It seems that HP is far from alone in seeing Linux as a valid, cheap, better-performing alternative to Microsoft OS's on the server-side, but (like much of the industry) doesn't think Linux has any business as a client/workstation OS. I think that's a mistaken view, but it's a common one. Of course, what they're failing to see, is that even a server may (depending on purpose) need to print from time to time.
Microsoft's only 'revolution' was when it conned Seattle Computer Co. out of DOS and sold it to IBM. Absolutely, that revolutionized the industry by having a competitor to the Apple Computer that was more mass-marketable.
On the other hand, since then, all MS has done is stomp all over other companies, buy some of them out, and call their products 'Microsoft Innovation.'
If Microsoft truly competes on its merits, and makes both great apps and a great OS, then a split shouldn't hurt it. The only way in which a split will hurt it, is if it has in fact been basing most of its Windows apps on undocumented features of the Windows OS/APIs, thus wielding monopoly power unfairly and keeping competitors from standing a chance.
So, if the breakup hurts MS, it's because MS was doing things it shouldn't have, and it couldn't survive in an environment in which it actually had to compete on its merits.
If they don't, and it gets kicked back to Appellate court, the court of appeals will be pissed at Jackson, and will probably be even more biased towards MS than they already were.
This Supreme Court should, I think, agree with Jackson, but if this lasts into a (shudder) "dubyah" term, I think the Silver Spoon Boy will try his hardest to politicize the case and influence it in MS's favor.
Whatever happened to separation of Executive and Judicial brances??
"And I believe, and the people that we talk to about this, we believe, that the minute some of these companies become active, when they basically come to a point that they become fully funcitonal, we believe that there will be technology and a way to go after them in the way they can invent this technology and make it untraceable."
Lars just doesn't get it, and I'm sure their lawyers don't get it either. There may never *be* anyone to sue. They can try to sue a thousand people, like the MPAA did over DeCSS, and that will only spread it around more. Maybe Gnutella has some holes that would allow Metallica to find out who's pirating their mp3s (I don't know if Gnutella has any such holes, I'm just speaking hypothetically) but there's never going to be a company that you can sue for damages. And holes can be patched up.
Sorry, Metallica, it's going to stop being possible to sue *somebody* whenever you feel you've been screwed.
Well, stability is almost impossible to test (unless you have a misconfigured system that keeps crashing) in a lab environment. You either have to rely on anecdotal evidence, but then it's hard to separate out the ranting (i.e. the idiots who spell Mac 'MAC' and say that they crash all the time, but haven't used one since 1994, or the morons who think Linux doesn't hav a GUI), or you have to try running purposefully misbehaving apps (i.e. a program that walks all over memory or somethign) but that's not a real-world test.
Bitmaps, bitmaps, bitmaps... until Linux has some good res-independent (vector) tools, publishing is an industry that won't touch it. Whenever someone mentions that the Mac is better for graphics, someone tries to mention the GIMP... but the GIMP doesn't do what Quark, Illustrator, InDesign, Freehand, etc. do. And unfortunately for Linux, Mac OS X's graphics capability (PDF everywhere) is going to be yet something else to catch up with.
iCab on Mac OS takes a different, very successful approach to this. It lets you skip images that are contained in a specified subdirectory, say/ad or/advert, as well as images from known ad-servers. In practice, this blocks about 95% of ad images. The only bad side-effect I've had is on The Register which puts some strange images (like the little cartoon graphics in their BOFH features) in/advert for some reason. Still, this approach by and large works great, and it's totally user configurable.
"however I don't think that just Photoshop benchmarks with a plugin which makes use of a Mac specific co-processor tell the whole story."
Fair enough, but it is technically not a co-processor. It's an additional execution unit within the main processor. Moreover, several parts of the operating system already support it - certain memory operations *systemwide* as of Mac OS 9.0.2, for example. Under Mac OS X, much more of the OS will be Altivec-enhanced, which will give a big speed boost.
Yes, applications have to be written specifically to take the BEST advantage of Altivec (to use the new instruction set, vector permutes and the like) but they only need to be recompiled with the latest Codewarrior to take SOME advantage - to treat the Altivec unit as an additional fp unit. Obviously full altivec optimization is best, but the point is that there can be some improvements with just a recompile.
Under Mac OS X, a *lot* will be done with system services - not just process and I/O management with the kernel, but Quicktime, Aqua, OpenGL, and possibly even the system libraries for Carbon and Cocoa will be heavily Altivec-optimized. OpenGL already is under Mac OS 9. So it's a little like the shift to PowerPC... at first, only a couple apps supported it, and Photoshop needed a plugin for support! Over time, it got better and better, however. The same will happen with Altivec.
Incidentally, the same system services that are Altivec-optimized should also be MP-capable, and applications that make use of those services will see those benefits.
What Apple was illustrating with that ad, is that the G4's altivec unit can process data in 128 bit chunks (or 2 64 bit chunks at a time, or 4 32 bit chunks...). It can do vector permute ops as well, integer or FP. It's basically a far, far better SIMD than Intel's MMX stuff.
I could be mistaken about which distribution, but I'm pretty sure that Black Lab Linux (is that from Yellow Dog?) supports Altivec. That doesn't, unfortunately, mean that any of the distribution is altivec-native, but just that you can write altivec code and have it run. An altivec-enhanced (for memory access, etc) linuxPPC kernel is probably significantly farther away than is the altivec-enhanced Mac OS X.
Apple's sold multi processor systems (dual; Daystar sold quads) before, but the Mac OS at present has very poor MP support. Mac OS 9 is somewhat improved; some Finder operations will take advantage of a second processor, as will all Quicktime operations; applications that are explicitly parallel get a big boost (Photoshop, for example). However, you don't get what you get in Linux, where a given single-threaded process runs on the lowest-loaded processor at the time.
However, I don't think Apple's going to be SELLING these machines in May or June. I think Apple's going to be demonstrating them to developers, showing what a boost Mac OS X gets with a dual or quad G4 machine - and what a boost a dual or quad machine gets under OS X. Since OS X is slated for release sometime this summer (probably Macworld Expo New York in July), that will likely tie the two together. I'm sure these machines will run Mac OS 9 as well, but don't expect too much.
That said, the G4 is still far ahead of twice-as-'fast' Pentium IIIs - several reviews have shown that, with Altivec-native programs like Photoshop, a G4 at 450MHz creams a Pentium III at 1GHz, by 30% in some instances. With Mac OS X on dual or quad G4s, and with much better G4s (dual altivec units, and deeper pipelining to allow higher clock speeds) coming this fall, the Mac platform's about to get a massive boost.
That said, I fear that Apple will price these dual or quad machines way out of reach. An additional processor doesn't add that much to the price - maybe $500 reasonably. The smart approach with MP is not to double up on the very fastest chips; they just cost too much. Rather, it's better to step down the clock speed a little bit to allow for more processors at a reasonable price point. Thus, I think dual G4s at only 400 or 450MHz would make a lot of sense, and could be reasonably priced. I say could be; I have little faith in Apple to do this, though Apple's been much better about price-performance lately than they used to be.
Also, there are very often going to be trade secrets from *other* companies that prevent the company in question from opening up the specs. In other words, very often it's hard to 'open source' (I use quotes because in the case of hardware, 'source' is a misnomer) things that weren't designed to be open source, because very often you're licensing code from someone else who won't let you open it up.
Well, they've spotted it... I wonder how long until asteroid mining becomes somewhat feasible? An interesting question will be which becomes more valuable to mine from space... ore, or ice? (as Earth pollutes its water supplies).
Then there's the tantalizing possibility of heavier metals... i.e. gold... in some of those asteroids.
I remember YEARS ago, at a Macworld Expo, GraphSim demoed F/A-18 Hornet (which was mac-only at the time) running on a Quadra 840AV (so this was about 1993) on four monitors - one for front view, one for each side, and one for the instruments below, as I recall. It was pretty damned cool, both as a demo of what a well writtten game can take advantage of, and what the Mac OS could do way back then. Unfortunately, Hornet 3.0 was released for both Mac and Windows, and they removed the multi-monitor capability from the Mac version... oh well.
Does anyone else remember this one? Someone frankensteined an ancient Apple//e into accepting a Powermac 9500 motherboard with a ~200MHz 604e (this was a couple years ago, I think). They actually did a really nice job - the reset key on the//e's keyboard mapped to the power key on the Mac, and a bunch of other things were rather elegantly handled.
It seems like the BBC article confused two ideas. One is that the universe is 'flat' in the sense that it will stop expanding, but will never collapse in a 'big crunch.' This is a major result. The article also mentions the universe being geometrically flat, which has to do with the path light takes, and how the structure of spacetime is shaped. This is an entirely different question, and one which is NOT answered, as I understand it, by this experiment.
As far as a GUI, the best way to achieve an easy to use system is to have a consistent real-world metaphor for something a novice will be familiar with. The best example, and the only GUI to get this somewhat right so far, is the Mac OS. Of course, over the years, Mac OS has gotten much more complex and has strayed from this metaphor. Operating Systems are far more complex now than they were in 1984, and it's questionable whether a GUI could ever have a nice, clean, elegant, consistent GUI now and still accomplish everything it needs to accomplish.
I remember solar panels for various Powerbook models years ago. For the Powerbook 1400, there was a folding module that folded up to fit in the 'bookcover' slot (though you had to unfold it to use it).
This isn't exactly new... though it's of course a great idea.
Ok, IPv4 uses 32-bit numbers (four dotted-bytes). IPv6 uses 16 dotted bytes (128 bits). I don't see why the current IPv4 network can't be treated as one network within IPv6, with 12 of the bytes set to a constant. That would make translation pretty easy, though of course software still has to be updated. I.e. 128.45.3.25 for example would map to 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.128.45.3.25, and the range that's all ones would gradually expand to include other networks.
The current Mac OS doesn't have any type of HAL, and driver development is messy. However, a module to implement a limited HAL that allowed WinDriver modules to work in it, wouldn't be impossible.
That said, Mac OS X's driver model basically has drivers act as clients of the Mach kernel, AFAIK. I don't see any reason why WinDriver couldn't be modified to create Mac OS X drivers. However, WinDriver focuses on x86 drivers. They'd either need to create 'fat' drivers (for x86 and PPC) or have it compile PPC drivers as an option.
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It seems that HP is far from alone in seeing Linux as a valid, cheap, better-performing alternative to Microsoft OS's on the server-side, but (like much of the industry) doesn't think Linux has any business as a client/workstation OS. I think that's a mistaken view, but it's a common one. Of course, what they're failing to see, is that even a server may (depending on purpose) need to print from time to time.
Microsoft's only 'revolution' was when it conned Seattle Computer Co. out of DOS and sold it to IBM. Absolutely, that revolutionized the industry by having a competitor to the Apple Computer that was more mass-marketable.
On the other hand, since then, all MS has done is stomp all over other companies, buy some of them out, and call their products 'Microsoft Innovation.'
If Microsoft truly competes on its merits, and makes both great apps and a great OS, then a split shouldn't hurt it. The only way in which a split will hurt it, is if it has in fact been basing most of its Windows apps on undocumented features of the Windows OS/APIs, thus wielding monopoly power unfairly and keeping competitors from standing a chance.
So, if the breakup hurts MS, it's because MS was doing things it shouldn't have, and it couldn't survive in an environment in which it actually had to compete on its merits.
Kinda like a leap of faith, eh??
If they don't, and it gets kicked back to Appellate court, the court of appeals will be pissed at Jackson, and will probably be even more biased towards MS than they already were.
This Supreme Court should, I think, agree with Jackson, but if this lasts into a (shudder) "dubyah" term, I think the Silver Spoon Boy will try his hardest to politicize the case and influence it in MS's favor.
Whatever happened to separation of Executive and Judicial brances??
"Wow, so now Linux is a legal entity? Last I checked, it was just a kernel... "
Watch out, they'll misunderstand and think you said 'colonel' and try suing the U.S. Army.
I quote...
"And I believe, and the people that we talk to about this, we believe, that the minute some of these companies become active, when they basically come to a point that they become fully funcitonal, we believe that there will be technology and a way to go after them in the way they can invent this technology and make it untraceable."
Lars just doesn't get it, and I'm sure their lawyers don't get it either. There may never *be* anyone to sue. They can try to sue a thousand people, like the MPAA did over DeCSS, and that will only spread it around more. Maybe Gnutella has some holes that would allow Metallica to find out who's pirating their mp3s (I don't know if Gnutella has any such holes, I'm just speaking hypothetically) but there's never going to be a company that you can sue for damages. And holes can be patched up.
Sorry, Metallica, it's going to stop being possible to sue *somebody* whenever you feel you've been screwed.
Well, stability is almost impossible to test (unless you have a misconfigured system that keeps crashing) in a lab environment. You either have to rely on anecdotal evidence, but then it's hard to separate out the ranting (i.e. the idiots who spell Mac 'MAC' and say that they crash all the time, but haven't used one since 1994, or the morons who think Linux doesn't hav a GUI), or you have to try running purposefully misbehaving apps (i.e. a program that walks all over memory or somethign) but that's not a real-world test.
Bitmaps, bitmaps, bitmaps... until Linux has some good res-independent (vector) tools, publishing is an industry that won't touch it. Whenever someone mentions that the Mac is better for graphics, someone tries to mention the GIMP... but the GIMP doesn't do what Quark, Illustrator, InDesign, Freehand, etc. do. And unfortunately for Linux, Mac OS X's graphics capability (PDF everywhere) is going to be yet something else to catch up with.
iCab on Mac OS takes a different, very successful approach to this. It lets you skip images that are contained in a specified subdirectory, say /ad or /advert, as well as images from known ad-servers. In practice, this blocks about 95% of ad images. The only bad side-effect I've had is on The Register which puts some strange images (like the little cartoon graphics in their BOFH features) in /advert for some reason. Still, this approach by and large works great, and it's totally user configurable.
"however I don't think that just Photoshop benchmarks with a plugin which makes use of a Mac specific co-processor tell the whole story."
Fair enough, but it is technically not a co-processor. It's an additional execution unit within the main processor. Moreover, several parts of the operating system already support it - certain memory operations *systemwide* as of Mac OS 9.0.2, for example. Under Mac OS X, much more of the OS will be Altivec-enhanced, which will give a big speed boost.
Yes, applications have to be written specifically to take the BEST advantage of Altivec (to use the new instruction set, vector permutes and the like) but they only need to be recompiled with the latest Codewarrior to take SOME advantage - to treat the Altivec unit as an additional fp unit. Obviously full altivec optimization is best, but the point is that there can be some improvements with just a recompile.
Under Mac OS X, a *lot* will be done with system services - not just process and I/O management with the kernel, but Quicktime, Aqua, OpenGL, and possibly even the system libraries for Carbon and Cocoa will be heavily Altivec-optimized. OpenGL already is under Mac OS 9. So it's a little like the shift to PowerPC... at first, only a couple apps supported it, and Photoshop needed a plugin for support! Over time, it got better and better, however. The same will happen with Altivec.
Incidentally, the same system services that are Altivec-optimized should also be MP-capable, and applications that make use of those services will see those benefits.
What Apple was illustrating with that ad, is that the G4's altivec unit can process data in 128 bit chunks (or 2 64 bit chunks at a time, or 4 32 bit chunks...). It can do vector permute ops as well, integer or FP. It's basically a far, far better SIMD than Intel's MMX stuff.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2000/04/17/BU1016CH.DTL "Power Mac Bests the Gigahertz PCs"
Of course this is Photoshop-specific; Microsoft Orifice will always run faster on Microsoft operating systems, because Microsoft wants it that way. I couldn't point you to a good thorough benchmark that's cross-platform, sorry.
I could be mistaken about which distribution, but I'm pretty sure that Black Lab Linux (is that from Yellow Dog?) supports Altivec. That doesn't, unfortunately, mean that any of the distribution is altivec-native, but just that you can write altivec code and have it run. An altivec-enhanced (for memory access, etc) linuxPPC kernel is probably significantly farther away than is the altivec-enhanced Mac OS X.
Apple's sold multi processor systems (dual; Daystar sold quads) before, but the Mac OS at present has very poor MP support. Mac OS 9 is somewhat improved; some Finder operations will take advantage of a second processor, as will all Quicktime operations; applications that are explicitly parallel get a big boost (Photoshop, for example). However, you don't get what you get in Linux, where a given single-threaded process runs on the lowest-loaded processor at the time.
However, I don't think Apple's going to be SELLING these machines in May or June. I think Apple's going to be demonstrating them to developers, showing what a boost Mac OS X gets with a dual or quad G4 machine - and what a boost a dual or quad machine gets under OS X. Since OS X is slated for release sometime this summer (probably Macworld Expo New York in July), that will likely tie the two together. I'm sure these machines will run Mac OS 9 as well, but don't expect too much.
That said, the G4 is still far ahead of twice-as-'fast' Pentium IIIs - several reviews have shown that, with Altivec-native programs like Photoshop, a G4 at 450MHz creams a Pentium III at 1GHz, by 30% in some instances. With Mac OS X on dual or quad G4s, and with much better G4s (dual altivec units, and deeper pipelining to allow higher clock speeds) coming this fall, the Mac platform's about to get a massive boost.
That said, I fear that Apple will price these dual or quad machines way out of reach. An additional processor doesn't add that much to the price - maybe $500 reasonably. The smart approach with MP is not to double up on the very fastest chips; they just cost too much. Rather, it's better to step down the clock speed a little bit to allow for more processors at a reasonable price point. Thus, I think dual G4s at only 400 or 450MHz would make a lot of sense, and could be reasonably priced. I say could be; I have little faith in Apple to do this, though Apple's been much better about price-performance lately than they used to be.
Also, there are very often going to be trade secrets from *other* companies that prevent the company in question from opening up the specs. In other words, very often it's hard to 'open source' (I use quotes because in the case of hardware, 'source' is a misnomer) things that weren't designed to be open source, because very often you're licensing code from someone else who won't let you open it up.
Apparently, according to the specs page, it's MPEG 1, not MPEG 2... hardly the same quality compression as MPEG 2.
Well, they've spotted it... I wonder how long until asteroid mining becomes somewhat feasible? An interesting question will be which becomes more valuable to mine from space... ore, or ice? (as Earth pollutes its water supplies).
Then there's the tantalizing possibility of heavier metals... i.e. gold... in some of those asteroids.
Let's not forget the first (as I'm aware) meatworld hyperlinks... Choose Your Own Adventure books! Hypertext is not a new thing, after all.
I remember YEARS ago, at a Macworld Expo, GraphSim demoed F/A-18 Hornet (which was mac-only at the time) running on a Quadra 840AV (so this was about 1993) on four monitors - one for front view, one for each side, and one for the instruments below, as I recall. It was pretty damned cool, both as a demo of what a well writtten game can take advantage of, and what the Mac OS could do way back then. Unfortunately, Hornet 3.0 was released for both Mac and Windows, and they removed the multi-monitor capability from the Mac version... oh well.
Does anyone else remember this one? Someone frankensteined an ancient Apple //e into accepting a Powermac 9500 motherboard with a ~200MHz 604e (this was a couple years ago, I think). They actually did a really nice job - the reset key on the //e's keyboard mapped to the power key on the Mac, and a bunch of other things were rather elegantly handled.
It seems like the BBC article confused two ideas. One is that the universe is 'flat' in the sense that it will stop expanding, but will never collapse in a 'big crunch.' This is a major result. The article also mentions the universe being geometrically flat, which has to do with the path light takes, and how the structure of spacetime is shaped. This is an entirely different question, and one which is NOT answered, as I understand it, by this experiment.
Someone at the BBC didn't do all their research.
As far as a GUI, the best way to achieve an easy to use system is to have a consistent real-world metaphor for something a novice will be familiar with. The best example, and the only GUI to get this somewhat right so far, is the Mac OS. Of course, over the years, Mac OS has gotten much more complex and has strayed from this metaphor. Operating Systems are far more complex now than they were in 1984, and it's questionable whether a GUI could ever have a nice, clean, elegant, consistent GUI now and still accomplish everything it needs to accomplish.
I remember solar panels for various Powerbook models years ago. For the Powerbook 1400, there was a folding module that folded up to fit in the 'bookcover' slot (though you had to unfold it to use it).
This isn't exactly new... though it's of course a great idea.
Ok, IPv4 uses 32-bit numbers (four dotted-bytes). IPv6 uses 16 dotted bytes (128 bits). I don't see why the current IPv4 network can't be treated as one network within IPv6, with 12 of the bytes set to a constant. That would make translation pretty easy, though of course software still has to be updated. I.e. 128.45.3.25 for example would map to 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.128.45.3.25, and the range that's all ones would gradually expand to include other networks.
The current Mac OS doesn't have any type of HAL, and driver development is messy. However, a module to implement a limited HAL that allowed WinDriver modules to work in it, wouldn't be impossible.
That said, Mac OS X's driver model basically has drivers act as clients of the Mach kernel, AFAIK. I don't see any reason why WinDriver couldn't be modified to create Mac OS X drivers. However, WinDriver focuses on x86 drivers. They'd either need to create 'fat' drivers (for x86 and PPC) or have it compile PPC drivers as an option.
G3 Class solar storm... does that mean it cooks Pentiums? ;-)
Sorry, couldn't resist.