LOL. First of all, you get your info from Wikipedia? Silly rabbit.
Secondly, HDTV is 1080i. Yes, there is a standard for 720p. Virtually nobody uses it. It's got all of the disadvantages of HD --increased requirements for storage and transmission --but none of the benefits.
So...you're saying what, that Macs can't exchange e-mail with PCs? You're fucking up the analogy --destinations are tasks, not people --so it's really unclear what you mean by this. You seem to be saying that you need to own a PC because your friends own PCs. Since PCs and Macs are completely interoperable, the only thing I can figure is that you're citing (a) peer pressure, or (b) your desire to make illegal copies of your friends' software.
Neither of those is a good reason to do anything, you know?
No, it would have caught on earlier had it been as affordable and backwards compatible as it is now.
There's no technological challenge to 64-bit computing. It's not hard to build 64-bit processors. As I pointed out, we've had them for a decade now. Even on the desktop. Remember the Indigo2 IMPACT 10000? Well, probably not, but I mention it anyway for the amusement of the other old-timers out there.
The reason why 64-bit processors were expensive compared to 32-bit processors had to do with the economy of scale. The first unit of any microprocessor is expensive. The 10,000th unit is cheaper, and the 100,000th unit costs pennies. So if the MIPS R10000 (just to pick an example) would have been produced on a massive scale, it would have been cheap. And, of course, the R10000 was fully backwards-compatible with earlier MIPS instruction sets.
So why didn't MIPS churn out R10000s by the millions? Because there wasn't that kind of demand for them.
See how it works? No demand means no supply, which means high prices. High demand means high supply, which means low prices.
Did Apple produce the G5 because their customers were clamoring for a 64-bit computer? No, of course not. They produced it because they could, leveraging IBM's work on the POWER architecture. This satisfies a tiny, tiny number of customers as a side-effect, but has the primary effect of making faster, cheaper 32-bit processors available to Apple's customers. The 64-bit thing is just not important.
if you are starting from the premise that "all" or even "the majority" of x86 software is shitty, then sure, my previous post is bunk.
You're essentially right, but you left out some important items.
7. Chat with friends and family via text, audio or audio and video. 8. Organize and listen to their music, and buy new music. 9. Store, organize and share their digital photos. 10. Store, organize, edit and share their home movies.
It's not 1999 any more. The scope of things that the typical home user either does or wishes he could do has expanded quite a bit. It's kind of silly not to acknowledge that we're not living in a "web/e-mail" world any more.
Excuse me, but do you honestly believe one should take into account the "day to day running of a computer" when discussing the relative merits of processor architectures?
I'm going to go way the fuck out on a limb here and say "yes." I'm going to say "yes," that verbally masturbating over the number of dizmos on the wizzle bus is mind-bogglingly stupid when the fundamental differences -- like what software runs on each --so galactically outweigh the kinds of angel-counting in which you're engaged.
As for the operating system, that's getting off-topic
Look up, you colossal dumbass.
Not if that "carburetor" makes that "sports car or SUV" only work on 5% of the roads.
That's depressingly typical. You make an analogy, but you never bother to think it through, so you don't see that it actually serves the other side of the argument.
You want an analogy? Let's make an analogy.
You can choose between two cars. One car runs on (just to pick a number) 95 percent of the roads, but the roads are all paved with gravel. For most destinations, there are many roads that lead there, but they're all long, circuitous and hazardous to both car and driver. They're jammed with traffic, choked with pollution and periodically targeted by wandering bands of roadside gangs that pull people out of their cars at random, mug them, shoot them in the leg and steal their cars.
The other car runs on only 5 percent of all roads, but those roads go to every destination in which you're interested, including some destinations that aren't accessible by the other 95 percent of all roads. And they're all twelve lanes wide with no speed limits and paved with concrete that's smooth as glass.
The first car is cheaper, sure. But if you spend a little more on the second car, you can get everywhere you want to go in speed, safety and luxurious comfort.
And just last week, the company that makes car #2 released a new car that sells for considerably less than the price of car #1.
There's your analogy. Yes, the Mac uses different software in many cases, but the software that's available lets you do the same tasks...or even, in the case of editing HDV video, tasks that simply aren't possible on a PC at all. But the software that's available is nearly all top-quality stuff, as opposed to the mountains of trash that are available for the PC. And because a Mac isn't plagued by viruses, spy-ware and user-hostile software, you don't have to worry nearly as much about the reliability of your computer or the safety of the stuff on it.
Yes, it costs a little more... unless you're buying a mini, which feature-for-feature is the cheapest computer available anywhere.
- Natively address over 4gb of memory. This is already important for servers, and shall become important for desktops in the not-so-far future.
We've had microprocessors that can operate with 64-bit pointers for more than ten years now. Has 64-bit computing taken the world by storm? No. Because the number of applications that require 64-bit processing is so tiny as to be hardly worth discussing in any broad context. Probably the most demanding desktop application right now, in terms of memory addressing, is HD video. Guess what? The industry-leading HD video editing application is, you guessed it, a 32-bit application. It's called Smoke and it's from a company called Discreet Logic. It costs a quarter of a million dollars, and it does things that no other piece of video editing software can do. All inside 32 bits.
wilhelm 9% file smoke_IRIX_6.5_ip35 smoke_IRIX_6.5_ip35: ELF N32 MSB mips-4 dynamic executable MIPS - version 1
Sixty-four-bit computing has been in the "shall become important" category for years. And I think it always will be.
- fully backwards compatible with x86!
So? You can run the mountains of laughably bad software that's lying around rotting?
- able to run x86 at native speeds!
Oh, I see. You'll be able to run incredibly bad software... quickly. Do nothing useful faster!
- roughly 15% performance benefit from porting an average x86 program to AMD64
Okay, we covered "do nothing faster" already. Move along, please.
- future-proof investment
Um. You're hoping that somebody will come along and write decent software someday, while ignoring the vast and growing body of good software that's been and is being written for the Mac today? That doesn't sound like a good investment to me. That sounds like a speculative investment.
- MEMORY CONTROLLER INTEGRATED INTO THE CPU
So? You think microsecond latencies between CPU and main memory, you know, affect your life somehow?
But a new PPC would have to perform _very_ well and be _very_ cheap by comparrison to outweigh it's inability to run x86 code.
LOL. You've got that completely backwards. The inability to run shitty software is a major advantage.
You know, I think I've got it figured out. You're a ricer, aren't you? Your computer probably has neon on it somewhere, and a custom paint job. "AMD64" is your version of VTEC.
You do realize that the AMD64 arch. is the direct competition to the G5, right?
Of course it's not. You can't run software compiled for the G5 on this "AMD64" blah-blah whatever, nor can you drop an AMD64 whoozit into place behind an Apple system controller. Saying the two compete is like saying that PAL competes with NTSC. The two things never intersect.
Despite what Jobs about the G5 being the first 64-Bit workstation on the market
He never said that. This is rapidly becoming an "Al Gore invented the Internet" thing. What he said was that the G5 was the first 64-bit personal computer, a statement which is entirely true.
So, are you saying you don't give a shit about 64-Bit computing at all?
I wrote software for the SGI Power Challenge back when having a 32-bit processor on your desk made you somebody special. Having done it for years I can say without reservation... no. I don't give a shit about 64-bit computing at all. There are practically no single-user applications that call for more than 2 GB of virtual memory-- there are some, yes, but the number is vanishingly small. And line-for-line, a 64-bit program is always slower than the same program compiled for 32-bit processing because you run out of cache lines faster.
So no. I do not give a shit about 64-bit computing. And neither do you, not really. You do, odds are, care about the latest buzzword. Just keep on sucking down that predigested marketing pap. It'll make you a better consumer.
Nope: I don't give a damn about VOIP or OLED. I do, however, care about HDTV...but I don't care what kind of MPEG decoder my TV has in it.
I care very much about the things that affect my life. What kind of new-fangled microprocessor somebody has dreamed up that won't run any decent software anyway is not a subject I spend a whole lot of time contemplating.
AMD *invented* it, and AMD64 just happens to be the name I and a few others such as Linus like to use. It has nothing to do with brand loyalty.
Um. You see the irony, right? "[Brand] invented [Brand], so [Brand] and I call [Brand] [Brand]."
Way to prove the point.
the price/performance value is truly wonderful.
You have a very curious definition of "price/performance value." You seem to think that something you get for free that desperately, desperately sucks is better than something wonderful sold for a reasonable price. I think there's a "division by zero" error in your arithmetic somewhere.
If they ported OSX to blah-blah-dickety-blah
Hey, we're back to this again. Another Mac-related story, another "why don't they port it to my favorite irrelevancy" whine.
1. HD-DVD and "Blu-Ray" are myths right now. They don't exist as commercial products.
2. Bluetooth.
3. Wrongo. My Mac is only a 1 GHz G4, slower than a mini, and it plays back AVC-encoded HD content just fine with the Tiger developer preview. (WMA-9? Silly rabbit. It's not 1999 any more. The world has moved on.)
4. Yeah, there is. It's called DVI-I. DVI-I to component analog adapters are about $40.
Of course the mini is not a "media center solution" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean). It's a computer. But your objections are still just a lot of hot air.
Your information is out of date. Yes, there are a couple of proposed HD (that's D for density, not definition) DVD specs out there that call for discs in the 30-40 GB range, but recent advances on the codec front have resulted in the encoding of broadcast-quality HD content at about 8 Mbps. That means an HD movie could fit quite easily on a regular old DVD.
If high-density optical media takes off, I'm sure discs will be encoded at higher bit rates to take advantage of them. But it's not technically necessary.
Of course, all these downloaded movies will only play on one computer, require a connection to the internet each time you want to play the movie (to authenticate), and you will only "own" the movie for 48 hours.
Here's my theory: You're a brand bitch. Your rock of choice is this thing you mentioned called "AMD64." (No idea what that is. Never heard of it. I'm taking your word for it that it's a real thing.) You care about this brand for absolutely no practical reason. "My brand is better than yours," you say. "My brand has more googs," where "googs" are something that nobody gives a shit about. But, by God, your brand has more of them.
What about the part where you didn't take into consideration that if I'm using Windows, I have to remember to _not_ do option-shift-hyphen and instead hold down the alt key and strike 0151 on the keypad
Isn't that your problem? Your inability to type isn't something that particularly interests me.
Let me know when you think you can typeset something like that in less than a couple of hours (which was how long the TeX run took), 'kay?
Sigh. Still not getting it. It's not automation. It's art. You don't get bonus points for being fast.
Are you not going to try to provide an example of a textual page which can't be done in TeX?
Of course not, because for all I know, TeX is capable of describing any printed page you can imagine. But so is PostScript; so is PDF. That's not the point. The point is that TeX is completely obsolete. Its liabilities vastly, vastly outweigh any possible imaginable advantage that it might once have had.
Why should you understand this? You think computer automation is still the neatest thing since sliced bread. Like I said, you're stuck in 1979.
Nope, wrong. AAC is an open standard. FairPlay is a rights-management system that's got nothing to do with AAC. It's implemented as a component of QuickTime.
There's no reason, if you had access to the encryption software, that you couldn't produce a FairPlay-protected AIFF file, or a FairPlay-protected MPEG-4 movie.
Slashdot Mirror
The OS has no bearing on my question.
Yes. It does.
You seem to be having a problem with your brain today.
If it helps you comprehend the situation, lets just assume I'm going to put YellowDog on this hypothetical PPC system.
Maybe it's not just today.
LOL. First of all, you get your info from Wikipedia? Silly rabbit.
Secondly, HDTV is 1080i. Yes, there is a standard for 720p. Virtually nobody uses it. It's got all of the disadvantages of HD --increased requirements for storage and transmission --but none of the benefits.
When somebody says "HDTV," think "1080i."
What do you mean "what resolution?" You know, HD: 1080i. And no, it's a single-processor G4 iMac.
A microprocessor is not the same as an entire appliance. Your analogy is bogus.
the difference between workstationm and pc is either price or marketing.
It's neither. It's the intent with which it was designed.
WMA9 is part of the HDDVD and Bluray specs.
It used to be, like two years ago. It's since been supplanted by H.264/AVC.
It's coming and Apple is going to have to get an implementation sooner or later.
Sooner. It's built in to QuickTime 7. In fact, by the look of things, Apple's going to have it running before anybody else.
Due to being in bed with Microsoft
Apple's in bed with Microsoft? I'm not even sure what that means.
My friends live on the other 95% of the roads.
...you're saying what, that Macs can't exchange e-mail with PCs? You're fucking up the analogy --destinations are tasks, not people --so it's really unclear what you mean by this. You seem to be saying that you need to own a PC because your friends own PCs. Since PCs and Macs are completely interoperable, the only thing I can figure is that you're citing (a) peer pressure, or (b) your desire to make illegal copies of your friends' software.
So
Neither of those is a good reason to do anything, you know?
No, it would have caught on earlier had it been as affordable and backwards compatible as it is now.
There's no technological challenge to 64-bit computing. It's not hard to build 64-bit processors. As I pointed out, we've had them for a decade now. Even on the desktop. Remember the Indigo2 IMPACT 10000? Well, probably not, but I mention it anyway for the amusement of the other old-timers out there.
The reason why 64-bit processors were expensive compared to 32-bit processors had to do with the economy of scale. The first unit of any microprocessor is expensive. The 10,000th unit is cheaper, and the 100,000th unit costs pennies. So if the MIPS R10000 (just to pick an example) would have been produced on a massive scale, it would have been cheap. And, of course, the R10000 was fully backwards-compatible with earlier MIPS instruction sets.
So why didn't MIPS churn out R10000s by the millions? Because there wasn't that kind of demand for them.
See how it works? No demand means no supply, which means high prices. High demand means high supply, which means low prices.
Did Apple produce the G5 because their customers were clamoring for a 64-bit computer? No, of course not. They produced it because they could, leveraging IBM's work on the POWER architecture. This satisfies a tiny, tiny number of customers as a side-effect, but has the primary effect of making faster, cheaper 32-bit processors available to Apple's customers. The 64-bit thing is just not important.
if you are starting from the premise that "all" or even "the majority" of x86 software is shitty, then sure, my previous post is bunk.
By George, I think he's got it.
You're essentially right, but you left out some important items.
7. Chat with friends and family via text, audio or audio and video.
8. Organize and listen to their music, and buy new music.
9. Store, organize and share their digital photos.
10. Store, organize, edit and share their home movies.
It's not 1999 any more. The scope of things that the typical home user either does or wishes he could do has expanded quite a bit. It's kind of silly not to acknowledge that we're not living in a "web/e-mail" world any more.
Excuse me, but do you honestly believe one should take into account the "day to day running of a computer" when discussing the relative merits of processor architectures?
...or even, in the case of editing HDV video, tasks that simply aren't possible on a PC at all. But the software that's available is nearly all top-quality stuff, as opposed to the mountains of trash that are available for the PC. And because a Mac isn't plagued by viruses, spy-ware and user-hostile software, you don't have to worry nearly as much about the reliability of your computer or the safety of the stuff on it.
... unless you're buying a mini, which feature-for-feature is the cheapest computer available anywhere.
I'm going to go way the fuck out on a limb here and say "yes." I'm going to say "yes," that verbally masturbating over the number of dizmos on the wizzle bus is mind-bogglingly stupid when the fundamental differences -- like what software runs on each --so galactically outweigh the kinds of angel-counting in which you're engaged.
As for the operating system, that's getting off-topic
Look up, you colossal dumbass.
Not if that "carburetor" makes that "sports car or SUV" only work on 5% of the roads.
That's depressingly typical. You make an analogy, but you never bother to think it through, so you don't see that it actually serves the other side of the argument.
You want an analogy? Let's make an analogy.
You can choose between two cars. One car runs on (just to pick a number) 95 percent of the roads, but the roads are all paved with gravel. For most destinations, there are many roads that lead there, but they're all long, circuitous and hazardous to both car and driver. They're jammed with traffic, choked with pollution and periodically targeted by wandering bands of roadside gangs that pull people out of their cars at random, mug them, shoot them in the leg and steal their cars.
The other car runs on only 5 percent of all roads, but those roads go to every destination in which you're interested, including some destinations that aren't accessible by the other 95 percent of all roads. And they're all twelve lanes wide with no speed limits and paved with concrete that's smooth as glass.
The first car is cheaper, sure. But if you spend a little more on the second car, you can get everywhere you want to go in speed, safety and luxurious comfort.
And just last week, the company that makes car #2 released a new car that sells for considerably less than the price of car #1.
There's your analogy. Yes, the Mac uses different software in many cases, but the software that's available lets you do the same tasks
Yes, it costs a little more
How do you like your analogy now?
We've had microprocessors that can operate with 64-bit pointers for more than ten years now. Has 64-bit computing taken the world by storm? No. Because the number of applications that require 64-bit processing is so tiny as to be hardly worth discussing in any broad context. Probably the most demanding desktop application right now, in terms of memory addressing, is HD video. Guess what? The industry-leading HD video editing application is, you guessed it, a 32-bit application. It's called Smoke and it's from a company called Discreet Logic. It costs a quarter of a million dollars, and it does things that no other piece of video editing software can do. All inside 32 bits.Sixty-four-bit computing has been in the "shall become important" category for years. And I think it always will be.
- fully backwards compatible with x86!
So? You can run the mountains of laughably bad software that's lying around rotting?
- able to run x86 at native speeds!
Oh, I see. You'll be able to run incredibly bad software
- roughly 15% performance benefit from porting an average x86 program to AMD64
Okay, we covered "do nothing faster" already. Move along, please.
- future-proof investment
Um. You're hoping that somebody will come along and write decent software someday, while ignoring the vast and growing body of good software that's been and is being written for the Mac today? That doesn't sound like a good investment to me. That sounds like a speculative investment.
- MEMORY CONTROLLER INTEGRATED INTO THE CPU
So? You think microsecond latencies between CPU and main memory, you know, affect your life somehow?
But a new PPC would have to perform _very_ well and be _very_ cheap by comparrison to outweigh it's inability to run x86 code.
LOL. You've got that completely backwards. The inability to run shitty software is a major advantage.
You know, I think I've got it figured out. You're a ricer, aren't you? Your computer probably has neon on it somewhere, and a custom paint job. "AMD64" is your version of VTEC.
You do realize that the AMD64 arch. is the direct competition to the G5, right?
... no. I don't give a shit about 64-bit computing at all. There are practically no single-user applications that call for more than 2 GB of virtual memory-- there are some, yes, but the number is vanishingly small. And line-for-line, a 64-bit program is always slower than the same program compiled for 32-bit processing because you run out of cache lines faster.
Of course it's not. You can't run software compiled for the G5 on this "AMD64" blah-blah whatever, nor can you drop an AMD64 whoozit into place behind an Apple system controller. Saying the two compete is like saying that PAL competes with NTSC. The two things never intersect.
Despite what Jobs about the G5 being the first 64-Bit workstation on the market
He never said that. This is rapidly becoming an "Al Gore invented the Internet" thing. What he said was that the G5 was the first 64-bit personal computer, a statement which is entirely true.
So, are you saying you don't give a shit about 64-Bit computing at all?
I wrote software for the SGI Power Challenge back when having a 32-bit processor on your desk made you somebody special. Having done it for years I can say without reservation
So no. I do not give a shit about 64-bit computing. And neither do you, not really. You do, odds are, care about the latest buzzword. Just keep on sucking down that predigested marketing pap. It'll make you a better consumer.
Nope: I don't give a damn about VOIP or OLED. I do, however, care about HDTV ...but I don't care what kind of MPEG decoder my TV has in it.
I care very much about the things that affect my life. What kind of new-fangled microprocessor somebody has dreamed up that won't run any decent software anyway is not a subject I spend a whole lot of time contemplating.
AMD *invented* it, and AMD64 just happens to be the name I and a few others such as Linus like to use. It has nothing to do with brand loyalty.
Um. You see the irony, right? "[Brand] invented [Brand], so [Brand] and I call [Brand] [Brand]."
Way to prove the point.
the price/performance value is truly wonderful.
You have a very curious definition of "price/performance value." You seem to think that something you get for free that desperately, desperately sucks is better than something wonderful sold for a reasonable price. I think there's a "division by zero" error in your arithmetic somewhere.
If they ported OSX to blah-blah-dickety-blah
Hey, we're back to this again. Another Mac-related story, another "why don't they port it to my favorite irrelevancy" whine.
1. HD-DVD and "Blu-Ray" are myths right now. They don't exist as commercial products.
2. Bluetooth.
3. Wrongo. My Mac is only a 1 GHz G4, slower than a mini, and it plays back AVC-encoded HD content just fine with the Tiger developer preview. (WMA-9? Silly rabbit. It's not 1999 any more. The world has moved on.)
4. Yeah, there is. It's called DVI-I. DVI-I to component analog adapters are about $40.
Of course the mini is not a "media center solution" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean). It's a computer. But your objections are still just a lot of hot air.
How big would a two hour full HD movie be?
About 7 GB. (H.264/AVC is nice.)
For the money, there's no question but what the mini is the fastest Mac there is.
The neat thing about the mini is that the same statement would be true if you doubled the Mac's retail price.
(Hell, for that matter it's still basically true if you triple the Mac's retail price. Mac minis are cheap.)
Your information is out of date. Yes, there are a couple of proposed HD (that's D for density, not definition) DVD specs out there that call for discs in the 30-40 GB range, but recent advances on the codec front have resulted in the encoding of broadcast-quality HD content at about 8 Mbps. That means an HD movie could fit quite easily on a regular old DVD.
If high-density optical media takes off, I'm sure discs will be encoded at higher bit rates to take advantage of them. But it's not technically necessary.
Of course, all these downloaded movies will only play on one computer, require a connection to the internet each time you want to play the movie (to authenticate), and you will only "own" the movie for 48 hours.
And it'll cost a buck.
Everybody wins.
I wonder if you bothered to read the article, in which he addresses that very point?
And you care about this ... why?
Here's my theory: You're a brand bitch. Your rock of choice is this thing you mentioned called "AMD64." (No idea what that is. Never heard of it. I'm taking your word for it that it's a real thing.) You care about this brand for absolutely no practical reason. "My brand is better than yours," you say. "My brand has more googs," where "googs" are something that nobody gives a shit about. But, by God, your brand has more of them.
That's my theory. You're just a brand bitch.
It would solve a lot of distribution problems. It would create a lot more user-experience problems.
Apple is not in the business of making it easy for third-party developers to ship lousy software.
Yes, yes, you're very pretty. All the other kids are just jealous.
What about the part where you didn't take into consideration that if I'm using Windows, I have to remember to _not_ do option-shift-hyphen and instead hold down the alt key and strike 0151 on the keypad
Isn't that your problem? Your inability to type isn't something that particularly interests me.
Let me know when you think you can typeset something like that in less than a couple of hours (which was how long the TeX run took), 'kay?
Sigh. Still not getting it. It's not automation. It's art. You don't get bonus points for being fast.
Are you not going to try to provide an example of a textual page which can't be done in TeX?
Of course not, because for all I know, TeX is capable of describing any printed page you can imagine. But so is PostScript; so is PDF. That's not the point. The point is that TeX is completely obsolete. Its liabilities vastly, vastly outweigh any possible imaginable advantage that it might once have had.
Why should you understand this? You think computer automation is still the neatest thing since sliced bread. Like I said, you're stuck in 1979.
Nope, wrong. AAC is an open standard. FairPlay is a rights-management system that's got nothing to do with AAC. It's implemented as a component of QuickTime.
There's no reason, if you had access to the encryption software, that you couldn't produce a FairPlay-protected AIFF file, or a FairPlay-protected MPEG-4 movie.