18 May 07
Originally posted by rbmorrisMac relies heavily on customer ignorance and even more on fadding a product. I agree, Mac is comparing apples to oranges. I am quite particularly fond of the commercial with "crash" under the table.
Slightly off topic...
Am I the only one who finds those new Mac commercials highly annoying? You know...the ones with the young "edgy" Mac guy and the fat middle-aged PC representation of Bill Gates. I think I'm less likely to buy a Mac because of those commercials.
18 May 07
Originally posted by winslowRisc technology is still hardware, the kind of chip inside the CPU called Reduced Instruction Set Computer. It is a left over technology I don't think is even in use today because the rational for that technique was the lack of speed of the early processors, measured in megahertz and low megahertz at that. Now we have processors capable of billions of instructions per second and inefficiencies of OS's aside, that is thousands of times more capable than the early days and so RISC is simply obsolete. Which is not to say RISC is inferior, it's just that the world has gone in other directions now that CPU's are so bloody fast.
what about the movie Hackers that made mention of the RISC technology in a LAPTOP, one of Angelina Jolies first flicks hubba hubba.
If we used RISC technology combined with present day multi billion instruction per second speeds we have now, it might be ten times faster yet but by and large it is not neccessary, especially now that a Gigahertz barrier has already been reached ( you don't see the emphasis on how many gigahertz the CPU puts out any more because the whole industry has stumbled trying to get much past the 3 Ghz area so now they tout funtionality) and since moore's law is still operational, now we are down to production capability of 45 Nm features, thousands of times smaller than the old stuff which started around 3 microns, or 3,000 Nm. When you cut that number down, you square it to get an idea of how much more stuff you can jam on a given area of silicon so than means now we are stuffing about 5,000 times the number of transistors on a single chip, aproaching one billion transistors now, not quite just yet but in sight. That said, the way Intel and others are getting more performance is to double or quadruple the number of CPU's on one chip and using parallel processing which has its own inefficiency problems but you still get more performance by adding more CPU's. Intel just came out (lab specimen only for now) a chip with 80 CPU's on a single chip. This chip is the first terabyte chip ever, it used to take a whole room full of PC's in parallel to duplicate that amount of computing power to say nothing of a huge amount of energy just to COOL such an assembly, now can be built on one chip consuming less than a hundred watts total. That shows the future of processing. Think about that, one trillion calculations per second, hundreds of times faster than the present generation fastes PC's or Mac's on the market. By the time such a chip is commonplace, the labs will probably be producing the first PETAbyte chip, one thousand trillion calcs per second, a number exceeded by only one or two computers on the planet at this time.
18 May 07
Originally posted by rbmorrisWhat, you don't like John Hodgman (the PC guy)? He's hilarious. Elsewhere, anyway. I loved The Areas of My Expertise.
Slightly off topic...
Am I the only one who finds those new Mac commercials highly annoying? You know...the ones with the young "edgy" Mac guy and the fat middle-aged PC representation of Bill Gates. I think I'm less likely to buy a Mac because of those commercials.
18 May 07
Originally posted by rbmorrisWhat? like this one? http://tinyurl.com/26kr5w
Slightly off topic...
Am I the only one who finds those new Mac commercials highly annoying? You know...the ones with the young "edgy" Mac guy and the fat middle-aged PC representation of Bill Gates. I think I'm less likely to buy a Mac because of those commercials.
19 May 07
Originally posted by sonhousehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc#Later_RISC
Risc technology is still hardware, the kind of chip inside the CPU called Reduced Instruction Set Computer. It is a left over technology I don't think is even in use today because the rational for that technique was the lack of speed of the early processors, measured in megahertz and low megahertz at that. Now we have processors capable of billions of instr ...[text shortened]... r second, a number exceeded by only one or two computers on the planet at this time.
"Today the vast majority of all 32-bit CPUs in use are RISC CPUs, and microcontrollers. RISC design techniques offers power in even small sizes, and thus has become dominant for low-power 32-bit CPUs. Embedded systems are by far the largest market for processors: while a family may own one or two PCs, their car(s), cell phones, and other devices may contain a total of dozens of embedded processors. RISC had also completely taken over the market for larger workstations for much of the 90s (until taken back by cheap PC-based solutions). After the release of the Sun SPARCstation the other vendors rushed to compete with RISC based solutions of their own. The high-end server market today is almost completely RISC based.
[edit] RISC and x86
However, despite many successes, RISC has made few inroads into the desktop PC and commodity server markets, where Intel's x86 platform remains the dominant processor architecture (Intel is facing increased competition from AMD, but even AMD's processors implement the x86 platform, or a 64-bit superset known as x86-64). There are three main reasons for this. One, the very large base of proprietary PC applications are written for x86, whereas no RISC platform has a similar installed base, and this meant PC users were locked into the x86. The second is that, although RISC was indeed able to scale up in performance quite quickly and cheaply, Intel took advantage of its large market by spending vast amounts of money on processor development. Intel could spend many times as much as any RISC manufacturer on improving low level design and manufacturing. The same could not be said about smaller firms like Cyrix and NextGen, but they realized that they could apply pipelined design philosophies and practices to the x86-architecture — either directly as in the 6x86 and MII[1] series, or indirectly (via extra decoding stages) as in Nx586 and AMD K5. Later, more powerful processors such as Intel P6 and AMD K6 had similar RISC-like units that executed a stream of micro-operations generated from decoding stages that split most x86 instructions into several pieces. Today, these principles have been further refined and are used by modern x86 processors such as Intel Core 2 and AMD K8. The first available chip deploying such techniques was the NextGen Nx586, released in 1994 (while the AMD K5 was severely delayed and released in 1995).
As of 2007, the x86 designs (whether Intel's or AMD's) are as fast as (if not faster than) the fastest true RISC single-chip solutions available.
"
19 May 07
Mac's are overpriced, limited and incompatible.
They are built for the single purpose of ensnaring the proportion
of people that would rather look at something pretty than do any
real work.
I belive we could substantially reduce the mac community by putting
mirrors on the bottom of swimming pools.
19 May 07
Originally posted by Thequ1ckYou obviously can't differentiate between the shape of the box and what's contained within. Mac's are designed to look a certain way, but what's been used as an operating system since they came out is UNIX based. All the PC users running around talking about how "Windows sucks, I'm switching to LINUX" are generally people who weren't aware that you can run a Mac in a command line and it will work almost exactly as a command line in a LINUX system. Almost all LINUX apps will run on a Mac as-is. The way Apple advertises and what a Mac is are two different things. As to the hardware issue - meh, they bet one way and lost, they've changed that.
Mac's are overpriced, limited and incompatible.
They are built for the single purpose of ensnaring the proportion
of people that would rather look at something pretty than do any
real work.
I belive we could substantially reduce the mac community by putting
mirrors on the bottom of swimming pools.
Mac's are also being used by the music industry, the film industry, the graphic design industry, etc. There are plenty of "serious" users out there using Apple products. You can't discount Mac as a viable, usable PC. It comes down to preference. Some guys are Ford guys, some guys are Chevy guys.
Having said all that I have two Windows Vista PC's because it's easier to deal with, most programs are compatible and I don't have to bother my arse doing anything to change it, or typing, or working for more than an hour or two because something will lock up...
19 May 07
1 edit
Originally posted by st00p1dfac3You're right, I never got further than the price tags.
You obviously can't differentiate between the shape of the box and what's contained within. Mac's are designed to look a certain way, but what's been used as an operating system since they came out is UNIX based. All the PC users running around talking about how "Windows sucks, I'm switching to LINUX" are generally people who weren't aware that you can yping, or working for more than an hour or two because something will lock up...
I did try a mac laptop once and being left handed was unable
to use the heatpad with the one control key available of the LHS.
One button mice, only good for failed Yakuza members. If I designed
a mouse it would look something like the car Homer Simpson designed.
The iPod shuffle, another brilliant invention, why not just pin a
$100 bill to your lapel?
And seriously, how many music and graphical design artists do you
know that also need command line Linux??
The Ford and Chevy analogy goes some way to prove my theory
that Mac's are not positioned for the work force. Just posers.
19 May 07
If I remember correctly PC has come from a brand name - the IBM Personal Computer back in the 1980s. The distinction between computers was one of scale - mainframes, minis and microcomputers.
As chips got more powerful, micros took over the role held by minis, especially when networked and people used the term micro less and less. The terms: Server and PC spread quickly.
Now, there is still a scale differentation: server, desktop, portable, laptop, palmtop. Language is like chess, full of potential, sith some language taking you down complex analysis, others lead you to a dull avenue, and things like punctuation and grammar - out and out warfare. .....1st ever post, so be gentle....
19 May 07
Originally posted by zeeblebotboth excerpts are slightly misleading. the reason is, personal computers are indeed only a tiny fraction of the processor market, and pretty much anything outside of it could be classified as 'risc' for their simplicity. most systems don't need the functional flexibility personal computers do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc#Later_RISC
"Today the vast majority of all 32-bit CPUs in use are RISC CPUs, and microcontrollers. RISC design techniques offers power in even small sizes, and thus has become dominant for low-power 32-bit CPUs. Embedded systems are by far the largest market for processors: while a family may own one or two PCs, their c ...[text shortened]... as fast as (if not faster than) the fastest true RISC single-chip solutions available.
"
the second one makes it sound like spending more resources on a product's development was somehow unfair competition, which is obviously utter nonsense. x86 processors simply were faster and cheaper. the comparable risc processors aimed for the pc-market cost multiple times more, and that's why they never got more than marginal market share, not because everything was written for x86.
so the only problem was scalability, which x86 wasn't really designed for. then somebody got the bright idea of simply networking separate x86 systems into big distributed systems, and everything changed. it was scalable, fast, and extremely cheap. the disadvantage from the slow networking was more than compensated by the cheap price.
but some type of systems can't deal with the networking lag, so that's why there's still market for supercomputers. and low-level systems don't need the complexity of x86 or modern risc (which is anything but 'reduced' these days), nor the associated power requirements, so they keep using the simple processors with simple instruction sets. but for personal computing, well, it's almost like x86 was created for it.
one thing that has bugged me for the longest time, is how risc proponents keep chanting "x86 is bloated and obsolete", when it in fact has stood the test of time. if it really was inferior, it would've disappeared ages ago.
I don't deny that your ordinary risc architecture wasn't beautiful & streamlined, it really was. but x86 stood the test of time, got even more complex & 'bloated' and still became more powerful. -if the thing that's supposed to make it inferior, in fact makes it even better when you pour more of the 'bad thing' into the mix, doesn't that make the premise wrong?
okay, enough engineering talk. the dark side. god damn it, why didn't anybody slap me in the face to stop it. ðŸ˜
19 May 07
Originally posted by st00p1dfac3It comes down to what you want your computer for. Macs are great for handling multimedia and this is why Macs are widely used in the music, film and graphic design industries.
Mac's are also being used by the music industry, the film industry, the graphic design industry, etc. There are plenty of "serious" users out there using Apple products. You can't discount Mac as a viable, usable PC. It comes down to preference.
So unless it's someone who deals professionally or intensely with multimedia applications, it's probably just another victim of marketing.
19 May 07
Originally posted by Mr ChGood first post. I think this is the new best answer to the question. It does back up the idea that if a person refers to their desktop (laptop, etc) by a brand name, the best response is another brand name...
If I remember correctly PC has come from a brand name - the IBM Personal Computer back in the 1980s. The distinction between computers was one of scale - mainframes, minis and microcomputers.
As chips got more powerful, micros took over the role held by minis, especially when networked and people used the term micro less and less. The terms: Server and PC ...[text shortened]... ings like punctuation and grammar - out and out warfare. .....1st ever post, so be gentle....