Under AMD's solution the on die memory controller also gives lower latency. (Although this is a moot point for Intel, becuase their's is still controlled on the Northbridge.)
Actually, funny you should say that because I said the same thing about my PS2... just turn it on it's side and you're set. (It looks cooler too) The only console which doesn't have reasonably good storage ergonomics is the Xbox, which is the equivalent to an 18wheeler.
I'm not implying anything about the consoles themselves, just where they fit, I personally prefer Xbox games to GC ones)
While there's a true battle of the OSes with regards to features, (Tiger and Longhorn are both very good OSes from what I've seen) that battle is for individuals to make up their mind on, not market forces.
Surely nobody can realistically believe that there's going to be a real battle of numbers in the same way there is for games consoles/competing digital disk formats etc?
I don't know the exact figures, but I do know that Windows gets about the same number of new users each year as Mac OS has in there entire installed base... No matter how good Mac OS is (and I'm sure it's very good) it's not like we don't know with infinity+1:1 odds which OS is going to be the most widely adopted?
I think you'll probably find that there are statistically more crimes involving cars than armoured vans, simply because there are more.
This is totally different for browsers however;)
Besides, your objections are trumped by the most obvious rebuttal of all: Spotlight works. Spectacularly.
If you're willing to type out descriptions on all your files, the point being. When Jobs demonstrated Spotlight he had a load of images from Corbis which had all been nicely tagged and described by the good people that work there. People who don't have the luxury of being revered as gods inside Cupertino would have to actually type these lengthy descriptions themselves.
Meta data is a great idea in principal, much like Communism. Unfortunately there are few real life problems which we're faced with when impelenting it.
People are lazy, People are stupid and the system is not scalable to larger enterprises without problems.
People being lazy is possibly the greatest problem: Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage. Currently Metadata is common in Music only. I don't claim to know why this is, but my best guess is it's probably because it is not a visual file and there's no way of previewing it without watching. (As opposed to seeing a thumbnail of a document/movie/picture.) If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless because as with anything which is unreliable, it will fall into disuse and there will be less incentive to add metadata to files, so less people use the feature due to decreased reliability and the sitation continues to snowball.
People not knowing everything about their content is also a problem. Meta data can only identify what we know as it is added by humans. If i was confronted by Java Source Code for a program, I wouldn't be able to read it and I would not know what to describe it as.
A Meta data based system also scales up badly to network/internet size solutions. Not only is the first problem amplified the larger the system is (more people being lazy, also less confidence that everyone will do their bit in adding metadata) but an inherent problem is that in a webwide Meta data system, people have hidden agendas, and they lie. The largest web-scale meta data implemantation we have at the moment is META tags in web page markup. I don't think I need to explain why these are often ridiculed - people lie. META tags are often abused by sites to get more hits: adding Britney Spears, XXX, pr0n etc will boost a page's rank. (This is often misguided, as more hits may occur, they they will not be relevant and leave the site straight away, however this is besides the point - they still input incorrect metadata into the system.) The problem has got to the stage where Google really doesn't pay all that much attention to META tags in comparison to the page's actual content and a monitoring of it's popularity with visitors searching for a certain subject.
This last point might not be a problem with Spotlight currently, as a systemwide index it's not affected by it - however on an enterprise level there are instances where it could be a problem even over a LAN or WAN and afterall, the Internet is just computers connected together so this metadata is really useless on a larger scale in the same way that METAtags are now almost redundant in HTML, or or the RIAA has been able to spoof meta data on P2P networks to fool fileswappers.
Spotlight is a full-fledged system service, not just a user interface. Application developers can very easily add Spotlight to their own applications. For example, look at Mail. The additions to Mail to support Spotlight searching were trivial. In fact, the total code size of an early Spotlight build of Mail was significantly smaller, because we off-loaded all of the indexing and searching to the Spotlight service, removing it from Mail.
You're obviously making your point from a developer's point of view: mine is as an end-user, who doesn't have the tiniest idea about developer technologies. I'm sure everything you said about Spotlight is true, as you seem to know your stuff, however to the end user, who wants a search function, it's Copernic.
Um. No. Dashboard widgets are little Web Views. They're essentially Web applications running in little floating windows. I'd suggest you check it out before just arbitrarily declaring it to be the same as something else.
Again, it's clear from my ignorance that I'm not a developer. I do know however as an end user that Widgets are Widgets. If I understand correctly what you're saying, you're saying that Dashboard is different to AveDesk/Samaurise/The rest because it pulls it's information off the Internet. Avedesk/Samaurise/The rest, to the best of my knowlege, also do this, hence the Weather Widget, (which can be skinned to be exact clones of the Tiger widget, and has been available since the first shots of Dashboard were released) POP/IMAP mail checker, etc.
We're not including free fonts. We're including professionally designed and licensed fonts --fully Unicode-savvy, of course -- that would cost hundreds of dollars if bought after the fact.
The Longhorn Readability Fonts are free: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantina and Corbel. They look pretty professional to me.
You don't understand the feature. This doesn't really surprise me at this point, because it's clear that your goal here is just to post criticisms without a whole lot of concern about truth.
My apologies, it wasn't clear which features had been added in the explanation on the Apple site, so I incorrectly assumed that Apple's uber-modern "World's Most Advanced Operating System" already fully supported RAID that was fully laid down in 1988, and that they were merely fixing a bug or two.
On Konfabulator- Understood, although I was more referring to Windows users who also use Windowsblinds/StyleXP to "dress" their system up like OS X, in which case they are often emulating Konfabulator, although you are correct. Aqua-Soft Is one site dedicated to it.
On MS's new fonts- Because MS's new fonts are free, even to OS X users;)
I hope my post doesn't have tinge of Mac hating to it, becuase I love OS X, I just don't like Apple for their arrogant marketing.
It's still OS X...
Face it, you could pick up a load of those features for free for Windows or Linux.
Spotlight = Copernic/Google Toolbar/MSN Toolbar (whatever floats your boat.)
Safari RSS = Why the name change? It has RSS support... Firefox isn't Firefox RSS, Opera isnt Opera RSS, they're both had the feature for donkey's years. Note how on this list they've basicly listed "RSS Support" 4 times:
RSS Auto Detection, RSS Bookmarks, RSS Update Notification, Safari RSS View.
Dashboard = Avedesk/Samaurise, Windows users have been using these widget programs to emulate Konfabulator for years.
Going through the long list of new features, "AIM Profiles in iChat AV" isn't exactly a huge innovation, and have been enjoyed by normal computer users since the program's inception.
Listing "New fonts" - I don't know if Mac users ever use "the rest of the internet" (it's probably too underdesign for their tastes) by it's quite easy to obtain as many free fonts as you please. Microsoft recently released a few free ones designed for Longhorn.
Also, "Improved RAID Support" is what we call a "fix" not a new feature. When I go around updating my system drivers I don't say "Whoa, I'm gonna add 4 new features to my system! Improved RAID0 support, improved RAID1 support, improved RAID0+1 support and improved RAID5 support!"
I'd love to see this used in conjunction with this http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/ 15/220204&tid=126&tid=227&tid=97 (Minority Report UI For The Military)
There could be a gesture which brings the "window" you're moving around closer towards you on the Z-axis (like a beckoning gesture) and one to move the windows further away on the Z-Axis. (Like a pointing gesture.)
Consoles are marketed differently to PCs though - If M$ or Sony do their maths right as they've done on their previous consoles they recuperate lost revenue through selling software, as they are the end-all-be-all software disto for their platform.
For instance, Microsoft requires you to buy 7 full price games for each Xbox you buy to break even. (PIIIs may be cheap but they're not that cheap)
CPU - Xenon's CPU has three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores. Each core is capable of two instructions per cycle and has an L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions. The three cores share 1 MB of L2 cache. Alpha 2 developer kits currently have two cores instead of three.
Here are the other specs.
GPU - Xenon's GPU is a generation beyond the ATI X800. Its clock speed is 500 MHz and it supports Shader 3.0. Developers are currently working with an alpha 2 GPU. Beta GPU units are expected by May and the final GPU is slated for a summer release. The final GPU will be more powerful than anything on the market today; in game terms, it would handle a game like Half-Life 2 with ease.
System Memory - Xenon will have 256 MB of system RAM. Keep in mind that this number should not be equated to typical PC RAM. The Xbox has 64 MB of system RAM and is a very capable machine.
Optical Drive - As many have speculated, Xenon will not use Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Games will come on dual-layer DVD-9 discs. While the media is the same as that of the current Xbox, the usable space on each disc is up to 7 GB. The drive is slated to run at 12X.
Memory Units - Xenon will use 64 MB to 1,024 MB memory cards. 8 MB is reserved for system use, leaving a 56 MB to 1,016 MB for user data.
Hard Drive - As many have speculated, Xenon's hard drive is optional. 2 GB of the drive will be used as game cache. The final drive size is still being determined.
Camera - Xenon will have a USB 2.0 camera. It's capable of 1.2 megapixel still shots and VGA video. Photos can be used in-game and for gamer profiles. The camera can also be used for video chat. It's unknown if the Xenon camera will allow for EyeToy-like gameplay. Developers are currently using a simulated camera driver.
Sound Chip - Xenon does not have an audio chip in the traditional sense. Decompression is handled by hardware, while the rest of the chores are handled by software. DirectSound3D has been dropped in favor of X3DAudio. The former was deemed too inflexible.
If anything these will be more like the DualCore G5s comming up in the the future for the PowerMac G5s.
Dual Processors are not new, Dual Core on the same die is, and that is what's being raved about.
Apple only recently moved into Dual CPUs with the G5, whereas dual CPUs on home computers have been around since the days of the Pentium II.
Apple has yet to release a G5 with dual cores on the same die, probably because of heat issues. (The G5 is the one home CPU which is actually worse heatwise than a Presc-hot)
...is one of my favourite journalists and this review is a great example of why. He makes fair criticisms (Apple ignoring their own interface guidelines FI) but also does take note of good point, unlike some "journalists" such as Leander "Steve Jobs" Kahney, who tends to be more interested in placating the Mac fanatics, for the sake of whom I will probably be modded down to about minus a zillion.
It's a shame that Mac fanatics give him such a hard time for making just observations.
Except that I have never enountered an outsourced tech support member who knew what they were talking about, but you [i]sometimes[/i] get someone who knows what they're doing when they're stationed in your home nation.
They also tend to speak much better English, because it's their home language. I know that if I was made to do tech support in Gujirati I would be just as poor as they are, if not worse, but it doesn't mean that I would want to use tech support of that standard.
Apple are reaping what they have sown now. They have such brand recognition with Joe Sixpack that when someone goes out to buy an mp3 player, they ask for an iPod.
Most congress committee members have about the same intelligence level as Joe Sixpack, and when you half explain to them that FairPlay is restrictive, they think something along the lines of "[the only distribution channel on the internet that anyone except my tech savvy nephew knows about] is restrictive".
So they open it up. Opening FairPlay up would be wrong, but beneficial. Congress have no right to do it, but I would sure as hell love it: FairPlay sucks some serious ass encrptionwise and if every online store were to use FairPlay (including subscription services such as Napster) we would just HYMN all our music to be DRM free.
Apple would never adopt MS's DRM (if they did they would have to rehaul iTunes... Ok I may have spoken too soon) so they could either get everyone else to adopt their DRM (which seems more likely - everyone wants a piece of the iPod pie) or go DRM free, which would be a glorious occasion indeed, if an unlikely one.
"The shuttle has flown over 100 times with only two serious failures."
Replace "The shuttle" with any other mode of transport and "serious failures" with "explosions killing all the passengers" and you'll probably understand why.
I find this quite worrying actually... it shows that google actually has the ability to more or less exclude a website from the mass internet. For instance if they excluded CNN from google searches, then CNN's traffic would doubleless go down.
Mozilla's most recent figures seem to indicate a flattening off of Firefox's adoption. In what ways do you plan to change this trend? (Presumably through SpreadFirefox)
*gasp*
Are you suggesting that an evil Microsoft based venture was quicker off the mark and more feature loaded that a freedom loving [insert group here] product, so the freedom loving [insert group here] product didn't even make it to market!
Slashdot Mirror
Under AMD's solution the on die memory controller also gives lower latency. (Although this is a moot point for Intel, becuase their's is still controlled on the Northbridge.)
I'm not implying anything about the consoles themselves, just where they fit, I personally prefer Xbox games to GC ones)
Surely nobody can realistically believe that there's going to be a real battle of numbers in the same way there is for games consoles/competing digital disk formats etc?
I don't know the exact figures, but I do know that Windows gets about the same number of new users each year as Mac OS has in there entire installed base... No matter how good Mac OS is (and I'm sure it's very good) it's not like we don't know with infinity+1:1 odds which OS is going to be the most widely adopted?
I think you'll probably find that there are statistically more crimes involving cars than armoured vans, simply because there are more. This is totally different for browsers however ;)
Besides, your objections are trumped by the most obvious rebuttal of all: Spotlight works. Spectacularly. If you're willing to type out descriptions on all your files, the point being. When Jobs demonstrated Spotlight he had a load of images from Corbis which had all been nicely tagged and described by the good people that work there. People who don't have the luxury of being revered as gods inside Cupertino would have to actually type these lengthy descriptions themselves.
My bible for this argument is basicly here: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
People are lazy, People are stupid and the system is not scalable to larger enterprises without problems.
People being lazy is possibly the greatest problem: Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage. Currently Metadata is common in Music only. I don't claim to know why this is, but my best guess is it's probably because it is not a visual file and there's no way of previewing it without watching. (As opposed to seeing a thumbnail of a document/movie/picture.) If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless because as with anything which is unreliable, it will fall into disuse and there will be less incentive to add metadata to files, so less people use the feature due to decreased reliability and the sitation continues to snowball.
People not knowing everything about their content is also a problem. Meta data can only identify what we know as it is added by humans. If i was confronted by Java Source Code for a program, I wouldn't be able to read it and I would not know what to describe it as.
A Meta data based system also scales up badly to network/internet size solutions. Not only is the first problem amplified the larger the system is (more people being lazy, also less confidence that everyone will do their bit in adding metadata) but an inherent problem is that in a webwide Meta data system, people have hidden agendas, and they lie. The largest web-scale meta data implemantation we have at the moment is META tags in web page markup. I don't think I need to explain why these are often ridiculed - people lie. META tags are often abused by sites to get more hits: adding Britney Spears, XXX, pr0n etc will boost a page's rank. (This is often misguided, as more hits may occur, they they will not be relevant and leave the site straight away, however this is besides the point - they still input incorrect metadata into the system.) The problem has got to the stage where Google really doesn't pay all that much attention to META tags in comparison to the page's actual content and a monitoring of it's popularity with visitors searching for a certain subject.
This last point might not be a problem with Spotlight currently, as a systemwide index it's not affected by it - however on an enterprise level there are instances where it could be a problem even over a LAN or WAN and afterall, the Internet is just computers connected together so this metadata is really useless on a larger scale in the same way that METAtags are now almost redundant in HTML, or or the RIAA has been able to spoof meta data on P2P networks to fool fileswappers.
You're obviously making your point from a developer's point of view: mine is as an end-user, who doesn't have the tiniest idea about developer technologies. I'm sure everything you said about Spotlight is true, as you seem to know your stuff, however to the end user, who wants a search function, it's Copernic.
Um. No. Dashboard widgets are little Web Views. They're essentially Web applications running in little floating windows. I'd suggest you check it out before just arbitrarily declaring it to be the same as something else.
Again, it's clear from my ignorance that I'm not a developer. I do know however as an end user that Widgets are Widgets. If I understand correctly what you're saying, you're saying that Dashboard is different to AveDesk/Samaurise/The rest because it pulls it's information off the Internet. Avedesk/Samaurise/The rest, to the best of my knowlege, also do this, hence the Weather Widget, (which can be skinned to be exact clones of the Tiger widget, and has been available since the first shots of Dashboard were released) POP/IMAP mail checker, etc.
We're not including free fonts. We're including professionally designed and licensed fonts --fully Unicode-savvy, of course -- that would cost hundreds of dollars if bought after the fact.
The Longhorn Readability Fonts are free: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantina and Corbel. They look pretty professional to me.
You don't understand the feature. This doesn't really surprise me at this point, because it's clear that your goal here is just to post criticisms without a whole lot of concern about truth.
My apologies, it wasn't clear which features had been added in the explanation on the Apple site, so I incorrectly assumed that Apple's uber-modern "World's Most Advanced Operating System" already fully supported RAID that was fully laid down in 1988, and that they were merely fixing a bug or two.
Why was this Trolled? It's the most true thing I've ever heard of Slashdot! :o
On Konfabulator- Understood, although I was more referring to Windows users who also use Windowsblinds/StyleXP to "dress" their system up like OS X, in which case they are often emulating Konfabulator, although you are correct. Aqua-Soft Is one site dedicated to it.
On MS's new fonts- Because MS's new fonts are free, even to OS X users ;)
I hope my post doesn't have tinge of Mac hating to it, becuase I love OS X, I just don't like Apple for their arrogant marketing.
Spotlight = Copernic/Google Toolbar/MSN Toolbar (whatever floats your boat.)
Safari RSS = Why the name change? It has RSS support... Firefox isn't Firefox RSS, Opera isnt Opera RSS, they're both had the feature for donkey's years. Note how on this list they've basicly listed "RSS Support" 4 times: RSS Auto Detection, RSS Bookmarks, RSS Update Notification, Safari RSS View.
Dashboard = Avedesk/Samaurise, Windows users have been using these widget programs to emulate Konfabulator for years.
Going through the long list of new features, "AIM Profiles in iChat AV" isn't exactly a huge innovation, and have been enjoyed by normal computer users since the program's inception.
Listing "New fonts" - I don't know if Mac users ever use "the rest of the internet" (it's probably too underdesign for their tastes) by it's quite easy to obtain as many free fonts as you please. Microsoft recently released a few free ones designed for Longhorn.
Also, "Improved RAID Support" is what we call a "fix" not a new feature. When I go around updating my system drivers I don't say "Whoa, I'm gonna add 4 new features to my system! Improved RAID0 support, improved RAID1 support, improved RAID0+1 support and improved RAID5 support!"
There could be a gesture which brings the "window" you're moving around closer towards you on the Z-axis (like a beckoning gesture) and one to move the windows further away on the Z-Axis. (Like a pointing gesture.)
For instance, Microsoft requires you to buy 7 full price games for each Xbox you buy to break even. (PIIIs may be cheap but they're not that cheap)
CPU - Xenon's CPU has three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores. Each core is capable of two instructions per cycle and has an L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions. The three cores share 1 MB of L2 cache. Alpha 2 developer kits currently have two cores instead of three.
Here are the other specs. GPU - Xenon's GPU is a generation beyond the ATI X800. Its clock speed is 500 MHz and it supports Shader 3.0. Developers are currently working with an alpha 2 GPU. Beta GPU units are expected by May and the final GPU is slated for a summer release. The final GPU will be more powerful than anything on the market today; in game terms, it would handle a game like Half-Life 2 with ease. System Memory - Xenon will have 256 MB of system RAM. Keep in mind that this number should not be equated to typical PC RAM. The Xbox has 64 MB of system RAM and is a very capable machine. Optical Drive - As many have speculated, Xenon will not use Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Games will come on dual-layer DVD-9 discs. While the media is the same as that of the current Xbox, the usable space on each disc is up to 7 GB. The drive is slated to run at 12X. Memory Units - Xenon will use 64 MB to 1,024 MB memory cards. 8 MB is reserved for system use, leaving a 56 MB to 1,016 MB for user data. Hard Drive - As many have speculated, Xenon's hard drive is optional. 2 GB of the drive will be used as game cache. The final drive size is still being determined. Camera - Xenon will have a USB 2.0 camera. It's capable of 1.2 megapixel still shots and VGA video. Photos can be used in-game and for gamer profiles. The camera can also be used for video chat. It's unknown if the Xenon camera will allow for EyeToy-like gameplay. Developers are currently using a simulated camera driver. Sound Chip - Xenon does not have an audio chip in the traditional sense. Decompression is handled by hardware, while the rest of the chores are handled by software. DirectSound3D has been dropped in favor of X3DAudio. The former was deemed too inflexible.
If anything these will be more like the DualCore G5s comming up in the the future for the PowerMac G5s.
Dual Processors are not new, Dual Core on the same die is, and that is what's being raved about. Apple only recently moved into Dual CPUs with the G5, whereas dual CPUs on home computers have been around since the days of the Pentium II. Apple has yet to release a G5 with dual cores on the same die, probably because of heat issues. (The G5 is the one home CPU which is actually worse heatwise than a Presc-hot)
It's a shame that Mac fanatics give him such a hard time for making just observations.
They also tend to speak much better English, because it's their home language. I know that if I was made to do tech support in Gujirati I would be just as poor as they are, if not worse, but it doesn't mean that I would want to use tech support of that standard.
That is most certainly not a coincidence...
Apple are reaping what they have sown now. They have such brand recognition with Joe Sixpack that when someone goes out to buy an mp3 player, they ask for an iPod. Most congress committee members have about the same intelligence level as Joe Sixpack, and when you half explain to them that FairPlay is restrictive, they think something along the lines of "[the only distribution channel on the internet that anyone except my tech savvy nephew knows about] is restrictive". So they open it up. Opening FairPlay up would be wrong, but beneficial. Congress have no right to do it, but I would sure as hell love it: FairPlay sucks some serious ass encrptionwise and if every online store were to use FairPlay (including subscription services such as Napster) we would just HYMN all our music to be DRM free. Apple would never adopt MS's DRM (if they did they would have to rehaul iTunes... Ok I may have spoken too soon) so they could either get everyone else to adopt their DRM (which seems more likely - everyone wants a piece of the iPod pie) or go DRM free, which would be a glorious occasion indeed, if an unlikely one.
"The shuttle has flown over 100 times with only two serious failures." Replace "The shuttle" with any other mode of transport and "serious failures" with "explosions killing all the passengers" and you'll probably understand why.
They have fixed SP1, it's called SP2... It's not an entirely new OS, it's an updates to SP1, just like SP1 was an update to the original XP release.
I find this quite worrying actually... it shows that google actually has the ability to more or less exclude a website from the mass internet. For instance if they excluded CNN from google searches, then CNN's traffic would doubleless go down.
None of which, in my experience work, because the Mac I use at work (the stupid slot loading CD-ROM iMac) locks up frequently when I insert disks.
Mozilla's most recent figures seem to indicate a flattening off of Firefox's adoption. In what ways do you plan to change this trend? (Presumably through SpreadFirefox)
I hope the liscences dont go the same way as the 3G mobile liscences in the UK... Those were a disaster and have held back the industry if anything.
*gasp* Are you suggesting that an evil Microsoft based venture was quicker off the mark and more feature loaded that a freedom loving [insert group here] product, so the freedom loving [insert group here] product didn't even make it to market!