Well actually PCI is often used in high-end servers and as a telecom backplane interconnect, which is probably why it is quoted there. So I stand by my original statement that asking a question of the "killer app" in term of a video card is a PC was a stupid question.
Why do hardware makers insist on using marketroid-designed names?
Well that would be because, despite what you may hear around here, marketing actually helps in selling products, and with the help of a good sales force, this leads to a thing called revenue.
You may not like it, but having a good names helps sell a standard, even when it's being sold to engineers. HyperTransport used to be called LDT, but nobody calls it LDT anymore, because the vast majority of people prefer the "sexy" new name.
And if you're happy with your PCI bus, fine. But then again if you're still using PCI then you're not even remotely close to the real target market for these standards anyhow and nobody cares.
HyperTransport and RapidIO are mostly designed for the telecom market right now, as is that bridge from API Networks. The MIPS processor is the major driving force behind HyperTransport in this area right now, and they've been making some serious inroads on what has mostly been PowerPC territory in the past (PPC being the driving force behind RapidIO).
Some other interesting parts with HyperTransport include PMC-Sierra's new 9000x2 processor with two 1GHz MIPS cores, and Sibyte's similar Mercurian processor.
It's processors like these that require the serious speed and low-latency of HyperTransport. It will be interesting to see how these technologies filter down to the PC market after a few years.
The "killer application" for these technologies (at least HyperTransport and RapidIO) is mostly very high-end telecom infrastructure equipment. My last job involved working on the definition of a HyperTransport bridge product that was targeted for these types of systems. A good serialized interconnect is needed in these systems, as nothing else comes close in terms of speed and latency.
PCI-X is also becoming very useful as a telecom backplane connector, and for drive arrays in high-end servers.
Of course your message was completely stupid in the first place. Why is it that so many people on slashdot look at every technology as though the PC is the only important system on the planet? It's fine that all you use is your desktop PC, and it's fine that you wait for the most commoditized solutions to filter down to your local PC shop, but despite what you might think, the world doesn't revolve around PCs. Perhaps you'll want a HyperTransport video card in 2004, but your major Internet backbones aren't going to be connected through AGP4x today. Do yourself a favour and get a more rounded technical education.
Older PDF files have the nasty habit of being compressed with LZW (think GIF).
True, but all new PDFs are compressed with ZIP so this isn't a concern anymore.
I also remember reading somewhere (maybe/.) about problems reading some of the newer PDF files on *nix systems if they used fonts that weren't on the system.
Well if the fonts in a PDF aren't on your system then you can't view them, obviously. But how is this any different from any other word processor file? The nice part is that fonts can (and in most cases, should) be embedded into the PDF so if anything, this is another reason to use PDF over something like RTF.
Someone should create a site debunking the Photoshop myth.
Actually the Photoshop benchmark is completely valid. Apple's largest market for their G4s is the designer community. The most popular application for those people, and the application they spend the most time waiting for, is Photoshop. Therefore, when they're out to buy a new computer, the most important thing to them is... the speed of Photoshop!
Additionally Apple has been using two benchmarks lately: Photoshop and movie compression. High-end video is Apple's second-largest market for their G4s, and this market spends most of their time waiting for video effects, such as compression. This is also a valid benchmark.
Thirdly, microprocessors are increadibly complex, plus the end-user speed is also dependant on many factors including software and OS optimizations. It is absolutely useless to compare the speed of processors by some numerical benchmark. What's important to anybody who wants to be productive on a computer, is how quickly your key applications run. And lo and behold, this is what Apple is benchmarking.
Remind me again why this benchmark is invalid? If anything I would suggest that any benchmark besides end-application speed is useless.
Well perhaps, but then no default Apple install has two partitions, which is a requirement as well. Still, I imagine the problems happened to quite a few people who had made two partitions: one called "Mac OS 9" and the other "Mac OS X."
- j
Re:Save as .PDF???
on
Looking At Gobe
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No, PDF does not require a license from Adobe. It's a remarkably open file format actually; I'm surprised that it isn't used by open source advocates more often.
Well I'm not intimite with Apple's QA procedure, but I'm sure it's no worse than any other vendor, and considerably better than open source (you know, the "it worked on my machine so I'll release it" philosophy.).
Do you realize that this bug is very specific? You must have at least two partitions, and one must be called "Foo" while the other is called "Foo Bar." That is, the drives must have the same name up to the space. "Disk" and "Disk 1" is an another example that many have used. QA is all fine and dandy, and programmers should be exceedingly careful with "rm -rf," but nevertheless, this is a very obscure bug.
The same thing happened to me when I was going through my Electrical Engineering degree. I really like EE (and CS) topics from the high-level, but when it came down to the mundane details of integration it was just too much. I finished my EE degree (and I suggest you get your degree too, it's important), but after I graduated I went right into technical marketing and I love it. I still get to work on some great technical projects, and I still get to work with the engineers about 30% of the time, but I deal with the product on an industry-wide scale as opposed to hacking up 1/100th of another DLL file.
The world is in need of more good technical marketing people. Everytime you hear stories about "stupid marketroids," it's another reminder of why more technical people need to staff a good marketing department. I'm no marketing expert, and I don't have an MBA (yet), but people like me on the marketing team are necessary to keep the business majors from making some basic technical mistakes. Give it some thought!
(also, as another poster mentioned, go on a trip! Head out to Europe or SE Asia or something. A trip like this should be a requirement for every University and College grad:).
They got me to switch. I didn't really like OS 9 (it seemed to limiting and a lot of the features seemed "tacked on"), but OS X is phenomenal. Sure the Mac was more expensive than another x86 box, but I don't regret the purchase one bit. I was skeptical, but I know honestly believe this is one of those time that you get what you pay for.
OS X has been making some really impressive inroads in to the Windows camp. Many tech columnists who have been anti-Mac forever have actually been saying that OS X trumps Windows XP. That's really impressive.
The iPod, of course, is only the first step. It's quite obvious from this story that the iPod has more capabilities than Apple is enabling at this point. I predict that they're eventually going to roll out a lot more "digital devices" in the future. Sure similar things will on the PC side, but the ease and integration of the future "iPods" will be the real draw.
Apple has a good solid business plan, healthy gross margins and a strategy. I really think that OSX, the future iPods, the retail stores and the attention to detail and integration are going to bring some very impressive returns for Apple in the near future. They'll never have 95% market share, but if one in every ten home computers is a Macintosh, that will all the critical mass they'll need.
But I digress. Apple has screwed up a lot in the past, but this is not the same Apple they used to be. If they can convert an old time Mac-hater like me, I have a lot of faith in their future.
You mis-understand me. I never said that it would answer any questions for you, but rather that it would help you understand how it could be possible that time did not exist. DMT doesn't answer anything, but when solution requires looking at the problem without your normal conceptions of "reality," it certainly does help in understanding.
What caused the big bang? How was it initiated? What were the bounds of the "universe" as it were before the big bang?
There was nothing before the Big Bang as it was the beginning of existance. It's sometimes a difficult answer to accept, as you've been accustomed the existance of time all your life, but you have to realize that this wasn't always the case. If you're still having trouble there are some chemicals you can use to help make it clearer.
10%????? You are WAY dreaming. Not even the Mac is 10% of the market.
You're absolutely right. This always cracks me up when people say things like this. Servers are one thing, but there is no way in hell that Linux desktop marketshare is even remotely close to that of the Macintosh.
Articles like this prove it: The Sims has been available for the Mac nearly as long as it has for Windows, but where's the Linux version? I still have yet to see any credible evidence that Linux has any more than a negligable desktop market share, and I think your guess of 0.1% is generous. I use Linux on all of my low-end servers, but there's no way I'll waste a perfectly good desktop machine with it.
Fortunately I didn't have money to waste on those awful intermediate models with their hinges that would break.
The Pismo has the same hinges as the Wallstreet and Lombard, so you're not completely safe. I had the hinges replaced on my Wallstreet; it was a pain in the ass, but it was cheap ($100CAN). I suggest that you never open and close your Pismo by pulling on only one side at a time or you'll exacerbate the problem.
Well I've had the... um.. "pleasure".. of trying to get a MIPS single board computer up and running with x-windows (for a tradeshow demo) and I'll tell you, it's not fun. The Linux kernel on MIPS is pretty solid these days, but the application-level support reminds me of Linux in '94. It was a very painful experience (though for the record I did get it up and running and it looked great, provided nobody touched the mouse:).
But hey, the more coders who play around with the MIPS port, the better it will get, right? Go for it!:)
oh for fucks sake. For the last time, these companies don't care who you are and as a result don't bother to keep information such as your name. If they are permitted only to keep you as a number then you are safe. Sure somebody, somewhere could, theoretically, piece the puzzle together and figure out who did what; but it would be a monumental task, and I pretty much guarantee you're not interesting enough to warrant all that work.
Y'know being that paranoid will take twenty years off your life from the stress alone.
Marketing is not about selling people the things they want. Marketing is about convincing people to buy things that they don't need!
Well I see you're a subscriptor to Adbusters. So am I. That's great. But before you go off on your little tangent I would like to point out that, unless you live in a basic shack and buy only food to keep yourself alive then, I bet you buy things that you don't need on occassion. And to that end, some day you're going to go buy something, either a product or a service. Something you want; something that isn't fundamentally required for you to remain on this planet. And when you do, it might be handy for you to know, perhaps, where to buy this product or service.
Now, would it be nice if, when you were out on the Internet perhaps, you saw only those adverisements that were of things in which you were interested? Sure you may not want to buy all of them, but wouldn't it be handy if information about the product or service you wanted was right there infront of you?
So get down off your high-horse. Yes we are over-saturated with advertising in this world, but that doesnt mean that advertising is inherantly evil. In fact, if advertising were able to be more finely targeted there would be less ads required. Corporations would be able to target their market without plastering ads everywhere and you would get only the information that you are interested in. Advertising can be useful, but you have an open mind about the possibilities.
And this is precisely why I am up in arms about that kind of research: because, to them, I am "just a number."
Wow, that's a totally different problem. Though I don't understand what you're rambling on about: if you're just a number then you have your privacy! There's no way of linking the sites you visit or the things you buy to who you are, so what's the problem?
No privacy is being "taken" from you from "companies tryping to make money." It seems like you may have deeper social issues.
I reserve the right to clandestinely take photographs of you masturbating and send those photos to everyone who knows you, including your employer, potential employers, and your extended family.
Well nice idea, but those photos are already available online. Perhaps I could just send you the URL and save you the trouble?
I would like to point out that in order to find which consumers are interested in a company's product, market research is required. A lot of people around here complain about market research companies harvesting data from people, through cookies and devices like personal video recorders.
Privacy advocates are up in arms about this kind of research, but these people have to get it through their heads that these companies don't give a fuck who you are. To them you're just a number. A number who happens to like programming books, geek shirts, alternative music and donkey porn. And it is through that information that you can get what you want: "show me products I am actually interested in."
Slashdot Mirror
Well actually PCI is often used in high-end servers and as a telecom backplane interconnect, which is probably why it is quoted there. So I stand by my original statement that asking a question of the "killer app" in term of a video card is a PC was a stupid question.
- j
Why do hardware makers insist on using marketroid-designed names?
Well that would be because, despite what you may hear around here, marketing actually helps in selling products, and with the help of a good sales force, this leads to a thing called revenue.
You may not like it, but having a good names helps sell a standard, even when it's being sold to engineers. HyperTransport used to be called LDT, but nobody calls it LDT anymore, because the vast majority of people prefer the "sexy" new name.
And if you're happy with your PCI bus, fine. But then again if you're still using PCI then you're not even remotely close to the real target market for these standards anyhow and nobody cares.
- j
HyperTransport and RapidIO are mostly designed for the telecom market right now, as is that bridge from API Networks. The MIPS processor is the major driving force behind HyperTransport in this area right now, and they've been making some serious inroads on what has mostly been PowerPC territory in the past (PPC being the driving force behind RapidIO).
Some other interesting parts with HyperTransport include PMC-Sierra's new 9000x2 processor with two 1GHz MIPS cores, and Sibyte's similar Mercurian processor.
It's processors like these that require the serious speed and low-latency of HyperTransport. It will be interesting to see how these technologies filter down to the PC market after a few years.
- j
The "killer application" for these technologies (at least HyperTransport and RapidIO) is mostly very high-end telecom infrastructure equipment. My last job involved working on the definition of a HyperTransport bridge product that was targeted for these types of systems. A good serialized interconnect is needed in these systems, as nothing else comes close in terms of speed and latency.
PCI-X is also becoming very useful as a telecom backplane connector, and for drive arrays in high-end servers.
Of course your message was completely stupid in the first place. Why is it that so many people on slashdot look at every technology as though the PC is the only important system on the planet? It's fine that all you use is your desktop PC, and it's fine that you wait for the most commoditized solutions to filter down to your local PC shop, but despite what you might think, the world doesn't revolve around PCs. Perhaps you'll want a HyperTransport video card in 2004, but your major Internet backbones aren't going to be connected through AGP4x today. Do yourself a favour and get a more rounded technical education.
- j
Older PDF files have the nasty habit of being compressed with LZW (think GIF).
/.) about problems reading some of the newer PDF files on *nix systems if they used fonts that weren't on the system.
True, but all new PDFs are compressed with ZIP so this isn't a concern anymore.
I also remember reading somewhere (maybe
Well if the fonts in a PDF aren't on your system then you can't view them, obviously. But how is this any different from any other word processor file? The nice part is that fonts can (and in most cases, should) be embedded into the PDF so if anything, this is another reason to use PDF over something like RTF.
- j
Someone should create a site debunking the Photoshop myth.
... the speed of Photoshop!
Actually the Photoshop benchmark is completely valid. Apple's largest market for their G4s is the designer community. The most popular application for those people, and the application they spend the most time waiting for, is Photoshop. Therefore, when they're out to buy a new computer, the most important thing to them is
Additionally Apple has been using two benchmarks lately: Photoshop and movie compression. High-end video is Apple's second-largest market for their G4s, and this market spends most of their time waiting for video effects, such as compression. This is also a valid benchmark.
Thirdly, microprocessors are increadibly complex, plus the end-user speed is also dependant on many factors including software and OS optimizations. It is absolutely useless to compare the speed of processors by some numerical benchmark. What's important to anybody who wants to be productive on a computer, is how quickly your key applications run. And lo and behold, this is what Apple is benchmarking.
Remind me again why this benchmark is invalid? If anything I would suggest that any benchmark besides end-application speed is useless.
- j
Well perhaps, but then no default Apple install has two partitions, which is a requirement as well. Still, I imagine the problems happened to quite a few people who had made two partitions: one called "Mac OS 9" and the other "Mac OS X."
- j
No, PDF does not require a license from Adobe. It's a remarkably open file format actually; I'm surprised that it isn't used by open source advocates more often.
- j
Well I'm not intimite with Apple's QA procedure, but I'm sure it's no worse than any other vendor, and considerably better than open source (you know, the "it worked on my machine so I'll release it" philosophy.).
Do you realize that this bug is very specific? You must have at least two partitions, and one must be called "Foo" while the other is called "Foo Bar." That is, the drives must have the same name up to the space. "Disk" and "Disk 1" is an another example that many have used. QA is all fine and dandy, and programmers should be exceedingly careful with "rm -rf," but nevertheless, this is a very obscure bug.
- j
Although, they shouldn't have erased my files to begin with.
Granted, but mistakes happen.
Now, how do I start my broken Mac again?
With your OS 9 CD. Pop it in and hold down "c" until you see OS 9 booting up. Alternatively, the Norton CD is self-booting.
- j
The same thing happened to me when I was going through my Electrical Engineering degree. I really like EE (and CS) topics from the high-level, but when it came down to the mundane details of integration it was just too much. I finished my EE degree (and I suggest you get your degree too, it's important), but after I graduated I went right into technical marketing and I love it. I still get to work on some great technical projects, and I still get to work with the engineers about 30% of the time, but I deal with the product on an industry-wide scale as opposed to hacking up 1/100th of another DLL file.
:).
The world is in need of more good technical marketing people. Everytime you hear stories about "stupid marketroids," it's another reminder of why more technical people need to staff a good marketing department. I'm no marketing expert, and I don't have an MBA (yet), but people like me on the marketing team are necessary to keep the business majors from making some basic technical mistakes. Give it some thought!
(also, as another poster mentioned, go on a trip! Head out to Europe or SE Asia or something. A trip like this should be a requirement for every University and College grad
- j
They got me to switch. I didn't really like OS 9 (it seemed to limiting and a lot of the features seemed "tacked on"), but OS X is phenomenal. Sure the Mac was more expensive than another x86 box, but I don't regret the purchase one bit. I was skeptical, but I know honestly believe this is one of those time that you get what you pay for.
OS X has been making some really impressive inroads in to the Windows camp. Many tech columnists who have been anti-Mac forever have actually been saying that OS X trumps Windows XP. That's really impressive.
The iPod, of course, is only the first step. It's quite obvious from this story that the iPod has more capabilities than Apple is enabling at this point. I predict that they're eventually going to roll out a lot more "digital devices" in the future. Sure similar things will on the PC side, but the ease and integration of the future "iPods" will be the real draw.
Apple has a good solid business plan, healthy gross margins and a strategy. I really think that OSX, the future iPods, the retail stores and the attention to detail and integration are going to bring some very impressive returns for Apple in the near future. They'll never have 95% market share, but if one in every ten home computers is a Macintosh, that will all the critical mass they'll need.
But I digress. Apple has screwed up a lot in the past, but this is not the same Apple they used to be. If they can convert an old time Mac-hater like me, I have a lot of faith in their future.
- j
You mis-understand me. I never said that it would answer any questions for you, but rather that it would help you understand how it could be possible that time did not exist. DMT doesn't answer anything, but when solution requires looking at the problem without your normal conceptions of "reality," it certainly does help in understanding.
Get it?
- j
existAnce? Hrmm.. er .. existEnce. DMT taught me a lot but it never taught me to spell.
- j
What caused the big bang? How was it initiated? What were the bounds of the "universe" as it were before the big bang?
There was nothing before the Big Bang as it was the beginning of existance. It's sometimes a difficult answer to accept, as you've been accustomed the existance of time all your life, but you have to realize that this wasn't always the case. If you're still having trouble there are some chemicals you can use to help make it clearer.
- j
10%????? You are WAY dreaming. Not even the Mac is 10% of the market.
You're absolutely right. This always cracks me up when people say things like this. Servers are one thing, but there is no way in hell that Linux desktop marketshare is even remotely close to that of the Macintosh.
Articles like this prove it: The Sims has been available for the Mac nearly as long as it has for Windows, but where's the Linux version? I still have yet to see any credible evidence that Linux has any more than a negligable desktop market share, and I think your guess of 0.1% is generous. I use Linux on all of my low-end servers, but there's no way I'll waste a perfectly good desktop machine with it.
- j
Wow. I recognize that as a load of crap and I work in marketing!
- j
Fortunately I didn't have money to waste on those awful intermediate models with their hinges that would break.
The Pismo has the same hinges as the Wallstreet and Lombard, so you're not completely safe. I had the hinges replaced on my Wallstreet; it was a pain in the ass, but it was cheap ($100CAN). I suggest that you never open and close your Pismo by pulling on only one side at a time or you'll exacerbate the problem.
- j
Well I've had the ... um .. "pleasure" .. of trying to get a MIPS single board computer up and running with x-windows (for a tradeshow demo) and I'll tell you, it's not fun. The Linux kernel on MIPS is pretty solid these days, but the application-level support reminds me of Linux in '94. It was a very painful experience (though for the record I did get it up and running and it looked great, provided nobody touched the mouse :).
:)
But hey, the more coders who play around with the MIPS port, the better it will get, right? Go for it!
- j
oh for fucks sake. For the last time, these companies don't care who you are and as a result don't bother to keep information such as your name. If they are permitted only to keep you as a number then you are safe. Sure somebody, somewhere could, theoretically, piece the puzzle together and figure out who did what; but it would be a monumental task, and I pretty much guarantee you're not interesting enough to warrant all that work.
Y'know being that paranoid will take twenty years off your life from the stress alone.
- j
Marketing is not about selling people the things they want. Marketing is about convincing people to buy things that they don't need!
Well I see you're a subscriptor to Adbusters. So am I. That's great. But before you go off on your little tangent I would like to point out that, unless you live in a basic shack and buy only food to keep yourself alive then, I bet you buy things that you don't need on occassion. And to that end, some day you're going to go buy something, either a product or a service. Something you want; something that isn't fundamentally required for you to remain on this planet. And when you do, it might be handy for you to know, perhaps, where to buy this product or service.
Now, would it be nice if, when you were out on the Internet perhaps, you saw only those adverisements that were of things in which you were interested? Sure you may not want to buy all of them, but wouldn't it be handy if information about the product or service you wanted was right there infront of you?
So get down off your high-horse. Yes we are over-saturated with advertising in this world, but that doesnt mean that advertising is inherantly evil. In fact, if advertising were able to be more finely targeted there would be less ads required. Corporations would be able to target their market without plastering ads everywhere and you would get only the information that you are interested in. Advertising can be useful, but you have an open mind about the possibilities.
- j
And this is precisely why I am up in arms about that kind of research: because, to them, I am "just a number."
Wow, that's a totally different problem. Though I don't understand what you're rambling on about: if you're just a number then you have your privacy! There's no way of linking the sites you visit or the things you buy to who you are, so what's the problem?
No privacy is being "taken" from you from "companies tryping to make money." It seems like you may have deeper social issues.
I reserve the right to clandestinely take photographs of you masturbating and send those photos to everyone who knows you, including your employer, potential employers, and your extended family.
Well nice idea, but those photos are already available online. Perhaps I could just send you the URL and save you the trouble?
- j
FWIW Hunter S. Thompson is also known as Gonzo.
- j
I would like to point out that in order to find which consumers are interested in a company's product, market research is required. A lot of people around here complain about market research companies harvesting data from people, through cookies and devices like personal video recorders.
Privacy advocates are up in arms about this kind of research, but these people have to get it through their heads that these companies don't give a fuck who you are. To them you're just a number. A number who happens to like programming books, geek shirts, alternative music and donkey porn. And it is through that information that you can get what you want: "show me products I am actually interested in."
- j
This reminds me, does anybody know of any PGP-style email encryption/authentication programs that work under Mac OS X?
- j