Clearly you didn't watch the WWDC keynote address. The workstations and servers are cheaper than comparatively equipped Dells. And if you add the webcam and a few other things the Mac has to a Dell notebook, the price of comparable MacBooks and MacBook Pros is about the same. It's one advantage of using the same underlying Intel hardware...
That's great if I want a workstation that costs thousands of dollars. Or a webcam in my notebook. But if I don't want those things, why should I have to pay for them? Fact is, I can always build the computer I want for much less than what it would cost to get the computer I want from Apple. Or from Dell, for that matter.
When was the last time you put together a PC from scratch? I spec'd out a bunch of system components recently, and when I added up the retail prices of all the things I needed (case, keyboard, mouse, display, drives, etc.), the Dell and Apple prices were pretty hard to beat. Don't want to pay for the camera, display, or keyboard that come with some of the Mac's? Get a Mac Mini and add the pieces you do want. Or one of the bare-bones Dells. At $599 and $499 respectively (with the Dell actually including the case, display, keyboard, and mouse), I'd actually bet you would be unable to meet or beat those prices by buying components separately.
Besides, you sound like a guy who likes to mess around with computers any way. But what about for things you don't enjoy cobbling together, like your TV or car? Does it really bother you so much that your TV wasn't as inexpensive as it could have been because it came with a remote, an antenna circuit you'll never use, a sleep timer, and the option to display the menus in French or Spanish? I'll also bet that your car came with OEM air-conditioning, an audio system, tires, and wheels that substantially raised the price of the vehicle over what it could have been. And as far as the car accesories go, these are things you'd probably go and add as after-market items anyway, so why hassle with after-market brands when you can get it built right into the car and guaranteed to work with the controls on the steering wheel?
OK, I found an independant site that configured two identical systems as impartially as possible -- and you're right, that Mac was $90 cheaper with 20" displays configured, and $332 cheaper with no displays configured.
You obviously don't know me from Adam, so there was no way you could have known that I verified the numbers before making my initial post. But it's good that you were able to verify the pricing differences. Independent verification on these sorts of things is important, so that the marketing hype/fanboy-ism can get filtered out. I hadn't remembered that Apple had claimed a difference of $1000 between systems though. It may be that Dell has updated their prices since the WWDC to try to be more competetive...
Now if only I could get someone to buy my over-priced, power hungry (20 minutes on a charge now that the battery ain't new anymore!) Dell XPS P4 laptop that I bought not too long ago so I can go out and get a cool new MacBook Pro... hmmm.... maybe the initial poster who thinks "Macs are overpriced"...;)
Clearly you didn't watch the WWDC keynote address.
Really?!? You mean Apple, at the keynote address given by their own CEO at their own developers conference, claims that they themselved are not overpriced? Are you sure? I mean, I think I speak for all of us when I say that I was expecting Steve to stand up there like a man and say that Macs are too expensive.
Clearly, you didn't watch the WWDC keynote address either. It was the CFO not Steve, and he didn't just say it, he domonstrated it. He displayed a chart that compared the new Mac Workstation to a comparable Dell workstation. Configuration and price for the Dell was pulled from Dell's web site. Same CPU, Same speed, same amount of RAM, same HD configuration, on and on. Final bottom line was that the Mac Workstation cost less. Then he proceeded to show a slide that compared Apple and Dell servers the same way.
These weren't just just the same old "we're better" statements that normally come out of Apple. Hard as it may be to believe, the claims were substantiated by real numbers this time. I even went to the Dell site to verify that his figures were correct, and they were.
Believe me, I'm no Mac fanboy, I don't even own a Mac (in fact, I'm sitting here typing this on an over priced Dell. So there!:P ) And I certainly never take anything a marketing/management type says for granted... but I have to say that at this point the old "Macs are overpriced" argument doesn't hold water anymore.
Clearly you didn't watch the WWDC keynote address. The workstations and servers are cheaper than comparatively equipped Dells. And if you add the webcam and a few other things the Mac has to a Dell notebook, the price of comparable MacBooks and MacBook Pros is about the same. It's one advantage of using the same underlying Intel hardware...
Get over it people, whining about the price difference between a PC and Mac isn't really a valid argument anymore.
As Apple announced at the WWDC, Leopard will be 64-bit top to bottom. The announced release of Leopard is sometime in Spring 2007.
What's it good for? Mostly increasing RAM beyond 4GB. This may sound like a lot, but when you're doing video editing and trying to also minimize virtual memory page faults, RAM beyond 4GB starts to sound attractive to some. Increased RAM is particularly useful for servers, also to minimize swapping stuff to HD.
In theory, HDs will also be able to be partitioned with smaller cluster sizes, making disk usage more efficient.
Is it too much to ask for the submitters and editors to do a simple Google/Wikipedia search on the articles and maybe include a hint of criticism and doubt when faced with such BS stories.
Well, yes it is too much to ask. Geez, it takes a lot of time to run a web site geared towards science oriented news stories. They don't have time to actually read read them!
Every time some asian (or navtive american) says something whisy washy, a sizable group of people think it's wisdom. Look at the quotes in the article, it's meaningless blabber.
Just because you don't understand, doesn't mean it isn't wisdom.
Yeah, just like being able to run MS-DOS from Windows machines caused Windows based games to wither and die.
The only reason OSX games would wither and die is if developing them had no benefit over developing games for Windows. But developing for OSX has a number of advantages:
All of OSX's graphics (including 3D) is based on standard OpenGL.
OSX presents a flavor of *NIX app developers.
OSX hardware is a well defined, which reduces the number of hardware configurations the code needs to be adapted to and tested on.
And a lot of really nice professional tools exist under OSX for the development of in-game art and sound assets.
In addition to simplifying initial development of the game, the resemblence of the underlying OSX shell to *NIX and the use of OpenGL would make porting games to Linux easier as well. And that's not idle talk on my part either... I am currently dealing with exactly these sorts of development issues at my current gig.
Oh, and regarding the points made in the article about the two OS's not being able to access eachother's data, Windows can access Mac disks quite easily by using a program called MacDrive, which makes Mac volumes look like any other drive from within Windows. And you can expect to see integrated support for NTFS in OSX some time soon, probably even as soon as the release of Leopard.
Lastly, to be able to virtualize Windows and use it from within OSX, you first need to be able to create a partition in which Windows can exist. Consequently, the functionality that BootCamp provides is a prerequisite for full virtualization. And dual booting is probably still useful enough that it made sense to release it for public use before support for virtualization is complete. (In fact I use an Intel iMac 20" running Windows and OSX right now because some of the tools I need exist only in Windows, and some of the others only exist on OSX.)
Imagine a computer the size of a paperback, with one of these projectors in it. Add one of those laser projected keyboards with a virtual touch-pad, a 60GB HD like the ones found in iPods, a WebCam, and WiFi. Talk about one cool computer! Powerful as a desktop, more transportable than a laptop, plays games and music, browses the web, can do VOIP and video conferencing, and can also act as a large-screen TV for streaming movies or as presentation projector.
So Long expensive Video Projectors. Bye-Bye Plasma, LCD, CRT TVs/Monitors. See Ya Desktops, Laptops, PDAs, iPods. Sayonara Pocket Game Consoles with tiny screens.
Wow. I want one.
P.
Re:Perfect? Like Neck stretched over chopping bloc
on
Apple to Buy out Palm?
·
· Score: 1
Palm is in the perfect position to build the device.
There really isn't anything obvious that Palm can offer to such an effort that Apple doen't already have a demonstrated ability to do without Palm.
Integration with cellular hardware comes to mind. This is non-trivial, but something that cell phone manufacturers know how to do and Palm knows how to do (through its previous acquisition of Handspring.)
The point is: There are undoubtedly a few good engineers left at Palm, but Apple can simply hire the good ones. They don't need to buy the company and get layers of clearly innefective mangement, legions of pissed off customers, and legacy technology baggage like PalmOS and HotSync as part of the deal.
Actually, it's probably not true that Apple could 'just hire the good engineers' from Palm. Most companies have a non-compete clause in their hiring contracts that prevents employees from leaving to work for competitors for periods of six months to a year. Another reason to buy the company is the patents and IP you gloss over. In this day and age of litigation over questionable software patents, it might just be simpler to buy the company for the IP and dump the management. Support for the 'technological baggage' of the old company could simply ramped down over time, similar to what Apple intends to do with older PPC based Macs now that the Intel based machines are available.
...through the use of VirtualPC. Now that the CPU is Intel, VirtualPC will probably run at near native speeds. I agree with the poster who said that running Windows in such a VM (sandbox) would be much preferable in most instances to dual booting. And with a dual-core chip with one CPU running VirtualPC and one running OSX, you'd probably get pretty good performance for both OS's.
You don't understand why Apple advocates(d) the one-button mouse, do you?
The reason is quite simple: it is for programmers to make their applications in such a way that you can access ANY features using a single mouse button.
Errr... not exactly. Old Apple lore has it that having a one button mouse made writing the documentation easier. It had nothing to do with "hidden" menus. In fact, if you think about it, with all the Ctrl-Alt-Apple-Command modifiers, that single button mouse in some ways is harder to use than a pop-up right click menu ever was.
Take your 15" laptop and set it 3 feet away from you. Does that look impressive to you? Hardly... and that's with a display that's 3" larger than what this thing claims to do.
Interestingly, the speedup was a side-effect, not the main point of the exercise. The intent of the Dynamo project was to experiment with hardware emulation of other platforms.
While x86 code dynamically recompiled under Dynamo didn't run any faster on x86 machines, the question that remains is does PPC code running under a Dynamo-like recompiler run fast enough to be passable on an x86?
Furthermore, a lot of time and research has gone by since the days of Dynamo on the PA-8000 architecture. So a more specific follow-on question is: has Transitive made sufficient progress in this area so that their product does a passable job of running PPC code on the x86? I don't know the answer for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had. (If someone else has more info, please jump in.)
If the L1 was as fast as registers, people wouldn't bother putting more registers on their chip. While the L1 can give you a throughput of 1/cycle, this doesn't count latency (~3 cycles on recent Intel chips I think), the fact that at least one x86 instruction has to be a register operant, and the fact that a PPC would *already* be using the L1 for other things.
I think that the higher clock speeds would probably null out the latency issues. However, the penalty for missed branch prediction on the P4 pipe might hurt emulation considerably. My guess is that for typical apps, it's probably a wash.
About renaming, the PPC does it too (so it has even more registers), so you still have less registers. Also, the renaming is mainly there to allow the pipelines to work correctly. You still only have eight "logical" registers to put stuff in.
Really all I was trying to say with register renaming is that the current implementations of the x86 architecture have many more (albeit hidden) registers for storing and reusing intermediate pipeline results than the visible four register architecture implies. For the most part, the additional registers found in other (RISC) CPUs are also used by compilers to store intermediate results. Seldomly do compilers make use of the added registers for holding additional local variables, and hand optimized code that makes better use of the additional PPC registers is probably also fairly rare today.
Last thing, AltiVec must be pretty hard to do efficiently on x86. First, it does twice the amount of computation as SSE does per cycle, but also because it does a MAC, which would have a 9-cycle latency if implemented in SSE.
True, but for apps that make heavy use of AltiVec you'd probably want your app to be a native recompile anyway for maximum performance. For folks that use their computers in ways that AltiVec matters (audio/video editing, Photoshop, etc.) periodic upgrades is de rigeur anyway.
Simply put, when consider the slightly higher clockspeeds of the x86, dynamic compiling, and the fact that the internals of the x86 are more RISC like than the visible register set would lead you to believe, there's probably enough horsepower there to make PPC emulation on x86 chips good enough for most Mac apps.
Here's a link to an old ArsTechnica article about a project at HP called Dynamo
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/dynamo/dynamo- 1.html
Note that using the term "JIT" in my previous post to describe what Dynamo does is technically incorrect. Dynamo does "Dynamic Compiling." In the ArsTechnica article, they quote the effectiveness of dynamic compilation in this way (emphasis in the last line is mine):
"...Dynamo is an odd beast. It is, in essence, an interpreter for HP's PA-8000 instruction set that itself runs on a PA-8000 processor. That's right -- it interprets programs that could just as easily be executed natively on the same hardware. For a research prototype, this isn't as strange as it seems. The Dynamo project was started to investigate issues in what was seen as an increasingly important area -- dynamic translation of non-native binaries to native code. For that purpose it doesn't really matter if the original binaries are non-native or not, only that, whatever they are, they're read into some internal form, munged, and spit back out for native execution. The question is only, "How can this translation be efficient, both in time and space?" What's surprising is that Dynamo "inadvertently" became practical. Programs "interpreted" by Dynamo are often faster than if they were run natively. Sometimes by 20% or more."
In any case, it seems that emulating PPC code on Intel chips could be quite doable.
Apparently L1 Cache accesses are as fast as register accesses on Intel chips. Thus, 512KB of L1 Cache translates to 128K 32-bit registers available for the CPU. That's plenty of registers.
Aside from this, CPU registers are heavily renamed (remapped) to a whole host of hidden registers to improve parallelism. Essentially, the old AX, BX, CX, DX register model is is simply the public representation of the CPU architecture, while behind the scenes things are very much more RISC like in their implementation.
In any case, given the 0.5 GHz to 1.5 GHz advantage that Intel CPUs have over the current PPC chips, it's entirely likely that native PPC code written for OSX could run quite well on a JIT compiler on x86. In fact, there was an article on/. quite a while back about some research group that had achieved better throughput using a JIT compiler than a standard optimizing C compiler (Can someone find a link to this in the/. archive?)
How could JIT compilation beat an optimizing C compiler you ask? Because JIT compilers can actually watch the code run, and can then re-optimize frequently used code on the fly. In contrast, a traditional optimizing compiler has to do all of its optimizing up front before the code ever runs, which limits the amount of performance improvement that it can achieve.
Hair on the lens. The flash may be the end of the hair catching some sunlight (squint facing the sun and see the glare off your eye lashes to see what I mean.)
These frames are probably time-lapse, and so the hair blew onto the lens... snap a picture was taken... the hair blew away again... snap another picture.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you put together a PC from scratch? I spec'd out a bunch of system components recently, and when I added up the retail prices of all the things I needed (case, keyboard, mouse, display, drives, etc.), the Dell and Apple prices were pretty hard to beat. Don't want to pay for the camera, display, or keyboard that come with some of the Mac's? Get a Mac Mini and add the pieces you do want. Or one of the bare-bones Dells. At $599 and $499 respectively (with the Dell actually including the case, display, keyboard, and mouse), I'd actually bet you would be unable to meet or beat those prices by buying components separately.
Besides, you sound like a guy who likes to mess around with computers any way. But what about for things you don't enjoy cobbling together, like your TV or car? Does it really bother you so much that your TV wasn't as inexpensive as it could have been because it came with a remote, an antenna circuit you'll never use, a sleep timer, and the option to display the menus in French or Spanish? I'll also bet that your car came with OEM air-conditioning, an audio system, tires, and wheels that substantially raised the price of the vehicle over what it could have been. And as far as the car accesories go, these are things you'd probably go and add as after-market items anyway, so why hassle with after-market brands when you can get it built right into the car and guaranteed to work with the controls on the steering wheel?
P.
You obviously don't know me from Adam, so there was no way you could have known that I verified the numbers before making my initial post. But it's good that you were able to verify the pricing differences. Independent verification on these sorts of things is important, so that the marketing hype/fanboy-ism can get filtered out. I hadn't remembered that Apple had claimed a difference of $1000 between systems though. It may be that Dell has updated their prices since the WWDC to try to be more competetive...
Now if only I could get someone to buy my over-priced, power hungry (20 minutes on a charge now that the battery ain't new anymore!) Dell XPS P4 laptop that I bought not too long ago so I can go out and get a cool new MacBook Pro... hmmm.... maybe the initial poster who thinks "Macs are overpriced"...
P.
These weren't just just the same old "we're better" statements that normally come out of Apple. Hard as it may be to believe, the claims were substantiated by real numbers this time. I even went to the Dell site to verify that his figures were correct, and they were.
Believe me, I'm no Mac fanboy, I don't even own a Mac (in fact, I'm sitting here typing this on an over priced Dell. So there!
P.
I'd buy a Mac if I didn't feel it was overpriced.
Clearly you didn't watch the WWDC keynote address. The workstations and servers are cheaper than comparatively equipped Dells. And if you add the webcam and a few other things the Mac has to a Dell notebook, the price of comparable MacBooks and MacBook Pros is about the same. It's one advantage of using the same underlying Intel hardware...
Get over it people, whining about the price difference between a PC and Mac isn't really a valid argument anymore.
P.
'Nuff said. Oh wait, or does you TV run LINUX too? Then you're screwed. :)
P.
As Apple announced at the WWDC, Leopard will be 64-bit top to bottom. The announced release of Leopard is sometime in Spring 2007.
What's it good for? Mostly increasing RAM beyond 4GB. This may sound like a lot, but when you're doing video editing and trying to also minimize virtual memory page faults, RAM beyond 4GB starts to sound attractive to some. Increased RAM is particularly useful for servers, also to minimize swapping stuff to HD.
In theory, HDs will also be able to be partitioned with smaller cluster sizes, making disk usage more efficient.
P.
... widespread demand for titanium dioxide as a source for metallic titanium has lead to huge increases in the price of sunblock. P.
...NASA states that the foam used on the tank has not yet been approved for a return to space.
P
P.
Every time some asian (or navtive american) says something whisy washy, a sizable group of people think it's wisdom. Look at the quotes in the article, it's meaningless blabber.
Just because you don't understand, doesn't mean it isn't wisdom.
P.
The only reason OSX games would wither and die is if developing them had no benefit over developing games for Windows. But developing for OSX has a number of advantages:
In addition to simplifying initial development of the game, the resemblence of the underlying OSX shell to *NIX and the use of OpenGL would make porting games to Linux easier as well. And that's not idle talk on my part either... I am currently dealing with exactly these sorts of development issues at my current gig.
Oh, and regarding the points made in the article about the two OS's not being able to access eachother's data, Windows can access Mac disks quite easily by using a program called MacDrive, which makes Mac volumes look like any other drive from within Windows. And you can expect to see integrated support for NTFS in OSX some time soon, probably even as soon as the release of Leopard.
Lastly, to be able to virtualize Windows and use it from within OSX, you first need to be able to create a partition in which Windows can exist. Consequently, the functionality that BootCamp provides is a prerequisite for full virtualization. And dual booting is probably still useful enough that it made sense to release it for public use before support for virtualization is complete. (In fact I use an Intel iMac 20" running Windows and OSX right now because some of the tools I need exist only in Windows, and some of the others only exist on OSX.)
Meat.
Imagine a computer the size of a paperback, with one of these projectors in it. Add one of those laser projected keyboards with a virtual touch-pad, a 60GB HD like the ones found in iPods, a WebCam, and WiFi. Talk about one cool computer! Powerful as a desktop, more transportable than a laptop, plays games and music, browses the web, can do VOIP and video conferencing, and can also act as a large-screen TV for streaming movies or as presentation projector.
So Long expensive Video Projectors.
Bye-Bye Plasma, LCD, CRT TVs/Monitors.
See Ya Desktops, Laptops, PDAs, iPods.
Sayonara Pocket Game Consoles with tiny screens.
Wow. I want one.
P.
P.
...through the use of VirtualPC. Now that the CPU is Intel, VirtualPC will probably run at near native speeds. I agree with the poster who said that running Windows in such a VM (sandbox) would be much preferable in most instances to dual booting. And with a dual-core chip with one CPU running VirtualPC and one running OSX, you'd probably get pretty good performance for both OS's.
P.
Thunderbird 2 from the Gerry Andersen series.
P.
P.
Jeez, that's hardly impressive size wise.
Take your 15" laptop and set it 3 feet away from you. Does that look impressive to you? Hardly... and that's with a display that's 3" larger than what this thing claims to do.
P.
Intel + iMac = InteliMac.
Interestingly, the speedup was a side-effect, not the main point of the exercise. The intent of the Dynamo project was to experiment with hardware emulation of other platforms.
While x86 code dynamically recompiled under Dynamo didn't run any faster on x86 machines, the question that remains is does PPC code running under a Dynamo-like recompiler run fast enough to be passable on an x86?
Furthermore, a lot of time and research has gone by since the days of Dynamo on the PA-8000 architecture. So a more specific follow-on question is: has Transitive made sufficient progress in this area so that their product does a passable job of running PPC code on the x86? I don't know the answer for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had. (If someone else has more info, please jump in.)
P.
Simply put, when consider the slightly higher clockspeeds of the x86, dynamic compiling, and the fact that the internals of the x86 are more RISC like than the visible register set would lead you to believe, there's probably enough horsepower there to make PPC emulation on x86 chips good enough for most Mac apps.
P.
P.
Apparently L1 Cache accesses are as fast as register accesses on Intel chips. Thus, 512KB of L1 Cache translates to 128K 32-bit registers available for the CPU. That's plenty of registers.
/. quite a while back about some research group that had achieved better throughput using a JIT compiler than a standard optimizing C compiler (Can someone find a link to this in the /. archive?)
Aside from this, CPU registers are heavily renamed (remapped) to a whole host of hidden registers to improve parallelism. Essentially, the old AX, BX, CX, DX register model is is simply the public representation of the CPU architecture, while behind the scenes things are very much more RISC like in their implementation.
In any case, given the 0.5 GHz to 1.5 GHz advantage that Intel CPUs have over the current PPC chips, it's entirely likely that native PPC code written for OSX could run quite well on a JIT compiler on x86. In fact, there was an article on
How could JIT compilation beat an optimizing C compiler you ask? Because JIT compilers can actually watch the code run, and can then re-optimize frequently used code on the fly. In contrast, a traditional optimizing compiler has to do all of its optimizing up front before the code ever runs, which limits the amount of performance improvement that it can achieve.
P.
Hair on the lens. The flash may be the end of the hair catching some sunlight (squint facing the sun and see the glare off your eye lashes to see what I mean.)
These frames are probably time-lapse, and so the hair blew onto the lens... snap a picture was taken... the hair blew away again... snap another picture.
Thank goodness Apple didn't realize this when they made the iPod!
P.
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The slashdot crowd stepped in and really hijacked the site and took the storyline in another direction? You know, an Open Source ARG?
Isn't turn-around fair play?
P.
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