You know what, I think my earlier post was crap. I installed it on my work machine and noticed no perceptible difference in startup or app startup times the first time I booted. It may still do those things, but they don't appear to affect startup times. I'm installing on my home machine right now, but I expect a similar experience.
So, why would your machine all of a sudden slow down? You could try to force OS X to rebuild the caches by running
You can also run "dmesg" to see if there are any error messages showing up during boot.
If you are still having problems, you would be better off posting to the Machintoshian Achaia. There are some pretty helpful folks over there and it is much more responsive to these kinds of problems then SlashDot.
Try rebooting again. The first time after a major system upgrade (kernel replacement versus just a security patch), it probably invalidates the kext cache, so it has to probe to see what all is there.
Regarding app lauches, with new system libraries it would probably have to fix the prebindings, which would be a similar situation to above. If they aren't faster on subsequent launches (after a reboot; of course they will be faster if they are still cached in RAM), I would be surprised and like to see objective data.
Jobs' comment that "a legal alternative to stealing music hadn't been invented until six months ago" takes "arguable" to new heights.
When you quote someone, you might want to ensure that it is something they actually said. It might not fit your argument as well, but it will greatly increase your credibility.
If you read the whole interview, you will see Jobs' is talking about a legal alternative that offers the same benefits as illegally downloading music. In fact, he says he is talking about (and this is a quote from the article) "a legal alternative that offers those same benefits [of illegal downloads]."
He doesn't say instant gratification is a right, he simply points out it is something people want in digital music and something that can be provided legally. I don't see the problem, but maybe I am missing something.
You're also benefitting from a paycheck, should your employer have access to that, too? There is a tradeoff in working at most jobs beyond just monetary compensation. That includes experience. Companies should have no rights to anything an employee produces in their own time, with their own resources, using their own ideas and experience. I think non-compete clauses are reasonable, but trying to lay claim to every idea in an employees head is not, and it stifles new ideas. Why bother working on developing anything in your free time if you are just working for your employee with no compensation?
"I would really never have considered buying a mac before OSX (come on, they didn't even have a command line!)...."
Dude, MPW! You obviously didn't know any hardcore-geek Mac users. Before switching to Linux, that is what I used. It rocked! It was probably the most integrated CLI and GUI ever. You could close windows from the command line, you could send Apple Events, you could copy things to the clipboard, you could control Macs remotely with a remote shell. It was completely odd and totally Mac. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it kicked the ass of DOS. Good times...
Maybe you should read the claims, too. Donald Luskin's (alleged, I don't know if this has been confirmed yet) attorney isn't claiming Atrios said anything libelous (just unfortunate). Read the e-mail. Then, maybe, you can express your thoughts on the subject.
No, he is abusing his legal rights to out Atrios, who blogs anonymously. He is trying to punish Atrios for using his free speech rights and cause a chilling effect on other anonymous bloggers. There are many excellent posts from both the left and right of the political spectrum on why this is a despicable thing. Try reading some of them.
VPC was a platform that ran Windows as well as Linux, etc. Intel has a platform that runs Windows as well as Linux, etc. If Microsoft bought x86 and stopped supporting Linux, etc., would you still argue they weren't illegally using their monopoly power to strangle competitors? I think most people would see that as an illegal use of monopoly power, as is this. The scale is smaller, but it seems like the action is the same.
Part of the problem is that they didn't just not add support for other OSes, they actively removed support for those other OSes.
This appears to be inspired by the Wal-Mart sketch with Jennifer Garner and Amy Poehler (featuring Seth Meyers) from the 2/13/03 episode of Saturday Night Live. The major link, besides the theme, is the bottled water.
Here is a transcript and here is a WMV version. The map of North Wal-Mart is a riot. Not great, but pretty good for SNL.
Read your links. CmdrTaco is the only one that uses the 14 TFlops number and he only does it in the headline. The summary and the linked article never say 14 TFlops and the linked article stresses that efficiency isn't constant as you add machines to a cluster. Most people have the sense to discount Slashdot editors' hyperbole, so I think the original poster's claim that the performance was never stated to be 17 (or 14) TFlops is correct. No one involved in the project made any predictions. They were very careful not to.
The specs still claim 6 hours. Maybe that page wasn't up when you looked. The battery capacity is up 3 watt-hours over the previous, 50 to 47 for the old iBook (and the new PowerBook 12").
As far as actual length, 3 hours under normal use is much closer. That is what I get on my iBook 500. It depends on what you do, of course. As with all laptop manufacturers, those battery life claims are the absolute maximum; probably backlight one above off and left to sit there for the entire time. But the Apples have been getting Centrino battery life for years.
I haven't imported any MusicMatch MP3s into iTunes, but I have imported a bunch of files that friends have encoded with various Linux and Windows encoders and never had a problem with the ID3 tags. That would suggest that the problem is with MusicMatch rather than with iTunes.
The way buying an Intel machine locks you into a platform? Macs run Linux, *BSD, BeOS, etc. (AmigaOS?) You are much more locked in on a Wintel box. Apple gives away their development tools. The underlying OS is completely open-source. They use a lot of third-party open source software that can easily be exchanged or upgraded (sendmail, OpenSSL). If there is a security flaw in the OS, you can easily fix it yourself (all of the network code is open source, likewise the lower-level security code). That seems like a big advantage to me.
Another of the advantages for me is the hardware. My main machine is a 400mhz G3 I bought first off the line over four and a half years ago. It still runs everything I want (except the latest games, but I actually consider that an advantage - it is a huge productivity boost); it actually runs faster with Panther. I am able to get done everything I want to get done on this machine. Compiling requires some patience, but I can watch a movie while it chugs away in the background. I have found that the lifespan of an Intel machine running Windows is much shorter. I spent more, but when you spread it over 4 or 5 years, it isn't much. It has been a wise investment, in my experience.
Ha ha ha, somebody does read my posts. I don't think I could have said it better myself. : )
Follow the links in parent for more info. They will consider other OSes in the future, but for now Mac OS X was the only thing that full supported the Power Mac G5s and time was of the essence. Plus, as I have said before, OS X isn't a bad choice for performance. It has been improving by leaps and bounds and all of the stuff you're not using gets swapped out to disk anyway. I'd like to see some kernel performance numbers for 10.3 versus Linux. I'm sure Linux still has the edge in most things, but I'd guess not by much.
Well, that would be smart planning. But I wonder if it is making lemonade from lemons? After all, there was no rackmount option with the G5, so they were pretty much stuck with the desktop form factor. I wonder if given the choice, the reusability of the desktops would outweigh the extra space required (less density also means less stringent cooling). It would be an interesting study, especially since one of the design goals for this project appears to be low cost.
Well, that is reasonable, but they are using a stock install according to Dr. Aref, as I note here. And isn't that much better advertising than using a custom-built OS X or Linux?
BTW, if someone was interested in building a custom OS X, they can just use Darwin, which omits all of the Apple niceties and for which, of course, source is available.
Why don't you think Mac OS X is very high performance? Don't you think that if Apple could gain some performance benefits in OS X, they would roll it in to the OS so all their customers could benefit rather than trying to make a bunch of special builds?
The GUI doesn't suck up any additional resources, except perhaps a small bit of RAM that is wired. Everything else will get swapped to disk and the GUI only sucks up CPU if you use it. So why is OS X a poor choice?
No, Dr. Aref, the Dean of VT's College of Engineers, has said they are using the stock install of OS X, which at the time was 10.2.7. See my post here for references.
The quote is from the Mellanox CEO and he is probably using Linux to appeal to a wider audience than Mac OS X would.
No, he just screwed up the name. It is Paul's Movie Place. The Cinerama was bought and restored to glory by Paul Allen, not Bill Gates, and it is the one location in western Washington playing the trilogy.
Macs are much easier to administer and use in the classroom, thanks to Apple Remote Desktop. If you have never used this, it is pretty slick. It goes way beyond the normal remote desktop software like VNC or Windows Remote Desktop. And it is designed with education in mind. Some of the cool features include the ability to request help, for the teacher to display anyone's screen on everyone else's screens, to lock students screens (eliminates the issue of students goofing off on the computers while the teacher is trying to teach), and for the teacher to monitor students' screens (so you never know when the teacher may be watching you). And it helps administrators by creating reports on machine states and simplifying the rollout of software updates. I haven't seen anything close to this on the PC and I am pretty sure it doesn't exist.
Plus, Macs are very easy to lockdown. You can specify what apps a user can run, give them disk quotas, etc. Use an LDAP directory for network login (just use the OS X Server GUI admin tools) and you're set. For people who haven't had the pleasure of working on a Mac network, it is a breeze.
I know schools mainly look at price, but you simply can't do most of this stuff on a PC and you definitely can't do it as easily or as cheaply (OS X Server w/ unlimited client licenses is $999; how much would the school pay in client licenses if it went with a Windows solution?). That is why Apple has been winning a lot of the EDU deals.
The author has already replied, but I just want to point out: Megahertz does matter when talking about chips in the same architecture.
It should be patently obvious that a 2Ghz SparcIII is faster than a 1Ghz SparcIII. The original post was just saying that Sun needs faster Sparcs, and the only way to get a faster chip without changing the architecture is to increase the clock speed.
Slashdot Mirror
So, why would your machine all of a sudden slow down? You could try to force OS X to rebuild the caches by running You can also run "dmesg" to see if there are any error messages showing up during boot.
If you are still having problems, you would be better off posting to the Machintoshian Achaia. There are some pretty helpful folks over there and it is much more responsive to these kinds of problems then SlashDot.
Try rebooting again. The first time after a major system upgrade (kernel replacement versus just a security patch), it probably invalidates the kext cache, so it has to probe to see what all is there.
Regarding app lauches, with new system libraries it would probably have to fix the prebindings, which would be a similar situation to above. If they aren't faster on subsequent launches (after a reboot; of course they will be faster if they are still cached in RAM), I would be surprised and like to see objective data.
I'd like to know if that makes no difference.
Jobs' comment that "a legal alternative to stealing music hadn't been invented until six months ago" takes "arguable" to new heights. When you quote someone, you might want to ensure that it is something they actually said. It might not fit your argument as well, but it will greatly increase your credibility. If you read the whole interview, you will see Jobs' is talking about a legal alternative that offers the same benefits as illegally downloading music. In fact, he says he is talking about (and this is a quote from the article) "a legal alternative that offers those same benefits [of illegal downloads]." He doesn't say instant gratification is a right, he simply points out it is something people want in digital music and something that can be provided legally. I don't see the problem, but maybe I am missing something.
You're also benefitting from a paycheck, should your employer have access to that, too? There is a tradeoff in working at most jobs beyond just monetary compensation. That includes experience. Companies should have no rights to anything an employee produces in their own time, with their own resources, using their own ideas and experience. I think non-compete clauses are reasonable, but trying to lay claim to every idea in an employees head is not, and it stifles new ideas. Why bother working on developing anything in your free time if you are just working for your employee with no compensation?
"I would really never have considered buying a mac before OSX (come on, they didn't even have a command line!)...."
Dude, MPW! You obviously didn't know any hardcore-geek Mac users. Before switching to Linux, that is what I used. It rocked! It was probably the most integrated CLI and GUI ever. You could close windows from the command line, you could send Apple Events, you could copy things to the clipboard, you could control Macs remotely with a remote shell. It was completely odd and totally Mac. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it kicked the ass of DOS. Good times...
Maybe you should read the claims, too. Donald Luskin's (alleged, I don't know if this has been confirmed yet) attorney isn't claiming Atrios said anything libelous (just unfortunate). Read the e-mail. Then, maybe, you can express your thoughts on the subject.
For anyone else reading who might be confused by JamesKPolk's ignorance on the issue, see these:
Here is what a Yale professor of Constitutional and First Amendment law has to say. Here is the original e-mail sent to Atrios, and is where Atrios e-mailed Luskin with an offer to take down any specific comments he found libelous (but not the whole article or the non-libelous comments).
No, he is abusing his legal rights to out Atrios, who blogs anonymously. He is trying to punish Atrios for using his free speech rights and cause a chilling effect on other anonymous bloggers. There are many excellent posts from both the left and right of the political spectrum on why this is a despicable thing. Try reading some of them.
VPC was a platform that ran Windows as well as Linux, etc. Intel has a platform that runs Windows as well as Linux, etc. If Microsoft bought x86 and stopped supporting Linux, etc., would you still argue they weren't illegally using their monopoly power to strangle competitors? I think most people would see that as an illegal use of monopoly power, as is this. The scale is smaller, but it seems like the action is the same.
Part of the problem is that they didn't just not add support for other OSes, they actively removed support for those other OSes.
This appears to be inspired by the Wal-Mart sketch with Jennifer Garner and Amy Poehler (featuring Seth Meyers) from the 2/13/03 episode of Saturday Night Live. The major link, besides the theme, is the bottled water.
Here is a transcript and here is a WMV version. The map of North Wal-Mart is a riot. Not great, but pretty good for SNL.
Read your links. CmdrTaco is the only one that uses the 14 TFlops number and he only does it in the headline. The summary and the linked article never say 14 TFlops and the linked article stresses that efficiency isn't constant as you add machines to a cluster. Most people have the sense to discount Slashdot editors' hyperbole, so I think the original poster's claim that the performance was never stated to be 17 (or 14) TFlops is correct. No one involved in the project made any predictions. They were very careful not to.
Mfago's point is a good one.
The specs still claim 6 hours. Maybe that page wasn't up when you looked. The battery capacity is up 3 watt-hours over the previous, 50 to 47 for the old iBook (and the new PowerBook 12").
As far as actual length, 3 hours under normal use is much closer. That is what I get on my iBook 500. It depends on what you do, of course. As with all laptop manufacturers, those battery life claims are the absolute maximum; probably backlight one above off and left to sit there for the entire time. But the Apples have been getting Centrino battery life for years.
Because there is only one big name 'conservative' (Bush) drawing all the 'liberal' votes and three big name 'liberals'.
As I recall, he didn't do to well against just one big-name liberal.
And when it puts an album in the compilations directory, it stores them by album title rather than the usual artist name->album title.
I haven't imported any MusicMatch MP3s into iTunes, but I have imported a bunch of files that friends have encoded with various Linux and Windows encoders and never had a problem with the ID3 tags. That would suggest that the problem is with MusicMatch rather than with iTunes.
The way buying an Intel machine locks you into a platform? Macs run Linux, *BSD, BeOS, etc. (AmigaOS?) You are much more locked in on a Wintel box. Apple gives away their development tools. The underlying OS is completely open-source. They use a lot of third-party open source software that can easily be exchanged or upgraded (sendmail, OpenSSL). If there is a security flaw in the OS, you can easily fix it yourself (all of the network code is open source, likewise the lower-level security code). That seems like a big advantage to me.
Another of the advantages for me is the hardware. My main machine is a 400mhz G3 I bought first off the line over four and a half years ago. It still runs everything I want (except the latest games, but I actually consider that an advantage - it is a huge productivity boost); it actually runs faster with Panther. I am able to get done everything I want to get done on this machine. Compiling requires some patience, but I can watch a movie while it chugs away in the background. I have found that the lifespan of an Intel machine running Windows is much shorter. I spent more, but when you spread it over 4 or 5 years, it isn't much. It has been a wise investment, in my experience.
I bet you think Apple's first product was the Macintosh.
Ha ha ha, somebody does read my posts. I don't think I could have said it better myself. : )
Follow the links in parent for more info. They will consider other OSes in the future, but for now Mac OS X was the only thing that full supported the Power Mac G5s and time was of the essence. Plus, as I have said before, OS X isn't a bad choice for performance. It has been improving by leaps and bounds and all of the stuff you're not using gets swapped out to disk anyway. I'd like to see some kernel performance numbers for 10.3 versus Linux. I'm sure Linux still has the edge in most things, but I'd guess not by much.
Well, that would be smart planning. But I wonder if it is making lemonade from lemons? After all, there was no rackmount option with the G5, so they were pretty much stuck with the desktop form factor. I wonder if given the choice, the reusability of the desktops would outweigh the extra space required (less density also means less stringent cooling). It would be an interesting study, especially since one of the design goals for this project appears to be low cost.
Thanks for the info!
Well, that is reasonable, but they are using a stock install according to Dr. Aref, as I note here. And isn't that much better advertising than using a custom-built OS X or Linux?
BTW, if someone was interested in building a custom OS X, they can just use Darwin, which omits all of the Apple niceties and for which, of course, source is available.
Why don't you think Mac OS X is very high performance? Don't you think that if Apple could gain some performance benefits in OS X, they would roll it in to the OS so all their customers could benefit rather than trying to make a bunch of special builds?
The GUI doesn't suck up any additional resources, except perhaps a small bit of RAM that is wired. Everything else will get swapped to disk and the GUI only sucks up CPU if you use it. So why is OS X a poor choice?
That is interesting, but it is the first time I've heard it. Could you provide a source? Thanks.
No, Dr. Aref, the Dean of VT's College of Engineers, has said they are using the stock install of OS X, which at the time was 10.2.7. See my post here for references.
The quote is from the Mellanox CEO and he is probably using Linux to appeal to a wider audience than Mac OS X would.
No, he just screwed up the name. It is Paul's Movie Place. The Cinerama was bought and restored to glory by Paul Allen, not Bill Gates, and it is the one location in western Washington playing the trilogy.
Macs are much easier to administer and use in the classroom, thanks to Apple Remote Desktop. If you have never used this, it is pretty slick. It goes way beyond the normal remote desktop software like VNC or Windows Remote Desktop. And it is designed with education in mind. Some of the cool features include the ability to request help, for the teacher to display anyone's screen on everyone else's screens, to lock students screens (eliminates the issue of students goofing off on the computers while the teacher is trying to teach), and for the teacher to monitor students' screens (so you never know when the teacher may be watching you). And it helps administrators by creating reports on machine states and simplifying the rollout of software updates. I haven't seen anything close to this on the PC and I am pretty sure it doesn't exist.
Plus, Macs are very easy to lockdown. You can specify what apps a user can run, give them disk quotas, etc. Use an LDAP directory for network login (just use the OS X Server GUI admin tools) and you're set. For people who haven't had the pleasure of working on a Mac network, it is a breeze.
I know schools mainly look at price, but you simply can't do most of this stuff on a PC and you definitely can't do it as easily or as cheaply (OS X Server w/ unlimited client licenses is $999; how much would the school pay in client licenses if it went with a Windows solution?). That is why Apple has been winning a lot of the EDU deals.
The author has already replied, but I just want to point out:
Megahertz does matter when talking about chips in the same architecture.
It should be patently obvious that a 2Ghz SparcIII is faster than a 1Ghz SparcIII. The original post was just saying that Sun needs faster Sparcs, and the only way to get a faster chip without changing the architecture is to increase the clock speed.