It's hot in OSX, it's blazing hot in WinXP. I don't know what else to say except it's just not acceptable.
When running native apps, it's usually is fine but periodically will stop responding. Onscreen clocks, the mouse cursor, all apps, will stop responding for around 20 seconds and all of a sudden resume. Imagine doing something and seeing what appears to be a system freeze for 20 seconds franticly thinking about whether or not you saved all your text editor windows.
Sleep on battery exhaustion seems to be unreliable, it's powered itself down instead of sleeping a few times, losing everything in memory.
When running native apps, it seems barely faster than my old G4 powerbook. When doing performance tests at work, this thing still doesn't clock in as fast as the dual 2.0 g5 on my desk. (yes I'm using a gig of ram here, way more than my app needs, so it's got nothing to do with swap, and my apps arn't video card dependent.) In general, this thing doesn't feel any faster than the quicksilver dual 1ghz that I use at home.
The only time this thing has impressed me at all, has all been related to the video card (games and movie playback) and the backlit keyboard cuz I didn't have one of those before. All in all, I think I would have been much happier if they released a MPC8641D based Powerbook first.
You don't deserve to run OSX on anything you want if you can't even back your statements.
PPC and SPARC is more open than x86. The Intel/AMD relationship is historically based off AMD existing as a second source of Intel-designed chips for IBM back in the 80s. PPC and SPARC licenses exist for other companies to make PPC and SPARC chips. Fujitsu is an example of a SPARC licensor. Aside from Freescale and IBM, other companies such as PA Semi are licensed to design and develop new PPC chips. The difference is that PPC and SPARC specs are actively shared with other companies designing PPC and SPARC chips, where on the other hand, Intel and AMD share nothing with people interested in designing processors around the x86 architecture.
OpenFirmware was not created by Apple, it's a well known standard that has not contributed in any way to locking out any OSs. In fact, it's what makes it so easy to load NetBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and MacOS on a Mac without all the messed up chained bootloaders like you need on a x86 PC. OpenSolaris and even a PPC version of NT boot through OpenFirmware easily. OpenFirmware, before being used on the Mac was also used on Sun stations and various other non-x86 computers.
EFI is developed by Intel for Intel as a way to replace BIOS and put AMI and Phoenix out of business. They could have chosen OpenFirmware to do everything EFI does, but instead they decided that they felt like making something of their own in a fit of NIH syndrome. Sure they're publishing this as a standard, but with OpenFirmware a proven working loader firmware, there's no good technical reason to chose EFI.
You want me to back Intel? The company that created TPM? The company that sued other companies trying to make x86 processors? The company that created a near duplicate of an already existing firmware standard just so they could control more of the hardware they've already locked down? Wake up.
Disclaimer: I work for a division of Apple unrelated to hardware or system design. 2nd Disclaimer: In the Apple architecture wars, I side with the PPC supporters. 3rd Disclaimer: I not only own a Mac, I build my own PCs.
Apple has said they have in no way attempted to prevent Windows from booting. Unless your post is a typo, you need to go back and check what has been said.
Secondly, despite not preventing Windows from booting, they have no obligation to the EFI standards nor to their customers (Mac users) to implement any additional features to support backwards compatibility with traditional BIOS. Why should they? It's not necessary in a Mac. The less work necessary to get a new design out, the better. Plus, from what articles say, it sounds like they have their hands full getting power management working.
Thirdly, as a PC user and one who has studied the history of modern desktop architectures, dropping support for BIOS has to be encouraged eventually. (While I would have preferred OpenFirmware over Intel's NIH-fit-induced EFI, EFI will have to do.) PCs have to move on eventually. Being one of the few manufacturer of legacy-free PCs will encourage the development of EFI support in PC OSs and hopefully move along development towards whitebox legacy-free PCs in general. Much in the same way that the original iMac spurred development for USB, the iMac Core Duo will hopefully spur the transition to a much cleaner PC design. Do you really want to have you PC depend on code written for a 8088 for yet another decade?
Heck, I recall there being some Register or Slashdot article which said something about the number of people who know how to write proper x86 startup code for traditional BIOSs has dwindled to less than 5. (this means that less than 5 people know how to startup a x86 processor through the modes in the correct order to implement the traditional BIOS)
In place of Stuffit Expander, you can use an old copy of AOL to decompress stuff since they built in Stuffit Expander's capibility into AOL. Now to find a old AOL floppy for mac, and then decompress the stuffit expander SIT or SEA through AOL:) Just opening it through AOL should do it if I recall correctly.
If you read further, you'll see that they explictly bold the line which says it does NOT have to be an Microsoft product. Basically, it's for hardware and software for a consumer desktop or laptop of any operating system.
So assuming they grant my several hundred dollars worth, I think I'm inclined to get myself a G5......
Actually, the vouchers are for almost anything tech related. If you read info given, they even say explicitly that you can spend it on non-microsoft things like a Mac.
Two things: You're not going to get AGP 4x nor 200mhz DDR on a Spartan-3. If you do, you're going to have spent so much time laying out the gates by hand that you might as well have just went to work at McDonalds and bought yourself a Virtex4 with that money. And even then, you won't have a easy time laying out the rest of the design (the actual 3d and 2d processing cores). Whew...and then RAM? I forgot how much the Spartan-3 has in off chip IOs... but I doubt it's THAT many.
Next. Make the board double as a prototyping platform for people who don't have access to cheap FPGA boards. Check out "http://www.fpga4fun.com/board_dragon.html". This way, you can leverage university students and hobbyists who want to make other types of cores or even single board computers since there's onboard RAM.
Despite being a mac user, I'm sorta annoying to be flooded by the numerous fans who post so much it decreases the signal/noise ratio in the forums.
But then again, it's no different when there's a GPL/OpenSource/Linux related article. All of the fans of open source come out in one giant clusterfuck to either applaud a decision, mention "of course it'd be better open source" without actually thinking about the implications, and all the "down with BSD/MIT/etc, all hail RMS and the GPL" type posts.
Really, there's no way to solve this cuz there's too many cheerleaders of insert-favorite-tech-here.
True. But most geeks usually tend to mean that the designers are the ones that actually do the work in figuring how the device should work instead of how the device should be put together.
I meant to say that for what most geeks think of as design, almost all of it for a Mac is done in Cupertino. And in that same set of definitions, most PCs are designed in Taiwan (since the chipsets, board layout, pretty much all of it but the CPU itself is out there).
I know tooling is a lot of work, but in most./er's context's, tooling is ignored.
It's hard to call an Opteron an x86 chip. More accurately it's a superset of the x86 archtecture.
Kinda like how the 80286 is a superset of the 8086.... and the 80386 is a superset of the 80286.....and how the Pentium MMX is a superset of the 80386.... and how SSE makes the..... get the drift?
Opteron is an x86 chip. It's just been too long since we've had a 286-to-386 scale change in the architecture.
Well, I've actually met one of the people who does logic board layout and one of my friends worked on one of the G4 northbridges before going to grad school. Both of them worked in Cupertino.
So outside of manufacturing, there really isn't much design work they do FOR APPLE in Taiwan.
However, that's not to say that Taiwanese companies didn't do the design work for the LCDs (probably Korea actually), the hard drives, the bluetooth modules (since almost every single one is from CSR or broadcom), CD/DVD recorders, actual battery cells (not controllers), LCD inverters, and discrete components.
Heh heh, 16 hours? Bah, check out these MD players. http://www.minidisc.org/portable_table.h tml
While they're not the HI-MD, it's obvious there's going to be a backlash in MD users if they come out with something with just a measly 16 hours.
Some of these last 2 DAYS (48 hours) of continuous playback off 1 (yes, a single) AA battery. If your iRiver is to compare to an MD in battery life, there's no contest.
And then there's an onboard lithium rechargable too....
Why the Darwin kernel? Why not the Linux kernel -- it's got the best hardware support. What about the L4 microkernel that has incredibly fast messaging rates?
Linux best hardware support my ass.
There have been 4 major releases of OS X on the market. Along that time I'm sure changes to the kernel have been made, possibly during security or x.x.1 point revisions also.
If Mac OS X was based off Linux. That's a shitload of clueless people recompiling their drivers.....or asking "which one of these 4 drivers (multiplied by version releases) are we are supposed to install?" just because kernel modules on Linux arn't portable.
I think it's borderline pain in the ass already and I use Gentoo. If I were using Fedora, and didn't already install Gentoo to learn all that compile stuff, I'd never get this working right (without months wasted).
You call that hardware support?
Support doesn't mean "oh, tech support phone guy will walk me through a kernel source install, driver compile, and copying modules around on my system."
Support means that "oh, I plugged it in, ran old ass installer CD from 3 versions ago dug out of the rotting box, and *poof* whatever the hell it is suddenly works."
And it's not like this is all that hard to put into the Linux kernel. IT'S BECAUSE LINUS AND THE KERNEL DEVELOPERS WANT IT THE WAY IT IS NOW. Having Apple back Linux won't change that one bit. Would you really want them to fork it instead?
Want an example of it done right (relatively)? Look at printing on OSX. There's cupsd. Not exactly the easiest user friendly of all printing systems. (I mean, grandma isn't going to know what http://localhost:631 is supposed to mean) But nice and powerful. There's also the pre-cupsd OSX printing system there, which wasn't so hot because while it was uniform to code drivers for, it just didn't have any to begin with. And then there's the UI wrapper that combines both of them behind some UI.
Now, I'm using a Epson 480SXU. It's a printer so cheap that it doesn't even have a power button. It cost me less including cartridges, than it would if I just bought ONE of the two cartridges alone.
It also only has Windows drivers. Lucky for me, my Powerbook has cups, which has mild support for it. And with my unix knowledge, I got my printer working.
Now..... if I had a hypothetical deskjet 9999 or whatever the heck they're on, there's no CUPS support yet cuz it starting shipping 3 hours ago. But they were nice enough to include OSX drivers......tested for 10.1..... you know, before cups came on OSX......you know, like 2 years older than OSX 10.3. (this situation actually happened with a DJ1152 or some number in that range)
Sure, they chose not to open source their drivers to protect whatever patented dithering system they might have coded in. But lucky for me! The old school printing API on OSX is solid enough to let me run some crappy driver with unoptimized code. Sure it might suck as a v1 driver, but it was easy to install and any moron could do it.
And you can't do that with Linux right now. All because of the lame kernel modules API. The lesson learned? Somebody ought to make a new Linux API specifically for hardware support so we can actually pass around binary drivers.
And then...for REAL plug & play, make it possible to embed these drivers on the device themselves [serial EEPROM] so that if there's no newer driver on the system, it'll load the old one that came on release of the hardware. That is the kind of hardware support we should look at. Afterall, there's already an EEPROM that just holds the PCI ID anyways, might as well fill it up.
I totally agree. The saddest part is that Linus himself doesn't want to stabilize the kernel module API, supposedly because it'll allow for more binary drivers.
I'm not a Linux guru by any means, but have craploads of experience across the board, and yet it still took me over 2 months to attempt get MythTV set up on hardware "known" to work..... and still have it fail. (yes, 2 months, with approximately 3 hours per day spent working on it.) (For those interested, it's a EPIA board with a PVR250. Eventually returned it for a Sempron/VIA-KT/Geforce.)
Everybody talks about "oh, it's easy, use apt-get ivtv, or emerge freevo (for a different project)" or whatever. But do you really think this is easy? Especially if freevo is masked out of Gentoo's tree, and ivtv appears to need stuff compiled into the kernel?
What if i'm working on an older machine with 1 gig of hd space? If my whole point is to avoid the bloat of Windows and I end up spending all my disk space on kernel source, the kernel, and swap...... all to just compile nvidia drivers?
Look at XP. Sure it sucks ass. Sure it has so many vulnerabilities that I now recommend Win98SE to all my friends because all the surviving viruses can't infect it. But it can load (sometimes) old drivers. When it comes time for some clueless newb to install a piece of hardware, a driver is a driver, and it'll install. Unlike this, "your kernel needs version 2.4.6-subtype2-redhat-fc2-9847-test1337-wtfdoesthi sdo" even when the only difference between that and what you're running is that you accidentally deleted a dash in the version line in the makefile.
Having a uniform driver architecture will make installs so much easier. Distros can share driver databases. You no longer will have dependency on specific how-to's for each distro. And finally, there can be a declaration of a uniform friendly config system for all the hardware devices. (really, am I going to take the time to memorize that I need a module flag of "tuner=5 cardtype=6" for bttv..... and must grep the bttv source to even figure this out?) Something as simple as having a XML document listing options and values and a simple UI generator like menuconfig ought to do it.(with then a GUI version with more data) If it requires more detail, like color calibration for example, then make sure the text version gets everything necessary to start up a GUI even if blue and red are switched and you're locked into 640x480 or whatever video funkiness exists.
You know, most likely the only way to get around this is to get the kernel developers to all agree to it, or fork the kernel entirely just to develop this with some wrapper for compatibility.
Nah, Microsoft wants to 0wn all your entertainment gadgets and be popular enough to get people to adopt WMA.
Sun, by selling out to MS, cutting some of the Sparc development, switching away from Solaris towards Linux and Windows, start selling glorified AMD boxes, and yada yada...... IS trying to cut their market share to 0.00001%.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding transmeta:
Transmeta probably had little impact on Intel's decision to develop the Pentium M. Starting from the beginning it was known that NetBurst wasn't going to be as efficient nor powerful as marketing claims. It was also confirmed that the 1+ ghz P3s could easily outperform all the P4s available at the time, if you look at the point in time that the P3s were discontinued, it was exactly that situation. Releasing the Pentium M was basically bringing back the P3s with a few tweaks.
Discontinuing the faster product in favor of what milks the consumer better is shady, but they're not stupid. They knew it's just not going to work for laptops. Whether or not transmeta existed, Intel had to do something to get a chip that will run at a speed similar to the desktops and have a reasonable battery life.
Contrary to popular opinion, your brother's experience is more likely to be the more common experience
:)
The Nano's screen design isn't new at all.
It's the same material as in the 4th gen ipod. Most likely the same as earlier ipods as well.
The difference is that the 4th gen isn't as easily stuck in a pocket.
As for why 1st gen Apple products suck? There's are reasons for that.
Often times when they're creating a new product, there's quite a bit of secrecy involved. (duh, it's Apple) For example, the 1st gen 12 inch Powerbook G4 was thought to be a G4 version of the iBook during its design phase. If the designers didn't even know what it was they were designing, what kind of consistency can you expect? Not much.
What about the MacBook Pro? Everybody's gotta know what that was supposed to be when working on it cuz it's too different. Very true. Chalk this one up to lack of experience. In all seriousness and with marketing bullshit pushed aside, the heat output of the Core Duos is much greater than the G4s. There's a reason there's no other PC manufacturer out there with an all metal Core Duo notebook at about 1 inch thick, because they've all heard about the Dell owner who burned his vitals with his P4 "laptop." Couple that with the fact that Apple was one of the first to release a dual processor laptop, and you've got a heat disaster in the making.
There are four groups of people in the MBP heat debate.
1) People who say the CPU is too hot because of improper thermal paste usage. (perhaps, depends what temps you're getting)
2) People who say the MBP outside shell is too hot because of improper thermal paste usage. (you're the type of people we make one button mice for)
3) People who say the thermal paste usage doesn't matter much. (perhaps, depends on what temps you're getting at the CPU)
4) Intel sucks. It's their fault.
Groups 1 and 3 both have good reasons (because they're talking about the CPU temps) all centered around the thickness of thermal transfer compound. I use the words "thermal transfer compound" very carefully. When you go to install your Athlon, the heatsink comes with a half millimeter thick layer of some transfer compound. Do you smooth that out? No. Because the pressure of the heatsink clamp coupled with the heat from the CPU melts it and then squeezes out the excess as soon as you turn it on for the first time. Don't believe me? I've seen P4 dies which have so much pressure and heat that when I try removing the heatsink, the compound has such a thin and well spread layer I pulled the chip out of the socket. This is WITH the clamps set in place. My vote is towards it not being a problem, unless whatever tech assembled your MBP didn't tighten the screws enough, in which case, yeah, good idea to reapply or screw it in tighter.
As for group 2:
The thermal paste has almost nothing to do with your burning sensation. Think about it. Proper use of thermal paste transfers heat. Improper use of thermal paste makes heat transfer slower. Putting the right amount means the heat transfers better. What does "better" mean? It means the case gets hotter.
There is no magical property of thermal paste that causes heat to vanish, it has to go somewhere. Heat comes from the cpu and goes to the heatsinks and case. If you use too much, the cpu overheats and the case is cool. If you use the right amount, the cpu is nice and cool because all the heat goes to the case.
Now that you know this, go educate the rest of your brethern.
And if you're in group 4:
You know too much.
The first five points, yes, I agree.
However, using CDMA is actually a benefit to me and is pretty much the only reason I stayed with Verizon so long. In short, their use of CDMA is what gives my phone a better reception, data handling, and reliability over other networks using GSM. (Sprint's a bit of a mess just cuz they haven't invest in enough cdma towers)
Regardless, I'm also using a E815 with java imported from canada on the verizon network.
I'm posting from a MBP RevD, and have taken to naming it evilBook to the chagrin of my coworkers. While it's got major coolness and performance compared to other WinXP machines while running XP, it's not what I've come to expect as a Mac user. I am running all native apps (or at least for the apps that matter since sometimes I have to do testing on old versions). This thing's just got all sorts of issues.
While it is definetely faster than my old PB G4 12" 867, it's also much hotter than anything I've seen. It's hot in OSX, it's blazing hot in WinXP. I don't know what else to say except it's just not acceptable.
When running native apps, it's usually is fine but periodically will stop responding. Onscreen clocks, the mouse cursor, all apps, will stop responding for around 20 seconds and all of a sudden resume. Imagine doing something and seeing what appears to be a system freeze for 20 seconds franticly thinking about whether or not you saved all your text editor windows.
Sleep on battery exhaustion seems to be unreliable, it's powered itself down instead of sleeping a few times, losing everything in memory.
When running native apps, it seems barely faster than my old G4 powerbook. When doing performance tests at work, this thing still doesn't clock in as fast as the dual 2.0 g5 on my desk. (yes I'm using a gig of ram here, way more than my app needs, so it's got nothing to do with swap, and my apps arn't video card dependent.) In general, this thing doesn't feel any faster than the quicksilver dual 1ghz that I use at home.
The only time this thing has impressed me at all, has all been related to the video card (games and movie playback) and the backlit keyboard cuz I didn't have one of those before. All in all, I think I would have been much happier if they released a MPC8641D based Powerbook first.
You don't deserve to run OSX on anything you want if you can't even back your statements.
PPC and SPARC is more open than x86. The Intel/AMD relationship is historically based off AMD existing as a second source of Intel-designed chips for IBM back in the 80s. PPC and SPARC licenses exist for other companies to make PPC and SPARC chips. Fujitsu is an example of a SPARC licensor. Aside from Freescale and IBM, other companies such as PA Semi are licensed to design and develop new PPC chips. The difference is that PPC and SPARC specs are actively shared with other companies designing PPC and SPARC chips, where on the other hand, Intel and AMD share nothing with people interested in designing processors around the x86 architecture.
OpenFirmware was not created by Apple, it's a well known standard that has not contributed in any way to locking out any OSs. In fact, it's what makes it so easy to load NetBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and MacOS on a Mac without all the messed up chained bootloaders like you need on a x86 PC. OpenSolaris and even a PPC version of NT boot through OpenFirmware easily. OpenFirmware, before being used on the Mac was also used on Sun stations and various other non-x86 computers.
EFI is developed by Intel for Intel as a way to replace BIOS and put AMI and Phoenix out of business. They could have chosen OpenFirmware to do everything EFI does, but instead they decided that they felt like making something of their own in a fit of NIH syndrome. Sure they're publishing this as a standard, but with OpenFirmware a proven working loader firmware, there's no good technical reason to chose EFI.
You want me to back Intel? The company that created TPM? The company that sued other companies trying to make x86 processors? The company that created a near duplicate of an already existing firmware standard just so they could control more of the hardware they've already locked down? Wake up.
Disclaimer: I work for a division of Apple unrelated to hardware or system design.
2nd Disclaimer: In the Apple architecture wars, I side with the PPC supporters.
3rd Disclaimer: I not only own a Mac, I build my own PCs.
Apple has said they have in no way attempted to prevent Windows from booting.
Unless your post is a typo, you need to go back and check what has been said.
Secondly, despite not preventing Windows from booting, they have no obligation to the EFI standards nor to their customers (Mac users) to implement any additional features to support backwards compatibility with traditional BIOS. Why should they? It's not necessary in a Mac. The less work necessary to get a new design out, the better. Plus, from what articles say, it sounds like they have their hands full getting power management working.
Thirdly, as a PC user and one who has studied the history of modern desktop architectures, dropping support for BIOS has to be encouraged eventually. (While I would have preferred OpenFirmware over Intel's NIH-fit-induced EFI, EFI will have to do.) PCs have to move on eventually. Being one of the few manufacturer of legacy-free PCs will encourage the development of EFI support in PC OSs and hopefully move along development towards whitebox legacy-free PCs in general. Much in the same way that the original iMac spurred development for USB, the iMac Core Duo will hopefully spur the transition to a much cleaner PC design. Do you really want to have you PC depend on code written for a 8088 for yet another decade?
Heck, I recall there being some Register or Slashdot article which said something about the number of people who know how to write proper x86 startup code for traditional BIOSs has dwindled to less than 5. (this means that less than 5 people know how to startup a x86 processor through the modes in the correct order to implement the traditional BIOS)
They are streaming *.ogg over cell phone networks to serenade your sprayed ass.
ogg? what's ogg? A really bad mispelling of ATRAC?
What is your non-profit and what is the minimum Mac spec you guys take?
Maybe if it sounds like a weapon in Duke Nukem Forever?
"The DNF-100 multiband digital alien suppressor! Get your's today!"
In place of Stuffit Expander, you can use an old copy of AOL to decompress stuff since they built in Stuffit Expander's capibility into AOL. Now to find a old AOL floppy for mac, and then decompress the stuffit expander SIT or SEA through AOL :) Just opening it through AOL should do it if I recall correctly.
If you read further, you'll see that they explictly bold the line which says it does NOT have to be an Microsoft product. Basically, it's for hardware and software for a consumer desktop or laptop of any operating system.
So assuming they grant my several hundred dollars worth, I think I'm inclined to get myself a G5......
Actually, the vouchers are for almost anything tech related.
If you read info given, they even say explicitly that you can spend it on non-microsoft things like a Mac.
So I actually sent mine in a full year and a half ago and haven't gotten anything back yet. What's up with that?
Two things:
s way, you can leverage university students and hobbyists who want to make other types of cores or even single board computers since there's onboard RAM.
You're not going to get AGP 4x nor 200mhz DDR on a Spartan-3. If you do, you're going to have spent so much time laying out the gates by hand that you might as well have just went to work at McDonalds and bought yourself a Virtex4 with that money. And even then, you won't have a easy time laying out the rest of the design (the actual 3d and 2d processing cores). Whew...and then RAM? I forgot how much the Spartan-3 has in off chip IOs... but I doubt it's THAT many.
Next. Make the board double as a prototyping platform for people who don't have access to cheap FPGA boards. Check out "http://www.fpga4fun.com/board_dragon.html".
Thi
You're actually kinda right.
Despite being a mac user, I'm sorta annoying to be flooded by the numerous fans who post so much it decreases the signal/noise ratio in the forums.
But then again, it's no different when there's a GPL/OpenSource/Linux related article. All of the fans of open source come out in one giant clusterfuck to either applaud a decision, mention "of course it'd be better open source" without actually thinking about the implications, and all the "down with BSD/MIT/etc, all hail RMS and the GPL" type posts.
Really, there's no way to solve this cuz there's too many cheerleaders of insert-favorite-tech-here.
True. But most geeks usually tend to mean that the designers are the ones that actually do the work in figuring how the device should work instead of how the device should be put together.
./er's context's, tooling is ignored.
I meant to say that for what most geeks think of as design, almost all of it for a Mac is done in Cupertino. And in that same set of definitions, most PCs are designed in Taiwan (since the chipsets, board layout, pretty much all of it but the CPU itself is out there).
I know tooling is a lot of work, but in most
It's hard to call an Opteron an x86 chip. More accurately it's a superset of the x86 archtecture.
Kinda like how the 80286 is a superset of the 8086.... and the 80386 is a superset of the 80286.....and how the Pentium MMX is a superset of the 80386.... and how SSE makes the..... get the drift?
Opteron is an x86 chip. It's just been too long since we've had a 286-to-386 scale change in the architecture.
Well, I've actually met one of the people who does logic board layout and one of my friends worked on one of the G4 northbridges before going to grad school. Both of them worked in Cupertino.
So outside of manufacturing, there really isn't much design work they do FOR APPLE in Taiwan.
However, that's not to say that Taiwanese companies didn't do the design work for the LCDs (probably Korea actually), the hard drives, the bluetooth modules (since almost every single one is from CSR or broadcom), CD/DVD recorders, actual battery cells (not controllers), LCD inverters, and discrete components.
Heh heh, 16 hours? Bah, check out these MD players.h tml
http://www.minidisc.org/portable_table.
While they're not the HI-MD, it's obvious there's going to be a backlash in MD users if they come out with something with just a measly 16 hours.
Some of these last 2 DAYS (48 hours) of continuous playback off 1 (yes, a single) AA battery. If your iRiver is to compare to an MD in battery life, there's no contest.
And then there's an onboard lithium rechargable too....
Holy shit, the chip costs more than my entire Athlon box combined!
Microsoft: The GIG is up!
Everybody else: Up? As in online? Or as in we're royally fucked?
Microsoft: Uh..... shit.
Why the Darwin kernel? Why not the Linux kernel -- it's got the best hardware support. What about the L4 microkernel that has incredibly fast messaging rates?
Linux best hardware support my ass.
There have been 4 major releases of OS X on the market. Along that time I'm sure changes to the kernel have been made, possibly during security or x.x.1 point revisions also.
If Mac OS X was based off Linux. That's a shitload of clueless people recompiling their drivers.....or asking "which one of these 4 drivers (multiplied by version releases) are we are supposed to install?" just because kernel modules on Linux arn't portable.
I think it's borderline pain in the ass already and I use Gentoo. If I were using Fedora, and didn't already install Gentoo to learn all that compile stuff, I'd never get this working right (without months wasted).
You call that hardware support?
Support doesn't mean "oh, tech support phone guy will walk me through a kernel source install, driver compile, and copying modules around on my system."
Support means that "oh, I plugged it in, ran old ass installer CD from 3 versions ago dug out of the rotting box, and *poof* whatever the hell it is suddenly works."
And it's not like this is all that hard to put into the Linux kernel. IT'S BECAUSE LINUS AND THE KERNEL DEVELOPERS WANT IT THE WAY IT IS NOW. Having Apple back Linux won't change that one bit. Would you really want them to fork it instead?
Want an example of it done right (relatively)? Look at printing on OSX.
There's cupsd. Not exactly the easiest user friendly of all printing systems. (I mean, grandma isn't going to know what http://localhost:631 is supposed to mean) But nice and powerful. There's also the pre-cupsd OSX printing system there, which wasn't so hot because while it was uniform to code drivers for, it just didn't have any to begin with. And then there's the UI wrapper that combines both of them behind some UI.
Now, I'm using a Epson 480SXU. It's a printer so cheap that it doesn't even have a power button. It cost me less including cartridges, than it would if I just bought ONE of the two cartridges alone.
It also only has Windows drivers. Lucky for me, my Powerbook has cups, which has mild support for it. And with my unix knowledge, I got my printer working.
Now..... if I had a hypothetical deskjet 9999 or whatever the heck they're on, there's no CUPS support yet cuz it starting shipping 3 hours ago. But they were nice enough to include OSX drivers......tested for 10.1..... you know, before cups came on OSX......you know, like 2 years older than OSX 10.3. (this situation actually happened with a DJ1152 or some number in that range)
Sure, they chose not to open source their drivers to protect whatever patented dithering system they might have coded in. But lucky for me! The old school printing API on OSX is solid enough to let me run some crappy driver with unoptimized code. Sure it might suck as a v1 driver, but it was easy to install and any moron could do it.
And you can't do that with Linux right now. All because of the lame kernel modules API. The lesson learned? Somebody ought to make a new Linux API specifically for hardware support so we can actually pass around binary drivers.
And then...for REAL plug & play, make it possible to embed these drivers on the device themselves [serial EEPROM] so that if there's no newer driver on the system, it'll load the old one that came on release of the hardware. That is the kind of hardware support we should look at. Afterall, there's already an EEPROM that just holds the PCI ID anyways, might as well fill it up.
I totally agree. The saddest part is that Linus himself doesn't want to stabilize the kernel module API, supposedly because it'll allow for more binary drivers.
i sdo" even when the only difference between that and what you're running is that you accidentally deleted a dash in the version line in the makefile.
I'm not a Linux guru by any means, but have craploads of experience across the board, and yet it still took me over 2 months to attempt get MythTV set up on hardware "known" to work..... and still have it fail. (yes, 2 months, with approximately 3 hours per day spent working on it.) (For those interested, it's a EPIA board with a PVR250. Eventually returned it for a Sempron/VIA-KT/Geforce.)
Everybody talks about "oh, it's easy, use apt-get ivtv, or emerge freevo (for a different project)" or whatever. But do you really think this is easy? Especially if freevo is masked out of Gentoo's tree, and ivtv appears to need stuff compiled into the kernel?
What if i'm working on an older machine with 1 gig of hd space? If my whole point is to avoid the bloat of Windows and I end up spending all my disk space on kernel source, the kernel, and swap...... all to just compile nvidia drivers?
Look at XP. Sure it sucks ass. Sure it has so many vulnerabilities that I now recommend Win98SE to all my friends because all the surviving viruses can't infect it. But it can load (sometimes) old drivers. When it comes time for some clueless newb to install a piece of hardware, a driver is a driver, and it'll install. Unlike this, "your kernel needs version 2.4.6-subtype2-redhat-fc2-9847-test1337-wtfdoesth
Having a uniform driver architecture will make installs so much easier. Distros can share driver databases. You no longer will have dependency on specific how-to's for each distro. And finally, there can be a declaration of a uniform friendly config system for all the hardware devices. (really, am I going to take the time to memorize that I need a module flag of "tuner=5 cardtype=6" for bttv..... and must grep the bttv source to even figure this out?) Something as simple as having a XML document listing options and values and a simple UI generator like menuconfig ought to do it.(with then a GUI version with more data) If it requires more detail, like color calibration for example, then make sure the text version gets everything necessary to start up a GUI even if blue and red are switched and you're locked into 640x480 or whatever video funkiness exists.
You know, most likely the only way to get around this is to get the kernel developers to all agree to it, or fork the kernel entirely just to develop this with some wrapper for compatibility.
Nah, Microsoft wants to 0wn all your entertainment gadgets and be popular enough to get people to adopt WMA.
:)
Sun, by selling out to MS, cutting some of the Sparc development, switching away from Solaris towards Linux and Windows, start selling glorified AMD boxes, and yada yada...... IS trying to cut their market share to 0.00001%.
Seriously, I thought I saw a StarMax box on ebay running NT-PPC 4. It included the install disks and looked like a StarMax 3000.