Re: ppc-intel query
On 08/06/2005, at 11:32 AM, Martin Hill wrote: From: Warren Jones [EMAIL PROTECTED] If the Mac will be able to run win software well, will this be a double-edged sword? - will that encourage companies to only write software for Win, knowing it will probably work on the new macs good enough? I think most software vendors realise Mac users don't suffer Windows-like software (or crappy ports or poorly written software for that matter) nearly as easily as Windows users who are used to that stuff. I think this is the big thing for Mac users now. Previously, companies could get away with writing so-so user interfaces as long as it basically worked. Nowadays, Mac users EXPECT a well thought out, clean, quality interface. Apple has shown the world that interfaces can be a functional thing of elegance and beauty. By that, I don't just mean eye-candy. There a many Windows apps that have a 'pretty' interface with glossy buttons and drop shadows everywhere, but after using them you realise that they were made by some intern that just discovered Photoshop filters. Pages, Delicious Library, Keynote, the iApps, QuickSilver, OmniApps et al have all shown that interface can look fantastic, but also be incredibly functional. It's what Mac users expect. Ugly Windows ports just won't cut it any more. - Matt
Re: ppc-intel query
All: On 07/06/2005, at 1:39 PM, Craig Ringer wrote: I presume that Steve Jobs' intention was not to halt all Mac sales for the indefinite future, disgruntle all recent switchers, spook anyone who was considering switching or upgrading in the near future [...] I'd be surprised if he managed that. The initial response has been way more negative than I would've expected. Surely people will realize that these will still be Macs despite the different CPU, and that developers will maintain compatibility for a fair while yet (there being a big PPC installed base and all)? Indeed. With the loss of the PowerPC, the Mac loses any advantage or disadvantage its CPU had over Intel. Thus if the 970 or 970MP or 980 were ever to beat Intel's offerings, we'll never know. From 2006 on, the Mac will compete solely on quality of design and software. Intel is unlikely to give Apple any breaks on the best chips it has in any particular season. From an emotional, slightly irrational perspective, Apple developers who are familiar with low-level details generally detest the x86 architecture and think the PowerPC and Altivec are far more elegant. The elegance promised a more performant future, but often it was just promises. It irks us that VHS won over Betamax, or Windows won over MacOS, etc. The main piss-off will be having to buy upgrades to all your software to get it to run at full performance on the Intel-based machines. Oh, and drivers. That *will* cause some fury. Hmmm... maybe you're right :S [...] and putting a knife through developers' prospects. I imagine he's done a good job of doing exactly that, though. Really? Porting doesn't seem that hard. I've read the porting document, and most of it deals with the two areas I expected - endian issues, and vector instructions. In a well written application the vector code will already be in well-separated platform-specific parts of the code, preferably with a portable equivalent already done. That just shouldn't be too bad even if they do need to write some new SSE-based vector ASM for x86. If the AltiVec code is scattered through their codebase then someone needs to show them what software engineering is. Endian issues will be more of a pain for Mac developers who don't also support any little-endian platforms already, but shouldn't be *that* big a deal. They didn't cause too much trouble when porting Scribus over to MacOS/X for PPC (not finished, but hardly anybody has time to work on it right now). If you read the porting document, there really aren't many good equivalents to Altivec opcodes e.g. permute. So the greatest pain in porting will hit the Altivec-focussed developers, the ones who have coded directly into Altivec rather than relying on a library like Apple's Accelerate framework or my macstl. They might feel cheated because unlike many pieces of Apple software (Open Transport, OpenDoc etc.) that fell by the wayside, they thought the hardware support was least likely to change. Will be interesting to see the Intel equivalents of the AltiVec and Xserve products, esp. given the inevitable Mac-vs-Windows-vs-Linux performance comparisons (eg. Adobe Photoshop for workstations, Apache for servers, etc.). My bet: Opteron . That'd provide SSE 3 and 3DNow pro. Admittedly not really the same as AltiVec, but not too bad either. I suspect there will be things we haven't seen yet that Steve has seen on the Intel maps, and/or IBM must have really told him to piss off. There are good reasons why G5 and PowerPC clusters are among the top 500 supercomputers in the world, and Intel will have a lot of catching up to do so. The low end G4's will go first since Intel has already (or should be able to) beat them -- hence iBooks, Mac mini, Powerbooks first. As a business decision I can see how it came down. Lose 5% of our market which are the performance geeks/scientists/high-end users, but gain 40% more market in laptop users, OK let's do it... No mention is made of 64-bit support. AMD pioneered a 64-bit variant of x86 which has proven quite popular, and even the far bigger Intel has been forced to accept this ISA instead of its own Itanium ISA. Besides 64-bit support which is quite esoteric, a few modernizations were but into x86-64 including many more registers, which generally makes programs run faster. The Intel Pentium-M's that Jobs were eyeing for the next Powerbooks don't support this x86-64, and the fat binaries in the porting document etc. only target the old x86, so that too is cause for concern. Still, when the x86 support is in full swing, it would be fairly straightforward to flick another switch to get x86-64 and/or get AMD in. SSE3 doesn't provide many opcodes over SSE2 or SSE. The one that brought near parity with Altivec was SSE2. My thinking is they shouldn't have ruled out PPC -- i.e. they should have offered both x86 and PPC. So
Re: Interesting article on cpu switch
Ken Woods wrote: While all this is comment is well intended, (and I have not seen the keynote), I have no doubt that this move will cost Apple severely in sales, reason - most people, and I mean most people will draw absolutely no separation between Intel and Windows! While I'm sure there will be those that will beg to differ I firmly believe that the average man and woman in the street associate Windows and Intel as one product, one entity , sad though this thought may be (clever man Mr. Gates). That may be, but I think only for those (like us) that actually know or care what a cpu is! I don't believe this group encompasses Mr and Mrs Joe Average, who buy many more computers than us enthusiasts. I really only work with the Averages and their PCs and I can tell you they don't even want to know about this stuff. You try to tell them and they nod their heads but they would fail a questionnaire soon after ;) It seems to me that this will hurt more in the battle of mine's bigger than yours. Personally, I embrace the change, it sounds like a Commodore with a Nissan engine, we bought those didn't we? Cheers Paul -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.6.6 - Release Date: 8/06/2005
Steve's Skunkworks pic from keynote
Hi All! Anyone want to know how Steve got that satellite pic of the Skunkworks at Apple? Look here: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1+Infinte+Loop, +Cupertinoll=37.331457,-122.030565spn=0.006566,0.010654t=khl=en As Matt would say, Google is your friend :-) Seeya Rod! PS The satellite maps are quite interesting to have a look at. I even had a look at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco!
Slang truism
Intel or no -- she'll be apples. Cheers, Vlad James Stoked on OS 10.4.1 on my G4/800
Re: Australian Phonebook widget / resizing widgets
Brett said: [...] It's a nice widget. I'm looking forward to the one that finds the lyrics to the song that's playing in iTunes. Try http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/music/ituneslyrics.html Have fun, Shay -- === Shay Telfer Perth, Western Australia Technomancer Join Team Sungroper in the Opinions for hire [POQ] 2005 World Solar Challenge http://public.xdi.org/=Shayfnord http://sungroper.asn.au/
List Archive
Could someone please provide the url for wamug mailing list archive as the link in the signature stops at 4Sep04. Thanks Cheers! Rob Davies [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can always tell if you're working on a Mac or a PC, he said. Just take your applications and stick them in and see if they run (Gates 05). If it does Welcome to Mac OS X! (RJDarts 05).
Re: List Archive
w On 09/06/2005, at 5:45 PM, Rob Davies wrote: Could someone please provide the url for wamug mailing list archive as the link in the signature stops at 4Sep04. http://wamug.org.au:8100/Lists/wamug/List.html Thanks Cheers! Rob Davies [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can always tell if you're working on a Mac or a PC, he said. Just take your applications and stick them in and see if they run (Gates 05). If it does Welcome to Mac OS X! (RJDarts 05). -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml Guidelines - http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml Unsubscribe - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] WAMUG is powered by Stalker CommuniGatePro
CommPost: Zytech specials
Hi all! Congratualations to Dave from Minnamurra who is our lucky winner for Apr-05 (Yes we are a bit late!) just for being a subscriber. Our May winner will be revealed in our next newsletter. In the every changing face of storage, Samsung Electronics recently announced a breakthrough in flash memory for mass storage with a 4GB flash device in a 70-nanometer chip. The 70nm form factor will replace the 90nm chip that held 2GB, and it will allow for 50 percent higher performance, writing at 16MBps. According to some analysts, flash memory promises to hold some very exciting future prospects. Included in this is the possible replacement of hard drive storage with flash memory storage. The advantages are, increased reliability (no spinning hard drives to worry about), and reduced power consumption being the major ones. Other industry analysts however, are quick to pour water on this idea, saying that the cost differential between the technologies is far too great and as flash memory prices come down, disk drives will also come down maintaining this competitive edge. The battle between disk and flash can be seen in the MP3 market where the iPod and iPod mini use disk and the iPod shuffle uses flash. Samsung, is producing the flash in volume now and is ramping up from 4,000 wafers per month in June to 15,000 per month by the end of the year. Although Intel also produces flash memory, it is the market leader in what is called NOR flash, which is used in cellular phones because it stores both the code that drives a cellular phone and the data. Samsung is the market leader in NAND flash, which is used only for data and is typically found in digital cameras and MP3 players. It will be interesting to see if flash memory makes its way into computers, no doubt laptops to begin with. We've added a couple of new products; firstly the iStation Speakers allows you to play your iPod just like a mini HiFi. The price is reduced only for a week so you'll have to be quick to snap up this special. http://zytech.com.au/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PRODProduct_Code=iPODStation We've also just introduced a 300GB drive for those truly serious about their storage requirements, and at $444 it represents great value for this much storage. Heres the link: http://zytech.com.au/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PRODStore_Code=ZOSFAFMDSProduct_Code=EDGF308 Check out this great offer from Zytech and Microsoft. Get the student/teacher edition of Office and you get a standard wireless optical desktop - this alone is worth $80 - heres the link: http://zytech.com.au/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PRODProduct_Code=SOMacMate For portability, we've put our 40GB FireStar on special at $249, heres the link: http://zytech.com.au/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PRODStore_Code=ZOSFAFMDSProduct_Code=ED2F405 And, lastly, any purchase of $2000 or more (at normal prices) qualifies you for a free 256MB multifunction MP3 player with voice recording. Here's the link: http://zytech.com.au/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PRODProduct_Code=FFPO256 Till next time. Kind regards, Greg Satti - Zytech PO Box 758 Bunbury WA 6230 Ph: (08) 9721 1125 Fx: (08) 9721 1126 Mb: 0423 558 636 The online data and technology store http://www.zytech.com.au/ If you have received this email in error or you no longer wish to receive communications from zytech, please send me an email at [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject line of UNSUBSCRIBE.
Re: Interesting article on cpu switch
Paul wrote: Personally, I embrace the change, it sounds like a Commodore with a Nissan engine, we bought those didn't we? Reg Whitely wrote: Hey that was a good engine, especially the turbo model! Reg It sure was/is! However there were some rather disturbing integration issues with it to be honest :( I personally have welded the entire length of the back of the heads due to cracking in the cam tunnel (a difference in the height of the top of the radiators in Commodores and Skylines was the culprit). I hope my comparison is not prophetic ;) I'm praying that Apple remain the Motherboard designers and or builders. Thats where they have had the edge IMO. The fact that I know almost zilch about Apple Motherboards is due to the no issues way in which they operate. What gives some folk here the idea that AMD chips are an option? Has this been touted elswhere too? It would be more interesting: Davids vs Goliaths For one of these to accept an AMD chip (which I usually prefer for PCs), would that imply a different Motherboard for that model or models? I have trouble (read anxiety) believing it could be like current PC boards where you can pick and choose and replace or upgrade CPUs with relatively numerous choices. Comments anyone? Cheers Paul -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.6.6 - Release Date: 8/06/2005
Re: Flash Memory: Zytech specials
My computer science lecturer predicted this in 1987 or 1988. In the every changing face of storage, Samsung Electronics recently announced a breakthrough in flash memory for mass storage with a 4GB flash device in a 70-nanometer chip. The 70nm form factor will replace the 90nm chip that held 2GB, and it will allow for 50 percent higher performance, writing at 16MBps. According to some analysts, flash memory promises to hold some very exciting future prospects. Included in this is the possible replacement of hard drive storage with flash memory storage. The advantages are, increased reliability (no spinning hard drives to worry about), and reduced power consumption being the major ones. -- --- Dr Rob Phillips, Educational Designer,[EMAIL PROTECTED] Room 4.38 Teaching and Learning Centre, Library North Wing Murdoch University, South St, Murdoch, 6150, Perth, Australia Phone: +61 8 9360 6054 Mobile: 0416 065 054 Executive Member, Australasian Council on Open, Distance and E-learning (ACODE) Join ascilite! http://www.ascilite.org.au ---
List Archive Suggestion
I've just dragged this to my Safari Bookmarks bar. It shouldn't get lost there. Reg On 9 Jun 2005, at 5:51pm, Robert Howells wrote: http://wamug.org.au:8100/Lists/wamug/List.html
Re: Interesting article on cpu switch
on 9/6/05 5:42 PM, Reg Whitely at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hey that was a good engine, especially the turbo model! Reg On 9 Jun 2005, at 7:59am, Paul wrote: Personally, I embrace the change, it sounds like a Commodore with a Nissan engine, we bought those didn't we? Well, it could also be like a BMW with an Excel or Kia engine!! Only joking . :) Philippe
Re: Interesting article on cpu switch
On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 20:00 +0800, J Philippe Chaperon wrote: Well, it could also be like a BMW with an Excel or Kia engine!! How about a BMW (complete with expensive and incompatible parts *grin*) with a powerful but rather unpredictable and very beat up looking rocket motor strapped to the top ;-) -- Craig Ringer
Re: Flash Memory: Zytech specials
My computer science lecturer predicted this in 1987 or 1988. Of course hard drives are about to increase in size by another order of magnitude or so. Have fun, Shay (waiting impatiently) -- === Shay Telfer Perth, Western Australia Technomancer Join Team Sungroper in the Opinions for hire [POQ] 2005 World Solar Challenge http://public.xdi.org/=Shayfnord http://sungroper.asn.au/
