iLounge

41

I am very thankful for people like this releasing such great free products.

Posted by WOLF MAN on August 15, 2004 at 7:33 AM (PDT)

42

This simply opens up the Airport Express for access from programs other than iTunes. I can’t see why anyone, including Apple have a problem with this? It doesn’t decrypt the music, it simply encrypts unencrypted music using the public key used by Airtunes so that it can play them. IIRC it will not play tracks bought from iTunes Music Store as they are in not in Apple Lossless format as well as encrypted.

As to the “My OS is bigger than your OS!” from both Windows and Mac zealots, why don’t you all grow up?

Posted by Hokalus on August 15, 2004 at 11:43 AM (PDT)

43

Now the interface is open I hope someone will work on an output plugin for winamp. Can I get a 2nd on that?

Posted by jpt1 in Fresno on August 15, 2004 at 2:39 PM (PDT)

44

Fiark-

Not too comfortable with you’re homosexuality, are you?  Not everyone is in the closet, and not everyone thinks Apple is better than Microsoft.

Interesting to see how much you have wrapped up in your Apple products…seems like your entire identity revolves around gadgets. 

Because someone likes Windows, they’re a closet homo, or a homophobe?  Get real man!  Or, should I say, get real girly man?

You should seek help, and come to terms with the fact that Microsoft makes products that are infinitely more diverse and universal; just as solid; and equally as productive as Apple.

Posted by Helllllo on August 15, 2004 at 3:36 PM (PDT)

45

But my OS *is* bigger than yours!!!!

Posted by hell yeah on August 15, 2004 at 6:36 PM (PDT)

46

Attention Apple worshiping lamers, dual processors are essentially useless for anyone not doing development or maybe even graphic design at the least.  The dual processor bit on those new desktops is a GIMMICK.  You are paying too much for hardware that is inferior to hardware available in the PC world.  The ONLY thing Apple has above Microsoft is OSX everything else you are paying far too much for. 

Posted by Shadow Skill on August 16, 2004 at 12:36 AM (PDT)

47

Here is a good analygy(sp):
Jobs has ALWAYS liked to create the Porsche of computers… and he has caught that market quite well… people who want a computer than runs well, is straightforward, and looks great go for Apple… but the adverage person can live with a cheap Honda because all they have to do is drive it to work and get back home…

Apple needs to get their EMacs in Wal Mart damnit… and cut the price to like $700 with 6 months of AOL and something that is sorta like Office…

OH, and people go to the iPod because it is an amazing MP3 player and is within a reasonable price range… and they buy from the iTunes music store because it is straightforward, easy to use (especially if you have an iPod), and the price is right…

Price, Price, Price, Price, Price!!!!!!

Posted by Nick Catalano on August 16, 2004 at 12:36 AM (PDT)

48

“Jobs has ALWAYS liked to create the Porsche of computers… and he has caught that market quite well”

Well let’s not mention the Mac Cube then, shall we?

Porsches are about speed and performance, and this is where the Mac falls well behind PCs (especially kitted with Athlon 64s) or quad Opterons or Xeons.

If we are using car analogies, I’d compare the Mac to a Volvo - slow, simple,gets you from A to B quite reliably, costs a little more than regular cars. Tends to be driven by people who want a calm, predictable ride.

Posted by voom voom on August 16, 2004 at 5:22 AM (PDT)

49

“Attention Apple worshiping lamers, dual processors are essentially useless for anyone not doing development or maybe even graphic design at the least.”

I’ve had dual processors, ever since the Pentium, right through P3, and now dual Opterons, and I can tell you my friend that you don;t know what you are talking about.

While it’s true that a lot of low-end or simple programs don;t know how to distribute threads across multiple processors and are single-CPU bound, this still means that you can max out one processor with a game or a DIVX conversion or something while the other CPU is still working away without a hiccup. So you experience no slowdown or frame lag or dropouts.

Sometimes, even, I find myself using the Task Manager’s “Affinity” command to purposely restrict a process to a single CPU in order to get some work done without interruption.

Finally, if multiple CPUs weren’t so damn useful, then why would Intel be faking it using their “HT” technology in the newest P4s, and why is Intel now abandoning super-long pipeline single CPU designs in favour of multi-core processors - basically multiple CPUs on a single die? AMD, Sun, and IBM have scored big with their multi-core designs and Intel are playing catch up here.

Posted by Dualies on August 16, 2004 at 5:27 AM (PDT)

50

“Attention Apple worshiping lamers, dual processors are essentially useless for anyone not doing development or maybe even graphic design at the least. The dual processor bit on those new desktops is a GIMMICK.”

Get a clue, dude!

I really hate ignorant Windows users.

Posted by The Raven in USA on August 16, 2004 at 5:59 AM (PDT)

51

Children…

1. 95% of personal computers are IBM clones. Most run WIndows, the rest mostly run Linux, BSD, or some other variety of Unix.

2. The rest are Macs of various varieties. These run the old Mac OS, or the two versions of Unix that have been released.

3. PCs are much less expensive than Macs, because there’s competition.

4. A PC running Linux or some flavor of Unix works more or less the same “under the hood” as recent Macs. However, I’m not sure if the Mac window manager is XWindows (Unix/Linux windowing system) compatible or not.

5. iPods work very well with either PCS with Win2000 or XP, or newer Mac OSes.

All the rest of the above arguing is just so much religious warfare, except that PCs run faster, and it’s a lot easier to bypass protection schemes on PCs than it is on Macs.

BTW I own and program PCs, but have used (and removed viruses from) older Macs in a previous job.

Posted by FloydC on August 16, 2004 at 9:57 AM (PDT)

52

“Frame lag” and “dropouts”?

You’re obviously a VERY tech-savvy person, and that’s why Apple loves taking your money.

Posted by JL on August 16, 2004 at 1:39 PM (PDT)

53

Dual processors are all but useless if the OS is not intended to do true multi-tasking one cpu is usually used to manage the other CPU in the case of Windows which is not a true mulitasking OS.  so for the vast majority of users regardless of being power users or not they will not get much at all out of a dual processor system at all.  Do you know that 64 bit processing has been around since the mud 90’s it was useless to almost everyone in existence because people simply do not have such needs.  I also said that you had to be a developer or at least a graphic designer (a power user) for the dual processor to be worth your time.  I know what I am talking about, I honestly doubt that many of the people who would buy a g5 with dual 64 bit processors outside of the world of power users would know how the second processor is wasted by the OS.  While it is true that OSX has a unix core which is better suited to the use of dual processors I doubt that most mac users who are not developers and have purchased these new models will do more than play a divx file or two.  It’s simply not worth the price to get a dual processor mac, when one could buy a comprable single processor amd compatible board and put an athlon 64 in it.  There is a reason I said what I said, I don’t get the impression that the majority of the people on these boards are what people call “power users”(I do not consider myself one either.) judging bow how ignorant the apologists are of the reality of the rest of the PC market (In that they just do not know that firmware updates for older products are quite common.) I can only imagine how many otherwise everyday users have been suckered by this dual processor bit with the g5.  I’ll have to do some shopping and see if getting ibm compatible dual cpu’s ends up being cheaper than buying a g5.  I’ll get back to you on that Raven and Dualies.

Posted by Shadow Skill on August 16, 2004 at 6:49 PM (PDT)

54

“You’re obviously a VERY tech-savvy person, and that’s why Apple loves taking your money.”

Which part of my message did you fail to understand, #####? All of it! I was talking Opterons, Xeons, Intel - none of these are in any way Mac-related. Get over yourself and argue the case, not sling useless insults.

I happen to also think that Macs are overpriced and underperforming, but unlike you I have a clue.

“one cpu is usually used to manage the other CPU in the case of Windows which is not a true mulitasking OS”

Please quantify in what way exactly Windows (I assume you mean Win2K and its descendents) is “not a true multitasking OS”. What exactly constitutes a multitasking OS?

I am expecting some definitions from the OS books by Tanenbaum or Silberschatz. Anything else just marks you as a windbag wasting all our time with spurious and ill-defined statements.

It seems like a lot of the weird hostility to SMP rigs comes from a simple case of envy. Within a few years you will all be using pseudo-SMP systems running multi-core CPUs (Windows PCs and Macs) and then you can finally see what you have been missing.

Posted by idiot alert on August 16, 2004 at 7:11 PM (PDT)

55

I forget the specifics my PC hardware professor explained this to my class a few months back it has to do witrh the way that windows manages the cpu’s, Windows currently just ends up wasting the power of the cpu’s using one to manage the processes of the other cpu.  I’m going to drop him an email or catch him on sim and I’ll go ahead and post his reply.

Posted by Shadow Skill on August 16, 2004 at 8:31 PM (PDT)

56

Dear Fiark, by my comment “No PC users, no mass demand for iPod, no iPod mini and 4G.” I meant that if the iPod stood as a Mac only product, PC users wouldn’t have bought them, we’d be off buying Creative Zens.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that Steve has the business sence to open them up to the dominant market, the iPod is a very good product and I love mine.  And I believe you were alluding to Microsoft ripping off the idea of the GUI from Apple…  Think again Bucko, Apple ripped the idea off from Xerox, yes the document company.  They invented the damn thing back in the early 70’s with a program called WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers).  Here’s a link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_GUI  just right click and you can open it in a new window…  oh that’s right, you’ve been using a mouse for over 20 years and still can’t master pressing 2 buttons…

Posted by Brad on August 17, 2004 at 2:37 AM (PDT)

57

“I’m going to drop him an email or catch him on sim and I’ll go ahead and post his reply.”

I am sure your teachers would love nothing better than to get embroiled in a flame fest on iPod lounge!

The only thing worse than someone with ill-informed opinions is someone badly parrotting other people’s ill-informed opinions.

Posted by academia on August 17, 2004 at 4:35 AM (PDT)

58

Since when is saying that one is going to clarify why something is as it is a bad thing.  I don’t remember the specific reason why windows wastes the cpower of dual cpu’s I didn’t write it down.  I also am inclined to think that he would be far better informed in this area than either you or myself.  Just because I have to ask someone else for the specifics doesn’t mean that I or the person who originally pointed it out to me is wrong.

Posted by Shadow Skill on August 17, 2004 at 9:21 AM (PDT)

59

Well I just caught him about a minute after my last comment so I’ll begin making my point now.  Windows itself doesn’t manage processes well it wastes 40% or so of the second cpu managing the system processes.  This weakness probably explains why you do not see too many dual cpu systems (From what I can tell the cost is not exceedinlgy prohibitive.) in the PC world.  Unix/Linux based systems are better suited to dual CPU systems because it is able to run two kernels at the same time or rather there are seperate shells or process sets for each cpu, so that one is not wasted managing instructions for the other.  In short if you are running an IBM compatible PC your not going to be served as well in terms of performance of the cpu’s unless you are running unix or linux. 

While it is true that OSX is going to handle the dual processor setup far better than windows ever will since it is based on Unix I do not see the majority of mac users doing anything that would be worth the extra expense when a simple memory upgrade is probably going to be far more cost effective.

Posted by Shadow Skill on August 17, 2004 at 10:08 AM (PDT)

60

IO think your prof’s experience is out of date. Perhaps he is thinking of DOS/Windows.

Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 is based on the DEV VMS kernal which has natively supported SMP and loosely coupled processing since the 1970s.

If Windows didn’t support MPC then insanely highly spec’d Windows rigs would not be winning all the highend TPC contests:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/performance/tpcc2.mspx

Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition comprise the first platform to ever record more than 700,000 transactions per minute (tpmC) in the prestigious TPC-C Non-Clustered benchmark. Auditors clocked an HP Superdome server, equipped with 64 Intel Itanium 2 6M 1.5 gigahertz (GHz) processors (code name “Madison”) running Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000, at a blistering 707,102 transactions per minute1, a level that was nearly unthinkable until the debut of Windows Server 2003.

The new record of 707,102 tpmC marks the third time in the past thirty days that Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition have broken new ground in benchmark performance. On April 23, 2003, Windows Server 2003 became the first platform to exceed 500,000 tpmC2, and became the first platform to exceed 600,000 tpmC3 on April 24, 2003. With these achievements Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 not only power the fastest database server in the world, but they also hold four out of the top six performance results4, and are the undisputed leaders in price-performance5.

Now, if you check the TPC tables, you will see a bunch of Linux/Unix machines there, but you will also see some modern Windows machines:

http://www.tpc.org/

Windows scores particularly well on the price/performance curve.

http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_price_perf_results.asp

Note the absence of OSX multiprocessor machines on these champion tables.

Posted by VMS on August 17, 2004 at 10:40 AM (PDT)