No, let's make your "summary" a little more accurate. The 2Ghz G5 is *very* slightly slower than the older 2.66Ghz P4 -- when running unoptimized code on an unoptimized version of OS X.
As far as I'm concerned, all of this benchmarking is meaningless at this point in time. The G5 is simply too immature of a CPU to benchmark until the software catches up with it.
This same problem came up when Intel first released the Pentium 75Mhz CPUs. Nearly everyone said "This thing isn't even quite as fast as my 486 that costs a lot less!" This also happened when Intel first added "MMX" support to their chips, and when the PIII's first came out as successor to their PII.
Any time you believe the early benchmark results on a new line of CPU, all you find out is that you're not going to get immediate gratification as an "early adopter". So what? This is common knowledge.
Apple fans have every reason to celebrate with the G5's release. It gives Apple a whole new starting point on CPUs they can "ramp up" from, instead of struggling to squeeze some meager improvement from the maxxed-out G4 chip. If you want to use Apple's OS and Apple compatible software - your only option is an Apple computer. Ultimately, that's the key, and explains why some people (myself included!) shelled out thousands for a system (dual CPU G4) that doesn't outperform Intel's best offerings. I want to do things I can't do with anything Intel sells, such as run OS X.
I don't think the original poster was trying to claim that the debate was over "releasing exploits to the public first", or "releasing exploits to the vendor first".
The exploits posted to groups, in an attempt to give a vendor incentive to fix them, are done only *after* the vendor was unresponsive (in 99% of the cases I've seen, anyway).
The "debate" seems to be on if it's right to do this, or if those discovering exploits should just sit on them indefinitely after telling the vendor about them. (EG. If the vendor doesn't think it's worth fixing, you should play along with them and pretend you never found the exploit. After all, the vendor is of the opinion that it's highly unlikely others besides you will find it, as long as you keep your mouth shut.)
Re: girls who prefer geeks?
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The Bug
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I actually modded your post up, because I think it's an interesting point many people discount too quickly.
Women, in general, aren't quite as interested as men in the "nitty gritty" technical details of how things work. Sure, there are exceptions - but not a whole lot of them. This is why you see more guys than gals working in just about any of the troubleshooting/repair fields - whether it's HVAC, computer technician jobs, or auto repair.
On the flip side, this means it's quite likely that they'll find people who *can* do these things well fascinating/interesting, at least initially. (People are always initially intrigued by others who can do things they can't fathom doing themselves. That's why the "Guiness Book of World Records" is always a good seller, and people liked TV shows like "That's Incredible!" or "Ripley's Believe It or Not".)
As you pointed out, a girlfriend who'd end up dumping a guy just because he kept struggling with a computer bug he couldn't fix makes some sense. She probably grew VERY weary of hearing him rant (or even attempt to explain) all the detailed things he was trying to get the problem solved. She just wanted to hear a positive outcome, and didn't get one.
I dunno.... I guess you have to go with whatever works for you. But personally, I find a still better solutuon for something small and stackable, yet cheap, is to buy the "thin client" machines made by Netier (now Wyse) called WinTerms. Units like these use a standard Micro ITX type motherboard and usually have a reasonably fast processor (233Mhz in many cases), often have 128MB of RAM in them by default, as well as some having a laptop-type CD-ROM drive and 3.5" floppy in them. They're whisper quiet since they have no big power supplies. (They use an AC adapter more like what a laptop has, with a round plug with 4 pins that plugs into the back of them.) You can mount a laptop IDE hard drive in them, turn off the booting from flash disk, and it's a full-featured PC. If you want, you can even get creative and use the "disk on chip" flash as a way to make Linux boot from firmware.
I often see the Netier XL2000 and XL1000 type thin clients selling for as little as $35 or so each on eBay, and they don't get bid on very often. (I guess most folks think they're useless except as Citrix "dumb terminals".)
Actually, I think Apple's music store has a built-in (if un-intended) protection against people only buying the "hit" songs and missing out on possible great tunes on the rest of an album.
They usually sell complete albums of songs for much less than it would cost you to buy each song individually for 99 cents.
When you find even 2 songs you like on a given album, you often think "Hmm.... spend about $2.00 for just 2 songs - or get all 12-13 tracks for between $6 and $10?" If you end up only listening to half of the stuff, it was still a fair deal that way.
There's nothing illegal about developing a Linux version that runs on hardware it was never intended to run on.
The whole issue here is somebody threatening a company with releasing destructive code unless the company does what they wish.
I really don't see the reason for a big uproar over making Linux run on the X-Box anyway? To me, Linux is promising because it already runs on so much hardware. You can practically take an old PC out of anyone's trash can or closet, put Linux on it, and make it useful again. Why spend $149 or more for an X-Box, which has numerous barriers to ease of installation of Linux anyway, and opt to use that as your Linux box? it's a *game console*, and in my mind, is best treated as such.
Next thing you know, they'll be trying to sell conversion kits to make your screwdrivers into drills and hammers.
Honestly, with today's low hardware prices, I don't quite understand all the bickering about XP not supporting this or that device properly.
Fact is, it seems to support practically everything made for a PC in the last 2-3 years. Almost all the headaches are with trying to make older hardware work. (EG. I have an Epson ES-600C parallel port color scanner. There's no support for anything newer than Win '98 or NT 4.0. Yeah, it pissed me off for a little while, because it's a perfectly good scanner and retailed for $799 back in 1996 or so when we first bought it. But finally, I just broke down and went scanner shopping. For $149, I got a USB 2.0 compatible Canon scanner that's easily 5x faster at scanning documents, gives excellent results, and integrates better with XP than any of Epson's older drivers/control panels would have.)
If you're not just pirating your copy of XP, you're paying more for it than what the average new video card costs.
If all this talk of spending more money on your system totally turns you off, then hell - run Linux! Thar's what it's there for....
For some reason, I seem to keep ending up working at "tech jobs" where my co-workers aren't even into "geeking out" in the least bit.
I usually got attacked for doing such things as reading Slashdot or ArsTechnica, and certainly poked fun at for ever attending a LAN party.
Maybe part of it's just being stuck here in the rather drab midwest, but I still don't really see people playing any interesting computer games in the workplace. The secretaries still click away on Solitaire once in a while, but most haven't even discovered the joy of Pop-Cap games.
Wow! It's so weird how the most "off the wall" items come up soon after they're originally mentioned!
I was just talking with my wife about memories of playing Intellivision over at the next-door neighbor's house, when I was a kid.
Burgertime was, by far, the most-liked game on the system. (To be fair, I don't think the neighbor girl owned too many Intellivision games, but I recall a rather cheezy football game and a few others. Burgertime really stood out as superior.)
I don't follow your logic. It sounds like you're more concerned with finding out which compiler gives the fastest compile times on both platforms than finding out which platform can perform the best given nearly identical tasks.
I'm not denying that getting the true facts on which compiler is "the best available to developers on the platform" is good and useful information. I just don't think it's what you want to be concerned with when launching a new system and want to pit it "head to head" against a competitor.
The speeds of different compiler software will always change with each revision. (Back in the day, Borland and Microsoft C compilers went back and forth, back and forth on who was faster, with each successive version.)
I just want to take the *same thing*, run it on both platforms, and see which can plow through the same commands the most quickly.
Thanks! I was starting to wonder when someone here was going to bring up this point!
The big deal I see about the G5 is that it's at the very beginning of its life - and seems to be designed with considerable "ramp up" potential in mind. (IBM pretty much promised it would be up to at least 3Ghz in one year.)
If it performs relatively "on par" with the fastest Intel P4 Xeon offerings at its initial launch, and is conducive to rapid speed increases over the next year or two - it's going to be a strong contender in the long haul.
Instead of bickering over the supposed validity of particular benchmarks - the only strong negative I see to buying a PowerMac G5 is the question of future CPU upgradability. There seems to be no mention of whether or not someone buying a $3000 G5 tower today will be able to remove the 2Ghz CPUs and upgrade them to, say, a 2.4Ghz pair of CPUs after they become available.
On the Intel side, it's generally always been possible to swap CPUs without requiring a whole new motherboard and new RAM (within reason).
Sometimes, Apple made this possible too. Other times not. (There was a lot of room to upgrade "logic boards" in the old PowerMac 7500/7600 series, for example. Even the beige G3 took several different speeds of CPU by moving jumpers on the motherboard. My dual G4 1.42Ghz tower seems to have no upgrade path whatsoever, though.)
I'm not about to argue with what you find useful about a newer PocketPC. If you actually take the time to encode movies to compressed DivX format and write them to smartcards, so you can then watch them while taking public transportation - then good for you. Enjoy!
I already have a PDA version of Quicken on my Palm phone. I can jot in purchases and sync them into my full version of Quicken later. I have Outlook integration too, if I want to set that up. I even have pocket spreadsheets and a Word document viewer for Palm. I've never really needed a financial calculator app on my PDA, but I'm 99% sure they exist. (There are tons of calculator applets available as freeware or shareware off sites like tucows.)
My point was, *most* people aren't chomping at the bit to buy these new PocketPC PDAs. They're pricy (major problem if it gets stolen, lost, or broken), and ultimately, the features they have that Palm PDAs lack are mostly just multimedia features. Anything multimedia, I write off as unnecessary in my PDA.
Actually, I believe this particular comparison was made more as an attempt to pump up sales of Logic software than anything else.
The fact is, for years now, Apple has been slipping in the MIDI and music composition market. Pro Tools is probably their only "saving grace" in the recent past, but it's really a hard disk recording/virtual studio product -- not a MIDI sequencer/music composition package.
Apple bought out EMagic because they realized they needed control of at least *one* respected MIDI/music product. (Otherwise, there was a very real possibility that EMAgic would dump Mac support and only produce Logic for the PC.) They're already suffering because of quality products like ACID Pro, and Sonar (formerly Cakewalk Pro Audio) that only exist in PC/Windows versions - and convinced many a Mac die-hard to install a PC in their studio.
I've worked with CuBase a little bit myself, and what I've found is this: The product has recently undergone MAJOR revision. (Perhaps, a total rewrite, even?) The "CuBase SX" product has a totally revised interface from CuBase 5.0 and earlier versions. Not only this, but they're working on both a Mac OS X and a PC version simultaneously. The last "bug fix" they put out for SX on the PC broke as much as it fixed for some people. Right now, it's probably an opportune time to pick on CuBase SX by finding complex musical scores that crash it.
After CuBase SX "matures" a little more, I'm not so sure Apple could still pull off a comparison like they did with Logic on the Mac.
Thanks for responding to my points/complaints about MacOS9. You make a good counter-argument.
I still say I'm not pleased with the MacOS9 startup sequence though. I can get much more information about what's actually going on in "verbose mode" of OS X. (EG. Say a CD-ROM driver doesn't initialize. In MacOS9, the most info one could see is a red X through an extension that failed to initialize the drive. On OS X, at least I could see some sort of message about the nature of the failure and possibly get a clue to fixing it. Things like a SCSI ID conflict should generate more than just a "failed to initialize" message.)
Also, using "find file" doesn't seem very intuitive when you already know perfectly well where the files are. All you want to do is select specific ones in a folder for deletion. Your trick may work ok, but it's lacking from a "user-friendliness" standpoint. (Also, I'm not familiar enough with MacOS Find File to say this for sure, but I don't recall it being extremely powerful in searching ability. I don't believe it takes wildcards like a Unix command line can? AKA. Search for a file starting with ari??3z.txt - so the 4th. through 6th. characters can be anything, but the remainder must all match.)
Seriously, unless it's just me, I sense a general malaise about the whole PDA thing. Companies keep launching the "next greatest thing in pocket PCs", but I just don't see mass numbers of people adopting/using them.
Basically, they still feel like "toys for the man who has everything" and "nifty prizes to win in a contest" more than "must have" items.
I'm still using a Kyocera 6035 combo cellphone/PalmPilot, and I really don't find myself needing such things as "128 megs. of RAM" or streaming video in it. I simply keep a few important addresses and phone numbers in it, use an applet every once in a blue moon that turns the phone into an alarm clock, and regularly read news items on it via "AvantGo" software.
As people keep saying (but the manufacturers don't seem to be listening), long battery life is more useful than thousands of colors and tons of storage space. When I need a computer, I want a full-size keyboard to type on and a screen large enough to read easily. I'll deal with the extra size of a slim laptop. When I don't, I just want something with the basics in it - and no extra flash.
Actually, I think you're simply posting personl opinion and arguing personal preference more than anything concrete.
I found MacOS9 much less than a "well-refined user interface". Why? Well, let me list a few items that come to mind:
1. When MacOS boots, only some extensions are shown loading up (with the associated puzzle piece icons). Why are some hidden while others get icons? Any logic to it whatsoever? Why is there no way to find out what one is during the boot sequence? As it is, one has to go to extensions manager and match up the picture to an item description to discover what it is.
2. MacOS lacked a good file management tool/utility. Want to delete all files in a given folder that start with a4 and end with an extension of.tmp, while leaving the rest alone, for example? With no command line whatsoever, and no really good file manager, this is rather difficult. (Writing an Applescript to do it isn't exactly a user-friendly option either.)
3. MacOS lacked a number of Internet-related tools. Personal web sharing in OS9 was far from "robust", for example. FTP or telnet, non-existant. OS X is light-years ahead in this arena.
4. MacOS numerical error codes were far from user-friendly or steps "forward in usability". Error 192 in Launcher? Not very intuitive.
5. The often-used "trick" of making an action happen only when the mouse button is held down for more than a couple seconds isn't obvious at all. One never really knows if holding the button down on an object will accomplish something or not. (Well, not until you try it and memorize the fact that it's useful for a specific item.)
Personally, I think the brushed metal "theme" looks pretty slick in programs like iTunes. I might nor care for it if EVERY program I used in OS X had brushed metal all over it, but it's fine for Apple's own commerical apps. Maybe it'll become a quick identifier than you're using an Apple-branded app?
I don't think my comments were "short-sighted" at all. Perhaps "greedy", but our entire system of government counts on "greed" as a motivator. I see no reason to apologize for it.
No, I don't work for a RAM company - but as I already said, there are ways a RAM manufacturer can counter this situation without resorting to running to "big government" for help in the form of tariffs and trade restrictions.
I don't care what country it is.... Ultimately, it's self-destructive behavior to keep selling/providing a product at below one's cost to produce it. If we'd let these things go, they'd sort themselves out in the long-run, and U.S. consumers would be the winners in the mean-time, getting product for less than it's really worth.
I pretty much agree with your statements, but I will say this much: I don't think the lack of useful changes you're seeing in IE are strictly due to them achieving a "90% marketshare".
Honestly, IE wouldn't have dominated so completely if it wasn't a pretty well "finished product". Compared to any version of Netscape I've used, IE is incredibly more stable and reliable. Netscape tends to blow up after only so much use, and can even destabilize an entire OS it runs on top of.
Many of the "innovative new features" now being added to browsers like Safari and Mozilla are, in my opinion, fluff and "nice idea, but far from a necessity" features.
Take one of the current big ones, tabbed browsing. Sure, it's nifty - but what does it ultimately add to the experience of viewing a given web page? The HTML is still rendered the same way, and that's the core function of any browser.
Maybe I'm giving MS too much credit here, but I suspect they've realized IE is a key piece of the operating system puzzle for them. They know they've achieved a stable, reliable, reasonably fast, and useful browser product for Windows. Why mess around too much with something that works, and risk breaking it further - when it's required for much of corporate America? (Heck, they're serving complete Windows applications through it with Citrix Metaframe.)
Actually, I see no problem wirh wearing free clothing with advertising on it. Usually, I'm interested enough or enough involved with the products in question that I'm happy to advertise that fact. (I mean, I'm not going to wear shirts advertising golf gear because I don't golf, and don't visit golf "super sales" or conventions where such free items would be given out.)
Other times, I simply wear the clothing in situations that make it obvious I'm bashing the product on my t-shirt. (EG. I often wear one of my free Microsoft "launch event" t-shirts when I'm selling refurbished Apple Macs at flea markets. Most of the time, people get a small laugh out of it.)
People in the "public eye" are evaluated, rated, tested and editorialized about all the time. We have speed guns giving immediate feedback on the exact speed a pitcher throws a ball. Major league athletes use computer training systems all the time to try to improve their swing, whether it's golf, baseball or tennis. Nobody's suggesting umpires should be replaced by machines! All this does is provides an objective way to rate their accuracy at calling strikes. With or without this system, people will be using technology to attempt to judge the accuracy of umpires' calls anyway. Right now, the only difference is, they're using slow-motion camera replays and making subjective decisions based on what the camera captures from various angles.
During the actual gameplay, the human umpires will still be making the calls, and people will still argue about it. Machines like this just give a "second opinion" that can be used, over time, as evidence of an umpire who isn't doing his/her job well. Why shouldn't the fans welcome another tool to the arsenal of tools available that help improve the game?
IMHO, ensuring umps can accurately call strikes is much more important than worrying about if a hitter had some cork in his bat.
Ack - pardon my lack of physics.... I stand corrected. (Guess I was stuck on the idea that the inner tracks are smaller circles, which means it takes less time for the laser to navigate around it. Of course, that "logic" neglects the fact that less data is contained on them as well!)
Look at it this way: As long as the Koreans are giving their taxpayer dollars to their own corporations so they can dump products here at below the cost to make them, the U.S. consumer wins! Sure, it might hurt business for U.S. based manufacturers of those products (in this case, RAM), but honestly, I don't care.
If you can't compete, for *any* reason, switch products or production methods. Heck, if I was a U.S. RAM manufacturer getting clobbered by people dumping RAM on my market at below cost, I'd buy as much of the stuff up as I could. Why not? If I bought enough, I could prevent it from easily making it on the market for the average consumer to buy, and I could just relabel and resell the stuff at a mark-up later!
The bottom line is, their citizens are helping pay for our citizens' RAM sticks. It's stupid to slap a tarriff on this and try to stop it from happening.
This really is fraudulent B.S. - but it's pretty much in line with the current state of the computer industry, isn't it?
I mean, we have Sony selling blank 1.44 meg. 3.5" floppys as "2MB" in big print on the front of the boxes, because that's supposedly the "unformatted capacity". (Since one *has* to format a disk to use it, though, I'm not quite sure how they figure this 2MB number has any value to anyone? How did they determine that all operating systems impose a formatting structure on a blank floppy that consumes exactly.56MB anyway?)
AMD has been selling Athlon XP processors with numbers that one would assume indicates Mhz - but no, it's not.
Monitor sizes are still advertised using diagonal measurements, with some vendors still building monitors that can't even draw an image all the way out to the edges of the glass to begin with.
New massively multi-player online games that are subscription based don't even tell you how much they're going to cost per month to play anyplace on their boxes, or even in their instruction books. (EG. Shadowbane)
Wattage on most computer speakers are still measured using a maximum theoretical peak wattage, instead of a useful RMS wattage figure. (Yeah, check out these 400 watt speakers from BenQ for only $29.95. Sure they are.....)
CD-ROM drives are rated at ever increasing speeds, yet they barely mention the fact that they're calculating the maximum read speed it can ever achieve while reading the *inner-most* track of a CD. Most 50x drives are reading at more like 16x as they get to the outer parts of a disc. (Wasn't the Kenwood "True-X" series of drives one of the only exceptions to this rule? And heck, they don't even make those any more.)
Nope - in the world of PCs, one has to stay on top of everything, because they're always out to screw over the uneducated/unsuspecting.
I was working at a local flea market over the weekend, where I try to sell used/refurbished computers and offer tech. services to people.
A guy came up to me and we got in a long conversation about the "old days" of computing. Turns out he used to be a big computer geek when machines like the Kaypro II and Osbourne I were in vogue. Around the time of Windows '95, he got burnt out and changed careers. Since then, he's been working for oil companies, assembling and repairing their holding/storage tanks.
He told me how they started outsourcing labor to India, and ever since then, they've wasted considerable time redoing the shoddy repair work the workers from India are doing. He said they'll often leave a tank dripping oil or other chemicals, and consider it perfectly ok - because the leak isn't "bad".
Also, previous articles right here on Slashdot were talking about call centers for PC customer support being outsourced to India - and you'll find numerous stories of the problems that's created. They're taught just enough English to read from a card and answer basic questions.
I don't see the real problem at all. Linksys and D-Link are two companies I have much respect for, because time after time, they've brought the price down to earth on networking equipment that the casual home user just couldn't justify purchasing before.
When 100Base-T was still pretty new, network cards often supported it - but home users still ran at 10Base-T because the cost of a hub/router that handled the higher speed was prohibitive. Then Linksys (and D-Link) brought out those cheap 100Base-T routers. Shortly afterwards, prices plummeted across the board.
They did it again with wi-fi adapters and gateways. (Residential gateways like the Lucent RG series were still in the $300-349 range until just after the Linksys stuff came out in the sub $200 price range.)
Now they're doing the same for integrated wi-fi routers/print sharing boxes/Internet sharing boxes.
Is it top quality stuff? Heck no... But it basically works, and at their prices, you can afford to throw one away and replace it if it does die on you after a year or two.
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No, let's make your "summary" a little more accurate. The 2Ghz G5 is *very* slightly slower than the older 2.66Ghz P4 -- when running unoptimized code on an unoptimized version of OS X.
As far as I'm concerned, all of this benchmarking is meaningless at this point in time. The G5 is simply too immature of a CPU to benchmark until the software catches up with it.
This same problem came up when Intel first released the Pentium 75Mhz CPUs. Nearly everyone said "This thing isn't even quite as fast as my 486 that costs a lot less!" This also happened when Intel first added "MMX" support to their chips, and when the PIII's first came out as successor to their PII.
Any time you believe the early benchmark results on a new line of CPU, all you find out is that you're not going to get immediate gratification as an "early adopter". So what? This is common knowledge.
Apple fans have every reason to celebrate with the G5's release. It gives Apple a whole new starting point on CPUs they can "ramp up" from, instead of struggling to squeeze some meager improvement from the maxxed-out G4 chip. If you want to use Apple's OS and Apple compatible software - your only option is an Apple computer. Ultimately, that's the key, and explains why some people (myself included!) shelled out thousands for a system (dual CPU G4) that doesn't outperform Intel's best offerings. I want to do things I can't do with anything Intel sells, such as run OS X.
I don't think the original poster was trying to claim that the debate was over "releasing exploits to the public first", or "releasing exploits to the vendor first".
The exploits posted to groups, in an attempt to give a vendor incentive to fix them, are done only *after* the vendor was unresponsive (in 99% of the cases I've seen, anyway).
The "debate" seems to be on if it's right to do this, or if those discovering exploits should just sit on them indefinitely after telling the vendor about them. (EG. If the vendor doesn't think it's worth fixing, you should play along with them and pretend you never found the exploit. After all, the vendor is of the opinion that it's highly unlikely others besides you will find it, as long as you keep your mouth shut.)
I actually modded your post up, because I think it's an interesting point many people discount too quickly.
Women, in general, aren't quite as interested as men in the "nitty gritty" technical details of how things work. Sure, there are exceptions - but not a whole lot of them. This is why you see more guys than gals working in just about any of the troubleshooting/repair fields - whether it's HVAC, computer technician jobs, or auto repair.
On the flip side, this means it's quite likely that they'll find people who *can* do these things well fascinating/interesting, at least initially. (People are always initially intrigued by others who can do things they can't fathom doing themselves. That's why the "Guiness Book of World Records" is always a good seller, and people liked TV shows like "That's Incredible!" or "Ripley's Believe It or Not".)
As you pointed out, a girlfriend who'd end up dumping a guy just because he kept struggling with a computer bug he couldn't fix makes some sense. She probably grew VERY weary of hearing him rant (or even attempt to explain) all the detailed things he was trying to get the problem solved. She just wanted to hear a positive outcome, and didn't get one.
I dunno.... I guess you have to go with whatever works for you. But personally, I find a still better solutuon for something small and stackable, yet cheap, is to buy the "thin client" machines made by Netier (now Wyse) called WinTerms. Units like these use a standard Micro ITX type motherboard and usually have a reasonably fast processor (233Mhz in many cases), often have 128MB of RAM in them by default, as well as some having a laptop-type CD-ROM drive and 3.5" floppy in them. They're whisper quiet since they have no big power supplies. (They use an AC adapter more like what a laptop has, with a round plug with 4 pins that plugs into the back of them.) You can mount a laptop IDE hard drive in them, turn off the booting from flash disk, and it's a full-featured PC. If you want, you can even get creative and use the "disk on chip" flash as a way to make Linux boot from firmware.
I often see the Netier XL2000 and XL1000 type thin clients selling for as little as $35 or so each on eBay, and they don't get bid on very often. (I guess most folks think they're useless except as Citrix "dumb terminals".)
Actually, I think Apple's music store has a built-in (if un-intended) protection against people only buying the "hit" songs and missing out on possible great tunes on the rest of an album.
They usually sell complete albums of songs for much less than it would cost you to buy each song individually for 99 cents.
When you find even 2 songs you like on a given album, you often think "Hmm.... spend about $2.00 for just 2 songs - or get all 12-13 tracks for between $6 and $10?" If you end up only listening to half of the stuff, it was still a fair deal that way.
There's nothing illegal about developing a Linux version that runs on hardware it was never intended to run on.
The whole issue here is somebody threatening a company with releasing destructive code unless the company does what they wish.
I really don't see the reason for a big uproar over making Linux run on the X-Box anyway? To me, Linux is promising because it already runs on so much hardware. You can practically take an old PC out of anyone's trash can or closet, put Linux on it, and make it useful again. Why spend $149 or more for an X-Box, which has numerous barriers to ease of installation of Linux anyway, and opt to use that as your Linux box? it's a *game console*, and in my mind, is best treated as such.
Next thing you know, they'll be trying to sell conversion kits to make your screwdrivers into drills and hammers.
Honestly, with today's low hardware prices, I don't quite understand all the bickering about XP not supporting this or that device properly.
Fact is, it seems to support practically everything made for a PC in the last 2-3 years. Almost all the headaches are with trying to make older hardware work. (EG. I have an Epson ES-600C parallel port color scanner. There's no support for anything newer than Win '98 or NT 4.0. Yeah, it pissed me off for a little while, because it's a perfectly good scanner and retailed for $799 back in 1996 or so when we first bought it. But finally, I just broke down and went scanner shopping. For $149, I got a USB 2.0 compatible Canon scanner that's easily 5x faster at scanning documents, gives excellent results, and integrates better with XP than any of Epson's older drivers/control panels would have.)
If you're not just pirating your copy of XP, you're paying more for it than what the average new video card costs.
If all this talk of spending more money on your system totally turns you off, then hell - run Linux! Thar's what it's there for....
For some reason, I seem to keep ending up working at "tech jobs" where my co-workers aren't even into "geeking out" in the least bit.
I usually got attacked for doing such things as reading Slashdot or ArsTechnica, and certainly poked fun at for ever attending a LAN party.
Maybe part of it's just being stuck here in the rather drab midwest, but I still don't really see people playing any interesting computer games in the workplace. The secretaries still click away on Solitaire once in a while, but most haven't even discovered the joy of Pop-Cap games.
Sigh....
Wow! It's so weird how the most "off the wall" items come up soon after they're originally mentioned!
I was just talking with my wife about memories of playing Intellivision over at the next-door neighbor's house, when I was a kid.
Burgertime was, by far, the most-liked game on the system. (To be fair, I don't think the neighbor girl owned too many Intellivision games, but I recall a rather cheezy football game and a few others. Burgertime really stood out as superior.)
I don't follow your logic. It sounds like you're more concerned with finding out which compiler gives the fastest compile times on both platforms than finding out which platform can perform the best given nearly identical tasks.
I'm not denying that getting the true facts on which compiler is "the best available to developers on the platform" is good and useful information. I just don't think it's what you want to be concerned with when launching a new system and want to pit it "head to head" against a competitor.
The speeds of different compiler software will always change with each revision. (Back in the day, Borland and Microsoft C compilers went back and forth, back and forth on who was faster, with each successive version.)
I just want to take the *same thing*, run it on both platforms, and see which can plow through the same commands the most quickly.
Thanks! I was starting to wonder when someone here was going to bring up this point!
The big deal I see about the G5 is that it's at the very beginning of its life - and seems to be designed with considerable "ramp up" potential in mind. (IBM pretty much promised it would be up to at least 3Ghz in one year.)
If it performs relatively "on par" with the fastest Intel P4 Xeon offerings at its initial launch, and is conducive to rapid speed increases over the next year or two - it's going to be a strong contender in the long haul.
Instead of bickering over the supposed validity of particular benchmarks - the only strong negative I see to buying a PowerMac G5 is the question of future CPU upgradability. There seems to be no mention of whether or not someone buying a $3000 G5 tower today will be able to remove the 2Ghz CPUs and upgrade them to, say, a 2.4Ghz pair of CPUs after they become available.
On the Intel side, it's generally always been possible to swap CPUs without requiring a whole new motherboard and new RAM (within reason).
Sometimes, Apple made this possible too. Other times not. (There was a lot of room to upgrade "logic boards" in the old PowerMac 7500/7600 series, for example. Even the beige G3 took several different speeds of CPU by moving jumpers on the motherboard. My dual G4 1.42Ghz tower seems to have no upgrade path whatsoever, though.)
I'm not about to argue with what you find useful about a newer PocketPC. If you actually take the time to encode movies to compressed DivX format and write them to smartcards, so you can then watch them while taking public transportation - then good for you. Enjoy!
I already have a PDA version of Quicken on my Palm phone. I can jot in purchases and sync them into my full version of Quicken later. I have Outlook integration too, if I want to set that up. I even have pocket spreadsheets and a Word document viewer for Palm. I've never really needed a financial calculator app on my PDA, but I'm 99% sure they exist. (There are tons of calculator applets available as freeware or shareware off sites like tucows.)
My point was, *most* people aren't chomping at the bit to buy these new PocketPC PDAs. They're pricy (major problem if it gets stolen, lost, or broken), and ultimately, the features they have that Palm PDAs lack are mostly just multimedia features. Anything multimedia, I write off as unnecessary in my PDA.
Actually, I believe this particular comparison was made more as an attempt to pump up sales of Logic software than anything else.
The fact is, for years now, Apple has been slipping in the MIDI and music composition market. Pro Tools is probably their only "saving grace" in the recent past, but it's really a hard disk recording/virtual studio product -- not a MIDI sequencer/music composition package.
Apple bought out EMagic because they realized they needed control of at least *one* respected MIDI/music product. (Otherwise, there was a very real possibility that EMAgic would dump Mac support and only produce Logic for the PC.) They're already suffering because of quality products like ACID Pro, and Sonar (formerly Cakewalk Pro Audio) that only exist in PC/Windows versions - and convinced many a Mac die-hard to install a PC in their studio.
I've worked with CuBase a little bit myself, and what I've found is this: The product has recently undergone MAJOR revision. (Perhaps, a total rewrite, even?) The "CuBase SX" product has a totally revised interface from CuBase 5.0 and earlier versions. Not only this, but they're working on both a Mac OS X and a PC version simultaneously. The last "bug fix" they put out for SX on the PC broke as much as it fixed for some people. Right now, it's probably an opportune time to pick on CuBase SX by finding complex musical scores that crash it.
After CuBase SX "matures" a little more, I'm not so sure Apple could still pull off a comparison like they did with Logic on the Mac.
Thanks for responding to my points/complaints about MacOS9. You make a good counter-argument.
I still say I'm not pleased with the MacOS9 startup sequence though. I can get much more information about what's actually going on in "verbose mode" of OS X. (EG. Say a CD-ROM driver doesn't initialize. In MacOS9, the most info one could see is a red X through an extension that failed to initialize the drive. On OS X, at least I could see some sort of message about the nature of the failure and possibly get a clue to fixing it. Things like a SCSI ID conflict should generate more than just a "failed to initialize" message.)
Also, using "find file" doesn't seem very intuitive when you already know perfectly well where the files are. All you want to do is select specific ones in a folder for deletion. Your trick may work ok, but it's lacking from a "user-friendliness" standpoint. (Also, I'm not familiar enough with MacOS Find File to say this for sure, but I don't recall it being extremely powerful in searching ability. I don't believe it takes wildcards like a Unix command line can? AKA. Search for a file starting with ari??3z.txt - so the 4th. through 6th. characters can be anything, but the remainder must all match.)
Seriously, unless it's just me, I sense a general malaise about the whole PDA thing. Companies keep launching the "next greatest thing in pocket PCs", but I just don't see mass numbers of people adopting/using them.
Basically, they still feel like "toys for the man who has everything" and "nifty prizes to win in a contest" more than "must have" items.
I'm still using a Kyocera 6035 combo cellphone/PalmPilot, and I really don't find myself needing such things as "128 megs. of RAM" or streaming video in it. I simply keep a few important addresses and phone numbers in it, use an applet every once in a blue moon that turns the phone into an alarm clock, and regularly read news items on it via "AvantGo" software.
As people keep saying (but the manufacturers don't seem to be listening), long battery life is more useful than thousands of colors and tons of storage space. When I need a computer, I want a full-size keyboard to type on and a screen large enough to read easily. I'll deal with the extra size of a slim laptop. When I don't, I just want something with the basics in it - and no extra flash.
Actually, I think you're simply posting personl opinion and arguing personal preference more than anything concrete.
.tmp, while leaving the rest alone, for example? With no command line whatsoever, and no really good file manager, this is rather difficult. (Writing an Applescript to do it isn't exactly a user-friendly option either.)
I found MacOS9 much less than a "well-refined user interface". Why? Well, let me list a few items that come to mind:
1. When MacOS boots, only some extensions are shown loading up (with the associated puzzle piece icons). Why are some hidden while others get icons? Any logic to it whatsoever? Why is there no way to find out what one is during the boot sequence? As it is, one has to go to extensions manager and match up the picture to an item description to discover what it is.
2. MacOS lacked a good file management tool/utility. Want to delete all files in a given folder that start with a4 and end with an extension of
3. MacOS lacked a number of Internet-related tools. Personal web sharing in OS9 was far from "robust", for example. FTP or telnet, non-existant. OS X is light-years ahead in this arena.
4. MacOS numerical error codes were far from user-friendly or steps "forward in usability". Error 192 in Launcher? Not very intuitive.
5. The often-used "trick" of making an action happen only when the mouse button is held down for more than a couple seconds isn't obvious at all. One never really knows if holding the button down on an object will accomplish something or not. (Well, not until you try it and memorize the fact that it's useful for a specific item.)
Personally, I think the brushed metal "theme" looks pretty slick in programs like iTunes. I might nor care for it if EVERY program I used in OS X had brushed metal all over it, but it's fine for Apple's own commerical apps. Maybe it'll become a quick identifier than you're using an Apple-branded app?
I don't think my comments were "short-sighted" at all. Perhaps "greedy", but our entire system of government counts on "greed" as a motivator. I see no reason to apologize for it.
No, I don't work for a RAM company - but as I already said, there are ways a RAM manufacturer can counter this situation without resorting to running to "big government" for help in the form of tariffs and trade restrictions.
I don't care what country it is.... Ultimately, it's self-destructive behavior to keep selling/providing a product at below one's cost to produce it. If we'd let these things go, they'd sort themselves out in the long-run, and U.S. consumers would be the winners in the mean-time, getting product for less than it's really worth.
I pretty much agree with your statements, but I will say this much: I don't think the lack of useful changes you're seeing in IE are strictly due to them achieving a "90% marketshare".
Honestly, IE wouldn't have dominated so completely if it wasn't a pretty well "finished product". Compared to any version of Netscape I've used, IE is incredibly more stable and reliable. Netscape tends to blow up after only so much use, and can even destabilize an entire OS it runs on top of.
Many of the "innovative new features" now being added to browsers like Safari and Mozilla are, in my opinion, fluff and "nice idea, but far from a necessity" features.
Take one of the current big ones, tabbed browsing. Sure, it's nifty - but what does it ultimately add to the experience of viewing a given web page? The HTML is still rendered the same way, and that's the core function of any browser.
Maybe I'm giving MS too much credit here, but I suspect they've realized IE is a key piece of the operating system puzzle for them. They know they've achieved a stable, reliable, reasonably fast, and useful browser product for Windows. Why mess around too much with something that works, and risk breaking it further - when it's required for much of corporate America? (Heck, they're serving complete Windows applications through it with Citrix Metaframe.)
Actually, I see no problem wirh wearing free clothing with advertising on it. Usually, I'm interested enough or enough involved with the products in question that I'm happy to advertise that fact. (I mean, I'm not going to wear shirts advertising golf gear because I don't golf, and don't visit golf "super sales" or conventions where such free items would be given out.)
Other times, I simply wear the clothing in situations that make it obvious I'm bashing the product on my t-shirt. (EG. I often wear one of my free Microsoft "launch event" t-shirts when I'm selling refurbished Apple Macs at flea markets. Most of the time, people get a small laugh out of it.)
People in the "public eye" are evaluated, rated, tested and editorialized about all the time. We have speed guns giving immediate feedback on the exact speed a pitcher throws a ball. Major league athletes use computer training systems all the time to try to improve their swing, whether it's golf, baseball or tennis. Nobody's suggesting umpires should be replaced by machines! All this does is provides an objective way to rate their accuracy at calling strikes. With or without this system, people will be using technology to attempt to judge the accuracy of umpires' calls anyway. Right now, the only difference is, they're using slow-motion camera replays and making subjective decisions based on what the camera captures from various angles.
During the actual gameplay, the human umpires will still be making the calls, and people will still argue about it. Machines like this just give a "second opinion" that can be used, over time, as evidence of an umpire who isn't doing his/her job well. Why shouldn't the fans welcome another tool to the arsenal of tools available that help improve the game?
IMHO, ensuring umps can accurately call strikes is much more important than worrying about if a hitter had some cork in his bat.
Ack - pardon my lack of physics.... I stand corrected. (Guess I was stuck on the idea that the inner tracks are smaller circles, which means it takes less time for the laser to navigate around it. Of course, that "logic" neglects the fact that less data is contained on them as well!)
Look at it this way: As long as the Koreans are giving their taxpayer dollars to their own corporations so they can dump products here at below the cost to make them, the U.S. consumer wins! Sure, it might hurt business for U.S. based manufacturers of those products (in this case, RAM), but honestly, I don't care.
If you can't compete, for *any* reason, switch products or production methods. Heck, if I was a U.S. RAM manufacturer getting clobbered by people dumping RAM on my market at below cost, I'd buy as much of the stuff up as I could. Why not? If I bought enough, I could prevent it from easily making it on the market for the average consumer to buy, and I could just relabel and resell the stuff at a mark-up later!
The bottom line is, their citizens are helping pay for our citizens' RAM sticks. It's stupid to slap a tarriff on this and try to stop it from happening.
This really is fraudulent B.S. - but it's pretty much in line with the current state of the computer industry, isn't it?
.56MB anyway?)
I mean, we have Sony selling blank 1.44 meg. 3.5" floppys as "2MB" in big print on the front of the boxes, because that's supposedly the "unformatted capacity". (Since one *has* to format a disk to use it, though, I'm not quite sure how they figure this 2MB number has any value to anyone? How did they determine that all operating systems impose a formatting structure on a blank floppy that consumes exactly
AMD has been selling Athlon XP processors with numbers that one would assume indicates Mhz - but no, it's not.
Monitor sizes are still advertised using diagonal measurements, with some vendors still building monitors that can't even draw an image all the way out to the edges of the glass to begin with.
New massively multi-player online games that are subscription based don't even tell you how much they're going to cost per month to play anyplace on their boxes, or even in their instruction books. (EG. Shadowbane)
Wattage on most computer speakers are still measured using a maximum theoretical peak wattage, instead of a useful RMS wattage figure. (Yeah, check out these 400 watt speakers from BenQ for only $29.95. Sure they are.....)
CD-ROM drives are rated at ever increasing speeds, yet they barely mention the fact that they're calculating the maximum read speed it can ever achieve while reading the *inner-most* track of a CD. Most 50x drives are reading at more like 16x as they get to the outer parts of a disc. (Wasn't the Kenwood "True-X" series of drives one of the only exceptions to this rule? And heck, they don't even make those any more.)
Nope - in the world of PCs, one has to stay on top of everything, because they're always out to screw over the uneducated/unsuspecting.
Ok, one example...
I was working at a local flea market over the weekend, where I try to sell used/refurbished computers and offer tech. services to people.
A guy came up to me and we got in a long conversation about the "old days" of computing. Turns out he used to be a big computer geek when machines like the Kaypro II and Osbourne I were in vogue. Around the time of Windows '95, he got burnt out and changed careers. Since then, he's been working for oil companies, assembling and repairing their holding/storage tanks.
He told me how they started outsourcing labor to India, and ever since then, they've wasted considerable time redoing the shoddy repair work the workers from India are doing. He said they'll often leave a tank dripping oil or other chemicals, and consider it perfectly ok - because the leak isn't "bad".
Also, previous articles right here on Slashdot were talking about call centers for PC customer support being outsourced to India - and you'll find numerous stories of the problems that's created. They're taught just enough English to read from a card and answer basic questions.
I don't see the real problem at all. Linksys and D-Link are two companies I have much respect for, because time after time, they've brought the price down to earth on networking equipment that the casual home user just couldn't justify purchasing before.
When 100Base-T was still pretty new, network cards often supported it - but home users still ran at 10Base-T because the cost of a hub/router that handled the higher speed was prohibitive. Then Linksys (and D-Link) brought out those cheap 100Base-T routers. Shortly afterwards, prices plummeted across the board.
They did it again with wi-fi adapters and gateways. (Residential gateways like the Lucent RG series were still in the $300-349 range until just after the Linksys stuff came out in the sub $200 price range.)
Now they're doing the same for integrated wi-fi routers/print sharing boxes/Internet sharing boxes.
Is it top quality stuff? Heck no... But it basically works, and at their prices, you can afford to throw one away and replace it if it does die on you after a year or two.