An ex-gf of mine is over there going to school, and I asked her this very question, and she said she hadn't noticed any difference. Now she's not really nerdy or anything, but we talk on AIM sometimes and I've tested it by saying anti-communist things and such, but no secret police have arrested her yet.
Don't lose hope my friend. Persistence will pay off. Keep on saying those anti-communist things and you'll get her arrested yet!
They've gained the respect of being the largest bootleg and spammers in the world, and the censorship will give them some credit to a bright tech china. Or just a Japanese wannabes. All considered, it's needed.
I love it when someone tries to justify censorship. As in, "no need to make your mind up for yourself".
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/Gallery/Pearse/Pearse. html
It appears that some of his supporters may have claimed that he flew first, but Pearse himself made no such suggestions.
"In two letters, published in 1915 and 1928, the inventor writes of February or March 1904 as the time when he set out to solve the problem of aerial navigation. He also states that he did not achieve proper flight and did not beat the American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright who flew on 17 December 1903"
I don't see any kind of proof that Richard Pearse beat them to the punch. All I see is a loosely formed theory based on people's vague memories of the time.
What I meant by my post is that overal sales don't always coincide with the influence that it had.
You can introduce something that nobody can buy, but everyone seems to emulate it. You didn't sell anything but you influenced the scene in a major way.
On the flip side, you can have a product that sold incredibly well, yet had almost no influence on the market styling wise. Take the Dodge Neon for example. They sold a ton of them, but I didn't see anyone trying to emulate a Neon.
As far as the iMacs went, they sold a very small number (Apple computers as a whole only accounted for about 2.0% of total computers sold worldwide last year), yet their influence was seen all over the place. Dell, on the other hand, accounted for 17.9% of all computers sold worldwide, yet Dell never seems to start any styling trends.
If the Mac Mini sells well, everyone will copy the idea. If not, it will disappear like the Cube and no one will ever build anything like it again.
Of course, the cube's problem wasn't the design, it was the price tag. If they'd sold the cube for $500, it would have been a big hit, and you'd see grey cubes everywhere, from other computer manufacturers to George Foreman CubeGrills.
Influence doesn't depend on the amount of units sold, it depends on if others think that design was good or not. Cars like Lamborghini have a huge influence on the style of cars, but Lamborghini sells hardly any cars compared to mainstream automakers.
The iMac did not sell very well compared to computers such as Dell, HP, and Gateway, but its influence was seen everywhere. More "iMac look-alike" wintel machines were sold than actual Apple iMacs. Generally people liked the look but they didn't want a Mac.
I think that the Mini will definitely influence the small form factor crowd, but that's only a small portion of the overall market. It costs more money to make things very small like that. You can build a larger computer for cheaper using off the shelf parts.
The average computer buyer wants the fastest computer for the cheapest price. Buying a slower, more expensive computer that's real small probably isn't going to appeal to the mass market.
The small 2.5" laptop hard drives (like the one in the Mini) are lower capacity than the 3.5" desktop drives, slower, and more expensive. You'd have to pay much more to get the same capacity and performance that a budget priced desktop drive will deliver.
I think if Apple made a slightly larger Mini with a desktop hard drive and at least 1 expansion slot for a good graphics card, it would be cheaper and have more of an influence than the current Mini will.
Remember, we're all geeks on here so we'd be willing to pay extra for the "coolness" factor. Everyday joe isn't.
But silly me, what do I know about national security. Here I still think it's better to make less enemies than more.
Exactly. You know nothing of national security.
You see, what you are supposed to do is piss off most of the world, and when they start coming after you, ignore it. After you've been hit a couple times, declare your patriotism and implement strict new laws which ironically only limit the legal citizens in your country. Then to top it off, you enact a few meaningless laws which limit people's mobility but makes the dumbest 51% of the population feel more secure.
After that, declare the war "won" and go about your way. It's time to piss off more countries my friend...
I was not arguing that Americans changed the spelling of many English words. I agree with that.
I was arguing that the airplane was invented in the US, and that the inventors get to name their invention what they want.
But as I looked up the links, I only became more confused. The Wright brothers called their airplane an "aeroplane", so I don't know why we'd change the spelling of that, since even the original american inventors spelled it differently.
yep "latency" is the word I was searching for, but you were the only one only evidently talking about frequency.
To be accurate, the original poster was talking about frequency too. He specified the memory by it's "PC" designation (PC3000) which is completely determined by its frequency. Its latency has nothing at all to do with that designation. You can have PC3000 and still have a miserable CL4.
The original poster was under the impression that the Mac mini used ECC or Buffered RAM, in which cases latency makes a much bigger difference in the actual throughput of the RAM.
The original poster was under a lot of incorrect impressions. But I'm not blasting him for it since he's not the one trying to tell me that I'm wrong.
Besides, none of his aircraft designs worked. He had the imagination for sure, but he wasn't able to work out the specifics and get one to actually work.
That's not totally true, you can generally run underclocked RAM at a higher access time(the time the computer waits for the RAM to set down to a state).
You're talking about its latency, not its frequency. We're talking about frequency here (using PC2700 memory vs PC3000 memory in the Mini).
The original poster didn't state anything about latency, he specified the stick by its frequency. He said that by using a PC3000 chip in the Mini, its memory speed would be faster. That is false.
What you are talking about is the chip's latency, and the latency does not depend on its frequency. I'm sure you've seen chips marketed as "PC2700 CL 2.5", or "PC2700 CL 3" on Crucial's website before. They both run at the same clock speed but the latency is different, the chip with the latency of 2.5 will be faster.
If a user buys just any PC3000 stick and puts it in his Mini thinking it will be faster than a good PC2700 stick, he'd be wrong. They'd both be running at PC2700 speed once he installs them, but the good chip will most likely have a lower latency than the cheap chip.
Apparently this is 'ECC' RAM instead of 'non-ECC' like the $226, and it's also 'Registered' instead of 'Unbuffered,' and '128meg x 72' instead of '128 meg x 64'.
That is the type of memory that servers use.
ECC is error correction code. PC's usually use regular non-ECC, non-parity memory. The chipset of the computer needs to support the special ECC or parity type memory in order to use it.
The "128 meg x 64" vs. "128 megs x 72" tells you the chip configuration that the memory stick uses. The "128meg" part tells you that each stick uses individual chips of 128 MB capacity. On normal PC memory, there are 8 of those individual chips on the stick bringing the total memory to 1024 megs, that's 1 GB. As far as the "64" or "72" part, that's the bit width of the memory stick. PC's use 64 bit sticks and servers use 72 bit sticks. On a PC's memory stick, since each chip is 8 bits, 8 memory chips x 8 bits means a total of 64 bits. Server memory uses an extra parity bit for each byte which brings the total to 9 bits. So a server memory stick has 9 individual chips on it- each chip is 8 bits wide and there are 9 of them- 8 x 9 = 72.
So to recap, what apple is installing is "better" in terms of stability, and if they use faster-rated RAM (say, PC3000) to build it, the speed lost to ECC and buffering will be negligible compared to normal PC2700.
It doesn't work that way. SDRAM is synchronous memory and the chipset will attempt to run the memory at the speed of the bus. Faster memory will not make the bus go any faster than the chipset's rated speed.
For example, I had a KT333 chipset which had a 333 mhz bus speed. It used PC2700 memory, which is 333 mhz memory. I had a power surge and my MB died. So I replaced it with a KT266 motherboard, which only has a 266 mhz bus speed (PC2100 speed). I still used my old PC2700 memory, but the memory now operates at the bus speed, which is 266 mhz. It is not any faster than if I just had PC2100 memory in it, since it can only run as fast as the chipset can drive it.
The Mac mini's chipset works at 333 mhz, which is PC2700 speed. Putting in PC3000 or faster won't make the memory speed be any faster- it'll always run at 333 mhz.
Some people have pointed out that China is banning these games because they are often pirated games, not because of any political agenda.
That still doesn't make sense to me. If you ban The Sims 2 outright, wouldn't that mean that EVERYONE in China that wants to play that game will have to pirate it? Sure, it was probably widely pirated before, but now the Chinese will have no other choice but get a pirated copy if they want to play it, since the option to buy a legitimate copy at a store is now gone. And you know they're not going to just stop playing it because it was illegal, pirated copies of games are illegal, too, but that doesn't stop that, does it?
By doing this, China is not cracking down on pirated copies of these games- they are instead cracking down on legit copies of these games because those are the only copies that they can accurately track. People will still play these games either way.
From what I know, Rambus intentionally pulled a fast one.
First of all, they were on a committee of memory manufacturers whose purpose it was to design the next generation of memory, SDRAM. It was in the manufacturers' best interest to form an open standard that could be produced easily.
The strange thing is that Rambus is not a manufacturer. They are an IP company. I don't know why they were on that committee in the first place. What would be in it for them as an IP company to help produce an *open* standard?
As things turned out, they used the knowledge gained on the committee to modify existing patents that they had. From being on that committee, they saw the direction that the industry was about to go. Using that information, they modified their patents with the intention that the industry's new direction would infringe on their patents. They might have even used their influence on that committee to steer the industry to "run over" patents that Rambus held.
To sum it up, Rambus's involvement on that committee was dubious from the beginning. The only reason it was on that committee was to help position itself for the legal actions that were its ultimate goal.
It has a Radeon 9200 (better than the gForce 3 in the XBox)
The Radeon 9200 is slower than the Geforce 3. It's even slower than the Radeon 9000, and THAT was slower than the GF3.
In addition, the Xbox doesn't really have a Geforce 3 in it, it has a variant that was never released in the PC world. It's the NV2A, and it's partly between the Geforce3 and Geforce4. It has 2 vertex pipelines instead of one and is faster than the PF3.
If a critical mass of Mac mini systems end up in TV rooms across America, a few game developpers will probably gravitate towards exploiting that market, and Apple may find themselves selling a popular game console entirely by accident.
Everyone agrees that the Mac mini is not a 3d powerhouse. It has a very weak integrated graphics card with a minimum amount of memory. There is no way that it would become a popular game console. I don't have the exact specs of its graphics hardware on hand, but I'm sure the graphics capabilities of the Xbox and PS2 exceed it (because that's all they do) and don't cost $500.
I loved their consoles, but they decided that it wasn't profitable so they exited the hardware business.
Then a hollow shell of the company continued to produce software for other platforms, and now they announce that they're going to stop producing the most popular games they make (sports games).
What is left for them? Will they just sit there and "exist" but do nothing? Maybe they can pay other game makers to randomly put a Sega banner somewhere. Maybe they'll turn into a new type of corporate entity... "the undead"... a company that doesn't do anything but "exists".... a zombie, the corporate equivalent of a ghost ship.
First of all, Sega did not make Madden- EA did. That was the best selling game for the Genesis and since then Madden Football is the best selling game franchise of all time.
What kind of company would want to stop producing their #1 product? What kind of business move would that be?
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An ex-gf of mine is over there going to school, and I asked her this very question, and she said she hadn't noticed any difference. Now she's not really nerdy or anything, but we talk on AIM sometimes and I've tested it by saying anti-communist things and such, but no secret police have arrested her yet.
Don't lose hope my friend. Persistence will pay off. Keep on saying those anti-communist things and you'll get her arrested yet!
They've gained the respect of being the largest bootleg and spammers in the world, and the censorship will give them some credit to a bright tech china. Or just a Japanese wannabes. All considered, it's needed.
I love it when someone tries to justify censorship. As in, "no need to make your mind up for yourself".
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/Gallery/Pearse/Pearse. html
It appears that some of his supporters may have claimed that he flew first, but Pearse himself made no such suggestions.
"In two letters, published in 1915 and 1928, the inventor writes of February or March 1904 as the time when he set out to solve the problem of aerial navigation. He also states that he did not achieve proper flight and did not beat the American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright who flew on 17 December 1903"
I don't see any kind of proof that Richard Pearse beat them to the punch. All I see is a loosely formed theory based on people's vague memories of the time.
What I meant by my post is that overal sales don't always coincide with the influence that it had.
You can introduce something that nobody can buy, but everyone seems to emulate it. You didn't sell anything but you influenced the scene in a major way.
On the flip side, you can have a product that sold incredibly well, yet had almost no influence on the market styling wise. Take the Dodge Neon for example. They sold a ton of them, but I didn't see anyone trying to emulate a Neon.
As far as the iMacs went, they sold a very small number (Apple computers as a whole only accounted for about 2.0% of total computers sold worldwide last year), yet their influence was seen all over the place. Dell, on the other hand, accounted for 17.9% of all computers sold worldwide, yet Dell never seems to start any styling trends.
I don't know why you'd take a large desktop over a smaller form factor machine if you can get equivalent power out of the smaller machine.
That's the problem- you can't yet, at least for anywhere the same price.
On the Mini review on a Mac enthusiast site, their biggest complaint about it was the slow speed of the hard drive.
If the Mac Mini sells well, everyone will copy the idea. If not, it will disappear like the Cube and no one will ever build anything like it again.
Of course, the cube's problem wasn't the design, it was the price tag. If they'd sold the cube for $500, it would have been a big hit, and you'd see grey cubes everywhere, from other computer manufacturers to George Foreman CubeGrills.
Influence doesn't depend on the amount of units sold, it depends on if others think that design was good or not. Cars like Lamborghini have a huge influence on the style of cars, but Lamborghini sells hardly any cars compared to mainstream automakers.
The iMac did not sell very well compared to computers such as Dell, HP, and Gateway, but its influence was seen everywhere. More "iMac look-alike" wintel machines were sold than actual Apple iMacs. Generally people liked the look but they didn't want a Mac.
I think that the Mini will definitely influence the small form factor crowd, but that's only a small portion of the overall market. It costs more money to make things very small like that. You can build a larger computer for cheaper using off the shelf parts.
The average computer buyer wants the fastest computer for the cheapest price. Buying a slower, more expensive computer that's real small probably isn't going to appeal to the mass market.
The small 2.5" laptop hard drives (like the one in the Mini) are lower capacity than the 3.5" desktop drives, slower, and more expensive. You'd have to pay much more to get the same capacity and performance that a budget priced desktop drive will deliver.
I think if Apple made a slightly larger Mini with a desktop hard drive and at least 1 expansion slot for a good graphics card, it would be cheaper and have more of an influence than the current Mini will.
Remember, we're all geeks on here so we'd be willing to pay extra for the "coolness" factor. Everyday joe isn't.
Is that a fuel rod in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
But silly me, what do I know about national security. Here I still think it's better to make less enemies than more.
Exactly. You know nothing of national security.
You see, what you are supposed to do is piss off most of the world, and when they start coming after you, ignore it. After you've been hit a couple times, declare your patriotism and implement strict new laws which ironically only limit the legal citizens in your country. Then to top it off, you enact a few meaningless laws which limit people's mobility but makes the dumbest 51% of the population feel more secure.
After that, declare the war "won" and go about your way. It's time to piss off more countries my friend...
I was not arguing that Americans changed the spelling of many English words. I agree with that.
I was arguing that the airplane was invented in the US, and that the inventors get to name their invention what they want.
But as I looked up the links, I only became more confused. The Wright brothers called their airplane an "aeroplane", so I don't know why we'd change the spelling of that, since even the original american inventors spelled it differently.
yep "latency" is the word I was searching for, but you were the only one only evidently talking about frequency.
To be accurate, the original poster was talking about frequency too. He specified the memory by it's "PC" designation (PC3000) which is completely determined by its frequency. Its latency has nothing at all to do with that designation. You can have PC3000 and still have a miserable CL4.
The original poster was under the impression that the Mac mini used ECC or Buffered RAM, in which cases latency makes a much bigger difference in the actual throughput of the RAM.
The original poster was under a lot of incorrect impressions. But I'm not blasting him for it since he's not the one trying to tell me that I'm wrong.
Tell that to Leonardo da Vinci
I can't, he's no longer with us I'm afraid.
Besides, none of his aircraft designs worked. He had the imagination for sure, but he wasn't able to work out the specifics and get one to actually work.
So we changed the spelling of "aeroplane" after the revolutionary war to distinguish ourselves from Britian?
There weren't too many airplanes back then.
Why don't you see how the Wright Brothers spelled it? They invented the damn thing.
That's not totally true, you can generally run underclocked RAM at a higher access time(the time the computer waits for the RAM to set down to a state).
You're talking about its latency, not its frequency. We're talking about frequency here (using PC2700 memory vs PC3000 memory in the Mini).
The original poster didn't state anything about latency, he specified the stick by its frequency. He said that by using a PC3000 chip in the Mini, its memory speed would be faster. That is false.
What you are talking about is the chip's latency, and the latency does not depend on its frequency. I'm sure you've seen chips marketed as "PC2700 CL 2.5", or "PC2700 CL 3" on Crucial's website before. They both run at the same clock speed but the latency is different, the chip with the latency of 2.5 will be faster.
If a user buys just any PC3000 stick and puts it in his Mini thinking it will be faster than a good PC2700 stick, he'd be wrong. They'd both be running at PC2700 speed once he installs them, but the good chip will most likely have a lower latency than the cheap chip.
Apparently this is 'ECC' RAM instead of 'non-ECC' like the $226, and it's also 'Registered' instead of 'Unbuffered,' and '128meg x 72' instead of '128 meg x 64'.
That is the type of memory that servers use.
ECC is error correction code. PC's usually use regular non-ECC, non-parity memory. The chipset of the computer needs to support the special ECC or parity type memory in order to use it.
The "128 meg x 64" vs. "128 megs x 72" tells you the chip configuration that the memory stick uses. The "128meg" part tells you that each stick uses individual chips of 128 MB capacity. On normal PC memory, there are 8 of those individual chips on the stick bringing the total memory to 1024 megs, that's 1 GB. As far as the "64" or "72" part, that's the bit width of the memory stick. PC's use 64 bit sticks and servers use 72 bit sticks. On a PC's memory stick, since each chip is 8 bits, 8 memory chips x 8 bits means a total of 64 bits. Server memory uses an extra parity bit for each byte which brings the total to 9 bits. So a server memory stick has 9 individual chips on it- each chip is 8 bits wide and there are 9 of them- 8 x 9 = 72.
So to recap, what apple is installing is "better" in terms of stability, and if they use faster-rated RAM (say, PC3000) to build it, the speed lost to ECC and buffering will be negligible compared to normal PC2700.
It doesn't work that way. SDRAM is synchronous memory and the chipset will attempt to run the memory at the speed of the bus. Faster memory will not make the bus go any faster than the chipset's rated speed.
For example, I had a KT333 chipset which had a 333 mhz bus speed. It used PC2700 memory, which is 333 mhz memory. I had a power surge and my MB died. So I replaced it with a KT266 motherboard, which only has a 266 mhz bus speed (PC2100 speed). I still used my old PC2700 memory, but the memory now operates at the bus speed, which is 266 mhz. It is not any faster than if I just had PC2100 memory in it, since it can only run as fast as the chipset can drive it.
The Mac mini's chipset works at 333 mhz, which is PC2700 speed. Putting in PC3000 or faster won't make the memory speed be any faster- it'll always run at 333 mhz.
Some people have pointed out that China is banning these games because they are often pirated games, not because of any political agenda.
That still doesn't make sense to me. If you ban The Sims 2 outright, wouldn't that mean that EVERYONE in China that wants to play that game will have to pirate it? Sure, it was probably widely pirated before, but now the Chinese will have no other choice but get a pirated copy if they want to play it, since the option to buy a legitimate copy at a store is now gone. And you know they're not going to just stop playing it because it was illegal, pirated copies of games are illegal, too, but that doesn't stop that, does it?
By doing this, China is not cracking down on pirated copies of these games- they are instead cracking down on legit copies of these games because those are the only copies that they can accurately track. People will still play these games either way.
From what I know, Rambus intentionally pulled a fast one.
First of all, they were on a committee of memory manufacturers whose purpose it was to design the next generation of memory, SDRAM. It was in the manufacturers' best interest to form an open standard that could be produced easily.
The strange thing is that Rambus is not a manufacturer. They are an IP company. I don't know why they were on that committee in the first place. What would be in it for them as an IP company to help produce an *open* standard?
As things turned out, they used the knowledge gained on the committee to modify existing patents that they had. From being on that committee, they saw the direction that the industry was about to go. Using that information, they modified their patents with the intention that the industry's new direction would infringe on their patents. They might have even used their influence on that committee to steer the industry to "run over" patents that Rambus held.
To sum it up, Rambus's involvement on that committee was dubious from the beginning. The only reason it was on that committee was to help position itself for the legal actions that were its ultimate goal.
Aside from products and technology, has everyone forgot the kind of business that Rambus ran?
They pulled a fast one on the industry and then tried suing everyone in an effort to bully companies into licensing agreements.
They are a VERY shady company. Very unscrupulous and litigious. I would never deal with them knowing their past.
How soon we forget...
When the PS2 was about to come out, they claimed that it could render "Toy Story-like" graphics in realtime. When the PS2 came out, it could not.
Now they say the same thing about the PS3. I'm getting tired of being fed the same lines.
How long do they think a horse will keep on walking if you dangle a carrot in front of it?
It has a Radeon 9200 (better than the gForce 3 in the XBox)
The Radeon 9200 is slower than the Geforce 3. It's even slower than the Radeon 9000, and THAT was slower than the GF3.
In addition, the Xbox doesn't really have a Geforce 3 in it, it has a variant that was never released in the PC world. It's the NV2A, and it's partly between the Geforce3 and Geforce4. It has 2 vertex pipelines instead of one and is faster than the PF3.
If a critical mass of Mac mini systems end up in TV rooms across America, a few game developpers will probably gravitate towards exploiting that market, and Apple may find themselves selling a popular game console entirely by accident.
Everyone agrees that the Mac mini is not a 3d powerhouse. It has a very weak integrated graphics card with a minimum amount of memory. There is no way that it would become a popular game console. I don't have the exact specs of its graphics hardware on hand, but I'm sure the graphics capabilities of the Xbox and PS2 exceed it (because that's all they do) and don't cost $500.
I loved their consoles, but they decided that it wasn't profitable so they exited the hardware business.
Then a hollow shell of the company continued to produce software for other platforms, and now they announce that they're going to stop producing the most popular games they make (sports games).
What is left for them? Will they just sit there and "exist" but do nothing? Maybe they can pay other game makers to randomly put a Sega banner somewhere. Maybe they'll turn into a new type of corporate entity... "the undead"... a company that doesn't do anything but "exists".... a zombie, the corporate equivalent of a ghost ship.
First of all, Sega did not make Madden- EA did. That was the best selling game for the Genesis and since then Madden Football is the best selling game franchise of all time.
What kind of company would want to stop producing their #1 product? What kind of business move would that be?