Re:Does anyone else find it mildly strange....
on
Drafting GPL3
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The difference is that Jobs inspires respect without his doing anything to demand it. Stallman, on the other hand, inspires ridicule. It's telling that the only way Stallman can get people to kiss his toes is by force of legal contract.
There's also the fact that Safari's intelligent about naming tabs. If you have five tabs open whose names all start with "Amazon.com," for example, and there's not enough room to display the whole title, Safari gets rid of the redundant part of the name. Meanwhile, in Firefox you'll probably be seeing "Amazon.com" five times--not particularly helpful.
Safari has extensions too, you know. I'm running with one that lets you rearrange tabs and drag and drop them between windows, and another that blocks ads. To each his own, I guess...
I think GP was actually saying Safari's tabs are less elegant, but I still disagree. For one thing, if you open too many tabs in Firefox, they're pushed off the side of the window; Safari, on the other hand, displays a popup menu so you can still switch to them. Also, Safari's tabs are a hell of a lot nicer-looking. It's small things like that that really make the difference.
Safari has fewer keyboard shortcuts? Then I'd be happy to know what key combinations I can press in Firefox to switch between tabs and how to make the Delete key act as a shortcut for "go back." If it requires the use of extensions or mucking in about:config, forget it.
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon. Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon. I can't pay no doctor bills but Whitey's on the moon. Ten years from now I'll be payin' still while Whitey's on the moon.
The man just upped my rent last night cuz Whitey's on the moon. No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey's on the moon. I wonder why he's uppin me. Cuz Whitey's on the moon? I was already givin' him fifty a week but now Whitey's on the moon.
Taxes takin' my whole damn check, The junkies makin' me a nervous wreck, The price of food is goin' up, And as if all that shit wasn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon. Her face and arms began to swell but Whitey's on the moon. Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon? How come there ain't no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.
Ya know, I just about had my fill of Whitey on the moon. I think I'll send these doctor bills airmail special.... to Whitey on the moon.
It sure was when the Mac transitioned from 68k to PowerPC. It was as if nothing changed, except that apps kept getting faster and faster over time as developers recompiled them for the new architecture.
And in order to recompile, developers only had to make sure they weren't doing anything too dirty, like directly writing to system globals in low memory addresses and things like that.
This time around, it'll be the same for the user, and for the developer, it looks like there's even less work involved in recompiling. So I'm not sure where all these doomsday prophecies are coming from, but transitioning between ISAs doesn't have to be an ugly and torturous process.
Well, maybe I'm an exception, but I went through both transitions and I'm not particularly concerned about this new one. The transition from 68k to PPC was especially beautiful, almost seamless, and architecturally quite elegant behind the scenes. That's what I'm looking forward to (no godawful "compatibility box" like with Classic on OS X, at the very least).
But which benchmarks? Depends, of course, on whether you're running a server, recompositing layers in Photoshop, or just browsing the Web. I'm just saying that "performance per watt" is a slippery concept, and that while there will certainly be applications for which the Intel-based Mac runs cooler, there's bound to be others for which it runs hotter.
It's the old and crufty 32-bit ISA, unfortunately. From Apple's Universal Binary Programming Guidelines, released today: "The term x86 is a generic term used throughout this book to refer to the class of microprocessors manufactured by Intel. This book uses the term x86 as a synonym for IA-32 (Intel Architecture 32-bit)."
Hell already froze over once before, in the early '90s, when Apple and IBM announced they were teaming up to produce a new processor to power Macs for the next decade. Back then, the idea of Big Blue--the faceless monster, the Orwellian machine!--entering the Macintosh world was completely heretical.
Funny how things change. And how they stay the same.
Steve mentioned that going forward, Intel processors have a higher "performance per watt" (whatever that is) than the PowerPC roadmap promises. Cool-running processors are important to Apple's design aesthetic, I think, and switching CPU architectures on the backend doesn't change that.
Evil mirror universe--nah, I don't think so. Apple's always been about doing what it takes to bring elegance and aesthetics to computing. It's just that they've decided Intel's a better bet than IBM and Motorola to let them do the things they do best.
"When Apple last changed processor families, there was a big problem with binary incompatability. Needless to say, there were a lot of very pissed off Apple users."
Really? I don't remember any "big problems" with incompatibilities between 68k and PPC code. If memory serves, Apple provided a fast and uncommonly elegant "mixed mode" emulator that even had support for multiple (as in more than 2) architectures. On the user side, I don't remember any hassles at all, literally not a one. You couldn't run PPC code on 68k machines, of course, but by the time vendors started offering PPC-only apps, most people had already made the transition.
In short, it was a relatively painless couple of years, certainly not the disaster you make it out to have been.
Also, Apple's been pissing us off for decades. This isn't anything new.:)
Know what's interesting? There's probably a statistically significant correlation between people who believe in your tenure at Apple, absent any verifiable evidence, and people who believe the world came about by the good grace of a haggardly geriatric taking a seven day shit. I've got nothing against religious chaps, and I've even been known to endure a sermon every now and again, but you know what else? It's just not for me.
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The difference is that Jobs inspires respect without his doing anything to demand it. Stallman, on the other hand, inspires ridicule. It's telling that the only way Stallman can get people to kiss his toes is by force of legal contract.
There's also the fact that Safari's intelligent about naming tabs. If you have five tabs open whose names all start with "Amazon.com," for example, and there's not enough room to display the whole title, Safari gets rid of the redundant part of the name. Meanwhile, in Firefox you'll probably be seeing "Amazon.com" five times--not particularly helpful.
Safari has extensions too, you know. I'm running with one that lets you rearrange tabs and drag and drop them between windows, and another that blocks ads. To each his own, I guess...
I think GP was actually saying Safari's tabs are less elegant, but I still disagree. For one thing, if you open too many tabs in Firefox, they're pushed off the side of the window; Safari, on the other hand, displays a popup menu so you can still switch to them. Also, Safari's tabs are a hell of a lot nicer-looking. It's small things like that that really make the difference.
Safari has fewer keyboard shortcuts? Then I'd be happy to know what key combinations I can press in Firefox to switch between tabs and how to make the Delete key act as a shortcut for "go back." If it requires the use of extensions or mucking in about:config, forget it.
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon.
I can't pay no doctor bills but Whitey's on the moon.
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still while Whitey's on the moon.
The man just upped my rent last night cuz Whitey's on the moon.
No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey's on the moon.
I wonder why he's uppin me. Cuz Whitey's on the moon?
I was already givin' him fifty a week but now Whitey's on the moon.
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
The junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
And as if all that shit wasn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell but Whitey's on the moon.
Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon?
How come there ain't no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.
Ya know, I just about had my fill of Whitey on the moon.
I think I'll send these doctor bills
airmail special....
to Whitey on the moon.
Gil-Scott Heron, 1972
"it's never ever that smooth"
It sure was when the Mac transitioned from 68k to PowerPC. It was as if nothing changed, except that apps kept getting faster and faster over time as developers recompiled them for the new architecture.
And in order to recompile, developers only had to make sure they weren't doing anything too dirty, like directly writing to system globals in low memory addresses and things like that.
This time around, it'll be the same for the user, and for the developer, it looks like there's even less work involved in recompiling. So I'm not sure where all these doomsday prophecies are coming from, but transitioning between ISAs doesn't have to be an ugly and torturous process.
Well, maybe I'm an exception, but I went through both transitions and I'm not particularly concerned about this new one. The transition from 68k to PPC was especially beautiful, almost seamless, and architecturally quite elegant behind the scenes. That's what I'm looking forward to (no godawful "compatibility box" like with Classic on OS X, at the very least).
Now you just need some batteries: "Calculations showed that a one kilo Lithium battery can provide a diver with about one hour of diving time."
Does that make it lighter or heavier than existing oxygen tanks?
Sounds to me like a job for nuclear-powered batteries.
They take after their CEO that way.
But which benchmarks? Depends, of course, on whether you're running a server, recompositing layers in Photoshop, or just browsing the Web. I'm just saying that "performance per watt" is a slippery concept, and that while there will certainly be applications for which the Intel-based Mac runs cooler, there's bound to be others for which it runs hotter.
It's the old and crufty 32-bit ISA, unfortunately. From Apple's Universal Binary Programming Guidelines, released today: "The term x86 is a generic term used throughout this book to refer to the class of microprocessors manufactured by Intel. This book uses the term x86 as a synonym for IA-32 (Intel Architecture 32-bit)."
Yeah, but how do you measure things like "slower" and "same speed"? Therein lies the problem.
You misspelled "Phil fucking Schiller."
Har har.
Not to be a "MAC" zealot, but he said nothing about MHz per watt. He mentioned performance per watt-- a very different concept.
I'm just trying to get karma here. Leave me alone.
No offense if I've misread you, but I seriously don't know if you're trolling. You even brought up the one-button mouse. For God's sake.
If you've got an argument to make, don't set up such obviously flawed premises.
Hell already froze over once before, in the early '90s, when Apple and IBM announced they were teaming up to produce a new processor to power Macs for the next decade. Back then, the idea of Big Blue--the faceless monster, the Orwellian machine!--entering the Macintosh world was completely heretical.
Funny how things change. And how they stay the same.
Damn straight. Intel is for the proletariat.
My friends dragged me to a Blue Man Group performance once and it was so bad I had to wash myself off afterwards with a bath of Évian and caviar.
Steve mentioned that going forward, Intel processors have a higher "performance per watt" (whatever that is) than the PowerPC roadmap promises. Cool-running processors are important to Apple's design aesthetic, I think, and switching CPU architectures on the backend doesn't change that.
Evil mirror universe--nah, I don't think so. Apple's always been about doing what it takes to bring elegance and aesthetics to computing. It's just that they've decided Intel's a better bet than IBM and Motorola to let them do the things they do best.
Sticking with the Mac would be annoying and difficult because of compatibility headaches, so you're switching to Linux?
"When Apple last changed processor families, there was a big problem with binary incompatability. Needless to say, there were a lot of very pissed off Apple users."
:)
Really? I don't remember any "big problems" with incompatibilities between 68k and PPC code. If memory serves, Apple provided a fast and uncommonly elegant "mixed mode" emulator that even had support for multiple (as in more than 2) architectures. On the user side, I don't remember any hassles at all, literally not a one. You couldn't run PPC code on 68k machines, of course, but by the time vendors started offering PPC-only apps, most people had already made the transition.
In short, it was a relatively painless couple of years, certainly not the disaster you make it out to have been.
Also, Apple's been pissing us off for decades. This isn't anything new.
What happened--somebody call you out on your farce? Or did you just get tired?
I think I liked you better as Leo McGarry (as seen on TV, naturally). What's your next alias? Please let it be "Sidney."
Know what's interesting? There's probably a statistically significant correlation between people who believe in your tenure at Apple, absent any verifiable evidence, and people who believe the world came about by the good grace of a haggardly geriatric taking a seven day shit. I've got nothing against religious chaps, and I've even been known to endure a sermon every now and again, but you know what else? It's just not for me.