The minute Apple does that is the instant Microsoft drops Office for OS/X.
Then watch a nice platform become a dead weight.
Jobs has done it before with NeXT (make a nice O/S available for the x86). It pretty much killed the company. I can't see how Apple would fare any differently.
It is possible to use TeX for many things, including poster designs, but I have yet to see a full magazine designed in TeX. TeX is great for generating content but has some limits on what it can output visually.
Look for any recent benchmark. A top of the line G5 with the best video card (say ATI x800 series) runs at about 50% of the framerate of a comparable PC.
In fact it is currently impossible to get good full resolution performance on Doom3 for Macs, on any of the hardware that Apple sells.
Who is talking about a friendly takeover? However the Google stock is probably overvalued, so also probably not a great long-term investment right now.
It never cease to amaze me how much these so-called industry pundits don't understand anything.
Apple can endeavour to threaten Linux if they want, they'll end up nowhere, as Linux is not a vendor and doesn't care about threats.
Unless Apple unbundles OS/X and makes it Free and Open-Source, they won't change a bit the way Linux works and progresses.
Most likely Linux will end up working on Apple hardware, and not the other way around (OS/X on a random beige box). Where is the threat? Some people might continue to buy nice Apple hardware and put their favourite OS on it, as they do now. I'm sure Apple is cool with it BTW.
So far EM64T hasn't proved to be the performer one would expect. Whereas AMD64 extentions improve performance on AMD chips, they don't seem to on Intel hardware according to various benchmarks.
Redhat mentioned this in their realease statement: "Software IOTLB -- Intel EM64T does not support an IOMMU in hardware while AMD64 processors do. This means that physical addresses above 4GB (32 bits) cannot reliably be the source or destination of DMA operations. Therefore, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 2 kernel "bounces" all DMA operations to or from physical addresses above 4GB to buffers that the kernel pre-allocated below 4GB at boot time. This is likely to result in lower performance for IO-intensive workloads for Intel EM64T as compared to AMD64 processors."
Moreover the preview cross-platform developer toolkit released at the time of the JobsTalk is 32-bit only.
All in all I'm not sure we are moving forward here.
The Trolltech-QT devkit for Apple doesn't follow Aqua conventions (menu shortcuts, services, gui elements, etc). Applications developed for QT sort-of look like Aqua but not quite, in short they are ugly.
I know only of a few apps that do use QT. Increasingly I feel that for serious apps it is worthwhile to spend the time to code for the native toolkits on all platforms.
On the hardware hand, it is not good because now Apple can't pretend that they have a better chip than the PCs in their hardware. Sure the G5 petered out at 2.7GHz, but remember not long ago all the marketing effort on 64-bit computing, the fastest computer on Earth etc. All BS, I know, however for a while the G5s were exciting. Now Apple can't pretend they are not selling anything else than proprietary PCs in pretty cases. I can't see how that can be a differentiating factor. Who seriously cares about pretty cases ?
Furthermore on that point, Apple will be subject to a lot more competition on the MHz front. Everyone will be comparing their hardware to everyone else's, and instead of complex benchmarks that are always wishy-washy, one single number will suffice, i.e. the frequency of the CPU. If that doesn't follow the state of the art, people will be pissed off, and won't buy. This will also put pressure on Apple to renew their offering more often. Can they sustain it ? Most likely this will make the Apple products more expensive than they are now, or they will have their margins squeezed, and therefore they will innovate less. Right now Apple innovates on software, not hardware, but they make their margin on hardware.
Will there be a successor the the G5? I don't think so. Who cares now ? Before people were convinced that the x86 was finally showing some signs of weakness, through the AMD better offering and the P4 implementation that was not doing well at all. On the other hand the G5+ offering from IBM looked reasonable and a good way forward. Now it's x86 or die. Very sad.
On the software hand MacOS/X will now run on x86, but not on beige boxes. To make that happen Apple will have to put in some kind of DRM gadget in their hardware that will have no function other than enforcing their policy. This will piss people off. I don't like it, and I own a Mac.
Basically the Mac offering will be standard PCs that can run some kind of proprietary incompatible OS. Yes it is prettier, yes it will be running Windows software through VPC, but you have to pay extra for that (the VPC bit, a license for Windows, more RAM to accomodate the virtualization, etc). What's the point ?
Mostly this is very sad because I can't belive that Intel got chosen, with their kludgy CPU. Yes the Pentium-M is nice and cool, but I can't see it scale very fast either. After all this is some kind of P-III architecture rehashed, and it is 32-bit only. Shortly this will not be enough. I have close to 1GB of RAM on all my computers. In a few years I'll have exhausted the address space. The P-IV is horrible and at an end for the desktop.
Honestly I can't see how to put any kind of positive spin on this piece of news.
If you'd ever used xpdf, particularly if you actually have been trying to produce PDF documents, you'd know that it is in fact much more useful than the big buggy bloated brontosaurus, aka acroread.
Similarly OpenOffice has things going for it that are not simply MS-Office emulation. Sure the majority of users would not care but some would.
I realize they probably had no choice with laptop G5 not working out, and the desktop G5 not ramping up in speed fast enough either, but this is not good news. The Intel chips are not great, the Pentium-M is and will remain 32-bit for a while. It has great speed and autonomy but it is yesterday's technology (the P-III in a different clothing). The 64-bit processors from Intels are all a sad joke, both the EMT and the Itanic.
Somehow if Apple had gone to AMD I'd have been much happier. AMD64 works fine on the laptop.
Macs and PCs will be much more alike. I can't see how the potential ability to run Windows programs better via VPC can be an advantage for Macs. This will probably mean that in a short few years the big software houses will only develop for Windows and expect their programs to run on Macs too.
Then why would people buy a Mac a all ? Sony and Toshiba make pretty laptops too.
Personally I dislike the MacOS/X kernel. I don't know how it works internally but it doesn't seem to know how to put processes at idle or to shift priorities to the foreground process efficiently.
On my Linux box I have typically hundreds of processes running, including various terms, browsers, editors, mail clients, whatever, and unless I'm actually running a compute intensive process like some scientific software, the CPU stays at a few % activity level. When a compute intensive process runs it captures 95-98% of the CPU.
Unlike on my iBook. Even when I'm just looking at it doing nothing the CPU meter typically indicates something like 30% activity level. Running `top' requires an extra 15-20% of the CPU, and if I'm trying to run something CPU intensive it can't capture more than 70-80% of it.
Why ?
This is why people have proposed stupid hacks like `cunning fox' which are just a convenient GUI to stop and start Aqua apps, in order to give the front-running application most of the CPU.
Now the question. Could one run Aqua on top of the Linux kernel ? if so would it run things more efficiently ? What would be required ?
Note that Einstein never got a Nobel prize for his far fetched relativity work. He got it for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, something far more practical and measurable in those days.
Hint: the grandparent is correct. Radioactive sources are deemed truly random according to QM, but not the way we can measure decay. This is enough to generate some autocorrelation and spoil the randomness.
An excerpt:
Santha, M. and U. Vazirani. 1986. Generating Quasi-random Sequences from Semi-random Sources. Journal of Computer and System Sciences. 33: 75-87.
"Several computational applications require a source of 'random bit-sequences.'" "Unfortunately, the available physical sources of randomness (including zener diodes and geiger counters) are imperfect [9]. Their output bits are not only biased but also correlated."
Microsoft's history doesn't start with MS-DOS, it pretty much starts with Microsoft BASIC, which was a standard on all 8-bit machines in the late 70s, early 80s.
The saying was that Microsoft was doing a good BASIC back then.
Indeed 30 s sounds like a long time, however on this site it also says that the crew can experience a slow depressurisation and go into hypoxia without realizing the emergency because they can ge busy fighting some other problem, which could definitely happen with a terrorist attack.
The author specifically writes that he himself had experienced hypoxia with all the symptoms (blue lips, giddyness etc) without realizing what was going on. If it had not been an experiment on the ground he would have been unable to react to any emergency.
A rapid depressurization at high altitude in any plane can mean a number of people pass out and die before they have a chance to put on their mask.
If for some reason the crew cannot put on masks rapidly then their capacity to react can become impaired due to hypoxia, even if the depressurisation is not rapid. This might be a useful reference.
Read the README file from Doom3, then wonder why Id programmers are held in such high regard by the nerd crowd.
But there are far more than just games. If you administer your own box at home, you'll find you need to run the admin account from time to time manually, to get the updates, etc.
That's why most people don't bother and run as the admin all the time.
Mac OS/X has got that one right. There isn't even an admin account by default.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure, but he uses anger to defeat Vader in Death Star mkII.
The minute Apple does that is the instant Microsoft drops Office for OS/X.
Then watch a nice platform become a dead weight.
Jobs has done it before with NeXT (make a nice O/S available for the x86). It pretty much killed the company. I can't see how Apple would fare any differently.
This must mean that the average IQ of the developer pool of both platforms just increased.
Actually there were whole SPIE conference tracks on the Hubble problem for a while.
It is possible to use TeX for many things, including poster designs, but I have yet to see a full magazine designed in TeX. TeX is great for generating content but has some limits on what it can output visually.
Look for any recent benchmark. A top of the line G5 with the best video card (say ATI x800 series) runs at about 50% of the framerate of a comparable PC.
In fact it is currently impossible to get good full resolution performance on Doom3 for Macs, on any of the hardware that Apple sells.
Who is talking about a friendly takeover? However the Google stock is probably overvalued, so also probably not a great long-term investment right now.
It never cease to amaze me how much these so-called industry pundits don't understand anything.
Apple can endeavour to threaten Linux if they want, they'll end up nowhere, as Linux is not a vendor and doesn't care about threats.
Unless Apple unbundles OS/X and makes it Free and Open-Source, they won't change a bit the way Linux works and progresses.
Most likely Linux will end up working on Apple hardware, and not the other way around (OS/X on a random beige box). Where is the threat? Some people might continue to buy nice Apple hardware and put their favourite OS on it, as they do now. I'm sure Apple is cool with it BTW.
Moreover the preview cross-platform developer toolkit released at the time of the JobsTalk is 32-bit only.
All in all I'm not sure we are moving forward here.
The Trolltech-QT devkit for Apple doesn't follow Aqua conventions (menu shortcuts, services, gui elements, etc). Applications developed for QT sort-of look like Aqua but not quite, in short they are ugly.
I know only of a few apps that do use QT. Increasingly I feel that for serious apps it is worthwhile to spend the time to code for the native toolkits on all platforms.
Moving to x86 is not good IMHO.
On the hardware hand, it is not good because now Apple can't pretend that they have a better chip than the PCs in their hardware. Sure the G5 petered out at 2.7GHz, but remember not long ago all the marketing effort on 64-bit computing, the fastest computer on Earth etc. All BS, I know, however for a while the G5s were exciting. Now Apple can't pretend they are not selling anything else than proprietary PCs in pretty cases. I can't see how that can be a differentiating factor. Who seriously cares about pretty cases ?
Furthermore on that point, Apple will be subject to a lot more competition on the MHz front. Everyone will be comparing their hardware to everyone else's, and instead of complex benchmarks that are always wishy-washy, one single number will suffice, i.e. the frequency of the CPU. If that doesn't follow the state of the art, people will be pissed off, and won't buy. This will also put pressure on Apple to renew their offering more often. Can they sustain it ? Most likely this will make the Apple products more expensive than they are now, or they will have their margins squeezed, and therefore they will innovate less. Right now Apple innovates on software, not hardware, but they make their margin on hardware.
Will there be a successor the the G5? I don't think so. Who cares now ? Before people were convinced that the x86 was finally showing some signs of weakness, through the AMD better offering and the P4 implementation that was not doing well at all. On the other hand the G5+ offering from IBM looked reasonable and a good way forward. Now it's x86 or die. Very sad.
On the software hand MacOS/X will now run on x86, but not on beige boxes. To make that happen Apple will have to put in some kind of DRM gadget in their hardware that will have no function other than enforcing their policy. This will piss people off. I don't like it, and I own a Mac.
Basically the Mac offering will be standard PCs that can run some kind of proprietary incompatible OS. Yes it is prettier, yes it will be running Windows software through VPC, but you have to pay extra for that (the VPC bit, a license for Windows, more RAM to accomodate the virtualization, etc). What's the point ?
Mostly this is very sad because I can't belive that Intel got chosen, with their kludgy CPU. Yes the Pentium-M is nice and cool, but I can't see it scale very fast either. After all this is some kind of P-III architecture rehashed, and it is 32-bit only. Shortly this will not be enough. I have close to 1GB of RAM on all my computers. In a few years I'll have exhausted the address space. The P-IV is horrible and at an end for the desktop.
Honestly I can't see how to put any kind of positive spin on this piece of news.
If you'd ever used xpdf, particularly if you actually have been trying to produce PDF documents, you'd know that it is in fact much more useful than the big buggy bloated brontosaurus, aka acroread.
Similarly OpenOffice has things going for it that are not simply MS-Office emulation. Sure the majority of users would not care but some would.
I realize they probably had no choice with laptop G5 not working out, and the desktop G5 not ramping up in speed fast enough either, but this is not good news. The Intel chips are not great, the Pentium-M is and will remain 32-bit for a while. It has great speed and autonomy but it is yesterday's technology (the P-III in a different clothing). The 64-bit processors from Intels are all a sad joke, both the EMT and the Itanic.
Somehow if Apple had gone to AMD I'd have been much happier. AMD64 works fine on the laptop.
Macs and PCs will be much more alike. I can't see how the potential ability to run Windows programs better via VPC can be an advantage for Macs. This will probably mean that in a short few years the big software houses will only develop for Windows and expect their programs to run on Macs too.
Then why would people buy a Mac a all ? Sony and Toshiba make pretty laptops too.
Personally I dislike the MacOS/X kernel. I don't know how it works internally but it doesn't seem to know how to put processes at idle or to shift priorities to the foreground process efficiently.
On my Linux box I have typically hundreds of processes running, including various terms, browsers, editors, mail clients, whatever, and unless I'm actually running a compute intensive process like some scientific software, the CPU stays at a few % activity level. When a compute intensive process runs it captures 95-98% of the CPU.
Unlike on my iBook. Even when I'm just looking at it doing nothing the CPU meter typically indicates something like 30% activity level. Running `top' requires an extra 15-20% of the CPU, and if I'm trying to run something CPU intensive it can't capture more than 70-80% of it.
Why ?
This is why people have proposed stupid hacks like `cunning fox' which are just a convenient GUI to stop and start Aqua apps, in order to give the front-running application most of the CPU.
Now the question. Could one run Aqua on top of the Linux kernel ? if so would it run things more efficiently ? What would be required ?
Exactly,
Note that Einstein never got a Nobel prize for his far fetched relativity work. He got it for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, something far more practical and measurable in those days.
Personal projects and fundamental research are not the same thing. No structure, no team, to start with.
> it's going to burst.. it has to.. unless they grow
> a lot. and quickly.
And the question is, grow how ? take over which market ?
Until it runs out of resources, i.e. very quickly.
Hello,
Science is difficult and one may find that there doesn't exist definite answers on anything, hence it is very hard to be authoritative.
In your case, perhaps you would benefit from reading some litterature on Random Number Machines.
Hint: the grandparent is correct. Radioactive sources are deemed truly random according to QM, but not the way we can measure decay. This is enough to generate some autocorrelation and spoil the randomness.
An excerpt:
Santha, M. and U. Vazirani. 1986. Generating Quasi-random Sequences from Semi-random Sources. Journal of Computer and System Sciences. 33: 75-87.
"Several computational applications require a source of 'random bit-sequences.'" "Unfortunately, the available physical sources of randomness (including zener diodes and geiger counters) are imperfect [9]. Their output bits are not only biased but also correlated."
All the best.
Microsoft's history doesn't start with MS-DOS, it pretty much starts with Microsoft BASIC, which was a standard on all 8-bit machines in the late 70s, early 80s.
The saying was that Microsoft was doing a good BASIC back then.
Indeed 30 s sounds like a long time, however on this site it also says that the crew can experience a slow depressurisation and go into hypoxia without realizing the emergency because they can ge busy fighting some other problem, which could definitely happen with a terrorist attack.
The author specifically writes that he himself had experienced hypoxia with all the symptoms (blue lips, giddyness etc) without realizing what was going on. If it had not been an experiment on the ground he would have been unable to react to any emergency.
You misspelt "rectal".
This sounds inevitable given the way we are heading.
A rapid depressurization at high altitude in any plane can mean a number of people pass out and die before they have a chance to put on their mask.
If for some reason the crew cannot put on masks rapidly then their capacity to react can become impaired due to hypoxia, even if the depressurisation is not rapid. This
might be a useful reference.
Read the README file from Doom3, then wonder why Id programmers are held in such high regard by the nerd crowd.
But there are far more than just games. If you administer your own box at home, you'll find you need to run the admin account from time to time manually, to get the updates, etc.
That's why most people don't bother and run as the admin all the time.
Mac OS/X has got that one right. There isn't even an admin account by default.
YES, Andrei Rublev, how could they miss that one ? Not a single Tarkovski.