shamino

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shamino
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  • Pre-Apple Jobs and Woz check sells for $135,000

    Note: There has been discussion about this check when the auction was first announced on July 31.


    zeus423watto_cobra
  • Samsung announces massive 57-inch Odyssey Neo G9 curved gaming monitor

    Regarding "native support for 8K displays", I wouldn't call this an 8K display since it's an ultra-wide.  An 8K 16:9 display would be 7680x4320 (about 33M pixels).  This is 7680x2160 - half the pixels (16.5M).  Its requirements fall halfway between those of a 4K and an 8K display.

    Regarding what Apple can support, the highest resolutions they currently advertise is 6K for the ProDisplay XDR (6016x3384 = 20M pixels).  This is 21% more pixels than the Neo G9.  Which means any Mac capable of driving a ProDisplay XDR has a GPU with enough bandwidth (and video memory) to drive this Samsung display.  In other words, it really should just work - the Mac should read the display's native resolution via DDC and the Mac should be able to generate the signal.  If it doesn't, I would consider it a really embarrassing bug.
    dewmebaconstangravnorodomwatto_cobra
  • Apple plans to expand AirDrop time limit to customers worldwide

    Before jumping into "Apple is taking orders from the Chinese government" theories, there may be other perfectly reasonable reasons for this change.  Like, for instance, the fact that AirDrop has been used as a medium for sending obscene images to strangers.  Some news stories:


    By preventing phones from being set to "Everyone" at all times, you block most of this, since the attackers will only be able to send to people who already have him in their contacts list.

    FWIW, I leave my devices set to "Contacts Only" precisely because I don't want any possibility of a stranger sending me anything.  I can share content with my friends and relatives, and that's plenty.
    racerhomie3mike1gregoriusmFileMakerFellerAlex1NiOSDevSWEdewmewatto_cobra
  • Adding water cooling to the Mac Studio does surprisingly little

    chadbag said:
    Water cooling by itself doesn't boost performance.  It gives you expanded headroom to change and boost performance parameters.
    Yes, but maybe not.  That was definitely true in the old days when CPUs ran at a fixed clock speed.  Extra cooling would allow you to boost the clocks without overheating the chips, but you don't get more performance unless you actually do boost these frequencies.

    But modern CPUs have variable frequencies, even in their stock configurations.  They run at a baseline frequency, but they will "turbo boost" to higher frequencies when software demands more performance.  They will also run at reduced frequencies when idle.  When temperatures get too high for the cooling solution, they will "thermally throttle", limiting the maximum frequency they can boost to, the amount of time they can run at boosted frequencies, and may (if necessary) even force it to run at frequencies below the baseline.

    With modern chips (at least high-end ones from Intel and AMD), an air-cooled system generally can't keep up with the thermal output of the chip running at its maximum turbo boost frequency.  When you add more/better cooling, the CPU can remain boosted for longer periods of time before throttling, and therefore perform better overall.  With enough cooling so the CPU never throttles, it can remain running at its boost frequency pretty much all the time, which is pretty much as good as it will get without "overlocking" (that is, increasing the maximum boost frequency beyond manufacturer specs).

    And if you've got a separate GPU, all of the above applies to it as well.

    What the Linus experiment proves is that Apple's air-cooling system is sufficient to prevent thermal throttling even when the M1 is running at its maximum performance.  So extra cooling won't benefit it unless you figure out a way to overclock it beyond what the stock air-cooler can handle.  Which we could have predicted, because prior tests show that the Mac Studio doesn't experience thermal throttling under load.

    This is in contrast to (as the video mentioned) a MacBook Air, where the completely passive cooling system isn't sufficient.  If the M1 in there is pushed hard, it will thermal-throttle.  Improving its cooling (e.g. with a fan, as with the MacBook Pro, or with some Frankenstein water cooling system like Linus is fond of) will improve performance, because the CPU will be able to run at maximum load for longer (perhaps indefinitely) before throttling.
    roundaboutnowFileMakerFellerchadbagelijahg
  • Ex-Apple engineer explains why the first iPhone didn't have copy and paste

    Beats said:

    shamino said:
    Apple may have been the first to deploy these technologies on a consumer device, but they didn't invent it.

    Before there was any iPad/iPhone, we were all fascinated by multitouch UI demos produced by Jeff Han (researcher at NYU and founder of Perceptive Pixel, which was since acquired by Microsoft).  For example:

    I don't think Apple ever used Jeff Han's code, and modern multitouch display panels use a completely different technology from what Han was using, but I can guarantee that lots of important people there (like the rest of us) saw these videos and drew inspiration from them.  Including swiping, scrolling and pinch-to-zoom operations.

    Dismissing the hard work of Steve Jobs and Apple engineers because crappy resistive touch screens existed is ludicrous. I was heavy into futuristic cell phones in 2007 and had the highest rated Windows Mobile Phone and it was absolutely garbage compared to what iPhone brought. None of the ideas of Windows Mobile carried over to iPhone and it had none of the cool iPhone inventions like pinch to zoom. There were arrows everywhere in the UI and there was a “calibrate” setting I had to revisit every few days. This was a super high-tech phone in 2007, mobile keyboard and all!
    You didn't actually read anything I wrote, did you?  I didn't say anything about resistive screens or Windows phones.  Where you did you get the idea that I did?

    Jeff Han was not a Microsoft employee at the time.  He was a researcher at NYU, where he developed a lot of the fundamental research behind multitouch interfaces.  He published video demonstrations of his research over a year before Apple announced anything of the sort.  He was using a unique hardware system involving glass panels, cameras and projectors - which nobody else has ever used - but that's irrelevant.  The point is not the digitiizer but all of the user interface concepts that he developed in order to show the usefulness of multitouch.

    I get the impression that you hadn't actually watched his videos when they were published in 2006 and 2007.  You should go watch them now in order to understand what I'm talking about.

    Again, Apple did a tremendous amount of work to bring the iPhone to market, but to claim that they invented the underlying UI concepts like multitouch interfaces is to deny history.
    sphericfastasleepBeDifferent